I don’t propose that link builders allot a budget for building no follow links or start to spend lots of time acquiring these. However, I do believe that it would be wise for many people in the SEO industry to reconsider their stance on no followed links. Those who are in the most competitive and most lucrative industries may want to pay a little bit more attention than others.

You can see a discussion some of the different types of value that can be gained from no followed links below.

Direct Click-Throughs

A link from a relevant source can provide targeted traffic that can convert just as well as any other kind of traffic. Don’t forget that the ultimate goal of internet marketing is to acquire targeted website visitors that will convert.

A hardcore devil’s advocate (I’m hardcore, but not this hardcore) could even argue that in some cases – the best links are links that provide lots of targeted traffic but still use the no follow attribute. This link has zero SEO risk with regards to either being “spammy” now or turning into a “spammy” website 4 years down the road. If you fill a job position that is more in the realm of ad buying and customer acquisition instead of SEO, I’m sure that you can relate to this. You want to be known as the person who brought in all of the great web traffic, not the guy who accidentally got your website penalized by getting involved with a “bad neighborhood” on the web.

Branding Impressions

A visitor does not even have to click on your link in order for you to obtain some value for your brand in this fashion. If you can get your brand name out there in front of your targeted audience, you are receiving valuable branding impressions regardless of whether or not anyone actually clicks on your links. When looking for branding impressions, you can often assume that if you are getting zero clicks, you are not likely to be getting many quality impressions either. However, this doesn’t mean that you are receiving zero branding impressions and obtaining no value at all.

To put these first two points in perspective, I like to ask people if they would accept a link from CNN’s homepage if they knew that it would be no followed. The answer is usually a resounding “yes”. Most link building opportunities don’t involve big names like CNN, but the same principles still apply elsewhere to a small extent.

The Long-Term Value of a Sustainable Link Profile

While we know that today Google is not passing pagerank through these links, this does not mean that Google will never pass any pagerank through any of these links and that Google will never figure out a useful way to use the data. There is a difference between passing pagerank and using data generated from a no follow link.

If you really want to build a link profile that will be sustainable over a long period of time, I suggest using the mentality that you need to build up a link profile that is similar to that of an authority website which has had no manual link building. This includes having no followed links regardless of their value. A large authority website is going to have lots of links that use the no follow attribute.

For all we know, Google may eventually start to look at the % of your link profile that consists of no followed links and use this to try and determine if the website has had manual link building done by an SEO or if it has acquired backlinks naturally. Some SEO tools that are used by the marketing community already offer this capability.

We also must also consider the possibility that Google will not always be the most important name in the search engine industry and not all search engines will always work the same. In other words – Google may never change how they feel about no follow links, however someone else might eventually treat them differently and that someone might turn out to be important. Ultimately; our interest is in “acquisition engines”. Right now search engines are filling this role nicely, but the web is young and it is not immune to changes, innovation, and new engines that can drive targeted traffic to your website.

Valid User Signals

One of the biggest overall changes in the way that Google has valued websites in the last few years has been the usage of user data for ranking purposes. This area of search is evolving quickly and information about how “user data” is incorporated into the SERPs is still fairly scarce. It should be acknowledged that even though no followed links may not pass any pagerank, this does not mean that useful user data cannot be collected by Google and used along with their other user behavior data.

For example; If someone clicks on a link that points to your website and that user has a high time-on-site and high number of page views – in some cases Google is able to see this through their data collection methods. This implies that the link was useful and it points to a website that is useful.

The user data is still meaningful and they do reserve the right to use it. They can even use the data while still saying that “no followed links do not pass pagerank”. Do not mistake that last statement as Google having said “no followed links cannot provide any value to you or our algorithms”. The marketing services that we offer here at seo4anyone incorporate the sentiment of all of the principals above into our strategies (with some followed links too of course). You can see the plethora of services that we offer to our clients on our SEO Services page.

Anyone out there in the marketing world is welcome to comment below. I suspect that the SEO gurus won’t agree with the points made here as much as the brick & mortar marketers. If you disagree, let us know why. If you agree and you have found benefits from your no followed links in the past, I hope that you will share your experiences with us in the comment box below as well.

