Google Plus Open to All

After weeks of invitation-only field tests, Google brought its social network Google+ into “open beta” status. This means that anyone can join, without receiving an invite from someone who's already a member.
Google revealed the change of status in a blog post, in which they also discussed eight other improvements to the social site. The search company says that over the past 90 days in which Google+ has been in field trials, they've made 100 improvements, including the nine unveiled in the post. Interestingly, they put the status change at the end of the post.
So what other features did Google add to Google+ that might be of interest? They made some serious improvements to Hangouts. Google+ members have used this video conferencing capability in a number of innovative ways, “from cooking classes to game shows to music concerts,” Google notes. So it seemed natural that the search firm would want to make Hangouts more flexible. A new application will make it possible for users to check into Hangouts from their mobile devices – specifically, from Android 2.3+ devices with front-facing cameras. IOS support is on the way.
Another improvement, Hangouts on Air, should meet with great approval from those using Hangouts for giving concerts or classes or similar events. Hangouts on Air users simply start a normal Hangout, and then can choose to broadcast and record their session. “Once you're 'On Air,' up to nine others can join your hangout (as usual), and anyone can watch your live broadcast,” Google explained. At the moment, Google is limiting the number of people who can broadcast, but anyone in the Google+ community can watch a Hangout On Air. The very first On Air hangout, in fact, will take place tonight with will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas.
In addition to hanging out via mobile phone and hanging out as a spectator, Google added new abilities to Hangouts. These let users share their screens, a sketch pad, Google Docs, and even name their Hangouts. The latter is chiefly intended for users who “want to join or create a public hangout about a certain topic,” Google noted.
The blog post also threw a bone to developers, as the company released a basic set of Hangouts APIs. Google said that it's for developers who want to build “new kinds of apps and games (and who-knows-what-else),” and pointed interested programmers to theGoogle+ platform blog for more details.
But the second biggest news for most users (the first being opening Google+ to the public without an invitation) is that you can now search content in Google Plus. It seems a little ironic that a search company would take so long to add this kind of search feature to its social networking site, but there it is. “Just type what you're looking for into the Google+ search box, and we'll return relevant people and posts, as well as popular content from around the web,” Google notes. As of this writing, not everyone can use it, but Google is rolling it out very quickly.
Here's the point that I find the most interesting, however. Google instituted these changes at Google+ within 24 hours of Facebook making major changes that seem to have people leaving in droves. I can't comment too much on the changes, as I haven't seen them yet, but it sounds like they include losing the ability to toggle between “Top News” and “Most Recent” on your feed, so you can't choose to see your feed in chronological order. This seems to be the result of a “news ticker” they've added on the right hand side. You can find complete information on the change here. For many, it seems to be the last straw; it feels as if Facebook had taken away control over how they can view their own feeds. A number of my friends have decided to leave Facebook for Google+ over this. One could get an entire article out of how Google's changes to Google+ tend to give users more control over what they can do, while Facebook's changes to their social site seem to give users less control. For now, though, I'll simply congratulate Google on the improvements and hope they're ready for the influx of new users.

Must-Read Info on Facebook Ads with Marty Weintraub ━ SEM Synergy Extras

You’ve heard about how Facebook is the closest stop to Mecca on the Internet marketing train these days. With user segment targeting that surpasses all other channels and a drool-worthy potential for engagement, businesses of all stripes are interested in creating or maintaining a lively presence on the social networking site.

Just as Facebook made major changes to the site today (many of them encouraging users to remain on-site longer) this week’s SEM Synergy features an interview with dynamic Facebook Advertising genius Marty Weintraub.

Marty, @aimclear, got deep with me about Facebook Advertising and some of the contents of his book,Killer Facebook Ads. In our interview he shares insights that illuminate practical Facebook advertising practices that can help with your marketing today, and a look into the promise-filled future of Facebook, including:

• An extensive collection of targeted user segments
• A productivity hack for demographic research
• Using Facebook as a direct response channel and as a branding channel for a multi-channel campaign
• Facebook’s wealth of user data via lateral stemming semantic data
• And keeping up with Facebook as it evolves.

