Final Lap time again! Check out some of the great stuff our team The Pit Crew read during the week of October 24.

Stoney deGeyter (@StoneyD)

Proof that Google’s Secure Search Now Affects More Users
by Rachael Gerson

Google is rolling out the new secure search to more users, and we all need to be prepared for the outcome.

Mike Fleming (@mflem25)

Dear Internet Marketers: Stop Building Your Careers On A Single Commoditized Skill
by Scott Cowley

I like Ian Lurie’s list of skills internet marketers should have because it represents a transformation that our entire profession has been seeing over the last several years, not just the copywriters. It is not enough to be copywriter or community manager or customer service specialist. The truth is, people are hiring cheaply for these positions at a time when every dime matters.

Advertising Companies Fret Over a Digital Talent Gap
by Tanzina Vega

When the Ad:tech advertising technology conference hits New York next week, marketers, advertising agencies and recruiters may spend less time listening to the panelists and more time working the floor to find new employees.

Annalisa Hilliard (@ahilliardm)

Get the Marketing Basics Down Before Worrying about SEO
by Nick Stamoulis

Too often site owners jump the gun when it comes to SEO. While I appreciate an enthusiastic site owner, it’s important to make sure that the rest of your marketing basics are in order BEFORE you start worrying about rank, visitor growth, bounce rate, conversion rate and so forth. If you don’t fully understand exactly what you are trying to accomplish for your business and brand, SEO isn’t going to be able to tell you.

Viral vs shareable: Do you know the difference?
by Hugo Guzman

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an executive at a Fortune 500 company (or an agency stakeholder for said company) skim through the real meat of a social media plan or strategy and then assert that they what they really need the next Old Spice idea, etc. and so forth.

A New Way of Looking at Ranking Factors
by Danny Sullivan

SEOmoz readers are no strangers to the concept of search engine ranking factors. In general, much of the community that comments seems to delight when some new factor is discovered that may provide a potential ranking boost. Who wouldn’t, right? But in this post, I’d like to suggest that perhaps some refocusing on the “forest” of the ranking factors world, rather than the individual “trees” that populate it, might be in order.

Jen Carroll (@martijen)

The Smartphone Wars Are Over
by Kit Eaton

Statistics, arguments, sales figures, and passionate explanations claiming one or another smartphone platform has sold or will sell more than another in a specific market might litter the web for a while to come. But, really, it’s all over but the shoutin’.

Google Penalizes Overstock for Search Tactics
by Amir Efrati

Google Inc. is penalizing Overstock.com Inc. in its search results after the retailer ran afoul of Google policies that prohibit companies from artificially boosting their ranking in the Internet giant’s search engine.

An honest look at being a Social Media consultant
by Mack Collier

Typically, I am loathe to write personal posts here, because I think I am boring y’all to tears, but I wanted to do so today. Over the past few months, I’ve had several discussions with people that are working in this space as the umbrella term of a ‘social media consultant’. What prompted me to write this post was because several times I have heard from friends that are struggling, and they assume that since they are struggling, that it’s a direct reflection on their abilities as a consultant. They also assume that most consultants are doing extremely well, so if they aren’t, that further cements the idea that they just aren’t ‘cut out’ for this type of work.

 
What’s the best thing about online marketing that you read this week? Leave us your comments.

Final Lap time again! Check out some of the great stuff our team The Pit Crew read during the week of October 24.

Stoney deGeyter (@StoneyD)

Discussion: Should SEOs Accept Clients That Compete With One Another?
by Matt McGee

Whether you’re a solo consultant or part of a bigger agency, chances are good that you’ll eventually be faced with this situation: the opportunity to provide consulting for two companies that are in competition with one another. In our “Discussion of the Week,” we’d like to hear your advice for handling that situation. Should SEOs accept clients that compete against one another? If so, what are the best ways to deal with potential risks of doing so? The floor is open!

Mike Fleming (@mflem25)

How Search Conversions Are Driven By Display Impression Frequency
by Manu Mathew

Along with the most obvious campaign attributes that impact cross-channel marketing performance — traits like publisher, size, creative, keyword, placement, etc. — are a number of less intuitive factors that can significantly influence your results. Among these more ancillary factors is “frequency” — specifically the frequency with which online users are exposed to a given marketing tactic in advance of an eventual conversion.

5 ways to use the new Google Analytics Real Time features
by Helen Birch

In certain situations real-time data can be a very powerful tool in the analyst’s kitbag. I’ve been testing the real-time reports for a few weeks now and whilst there is still room for improvement, I’ve been able to help a client find out some great insights on events that have been occurring which otherwise would have been a lot harder to discover.

