feed hat blog

We’ve all kind of noticed that retweets of our articles seem to have dropped off lately. And yet we’re still writing blindingly incisive humourous and topical content with no discernable drop in daily traffic. Sometimes.
Odd.
On one level it hardly matters, but there’s no denying that the Tweetmeme counter up there adds something to the way [...]

Retweet Counts all Shot to Hell is a post from: Dave Naylor’s SEO Blog.

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Retweet Counts all Shot to Hell

When your blog or website becomes successful and starts to get traffic, if you don’t make direct sales yourself or commissions via affiliate traffic, you almost always look for other revenue streams. The most common revenue stream is CPM based advertising or something like adsense. However, once many publishers start down that path, they almost always end up chasing off topic traffic. Let’s look at two of the flagship websites of the technology space, Techcrunch and Mashable.

This week, Techcrunch posted a story about how so many valley entrepenuers in the Valley are now having babies. I’ll take a quote from the article which shows exactly how silly this type of posting is:

To anywhere else in the US, this may sound “So what? People have babies all the time.” But in the Valley, this is a staggering injection of work-life balance into the 24/7 Web space.

This is not tech news. In fact it barely qualifies as a “slice of life” piece about life in the Valley. ZOMG I mean you people in the valley finally realize that 99% of the rest of the population in the US struggles with work-life balance issues… I mean–WOW. Congratulations on peeping your head out of your narcissistic incestuous self centered bubble for nine months and, you know, actually getting  a life. This piece was written to be nothing more than a polarizing, emotionally-charged bit of linkbait designed to drive up page views.

Don’t worry, Mashable. You’re just as guilty as Techcrunch of chasing off topic subjects. Just look at how many Tiger Woods posts you have. And after victims of the recent earthquake tragedy in Chili posted pictures to twitpic, how long did it take your writers to create their articles?  Just because an issue arises doesn’t mean you should start writing about off topic subjects.

Let’s be honest here. You aren’t being responsible journalists. You’re becoming ambulance chasers, hoping to make some page views and few dollars off of a time sensitive spike in search terms. Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with being a traffic whore. But you can’t act like a traffic whore then turn around and claim you’re a journalist. It just doesn’t work that way.

As a publisher, how do you decide what to cover and what not to cover? Ask yourself this question and answer honestly. Am I writing about this subject because it’s part of my industry or because it’s kinda connected and there is a lot of traffic? Every so often there comes a story that is too good to pass up. But remember that, every time you bite into that juicy little bit, you sell out just a little.

Nobody ever sells out all once. They do it slowly over time until, eventually, there’s nothing left…

Decide which side of the fence you want to be on. Every time you cross from one side to the other, you lose the respect of your peers and your readers.

Advertisement: Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts. #4

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Are You Chasing Off Topic Traffic

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Yes you heard right: it’s an anti Bing Title. This stuff annoys the hell out of me…
Bing are at one of the trickiest stages when it comes to building a brand. There is awareness about the brand and people are trying it out, but there’s no massive emotional attachment to it like there is to [...]

Bing: Left hand, Right hand get your shit together is a post from: Dave Naylor’s SEO Blog.

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Follow all of Bruce Clay’s Liveblogging Coverage of SMX West 2010 here. Session names will take you to the coverage and show you what’s upcoming. Session descriptions link you to the SMX conference site.

Enjoy!

Day 1: Tuesday, March 2

Day 2: Wednesday, March 3

Day 3: Thursday, March 4

SMX West 2010 Liveblog Coverage was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

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SMX West 2010 Liveblog Coverage

Last night’s SMX After Dark party was kickin’ — thanks Bing!

Oh, and get this. I left my iPhone at the BCI booth and they locked up the expo hall before I realized it. So last night I was feeling a little concerned. You know how it is when A) you don’t have your phone, and B) you think you know where it is, but you’re not sure, so you realize maybe you’re putting your hope in the wrong thing when really you should be looking elsewhere. Ugh!