I’ve transcribed our interview, for the benefit of the bots as well as those of us who enjoy dissecting text.

On available Facebook targeting segments, the supplemental segments he’s made available as a companion online, and how these buckets are what Marty and his team at his consultancy aimClear go back to on a daily basis:

There’s a great back story to this appendix in this book, which is essentially a great big bucket, 30 pages of pre-set targeting segments. There’s an accompanying website for this and you can go to killerfbads.com [...] if you go to there and you have the book and the secret, lucky astrology decoder password that is in the book, then you [...] can copy the actual text for the segments.

If you go into Facebook’s Power Editor, which is their recent build out for Facebook Ads construction, you can literally paste these in. So they’re copy and paste segments. They range from every Fortune 5000 company to all the marketers in the world, the people who do bodybuilding ━ like there’s 30 pages of segments there.

The back story is that was the book I wanted to write first. When we first started talking to Cybex I said, “Oh yeah, lets just do 300 pages of targeting segments, because at aimClear we have thousands, tens of thousands of pre-set targeting segments because we’ve been working in this space since 2007. That is priceless stuff. We maintain a library of it. We go back to it over and over and over again. So, the editors said, oh well you might be able to provide some additional insight other than just targeting segments.

Still, now that the book has been out for a while and it approaches best seller status in some categories on Amazon, that is what people contact us about. They go, “Oh well have you put the segments on the website yet? Are there any more segments available?” My goal was to make it so, just the ability to walk into a book and know how to target every company in the Fortune 500 by various job descriptions is massive. That’s what I go back to in this book.

Also, just as long as I’m saying that, Facebook analytics and Facebook metrics are always evolving and pretty complicated, so even our staff, even with the level of client work that we do, we go back to this book to go, oh yeah, that’s what this metric is about, oh yeah, that’s the difference between that one. So I know there is a definitive resource, because we’re one of the definitive firms that do that type of work in the world, and we go back to it for our own training on a daily basis, practically.

On the alpha pattern productivity hack that cuts time when doing demographic research, and the sometimes misunderstood use of the Facebook hashtag:

Now we hear about these hacks all the time, from other speakers and companies, but we were the first to discuss many of them, especially one of our team members, Merry Morud. My favorite one that nobody ever talked about until she talked about it in public was the whole alpha pattern thing that you do with demographic research.

If you go on to Facebook Ads and you go to the Precise Interest area ━ you go Facebook.com/advertising, create a new ad, go down to Precise Interests, if it defaults to broad targeting then change it to precise targeting, then start typing. Just put in the letter “a” and you’ll get the short tail of Facebook “a” words, just like if you search for “a” in Google. And then say you type a word, “android”, it will show you the short-tail stuff for “android”, maybe “android apps” or whatever.

But then you go “android” space “a” and you get an entirely different selection of words. “Android” space “b”, “android” space “c”, and you could go through, call it the mid-tail for lack of a better word. But then once you have that, then you could go “android ab”, “android ac”, “android ad”, like the swapping consonants and vowels, and you unearth the depth of inventory of precise interest in Facebook ads.

That’s like a must-do productivity hack. It works for colleges, it works for programs in colleges, in works for cities, it works for many of the attributes in the ad targeting tool, and it’s as simple as going “word” space “a”. Of course, Merry would argue with me because she doesn’t like the copy and paste function, but if it’s me and I’m looking for New York everything, I’ll go “New York” copy it, then I go to the window and I go paste, space, “a”, paste, space, “b”.

It also works with Facebook Ads’ new hashtag, which sort of rolls up segments. Facebook has a new function in their demographic targeting that some people think is about trends, like in Twitter, but it’s not. If you go hashtag New space York, hashtag New York or hashtag one-word New York in Facebook Ads, you’re rolling up every possible other thing they have in inventory, be it New York anything. Anything associated with New York. So the alpha pattern thing in Facebook is just like the most important productivity hack.