LANDING PAGE QUALITY SCORE
by George Michie

As Pamela Parker described at SEL earlier this month, Google has announced that going forward, landing page quality will be a larger factor in an ad’s overall Quality Score. Given that my last post for SEL was on Quality Score and suggested that landing page quality was mostly a hammer used to beat up bad actors and didn’t have much meaning for legitimate businesses, this announcement was a bit embarrassing. It also made me curious as to how quality will be defined.

Jen Carroll (@martijen)

Pinterest stands out in crowded social media field
by Adam Belz

Time magazine called Pinterest — a website where users post collections of images of their favorite food, clothes, places and everything else — one of the five best social media sites of 2011, along with Google-Plus and Klout. The company has raised $27 million in venture capital led by the firm Andreessen Horowitz, which several tech news outlets have reported as valuing Pinterest at $200 million.

Nobody Gives A Damn About Your Klout Score
by Alexia Tsotsis

Klout’s pervasive problem is that the deeper among us are never going to judge anyone based solely on some arbitrary decimal score. Especially when that decimal number ranks teenbot Justin Beiber at 100, but precludes me from claiming Windows Phone 7 “Klout Perk” and tickets to a Matt and Kim concert because I don’t have enough technology Klout.

Google Plus Finds Sweet Spot Between Facebook & Twitter
by Jon Mitchell

Google Plus got a few more fun features today in addition to workplace ones. There’s a new feature called What’s Hot that surfaces popular posts (don’t call them “trending”), and a very cool visualization tool called Ripples that lets you watch Plus conversations flow out across the network. These are neat ways to track social activity that Facebook and Twitter don’t offer.

What’s the best thing about online marketing that you read this week? Leave us your comments.

It’s time again for Pole Position Marketing’s Final Lap! Check out some of the great stuff our team The Pit Crew read during the week of October 17.

Stoney deGeyter (@StoneyD)

SEOs Strike Out as Google Encrypts Signed-in Search Data
by Jonathan Allen

Google has made a major change to the way secure search works for signed in users of its services. If a user is signed into a Google account, any search performed will now be done on a secure socket layer (SSL) and will no longer pass the search term referrer data. However, Google have also said that search term referrer data will be passed to advertisers who use their pay-per-click product. The SEO community is crying foul…

HTML5 and SEO: New Strategies for Optimizing Code
by David Gould

The evolution of HTML has been a long transition away from how things look and toward what things mean. Gone are the days when web pages were cobbled together in HTML tables to compensate for limited layout controls. (Or, rather, those days should be gone. You know who you are.) Improvements in the language and the rise of CSS allowed web programmers to build pages that looked great for users and made better sense to search engines.

SEO Training Courses & SEO Certifications
by Dave Naylor

To save others from the time and hassle it took me to sort through all of the redundant courses to find the useful ones, I decided to do the decent ones and write a review on each. I also knew that just like reading a few different books on the same subject I would still learn at least something from each one, due to the different experiences, knowledge and perspectives of the course authors. A few more courses have come along since I found the first ones, therefore I’ve waited to do those so that they can be included here.

Mike Fleming (@mflem25)

INTEGRATING SEO & PPC: 3 AREAS TO STUDY
by Adam Audette

A plethora of articles have been written about the convergence of SEO and PPC, most of them fairly elementary. I think everyone understands that, at least from a keyword level, each channel can (and should) inform and reinforce the other. That idea of “reinforcement” is a bit tricky, however.

How To Take Your Keyword Research To A Higher Level
by Tom Schmitz

Keyword research is your time to understand the market you are competing in and how people search. It is your opportunity to comb through the competition and learn their keywords, content and link-building strategies. It is your opportunity to map out what you should track for your website, your market competitors and your keyword competitors. If you plan a months- or years-long relationship with a client or website, you owe several hours or days to get this right.

Five tricks our minds play on us and what marketers need to know
by Kelvin Newman

There’s a phenomena on the cusp between behavioral economics and psychology known as cognitive biases which are essentially scientifically documented tricks that our minds play on us. As all of us in the world of digital marketing are in the business of persuasion, understanding these often irrational tendencies can help us do a better job.

Annalisa Hilliard (@ahilliardm)

Check My Links Chrome Extension – A Link Builder’s Dream
by Jon R. Cooper

Not too long ago I was dead link building with the Mozilla Firefox LinkChecker Add-on. I started recommending it in a few posts, saying how great of an add-on it was, when in reality I had no idea there were other broken backlink checkers out there. But one day Ross Hudgens was kind enough to tweet about one of the greatest link building browser extensions known to man – Check My Links, a chrome extension. From that point on, I was fully converted to the Chrome toolbar, but arguing Firefox and Chrome is a topic for another time. In a nutshell, Check My Links will become your best friend for building some of the top links on the web for multiple reasons.