Luckily the awesome SMX team worked some of their lovely magic and got the convention center security to let me in to get my phone. Thanks so much, Michelle Robbins, Karen DeWeese, and Santa Clara Convention Center Security! This is one happy, mobile-ready blogger!

Now on to the keynote! Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, is beyond impressive. He’s a search pioneer, an author, a rocket scientist and was an “adult partier” in the Nutcracker. And that isn’t even half of the accomplishments moderator Chris Sherman just rattled off. Google and their geniuses.

Peter will start by presenting a number of Google’s research projects:

1. Person Finder: really useful after natural disasters
2. PowerMeter
3. Earth Engine: shows deforestation of rain forests
4. Trike and Snowmobile StreetView: taking StreetView to new frontiers
5. User Photos in StreetView
6. Image Swirl: see images related to each other
7. Web-Scale Image Annotation
8. Image Rotation Captcha: Instead of swirly, hard to read words, they’re experimenting with having users turn an upside-down picture, right-side up.
9. Goggles: take a picture and get info on it
10. Discontinuous Video Scene-Carving
11. Sharing Cluster Data
12. App Inventor for Android: introductory program development
13. Speed Recognition
14. Punctuation/Capitalization in Transcribed Speech
15. Translating Phone: translate text, Web pages and documents
16. Low-Resource MT: Yiddish: Some languages don’t have much written text examples, but they used languages that share attributes with Yiddish and were able to figure out translation
17. Sound Understanding
18. Google Squared
19. Clustering
20. Attribute Extraction
21. Browser Size

“You can observe a lot just by watching.” -Yogi Berra

Now Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman will be throwing out questions.

Q: What’s the biggest thing that came out of the 20 percent project?

One story is that both Gmail and Adsense were built by a Googler because he was frustrated he couldn’t search his e-mail. Machine translation is similar. And speech recognition has come so far since its original iteration.

Q: How hands-on are Google’s founders in 20 percent projects?

They’re still involved, but we don’t see them around as much. I don’t think they have their own 20 percent project because their jobs are pretty much 100 percent.

Q: Are your research facilities around the world separated by project or is it you just can’t fit everyone in Mountain View?

It’s both. Some projects you need to have people that are living in the language and culture. Also, sometimes we need more engineers and we can’t hire everyone from the same pool.

Q: What’s the most hyped technology development?

I think the emphasis is on the right place right now. Mobile emphasis is appropriate. Are we going to have hand-curated tags or be able to machine read the content? That’s going to be messy but I don’t think it’s overhyped any more.

PageRank is one thing that’s overhyped. Yes, the PageRank computation is important, but it’s just one of many things. It’s got the catchy name and the name recognition, but we’ve always looked at all the available data. The infrastructure that we built

Q: Is there a difference between core search vs. ads vs. other projects?

Yeah, in some sense there’s a separation of the house, just like at a newspaper they don’t let the ad department effect the editorial department.

Q: If you want to grow up to be a search engineer, how does someone do that? There’s no school for search engineering.

In other industries you can get trained at school and then step into the field quickly. When people are doing information retrieval in college and then come to Google, after a few months they’ll say, wow this is a whole different world than what I did in school. The books coming out now are getting better now, expanding from library science to search.

Q: What’s the training to become a Googler?

There’s a course they start with, then they get put on a starter project. They get experience and lots of help as they get their feet wet.

Q: Do people move around a lot at Google?

We encourage moving around. We try to keep projects short, three or six months. And you find that people will come up with a new idea as they’re working on a project that they want to develop once it’s over. The infrastructure of departments is parallel, which makes it easy to move around.

Q: Anything you’d like to know from our attendees?

How are we doing?

[The audience applauds!]

