What Google Knows - Who Are You?

We often wonder what Google knows about us and there is a simple tool you can use now that will tell you exactly who they think you are... 


Go to 
www.google.com/ads/preferences


Here you can see and edit your profile with Google.
Who cares... advertisers care.  Google keeps trying to get you to slice out your "special" friends on your email list, Google keeps trying to test what it is you want... now you can see all


Here is another great article on the subject that was recently in Bloomberg Business Week.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/who-does-google-think-you-are-02022012.html


This all dovetails into Google's new centralized privacy policy... translation: we will watch you on every device on all sites... YouTube, your smartphone, your gmail and form a collective picture of you.  Who said "don't be evil" didn't include selling every inch of you to advertisers?

Everyone Envies Local - should you?

Local looks like the obvious panacea to everyone.
The more local you get the more likely you are near something or someone that is about to make a purchase right?

Well according to Chris Devore, co-founder of Judy's Book that couldn't be farther from the truth...

His three take away's are:

1. There's no money in it

2. It doesn't scale

3. It's too obvious

While I applaud Chris' sentiment  (read article link below),  I do believe that there are plenty of opportunities to make local work.  One of course is to pick an industry and go across the US (world?) to make it work.  Lending Tree is an example of this and so are Dentist and Doctor referral sites.  Offers Network has chosen Real Estate and Automobile Dealers...across the US with only one or two players in a market.

Our tools dominate for them over all their competitors.

But trying to turn an entire local market into a money maker I think is a loser...calling on a house painter one day, a hair salon another doesn't scale.  Each sale is small and their understanding of how to price and deal with promotions is very limited ... so scaling a new promotional service across an entire "town" is tough.

Remember this, Groupon has 10,000 sales reps calling local businesses every day and there are some 200 other "deal-type" sites out there... so good luck trying to get local businesses attention. 

Devore’s Advice to Entrepreneurs: Be Wary of Local: http://www.crashdev.com/2012/01/top-three-reasons-not-to-do-local.html

Quality Time with our Social Media

As we are spending all this time deciding how to crank up our markets I wanted to start to set the stage about what we should and should not be doing in Social Media.  Sometimes people I work with misunderstand the difference between Push Media, which is like TV, Radio and email vs Social Media which is about engagement.

I often talk to companies about their social media play and often get this kind of sickly sweet response that actually turns into PUSH advertising… Of course my major markets have been real estate brokers and automobile dealers… so what was I expecting?

I thought that this article was a good “do’s and don’t” overview

http://searchengineland.com/google-growing-your-social-network-quantity-vs-quality-109210

REF: Google+ Growing Your Social Network: Quantity vs. Quality Jan 31, 2012 by Aaron Friedman Search Engine Land. http://tinyurl.com/6vqrrg7

I wrote an overview of this in my blog outlining a guy who I think really says it all by Gary Vaynerchuck on  who just wrote a great book,  "The Thank You Economy"

http://torreyrussell.blogspot.com/2011/03/thank-you-economy-are-you-part-of-it.html

To Post on Zillow or Not to Post - That is the question

In a recent article by John Cook on Geekwire (January 31, 2012 at 9:23 am by John Cook ) he talks about Jim Abbott, president of the Abbott Realty Group in San Diego, who recently announced plans to pull listings from Trulia, Realtor.com, Zillow, 


The best quote here is:
“All listing syndicators have one thing in common: They act as middlemen and post our valuable listing data alongside the contact information of other agents and brokers who rent ad space on their sites,” Abbott said in the video. “Usually, they do this with our permission, while claiming that exposure of our listings in any way on the Internet is a good thing. Time and results prove that it is absolutely not.”


So if this isn't working for him... why are you still doing it?
Giving away your front page position to a 3rd party is not becoming the wrong thing to do.  For them to use your listing to pump up their site... how does this make sense for you.  If instead you put your efforts into creating your own SEO (Search Engine Optimization) program your benefits far outweigh the negatives.  


Every study shows that consumers start at a search engine and then find these 3rd party sites.... they don't start at these sites.  The question is, are you, and everyone else in your office, going to band together to fight this?


