SEO/SEM
Archived Posts from this Category
I found an interesting service at AttentionMeter today. It’s pretty handy and lets you input up to 5 websites to output Alexa and Quantcast data charts for Site Reach and Traffic Results.
Here’s an example of our URL along with 4 of our competitors (randomly selected from the top 10 results in a Google search for the keyword “Shopping Cart Software”). It’s a little hard to read the small images, but 1ShoppingCart is the top line in each image!
Check out the Alexa and Quantcast rankings for your site today.
USA Today has been making news this week following a major site upgrade. The update includes a redesign and the addition of new ’social media’ type features. According to USA Today:
While we’ve refined the design, we’ve also expanded the journalistic mission: Our ambition is to help readers quickly and easily make sense of the world around them by giving them a wider view of the news of the day and connecting them with other readers who can contribute to their understanding of events.
They go on to further explain the reasons for their new system:
It is an extension of the mission we set for ourselves nearly 25 years ago… but it is a mission recast for an era in which readers are inundated with information, have little allegiance to a single news source, struggle to assess the credibility of what they read and have the capacity to share their own insights with a wide audience.
Some of the new features you will find include:
• Scan other news sources directly on USATODAY.com;
• See how readers are reacting to stories;
• Recommend stories and comments to other readers;
• Comment directly on stories;
• Participate in discussion forums;
• Write reviews (of movies, music and more);
• Contribute photos;
• Better communicate with USA TODAY staff.
Unfortunately for USA Today, the feedback has been overwhelmingly negative from longtime site visitors; although, my experience is ANY change, even for the better, will generate a lot of negative comments (we all get used to things being a certain way and unless we personally need a specific change, most of us don’t look favorably on any change.)
That being said, the comments seem to indicate that USA Today has gone and ruined pretty much everything their target audience enjoyed about the site (including easy navigation, easy access to the Dow Jones and simple design), and traded it in for a bevy of social media features (like blogs, comments, opinions etc.)
Personally, I think one of the most interesting things about USA Today’s new move is allowing all of their free members to host a blog at USAToday.com. So it just became easier to get potentially quality links from an authoritative PR 8 site!
Check out my new eCommerce blog at USAToday (ooo! Doesn’t that make me sound important!) The URLs could definitely use some help, and there are some unfortunately spammy PPC ads at the bottom, but this may turn out to be an exciting resource for your future SEO efforts 
At the end of the day, I applaud USA Today for trying something different, but I don’t think they quite got it right. Realistically, if you go to USA today to read an article on the latest big business merger, do you really care what Jenny from Cali has to say about it?
Video Provided by WebProNew.com
From WebProNews:
American searchers spent a lot of time in January hitting the search engines. ComScore said Americans made 6.9 billion searches for the month, with Google handling 3.3 billion of them. Those searches gave Google 47.5 percent of the market, and that was a little increase over their December share. After Google, the other major search engines fell into line behind them.
Yahoo held on to second place but lost some share, dropping to 28.1 percent, while Microsoft moved up a little to 10.6 percent. Ask.com saw its share drift down to 5.2 percent. Overall, people have been doing a lot more searching. January’s number of searches was up 26 percent over the same month in 2006.
I guess I’m a bit of an SEO-geek, because I enjoy finding the unexpected when using search engines.
For example, I was excited to come across this little irony with the word eCommerce while doing some keyword research earlier today…
First, the definition of eCommerce (according to wikipedia) is the buying, selling, marketing and distribution of products or services over electronic systems; especially the Internet.
Or more simply, any online business activity aimed at a commercial transaction.
Now, according to Overture, there are potentially hundreds of thousands of eCommerce related searches every month.
One would expect then, that the SERPS (search engine result pages) for the keyword eCommerce would be chock full of eCommerce companies; or at least eCommerce companies like 1ShoppingCart.com who specialize in providing applications to help other online businesses succeed.
The irony is that 9 of the top 10 (and 17 of the top 20) results in Google for the search term eCommerce are not primarily commercial sites.
Instead, these results are dominated by eCommerce news and information sources.
In fact, eCommerce providers don’t really start appearing until page 5!
Guess I have some work to do
At the dawn of the social network era, early adopters and forward thinking marketers were able to take advantage of opportunities that networks like Digg and Del.icio.us offered; they were new, they were cool, and they had rapid base of users just waiting for the next story to come along.
Things are changing. Now every marketer thinks about how they can use these sites to their advantage, and the social network demographic has become increasingly savvy in dealing with overt marketing attempts.
Gone are the pre-Internet days when people would simply turn the page, or change the channel if they didn’t like your advertisement. Online, the eyeballs you’re targeting are attached to fingers that have their own blogs who aren’t afraid to flame you.
But love them or hate them, Social networks are making an evolution as a marketing vehicle.
Not because they’re cool, and with a new social network opening daily, certainly not because the genre is unique, but because each new social network provides a doorway to a new, niche, target demographic. And every new community that sprouts online offers the savvy marketer a new channel to spread their message across.
But a Word of Warning…
Like people on the other side of any doorway you ever walk through, online communities that have grown up around your favorite social network are going to take offense if you barge in and start throwing your sales pitch around… And then the flaming begins.
In a social environment, subtlety works much better.
So, how do you start your subtle social network marketing program?
This resource is an excellent place to start!
Download this article as a PDF
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