Feeding the Hummingbird: Structured Markup Isn't the Only Way to Talk to Google

In a recent poll, Moz asked nearly 300 marketers which Google updated affected their traffic the most. Penguin and Panda were first and second, followed by Hummingbird in a distant third.

 

Breaking the SEO Rules: When Not to Follow Best Practices - Whiteboard Friday

Best practices are set in place to guide us toward success in most situations. Not all situations. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus shows us several instances in which it's actually best to break the rules and throw those best practices out the window.

 

How to Be More Creative in Your Online Campaigns

The SEO landscape has changed so much in the last few years in the wake of the Penguin and Panda apocalypse that the discipline is now considered in the broader terms of online marketing or digital marketing. The one element that is common is the requirement for new skills such as PR, classic marketing and most importantly: creativity. Agencies and freelance individuals who can't adapt, evolve and embrace the new mode of thinking/operating are vulnerable with nowhere to hide behind mediocre work and outdated tactics.

Be more creative, is a phrase often used within business and marketing with little consideration given to its meaning. But, what does it mean to be creative?

                           
                               

Silly Marketer, Title Tags Are for Robots!

Like all good marketers, we think carefully about our title tags before publishing new content. Then we just take that carefully crafted title and plop it into the OG tags for social shares, right?

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Jen Lopez explains why we need to put in a little more effort than that.


                          

Is eBay A Big Loser In Google’s Panda 4.0 Update? — Winners & Losers Data

Google began rolling out their Panda 4.0 update designed to punch low-quality content. That’s generated both “winners” who have moved up in rankings as “losers” have dropped down — and eBay might be one of the big losers.

Searchmetrics gave us their initial winners and loser charts, based on rankings they continually monitor. These show that one of the biggest losers was eBay. According to the data, eBay lost a tremendous amount of traffic from Google, much of it from the ebay.com/bhp/ area of its site.


                     

10 Tactics to Improve Blog Readership

If you're looking to increase traffic to your blog, there are many tactics that can significantly boost your progress. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand lays a roadmap for the journey, offering 10 of the best tactics for you to keep in mind along the way.

                                

Google’s Matt Cutts: Why Google Will Ignore Your Page Title Tag & Write Its Own

Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video answer on the question about why and when Google will ignore your title tag and use something else for the snippet title in the search results.

Matt explains in the video that Google really wants the title of the snippets to match on some level the query of the searcher. This logic often results in a higher click through rate on the URL and thus should be better for both the searcher and the web site owner.

The criteria Google uses when coming up with a new title tag are:

(1) Something that is “relatively” short

(2) Have a good description of the page and “ideally” the site that the page is on.

(3) And that it is relevant to the query.

If your existing title tag fits the criteria, then Google will most likely use your title tag. If not, then Google may use (1) content on your page, (2) anchor text links pointing to the page and/or (3) may also use the Open Directory Project.

The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing

It's probably pretty clear to everyone that content marketing takes time, but there's a common misconception in just how much time. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand warns us of an overly optimistic mindset, and shows us how things really (usually) end up happening.


                                   

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to talk a little bit about content marketing and specifically this giant myth, this misconception that exists in the content marketing field about how the practice really works.

This hurts a lot of people. This hurts people on the SEO side. It hurts people who do social media. It hurts people who invest in actually building the content, and it hurts teams and executives and people who plan and strategize around what content marketing can and can't achieve and how it should work.

You know, I really came to this because I think it's been something that's been bubbling up in the world of content and inbound marketing for a long time. But I was speaking to a number of startups yesterday afternoon here in Seattle. I was talking to them about how we at Moz produce blog posts, video content, like Whiteboard Friday, presentations, and webinars in all of these different mediums.

I got this question, like, "Okay, it must be the case . . . how do you put out a blog post, Rand, that once you launch it, once people read it, they're actually going to go and buy from you?"

I had this moment of, "Oh my God, this happens all the time." People think that the reason you're putting out content is so that someone will consume that content and be inspired from it to go and make a purchase.

This is how the myth works. Step one, oh yeah, you know, ta-dak I created this amazing piece of content. Look, it's got lovely parallax scrolling, and responsive design, and beautiful graphics, and a lovely layout. Fantastic content. Wow. All right. People are going to download that. They're going to share it. They're going to love it.

Step two, thankfully, people are thinking about this at least. All right, I'm going to go tweet and Facebook share and put it on Google+. I'm going to point a bunch of links to it. I'm going to put it on my LinkedIn account. I'll promote that content through all of these platforms.

