INSIGHT blogArchive: August 2009

Archive for August, 2009

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How does Social Media benefit SEO?

28
August
2009

Social Media sites and links have strong SEO and organic rank value

Andrew Bates

Client Services Manager

Over the last couple years of both pitching and listening to pitches about corporate social media, I’m often surprised by how organizations focus on the “buzz” or brand benefits around social media without noting the obvious technical benefits for that organization’s search engine optimization.

We know that keyword phrases, site architecture, relevant content, and links make up for much of a website’s rankings (http://www.sherpastore.com/Benchmarks-Metrics.html and 1000s of other sources).  Out of traditional SEO, we see that both on-page elements of a website like keywords and content factor as well as off-page elements like inbound links.  Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing value inbound links from other websites as “votes of confidence” for the website they are linking too (http://www.seocrunch.com/factors-in-seo-link-value/).  Time and consistent results have shown that inbound links make up a majority of a site’s page rank value, and that each type of inbound link has different merit or weight for the referenced site:

Overall Ranking Algorithm

Overall Ranking Algorithm

  • 24% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain

  • 22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page

  • 20% Anchor Text of External Links

  • 15% On-Page Keyword Usage

  • 7% Traffic and Click-Through Data

  • 6% Social Graph Metrics

  • 5% Registration and Hosting Data

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors/

So what is the bulk of social media engineering? (besides the important, high-level concepts like awareness, community, resources, reputation management and the rest…)  Well?  Social ends up being a lot of properly research keyword phrases imbedded in optimized content on open, crawlable sites with tons and tons of contextual, relevant links from powerful domains.  Social media is an ever increasingly important component of holistic, natural search.  One of the best things an organization, association, group, or business can do to improve their web presence is to introduce a social media strategy that keeps SEO in mind during the strategy, execution, and analysis phases.

Search engines and search sites today are putting ever increasing value on authoritative social and multi-media based sites.  Links from video sites like youtube.com and posts on sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, or Delicious are beginning to become incredibly important for any organization competing for their own space on the web (http://www.bestrank.com/blog/how-social-media-can-help-improve-organic-search-rankings/).

So remember when you are articulating your new social outreach program to your client or internal management team, you can remind those decision makers that your social and new media strategy will help measure and monitor the brand, it will help you communicate, understand and grow your audience base, AND… when executive properly it will improve and solidify the SEO value of that website.

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Retailers Trying To Use Word of Mouth Marketing

25
August
2009

Retailers are hoping to utilize the power of viral marketing to help them reach new potential customers.

Ryan Moss
Media Coordinator

Retailers have been using email marketing for quite some time now to keep their existing customers informed and hopefully attract new customers. Now more and more retailers are adding "share" or "forward to a friend" options to their emails, hoping that their existing subscribers will help them bring in new ones.

Retailers have been using to two different techniques to encourage word of mouth marketing. The first is adding a "forward to a friend" (FTAF) button, which according to data from Smith Harmon, has been adopted by 41% of retailers surveyed. The other option, which is less popular right now, is adding a "share with your social network" (SWYN) option. Of those surveyed, only 6% said they provide this option. The study also showed that 7% of retailers offered both options while 46% offered neither option.

FTAF is clearly the more popular option right now, but many people believe that SWYN is on the rise. Within SWYN there are several different social networks that retailers make available. As seen in the chart below, the most popular one by far is Facebook.

Adding these functions to your emails is a tremendous idea and is something that should be done by all companies and organizations, not just retailers. When finding either a forward to a friend or a share with your social network tool to incorporate with your email newsletters, there are several different options out there including our own tool, JumpReach. Our solution provides robust analytics that allow you to see the detailed results of your sharing campaign and it also makes it easy for your existing subscribers to forward your message by allowing them to access their address book for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Outlook and LinkedIn to select which contacts they want to share with. In conjunction with our JumpReach solution, we offer a FREE Assessment in which one of our Product Specialists will discuss how your business can enjoy the benefits of viral marketing.

106065 Retailers Trying To Use Word of Mouth Marketing

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Facebook, Back in the Game

18
August
2009

In an effort to better compete with Google and Twitter, Facebook purchases FriendFeed

Christine Pepin
Media Coordinator

Social media, social media, social media.  Everyone’s talking about it in some way or another and there is no doubt this conversation will continue to evolve for quite some time.  In the meantime, the major players in the online space are working eagerly to sprint ahead of the dialogue and predict the new “must sign-up tool.”  Last week, Facebook released that it had bought FriendFeed, a service that allows users to share updates with friends as well as aggregate the updates from other social sites such as Twitter, Gmail or Facebook. 

I finally had the opportunity to play around a bit more today with it and saw that this may just be the tool that social networking fans cannot do without.  When I first started becoming familiar with Twitter, I thought “who has the time to make these updates, while still checking Facebook, connecting with others on LinkedIn, blogging, G-chatting and all the other factors of everyday-life?”  With the functionality on FriendFeed, it appears to be easier to do so with less clicks and time, as all these outside feeds can be streamed together to be used on one platform.  In real-time, updates can be made on the site, which looks ironically like Facebook; built with the same options to “comments, share or like.”