On Facebook as a direct response channel and as part of a multi-channel campaign:

All data points to Facebook being a fabulous channel to get people to the top of the funnel, and it’s not that you can’t do direct response in Facebook ━ you can. If it’s prom time and you’re marketing to 16, 17 and 18 year old boys who are in high school, and you market to the girls and show a picture of a hot dude and say “Flowers, hot like him. 30% off for prom if you go to XYZ school”, right, or if you live in this town, yeah you can get people in the funnel and you can sell them things.

It’s most likely that the conversion costs will be higher in Facebook. It’s a display channel, so even though the target is very cool, it’s most likely going to cost a bit more on the CPA side than paid search. But, fantastic things happen in multi-channel campaigns.

Data, not just from us but I’ve seen great Marin data, I’ve seen great Efficient Frontier data. I’ve seen lots and lots of data that says if you market aggressively and you take a softer touch in Facebook, then it just radically improves paid search CTR, which lowers your Quality Score, which lowers your cost per conversion on the landing page. Facebook is awesome for a patient approach to advertising and a multi-channel approach to advertising. It’s not likely to be your quick hit but it sure can.

On KPIs that Facebook dominates and testing mechanisms within and outside of the platform:

Remember that there’s other KPIs too. Like, a friending KPI on Facebook, Facebook is going to wipe the floor with paid search. Anything that’s inside of Facebook. An application download, an event sign up, liking a page, anything like that.

Also, savvy marketers these days are taking what used to be an offline conversion page and dropping that form or dropping that e-commerce tool or whatever into a Facebook page and doing an A/B split testing on how conversion works for the same mechanism in and out of Facebook. Guess what, it works out way better staying inside Facebook quite a bit of the time.

So, Facebook works in a wide range of classic public relations and advertising KPIs, from crisis management, internal relations, community relations, investor relations, events, direct response, branding. Dude, nothing like serving 150 million impressions into the country of Australia to make a product name known to a new market. Facebook is massive. It’s really massive.

On what the future of Facebook holds, including data reports for sale and targeting social synonyms and stemmed interests:

I think what’s going to happen with Facebook is, first, Facebook over time will take advantage of being really the only company in the world that has lateral stemming semantic data. Facebook knows that if you are someone that clicks on a Buddhist ad or an ad targeted to people who like Buddhism, that you probably read Siddhartha, or like pad thai, or are interested in traveling to the mountainous regions of Japan. They know this lateral data, these stemmed interests, these social synonyms.

I think what’s going to happen, in time, I think Facebook will have a function for locating things more radically entwined with that stemming data. I think that will be made available to advertisers for lots and lots and lots of money. Facebook used to have a report like that ━ it’s in the book, one of the profile reports has been removed from Facebook and they’ve been selling that data to companies like Nielsen.

So I think extremely high end advertisers are going to be able to get data where when somebody clicks on a banner ad in any channel, there’s going to be a service available to ping Facebook and pull out that data about what that user, probably anonymized for privacy reasons, is into and you’re going to see content configuring on pages. That’s not going to affect you and me as marketers today, but I think that wealth of laterally stemmed data is going to be the most valuable marketing inventory in the world. It’s why Facebook will probably IPO at $100 billion and it will probably be worth it.

On what marketers need to pay attention to as Facebook evolves:

I think marketers need to stay in tune with evolving ad units inside of Facebook. Like the format, the concept of what it is, like for instance, Sponsored Stories. Sponsored Stories, that’s really organic, you know. Facebook is so viral, if you look at all the things that happen in Facebook where your friend sees that you’re into that or doing that or downloading that or participating in that.

Facebook is so completely virile that they basically chopped off the top of it and said if you want the rest of that organic activity, you have to pay for it, and that’s what Sponsored Stories are ━ the rest of the [...] News Feed organic prominence. I think being aware of the various ways that data is available and how you can use that, I think being aware of the evolution of ad units and how it affects you as a marketer.