Then, look at these hordes of people right there. Not the most attractive horde. A little gangly. But, wow, that's really good. We should sign up for whatever these people are selling. They must be amazing, right? The visitors who experience the content, and then some percent of them, like oh maybe 2% are going to go and convert.

This doesn't happen, does it? This is not actually how content marketing works. But it's how a lot of people invest in and think about content marketing. But it almost never happens. With a few rare exceptions, this is not how content marketing really works.

How it actually works is you repeat step one and two many, many times, again and again and again and again until you start to get good at the process, until you start finding the XYZ, the piece of amazing content that really is going to resonate with your audience. That takes a lot of trial and failure. It really does.

Step three is entirely a myth. It is almost never the case, practically never the case that someone goes, experiences a piece of content from a brand they don't know about or haven't heard of, or experiences that content for the first time and then immediately goes, "I wonder what they sell. I should buy whatever that is." Or even sees kind of a plug or a pseudo-plug for their product inside that content and goes, "Yes, you know what, I'm just going to buy that right now." That almost never happens.

What really does happen is that people come many, many times. They essentially grow this memory about your brand, about what you do, and they build up kind of what I'd call a positive bank account with you. But that bank account, there are not coins and money in there. There are experiences and touches with your brand. Those content touches, and those social media touches, and those touches that come through performing a search and seeing you listed there, those build up the capital in the account.

http://moz.com/blog/the-greatest-misconception-in-content-marketing-whiteboard-friday

Google Introduces Google Trends Email Alerts, Trending Topics and Hot Searches Delivered To Your Inbox

Google announced today they will be rolling out the ability for users to have popular topics from Google Trends and Hot Searches delivered via email.

This new feature will work in a very similar way to how Google Alerts currently works. You will be able to subscribe to a particular topic and receive a notification if there is an increase in search volume around that topic.

Currently, Google allows you to subscribe to any search topic, Hot Searches for any country, or any U.S. monthly Top Chart.

You will also be able to subscribe to notifications about trending topics by location. For example, if you want to stay up to date about trends and popular searches in your local area, you can set up an email notification to tell you about the “hottest” Hot Searches in the location of your choice and get occasional emails about major local trends.

To set up an email subscription, simply visit the Subscriptions section within Google Trends and click on Add subscription.

                         
From there, select the topic and country of your choice and indicate how often you would like to receive notifications. Then click the Subscribe button.

                           

That’s all it takes to keep your finger on the pulse of trending topics and popular search terms. This is an incredibly useful feature for all the busy professionals out there who don’t have time to manually sift through blogs and websites every day to stay current. Now the information can be sent directly to you.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-introduces-google-trends-email-alerts-trending-topics-hot-searches-delivered-inbox/102207/

6 Changes We Always Thought Google Would Make to SEO that They Haven't Yet

From Google's interpretation of rel="canonical" to the specificity of anchor text within a link, there are several areas where we thought Google would make a move and are still waiting for it to happen. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand details six of those areas. Let us know where you think things are going in the comments!

                             

Number one, a lot of people in the SEO field, and even outside the field, think that it must be the case that if links really matter for SEO, then on-topic links matter more than off-topic links. So, for example, if I'm linking to two websites here about gardening resources, A and B, both about gardening resources, and one of those comes from a botany site and the other one comes from a site about mobile gaming, well, all other things being true, it must be that the one about botany is going to provide a stronger link. That's just got to be the case.

And yet, we cannot seem to prove this. There doesn't seem to be data behind it or to support it. Anyone who's analyzed this problem in-depth, which a number of SEOs have over the years -- a lot of people, who are very advanced, have gone through the process of classifying links and all this kind of stuff -- seem to come to the same conclusion, which is Google seems to really think about links in a more subject/context agnostic perspective.

Number two, I'm actually in this camp. I still think that someday it's coming, that anchor text influence will eventually decline. Yet it seems to be that, yes, while other signals have certainly risen in importance, and there have been lots of other things, it seems that anchor text inside a link is still far more important and better than generic anchor text.

Getting specific, targeting something like "gardening supplies" when I link to A, as opposed to on the same page saying something like, "Oh, this is also a good resource for gardening supplies," but all I linked with was the text "a good resource" over to B, that A is going to get a lot more ranking power. Again, all other things being equal, A will rank much higher than B, because this anchor text is still pretty influential. It has a fairly substantive effect.