Read more about this:

http://www.geekwire.com/2012/hear-real-estate-vet-pulled-listings-biggest-real-estate-sites-internet-zillow-ceo-spencer-rascoff

Tablets are Mobile Devices! Now owned by 20% of Americans

The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period. The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/E-readers-and-tablets.aspx

Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, tells msnbc.com’s Technolog they’ve “never seen growth quite like this” in the history of  conducting surveys on digital technology.

http://www.geekwire.com/2012/gadgets-galore-quarter-americans-ereader-tablet

Mobile search results are different than desktop

“Mobile search results not only produce different rankings from desktop search but can also vary based on the mobile device type that the query was performed on” http://searchengineland.com/how-to-achieve-mobile-search-ranking-clarity-108635

“Search Plus Your World” Google Socializes Search

“Search Plus Your World” This is a fundamental change in the way that google returns search results When you conduct a search now, currently just in the US and only in English, you will see this new header...

This new idea is where you are now looking at the search results of your Google+ network.

There are good and bad issues around this ... for one it will change SEO rules at its core.

SEO and Search Plus Your World means that your network of friends and family will drive what you see in a search result instead of  the world.  Google can now rank and rate YOU against the interests of your network of co-workers, friends and family to profile what you are interested in viewing... think Panda [define] rules tied to social graph.  

Genius, maybe, intrusive, absolutely.  Should you care... yes, your world just got smaller.  And while it may be great to share restaurant ideas or movie reviews... do you really want your boss or your brother in law commenting on every search you do?

Read this for more: 

http://searchengineland.com/googles-results-get-more-personal-with-search-plus-your-world-107285

AutoShopper Embed

YouTube Video Dominate in Google's Results? [Study]

Google launched universal search in 2007 and changed the world forever. How? Well, basically they started mixing in non-link content from a variety of sites. This content included videos, images, maps, shopping products, and beyond.

"It makes sense for marketers to increase the volume of video and image content they’re creating and to optimize it both on their own sites and on third party sites such as YouTube and Flickr." Dr. Horst Joepen, CEO of Searchmetrics.

Read more here:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2099640/Universal-Search-Which-Formats-Dominate-in-Googles-Results-Study

Search is about Local

When you are creating a program to gain SEO for your company make sure you are also listed in all the local directories. These are natural ways to build back links to your site or business name... these are often called "Citations". As search engines start to concentrate on delivering local search results this approach provides a legal (white hat) SEO way to have your business appear high on search results on Google. So while our blog often focuses on getting what you sell listed on the front page of Google like a car or a home, this is about getting to the top of the list for your brand or your category heading on local search. Of course you need to be registered with Google Local Listing service called Google Places first. www.google.com/places You also need to think about how to get your listing in the top 5 or 10 of your Places search result.

Then you need to get some people on Google+ to rate your business as the old YELP and Angie's List are not visible any more... however, don't be fooled. These sites and the list below are considered valid and trusted sites for listing data so Google uses them as a basis to determine if a business address is really where you say it is and is involved in what you are saying you do... Here’s a list of the biggest general ones that you need to be listed in: Yelp Superpages City Search Urban Spoon and OpenTable (for restaurants) Yellow Pages Angie’s List Express Update USA (formally infoUSA) Yahoo Local Trip Advisor Merchant Circle Dex Knows Insider Pages Localeze Shop City Judy’s Book Yellow Bot Kudzo Do a test and search for your company. Usually you can get a basic listing for free.

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Search for autoshopper inventory on custom video web page

Smartphone shoppers are real buyers

According to Google:

• 79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping, from comparing prices, to finding more product info, to locating a retailer.
• 70% use their smartphones while in a store.
• 77% have contacted a business via mobile, with 61% calling and 59% visiting the local business.
• 44% of searches for last minute gifts this holiday season will come through mobile phones.
• Mobile searches on Black Friday rose 200% from last year.
• Tablet traffic grew 440% in 2011 from 2010.

http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/2011/12/look-back-at-2011.html

"YouTube now exceeds 200 million views a day on mobile, a 3x increase in 2010."

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/01/music-videos-now-on-youtube-app-for.html

Based on the numbers above, are your cars or property listings optimized for mobile?  Have you created video landing pages for mobile users?

