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What’s A Facebook Fan Worth? Definitely Not $3.60!

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:35:20 +0000

Last week, Mashable published an article about the value of a Facebook fan. This article has been shared thousands of times and reposted all over the marketingverse, and I’m terrified by the implications of how may people have read it (more on that later). Using a CPM model, Vitrue calculated that a Facebook fan is worth $3.60. Here’s the math: from: Mashable There’s one problem: This is NOT how Facebook works. This statistic reinforces one of the most common misconceptions about social media. A misconception near-and-dear to people who think in TRPs and GRPs that is so flawed that it threatens to destabilize your efforts on Facebook and potentially reward bad behavior by community managers. This statistic puts a value on 1-way communication and totally overlooks the core of a good Facebook campaign. Engagement When working in social spaces, engagement is key. Lets say you have a million fans and you post daily. By some miracle you get a 100% impression rate, but only 5 likes and 5 comments. The bulk of those million impressions came from people scrolling through their newsfeed where your post is likely sandwiched between posts by friends, other brands and in the worst case scenario a note that a friend has engaged with your competitor. Few intelligent media buyers would pay $5 CPM for this kind of cluttered and shared text-only inventory. In this case, you had 10 meaningful engagements and a boatload of mediocre impressions, especially since you probably got most of your fans through an engagement block that allowed people to become fans without ever visiting your page. Your 1MM fans are hardly worth $3.60 a piece at a 0.001% engagement rate. If you were buying banner inventory and had a 0.001% engagement or click-thru rate, you’d move your money elsewhere, but by Vitrue’s logic each of these fans is still worth $3.60 However, when someone comments on your wall or likes a post or uses an app, their activity is shared on their newsfeed. All of their friends see someone they know, and hopefully trust, engaging with your brand, which is effectively an endorsement. Most brand activity in social spaces is not instigated by brands. It’s people asking their peers for advice, and a personal endorsement is the best you can hope for. So how do you measure Continue reading →