If you don’t buy Sponsored Stories now, you’re not getting the whole organic pop anymore. And probably, the effect of search. I know that Facebook search is still largely people and fan pages and it still kinda sucks, but it doesn’t suck as bad as it used to. And with the type of data Facebook has, if they ever decide that they’re going to build a serious search utility inside of Facebook, whoa. That’ll be so serious. Really serious.

Facebook's New Verbs Have Marketers Talking

Marketers say they are excited that Facebook's "like" and "recommended" buttons have company with a new set of verbs, such as "watch," "listen," "read," "hike," etc. The social site's users will soon be able to tap buttons for those verbs to describe their brand engagement with TV programs, music, books, and public places.

Such Facebook user activities will appear in the social site's ticker feature, which began surfacing yesterday as a complement to the news feed. Along with Facebook Places check-ins, the activities should create lightweight brand impressions in the way that "likes" and "recommended" have.

Data for the verbs will apparently be collected and reported as "likes" have, creating new engagement metrics. Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, said richer possibilities exist now for Facebook's Sponsored Stories ads.

"Those Sponsored Stories are not just going to be about me liking Samsung," he said. "They will be about me watching my favorite program on my Samsung device. They are going to be better stories. That's important for Facebook in terms of revenue generation."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the changes during his keynote address at the annual f8 developer conference on Thursday. He highlighted the company's partnership with digital music service provider Spotify. How Spotify will appear in the ticker is perhaps one of the niftiest aspects of the updated version of the open graph. For instance, when Facebook/Spotify users observe a friend listening to something on the music service, they can click and join the listening experience.

"We’re more than what we did recently," Zuckerberg said.

Mark Renshaw, chief innovation officer for Leo Burnett, questioned what the new multimedia features on Facebook would mean to marketers. "Is advertising part of that media?" he asked. "So is branded entertainment more in-the-now? The industry needs a bit [more information]."

Facebook advertisers will have to address more real-time conversation, Renshaw said. "In some cases, we're already having trouble getting clients to think in semi-real-time; so this is going to be another challenge," he said. "But it's also going to be another opportunity."

Schafer of Deep Focus said brands must start thinking about themselves in broader terms when it comes to Facebook. While companies need to begin paying more attention to app development, Schafer said content will play a bigger role now than in the recent past.

"Every brand and marketer is going to have to be a content programmer," he said. "They have to ask themselves if they are prepared for that. Are they prepared to create content, curate content, aggregate content? Can they give people the reason to engage with their brands outside the physical nature of their products [and find] the additional manifestation of their products that can exist between people?"

Reggie Bradford, CEO of Vitrue, said in an email to ClickZ that Facebook would see a new class of social apps focused on media and lifestyle in f8's aftermath. "And these social interactions will be activated automatically thanks to the evolved Open Graph that reduces permissions and creates a more frictionless experience," he wrote. "Basically it removes barriers. If a person tells people they’re wearing their Nikes, that info gets added to the user's Timeline automatically and becomes a part of their history, to be seen by whoever they give permission to see it."

How a Search Engine May Measure the Quality of Its Search Results

When you try to gauge how effective your website is, you may decide upon certain metrics to measure its impact. Those may differ based upon the objectives of your pages, but could include things like how many orders you receive for products you might offer, how many phone calls you receive inquiring about your services, how many people signup for newsletters or subscribe to your RSS or click upon ads on your pages. They could include whether people link to your pages, or tweet or +1 articles or blog posts that you’ve published. You may start looking at things like bounce rates on pages that have calls to action intended to have people click upon other links on that page. You could consider how long people tend to stay upon your pages. There are a range of things you could look at and measure (and take action upon) to determine how effective your site might be.

