Do you follow businesses on Twitter? Or are you a business on Twitter? Either way, you follow your favorite businesses to get real-time notifications about the latest hapennings and special offers or you promote your own business to connect with supporters and share news. We have talked about the positive role Twitter plays in search engines’ algorthims, which determine what websites are the most relevant – meaning, in large part, which sites are most liked by fellow internet users (people searching and shopping on the internet).

MG Siegler of TechCrunch talked to Twitter’s Adam Bain about newly promoted tweets:

“It turns out that on Twitter, users are already interacting with ads on a level that most would be surprised by,” Bain says. He notes that while traditional online display ads only get a click-through rate of something like 0.05 percent, some Promoted Tweets are seeing engagement in the double-digit percentages. “Engagement matters,” Bain says.

“Users want to be updated when brands have updates or exclusive content. The one problem we’ve heard from users is that when there is exclusive content or deals, there’s a chance they might miss them,” he says. “If the brand tweets at 9 AM, and the person comes in at 9:15 AM, they’ll miss them.”

“Resonance is also really important to us. This is about the realtime opportunity. And that expires fairly quickly,” Bain goes on, saying that in the ideal scenario, the things brands tweet will be “good, not loud”.

Bain says that the realtime aspect of the product is also vital to how Twitter places them. Because hot topics that people are Tweeting about can happen at any time, Twitter needs to be able to talk to a brand and quickly place an appropriate Tweet. “It’s realtime marketing at scale,” he says. “That’s the whole value proposition of the platform.”

LOCQL. It’s similar to Quora or other Q+A user-generated sites. Right now, it looks like the site could benefit from some more legitmate users but the intent for a location-based Q+A social network is positive.

Questions based around given cities can help users find local eateries, bars, attractions and other things to do while traveling or even if you just want a fresh perspective on your own town.

If you’re thinking the site would be a good platform for marketing your small business, take precautions – like any link-building or blog commenting strategy, it’s best to have a real interest in the subject matter you’re looking at. You should offer a real solution for people’s needs. You’ll want to provide helpful tips and insight rather than just throwing your name into the mix without being respectful of the platform and its users, meaning that you want to build trust and establish credibility as a community member rather than as a name dropper or free advertiser.

Here’s a link to another post that explains how it works. Here’s a link to LOCQL itself.

The positivity and excitement surrounding Yodle acquiring ProfitFuel this week is AMAZING! There has been a rush from New York and Austin to meet in the middle — on Facebook and Twitter, of course.

The Yodle and Profit Fuel teams have joined forces and are making friends and tweeting all about our newfound love and plans for TOTAL LOCAL DOMINATION!

@ProfitFuel
ProfitFuel: I didn’t think the future of @ProfitFuelInc could be any brighter but it is! Incredibly proud to be part of the @Yodle family…TO THE TOP!!
24 May via web

@Yodle
Yodle: @ProfitFuelInc @Yodle Welcome to the family and to TOTAL LOCAL DOMINATION
24 May via web Favorite Retweet Reply
from Manhattan, NY

The team at Yodle has been so welcoming and their product is absolutely killer! It allows customers a totally integrated online marketing experience that drives sales and helps build an impactful online social network. What businesses get is a full-service and turnkey solution. For example, a customer’s dashboard clearly shows real-time progress on growth in qualified traffic and search engine results. It also displays a live feed of actions we take on the customer’s behalf to achieve these results.

Paired with ProfitFuel’s service, Outrank, customers can customize their long term marketing and advertising campaigns that are optimized to drive relevant traffic to their websites and bring in new customers. Together, ProfitFuel and Yodle optimize content so Google, Yahoo and Bing will show customers’ profiles on the front page of search results. We’re focused on the keywords that drive the largest number of relevant customers to businesses and we promote our customers’ profiles across the internet to improve organic rankings in addition to local search rankings.

This partnership is the perfect match. Yodle CEO, Court Cunningham speaks for us all when he says,

With this acquisition, our goal stays the same: to change the game for small businesses by making online advertising more accessible and accountable. What changes is the additional scale we have to accelerate the speed of product innovation to help small businesses keep pace with the fast moving online landscape.

Not only is our mission one in the same, but the two company cultures – which promote integrity and balancing a strong work ethic with having fun – are nearly identical. Our offices even look extremely similar! We’re happy to be one big, WINNING family!

The 2011 results from the 15th Annual Webby Awards were revealed this week. There are four major entry types: Websites, Interactive Advertising, Online Film & Video and Mobile & Apps. Each category wins two honors – The Webby Award and The People’s Voice Award.

The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Established in 1996 during the Web’s infancy, the Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which includes an Executive 750-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities, and Associate Members who are former Webby Award Winners and Nominees and other Internet professionals.