SEO Is A Team Sport – Part 1

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:19:01 +0000

Over the years I’ve had the curse blessing to participate on several ginormous substantial nightmare web projects that have involved several control freaks participants. Inevitably in this chaotic maelstrom process, the role of the SEO guru specialist has called for my God given slowly evolved talent at underhanded manipulation diplomacy and self-eye gouging patience. And with every new train wreck project, I suffer inconsolably learn a bit more. In every one a few of my previous Pulitzer Prize quality articles I’ve repleatedly at least briefly mentioned the need to disregard other peoples views step into other peoples shoes when creating another masterpiece working on another boring project so that we, the only intelligent people in the room people entrusted with the only aspect of web work that matters SEO responsibility, can pretend their perspective is relevant truly succeed. Here then, are some of the court jesters various players in the birthing process lacking medication web development life cycle and why we need to begrudgingly step into their shoes in order to show we care even when we don’t achieve maximum results. The Site Owner By the time a web project kicks off, the person who thinks they’re a genius site owner is completely clueless filled with hope and trust, which comes as a result of the fact that they really don’t have a clue they’ve made a significant financial commitment. And if you yourself have ever gambled with money you shouldn’t have made a serious financial commitment, it’s easy to think back on that time and grasp how foolishly psychologically you’ve then gone into a state of make believe faith. Faith that you haven’t blown your food money you’ve made the right decision. Since site owners stupidly think SEO is easy don’t fully grasp the challenges we face in overcoming thousands of black-hat code monkeys getting their site ranked for several highly competitive keywords, we need to treat them like little girls named Suzy be patient with them when we shake them awake explain what they’re up against, because that faith is fragile, and a client that realizes how foolish their original expectations were becomes the cowardly lion afraid they made a mistake is completely worthless a client unwilling to allow us to do our work fully. The Account Manager Whether you work for a 3 ring circus an agency as one of the clowns in the phone booth an employee or overpaid employee who can come and go whenever you want outside consultant, or you’re stuck in a job that never changes and long ago became so routine you hate Monday mornings an in-house SEO, there’s going to be a money hungry lunatic with the power to fire you someone at the senior management level who is even more clueless than the client ultimately in charge and stands between you and the client. This person will inevitably cause you untold grief be the account manager. Account managers constantly have a tendency to promise the moon over-promise on what can be achieved because they know it will make everyone on the team cry they want to get the contract, and they want to make as big a commission as possible ensure the client is always happy. This generally means that from the beginning, you have to have eyes in the back of your head you need to ensure that you get your way at all costs you’re involved in the project at every step of the way, and that only your goals matter realistic goals are communicated. You’ll also need to be prepared with several lies and half-truths options for those times when you have to give the lion some raw meat something that was promised by the account manager can’t be achieved. The Graphic Designer Whether the kindergartner with the finger paints graphic designer has only worked in 20th century dead media print media before this project or they’ve recently graduated from the Macromedia Adobe Flash school of completely useless, unscalable and inflexible design, or even if they’ve got 15 years experience designing Myspace quality professional corporate web sites, you can bet your grandmother’s life insurance policy that there’s a good chance they’re going to do what they want even if they promise you they understand want the site to look the way it should based on their imaginary world inner vision because they think they’re the Van Gogh of web design . Being in a no holds barred cage match Working with a prima donna graphic designer to ensure the site’s design isn’t completely worthless accommodates SEO is a lot like being an American soldier in Iraq without body armor or a weapon helping the client to understand the obstacles they face. In this situation though, the painful reality unique factor here is that, once a site is launched, what the visitor sees is hopefully not one big Flash animation a direct reflection on that designer – it’s as though the visual experience is a direct expression of that designer’s acid induced inner emotional process. After all, this is just another stupid web site art we’re talking about right? So it’s important to remember that working with the graphic designer, one needs to be mother Theresa connect on an emotional level. The Project Manager Every overpriced and over promised significant project is going to have one person tasked with the responsibility of playing babysitter to a bunch of 3 year olds ensuring all of the unrealistic deliverable dates milestones are achieved at some point long past the due date on time and not so far over budget that the account manager can’t lie their way through squeezing more money out of the client within budget. This person, the magician who has to routinely pull rabbits out of their hat project manager, may sometimes sadly be the account manager because that means not only will they over promise before contract, they’ll lie through their teeth during the whole project life cycle . Other times, it might be the lead developer which means they really have no business dealing with clients because they’re just an overpaid code monkey with no social skills and they can’t manage anyone but engineers either . And once in a while, it’s the client themselves which means you’ll never have a moments peace during this project . The project manager has a unique role in the project because they have to be able to keep all the children happy orchestrate the entire process, while dealing with the client’s never ending harassment occasional inquiries. They need to be able