A search engine is no different in that the people who run it want to know how effective their site is. A patent granted to Yahoo today explores how the search engine might evaluate pages ranking in search results for different queries, and looks at a range of possible measurements that it might use. While this patent is from Yahoo, expect that Google and Bing are doing some similar things. And while Bing is providing search data for Yahoo, that doesn’t mean that Yahoo’s results might not be presented and formatted differently than Bing’s results, and include additional or different content as well. As a matter of fact, Yahoo recentlyupdated its search results pages.

One of the problems or issues that you might run into when attempting to see how well your site works is determining how well the metrics you’ve chosen to measure that might work. A problem that plagues large sites is that they are so large that it can be difficult to determine which metrics work best. Yahoo’s approach uses a machine learning approach to determining the effectiveness of different “search success” metrics.

How to Choose the Right Content To Drives Online Sales

Interview Screen Grab from the 2011 Vocus Users Conference

When I was at a client’s User Conference earlier this year, Steve Farnsworth caught up with me and asked a question about using analytics to refine content for increased sales. I’m a big fan of repurposing contentand I noticed that the video itself never mentions me or my name and that people who read Online Marketing Blog might not see it.

So I’ve paraphrased the transcription and shared below.

When people look at analytics from their website while developing content plans, what kinds of things should they look for to help improve online sales?

To start with, a company can do some research to start developing personas that reflect the kinds of customer segments they’re after. That information can get things going in terms of an Editorial Plan and keywords used to optimize content and attract links, resulting in content that ranks well on search engines and drives traffic to product and services pages. As you attract that traffic from search engines, there’s some data to work with – to analyze and refine.

Through web analytics you can see which search terms are driving outcomes that you want, like conversions.  You might see really broad phrases, if you’re fortunate enough to rank highly for really broad phrases, driving traffic that results in behaviors that are more indicative of “tire kicking” during the initial phase of a buying cycle.

More specific phrases may be more characteristic of buyers that are further along in the search process. You can see that by looking at referring search queries for instances of pricing, specific nomenclature or model numbers. That kind of search can be more representative of someone who is ready  to buy.

So in terms of your editorial planning for content, you can take a look at this sort of cycle and anticipate what people want, optimize and promote. Observe how they visit and behave on the site. Then identify and refine subsequent content creation, optimization and promotion to make the content even more relevant and valuable.  The result is a shortening sales cycle, more revenue per sale and a better experience for customers.

Paid search marketers can refine their ads on the fly and see the effect on sales. What do you look for you in your web analytics to refined web site content to become more “findable” and more likely to convert visitors to buyers? Do you incorporate social CRM tools with web analytics? Any other tools?

Hulu Buries YouTube With 4x More Ad Views – Are Advertisers Afraid of YouTube?

I’ve read the latest press release from “comScore Video Metrix, which says that 180 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in August 2011 for an average of 18 hours per viewer. In other words, 85.8 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video that month.

I’ve also looked at the top 10 video content properties by unique viewers. Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in August with 162 million unique viewers. VEVO ranked second with 62.3 million and Facebook.com ranked third with 51.7 million viewers.

In addition, I’ve reviewed the top 10 YouTube partner channels ranked by unique video viewers. The data revealed that video music channels VEVO (with 60.6 million viewers) and Warner Music (with 30.9 million viewers) assumed the top two positions. Gaming channel Machinima ranked third with 17.7 million viewers.

But, I needed to double-check the list of the top 10 video ad properties by video ads viewed that was buried near the bottom of the press release. Americans viewed more than 5.6 billion video ads in August, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at 996 million. Tremor Video ranked second overall (and highest among video ad exchanges/networks) with 764 million ad views, followed by Adap.tv (720 million) and BrightRoll Video Network (603 million).

As Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) asked in the Men in Black (1997), “Anything about that seem unusual to you?”

It's a Squid 
Men in Black — MOVIECLIPS.com

Hulu, which ranked No. 9 in August with 26.4 million unique viewers, also ranked No. 1 that month with 996 million video ad impressions. But YouTube.com, which ranked No. 1 in August with close to 162 million unique viewers, wasn’t even ranked in the top 10 in video ad impressions.

