Welcome to the Internet — but look up, you’re about to crash! If you are surfing the web today, it’s likely that your surfboard of choice is your phone. Hopefully you’re not multi-tasking behind the wheel of a car, but smartphones can provide most people with extremely useful tools for everyday life. As for marketers, surf’s up!  Phone marketing is the new big wave.

The dawn of the Internet brought a whole new meaning to the desktop. Instead of a work machine/second-rate gaming station, we gained a window into the whole world, with access to new games, programs, ideas, music, arts, niche news outlets, and fascinating people. There are free games, for surf’s sake! And no longer do free games mean Hearts, Mine Craft and Solitaire.  We now have whatever we can get our downloads on to. And even if we want a game with a little more oomph, we no longer have to pay what now seems like a rip-off premium at our local retail national chain. We no longer have to buy what the retailers in our neighborhood are contracted to sell — the Internet lets us seek out what we want with hyper-specificity.

For marketers, these are vehicles for their product. Web page after web page is filled with banners, popups and text-based ad campaigns. Spam emails flood our inbox every morning. Of course there are some more appealing and friendly avenues, including blog content campaigns and the ever-important SEO; the potential for abuse is there, but there are subtle ways to do it. All of these tactics have been frequented by marketing professionals for the past fifteen years, and they have produced extremely successful results for businesses independent, corporate and all between.

The desktop is regaining its position as a work machine/game station, except every aspect of the desktop is now souped-up with the addition of the Internet. We may have a desktop that has a free copy of Open Office we grabbed online with a few clicks of the mouse, rather than a $249 copy of Microsoft Office. Even though Open Office is free, this very blog is being drafted on a licensed copy of Microsoft Word, because it’s already installed on my Mac. Why would I bother downloading what may or may not be sub-quality when my employer has already payed for this licensed copy of Microsoft Office on my machine? I could if I’d like, but again, why bother? Open-source is a draw, certainly. Maybe you will just prefer to use Open Office unless you’re in an environment where it is mandatory. I’d say that defies the path of least resistance. And that leads us to the trait we love about the Internet: it embraces the path of least resistance. It also has a pretty solid record of rewarding those individuals and entities that also embrace said path. So where am I heading with all this? Well, the path of least resistance: the mobile phone.

In 2012, the Internet is on our phone. If I’m riding along in a car with my friends and we want to know what’s on the menu at a restaurant we’ve never been to, are we going to stop at a friend’s house to use the computer or, worse, go there ourselves? Oh no. There are mobile phones in our pockets that will be telling us what’s on that menu. Even if the restaurant’s website (if they have one) is not mobile-friendly, there are a slew of menu sites out there that are optimized for people in our exact situation. The question is, which site is optimized for our phones? That is the question you need to ponder as well, even in the context of your own website or marketing campaign.

If you think that the Internet on the phone is only for those who are away from home, then you forget about the path of least resistance.  If I want to know who plays “Spartacus” in the new season premiere, my friend on his Evo already has the answer before I’ve even lifted my laptop from the coffee table in front of me. With the phone, the Internet is either already in your hand or less than a foot away. Desktops are becoming less and less the vehicles of surf, regaining their position as just workstations and game systems. The mobile phone is the new vehicle of surf. It’s small. It’s simple. It’s easy. And if you care about your bottom line, you better hop on this wave, or find yourself on the rocks.

There are ways to prepare yourself for mobile phone marketing, like optimizing your website for mobile phones. To get into the real game, you can start testing out text marketing campaigns which are a real treat for bottom line as they are quick and easy for you to deploy. You can also engage with mobile phone-focused search engines. We will get into this and more in our next installment!

Are you one of the many business owners who’s decided to start a business during this challenging economic time? Competing online right out of the gate can be a deciding factor in your establishment’s survival. You’re probably already investing in your online presence to some degree, but check out this handy guide by Stoney deGeyter on the areas to maximize the potential of your efforts!