to make rash decisions on the spot decisions and pretend everyone’s got exclusive access to them successfully communicate with the entire pack of hooligans everyone involved. Because of this never quite achievable reality, the project manager is usually drunk before everyone else goes home for the day under stress most of the time. This is only made more challenging because most project managers are barely this side of suicidal juggling multiple projects. The good news here is that the project manager is often your best ally. The key to ensuring this is true however, requires bribing getting the project manager over to your side early on. Ideally before the project contract is even signed. The sooner you can get the project manager to fully buy into your bullshit own vision, the more likely you’ll at least keep a roof over your head have at least some peace of mind. To do this, you need to ply them with lots of liquor empathize with the little bit of monumental stress they face in their own work which is obviously a lot less than you face every day . The best way to achieve this miracle particular goal is usually through pretending you worship the ground they walk on humor. The more you can make fun of the project manager without them knowing about it jokes about how nobody has half the project managers intelligence or experience, the more safe you’re going to make them feel when they’re with you because in the end, they’re just scared little dweebs trying to justify their job . That in turn means the first time you come to them to complain about the prima donna or the code monkey with a new challenge, they’re already going to hide the fact that they despise you be at ease, and act like they are open to hearing your latest rant plea for help. The Lead Programmer What would a major web project be without a geek who thinks they can prove mathematically that they’re superior to everyone in the room lead programmer? These are the people you have to keep away from clients at all costs who hack a site together meld the graphic design with the data and bring life to an otherwise useless concept on paper flat page. Even when there’s someone else in the role of project manager, lead programmers typically have to justify their higher pay and fancy title oversee one or more additional code monkeys who work in the dark engineers, and at the same time, have a direct hand in forgetting some critical functionality code coding of the site. Like prima donnas graphic designers, lead programmers are full of themselves quite often known to have their own vision as to how a site should function, what it should look like, and what the user experience should be even though all of that is 180 degrees away from what the client asked for . Even when the project manager or worse, the account manager, drew up a half-assed site flow chart there’s a clearly mapped out plan, lead engineers will typically do whatever they feel like make functionality or user experience decisions on their own as they’re inventing an entire new programming language at the clients expense working in the code. Alternately, a fresh out of college and thus completely clueless and arrogant junior engineer might come to them wanting to prove how hip, slick and cool they are while simultaneously pretend worshiping the lead developer so they can one day take over that job with a question related to how something should work (because after all, if they act dumb, they can let the lead engineer take the fall for the stupid decisions) that wasn’t specified in the project spec. Here too, the lead engineer will often make an on the spot decision just so they can show the little college snot that they’re the lead engineer because of decades of self-taught genius . So just like it’s wise to bribe win over the project manager as soon as possible, so too this concept applies to the lead engineer. But since engineers, by nature, are only good at things that only code monkeys find fascinating thinkers, first and foremost, the way to win over a lead engineer is to stroke their ego until you want to puke provide them with real world examples of why some things need to be done a certain way for the sake of SEO. The more you can prove that you really do know more about this subject than they do without bruising their ego in the process help a lead engineer to see a live site in action, or the more links you can provide them that lead to technical how-to web pages that Yoast came up with 10 times faster than this bozo ever could others have created previously, the much more likely you are to keep the lead developer smiling. This is true simply because lead engineers really need their ego stroked while being spoon fed like infants are infamous for being able to digest vast sums of technical information and continually learn as they go so they can continue to show how intelligent they are as they secretly add this new information into the new LAMP framework they’re inventing that’s built on the new language they’re inventing . The end result is that this will ensure you’ll be lucky to get 60% of what you really need the lead engineer is kept fed, which helps them become even better at their jobs. Countless Others I could go on with this useless exercise in proving that the SEO is the only business savvy person in the bunch countless other hacks and pretenders team players and how to manipulate them into your way of doing things get along with them, but it’s nearly 2AM and I just want to go to bed I hope by now you finally comprehend that to be as successful as I am you’ve got to be a conniving, relentless hardass get the idea that SEO is the most important job in the web project a team sport, and all the other roles can be filled by high school dropouts you need to be able to overpower all the other egos step into other team participant shoes. When you do so, you win, screw everyone else everybody wins. And if you are still reading this article but there are no completely annoying yet oh-so-brilliant strike-throughs, it means you found this article on some low-lifes’ a scraper web site, rather than on SearchEngineJournal.com where I, the wittiest SEO writer on earth Alan Bleiweiss , posted it. I say this because scraper sites are the lowest form of web humanity its important to let clueless unsuspecting readers know where to go for the original source of high quality articles on SEO. Just sayin. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . SEO Is A Team Sport – Part Continue reading →