I think this is one of those cases where a lot of SEOs said, "Hey, anchor text is where a lot of manipulation and abuse is happening. It's where a lot of Web spam happens. Clearly Google's going to take some action against this."

Number three, 302s. So 302s have been one of these sort of long-standing kind of messes of the Web, where a 302 was originally intended as a temporary redirect, but many, many websites and types of servers default to 302s for all kinds of pages that are moving.

So A301 redirects to B, versus C302 redirecting to D. Is it really the case that the people who run C plan to change where the redirect points in the future, and is it really the case that they do so more than A does with B?

Well, a lot of the time, probably not. But it still is the case, and you can see plenty of examples of this happening out in the search results and out on the Web, that Google interprets this 301 as being a permanent redirect. All the link juice from A is going to pass right over to B.

With C and D, it appears, with big brands, when the redirect's been in place for a long time and they have some trust in it, maybe they see some other signals, some other links pointing over here, that yes, some of this does pass over, but it is not nearly what's happening with a 301. This is like a directive, and this is sort of a nudge or a hint. It just seems to be important to still get those 301s, those right kinds of redirects right.

Number four Speaking of nudges and hints versus directives, rel="canonical" has been an interesting one. So when rel="canonical" first launched, what Google said about rel="canonical" is rel="canonical" is a hint to us, but we won't necessarily take it as gospel.

Yet, every test we saw, even from those early launch days, was, man, they are taking it as gospel. You throw a rel="canonical" on a trusted site accidentally on every page and point it back to the homepage, Google suddenly doesn't index anything but the homepage. It's crazy.

Number five, I think, for a long time, a lot of us have thought, hey, the social web is rising. Social is where a lot of the great content is being shared, a lot of where people are pointing to important things, and where endorsements are happening, more so, potentially, than the link graph. It's sort of the common man's link graph has become the social web and the social graph.

And yet, with the exception of the two years where Google had a very direct partnership with Twitter and those tweets and indexation, all that kind of stuff was heavily influential for Google search results, since that partnership broke up, we haven't seen that again from Google. They've actually sort of backtracked on social, and they've kind of said, "Hey, you know, tweets, Facebook shares, likes, that kind of stuff, it doesn't directly impact rankings for everyone."

Number six, last one. I think a lot of us felt like, as Google was cleaning up web spam, for a long time they talked about cleaning up web spam, from '06, '07 to about 2011, 2012, it was pretty sketchy. It was tough.

When they did start cleaning up web spam, I think a lot of us thought, "Well, eventually they're going to get to PPC too." I don't mean pay-per-click. I mean porn, pills, and casino.

But it turns out, as Matt Brown, from Moz, wisely and recently pointed out in his Search Love presentation in Boston, that, yes, if you look at the search results around these categories, whatever it is -- Buy Cialis online, Texas hold-'em no limit poker, removed for content, because Whiteboard Friday is family-friendly, folks -- whatever the search is that you're performing in these spheres, this is actually kind of the early warning SERPS of the SEO world. 

http://moz.com/blog/6-changes-google-hasnt-made-to-seo-whiteboard-friday

Google is Rewarding Marketing Strategists

For many years now, search marketing has been a wide open market, with more business to go around than we have known what to do with. Brand after brand has recognized their need for help with search visibility, but they have not necessarily been clear on what that would entail. This led to the gold rush of search.

                           

While many larger agencies were focused on media buying, creative, and television campaigns, the digital landscape was taking form with SEO, PPC, social, display, conversion rate optimization, email marketing, outreach (PR for the web), and much more. We as search marketers know there is a massive opportunity to be had as the digital landscape continues to mature, but whether it is ours for the taking remains to be seen. In order for us to survive, search marketers need to become more well-versed into all digital marketing channels and gain a concrete understanding of when it is appropriate to invest into some of them.

The combination of secure search (not provided), Google's continual innovation upon their ability to crawl and understand both the web and search behavior (with Hummingbird being the most recent example), their successful moves against scalable link building tactics (Penguin and manual penalties), and an overall increase in competition will push search marketers down either of these two paths:

1. Become less and less white-hat over time, constantly looking for ways to justify the means for scalable tactics
2. Jump ship to broader digital marketing roles and bury the SEO hats (example: Director of Marketing, Marketing Strategists, Brand Strategist, Content Strategist, Product Manager etc.) to grow revenue/traffic over time on different marketing channels.