If you are interested in SEO services for your own company, please contact us through the contact page.

When someone Google’s your company name you want to own that first page of results and control the content that shows up. The first and best way to do this is to build the reputation and raking of your social media properties.

This includes your Facebook and Twitter pages, Linkedin profile, Youtube account, Pinterest account, and any other social media/business profile pages that you control. This will increase the SEO strength of these pages and make it more likely that these pages will show up in the #2, #3, #4, #5 spots in the search engine results when someone searches for your name.

This can give your brand name some protection from people who may be writing negative things about you on the internet. When someone searches for your brand name, they will see your main website in the top-ranking spot, followed by all of your social media accounts and profile pages. This is a wonderful result compared to a scenario where someone searches for your brand name, and they see a wide range of people writing negative things about you on sites like Ripoffreport.com, Yelp, Tripadvisor, or perhaps in their own blog articles or news postings.

For some nightmare stories about Negative Yelp Reviews, follow the link to another blog post about this very subject.

You can see this concept at work in the screen shot below. The green arrows represent websites where we are in control of the content. The red arrow is shown next to Yelp – a website where we do not have the ability to control the content. Ideally, you would want Yelp to be completely off of the first page of the results or at least below the fold.

We offer search engine brand protection services, better known as reputation management to our clients here at seo4anyone.com and you are welcome to contact us if you are interested in these services for your own brand.

#2 Subscribe to Google Alerts for Your Brand Name

Google Alerts are part of a free service that is offered by Google which will notify you when someone writes about you on the internet. You won’t see 100% of the things that are written about you, and it doesn’t allow you to see things immediately, but you will be taking a large step in the right direction by monitoring these alerts. Google is able to provide this service because they are constantly indexing new webpages as they are published throughout the internet (this is done by ‘Google Bots’ that crawl web pages automatically).

A popular website that is respected by Google will be indexed relatively often. This means perhaps every few hours for the busiest websites and every 2-5 days for a busy website that is on the lower end of the “busy” spectrum. A less popular website may only have its new webpages indexed every 10 or 20 days. In some cases the Google Bots that do the indexing may visit less often than this or perhaps never at all.

You won’t receive your Google Alert until a new piece of content containing your brand name has been indexed by Google. In general, you can expect to see the majority of things that are being written about you within 1-5 days.

#3 Subscribe to Google Alerts for Your Domain Name

This may seem startlingly similar to #2 above, but this serves a much different purpose with regards to protecting yourself. In this case you are not just looking for people who may be writing about you, but you are looking specifically for people who are linking to your company website.

There are some fringe benefits to subscribing to your domain name in addition to your brand name. Google Alerts are not perfect in terms of functionality and some indexed content is missed by the alert system. Subscribing to alerts for your domain name will help to catch some of the new content about you as it is indexed.

In theory, this could also notify you of any kind of “Google Bowling” attack; aka, a negative SEO campaign against you. Negative SEO is a large topic that is unknown to the majority of legitimate business owners, and will just be briefly addressed here. Please check back on this blog and we will be publishing a more detailed blog entry that specifically addresses the topic.

This term essentially refers to the concept that one of your competitors could (in theory) convince Google that you are trying to cheat in the search engines by violating their terms of service.

It is possible for a competitor to buy an absurd amount of incoming links to your website regardless of whether or not you have asked them to do so (in the range of perhaps 20,000 very low quality links). There is a very small possibility that in some cases – Google’s algorithms will be convinced that you were in fact trying to cheat in the search engine results by buying these links for yourself, and your website could incur an SEO penalty because of this.

It’s extremely unlikely that this will happen to most people, and extremely difficult (and in many cases impossible) for someone else to do this to you even if they try their hardest. In the rare case where this may actually happen to someone, they will have a better chance at thwarting the attack if they can learn about it before a penalty is incurred.

What should you do at this point if this ever happens to you? Just one year ago there would have been very little that could be done. The world has now changed and Google does have a solution that helps to protect business owners from this type of activity. See tip #4 below.

#4 When Needed; Use Google’s Link Disavow Tool

This is especially helpful if you have been penalized by a search engine for building links, or for some other reason there are some “spammy” links in your backlink profile that you believe may be effecting your website’s performance in the SERPs.