The Academy of Digital Art and Sciences is made up of luminaries like

musicians Beck and David Bowie, Internet inventor Vint Cerf, political columnist Arianna Huffington, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, R/GA Founder and Chairman Robert Greenberg, Virgin Atlantic Chairman and Founder Richard Branson, and The Weinstein Company Co-Founder Harvey Weinstein.

Interesting that Google barely made an appearance, even as far as simply being nominated. Google and YouTube: YouTube Play did win the People’s Voice Award in the Art category, though. It’s no suprise that they didn’t win anything in the Social category – they’ve had a difficult time syncing things up (Hotpot, Places, Reviews) to make for a seamless user experience. Here are some categories they would surely like to win next time around: 

• Best Use of GPS or Location Technology (Foursquare won both The Webby & People’s Voice Award)
• Guides/Ratings/Reviews (Yelp won  both awards as well)

Definitely a favorite of mine as well as around the office: Pandora won the Music category from both the Webby Academy and the People’s Voice.

I thought it would be interesting to look at what categories Google has won in the past compared to what they haven’t won in more recent years. You can visit the Webby Awards website to browse through each year, starting with 1997. It’s amazing to be able to see the changes in technology and trends — and how competition plays such a major role in progress.

2001 Best Practices: The Webby & People’s Voice Awards

2002 Best Practices: The People’s Voice Award

2003 News: The Webby Award, Webby Technical Achievement: The People’s Voice

2004 Best Practices: The Webby & People’s Voice Awards, Services: The Webby & People’s Voice Awards

2005 Best Navigation/Structure: People’s Voice, Best Practices: The Webby & People’s Voice Awards

2006 Best Practices: The People’s Voice

In 2007 they were nominated for Best Visual Design Function (gapminder.org: The Gapminder World 2006) and in 2010 they were nominated in the Music category for Google Creative Lab: YouTube Symphony Orchestra.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, made up of companies who control over 80% of online advertising, has released The IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report for 2010. PwC, the world’s second-largest professional services firm, prepared the report.

The report, which is available here, puts Internet advertising revenue for 2010 at $26 Billion, a new record. Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of IAB, had this to say in a recent press release:

“As the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report amply demonstrates, brand advertisers and marketers have adopted the power of digital media as a central element of their campaigns…Consumers have shifted more of their time to digital media – watching television shows and movies online – and advertisers now accept this multifaceted medium as a key component for reaching their targets.”

Any business owners reading this post should pay attention closely to what I’m about to say. A whopping 46% of internet advertising revenue in 2010 came from search advertising. That’s almost $12 Billion dollars. Much (if not most) of the revenue attributed to the “search” channel comes from paid search advertisements, or PPC. With that in mind, take into account that 85% of searchers don’t click on PPC ads. Most of us, myself included, stick to the regular (organic) results that appear when we’re using search engines. Furthermore, optimizing your site to rank prominently in organic search (the art of SEO) is much less costly than buying PPC ads.

So, for pennies on the dollar, your business can use SEO to reach way more customers than your counterparts who are using PPC. If paid search advertisers are making good money as it is, just imagine how much you could grow your business using SEO. As time progresses, the market will only become more competitive, so you might want to consider making a small investment while the iron is hot. As your competitors catch on after you, their sites will be at a disadvantage–older, more established sites that have been SEO optimized (like yours) will tend to rank better.

Structured markup, also known as semantic HTML, is a way of using HTML markup to present more details about the nature of elements present within a website. If this sounds confusing, let me explain plainly how it applies to your business.

Structured markup is an extension of standard HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). HTML contains information about your website that tells a browser (like IE or Firefox) how to show it to a user. It tells a browser what text will look like, where the text will go, what size an image will be, how links will function, etc.

Semantic HTML uses the same language to assign more meaning to the attributes of a website. Using “tags”, a web designer can categorize pieces of content as addresses, recipes, product information, and much, much more. Google uses information from some of these tags when presenting search results to users who are looking for products or businesses. The conversation goes something like this:

Website: Hey Googlebot, this is L’Amourita Pizza. Our address is 123 Main St, Albuquerque, NM. Our phone number is 206-555-1234.

Googlebot: Thanks, website. I’ll make sure that information is stored in my database correctly and shown to searchers.

It is important to note that Google’s official stance is that structured markup will not boost your rankings. However, it will help your CTR (Clickthrough Rate). Those familiar with PPC will understand this metric, which is how often users will click on the link to your site when it appears in their search results. Sites with richer, correctly displayed information will receive more clicks and more business.

I had the pleasure of attending an Austin Internet Marketing Meetup on the subject hosted by Homeaway. I can’t say enough about what a great host Homeaway was, not only for letting us use their attractive space for a free event, but especially for the great beer and appetizers they provided attendees. The speaker was Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer for BestBuy.com, who gave a really great presentation and explained how the semantic web is especially powerful for those who sell products online.