Given the picture I have described above, I want to provide you with a framework with supporting examples for how you, the search marketer, can better get more of the resources you will need in order to pursue path 2.

                          

Google is a business

SEOs are dependent on a third-party platform that provides them with no proprietary information and gives them no advantage. The reality is that as Google's ranking algorithm becomes increasingly complex, what exactly the right recommendation is for any given site becomes more ambiguous. Google simply isn't in the business to support SEOs; they're in the business to build the best technology in the world, so that they continue to attract the greatest number of users and generate the greatest amount of revenue. If SEOs continue to chase the algorithm, they'll simply continue down a rabbit hole of becoming dependent on short-term tactics that at best, have no longevity, and at worst, damage the core of a business.

                         

Not provided

Not provided impacted how SEOs were able to directly attribute their work to organic growth. It has brought challenges not only to reporting, but also to how the previous work SEOs did was valued within an organization. With the advent of not provided, different marketing departments within an organization such as content, SEO, PR, and creatives can all justify that their work is what led to organic traffic growth. This makes it difficult for any organization to invest significant budget into SEO.

                       

Penguin

Penguin sent a very clear signal to SEOs that many of the link building tactics they were reliant on in the past were not only no longer effective but could even provide long-term damage to the bottom line of a business. Recovering from Penguin and any algorithmic update is uncertain, difficult, and extremely expensive. It also forced SEOs to step back and assess whether a tactic that might work today may also be detrimental to the site in the future.

Hummingbird

Although Hummingbird may not appear to have significantly impacted search results at an initial glance, the reality is that the underlying algorithm has changed to become much more adept at understanding semantics. Hummingbird, in combination with not provided, indicates that a continued emphasis on keyword-focused strings is not sustainable. Future SEO initiatives cannot be siloed into keyword research, keyword-focused landing pages, and building links to those keyword-focused pages; wider context-based approaches are required.

http://moz.com/blog/search-marketers-need-to-evolve

4 Reasons Why Social Network Marketing is a Bad Content Strategy

Social network marketing is a poor strategy if your aim is new business, solid leads, and good traffic that converts.Playing around in the social networks *might* be good for branding, interacting with current and potential customers, but even that is questionable.

What is Social Network Marketing?

Social network marketing is diving (creating content that benefits your reader and you) into your social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ with the sole aim of generating leads that convert into real business. Social network marketing is generally what people are thinking/hoping for when they ask me, “Bill, can you help drive people to my web site?” Most social network marketing is all about getting people to click-through to another site/landing page where they can ‘convert’.               

Social network marketing doesn’t work for several reasons

1.  Driving is a poor, make that a lousy, strategy. Pushing people to go places they weren’t planning to go online, or in the real world for that matter, just doesn’t work. The ROI on time invested is terrible. Pulling people is the best strategy. This means that giving people something worth finding is at the heart of a solid content marketing strategy.  I demonstrated how a very aggressive social network marketing strategy can indeed increase traffic to your home site, but the cost in time with return on money made isn’t worth it.

2. Your social networks will tire of you and your marketing. Even you really think you are doing a favor to your 1000s of, ahem, ‘intimate’ friends and 10s of thousands of deeply loyal followers, and 100s of people in your circles and the circles you are in, plus your 100s of business connections, truth is, they are not in your social network so you can ‘do them a favor’. If it smells like marketing, they know it’s a duck.  You can see in the graph below how one of my students got her friends and family to come to her site by marketing to her Facebook network. Notice how the numbers dropped off by the week until she finally gave up and let organic growth do it’s thing.

3. Referrals from social networks aren’t good shoppers. Historically, visitors that come to my website from a social network referral perform very poorly. That is they don’t turn pages. They don’t look at ads. They don’t buy. More often than not they will look at whatever they were sent to see, then smile, laugh or swear, then back out = bounce. And we know that a bounce is the worst thing that can happen to your site. Search engines understand that a bounce = the visitor came but didn’t like what they saw and left = poor quality that results in a worse ranking going forward.