This function essentially tells Google not to count those links and to ignore them. You can use this to clean up your backlink profile if you have been penalized, or to prevent a penalty if you see some sort of spam influx (perhaps a Google Bowling attack in the worst case scenario).

I have seen some cases where search engines were “doing some strange things with regards to indexing some even stranger links on some yet stranger websites” where this has been handy.

In order to disavow links to your website, you will need to create a .txt file that looks like the one seen below.

I would not suggest using this if you have not incurred a penalty and you are not seeing something strange that is significant in proportion to your overall backlink profile. It’s not an all-inclusive fix and Google has made no promise that it will be 100% effective. The link disavow tool should be used sparingly as per my advice above. You can listen to Matt Cutts giving his own advice about using this tool in the video below.

#5 Search For Your Brand Name On Twitter

This is more of a social media interaction tip than a brand protection tip (assuming you run a business that doesn’t get a lot of people complaining about you on Twitter). However, this is something that is nonetheless important. You should keep up with what people are saying about you, and when you can, you should interact with your customers.

Some business owners may find some additional benefits to seeing this content in a timely fashion rather than waiting for it to get indexed and sent to you in your Google Alerts. Perhaps you are a restaurant owner and someone is writing about you while they are sitting in your restaurant. You may have the chance to extend your hand a give a great/surprising thank you to the guest. It’s also possible that you will have a chance to fix a problem before it grows or continues to worsen.

We offer a full range of SEO and marketing services to our clients here at seo4anyone. This includes monitoring and implementation of all of the concepts that are discussed above.

We also offer a free website analysis to all of our potential clients. Just fill out the brief form on the seo4anyone Homepage, or give us a call at our office and we will tell you what Seo4Anyone can do for you.

Feel free to give us your 2 cents in the Facebook discussion box below.

Twitter entered the scene back in 2006 as one of the first microblogging sites. With people’s attention span shrinking and the need for instant gratification growing, Twitter was a good avenue to accommodate both trends.

Founded and run by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, Twitter started to pick up speed quickly. In August 2007 the first hashtag #barcamp was posted by Chris Messina, who funny enough was told once by Evan Williams that hashtags were too nerdy and wouldn’t go mainstream.

See a history of Twitter below in this infographic.

What Is a Hashtag?

A hashtag is an easy way to group and organize conversation chains. Twitter patrons use them to keep all posts pertaining to a specific topic linked together and the full thread easily found. With over 500 million registered users as of March 2012 hashtags have become more common place as a necessary Twitter tool rather than a passing fad.

The Power of the #Hashtag

Marketers of all types are currently using #hashtags to keep the social conversation focused on one particular topic for the online community. Whether its radio, print, digital or TV ads, hashtags are becoming more popular. By creating a #hashtag, it allows people to easily remember a keyword or catch-phrase related to the marketing campaign.

As an example, Audi ran a campaign on Twitter using the #WantAnR8 hashtag. The Audi R8 is their gorgeous $150k super-car for you non-car buffs. The goal was to increase awareness and desire for the R8. They ended up creating a viral Twitter campaign utilizing twitpics of a random girl getting an R8.

The results:

• The Audi Twitter account grew over 200%
• #WantAnR8 received over 100 million impressions and currently stands as the best performing promoted trend ever, receiving an amazing 50.4% engagement. (Shorty Industry Awards)

In another example, Sysomos, a Marketwire company, surveyed several different brands that advertised during the Super Bowl and suggested a hashtag for people to tweet. The saw that companies who used their brand name as a hashtag such as #Doritos and #Calvin Klein had more posts using these hashtags than companies who suggested a phrase or catchy name. This is great for brand building!

With the world of social media, companies are no longer limited to strictly traditional marketing tactics and can utilize free avenues such as hashtags on Twitter to promote their message by word of mouth. Social media marketing companies who specialize in Twitter marketing and have been able to monitor referral traffic to their clients’ websites through this channel. Tracking that traffic is the key to calculating ROI for these types of social media campaigns.