Now Google is looking for mobile optimized sites and apps to crawl.  Is your web site ready for the 200 million mobile views every day?

...Take the lead now over your competitors and have Google search your site to optimize (rank) your site for mobile users... get ahead of your competitors.

Now there is a Googlebot for Smartphones... now Google can search and optimize your website for mobile.

"The new crawler will optimize content displayed on smartphones where it is specifically made for smartphones."

Understanding the new Googlebot tools.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/introducing-smartphone-googlebot-mobile.html

Read this for an overview of what is going on here.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2134040/Googlebot-for-Smartphones-Some-Useful-Stats

Large Website SEO Techniques

Often trying to manage a site with hundreds of links can seem daunting.  How you go about laying out your site is absolutely critical to the success of your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) program.

Often you will have different departments vying for control over the front page which is of course where search engines start.  One of the biggest issues is Conical links.  How to handle links back to the site or to the same item in the site.

I spend a large amount of time trying to figure out "Best Practices" for these sorts of problems for my clients and use my Blog to capture the best ideas I come across.

None of this is new to us but often it is nice to read it in a concise simple article with all the considerations in a few pages...

I think this article:

SEO Techniques for Large Sites

by Adam Audette 

Read At:

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2133151/seo-techniques-sites

Offers one of the better overviews of how to go about developing a schema plan for your site.
Remember that there is also a new consortium of search companies using schema.org layout parameters when instituting these new idea.

FREE SEO Tools

I am always looking for the best collection of tools to analyze my client's web sites.
I think this site provides one of the best compendiums of web analysis tools around
http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm

Long Tail vs Head Term SEO Results

We often think that if we can rank for the largest number of searchers for a core search term that we are winning the SEO wars.  Fact is the conversion rate can be as much as 2.5x more for a "long tail" term as apposed to the core "head term" search word.

Conductor, who offers a great service called Searchlight, has put together a simple two page review of their findings on this and can be had for free at:

http://www.conductor.com/resource-center/research/long-tail-search

So you want to be an SEO Rock Star?

Advanced Keyword Modeling is a leaned skill.  Like sailing a boat, making a pair of shoes... this can be learned.
I advise my clients to consider having their SEO staff take this simple and effective course from one of the pros
Learn From Bill Hunt on Advanced Keyword Modeling at the Click-Z Academy.
http://tinyurl.com/bo4htde
Learn:

• Optimizing your keyword strategy
• Optimizing snippets and identifying bad snippets
• Opportunities for end-of-life products
• Understanding searchers and using query intent and searcher mindset
• Brainstorming keywords, generating your initial keyword list and prioritizing
• Using keyword research tools
• Mapping searchers to actions, and keywords to pages
• Creating a taxonomy to define your content and search strategy
• Evaluating underperforming keywords
• Keyword modeling
• Aligning your keyword strategy to social media and PR
• Integrating paid and organic search

The session is approximately one hour 

Mobile Privacy-What Verizon does with your data

Does your cell phone carrier really care about your privacy? Not.

Verizon says this in my account... RE: Relevant Mobile Advertising...When you use your wireless device, you often see advertising on websites (Verizon is controlling these ads not Google?) and apps (again who is getting my personal information?). Using the postal address we have for you and certain consumer information such as your device type, language preference and demographic and interest categories provided to us by other companies [They mashup my actual contact info with my search history with where I am standing with my phone in my pocket and the credit card data that I am using at that moment, buying underwear in some store - wow that is such a violation]... (such as gender, age range, sports fan, frequent diner, or pet owner), we will determine whether you fit within an audience category that an advertiser is trying to reach....Please note that you will receive mobile ads whether you participate or not, but under the program, ads may be more relevant to you.

- You will see ads whether you opt in or not! Verizon is running ads on my phone taking up my minutes? This is just the beginning. You can't really opt out of this either... only remove "relevant data" whatever that means.

Check out your own phone privacy settings with your carrier when you log into your cell phone account. You will be amaized at what they say they can do.

Here is a great review of this subject from Mobile Commerce News.
http://tinyurl.com/vprivacynotice

Privacy changes...It (V's new polilcy) will require customers to have to actively opt-out unless they wish to send information to Verizon about the features and apps that they use, the websites that they visit using their mobile devices, and where they have physically travelled while using devices on the Verizon network.