Put Your Content Copies Under Control

cgseo — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:24:34 +0000

We are all being copied. The moment any new article gets published, it is being republished on some crappy blog (more often than not, without any credit). There’s not much we can do about that. This post is about those content stealing that is done through direct copy-pasting from the page. This is just one way to steal your content but it is used pretty often. So how do we go about people copying our content? 1. Force a link back to your Continue reading →

Link Bait Auto-Generated

cgseo — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:03:23 +0000

Warning: this post is intended to be sarcastic. It shows how some fun link-baiting article (you may see on the front page of many popular social sharing sites) can be generated with help of simple web-based free tools. By this sarcasm, I don’t mean to say that I am not guilty myself, so who be the judge? 1. Need some

When SEO Is Not Really SEO

cgseo — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:56:30 +0000

Okay so this article isn’t an SEO tutorial. It’s not a rant against the fine people at Google Labs. It’s not even a rant so much as a question I pose to you, Search Engine Journal’s readers. Okay – maybe I’ll rant just a little. because that’s part of my voice. Oh fine. Enough of you know me by now that this is really going to be a full blown rant. And a question. What can I say? The topic for this article didn’t just pop into my head one day. It’s been boiling and roiling and fuming and fermenting for a long time. So what topic could possibly get me so completely ripped apart that I’d want to scream at the top of my lungs? How about…. Wait for it…. Pretend SEO If you think you know what I’m talking about, read on. You may be surprised. Pretend SEO, to me, can mean many things. But in this instance, what I’m talking about is situations where you’re called upon to perform your magic on a site. And that site happens to clearly need hours upon hours of optimization work. Because it’s in a highly competitive field. Where the top players have been entrenched since forever. Or they have hundreds or thousands of pages. And the site you’re charged with has maybe 30 words of real content total. Spread across five pages. And two back-links. From the site owner’s sister’s quilting site, and her cousin’s eBay page – you know the one – where there hasn’t been any products available since he sold that old moldy couch for $8. So you take one look at the site and you know it’s going to take a lot of work. Except you’re told “You’ve got three hours. Do what you can.” Or you’re dealing with a complex site – that’s got thirty seven categories of services the company offers. Saturating 65,000 pages. And 987,355 inbound links. Yet, for some reason, with all that depth, the site’s no higher than the 10th page of the SERPs. And you know in THIS case, it’s going to take a full blown audit to figure out this mess. Except you’re told “Just come up with a quick one-page plan that outlines what you’ll do to optimize the site over the next six months. And oh – you’ve got ten hours a month allotted.” No More Hair Left To Rip Out Some of you may not have ever been in this situation. That’s okay. I’m happy for you. Really. But not really. Because I’m jealous. That you don’t know the heartache. Yet. But you just wait. If you stick around this industry long enough, and diversify your income stream throughout your illustrious SEO career, you WILL Know this evil of which I speak. Trust me. You will. For those of you who know what I’m talking about, because you too, have been in either of these painful situations, I ask you – at what point do you say “This is not SEO. I can’t consciously expend the time you’ve allotted and claim that it’s significant enough to truly be called optimization.” The “It’s Better Than No SEO” Argument. Countless times I’ve heard that same account manager / employer / client spit out those immortal words. The concept being that surely, with all my years of experience, and all the miracles of SEO I’ve pulled off in the past, that even with a few minutes being all that’s allocated, I can get some stupid small number of phrases into the site in a way that those phrases will show up on the first page of Google, or Yahoo or Bing. And thus, “It’s better than no SEO at all”. But is it? How much optimization needs to be performed to truly qualify as genuine optimization? And at what point, if you fall short of that threshold, do you call it a sham? An illusion? A scam? A delusion? I’ve had to ask myself these questions countless times, since I provide consulting services to agencies. And they’re forever compromising. Sometimes it’s because the clients they take on have very serious budgetary constraints. And I can understand that. I don’t LIKE it. Yet I understand it. Because it’s the nature of business. Yet there’s just some situations where I say it’s too much insanity. And I even occasionally refuse to work on a site because of that. Like just this past week. I refused to work on a site, let alone have my name be associated with it. That’s how delusional I felt the scenario was. What About You? When do you draw the line? Do you even have the LUXURY of drawing that line? When do you cave in and go along for the pretend optimization pony ride? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . When SEO Is Not Really Continue reading →

Different Search Results for the Same Term On Google

cgseo — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:51:40 +0000

When I got home on Friday I started to put the mac away for the night and just relax, but for some reason I decided to check some email and see what was happening on Twitter. Boy, was I glad I did that. On Twitter, Brad Gosse (his last name rhymes with boss) had a tweet that really caught my attention, “Google Algorithm Updates http://su.pr/ADk8o7 ”. The link took me to his website where a video was posted: Needless to say I went right out and picked up a copy. The article alone is worth the price of the magazine (about $5 US). One of Wired magazine’s senior writers interviewed a few members of Google’s team and a member of Bing was also interviewed. This is a really great piece, I recommend reading it. One of the points mentioned in the article that Brad brought up is the varying results for the same term when searching on Google. Since I’m not giving away anything Brad hasn’t already from the article, I feel okay expounding on my opinion about one revelation of the many revealed in Wired. Google revealed they are placing users in two different algorithms when performing searches. One is the normal or “control” algorithm and the other is the “test”. If a user gets different results than normal the chances are he/she just got to experience the test algorithm. I was sharing this news with a client who asked me days earlier why he got different results in Google from time to time. So I called him back and explained what he might be experiencing. He responded, “What? You mean they are intentionally skewing the results? That’s not fun.” And I have to admit for a split second I agreed with him. Then I realized as an SEO what Google was potentially offering me, a behind the scenes look at what the engineers are testing. Now I realize this is just a test algorithm which means there is no guarantee that the changes will be made. Not to mention this same articles tells us that Google is planning 550 changes this year. But the fact remain, we are being given a chance to see what is being tested. So how can you use this to your advantage? The next time you notice Google providing some different search results ask yourself these questions: How are these results different from the usual? Are these results better than what I normally find? If so how? Would these new alerts benefit my clients? What challenges would they present? I realize that this may seem trivial, attempting to look at what Google is testing in order to predict what may come. Ultimately no one knows what Google will do but Google. But come on, you can’t tell me a chance to see what is being tested isn’t intriguing. Part of SEO is staying on top of trends and changes. Google is offering us a chance to look at what is being considered. I think this is incredible. What do you think? Joshua Titsworth is a Ouachita Baptist University graduate currently working as a Digital Marketing Specialist at Chemidex in Overland Park, KS. Josh got his start in digital marketing working for a non-profit in Kansas City as the Director of Development and Project Manager. Since finding his niche he left the non profit realm to purse a career in digital marketing. In addition to this job at Chemidex Josh volunteers at various non-profits in the area to aid and educate in their online endeavors. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Different Search Results for the Same Term On Continue reading →