Getting More Clicks On Twitter (Infographic) — Marketing Pilgrim

Have you devoted serious thought to your content plan, scheduled your tweets in a timely manner and established a solid follower base, but still just aren’t getting the traction you want from Twitter? Optimize your tweets’ potential with this handy info graphic.

Walking The “Be Human” Line In Social Media — Outspoken Media

No matter how big the brand or careful the marketing team, nobody is entirely immune from a social media gaffe. When these events occur, however, the most important part is the response on the brand officials’ parts. Outspoken Media’s Lisa Barone takes us through a notable incident, and gives a few pointers on conducting oneself with grace via social media. Which segues nicely into…

Using Social Media Profiles for ORM [Online Reputation Management] — Graywolf’s SEO Blog

Online reputation management is as simple as making sure that positive chatter around an individual or establishment becomes more notable and relevant than potentially pre-established negative sentiment. Here, Michael Gray gives a network-by-network rundown of what you can do to make sure your brand is out there, established and buzzed-about.

How To Respond To Negative Reviews — ProNet Advertising

If you run a business, then chances are you’ve experienced a negative online review or two in your time. Valid or not, these reviews can really sting both on a personal level and potentially negatively impact your business. Here, Pronet’s Jen Williams gives some advice on how to best respond to a less-than-glowing evaluation in the online sphere.

And as a bonus, here’s a reminder: if you haven’t seen it yet, our new Google+ for Business ebook, Seven Steps to Social Media Heaven, is now available for download! Check it out and get all the best tips on building up a circle, promoting your business and tracking your success with the fastest-growing social network out there.

Deep thoughts by bigtime lawyers...

Nearly everyone in the technology sector, especially those focused on the Internet, have een talking about the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act. We’re not here to debate the finer points of combatting intellectual property theft on the internet — the “SOPA Blackout” has done a fine one-sided job of that. (If you’re interested in a very in-depth look at the whole saga, try Forbes’s information dump.) This “Blackout” has all the right components of a perfect case study of SEO, technical site architecture, viral marketing, and the nature of the internet.

As a preface, President Obama has basically said SOPA in its current form is a no-go. Similarly, by 8:30am, SOPA was losing supporters in the Senate. Whether by virtue of the Internet’s rage or by simple practicality and a realization that the legislature was in over its collective head, SOPA and PIPA seem to be sidelined. Similar bills are waiting in the wings, but will likely not see the light of day until months later.

Full Blackout

Imagine a World Without Wikipedia

Two sites led the initial charge for the Blackout, and they did it almost completely. Reddit and Wikipedia have nearly completely blacked out their sites, both seemingly using JavaScript. Wikipedia has done this by hiding all the content on the page, then adding a content block using jQuery. As soon as this happened, some found a way to hack around it using a browser console, but most users will lose access to one the most-trafficked pure information sites on the Internet. Wikipedia’s method likely has no SEO impact, but is effective at getting the user to do what the site wants — ponder life without a user-generated information source like Wikipedia, and use their already-extant legislator search to find the right person to bug about the issue.

What if I want a news link?

Reddit, on the other hand, is serving a totally different page for all links to the site. Not only is it providing information and calls to action to call a representative or sign a petition, but it also provides a list of compatriots who have also “gone black.” But both of these full blackouts highlight a major problem for a business site — what if someone is looking for your site? Looking for your content? Looking to buy something from you?

Man, I hope they meant to do that...

One of Reddit’s brothers-in-arms is the game Minecraft, which is a for-pay game that’s been a bit of a media darling for its bizarre gameplay. But today, if you’re trying to find out about the game, all you can find from the site itself is that they’ve shut down the site in protest of SOPA. And that’s the gamble with a full takedown of your site — are your users aligned with you enough to understand or even support a totally unusable site? Is Wikipedia going to lose share to About.com or another mirror of the encyclopedia? Will Reddit lose share to i-am-bored.com?

