Mergers and acquisitions happen every day in every industry and rarely (ok, pretty much never) do I feel compelled to write about them. So what makes this one different? If you have ever attended a conference on search and/or social marketing, whether that is SMX, SES or PubCon, you’ve most likely seen the prime suspects strutting their stuff on stage. These are people to know in the search/social industry, and now they are joining forces to bring their collective knowledge together under one virtual roof.  Chris Winfield of 10e20, Brent Csutoras of Brent Csutoras Inc, and the team from Search and Social have come together to create BlueGlass Interactive, an agency offering everything from Social Media and PR to Pay Per Click and SEO (much like another agency you may have heard of…ahem…Location3).

BlueGlass Interactive is a Tampa based company, with 40 employees across 4 major cities: Salt Lake City, New York, Tampa and LA.  One criticism is their complete oversight of the best city in the US. What, you guys don’t like to ski?

After speaking with both Chris and Brent at the last SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, their enthusiasm for this merger was infectious, so much so that I am excited to say that we will be working with them on some big projects in the near future. Bringing all of their various strengths together can mean great things for those posed to take advantage of their services, and we look forward to doing just that.

When digging into the site analytics to determine the performance of your SEO campaign, be careful not to get so keyword centric that you lose sight of the overall impact of your efforts. Often times when we are link building for specific keywords, it’s easy to judge the effect by reporting the traffic and conversions directly brought in from that exact phrase. However, a much better indicator is to use keyword sets to show the impact across any variation containing elements of your keyword, so as to capture short and long tail keywords that alone may only bring in 1 or 2 visits, but together account for the vast majority of traffic and typically convert at a much higher rate.

When pulling data for a keyword set, simply use advanced filters pull results containing the main piece of your keyword, meaning the word(s) that sets it apart from other keywords. Here are a couple filter variations:

In this example, when targeting both “graphic design services” and “graphic design agency”, the main part of the keyword that you want to track is “graphic design” as that will tell you whether or not your campaign is working, plus you may find in the results that “graphic design company” is the real winner. Just make sure you separate “graphic” and “design” so that you capture all variations.

It’s a fairly well known that Google updates it’s algorithm on a more than regular basis, somewhere between 350 and 500 times in a given year. Most of these tweaks are too small to be noticed, but sometimes an update is big enough to cause a commotion, even warrant a catchy name. Most recently, the “Mayday” Update that took place in the last week of April. From what SEO’s have speculated and Google has partially confirmed, the shift is putting more emphasis on higher quality websites and pages when ranking for long tail phrases, which typically accounts for a high percentage of a site’s traffic.

According to Vanessa Fox from Search Engine Land, the shift was not affecting the crawling or indexing, but the rankings themselves. Google is trying to deliver higher quality to their users, which they are doing by focusing on pages that receive more traffic and inbound links for these long tail phrases. Typically, it’s the subpages of a site that rank for the long tail as they are more specific to the topics than say the homepage or high level navigation pages. However subpages also tend to get less link love than those same pages, especially the deeper into the site they go. Pages that are buried too far into the site, more than a few clicks from the homepage, are likely to have lost their high rankings with the Mayday update. Yet another reason why a solid internal linking structure that can get a user to the right pages within a couple easy steps is so important.

Much to my relief, I’ve not seen the Mayday update having any noticeable impact on the sites I care about most and I haven’t felt the need to alter the way we approach our SEO strategy. As Vanessa put it “Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic.”

Last week, Google announced a few new reporting features to their Webmaster Tools. I don’t think I have been this excited since I heard Kate Gosselin was going to be on Dancing with the Stars. OK, I couldn’t care less about watch Dancing with the Stars, but I am thrilled about the data we are now able to pull regarding impressions and click through rate on organically ranked keywords.