Paid Advertising: Promoted Tweets

If you want to promote your tweets to non-followers, Twitter has the answer. Twitter launched their paid advertising platform with promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted Accounts.

These tools allow advertisers to control the growth of their campaigns rather than sit back and pray that they go viral. Since the launch of paid Twitter tweets, they have opened a London ad sales office to further push the use of promoted tweets. This new capability now gives Twitter users the ability to speak directly with the brands they are interested in.

Their Ads platform can be found at http://ads.twitter.com> and allows advertisers the ability to pick and choose their campaign, very similar to the Facebook ad platform. Advertisers can geo target their campaign to one or multiple locations and choose to promote a tweet.

With 34% of marketers gaining leads through Twitter and 20% of them actually closing deals, marketers can see the power of Twitter growing. (Stat courtesy of SBW Advertising: http://www.sbwadvertising.co.uk/blog/social-media-statistics-2012/)

With promoted tweets, advertisers can pick to promote one tweet such as this example promoting a $5 dollar album or the user can promote up to 5 different tweets. What is great about this platform is the fact that advertisers only pay per click.

This results in paying only for the traffic from the targeted audience who is interested. This campaign of promoted tweets is useful to:

• push products
• reviews
• celebrity quotes
• increase social trending
• build brand awareness
• educate and spread the word about your brand

Promoted accounts are more beneficial for building a following, specifically on Twitter. As in any social market segment, whether digital or not, sheer numbers make a difference. People are drawn to what is popular. When advertisers create campaigns to increase their “Following” this usually generates more interest.

With the number of people signing up on Twitter tripling with the integration of iOS 5, advertisers have the ability to generate large followings of pre-qualified customers. Similar to Facebook, Twitter users can see which of their followers are following the account therefore creating a personal connection and bond with the brand. Advertisers pay per each new follower, which is better than paying per impression.

Brands Who Know How To Use Twitter

Showing no evidence of slowing down, advertisers using Twitter such as Starbucks are taking full advantage of this social media juggernaut and utilizing it to its full potential. Starbucks creates social conversations and gains interest from their audience by creating tangible conversation threads that followers can feed off. Some followers win prizes from these conversation threads. Starbucks answers questions and effectively retweets photos from their audience, making that follower a little famous and in return allowing followers of that user be introduced to Starbucks.

Since the beginning of 2013 Starbucks has utilized current events to trend various posts and increase brand awareness. They support a wide range of charities, festivals, events and musicians and continue to spread these different ventures through their Twitter account.

So to repeat the question: “Is Twitter the powerhouse it boasts to be?” I think all the evidence points to yes. If the advertiser is utilizing it properly by taking advantage of trending topics while creating new creative hashtags for their brands, they are sure to flourish.

For more information about Twitter marketing and other social media marketing strategies, read more on our site. Feel free to contact us with questions or your own comments. Get involved by replying with a Facebook Conversation below. Or send your own tweet using our @seo4anyone name.

Since Facebook’s launch in 2004 business owners have been doing all they can to harness the power of the social network to generate money. Now with over 1 billion users on the site, the pressure is on to capitalize on this highly targeted group of users and turn their social browsing into spending!

Facebook Ads are born!

Soon after Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook in 2007, they launched Facebook Ads to the public. This complimented the newly formed Facebook business pages that were launched in late 2007 to allow business pages to attract potential customers to their newly formed pages and drive sales back to their website. Online marketing companies and business owners alike starting chomping at the bit to advertise on Facebook, as the cost of Google PPC was increasing at a steady rate.

It’s all about word-of-mouth advertising even in the digital world

Over one billion people Like and Comment an average of 3.2 billion times every day. When you have a strong presence on Facebook, your business is part of these conversations and has access to the most powerful kind of word-of-mouth marketing. As we know positive word-of-mouth in any business turns into sales.

The standard business owner who is looking to get into Facebook advertising could be overwhelmed by the amount of online marketing material there is out there to learn and master. But I say go to the source and see that Facebook actually has four basic but good steps to get started.

Facebook wants their business users to utilize the tools they have provided in order to be successful and make money. They understand that happy business owners who are making money will continue to purchase ads.