If you drill down into the data, then Hulu is delivering 38.1 ads per viewer, who is visiting Hulu for an average 6.3 sessions a month, each of which lasts an average of 30.5 minutes. Since the average online content video is 5.3 minutes long, this means Hulu is delivering more than 6 video ads and less than 6 online content videos during the typical session.

In contrast, YouTube says it is monetizing over 3 billion video views per week globally. But YouTube also says over 3 billion videos are viewed a day. If you do the math, then only one out of seven videos viewed on YouTube is being monetized.

So, either Hulu has one hell of a sales team, or advertisers are afraid of YouTube. Or perhaps that why Google was among the top bidders trying to buy Hulu?

Now, what do I think is the truth? I think advertisers are limiting themselves to running advertising against only "premium" video content. But viewers are watching “popular” video content. Whether it's produced by amateurs or professionals, it's all just video content to viewers.

This means that advertisers are making a distinction without a difference. Does it really matter if talented and entrepreneurial YouTube partners are building the next generation of media companies in bedrooms, garages, or studios across the globe?

In addition, a number of advertisers limit themselves to running advertising against only “scripted” content. But, more than half of YouTube video views are for videos that are over six months old. So, if you are nervous about running advertising against unknown user-generated content, all you need to do is watch it ahead of time.

That’s my take, but I could be missing other factors. Why do you think YouTube has more than 6 times more unique viewers than Hulu, but Hulu has more than 4 times more video ads than YouTube?

YouTube Beach Bar

Flourish Creative posted a picture of YouTube at the Cannes Lions Festival, where their booth was a neat beach bar, serving real drinks. The picture was posted on Flickr the other day but the photo was taken on June 19, 2011.

This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.

Who's The First Google + User

Brian White, an engineer at Google who deeply involved in Google's search quality, posted a Google + post with some detective work.

Brian White wanted to see who "Profile Zero" on Google + is. So he decided to sniff around the Google robots.txt file and found a sitemap file atgstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml. Thefirst sitemap file referenced there listed the first profile as Raj Pudota.

Truth is, and Brian White said it, "I actually don't know if this is a "canonical first profile" or anything--it's just the first one listed."

Technically, this is extremely not likely. The first Google + user was probably a Googler working on the project.

If you look at Facebook, you can see profile number 4 is Mark Zuckerberg. Just tryfacebook.com/profile.php?id=4, notice the id=4. Who is number one? Someone named Rosa Angelica Alba.

Anyway, any ideas who has the first Google + profile?

Forum discussion at Google +.

Google Maps Removes Driving With Traffic Estimates

I am not sure exactly when this happened, but Google Maps has dropped one of the more useful features. The feature is, estimating how much time it would take to drive somewhere with traffic, either live traffic or predictive traffic based on day/time.

Now, the feature is gone.

A Google Maps Help thread has a Googler explaining they removed it because it wasn't accurate enough. Daniel from Google explained:

We have decided that our information systems behind this feature were not as good as they could be. Therefore, we have taken this offline and are currently working to come up with a better, more accurate solution. We are always working to bring you the best Google Maps experience with updates like these!

Personally, I found Google's traffic data more accurate than any other live traffic information. Google croudsourced phones for real time traffic data and I thought it worked well.

Old:

New:

Google launched traffic estimates back in 2007.

The thing is, the traffic estimates still do work, just not on Google Maps. You can use your iPhone and get the details. I am not sure if it still works on Android as well.

Hope they don't remove it from the iPhone because I use this feature a lot.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

Google Ignoring Your Page Titles?

For the past month, I've been seeing sporadic reports that Google is ignoring the webmaster's title tag and rewriting it to a Google made up title tag.

There are four different threads on this topic atWebmasterWorld since June on the topic.

This new change seems to be a limited test since around June and for the most part, webmasters are not happy about it.

We know Google may opt to change your meta description and use something different in the search result snippet area but page titles?