Up until now we’ve done a solid job of reporting SEO success based on data pulled from the analytics in conjunction with search result positions, but that leaves out significant details about what is occurring in the search results before the user reaches the site.  Now in GWT, we can dig into individual keywords and see what positions they have ranked on over the designated time frame, approximately how many impressions they received within those given positions and what the click through rate was. This comes at a perfect time, as we are testing out various title structures to see which ones work best in terms of CTR. It’s as if Google was reading my mind and said, here Tarla, maybe this will help! Thank you Google, I think it just might.

Uh oh, but is this data accurate? I’ve heard speculation on the side of “nay”, and my own observations are worrisome. Some comparative research from Carla Marshall showed significant differences between the data provided by Webmaster Tools, Adwords keyword tool and the Google Analytics. If the source for all these points of data is Google, why the discrepancy, and more importantly, which one do we believe? I think for now this information may still be useful in testing the effectiveness of various titles on the search user, but we should still approach the results with caution.

If you’ve had a chance to try the new reporting, leave a comment and let me know what you think.

So last night before heading to bed I logged on to Facebook, an all too common occurrence with me. Lo and behold, what’s this, a new homepage design?! It seems like just yesterday we were all in a flurry over the last homepage redesign that we thought ended our relationship with Facebook as we knew it. Of course we all adjusted and can hardly remember what it was like before and why we were so mad about it. However with this new redesign I am seeing more of the positives rather than the negatives. First off, my favorite reason for visiting Facebook is to see the pictures posted by all my “friends”.  Now when you sort your feed by photos, there is a much more efficient use of space, showing around 24 photos above the fold rather than the maybe 5 you would see before.

Facebook Homepage Photo Sort

Another great feature is the ability to email friends without leaving your homepage. Actually, there seem to be a lot more activities to engage in without leaving home, such as searching through applications, groups and games. In fact, click on the games button and find out which games your friends are playing, just in case you want to join them for an exciting round of Fishville or Roller Coaster Kingdom. The chat function has also taken up new real estate on the left hand navigation, showing the top 5 friends online, reminding you that it’s just that easy to say hello in real time to your ex boyfriend from elementary school, or that girl that looks relatively familiar but you just can’t figure out from where.

So all in all, I’m liking the new layout, or at least what I’ve seen so far. Let me know what you think. What part do you like the most, and what feature has inspired you to write a strongly worded letter to Mark Zuckerberg telling him how he owes you and the entire Facebook community and apology?

In honor of the upcoming holiday, I decided my tip for the week would be not one of search expertise or social media know-how, but instead the best way to spice up a pumpkin pie, ever! I’ve been doing this to store bought pies for years and it makes a world of difference. Now forgive me, it has been ages since I’ve actually seen the recipe and I don’t know the technical amounts, but it’s really easy to eyeball.

Chop up approximately one cup of pecans, add in maybe 1/3 cup of brown sugar and a couple tablespoons of softened butter. Mix it into a dry crumble and spread evenly onto the pie. Broil just before serving for just a couple minutes. I’ve been known to burn this on occasion when I don’t keep a close eye on it, so I recommend not going too far from the oven. Add whipped cream (come on, it’s Christmas, get the real stuff!) and serve! Honestly, plain pumpkin pies are so boring to me after eating them with this topping, I highly recommend giving it a go.

So no need to Google pumpkin pie recipes this year, Location3 has you covered.

One question I hear a lot when discussing social media engagement with clients is “Do people really friend/fan brands on social networks?” Well, according to the digital marketing agency Razorfish, the answer is yes, they do. In an August 2009 study, Razorfish polled 1,000 internet users between the ages of 18 and 55 and found some interesting statistics regarding their online brand interaction. According to the study, 25.5% at one time or another have followed a brand on Twitter, and 40% have “friended” a brand on MySpace or Facebook. That’s a number to stop and take notice of. However the next reasonable question to ask is “why?”, and not surprisingly, between 37% and 43.5% do it for exclusive deals or offers. Well why not? People like free, and a sizeable discount is not half bad either.