Businesses should have success goals they would like to hit (i.e. sales conversions, increase Likes, increase site traffic, increased email signups or an increase in social interactions about the brand). Reviewing the analytics is a top priority in order to understand where progress is being made and if the ads are leading to a positive return on investment.

Top 6 areas to track analytics

There are certain areas that you will want to measure and track:

1. Brand awareness : You can also utilize socialmention.com to measure this
2. Influence
3. Audience Engagement
4. New Likes / Emails / Subscriptions
5. ROI from ads, posts and contests
6. Conversion Rates

Monitoring this activity will help you determine the success of your efforts and understand the value of Facebook advertising. With this data in hand, teams should meet weekly for brainstorm sessions so the entire team can be on board with the promotions, giveaways, contests and other merchandising tactics being used to drive virality and click thru rates.

Complimenting Facebook advertising with fan-to-fan interaction, encouraging fan conversation and sharing will increase potential conversions. It’s about enhancing the fans experience by creating a community that entices fans to interact. Engagement is more important than gaining Likes due to the long term relationship that is built.

PostRocket released 17 survival tips for Facebook marketing and engagement is number 6. Below you’ll find17 handy tips for marketing with Facebook.

In today’s competitive corporate world of online marketing, most businesses have a social presence and with that come hiring a social marketing team to execute social activity and Facebook ads. A quality social marketing manager will keep the goals in focus collecting data and generating reports that includes weekly or monthly growth.

Test your ads once, twice, three times . .

Ad growth depends on the marketer using multiple different ads to test the ads:

• Call to Action
• Images
• Phrasing
• Landing Pages

These tests will help the marketer learn the most out of their ads. A social marketing manager has to conduct a finely tuned ballet of ads, content, and engagement to generate the best results. With Facebook currently being the largest publisher of all U.S display ad impressions delivering 28 percent of all display ad impression it is safe to assume for the moment it’s not going anywhere. (28% of all display ad information provided by The Social Marketer: www.socialmarketertraining.com)

To learn more about online marketing, Facebook ads and analytics feel free to click these links to read more. Or contact us for more information how we can help. I welcome your Facebook comments below.

But before you get started, you should first ask yourself a few key questions.

1. What vertical are you looking to tap into?
2. What is the demographic?
3. What will your subject lines be and what layout design to use?
4. How will I capture and grow my database?

These 4 questions will help you organize your plan.

What is your Vertical?

Looking at the first question, What vertical are you looking to tap into? Understanding your audience and being able to segment them will allow you to focus your marketing campaign. The vertical affects the amount of e-mails that your marketing team should release to that audience. Each industry has a different level of tolerance for the amount of emails they are willing to accept before burn out. Entertainment audiences are more accustomed to receiving e-mails compared to B2B audiences who require more lead nurturing.

Analyze your Demographic

Next you have to analyze the demographic. Demographics are the key to segmentation and also affect the amount of volume you send out to them. The demographic will also affect your layout design and call to action that will lead to interaction.  A demographic between 15-40 years of age has a higher tolerance to email marketing since their online activity is higher in general.

Focus on your Subject Line

A subject line can make or break your email open rates for your campaign. Strong subject lines should avoid spammy words such as FREE and have a strong call to action.  The subject should intrigue the audience and be relevant to the person you’re approaching.

Staying away from spam words/phrases such as “Buy Now”, “Hurry”, and “Sale”. Many spam filters on ISPs will mark these emails as junk. Approach the subject line asking yourself Does this grab my attention and interests me?

Asking your audience a question is a good tactic, such as Are You Ready for Hurricane Season? It is personal to them, will grab their attention, has immediacy and also a bit of self preservation instincts.

Layout and Design Matter

Once you know your market, demographic and the best call to action for your industry, you must focus on design. An email campaign layout is very important to the success of your campaign. A cheap look from a pre-built template will turn away potential clicks and you will lose trust and authority. An over the top high graphic billboard will also turn away potential clicks, especially in a B2B setting.