The answer is, not really. Barring some shocking numbers come tomorrow, even any lost traffic today will be forgotten tomorrow. In addition, the kind of domain-level link-love and social clout that will be showered upon these sites may override any short-term losses. Essentially, we won’t forget that Wikipedia still has solid information about every Pokemon, that Reddit is the nouveau-garde of social sharing, or that minecraft.com is probably a trusted source for information about the game.

Blackouts for Smaller Sites?

But for personal sites, small businesses, and other smaller sites without the kind of instant recognition, the loss of a sale might be too much. While we’ve talked about the general level of knowledge of website owners, nowhere is it more evident than when this kind of blackout goes bad. WordPress has been shilling its “SOPAstrike” plugin, to be used by website owners to serve an SEO-friendly “503 Service Unavailable” error and redirect to yet another page to contact someone in charge. It’ll even bring your site back whenever it’s done!

Here’s the code for the suggested plugin:

function sopastrike()
{
	if(!is_admin())
	{
		if(time() > 1326862801 && time() < 1326934800)
		{
			header("HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable");
			header("Location: http://sopastrike.com/strike");

			exit;
		}
	}
}
function phone_home()
{
	$url = get_bloginfo('siteurl');
	$name = get_bloginfo('name');

	$context = stream_context_create(array(
	  'http' => array(
	      'timeout' => 1
	      )
	  )
	);
	$content =
	file_get_contents('http://extrafuture.com/code/sopastrike/track.php?url='
	.urlencode($url).'&name='.urlencode($name), false,  $context);
}

Notice that phone_home()? The plugin description does mention that it will add your url and name to a petition automatically, but with all the vitriol and pushing, who has time to read all of 15 sentences? In addition, you’re trusting this author to not say, publish your link to a bunch of “bad neighborhoods” as SEOmoz likes to call them. It’s a security hole, even if it’s one with someone you think you can trust. Can your business handle that? Barring technical issues, will your business be able to lose that traffic and still make your daily sales? Certainly one bad day even if you have no sales shouldn’t wreck your profitability, but will one day of actually being down and then a few more days until your site has been crawled again? What if you forget something and are still serving the wrong kind of page?

Man, and I liked that game...

If you’re not going to use the recommendation and use something like Wikipedia’s javascript content, a small business oftentimes doesn’t have enough resources to consider the SEO implications of what it has done. The team that is making the game Overgrowth didn’t. This is a snippet from their site, a first-page result for the term [sopa successors]. While their splash sure is pretty, do they want such unrelated search traffic? When will their site be crawled again before Google thinks the home page is highly related to SOPA?

And what about the plugin they used? All programmers are not SEO whizzes. While it’s easy to slap your forehead on such a boneheaded move, you can’t assume that even a popular plugin will be the right way to create your protest. Again, the simple solution for small businesses is not always the safest for their search rankings.

Porn and Other Easy Fixes

Of course, blocking out your site or even worrying about if your content is being crawled is not on your radar if you simply change your images a little. Matt Cutts, Twitpic, Google, and some of your Facebook and Twitter friends have used this method to show that they do not support the bill. This easy change usually has little SEO effect, but you could get some interested search if you use image alt tags intelligently.

Porn Companies Care!

But it’s not just the highbrow ivory-towered linkerati who are protesting SOPA. Porn companies are doing it harder. One of the industries most impacted by SOPA could be adult entertainment. Many sites are user-generated, falling under the same licensing and piracy issues that YouTube would have. These companies have largely installed banners or JavaScript “click to see your content” splash pages.

Viral Call to Action

Moving from porn to an almost-related subject, the virality of the SOPA blackout has provided a killer case for organic lead generation. A lobbyist group like the Electronic Frontier Foundation can easily get a list of supporters and possible wallets to back their efforts, simply by being the recipient of a large amount of blacked-out links.

What a Gorgeous Landing Page. What do you think they want you to do?

This page is a beautiful example of how to get leads. The opt-in for the newsletter makes the user feel like it’s solely to make a stand, sign a petition, and publicly project your feelings. But even if a user doesn’t click that box, demographics, cross-referencing with social networks for deeper information, and simple numbers of responses allows the EFF to better target its marketing efforts online. The EFF could also (but isn’t, in line with their ideals) grab referrer data or other tracking information to further hone their form submissions.