4. The numbers don’t add up. Best estimates are that it costs $1 – 1.50 to acquire a Facebook fan. And it costs more to keep the fan. Harley Davidson and Victoria Secret estimate that about half of one percent of anything posted on Facebook is only seen by the person who put it there. What that means is that I, or somebody I pay, must update my Facebook page 200 times before somebody MIGHT see what I did. I need 100 ‘people saw this’ to maybe get one click-through to a site where I want them to take action. And I need 100 click thrus to get a 1% action rate. That’s 200 updates times 100 times 100. I either need to be a mad dog on my Facebook or have a lot more friends. But remember, friends cost money. Visit any of the Facebook pages of your favorite star, company, hero. Find out how many fans they have. Look at how often they update. Check the number of comments and divide by the number of commenters/likes by the total of number fans. What’s the percentage?

                 

Use Paid Promotion to Refine Your SEO and Make Your Visitors More Valuable

I recently found myself trying to give a client a rough estimate of the value organic traffic brought them. In the process of doing so, I stumbled upon the world of paid promotion. Considering Rand's Whiteboard Friday about surviving the SEO slog, paid promotion is important to tactics that we know do provide immediate tangible value, and I wondered if there was potential for it to be a part of a wider online marketing strategy that could also enhance the work of SEO. I want to open up that world a bit and discuss what I discovered: how paid promotion can complement organic search.

First, let me define what I mean by "paid promotion." This might include typical paid search, but also display ads, remarketing, and paid ads on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Paid promotion comes in many forms, including sponsored images, sponsored stories, and everything else in the following image .

                     

Recently, there's been lots of discussion of the decreasing organic reach on Facebook. It seems that there's been a shift in the Facebook algorithm—certain posts have seen a decrease, others an increase in organic reach. Pages with over 500,000 likes are seeing a particularly massive decrease in organic reach, perhaps in an effort to encourage them to pay for ads. Additionally, MarketingLand recently reported that Pinterest will be adding promoted pins.

The reality is, paid promotion has a lot to offer online marketing, and can really complement some of what you might be doing with search marketing and optimization. Paid promotion offers a way to test things out to make sure they're worth putting the effort and resources into, as well as add more punch to the impact that search is already making for a site. Paid promotion offers quick results you can control, making it a great complement to your overall marketing strategy.

http://moz.com/blog/using-paid-promotion-to-enhance-seo

The Rules of Link Building - Whiteboard Friday

Much of marketing, especially SEO, has shifted from a game with very few rules to a game that Google is fairly strictly refereeing. With their old tactics eliciting penalties, many marketers are simply throwing in the towel.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard calls a time-out and shows us the new strategy we need to come out on top.

                            

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus. Today we're going to be talking about the rules of link building. Now this is really important because we see a lot of people out there in the marketing world getting scared of link building, past actions coming back to haunt them, people saying that link building is dead, links losing value in Google's algorithm. Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday a few weeks ago about that.

Beware links you control

First of all, I want to start off with some things that we want to avoid when link building. If we look at what Google has been targeting, there are usually two common factors in links that they target. They are, first of all, links that you control. When we see Google crack down on guest blogging networks, on widget links, signature profile links, they all have that one element in common: that you control the anchor text. That's exactly what Google is looking for. I predict any new link penalties that happen in the future will also follow this pattern. It will be links where you control the anchor text.

Be cautious with links that scale

The same thing goes for links that scale. Again, we're talking about widget links, author bio boxes. When you combine these two together, those are exactly the kind of links that you need to be extra special careful with and not scale, not do too much anchor text manipulation because they will always be subject to those penalties.

Don't ask for anchor text

One rule that I've been following for years, I got this from Eric Ward, the very famous link builder: Never ask for anchor text. When you're doing outreach, when you're talking to other people, when you're guest posting, asking for the anchor text is going to raise a lot of red flags. That's what kills it for you, because when you start asking for anchor text, your brain starts working. You think, "Well, I need this keyword. I need this keyword." You create patterns. You create over-optimization. No matter what the temptation is, if you don't ask for anchor text, you're going to get a much more natural link profile.

Don't link externally in the footer

A couple of other rules that I see people violate all the time that Google has made painfully clear in the past few months: Don't link externally in the footer. Just don't. I'm not going to go into the reasons. Just don't do that.

Avoid site-wide links

By the same token, except for navigation, avoid site-wide links. This is something that we've known for years. If someone links to you externally, site-wide, in the side bar, that's ripe for Penguin-style links.

Again, these are best practices. There are always exceptions to the rules. But, generally, following these rules is going to help you out even if you have to break them sometimes.

Keep doing link building!