Facebook has done very well over the last few years capitalizing on their earning potential.  With all the personal information they have access to as well as their massive 250 million user base, advertisers that can afford it are flocking to get in front of the audience they can so accurately target.  Now with FriendFeed, they have even more site ad inventory where they can mirror their model.  Some have said that Facebook is aspiring to be the next Google.  I’m not convinced yet but the idea is possible.  Google has a way of diving its hands in anything it can, being an innovator and setting the bar for others in the online industry.  But maybe, Facebook is ready to set the bar just a smidge higher in the realm of social. Nevertheless, it’s a constant race and it’s clear Google is taking close watch. 

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Your Simple Social Media Cheat Sheet – Part 2

13
August
2009

Once you’re ready to join the conversation, how do you execute, manage, and adjust?

Blake Bowyer
Media Program Analyst


| Read Part 1 |

So, after deciding whether to test your social media efforts – whether it be in one venue, with one message, or with a limited audience – you’re ready to go live. Assuming that you’ve focused your campaign, it’s time to implement and move down the checklist:

  • How are you monitoring your social media engagement?

You have established your goals and ways to track them, but social media moves fast and you might have to adjust based on the response. Unlike the approach one would take with traditional mediums and check them at the end of the month, week, or even day, social media must be watched in realtime. The dialogue can change quickly and responses must be immediate. Whether you’re answering questions, handling problems, or encouraging fan/follow/customer participation, you must be active. Even if the objective is to gain long-term benefits, you must keep the effort on track or change course if you’re veering.

  • How will you build your presence up or down?

Whether you create a flicker of conversation or a groundswell of chatter, it’s as if you engaged a few people. How will you expand that effort if successful or long-term and how will you responsibly end that effort if unsuccessful or short-term? Social media participants don’t easily forget, so even when pulling a campaign off the grid, it must be done cautiously to avoid unraveling what is established.

  • How will you communicate the success of your organization’s social media initiatives?

Not everyone is going to understand why social media is a success (or even a failure), so be prepared to translate the outcomes. Track engagements, problems solved, coupons redeemed, or other numbers of engagements you decided to measure in the beginning. Also, building presences is valuable as well, so be sure to communicate beyond your ultimate goals.

  • Wash, rinse, repeat.

No matter how skillful or developed your organization becomes with social media, this process will always apply. Some steps might take longer or shorter, but they shouldn’t be omitted. As for that cheat sheet, here’s the quick list:

  • Determine what you want to accomplish.
  • Decide what each medium can do for the campaign. 
  • Decide the level of traditional, new, or a combination of media.
  • Determine your comfort in each social medium.
  • Decide to stay in-house or seek a partner.
  • Create a timeline.
  • Decide the duration and intensity.
  • Decide whether to test and at what scale.
  • Establish how to monitor the initiative.
  • Decide how to bow out or ramp up.
  • Determine how to translate internally.
  • Wash, rinse, repeat.

Now, jump in and see what your organization can do by being more sociable. 

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Online Marketing Campaigns Still Facing High Click Fraud Rates

12
August
2009

While click fraud rates have slightly decreased, advertisers must continue to be aware of this ongoing issue.

Stefanie Berliant
Media Coordinator

Many of my previous posts have sung the praises of display advertising.  Banner advertising is great for branding, driving search, and supporting online conversion goals, but there is one major caveat to these programs: Click Fraud.  Many marketers define click fraud as any method of artificially inflating clicks or page impressions.  Some define it solely for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns, however this is just as common with other campaign models such as Cost-Per-Thousand impressions (CPM).  You may ask yourself ‘Why would ad networks want to generate false clicks?’ Well, if the program is on a CPC model, then the advertising network garners revenue based on how many clicks are received. If a campaign is running on a CPM model, click fraud would help make an ad campaign appear more effective. Ad networks are not always the culprit either. Individual publishers within networks can also engage in this internet crime in order to increase their cut of the revenue generated. Direct competitors can also be the fraudsters, “spending” your money quickly in order to decrease your share of voice.    

While recent studies have shown that click fraud rates have decreased slightly in 2009, it still continues to be a major concern for online marketers as these bad clicks are increasingly coming from automated scripts.  There are companies who provide auditing services to combat click fraud, but they are not always going to be able to detect these malicious clicks 100% of the time as these scripts continue to become more sophisticated.  

Online advertisers must be aware of this problem and know the signs of when it is happening. Having a reliable analytics tool is the best step advertisers can take to not fall victim to this crime. Most analytics packages allow you to see geographically where most of these clicks are being generated or if specific keywords are receiving a surge in traffic. Advertisers must monitor and trend these metrics s to detect fraudulent clicks and making sure marketing budgets are being spent wisely.

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