Finally, these form submissions would never have happened without truly viral support. Random people are linking to the EFF, because they believe in the cause that EFF is championing. They touched a true part in many internet denizens’ hearts, and have reaped the benefits. This kind of authentic sharing is at the key of this blackout — even as most sites have maintained some kind of functionality to their content. It’s not about the action here, but the message, and as sites from as many industries as can be get behind the message, maybe we’ll see the lasting search and marketing effects of the action as the week plays out.

SOPA Blackout Roundup

John Cheese talks SEO

Cracked columnist and longtime internet comedy writer John Cheese put out a call for interviews recently, and I jumped at the chance to talk to him. Out of all the writers on Cracked, a site I have been fairly addicted to since about 2007, John Cheese has probably spent the most time eloquently weaving his own life experiences into his always funny and often moving columns.

John ended up really driving home a rather simple yet all-encompassing idea that we have adopted as a mantra at Search Influence: fresh content is king. It really doesn’t matter whether you are advertising a novel, a list-based comedy site, or a small business anywhere in the world – if you can produce quality content that people find interesting on a regular basis, everything else will fall into place. It doesn’t hurt if you are as insightful, funny, and talented as John is either.

Take a look at the results of my email interview with John Cheese:

As an Internet based writer, how important are good SEO practices to you?

Working for Cracked, I’m in a position where I don’t have to worry about optimization.  I’m in a comfortable place that many writers dream about:  I write my article, and the rest of the staff takes care of everything else.  But even back in the day where I was running my own website, I still didn’t worry much about it.  My fame and David Wong‘s fame were gained through 100% word of mouth.  Someone would read something they found funny and pass that to their friends, and the next thing you know, we’d have a massive influx of traffic.

Back then, Google wasn’t as much of a concern as writing high quality articles and letting the traffic filter in through sheer internet buzz.

How closely do you follow the ever-evolving world of SEO?

I don’t at all, actually.  Since Cracked takes care of all that on the back end, I just have to worry about content and fresh ideas.  Now, that’s not to say that I don’t think it’s important.  Quite the opposite, actually.  Good, useful SEO brings new users to the site — but without the quality content to set the hook, your site could be ranked #1 in every conceivable search term in every language, and it wouldn’t much matter.  That content trumps everything.

Do you think about how search engines will view your work as you are writing it?

Not with Cracked, but I did “aim” my writing when I was running my own sites.  When Britney Spears was first getting big, I used to do occasional fake interviews with her.  They were obviously satire and parody, but not to a search engine.  They saw “Britney Spears Interview,” and the rest of the content just didn’t matter.  That funneled in massive viewers back in my early days of writing…not all of them desirable.

As a writer and a website owner, this is where I had to be careful.  I had a site full of sexual and violent jokes.  My characters were doing drugs and talking about beating their wives… and those Britney Spears articles were bringing in 13 year old girls.

Back then, I could have used the help with not just raising my search rankings, but focusing the results to reach a specific, target audience.  Not all traffic is good traffic.  There are exceptions.

What advice would you tell someone just starting their first blog today, in terms of getting it found by Google?

The first thing I’d tell them is to not skip over the meta tags in their HTML.  It’s easy to do as a first time net writer.  Aside from that, I’d tell them to focus on their craft first — but if they’re going to get into the world of SEO, they need be true to their work.  Think about the audience they’re after first…think about the volume later.

But I’d also tell them to not just leave it in the hands of the search engines.  Yes, search engines are important.  But that article needs traffic, and the fastest way to gain it is to get people talking about it.  Nothing in the world of entertainment is as powerful as word of mouth.

How much time and energy do you spend crafting your online presence?

Before Cracked took me in, I spent around ten years writing under this name and developing a very specific character and persona.  The funny thing to me is that once I got signed as a weekly columnist for them, I dropped all that and just started being myself.  In fact, the change in tone and style was so dramatically different I considered not using the name John Cheese at all, and writing under my real name of Mack Leighty.

