Website Promotion is not Voodoo

Choosing the Right Images for Your Facebook Ads

Image from www.adrants.com

In a previous Facebook Advertising blog post I mentioned the importance of selecting images for your Facebook ads. What I failed to do in that post was to fully explain that idea. Sure I threw out some fancy jargon about “magazine editorial ads”, but I wanted to take this time to show you three types:

1) Contextually Relevant

Why I Dislike Facebook Insights

As I was checking up on the performance of a few fanpage campaigns today, I was hit with the revelation that Facebook Insights is a terrible web metric tool.

What is Facebook Insights you may ask?

Here’s the abridged FB definittion: “Facebook Insights provides Facebook Page owners and Platform application developers with metrics around their content.

Last week, Yahoo sent out emails explaining how the merger with MSN/Bing would effect paid search advertiser.  The most interesting piece of information the email provided was about the transition to Bing search algorithm in early Fall.

Organic Search Transition
To date, we’ve focused most of our communications to you on the paid search transition to adCenter. However, another key aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is the transition of Yahoo! organic search results (those found on the main body of the page). Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe.

What’s the Difference Between White, Gray, and Black SEO Hats?

When I was starting out in SEO, I was so confused by what the best practices were and I remember at my first search conference a speaker (I want to say it was Matt Cutts but it probably wasn’t) started explaining the “hats”. There are three different hats a SEO can wear and each color represents how clean they are with their  search engine tactics.

Nice Hat.

White Hat SEO

Yahoo Fails At Search, Tries Its Hand At Being A “Pretty Woman”

"Your Yahoo! May Look Different Today!"

It is a sad day when search engines are reduced to stalking celebrities to keep themselves relevant.

That is the thought I had when I saw the latest Yahoo TV commercial. Since their merger with Microsoft was announced, Yahoo has been trying to carve out a niche for itself as a entertainment news site (seriously how many E!s, TMZs, OhNoTheyDidnts, and Superficials must we have! How are all the celebrity bloggers going to eat and stay in white MSpaint to draw on photos?). They are even going as far as to declared themselves THE NUMBER ONE visited site for such frivolous news  – when in all honesty, they are including Yahoo Search,Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Games (noticed I didn’t include the “!” because there just isn’t anything exciting about Yahoo anymore) into this data.

Is Facebook the next evolution of Local Search?

Facebook stormtroopers devise plan to beat Google

We all knew it was a matter of time before Facebook started expanding into web search and they’ve finally done it by unveiling their own Facebook local search option: Open Graph search engine. What is Open Graph, you might ask, here’s what Facebook reps are saying, according to an allfacebook.com story:

“all Open Graph enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”

As a Search Marketing professional I’m always looking for new browser tools to help me with optimization. Over the last few months, I’ve become a huge fan of Google Chrome. It’s fast, light-weight, and  has tons of user generated extensions for SEO, PPC, and SMO. Here is a list of the top 5 Chrome plugins any Internet marketer should have.

1) Chrome SEO – Probably one of the best free SEO add-ons I’ve used. It provides backlink info, as well as, keyword research tool, domain age, and traffic and rank. It has everything. Unlike some other SEO plugins, I never find myself disabling it because it’s chugging resources or constantly crashing.

“Google Gears – Improving Your Web Browser”

Google Gears Does Work with Chrome? You don't say!

That is Google’s tagline for their open source project that stores data locally for web applications and runs Javascripts in the background. But as anyone who has used Gears will tell you, it’s buggy, especially when being used with Google applications.

For instance, Google Chrome comes pre-installed with Google Gears, however out of all the browsers that currently support Gears, it crashes the most. I’ve used Firefox and Internet Explorer with Gears and even though I still experience time-outs when downloading web app data and frequent Javascript slow downs, with Chrome I just get the “Aw, Snap! Something went wrong…” message practically every time I do anything Gears related.

When I was in elementary school I hated my school uniform. The yellow shirt, brown tweed jacket, blue slacks, and that awful little tie. I remember questioning the school taste level and being matter-of-factly told the uniforms made us focus on school rather than each other. I hate those uniforms because of their lack of personality. I initially had the same feelings towards Facebook. Despite it many features and (annoying) applications, everyone’s accounts looked the same. Sure this was FB’s way to avoid the flashing gif walls and neon colors of Myspace profiles but it took away people’s individuality. Anyone who is into social media marketing can tell you, if you want the community following you gotta stand out. Thankfully Facebook understood this and gave developers Facebook Markup Language.

When Doing It Yourself Isn’t Such a Smart Idea

Pay Per Click Search

I come from a family of “do-it-yourselfers”.  When my mom wanted new curtains for the kitchen, she’d go to the local craft store and purchase 3 – 5 feet of fabric and hot glue to her heart’s content.  My dad was no better; I remember watching him jury rig the plumbing after the basement flooded.  While I always admired their “make it work” attitudes, these (and many other) situations always ended with a call to a professional.  So when I hear that non-search marketers are doing pay per click marketing, I have flashbacks of curtains falling apart, pipes constantly leaking, and money being wasted.