Freewheel Report Says 97 Percent Video View Growth

From your mind to your eyes - google explains how search works

Google takes a minute to explain the history of the Google Search engine and how it has evolved and also how Universal Search [explained] works where they combine all of the various kinds of media types; web pages, images, video, text from books.... and how they get it to you faster.



If you deconstruct this video you quickly see that using other types of media besides web pages is the future of how Google plans to get you information.

OK Universal Search... return different media types in a single search. But really what does this mean?
1. Mobile devices doing search are better optimized for video. (30 % of our videos are being watched on a mobile device now)
2. How does Google make money? Selling ads, and if you haven't clicked on one of their ads in a general search, they make no money... but if they present a video result, namely a YouTube video link, this not only provides Google a second chance at charging someone for an ad impression, they also keep you in their eco system, instead of say going off to the New York Times.

Seems simple to me! What do you think?

NAR 2011 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers

New Home Buyer and Seller profile study now released by National Association of Realtors.
"Of buyers who used the web as a starting point for their search (88%), 45 percent found the home they ultimately purchased online, up nine percent from 2009"

There was a dramatic sea change regarding the New Home buyer profile and the precipitous drop in Fist Time Buyers in the market this year... With tightening credit standards and so many buyers under water that is to be expected. But there are also a number of important clues for creative Real Estate Agents to use to stand out in a crowded market.

Research Overview:
http://www.realtor.org/press_room/news_releases/2011/11/home_buyer_and_seller

Relevant Internet Use Summary: "... buyers use a wide variety of resources in searching for a home: 88 percent use the Internet, 87 percent use real estate agents, 55 percent yard signs, 45 percent attend open houses and 30 percent review print or newspaper ads."

There are tons of other important issues that the NAR study brings out for Agents to pay attention to...
We particularly liked the AGBeat overview of the study http://tinyurl.com/7p7ewqh

What does this tell us?
The major shift is from first time buyers to older, more established families... those over 65 tended not to use the Internet as much... again this is "as much" but they "still used" the Internet so from a standpoint of you are doing everything else to make your local presence known... you still need to use the Internet.

PDF overview of NAR 2011 Home Buyers Report http://tinyurl.com/7ejdomd

So as markets become more competitive what are you doing to stand out?

We believe that all studies indicate that using video, specifically YouTube video, which is not only the easiest way to put your listings in front of real buyers but also the fastest way.

In other studies it has been borne out that of all realtors in a recent study conducted by realtor.org …. (only) 2 percent used YouTube or another video hosting site.

October 10, 2010 study http://www.realtor.org/topics/homebuyers_sellers_profile/techtrends_pres

...and that 85.8 percent of American web users (77.3% of the population) are viewing web video...in addition, the tipping point for the use of mobile devices while in the field to view properties has grown dramatically. Putting video on YouTube solves all of these problems.
http://torreyrussell.blogspot.com/2011/09/tipping-point-mobile-video-search.html

So by taking the advantage that Video brings - you can quickly and easily gain a dominant position on the Internet without a lot of cost associated with creating and hosting it.... YouTube is free or use a service like ours, (http://techmediamarketing.com) cost about $1.00 per listing per month for a typical office to automate that process.

What separates Rich Real Estate Agents from Poor Real Estate Agents

Video SEO - are you playing by the book? YouTube rule book

Its easy to think you know everything about how something works after using for years and years... but really take a minute to read this document
http://www.youtube.com/creators/playbook.html
This alone tells you exactly what is and is not going to work if you are trying to use YouTube to gain better SEO for your brand, your assets or services you market or the story you want to tell.
Also be reading this guy with his first post on Search Engine Watch
Terry Van Horne, November 4, 2011
Video SEO: Video Metadata Optimization

Video SEO using YouTube how we do it

It all started here officially several years ago with this study done by a respected industry analyst called Forrester Research, “video stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the (Google) index”
http://blogs.forrester.com/interactive_marketing/2009/01/the-easiest-way.html

OK, a 50x advantage using video, specifically YouTube video over any other method of web presence.

