Tips and Tricks for the Advanced SEO

Keith Vera (@KeithVera)
Client Services Manager

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend SMX Advanced in Seattle, WA, and hear some strong presentations from some great SEOs. Overall the conference was very informative and a lot of fun. I attended the majority of the SEO tracks on both days of the conference, and my favorite session was “Build It Better: Site Architecture for the Advanced SEO, featuring @beussery, @ audette, and @SEO_Girl.

I found that on the whole, the SEO-focused sessions covered a lot of topics that are not only highly relevant in today’s natural search space, but also covered individual components of strong SEO programs that sometimes get overlooked or bypassed altogether. I’m going to cover a few of these SEO methods, tips and tricks that I have been working on implementing across various campaigns.

• As reiterated from @mattcutts of the course of the conference, in Google’s eyes, user experience is the key. Website and information architecture complements a good SEO strategy, and a strong user experience should always be the starting point with site design. SEO best practices can be leveraged later to achieve the best possible SEO value. In the simplest of terms, the primary consideration when looking at site information architecture is focusing on structuring all of a site’s content so that it can be easily absorbed by both your target audience and the engines.

• Images make good search results (and link bait) as they can give strong and relevant answers to specific search queries. Search engines will align images within SERPs or photo SERPs when images appear to match user intent. A few important points to remember when optimizing images for search are the file name, alt tags, text, captions, image quality, and includes in your XML sitemap. The example used by @beussery that I really feel drives home the point for optimization around images, is a result for the query “how to tie a necktie”. This is an example of a great result that is sure to drive a click response.

• While we’re touching on the subject of images for link bait, @chrisbennett’s presentation during the “Show Me The Links” track gave some really strong information on utilizing infographics for link bait. The best infographics are visually pleasing, and have a unique way of taking a significant amount of data and compressing it into a digestible format, or finding a unique way of representing that data. Good infographics are easy link bait, as they offer a lot of information in a small and interesting package. The following example of an interesting infographic that comes from Infographics Showcase:

There you have it, a few core ideas we took away from SMX Advanced that will hopefully inspire some new SEO ideas and activities. Have any success stories around these points that you’d like to share? Comment below:

Google Officially Acquires AdMob

Keith Vera

Client Services Manager

On Friday, Google announced that it had made another giant step towards growing its mobile internet advertising options by officially acquiring AdMob. According to Google and as seen on the AdWords Blog on Friday:

"It’s clear that mobile advertising is becoming a much larger part of our clients’ and partners’ strategies and with this acquisition, it’s now a central part of our own business. In continuing to invest in this highly competitive area, we’ll be bringing together our technology, resources and expertise in search advertising with AdMob’s innovative solutions for advertising on mobile websites and in mobile applications."

As the adoption of smart phones continues to grow, all major advertising players are looking to expand their capabilities and move into emerging markets. Google’s mobile search volume alone has grown exponentially in just the past two years, and smart phone searches through WebKit browsers are up over 62 percent from the previous quarter. With the addition of AdMob’s capabilities to the growing variety of mobile advertising options, marketers will be able to take advantage of the extensive reach and timely value of reaching consumers directly on their mobile devices like never before. Let us know your thoughts on Google’s AdMob acquisition by commenting below…

Facebook: New features let users share as they browse

Keith Vera
Client Services Manager

Looking to move more into competition with Google, Facebook announced today new features that will help Facebook users share their web activity with their contacts, or friends, as they browse the web. Focused on the peer connection, Facebook hopes to continue to grow its social media dominance by further connecting “friends”, allowing them to share web activity and interests outside of the Facebook website.

How it works: Websites can now install a “like” button or even use widgets that lets users share web content with their friends outside of Facebook.com. Comments and “likes” on content will show up on friend’s Facebook home pages, effectively sharing users browsing history, preferences, and interests (that they choose to share of course) as they move through the web outside of Facebook.com. Websites with large amounts of content will be able to take this new social browsing standard one step further, and outline within their pages what someone’s peers liked or recommended within a site.

The Washington Post has a interesting new Facebook news feature on the home page that will show the most popular Facebook “shared” articles, and the browsing activity of Facebook friends on the Washington Post site as long as you are logged into Facebook or Facebook Connect. Here is an image of the Washington Post homepage widget:

Washington Post Facebook Widget

Here is the expanded view of the feature showing the most popular overall activity as well as Friend activity:

Washington Post Facebook Widget

You can read a bit more on the announcement from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook blog. Be sure to comment on this post and let us know your thoughts on the new Facebook changes and the impact.

Google AdWords Click-to-Call Update

Keith Vera
Client Services Manager

Last month we talked about the launch of the new AdWords click-to-call feature as Google rolled out the service to all paid-search advertisers. Now, Google has rolled out a strong enhancement that brings click-to-call functionality to all mobile-triggered searches regardless of a users location through phone extensions. Advertiser phone numbers can now appear as the last line of ad text, and can be applied to all existing or new campaigns. Here is an example of what an advertisement utilizing the new phone extensions enhancement might look like:

Google AdWords Phone Extensions

We've been utilizing Google's new Click-to-Call features for some of our clients and have a few suggestions if you would like to take your PPC ads to the next level and implement click-to-call utilizing phone extensions:

• Treat your click-to-call campaigns as separate programs from your traditional PPC campaigns, much as you would campaigns that focus on advertising on the content network.
• Focus on the more general terms around your brand or product at first, with the goal of capturing users who are actively searching for your company, products or services. These users are more likely to be your stronger target-audience segment, and further down your conversion-funnel.
• Test and optimize your mobile campaigns just as you would your standard PPC campaigns, be sure to check your mobile calls-generated statistics frequently.
• Finally, be sure that you have a system in place to handle the new inbound call traffic. If your call center doesn't operate 24 hours a day, day-part your click-to-call campaigns to only operate during hours you can handle calls.

Let us know what you think of this new click-to-call AdWords feature by commenting below...

Google rolls out click-to-call for AdWords

Keith Vera
Client Services Manager

After a successful testing of the new AdWords click-to-call feature, Google has rolled out the service to all paid-search advertisers. AdWords click to call now “makes it even easier for potential customers to reach you by adding a location-specific business phone number in ads that appear on mobile devices with full internet browsers”. Phones with full browser capability that can show standard HTML web pages, like the iPhone, will allow phone number in the ads to be clicked to make phone calls direct to a business. The ads can be served based on a users specific location, automatically displaying the business location closest to the user.

View how click-to-call adverting works, shown in the Google Mobile (Ad)itude video:
Mobile [Ad]itude 9 with Meredith: Click to Call Ads

Costs to advertisers are the same as the cost for a click, which is a very cost effective way to generate calls to a business. Let us know what you think of the new click-to-call AdWords feature, and if you’ve seen the same type of boost in click-through rates that trail participants reported.