There must be an even mix of text and graphics with 1 primary call to action and a 2nd  call to action is also alright as long as they are visually far away from the primary call to action button or below the fold. Making sure your e-mail is branded and uniform will add to the legitimacy of your campaign. Look below at this e-mail template below:

Capturing Emails and Growing your Database

Once a design and layout is created the next thing to do is to strategize how to capture emails. There are several ways you can capture and grow your database. The standard way is to have several sign up boxes throughout your site. A standard newsletter or email form will do the job but only for highly motivated visitors.  The best practice for capturing an email is to have specific landing pages for each offer and incentive.

Landing pages are very focused on one audience with a specific offer. The probability of converting this visitor and getting their email is very high. Making sure that each landing page ties to a specific offer is the key to success. If you are offering free shipping on your PPC ad, your landing page better show free shipping as the main incentive.

Let them Unsubscribe Easily if they want to

Finally, after you capture a visitor’s email address make it easy for them to unsubscribe from your list. Every email you send out should have an unsubscribe link in the footer. More advanced email systems allow users to unsubscribe from selective types of emails or all emails. The more choices and control you give them, the more likely they will not completely unsubscribe.

These four questions are a great starting point for any business owner who is interested in starting up their email marketing campaign and trying to grow their database. E-mail marketing campaigns have one of the best returns on investments compared to other online marketing campaigns, so great attention should be placed on doing it right.

To learn more about email marketing and landing page conversion feel free to click these links to read more. Or contact us for more information how we can help. I welcome your Facebook comments below.

Why Should You Care?

With over 90% of people using search engines as their 1^st step to research your company and products, online ratings and review websites like Yelp are becoming more and more critical to your success; whether you know it or not.

• 7/10 consumers trust the opinions of unknown reviewers on these trusted sites
• 67% of consumers use online reviews to determine whether a local business is a good business
• More than 60% of consumers 55 years old and younger consult online reviews
• source: DVXMarketing Infographic

But why do legitimate positive reviews rarely make it past Yelp’s filter and get included in their ratings?

When someone searches for your company’s name on Google, one of the top results is almost always Yelp.com. Although there are several thousand review sites out there, the leading ones are Four Square, Yahoo Local, Angies List, City Search, Google Places, Urban Review, Trip Advisor, Open Table, and of course the most popular of them all, Yelp. All these sites in essence are very similar with certain ones branching out to different specialties.

Yelp, Four Square and Google Places are three of the most popular review sites reviewing everything from restaurants to industrial machinery companies. So acquiring good, honest and positive reviews is critical to your company’s success and reputation.

Some background about Yelp

Yelp is the leading review site on the web. It was founded in October of 2004 by Jeremy Stoppelman and has become a quasi-report card for businesses around the globe. They get over 53 million unique visitors per month and over 20 million reviews (source: Mashable). It is no surprise that businesses want a strong positive presence on Yelp and so should you!

When they first started, their review filters were generic and weak. This lead to many business owners boasting hundreds of great reviews about their own business and slandering their competition. Their review filter today is a different beast. It takes into account many different variables to weed out the true reviews from the fake ones.

Why Are You Filtering My Good Reviews??!!

So why does it seem like most of the positive reviews are filtered out while all the negative reviews show up immediately?

The Dreaded Established User

Yelp remains tight lipped about their review filter, but a common denominator seems to be reviews made by established users. It seems that the key to getting good reviews to stick is to make sure they come from established users. So what is an established user?

The established user is becoming the strong pawn across the board on review sites. The more time, information and personal touch a user gives their own personal account on these review sites, the more “established” Yelp views their profile.

But Yelp will not tell you their guidelines on what makes an established user. On the official Yelp blog they state “We’re purposely not elaborate about all the variables that go into defining an “established” user, because it’s a Catch-22: the more descriptive we are about what makes an established user, the less effective our filter is at fighting shills and malicious content.” Source: Yelp’s official blog

Yelp’s Integration with Facebook and Apple IOS Devices

Facebook Integration with Yelp

With the addition of the Facebook Beacon integration in December 2007, data from Yelp’s user accounts can now be sent to Facebook allowing users to share their activities and reviews. This opened a new huge avenue to business owners. Due to this strategic integration by Facebook, business owners not only could have the blessing of good reviews from Yelp, but also the ability for those users who wrote good reviews to syndicate that review to all their social network friends.