And if it is true that: "Most people start at a search engine on the Internet 74% of the time."

Information sources used in home search:
Internet: 74%
Real estate agent: 69%
Yard sign: 22%
Open house: 12%
Newspaper ad: 9%
Home book or magazine: 6%
Source: 2010 National Association of REALTORS® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers

And that of all realtors in a recent study conducted by realtor.org …. (only) 2 percent used YouTube or another video hosting site.
October 10, 2010 study http://www.realtor.org/topics/homebuyers_sellers_profile/techtrends_pres

And the rules by which we do all of this is in constant motion...

The ever changing landscape:
As stated above Google dominates the search industry.. They own YouTube. Google also embraces new companies from time to time. At one time they backed Facebook, then Twitter and for a short while Groupon… today those are no longer seen as partners but threats and competitors. Now they are backing a new group of startups like Storify and Tumblr. This process of embracing and then letting go of different partners effects the rules of SEO. This also provides an uneven and turbulent market in which to conduct a company’s business in which to acquire customers.

In our blog at http://offersnetwork.com/blog we identify all of these issues and how you can use Google’s current “love affairs” to maximize the SEO of your listings.

For example to take advantage of this we have written an entirely dynamic series of rules that wrap our client’s inventory into SEO landing pages using current Google partner’s sites as the scalable location from which to generate entirely new levels of SEO for their listings without violating the new rules of Google’s PANDA release [read more here http://tinyurl.com/pandarules ] and also we recognize through this process other rules of the road that are not documented but test out in our labs.

We are constantly evaluating the signals that Google is releasing regarding who they are backing and how that might affect our client’s ability to gain SEO of their brand and how we can use those alliances to have our client’s offerings dominate their local markets using these techniques.

Summary: To generate significant, scalable SEO for clients with large ASSET bases requires a programmatical approach. This cannot be done by hand. And with the ever changing landscape it is important to know what are the relevant signals the search engines give off that work and have the flexibility of design to take advantage of those new opportunities. Knowing which ones work and which ones produce false positives is a matter of hard work and testing. In addition, the research indicates that for those brokers that use Video, specifically YouTube video, it represents a huge advantage to dominate search results for their listings over other real estate listings in their market (98% of realtors don’t use video).

Content continues to be king for SEO new Infographic

schema-org what every SEO expert should know

YouTube Video Keyword Suggestion Tool

Video, video, video... especially YouTube video get better SEO than any other method

Top Level Domains still pull the best for SEO

No doubt about it, using a top level domain (TLD) creates tremendous SEO for that site.... not just .gov or .edu.  But putting the keywords you want in the order that the searcher is using also is key.

For example we just launched http://homes-for-sale-real-estate.com with each of our clients sitting under it by city and state and it is pulling a entirely new level of SEO for us. Each client (Real Estate) is then optimized at the Office, Agent and listing level...
Example site
Here is the video on all the features of this as marketed by our partner - Techmediamarketing.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YLKTWqftFY

Of course our entire process is to re-post directed links back to the YouTube videos for each listing to increase engagement (time) watching that video by more people.  Our clients take our customized java-scripted-slide-shows of their YouTube videos as embedable links and post them on their web blogs, web sites and face book accounts generating huge SEO back links again.  We are working with a newsletter company where we will take their embedded links and push that out to their newsletter readers... creating tons of page views, hey video takes longer to watch, email is opened on a mobile device 39% of the time, and creates longer "engagement" ranking for that search term... we win!

So this is an automated process... we are now creating new landing pages for each video, optimized for that city and state, then building clustered landing pages by category (houses for sale city state)... on and on. Cross links, back links, landing pages on our client sites with their videos embedded there, news sites that will take feeds like stumpleupon, tumblr, storify....   each listing is now linked from 10 or more places thus - with the TLD approaching the goal of starting the Google engine to follow all of this makes it simple and automated for tens of thousands of listings and is all kosher for Google (eg white hat).

It is nice to see other stories coming out that verify some of our techniques:

Author Tim Callan  |  September 28, 2011 on ClickZ

QR Codes just a snap of the camera with Google Goggles now... no scanning

8 great basic rules for SEO on your web site