When people search for you online, what do you want to show up?

I want it to show some of my highest traffic articles or my columnist index, which pretty much happens right now.  Cracked has a pretty crazy team of people on the back end who know their shit inside and out.  Which is awesome for me because the less I have to worry about, the more I can just focus on content, content, content.

How has the SEO world changed since you started writing on the Internet?

When I first started, it basically didn’t exist.  Google wasn’t really a thing — I think the big one back then was Lycos.  And searches seemed to operate on reading meta tags and spidering.  I remember when web pages used to put 200 hidden links at the bottom of their pages, containing the top 200 most popular search terms, just blatantly using bullshit manipulation to trick people into clicking their sites.

What is the most effective way that you connect to your audience?

Social networking, without a doubt.  It’s one thing to pull a lot of traffic, and it’s awesome to get fan mail…but the more traffic you pull, the more messages you receive.  You eventually reach a tipping point where there’s not enough time in a day to answer them all individually.

So now, I use Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr because if I can’t connect with everyone on an individual by individual basis, at least I can speak directly to my audience through a non-Cracked format.  And I believe that’s incredibly important.  People need to view me as a human above all because the second they start thinking of me as a soulless figurehead, my articles that touch on humanity become meaningless.

What would happen to your career if Google stopped indexing your work?

I’m sure I’d lose some traffic, but at this point (in my experience) the social networking sites are trumping the search engines.  My Apology to the Occupy Wall Street Generation article busted a million views in the first 24 hours, and it was all word of mouth and Facebook shares.  Now, that’s not saying that Google didn’t play a part in that, and it’s not saying that the search engines aren’t important.  But in my experience, if you’re a good writer, and you come up with a piece that people genuinely want to read, it’ll spread like wildfire.

How do you go about promoting your other projects, like the John Dies at the End novel and upcoming movie based on it? Do you depend mostly on the Internet, or do you turn to more traditional methods?

I run the social networking sites for the book, and I do monthly updates on the book’s main website (www.johndiesattheend.com).  The movie is a completely separate entity, ran by a team not related to Wong or myself.

But we’ve done a couple of different things with the book.  Simply keeping people talking about it on Facebook and Twitter is huge.  Giving actual updates — funny and interesting articles, rather than just occasional ads for the book –  on the main site is a big way to do that.  We also ran an alternate reality game a while back, and are planning another sometime this year.

The key is getting people involved and not making them feel insulted by claiming that we have a new update, only to give them an ad when they click the link.

But yes, it’s all Internet based.

What’s it like writing for Cracked?

It’s the most time-consuming job I’ve ever worked — and I wouldn’t change one millisecond of it.  Not just because I get a paycheck for writing comedy, but because I’ve gotten literally thousands of emails and private messages from people, telling me that something I wrote changed their lives for the better.  You can’t put a price on that.  I owe Cracked a lot for giving me that opportunity.  They really are an incredible bunch of people.

Special thanks to John Cheese for participating in this interview. Go read him on Cracked, like him on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter. 

If you’re anything like me, when you visit a website that’s overloaded with Flash, an abundance of images, excessive menus, and just a general maze of content, your brain shrivels up to the size of a raisin and your eyes glaze over with no focus of what to look at or where to find it. (As far as I’m concerned, the same problem exists for social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. Creating endless posts and tweets just for the sake of having more content and saying whatever pops into your fingers is the quickest way to get me to block or un-follow your posts. Then I’ll never hear anything you have to say!) The idea that the more there is to look at, the more visitors, friends, likes, and followers you’ll get is simply untrue in many cases.  You can still catch plenty of flies with sweet, sweet simplicity.

Too many web designers and developers make choices that, while skillfully executed with complicated Ajax and fancy Flash elements, not only confuse and deflect site visitors, but also have the same effect on search engine crawlers. While when properly used (read: in moderation) these elements have the potential to add functionality and style to your site, it is often beneficial to limit or altogether avoid these in favor of a clean, easily searchable and indexed site.