Taking it a step farther than a simple promotion or exclusive offer, 70% polled have participated in a brand-sponsored contest or sweepstakes. When working with brands wanting a presence in the MySpace community a few years back, we pushed contests and sweeps heavily as a way to drive traffic to the community. I guess we were right. Giving people a desirable incentive to engage with a brand such as a Nintendo Wii or a trip to Hawaii is much more powerful than saying “here we are, please be our friend”. However only 24% have produced content in order to join the contest so remember, the less the user has to do in order to enter, the more entrees you’ll have.

Another interesting question was in regards to the effect the friended/followed brand has on the user. For Twitter, 47% usually consider the brand when they are in the market for that product or service, 46% usually purchase a product or service from that brand, and 37% usually recommend that brand to others. These stats were just a little lower for Facebook, so the lesson learned here is that there IS in fact a value to having a presence on these popular social networks.

The last question I wanted to make note of is this one:

“Has an experience you have had online ever changed your opinion (ether positively or negatively) about a brand or the products and services they offer?” 65% apparently have. “Has that experience influenced whether or not you purchased a product or service from the brand?” I’d have to say a 97% yes is a significant percentage to take note of. Brands need to stay on top of their online reputation because if they’re not the ones doing the talking, someone else will and their message might not be as favorable.

Do you care what you get for your hard earned cash? If you buy a toaster, do you mind when it only cooks the right side of your bagel? I’m going to take a shot in the dark that yes, yes you do. Well believe me when I say it should be no different when it comes to your marketing dollar. Search Engine Optimization is still a new concept for most people, even for many of those in the search industry. Unlike pay per click where you can track exactly how much you got for what you spent, SEO is illusive and unpredictable. Therefore, as someone who receives money for SEO services rendered, it’s my job to make sure my clients are as satisfied as possible with their purchase. My tip this week is what you should expect to see (if you’re the client) or be sure to include (if you’re the agency) within your SEO campaign reports:

1. Keyword positions within the three main search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing). Make these keyword lists as robust as possible, because even if you are focused on a tight group of words, these efforts should have a trickle-down effect on various others.
2. Traffic by keyword, using the same keywords as above as well as any others found to bring in a decent volume of visits. For this you need to make sure the paid traffic is broken out from the organic within the website analytics.
3. Conversions/actions by keyword. This will be the true indicator if your SEO campaign is working. So what if you get keyword A to position one in Google if it doesn’t convert?
4. Visits by keyword in relation to their position. This report combines the first two I mentioned, only this gives some perspective as to how the potential of each keyword. For instance, if keyword A is bringing in hundreds of visits but is only on the bottom of page one, then you better start working to get it to the top.
5. Number of backlinks over time. This is great indicator of whether the link building campaign is really building links.
6. Monitor the website stats with Quantcast, Compete and Alexa, and hopefully they will show that the value of the website is growing.
7. Using a tool like SpyFu that crawls Google for all keywords ranking for your website as well as your competitors, you can track how many are in positions 1, 2 and 3, and pages 1, 2 and 3 each month to make sure that those numbers are increasing.

BUT, my most important recommendation to you is this: Get all of this data first BEFORE the campaign starts so that you can truly prove the value of the SEO efforts.

For many companies, creating a Facebook profile offers many opportunities. Get the word out about a special promotion or sweepstakes. Find out what your customer’s favorite product offering is. Post pictures of your office antics so your clients can see how fun and personable your company is. However, for some companies and industries, an open forum like Facebook is a dangerous space for unwanted criticism and feedback. Ordinarily I would tell them to suck it up, but in some instances the red tape is just a little too thick to be cut that easily.

For these instances, consider driving traffic to the boxes tab of the profile rather than the wall tab. The wall focuses on engagement and is great to show the conversation taking place between company and customer, however the boxes tab can be utilized to focus on information and content. Using the FBML application (Facebook Markup Language), you can add blank boxes to be filled with whatever your heart desires: featured product, company news, employee of the month, coupons, success stories, etc. Simply pop your HTML code into the box and voila! Custom images, copy and links on Facebook.

And if you really don’t want any organic feedback, you can turn off all user-generated content options. I wouldn’t recommend this for most because that engagement piece is fairly crucial to the whole “social media marketing” thing, but there are exceptions to every rule.