…I didn’t do this session justice. So much good stuff and my fingers aren’t awake yet or something. Thankfully there’s a whole slew of bloggers covering this session:

• Rob Hof’s coverage (I don’t know Rob but he’s sitting next to me and it looks like he’s caught stuff I missed.)
• Search Engine Land’s coverage
• Outspoken Media’s coverage

Keynote: Peter Norvig, Google was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

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Keynote: Peter Norvig, Google

Some days it feels like the universe is trying to tell you something. Today that something was that social media marketing (SMM) is the future, and yet, it is not what professional marketers might traditionally expect. Here are four lessons I learned today that advanced my understanding of SMM on the Web today:

1. The recession of the public relations industry is lifting — as long as you’re making use of social media.
2. If your organization is not active in social media marketing, you’re missing major opportunities.
3. Social media marketing shouldn’t be treated like a separate marketing silo — it should be interwoven throughout an organization.
4. The bar has been raised since social media was first used for marketing. Organizations need to graduate to a mature model of social media to truly take advantage of it.

CC BY 2.0

If any of the above points whet your appetite, grab a fork and let’s dig in!

Marketing Recession is Over for Those Who’ve Evolved

Certainly the economic recession hit most industries in the last year, and marketing didn’t escape unscathed. But now that recovery is underway, businesses are ready to grow instead of simply trying to survive. That means the marketing industry is in a position to grow, for the very reason that marketing efforts help businesses grow. However, marketing has come out on the other side of the economic storm a changed being. What else could have affected such a change but social media?

Social media was around before the recession hit, but in the past 12 months social networks and sites have exploded and What If I Didn’t Use Twitter. The promise of Twitter includes:

• A network of brand evangelists (though remember that building relationships takes time)
• A platform for sharing site content
• Interaction and relationship building between other experts in your industry
• Business relationships that result in revenue!
• Recognition for expressing your passion and expertise

SMM Involvement Should be Present Across an Organization

CC BY 2.0

If you’re familiar with the benefits and challenges of social media marketing, you may already be involved in or are planning your entry into the social media space. In that case, you should be aware of how social media marketing is different than traditional or even other Internet marketing channels. Unlike other marketing efforts, social media shouldn’t be relegated to a single team or department within your organization. Social media should be considered a “cross-discipline” undertaking.

Social media is more of a frame of mind than a series of tasks to accomplish. Social media can be a tool used for customer response, consumer research, promotions and incentives, and getting attention for just about any launch or announcement. For a business, social media encompasses transparency, speedy customer service, and a megaphone. Restricting social media efforts so that they don’t reach across an organization is restricting the potential effectiveness and opportunities of social platform.

SMM is Shifting Toward Non-Automation and Local Relevance

As I mentioned before, the rules of marketing have changed in the past year, in light of social media and social networks. Not only that, but the rules of social media marketing have evolved as well. In 5 Ways We Could Improve Social Media Together, we find concrete ways to improve your SMM efforts to meet the changing expectations of social media users. So what should businesses be doing with social media?

• Limit automation in favor of human participation.
• Only promote content that’s worthy.
• Have realistic expectations. Social media is a tool, not a magic wand.
• Tear down the wall of overly protective corporate speak and be real.
• Take advantage of the local aspect of social media.

One of the trickier characteristics of social media is that it will continue to change, and users and businesses will adapt to the change in order to use it to its full potential. It’s true that social media requires continuous time and resources, but the alternative is letting your business be left behind.

Reading Up on Social Media Marketing’s Next Chapter was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

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Reading Up on Social Media Marketing’s Next Chapter

It’s been a crazy week. I moved desks and now I have a great view out the window. We had a BBQ feast for lunch today. And Christopher and Shannon have been in town, hanging out at SEOToolSet training. Don’t you just love family reunions?

We’ve made it to Friday and it’s time to let off a little steam. So you know the drill on Fridays: news of the (search) world and news of the weird. Away we go!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/strollers/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

I tweeted about this on Monday (hat tip to Susan) and a few peeps liked it so I’m compelled to use it as my opener. I present to you CRABZILLA! I’m told on good authority that Mega Shark is Crabzilla’s only plausible nemesis. I wouldn’t want to take part in that battle. Well, until it’s over, at which point I’ll be there with my fork, butter and maybe a slice of lemon for garnish self-defense.