How to Get the Most out of Guest Blogging for Link Building
by Alan Grainger

Ever since Google came along and Panda-spanked article websites into oblivion, guest blogging has been the preferred choice for the internet marketer who is looking to squeeze a little more link juice from their articles. Guest blogging can be an effective way of getting a link, but could you get a lot more bang for your buck by making just a few small changes to your strategy? Here are a couple of tips to make sure that your efforts are not wasted.

3 HIGH QUALITY LINK BUILDING TECHNIQUES
by Matt Jackson

When it comes to link building schools of thought, there are those that opt purely for quantity, ignoring the quality and even relevance of the links received. However, and especially since recent Google algorithm updates, the onus in a link building campaign should be on quality for at least part of your monthly link work.

Jen Carroll (@martijen)

Are you placing too big of a bet on social media’s direct impact on SEO rankings?
by Stephen Chapman

You’ve heard it time-and-time again: social media has changed the SEO landscape. But just how much does social media actually impact rankings directly? Not as much as you might think…

Why the QR code is failing
by Sean X Cummings

They have become the standard violator appearing on advertising; in the corner of print ads, across billboards, on buses, or in pieces of direct mail — even peppered throughout this article. You’ve seen them; that little block of even littler squares. Unfortunately the technology behind QR codes was not invented for advertising and marketing; we are just co-opting its usage, and it shows.

Is Youtility the Future of Marketing?
by Jay Baer

What we’re trying to do with all forms of marketing is tie interests to actions. We assume that some percentage of the people seeing your smoke signal are indeed in the market for a new horse, and when we link interest and action to create a prospective customer, we call that “filling the top of the funnel.”

What’s the best thing about online marketing that you read this week? Leave us your comments.

Our team The Pit Crew has read some informative and helpful articles on Web marketing this week. Here are our picks.

Mike Fleming (@mflem25)

PPC Streamcap – Dealing With PPC Struggles
by Matthew Umbro

In the transcribed Streamcap from live chat, Matthew explores questions like, “What proactive measures do you take to ensure client satisfaction when results are less than satisfactory?” and “What has been your primary reason for losing PPC clients?” Lots of insight here!

Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value
by Avinash Kaushik

I am going to break one of my unspoken cardinal rules: Only write about real problems and measurement that is actually possible in the real world. I am going to break the second part of the rule. I am going to define a way for you to think about measuring social media, and you can’t actually easily measure what I am going to recommend. So why break the rule?

How To Save Money On AdWords Placements With Google Analytics
by Brad Geddes

Google’s display network can bring you tremendous amounts of clicks and conversions if used correctly. If it is not used correctly, you can quickly spend mass amounts of money and have nothing to show for it.

Annalisa Hilliard (@ahilliardm)

The various forms of influencer currency
by Hugo Guzman

One of the hot new catch-phrases in social media marketing circles is the word “influencer“. In a nutshell, it’s a person or entity that can influence consumers, readers, etc. and marketers large and small are trying to figure out ways to identify these influencers and then get them to behave in a manner that benefits branding and marketing efforts.

Link Building for Bloggers
by James Harper

Whether you’re a pro or amateur blogger, everyone wants traffic to their sites. And building links to your website is a great way to do this. Not only can it improve the visibility of your website in the search engines, but also if you pick your sites wisely you can benefit from referral traffic.

4 Reasons Blog Comments Are Great for Link Building
by Nick Stamoulis

Blog commenting is one of the best components of a link building campaign for numerous reasons. Aside from the obvious value of the link, there is a lot of long term value associated with developing a strong blog commenting campaign that can impact the overall success of your SEO and website. Here are 4 reasons why you should amp up your blog commenting.

Jen Carroll (@martijen)

Jobs’ Apple Standard vs. Page’s Google Standard
by Scott Cleland

The worldwide outpouring of respect, admiration and eulogies for Steve Jobs, Apple’s legendary leader and creative genius, proves his standard and legacy of innovation is one to measure other aspiring tech industry leaders by. Given that Apple and Google are the #1 and #2 most valuable brands in the world and that Google has invaded all of Apple’s markets in the last few years as a new competitor, it is illuminating and instructive to compare and contrast the radically different visions, values, and standards, of Apple’s former leader Steve Jobs and Google’s current CEO Larry Page.

5 Page Quality Indicators That Can Outweigh PageRank
by Bradley Zarich

PageRank would be a great indicator of page quality and relevancy if there is no link selling or artificial link building involved. Lacking that, Google has to implement a quality scoring system independent of link popularity. Let’s explore how to gauge page quality in a more sophisticated way using these 5 metrics.

The Holy Grail of Globalizing Editorial Planning
by Pam Didner

Social networks and search engines have changed the behavior of Intel’s business marketing audience of IT managers who are constantly searching for information and evaluating new technologies even when they are not purchasing them. As marketers, we need to engage with them on topics they care about and that are relevant to Intel on a timely basis. This is where an editorial planning process comes into play.

What’s the best thing about online marketing that you read this week? Leave us your comments.

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