Via statista.com, the average number of facebook friends of 25-43 year olds is 273 friends per account. This math adds up quick for business owners who now have caught on and most well marketed sites present a call to action asking customers to write a review on Yelp and socialize it.

Now with the visible social integration, Yelp’s “established” users who have integrated their Facebook accounts are favored over the average Joe who signed up quick just to say “I liked the pizza.” We may never know the exact variables that make up an “established” Yelp user but one can assume that the more you commit to Yelp and put into it, the more established and trusted you are, much like life.

IOS 6 Maps Integration with Yelp

It was announced on September 21^st, 2012 with the announcement of the Iphone 5 and new IOS 6 operating system that Yelp would be integrated into Apple’s new Maps app. If you thought Facebook was a game changer for Yelp well this is the cherry on top. Now iPhone and iPad users as well as previous generations that will update to the new IOS 6 will have Yelp streamlined into their maps app.

Apple maps users will be able to access snippets of Yelp reviews all directly in their map. Within the app as users are looking for their destination or just a place to eat, the app shows restaurants, stores and more with small pins. Once a user clicks a pin the Yelp review plus how many stars it has appears and users can go deeper and open up to find more photos, information and of course reviews. With Apple products having a huge share of the mobile and tablet markets, this opens not just the social window but the vast mobile avenue for Yelp.

G-d help us!

If you’d like to learn how seo4anyone is working with local businesses to improve their Yelp ratings and reviews check out the main pages of our site. You can find more information on our SEO for Small Business page.

Feel free to discuss below.

Let me start off by saying that this device is going to outsell the larger iPad by leaps and bounds. It really is the perfect size for a portable non-mission critical tablet. It is light, comfortable to hold, has great batter life, works seamlessly with all your other IOS apps and generally brings a smile to your face.

If you’re going to use a tablet to read books, the weight is ideal for holding it in one hand for extended periods of time. Anyone who has tried holding a full size iPad knows what a pain in the ‘wrist’ this can be. Having this device on your couch is a perfect addition to your remote control collection. (It should be your cable remote actually). Browsing the web, responding to emails, updating your Facebook account, tweeting.. Never simpler.

One interesting aspect of the smaller size is how much easier it is to type on the keyboard. Although the iPad does allow you to ‘pull apart’ the keyboard and have 1/2 of it on the left side of the screen and the other 1/2 on the right side, this new device absolves this need all together. We’re not talking blackberry typing speeds here, but definitely closer to iPhone speeds.

Why Apple Didn’t Offer a Retina Display Version

This has been the iPad Mini’s big draw back in the press. There are other HD tablets by Google and Amazon so why didn’t Apple give us the option to buy one in this size? No its not due to screen vendor supply constraints. Its because the only thing missing from this device today is the Retina screen. Its the only drawback for the device.

This thing would sell like hotcakes if it had a Retina display!! But that is the rub. Every sale of one of these Minis will cannibalize  a sale of the larger iPad 4. When you look at product margins, the iPad 4 has substantially higher margins than the new Mini. Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer told investors at their quarterly earnings call that the margins for the iPad Mini will be “significantly below the company’s average” which is calculated to be 40%.

As a stockholder of AAPL stock, its now obvious why investors are selling. Margins will continue to decline as more of these Minis sell and less full size iPad 4s sell. With over 17M iPads sold in Q4 2012, these figures will accelerate and margins will continue to be hurt. This should lead to further declines in the stock price.

So as a consumer I love this Mini. But as a stockholder of AAPL stock, it might be time to take some profits and look elsewhere to invest.

Let me know your thoughts.

Why do we care about rich text snippets? The answer is easy to understand. The reason we care about rich text snippets is that they show up as visually appealing additions to the Google search result listing. Let’s take a look at a Google SERP and it quickly becomes clear that links that have a visually appealing picture or image are far more likely to be click on.

Your eye is drawn to the links that have the visual appeal. As you will see below, this visual appeal comes in several forms. For people authoring content, Google shows their profile picture from their Google+ page. For reviews of a product or service, Google shows the graphical number of stars that page received. For recipes it shows a beautiful picture of the food itself.