Are you ready for Google Caffeine? It’s up for debate whether or not the infrastructure update that the search engine said would begin rolling out in the new year has been fully implemented. Still, it’s good to have some guidelines in mind when optimizing a Caffeine-ready site.

A few weeks back the makers of the quintessential doll Barbie asked fans what Barbie’s next job should be. The result is a sign of the techie times we live in. Barbie is a computer engineer! A little in-depth analysis by the BBC suggests some flaws with the way IT Barbie came together, but I’m a fan of the technically minded and feminine woman Barbie’s representing. [Me too. It's IT Barbie-style. —Susan]

Location updates have always posed a danger, and one site highlighting this fact was circulating the Web this week. Please Rob Me aggregates Foursquare updates with a dose of humor, keying in on the fact that people find it trendy to update the world about their empty homes.

Yes, there’s much to be cautious of on the social Web, which is why the demand for online reputation management has rocketed upwards. If you’re looking for innovative ways to defeat unflattering content on the Web, Bury Negative Publicity With New Pages on the Same Domain is a must-read, including tips for sites like Digg, Wikipedia, blogs, and even police blotters.

Photoshop celebrates its 20th anniversary today! What would we ever do without that fabulous photo editing suite? Gotta love the interactive timeline Adobe’s put together. Li’l guy’s come a long way!

A massive botnet, called the Kneber botnet, was uncovered by security analysts. The infected network included more than 74,000 personal, corporate and government computers, yet the botnet was recognized by less than 10 percent of antivirus software. It’s being attributed to two criminal gangs that have been cooperating with each other.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkadog/ CC BY 2.0

What’s a girl to do when even a wholesome place like the Internet is corrupted by criminal gangs? Play with a virtual kaleidoscope, of course! That toy right there is hours of fun, and it’s shared with love, care of Mrs. Esparza! [Hi, Mom! —Susan]

Of course, the Internet has facilitated sharing across the world, and social media is a big part of that. But which social network is really driving shared content? According to data from widgets company Gigya, Facebook is responsible for 44 percent of content shared via social networks. Twitter’s next with 29 percent, followed by Yahoo! at 18 percent. As a whole, social media sites account for 75 percent of all content shared online.

Susan got giddy when she shared this story in the Skype chat this week. It looks like in a couple years, one terabyte solid state hard drives the size of a postage stamp will be a reality. I believe her comment was along the lines of: “Imagine having a terabyte flash drive. You could carry your whole life around. Perhaps on a fashionable necklace.” Now that’s a girl who’s thinking of the possibilities! [It's no more geeky than the hashtag necklace I got this week. —Susan]

On a related note, it was interesting to learn that we’re facing a worldwide shortage of flash memory chips thanks to the iPhone and other Apple devices. Apparently the iPhone consumes 30 percent of the world’s supply of NAND flash chips.

If you had to describe the average player of Farmville or Mafia Wars or another game on a social networking site, what would you say? Are you picturing a 43-year-old woman, by any chance? If so, you’d be right! According to a survey in the U.S. and U.K., most social gamers are females between 30 and 59 who work full time. [This research is supported by anecdote. I have seven aunts and they all play Farmville like it's their job. —Susan]

And finally, as soon as I read a tweet from instantly popular @sh*tmydadsays account on Twitter, I was a follower. So it is with great joy and anticipation that I spread the rumor that William Shatner will play dad on the TV series pilot based on the Twitter account. This could just be the best show of the 21st century. No pressure.

Friday Recap: The Week in a Jiff Edition was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

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Friday Recap: The Week in a Jiff Edition

Over the last few weeks I’ve had three conversations with readers regarding different sources of traffic.

In each case I had a number of email exchanges with each blogger (all on the same day) and ended up laughing to myself at the common theme but extremely different opinions being expressed by each of the bloggers.