Take splash pages, for instance. When a splash page is your homepage, it not only prolongs the amount of time it takes for your visitors to get to the actual content they’re seeking, but it also confuses search engines. Without your homepage containing index-able elements like links to the other pages of your site and keywords, search engine spiders will not be able to properly crawl and index your site. Get rid of that splash page!

Aside from splash pages, using Flash elements or images elsewhere on your site for headers and menus can often cause visual frustration and complication for visitors and search engines alike. Dancing baby Flash headers and image-heavy menus can be a dizzying headache, and crawlers simply can’t read text embedded in Flash and images. There are several great resources for web designers on how to keep your site design from being overly complex while maintaining SEO excellence. Make sure you mind your H1′s, et al.

Personally, I agree with the late Steve Jobs when it comes to valuing the beauty of a highly-functional, simple design. There’s something to be said for keeping a clean, easily navigable, minimal aesthetic. And I’m not alone in my love of minimalism in web design.  I’m not suggesting you go out and replace all your shirts with black turtlenecks, but I am suggesting that you consider what William of Ockham said and not unnecessarily complicate matters when you can simply state your case. When you embrace minimalism, everybody wins: you, me, and the spiders. And you don’t want to upset the spiders. Trust me.

Here’s one of the emails I got:

Here we see a knucklehead posting a comment in a misguided attempt at link building. It’s not really the fault of the “spammer” that the link building attempt is for naught: this is an obvious mass-submission. Really, enough sites were probably hit by this submission machine that this message had some kind of benefit, and if so, congratulations to your diet supplements, dude.

Still, the fact stands that this carpet bombing of links missed its target with any LiveJournal comment fields it was posted on. Not because of LiveJournal’s disabling of HTML-formatted links on anonymous comments, or because this little comment is formatted in BB-code, but because of a little attribute on links that Google doesn’t like:

After joking with our very own Anthony Coleman about offering “LiveJournal SEO” services at our company, he admitted to researching the viability of this. Sadly or possibly as expected, he said that this was an empty pursuit, letting me know that every external link on LiveJournal is “nofollow,” as depicted and highlighted in the above picture. While my area of expertise in this company does not qualify me to comment on the exact benefit (or lack thereof) a “nofollow” link provides to a page’s rank, such links are certainly less desirable for SEO.

LiveJournal’s not the only site practicing the nofollow tactic to dissuade would-be spammers: Twitter takes the same approach, and so do the other social media giants. Even so, this doesn’t stop Search Influence from getting our clients a nutritious glass of “link juice” when we put links into our proverbial Juiceman Juicers all around the web. While “LiveJournal SEO” may not be a service that Search Influence will offer anytime in the future, we’ll always hold the site dear to us, and I’d personally like to thank my new pal “Odzywki” for reminding us of the respectable approach that Search Influence takes to SEO.

As an LSU alumnus, I'm proud to say I saw Tim Tebowing while crying, after a loss in Tiger Stadium.

According to Tebowing.com, tebowing is a verb, defined “to get down on a knee and start praying, even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different.” For a little background on the subject, Tim Tebow is a NFL quarterback who currently starts for the Denver Broncos. He’s known to be very religious, one of the greatest college football players of all time, and so far, not a very great NFL quarterback. For these reasons he has been a focal point of sports media since he joined the NFL. Since Tebow became an NFL starter the last few weeks, he has been seen praying frequently before and after games, which has given way to Tebowing — basically the same thing as planking, or taking pictures of yourself performing a specific, silly pose and posting it online.

At Search Influence, we occasionally plank, tebow, and sometimes start our own trends, but no one wanted to talk about it until we accidentally ranked for the term… or actually a misspelled version of the term. This morning I discovered that in the past 30 days www.searchinfluence.com has received 83 visits for terms like tbowing, t bowing, t-bowing, etc. How can that be, when we haven’t written anything about it? It turns out that this blog post ranks # 2 in Google for the term tbowing–which by the way isn’t how it’s spelled, but if you had no idea what it meant, you might search it with this spelling.