The links on the SERP that have visual appeal are the ones that will get clicked. Some evidence has already suggested that the click thru rate (CTR) is higher for a link that is #4 on the SERP compared to the #1 ranking link if it has a rich text snippet. You can see from the chart below that prior to rich text snippets there was a major advantage in being ranked in the top 3 positions on Google:

More studies will be published on the effect on CTR but this is a major change in how people interact with the search results page. You can learn more about how your ranking position is so important for click thru rates and acquiring SEO traffic

This infographic below summarizes the key points about rich text snippets and what the future may hold for them. Sorry for the size of the infographic, it’s worth it.

To get help implementing rich text snippets on your website click the link provided here or contact us and we’ll help you get started. We’d love to hear your experiences with rich text snippets so sound off on the Facebook comments section below. Happy snippeting! ]]> http://www.seo4anyone.com/blog/seo/what-is-a-rich-text-snippet-why-is-it-important/feed 0 http://www.seo4anyone.com/blog/conversion-testing/is-offering-free-shipping-to-your-e-commerce-site-nice-to-have-or-essential http://www.seo4anyone.com/blog/conversion-testing/is-offering-free-shipping-to-your-e-commerce-site-nice-to-have-or-essential#comments Fri, 06 Jul 2012 18:25:05 +0000 Matt Silvers http://www.seo4anyone.com/?p=1835 Back in the day, companies used to make a ton of cash by charging customers high shipping fees. Customers thought that those costs were simply what Fedex or UPS charges to ship that item. But as consumers have become more savvy and so many retails are now offering FREE Shipping, those days of easy profits are long gone.

But the good news is that Free Shipping can lead to huge increases in sales and the long term value of each customer. So you might lose a few bucks on free shipping today, but the long term profits of acquiring that customer will more than pay for itself.

Below the infographic, check out some summary points that are pretty powerful.

In this post, I have a few simple tips that will help you create the type of rich content that consumers will eat up and Googl’e Penguin won’t spit out like chum. At the end of the day, its all about getting people to buy your product or sign up for your newsletter, or download your software or complete the lead form. So speak to them like you would if they came in your place of business.

Tip #1: When it comes to writing product descriptions on E-Commerce websites, our first reactions are usually to yawn and skip down to the product reviews. That is because most times the product description is written by the manufacturer, not a marketing person. So what can you do to flip this into something people will want to read and it will positively affect their buying decision?

Appeal to the consumer’s sense of sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste. Help them feel the product like they were holding it in their hands in the store. What does it feel like? How does it smell? is it heavy? Are the edges smooth or sharp? With some creative product descriptions you can help create the experience for your users. As an example, this product description awakens the visitor’s sense of taste and sight:

A dozen bite-sized pieces of delicious chocolate covered strawberries smothered in creamy dark chocolate is a temptation your loved ones can’t resist no matter what the occasion. Not to be confused with the store bought varieties at Kroger, these morsels are topped with dark chocolate from Switzerland and the strawberries are so fresh that the juice will run down your face. Share a few with family and friends during a holiday dinner and you’ll be invited back year after year!

Tip #2: Many E-Commerce sites have products that are carried by many other vendors. How do you make your widget stand out from all the other widgets that are identical to yours?

The answer is by evoking emotions within your customer. Positive emotions like happiness, love and pride are great ways to spark a consumer’s interest. Add to that feelings of frustration they are encountering or even peek their curiosity to add some zing to your product descriptions. Remember that people engage more when their emotional about the topic.

This is best done by adding verbs and adjectives to your bland descriptions. Verbs are actions and they invoke your visitors to take action. They motivate the user to do something. Think of how different this sounds compared to your existing bla bla product descriptions on your site.

Another example… If describing a collection of women’s dresses, here are three product descriptions that  promote the same sku but use different emotions to get the point across:

1. The slimming lines of this slinky dress will make you the envy of the party.
2. Look and feel ten pounds lighter with our slimming line of dresses.
3. Slip on one of our new slimming dresses and see for yourself.

If your product copy reads like these descriptions above, congratulations! You’re in the top 1/2 of 1%. For more information on how content writing affects your SEO efforts check out our site or contact us now.