Anyway, this does not seem to be fully rolled out. I assume if it does, Google will only change your title tag based on the search query used and when they think it makes most sense. Are you comfortable giving Google the keys to your titles in the search results?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The risk of using dubious link-building services

You probably know the offers from companies who promise links from PR5-PR9 sites for a few dollars. This sounds like a very good offer and the websites look relatively credible. However, things that look too good to be true usually aren't true.

Many people have been burned by these link building services. Examples can be found here, here and here. (For the lawyers, we have nothing to do with the comments on the linked pages and we do neither endorse or denounce the companies mentioned on the pages.)

What do these companies promise and what do they actually do?

The promises of these dubious link building companies sound very good:

• They promise you links from high PR websites.
• The promise you a quick and easy solution to get more backlinks to your site.

Unfortunately, this is not what these companies actually do. When you order such a link building package, you will get the following:

• They create fake accounts on forums with a link to your site.
• They write dubious comments in forums with a link to your site.
• They create hundreds of fake websites and Internet directories to which they "submit" your site. The websites and directories are all owned by the same company (which also owns the link building service).

These links might actually harm your website

There are several reasons why these links won't help your website:

• The quality of the pages and the links is so low that the links won't have a positive effect on your rankings.
• Some of these sites add the links in a way that clearly looks like a paid link (which cause problems with Google).
• Most of the links will disappear after a short time.

Some people in the scam forums even reported that they were charged for links that didn't exist at all.

When they requested their money back, the customer service did not reply and the "US link building company" turned out to be located in an Eastern European country. The money was lost.

When it comes to link building and SEO, there is no fast-track

If you want to get lasting rankings in Google's top 10 results, there are no quick and dirty solutions. You need high quality web page content that has been optimized for users and search engines and you need backlinks from high quality websites.

It takes some time to get these backlinks but it's worth the time and the effort. A single link from a high quality website is better than lots of low quality links from dubious sites.

That's where IBP comes in: IBP helps you to manage your link building campaigns, it helps you to find potential link partners, it checks your backlinks and it helps you to contact your link partners.

In addition, IBP helps you to optimize your web pages, it helps you with keyword research, it checks the position of your website site and much more. And all of that for a price that is considerably lower than the prices that the link building services mentioned above charge.

Go for quality and try IBP now. You won't regret it!

Google says that valid HTML code is a quality signal

Webmasters are not sure about the importance of valid HTML code. Some think that it is very important while other say that it doesn't matter. Last week, Googlesaid that valid HTML code is a quality signal:

"Why does validation matter? There are different perspectives on validation—at Google there are different approaches and priorities too—but the Webmaster Team considers validation a baseline quality attribute. It doesn't guarantee accessibility, performance, or maintainability, but it reduces the number of possible issues that could arise and in many cases indicates appropriate use of technology.

While paying a lot of attention to validation, we've developed a system to use it as a quality metric to measure how we're doing on our own pages. Here's what we do: we give each of our pages a score from 0-10 points, where 0 is worst (pages with 10 or more HTML and CSS validation errors) and 10 is best (0 validation errors). We started doing this more than two years ago, first by taking samples, now monitoring all our pages."

What is valid HTML code?

Most web pages are written in HTML. As for every language, HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules.
Like any language, HTML is constantly changing. As HTML has become a relative complex language, it's very easy to make mistakes. HTML code that is not following the official rules is called invalid HTML code.

Why is valid HTML code important?

Search engines have to parse the HTML code of your web site to find the relevant content. If your HTML code contains errors, search engines might not be able to find everything on the page.
Search engine crawler programs obey the HTML standard. They can only index your web site if it is compliant to the HTML standard. If there's a mistake in your web page code, they might stop crawling your web site and they might lose what they've collected so far because of the error.
Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a single missing bracket in your HTML code can be the reason if your web page cannot be found in search engines.
If you don't close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might ignore the complete content of that page.

How can you check the validity of your HTML code?

Download IBP and select the HTML validator in the "Tools" menu. Enter the address of a web page and you will see how many errors the page contains.