As you can see in the screen shot, due to the apostrophe in the word isn’t, Google is connecting the “t” and the “bowing” to form one word. Since there is no website called tbowing.com and no one calls it “tbowing,” Google has no choice but to try to match your crazy search phrase, which it has probably never seen to any significant degree before, with something seemingly relevant.

What does this have to do with SEO? Not much other than trying to understand how Google works, and realizing that you might be able to rank for a new word, or an alternate spelling of a word that gets significant search volume, but provides irrelevant results. This brings up another issue — relevance. As you can see in the analytics screen shot, our site has received 83 extra visits that we didn’t plan on getting. The problem with this can be seen in the numbers: nearly 100% of visitors immediately left the page after it loaded because the page had nothing to do with the search term. Even if the page did have something to do with the search term, the term is likely not being Googled by an SEO firm’s target market, small to medium sized business owners, and therefore these “leads” aren’t really leads at all — the overall visits for this month are artificially inflated. Whether you’re a small business owner who has hired someone to manage your SEO, or a marketer looking to track your leads, make sure to exclude numbers like these.

The moral of this story is that while sheer numbers of visits can be impressive on the outside, they’re not worth much if the viewers leave immediately. Seeding irrelevant keywords and concepts into your webpages can bring in the visitors, sure, but without some dirt to back it up, you’re not going to see results — just a veneer of success.

After Google’s big “Freshness update” was announced yesterday, the SEO world has been in quite a tizzy. But for those of us who aren’t technically-minded, what does this update actually entail? Justin Briggs, an SEO expert and Big Fish Games marketing champion, gives us this exhaustive set of data analyses to come up with a comprehensive guide to link freshness, including handy data on how to think critically about your site’s “Freshrank.”

How to Properly Use Facebook’s Advertising Features — ProNet Advertising

Targeted Facebook ads are a bread-and-butter item of the SEO community, with FB’s enormous user base offering a nearly unlimited source of demographic information and marketing potential. However, they’re not without flaws; in order to maximize your ads’ potential, you’ll need to put some research into the best practices and what you can do to make sure that targeting translates to eyeballs and clicks. Sonia Tracy of PsPrint offers up these five basic tips that will get you on the road to a well-maintained, efficient Facebook ad campaign.

Euclid Offers “Google Analytics For The Real World” — Search Engine Land

Now here’s an idea: Euclid Elements, a brand-new startup from some of the innovators behind Google Analytics, promises to create an Analytics-like experience — for brick and mortar locations. Through the installation of small sensors in-store, Euclid can help business owners track repeat shoppers, identify consumer patterns, and gauge seemingly subjective metrics such as foot traffic appeal and customer loyalty. As SEL notes, this isn’t an entirely new concept, but Euclid is certainly the first service of its type to apply an Analytics-like sophistication to this kind of metric tracking, and can potentially be invaluable to savvy small business owners who want to “optimize” their physical location.

Which Brain Is Your Website Selling To? — ClickZ

A fascinating look at Internet marketing from an evolutionary psychology standpoint. ClickZ’s Tim Ash evaluates the different aspects of what goes on in your brain when you look at a webpage, and offers some tips on what you can do to make sure your site hits all the marks to be effective!

250,000 Ninjas Chop Fruit Every 60 seconds on Mobile [Infographic] — Social Times

Did you know that over 23k apps are downloaded every minute? The mobile world is expanding at an alarming rate, and Mobclix is here to give you the scoop on the pings, taps, requests and, yes, even tiny ninjas that are whizzing around us every second of the day. The numbers are impressive — I don’t know about you, but I’m rethinking giving up that Angry Birds habit.