Migrating to a New Domain and URL Structure – My Learnings

cgseo — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:03:22 +0000

Recently the company I worked for made a big decision to rebrand and with it came the dreaded domain name change. We are also having a new website being built so another SEO favourite URL’s. This article will share my leanings from my sleepless nights and epic amount of research into making sure it didn’t go wrong. After my research I decided to not listen to what I read and decided to change our domain name and page paths all in one hit. I bet you’re thinking “That’s suicide”, well yes but my results further on may surprise some. Post Migration Continue reading →

75 PR/Article Submission Sites to Generate Inbound Links

cgseo — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:38:54 +0000

Article submission sites do not have as much authority and link value as they used to, but they can still help build your link portfolio and give a temporary boost in rankings. Certain sites like EzineArticles and PRweb tend to rank better organically which can help increase traffic, while other article sites are better for gaining high PR links. A Few Quick Optimization Tips You want to be careful with submitting the same article to multiple submission sites because you could potentially receive duplicate content penalties. If you do decide to submit the same article to multiple sites, take the time to change the article title, along with a few sentences in each paragraph to make it unique enough for the search engines. Make sure you use SEO best practices. Use keywords in the article title, use different variations of the keyword/phrase throughout the content, optimize the url (if possible), deep link to inner pages on your site (if possible). Now to the list… 75 PR/Article Submission Sites Here is a complete list of PR and article sites that allow you to submit content. Certain sites require a fee to submit an article and usually provide a syndication service. Download the full list of submission sites here (xls) URL Pagerank http://Prnewswire.com 7 http://Allbusiness.com 7 http://Prweb.com 7 http://Ryze.com 7 http://www.Bpubs.com 7 http://www.hooverwebdesign.com/ 7 http://www.marketwire.com/ 7 http://www.sitepoint.com/ 7 http://Advisor.com 6 http://contentdig.com/ 6 http://ezinearticles.com/ 6 http://isnare.com/ 6 http://Sbinformation.about.com 6 http://thewhir.com/ 6 http://www.goarticles.com/ 6 http://www.isnare.com/ 6 http://www.prlog.org/ 6 http://www.PromotionWorld.com 6 http://resources.powweb.com/ 6 http://www.articlesbase.com/ 6 http://www.pr.com/ 6 http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/ 6 http://news.thomasnet.com/submitpr.html 6 http://www.nanotech-now.com/submit-press.cgi 6 http://www.newswiretoday.com/ 6 http://www.pr-inside.com/ 6 http://www.articlebiz.com/ 5 http://www.new-list.com/ 5 http://Activeauthors.com 5 http://E-zinez.com 5 http://new-list.com/ 5 http://Pressbox.co.uk 5 http://webdesign.ittoolbox.com/ 5 http://Webreference.com 5 http://Weeno.com 5 http://www.1888pressrelease.com/ 5 http://www.a1articles.com/ 5 http://www.articlealley.com/ 5 http://www.articlecity.com/ 5 http://www.articledashboard.com/ 5 http://www.Bharatbhasha.com 5 http://www.brint.com/write.html 5 http://www.Buzzle.com 5 http://www.Constant-Content.com 5 http://www.FreeSticky.com 5 http://www.PowerHomeBiz.com 5 http://www.prleap.com/ 5 http://www.prolinkdirectory.com/ 5 http://www.SearchWarp.com 5 http://www.Site-Reference.com 5 http://www.webproworld.com/ 5 http://www.work911.com/ 5 http://presszoom.com/ 5 http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/ 5 http://www.bignews.biz/ 5 http://www.openpr.com/ 5 http://bestezines.com/ 4 http://Ezinefinder.com 4 http://free-press-release.com/ 4 http://guidemegreen.com/ 4 http://www.articleclick.com/ 4 http://www.bestezines.com/ 4 http://www.free-press-release.com/ 4 http://Article-emporium.com 4 http://www.prfocus.com/ 4 http://www.prurgent.com/ 4 http://www.pressexposure.com/ 4 http://www.pr9.net/ 4 http://ecommwire.com/ 4 http://express-press-release.net/ 4 http://www.pressmethod.com/ 4 http://www.i-newswire.com/ 3 http://www.freepressindex.com/ 3 http://www.pressabout.com/ 3 Need more sites? Check out Top 50 Article Directories by Traffic & PageRank Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 75 PR/Article Submission Sites to Generate Inbound Continue reading →

Effective Blog Design Part 1

cgseo — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:55:37 +0000

Blogs have almost become as ubiquitous as the internet itsself. With powerful CMS tools like Wordpress and Blogger it’s never been easier to start a blog. In past articles I’ve spoken about the need to hire a professional web designer to get a great design or to rely on one of the thousands of free themes. However, whether you’re designing a new blog yourself or you’ve hired a web designer this series is going to teach you what you need to know about your blog design Why Your Blogs Design is so Continue reading →