I attended my first conference this weekend, SMX Advanced, or the Search Marketing Expo for those of you who are acronym-challenged like I am. As you might expect, the majority of presentations were based around search, such as “Mythbusting PPC Urban Legends,” “Duplicate Content Solutions,” and my favorite title of all “Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me – A Broad Match? Exact Match? Negative Match?.” However, with the constantly noisy trend of social media, a few tracks were devoted to mastering the art of corporate twittering and proving the value of social media as well.

The first session I attended was “Keyword Research Artistry,” an in-depth look into tools and tactics for developing the most relevant keywords for your search campaign. The first presenter, Christine Churchill (KeyRelevance), had an impressive list of tools she uses, everything from Google Trends and Yahoo! Buzz to Facebook Lexicon and WikiRank. Using these social media tracking tools is a great way to determine what words are being used by the online community today, which when combined with search volume and positioning tools can give a much more robust keyword picture.

So considering my position as both a Social Media and SEO Account Manager, I figured what better presentation to hear than that on “Twitter Tactics and Search Marketing.” I certainly found this session useful, especially when Joanna Lord (TheOnlineBeat) gave us her extensive list of Twitter tools at an alarmingly fast pace (she even used a slide to remind her to breathe in the middle). For those of you unfamiliar with the Twitter language, you might get a kick out of some of the names: Tweet Later, Tweetbeep, Tweetmeme, Twit(URL)y, Twibs and TwitterHawk just to name a few.  But seriously, the amount of tools out there for Twitter alone is so over-whelming; it was nice to have someone as experienced in this space as Joanna to recommend those that have been tried and true. Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land) also did a nice job moderating, interspersing a few comedic lines as well as some of his own expertise in this arena.

Getting ready for my presentation - "Proving the Value of Social Media"

After an over-sized lunch (it was buffet-style after all), it was time for Proving the Value of Social Media, presented by yours truly, as well as Tony Adam (Yahoo!), Ben Straley (Meteor Solutions) and Edmund Wong (iCrossing). To be honest, I was a bit on the nervous side for my first conference presentation that I wasn’t entirely able to retain information from the other presentations. However, I’ll be recapping my portion in an upcoming blog, so stay tuned!

Answering questions during the Q&A portion of the session. Tony Adam (on my left) looks thrilled with my answer.

One last session of the day, “Beyond the Usual Link Building.” It’s a tough position being at the end of a long day, but once again moderator Danny Sullivan got the crowd going for the 3 panelists Hamlet Batista (RankSense), Arnie Kuenn  (Vertical Measures) and Chris Silver Smith  (KeyRelevance). The panelists had some interesting suggestions on obtaining links such as widgets and contests, as well as some big don’ts when it comes to legitimate link building. This was obviously a topic of interest at the conference, as every seat in the largest hall was full, as were many of the aisles.

Andrew passing me Link Juice (get it, passing the link juice? Ok, maybe I was the only one who thought this was funny)

Before heading off to a much anticipated dinner and reception, it was time for the keynote presentation with Matt Cutts from Google. This was one of the most interesting portions as you might imagine, as people on the floor got to ask Matt questions regarding the infamous Google Algorithm. The most common topic dealt with page rank sculpting, or using no-follows on selected internal links so that the remaining links on the page carried all the weight. Not so, explained Matt. Now while he did not go in to detail as to why that is no longer a useful tactic, he did recommended against using no-follows on any links pointing to pages other than those you sincerely don’t care to rank, as the whole of the link juice does not actually get dispersed to the remaining links. Good news for those who were about to spend a good amount of time on this type of strategy, bad for those of us who already did.

All in all, a very successful first conference. I was able to give my first conference presentation without any major mishaps, and I learned a lot more about both search and social media in the process. I  was also given the opportunity to demo some new tools by SEOMOZ before jetting off to the airport, so I’m excited to give those a spin in the real world. Hopefully there will be many more conferences to come (hint hint).