For the past few years, it seems like every dataset that I’ve seen contradicts these market share reports, so I decided to dig a little deeper and see what I can find.

comScore’s numbers:

comScore is extremely thorough in its calculations. It obtains this information by installing software on the devices of a large number of paid users, which tracks and records all the searches performed on that device. In the month of September 2011, the company recorded over 17 billion search results. It claims to get data from a variety of users that is representative of the market share of major ISPs in the U.S., but other than that, I’m not sure how they pick users. Either way, 17 billion intuitively seems like a big enough sample to come to firm conclusions.

My Tiny, but Interesting Dataset

To find numbers that I thought would be representative of the search engine market share for our clients and sites, I created a custom report in Google Analytics that provides the number of site visits from organic searches, and breaks them down by each particular search engine, over the last month (10/2/11 – 11/1/11). To figure out which sites to use, I exported data for the first 75 sites I found that I was certain were active and received organic search visits. The total number of visits was approximately 350,000, so it’s a relatively small sample. There was one site that I excluded because its total visits exceeded all other sites by 3!

As you can see in the chart, Google searches account for a whopping 85% of the organic visits! Like the comScore data, Yahoo and Bing are about even. This is pretty amazing, right? Even though these numbers are too small to make comparisons to the U.S. market share as a whole, the information is representative of Search Influence clients and therefore important to us.

Industry Segments

Most of the sites we looked at are small businesses throughout the country. 40% of the results come from 2 medium sized yellow pages directories–but when you take these two sites out, the share is virtually the same. We also see big numbers from Health Care & Beauty and Non-profit. The Non-profit is actually one large organization and the Health & Beauty segment is mostly composed of dentists and plastic surgeons. Two of the sites included are informational sites that attract national visits. Those two sites alone, which represent about 1% of the total visits in this set, received on average 94% of their organic visits from Google.

Why the Numbers are Different

The numbers differ for many possible reasons, but none that I have been able to completely pin down. Obviously the set of websites used here is not representative of sites on the Internet as a whole. Another reason could be that Google inaccurately reports referrals from other search engines, or perhaps small businesses rank better on Google, so our small business clients get more visits from Google. Another factor may be that none of these sites target American users that search in a language other than English. Whatever the case may be, it’s obvious to me that Google has an even bigger impact on our small business clients than the comScore numbers suggest.

What about you? Feel free to share your data, do a similar study, speculate on these results, or tell me why I’m full o’ bull.

Oh, and if you’re interested in a more detailed breakdown of the results in a particular industry, here it is. Here is a link to the spreadsheet.

When it comes to the world of SEO and general web technology, some of us are so jaded we think we’ve heard of everything. Phones we talk to? Check. Virtual reality? Won’t be long until we’re standing on the holodeck. And as far as SEO, everyone and their mom is on deck calling themselves “social media experts” and promising they can make your business blast to the top of the search results.

No matter how out-there the current trends are, I feel quite sure that nothing compares to the hard, cold fact that MC Hammer has just announced he will be launching his own web browser, which will be focused on “Deep Search.” No disrespect, Hammer, but before you get busy on that search engine you might want to hire someone to make your blog look less like a Blogspot nightmare. Just sayin’.

Anyway, I’ll keep the dissin to a minimum, since it’s clear that Hammer’s too legit to stop at ministries and lifestyle clothing lines, so why stop at SEO? The search engine will be called WireDoo (I’ll leave that there for you to make cracks your own) and is about “finding the relationship beyond just the keywords,” as Hammer put it on stage at his presentation at the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. He also claims that Google and other big-name search engines are not as skilled at connecting keywords to related topics. So is this the magic that WireDoo claims it will be able to perform?

That’s all we know for now — that and that Hammer’s team has been working on the engine for the past two years. It can’t be denied that the rapper has come up with some ingenious ideas in the past — not to mention those cool 50 million albums he sold. But, you have to wonder what he’s got up his sleeve at this point. Taking on a beast like Google takes some serious balls, but as Hammer has repeatedly proven in the past, he’s got the cajones to try anything. And hey, he has well over 2 million Twitter followers.  He’s got to know something about how to make people listen to him … right?