In each case the bloggers had strong opinions (and experiences to back those opinions up) on what type of traffic was ‘best’ and how to get it.

1. In one case the conversation started with a blogger telling me that I focus too much upon social media traffic and not enough on traffic from search engines. Their niche didn’t work with social traffic but with search traffic they did best.
2. In another case the blogger told me that they’d been told to forget about search traffic in their niche and work more on building traffic from other sites and to convert it into ongoing traffic with newsletters.
3. In the last case a blogger told me that in their opinion the best type of traffic was social media traffic and they didn’t see the point in newsletters.

I was reminded through these conversations just how many different valid approaches there are to blogging. I also came away with a few thoughts that I thought I’d jot down here on the topic of driving traffic to blogs.

1. There are Many Valid Sources of Traffic

The above chart shows just 8 of many sources of traffic to a blog. As I write this others are already springing to mind (for example some bloggers run paid advertising to drive traffic to their blog – others get it from banner exchange programs). The reality is that there are many potential sources of traffic.

2. The ‘Best’ Source of Traffic Varies from Niche to Niche

As I thought about the 3 bloggers I was chatting to above it struck me that each had found great sources of traffic but that they were each operating in very different niches.

The first blogger who had written off social media was in a niche that people were simply not using social media for (I won’t reveal the niche as I don’t have their permission but it was a very very niche focused blog). Perhaps they could have driven a tiny bit of traffic with social media but for them Search was a much better place for them to invest their time.

3. Different Sources of Traffic Will monetize differently

Another important factor to consider is that some sources of traffic will monetize ALOT better than others. I’ve found that search traffic can work very well with AdSense for example (it depends upon the niche and intent of the reader). People arrive on your site searching for specific information, read your content, see an ad that relates to their search term and click on it.

RSS readers on the other hand don’t tend to convert for AdSense as they tend to be loyal readers and many don’t even click through to your site to read your content. RSS readers (and social media traffic) however can convert really well for affiliate promotions or selling your own products to.

4. Traffic Patterns Change over the life cycle of a blog

As a blog matures its sources of traffic often quite naturally change.

There’s no typical one size fits all pattern to this but at first the traffic might mainly come from other blogs or forums where you comment – or blogs where you guest post – or articles that you write. In time you might start to see more traffic from RSS or newsletters as a few people subscribe. Perhaps then some traffic will come from other sites who link to you (people who subscribe via RSS might have their own blogs) and from social media. After a while your search engine ranking might kick in as a result of the links from other sites and your guest posting and article writing and you might start seeing Google traffic. Once your blog is more established you might start seeing social bookmarking viral events that spike your traffic.

Again – this is not going to be the pattern for all blogs but in time traffic will naturally start to come from different places – the key is to try to leverage it for ongoing good (trying to get your blog to be sticky rather than just having one time visitors) and to work out how to convert that traffic for the goals you have.

5. Bloggers should be open to different approaches

While each of the three bloggers had discovered great lessons and good sources of traffic for their niches and the life cycles of their blogs – I was left wondering in each case whether the bloggers were being a little too closed off to different sources of traffic that perhaps could have added to the overall mix of traffic.

I see a lot of SEO type bloggers write about the worthlessness of social traffic for instance. One common comment that I get from some SEOs (definitely not all) is that social media traffic can’t be monetized. The reality could not be further from the truth. It won’t always convert but it certainly can. For example I know in each of the E-book launches that I’ve done in two niches that I’ve seen significant conversions from Twitter traffic.

On the flip side of things I hear some social media focused bloggers write off SEO and say that it works itself out and you don’t need to optimise your blog for search if you just produce good content. While there is some truth in that (good content does tend to generate natural incoming links to some extent) with a basic understanding of principles of SEO and a few minor tweaks a blog can rank much better in search engines without compromising the integrity of the content.

I guess what I’m getting at is that if you get exclusive about the type of traffic you are after you could actually be limiting the potential of your blog’s incoming traffic.