Although not all HTML errors will cause problems for your search engine rankings, some of them can keep web spiders from indexing your web pages.

Valid HTML code makes it easier for search engine spiders to index your site. Checking the HTML code of your web pages only takes a few minutes but it will have a major impact on the accessibility of your web pages.

Why the iPhone 5 will fail (how to create linkworthy content)

If you want to get backlinks from other websites, your site must have link-worthy content. Other websites will only link to your site if there's something interesting on your web pages. There are several things that you can do to create linkworthy content.

1. Stroke some egos

People like to feel important and they like to link to web pages that confirm that they are important. You can turn this into links by doing the following:

• Find companies that have "in the news" pages on their websites and write about these pages.
• Write a positive product or company review and inform the reviewed company about your review.
• Write articles that show the importance of people ("Why garbage men are so important", "If paid for all their work, housewives would earn $134,121 per year", etc.).

People like to link to that kind of pages. This method also works the other way around. For example, an article "Why the iPhone 5 will fail" might get many backlinks by angry Apple fans. Of course, you have to be careful with this tactic.

1. Write top 10 lists

Top 10 lists are a popular method to create linkworthy content. Your lists could start like this:

• The 10 best...
• 10 easy tips for...
• The 10 worst...
• The 10 most important...

Your lists can contain the best tips, resources, people, experts, websites, habits, etc. The possibilities are endless.

3. Create valuable resources

Valuable resources get the best backlinks. If there is no good guide for your industry, you should write it. Create how to's and tutorials. The more valuable the content on your website is, the more people will link to your website.

If you want to manage the backlinks of your website, try the backlink manager in IBP. IBP's link manager enables you to manage all of your backlinks by category, you can see the status of each backlink, backlinks are checked automatically, IBP gets the PageRank of the linking sites, nofollow links are marked and much more.

Optimize your internal links to get higher search engine rankings

Optimizing the content of your web pages is important if you want to get high rankings on Google. Most people know that they have to work on web page titles, web page content and links from other sites.

The internal link structure of a website is often overlooked although it has a big impact on the rankings of a website.

Why the internal link structure of your website is important

Internal links do not count as much as links from external websites. Nevertheless, search engines use them as an important signal in their algorithms.

Search engines consider links as votes. By optimizing the link structure on your web pages, you can lead search engines to the important pages of your website and you can show them the keywords for which you want to get high rankings.

1. Start by optimizing the main navigation on your website

The main navigation on your website are the navigational links that are visible on all pages of your site. The main navigation is the most important part of your website navigation.

It usually includes a "Home" link (including a linked company logo image) and links to the main sections on your website.

• Make sure that the links in your main navigation contain your most important keywords.
• Avoid Flash and JavaScript menus. Most search engines won't index your pages then. Use standard HTML and CSS to design your website navigation.

2. Consider breadcrumb navigation for sub-pages

Sub-pages can benefit a lot from breadcrumb navigation (Home > Category > Sub category > Product page). Sub pages usually aren't linked form the main website navigation.

Breadcrumb navigation links can help search engines to put the sub pages into the right context:

• Use breadcrumb navigation links on your web pages to show search engines and website visitors the exact location of a page.
• Use descriptive and keyword rich words in your breadcrumb navigation: Shoe shop > Sports shoes > Buy soccer shoes > Adidas deals

3. Make sure that the first link on the page is the right link

Google seems to consider only the text of the first link on a page. For example, if page A links to page B with the anchor text "further information" on the top of the page and with the anchor text "buy adidas soccer shoes" at the bottom of the page then only the first anchor text will be used by Google.

• If you link more than once to another page, make sure that the first link on the page contains the keywords for which you want to get high rankings.

Optimizing the internal link structure of your website can have a major impact of the search engine positions of your web pages.

If you want to get your website on Google's first result page for keywords that deliver paying customers to your website, analyze your pages with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer. IBP's Top 10 Optimizer will show you how to change your pages so that they get the best possible rankings on Google and other search engines.