E-Commerce websites can take advantage of Google’s Custom Search technology, which allows website owners to tailor a user’s search experience within their own website. You can create higher-level classifications for product information, including reviews and pricing. An example is shown below:

In one of the biggest SEO headlines in recent months, JCPenney was publicly outed as a practicioner of black hat SEO. The company, whose uncanny organic results have been manually downgraded by Google, was allegedly unaware of the sketchy tactics used by SearchDex, a third party SEO vendor acting on their behalf. Before webspam engineer Matt Cutts and the rest of the Google team took action, JCPenney had front page rankings for multitudes of product-specific keywords, like “comforter sets” for months.

How they did it:

SearchDex used a paid links network that compensates website owners for the placement of links on their sites. By optimizing the anchor text (the text that appears in the underlined hyperlink) with a given keyword for a large number of pages, it did not matter that the pages they used had little traffic on their own or were not contextually relevant. In a specific example shown by Search Engine Land, JCPenney’s landing page for “comforter sets” had 700-plus of these junk sites linking to it, which included sites dedicated to Eastern Medicine, car modification and “How to hack Friendster Private Picture” (I was not personally aware Friendster was even still in existence).

If you have any hand in your company’s search marketing efforts, regardless of size, you should learn from this. Yes, the ROI from their dark alley campaign was probably phenomenal. However, was it worth the mess their PR and marketing people have to clean up now? Google has manually demoted their search results to obscurity. For a company that is trying to transition from its “Big Book” catalog to e-commerce, is a few months of SEO glory worth the work it will take to repair the damage from this fallout? Fortunately for JCPenney, sales driven by organic SEO are only a small part of its revenue. But for any legitimate business seeking long-term online marketing success, pure black hat SEO is just not worth it.

Recently, Google Webspam Engineer Matt Cutts took to the company’s official blog to announce a new anti-spam initiative targeting “content farms”–low-quality, often plagiarized websites that are routinely used to help webmasters cheat their way to the top of search results pages.

Since the Caffeine update and other projects have both grown Google’s index and increased the crawling frequency of its spiders, an alarming number of questionable results have brought on loads of negative press criticizing search quality. Cutts claims that “pure webspam” has been reduced significantly enough to focus on a new target: “low-quality websites”.

Cutts goes on to say that Google has rolled out “two major algorithmic changes” focusing on these websites during 2010, and that the company’s webspam team has been strained as of late due to added obligations. However, the company’s stance is that its engine’s results are better than they ever were, and that they will continue to keep it that way.

At Outrank.com, we have always advocated an SEO strategy that is in alignment with industry best practices. As a business owner, you need to make sure your website is as effective as possible without cheating or spamming the search engines. Call us at 877-332-4321 to learn more.

Any SEO expert will advocate the importance of links in determining your placement in any major search engine, as will Outrank.com.

That said, link building is risky and complicated–too much so for an amateur to perform wisely.

All of the following are considered in the valuation of a given link:

• Continuity of subject matter
• Number of additional links to a page
• Presentation/positioning of the link
• Sites linking to the link-providing site
• Perceived authority of the linking site
• Variety of link sources
• Relative timespan/trending of links

This is a small and non-exclusive list. Furthermore, these factors vary in importance and use with one another…and between search engines.

With that said, search engines do a fairly good job of differentiating sites that try to game their algorithms from sites that are associated with relevant, trusted, popular, non-spammy domains. Fortunately, there are a variety of ways to gain legitimate, valuable links to your site, though these tactics require a large investment of resources and expert SEO knowledge:

• Creative content strategies
• Viral sharing
• Evaluating trending topics relative to your industry
• Legitimate directories
• Publicity

On a final note, attempting to use these strategies on your own or with an underqualified SEO company can have disastrous results. In the wrong hands, these efforts can damage your reputation or put you out of business. To talk about building your online presence as a small business, call Outrank at (877) 332-4321.

When it comes to small business advertising, Outrank.com is the leader in reaching potential customers on the front page of the search engines. With a low cost and measurable results, it’s no surprise that the SEO specialist now caters to over 8,000 small businesses looking to establish an online presence.

There is no secret to the company’s success, as the product sells itself. Clients are given a website and are registered on local directories in a way that helps their customers find the products and services they offer. It’s evident that people are going online to research and contact local businesses.

As demand grows, so does Outrank.com. They’re constantly adding experienced client services professionals to the team to make sure that every client has a personal point of contact, no matter what their monthly budget is. They’re also beefing up their marketing team, whose sole job is to make sure the product drives business to the customer. They have recently been named a “Top Workplace” by the Austin American-Statesman and a “Best Company to Work For” by Texas Monthly. These honors reflect their dedication to their employees and customers alike.

To see what all the buzz is about, call Outrank.com at (877) 332-4321.