6. Too many Eggs in One Basket Can Be Dangerous

I used to be very focused upon search traffic in my early days of blogging. I worked hard to optimise my first blogs for search and got to a point where I was making a full time living from the ad revenue I was getting almost exclusively from Google. As a result I got a little lazy in some of the other areas – I didn’t work to convert readers to be loyal with newsletters or with prominent calls to subscribe to RSS, I didn’t build too many relationships with other bloggers to generate referral traffic and I was very inactive in social media (although it was much more limited back then).

As a result when Google decided to adjust their algorithm one day and my rankings dropped (and almost completely disappeared) in their results I lost almost all of my traffic – and as a result almost all of my income.

I was lucky in that Google readjusted their algorithm a couple of months later and I regained a lot of (but not all) of that traffic but in the mean time I looked for and found a ‘real job’ – and more importantly learned an important lesson about the power of having more than one source of traffic.

That experience was the beginning of me doing a few things that included working harder on capturing readers as subscribers (email and RSS), networking more with other bloggers in my niche and getting more involved in promoting my blog in other places (mainstream media, social media etc). My hope in doing all of this was to build up other sources of traffic so that if Google ever switched off my traffic again (temporarily or permanently) I’d at least have enough traffic to survive.

Google still does send me around 40-50% of my traffic (it varies a little from blog to blog) but I’m in a position now where I could survive for an extended period if it all disappeared (not that I’d like for that to happen).

7. The Importance of Personality and Being Yourself

I’m sure there are other factors that are at play that might be worth considering when looking at traffic. One of these (that I’m yet to fully think through) is personality type.

For example a lot of my my technically thinking friends seem to enjoy the challenge of SEO a little more. They love experimenting with and testing what happens when they make small tweaks to different aspects of their blogs. They’re constantly testing different setups and do quite well from it. I am not technically minded and find their attention to detail very very unusual (and so far from where that I’m at that I feel like I’m from another planet).

Other friends are perhaps a little more social by nature and as a result seem to do well on Twitter.

Others seem to do better by applying their freakish ability to write blog posts that get tonnes of links from other sites and which do brilliantly on social bookmarking sites..

Others are networkers and spend a lot of time interacting with other bloggers and site owners and tend to get links and traffic that way.

Others just seem to be brilliant at building community on their blog and as a result retain almost everyone who ever comments and build new readers from those people telling their friends.

I guess the lesson here is to be yourself and work with your strengths. Of course you don’t want to let your strengths dominate so much that you ignore or become lazy in areas that you’re not as strong in – but do follow your natural abilities and leverage them as much as you can.

Remember that there is no wrong or right way to generate traffic for a blog. If you were analyze the sources of traffic on many top blogs you’d find quite different factors at play!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

7 Factors on Generating Traffic to Your Blog

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7 Factors on Generating Traffic to Your Blog

If you’re in the Tri-Cities area, Spokane, Seattle, or even Portland, I hope you’re making plans to come out to Learn About Web next week in Kennewick. It’s happening on February 18th, and you can use code LAW0208 to register for only $89 through Friday.

I’ll be giving a presentation on my SEO Success Pyramid and then doing a session on SEO and Local Search later in the day. Craig Sutton and Doug Waltman are speaking, too, on topics such as User-Friendly Web Design, Blogging, and Social Media. Oh, and all registrants will get a free copy of my How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes e-book.

We’re also offering detailed site reviews for no more than 3-4 attendees, and that only costs an extra $50 — a fraction of the regular consulting rate you’d pay.

If you live in the Tri-Cities area, you may see our TV commercial on-air this week. Here’s how it looks:

Hope to see you next week. Visit www.learnaboutweb.com for more details.

Advertisement: Improve your website rankings and traffic in just 15 mins/day! LotusJump will show you how to do your own professional-grade SEO. Find Out How Today!

This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SEO & Social Media Workshop – Next Week in Tri-Cities

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SEO & Social Media Workshop – Next Week in Tri-Cities