On the "do" side of things, one thing that I want to emphasize is do link building. Don't give up just because Google is imposing these rules and penalizing people. We still need the people who are actively out there building links. They still have a huge opportunity to win. So don't give up on this as a part of your practice. 

http://moz.com/blog/the-rules-of-link-building-whiteboard-friday

Google’s Matt Cutts On How They Evaluate New Search Algorithms

Google Head of Search Spam Matt Cutts posted a videotoday answering how Google goes about evaluating which new search algorithms they use and which they throw away or adapt.

The question was posed by James Foster of Sydney, Australia who asked:

What are some of the metrics that Google uses to evaluate whether one iteration of the ranking algorithm is delivering better quality results to users than another?

Matt Cutts breaks it down to about three steps of the evaluation process:

(1) They test the algorithm offline, benchmarking how the results rank with the new algorithms and if the URLs are higher quality than the previous algorithms in place. The quality is based on how the search quality raters rate the URLs in previous cases. If the URLs were unrated, Google can request these raters to rate the new URLs or compare the old search results to this new test set. Then based on those metrics, Google may decide to move the test to the next phase.

(2) Live tests, where Google will sample a subset of real live searchers and give them the new results with the new set of test algorithms. If Google sees a higher click rate on the new search results, it may imply that the new results are better than the older ones. This is not always the case, specifically with webspam, Cutts said. But in general, the more clicks on a specific search result page, the better quality the results.

(3) Then the Google Search Quality Launch Committee has the ultimate say on if the algorithm goes live to the public or not.

Matt said Google has this down to a “pretty good system” but every now and then they need to refine some of the processes within this workflow.

http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-evaluate-new-search-algorithms-188044

4 Digital Marketing Strategies: An Airbnb Case Study

 If you are searching for a place to stay in Google, you will likely come across Airbnb. This is the story of a fresh, new peer-to-peer vacation rental website that spread their marketplace service throughout the world via creativity. They had a digital marketing strategy to match their mission leading to international waters and, with a little struggle, came out on top. 

Visibility Drivers of Vacation Rentals in Germany:

Airbnb.de’s visibility when it comes to generic keywords in Germany is the result of AdWords. They show the most paid visibility in the German Vacation Rentals category, but very little organic visibility at the moment. If you take a look at the graphs below, you can see what drives the visibility of the domains in Germany and what content type provides the most visibility in the category.

               

Creative Digital Marketing Strategies

1.     Digital Marketing via Google Ratings

I did a little digging and found that this “Other” visibility for Vacation Rentals in Germany is mostly due to ratings, which makes sense, since ratings are a big part of the online vacation rentals business plan, especially in a peer-to-peer marketplace. Of course Airbnb uses the ratings system for their rental listings just like the others, but they also make sure that the ratings from Trustpilot.com show up in their AdWords listings. When I looked at the other top 5 domains in the category, this did not seem to be a part of their digital marketing strategy.

                    

2.     Content Strategy Matters :

In an article published by TechCrunch, Anand Iyer talks about Airbnb’s management of listings as a form of carefully curated content. The most appealing spaces on Airbnb’s website are ranked higher in the website’s search results, while listings with lower ratings or  lower quality content, in general, are harder to find due to a good algorithm and employees who curate and feature the best content.

In addition, returning to the idea of visual stimulation, Iyer mentions how Airbnb offered the mutually beneficial service of professional photos of the spaces listed on the site and guidelines for user-generated images. This way, the visuals provide better content and the spaces become more attractive to users searching for a place to stay.

3. Google Display Advertising for Expansion :

Sometimes we forget that aside from high positioning in Google SERPs, people also need to be visually stimulated for a good click-through rate. Airbnb chose to invest in Google display advertising with banner ad campaigns including images from actual housing being offered on their site. This allowed Airbnb to attract international traffic and increase their listings dramatically.

                         

4.     Google and CraigsList for Digital Marketing :

I left my favorite digital marketing strategy that Airbnb used for last. When they started out, Airbnb was quite resourceful. In the beginning, Airbnb realized they needed to integrate with two digital marketing giants to get enough customers. Obviously Google is the place to be for any e-commerce website, but Craig’s List can be useful for vacation rentals, especially for a peer-to-peer business. This noteworthy move allowed Airbnb to get the hosts and clients necessary to give them a good head start in their market. How did they integrated with these giants?

Since people were already using Craig’s List to post ads for short-term housing, Airbnb decided to let people have the opportunity to share their Airbnb posts on Craig’s List as well, driving more traffic to both the user’s listing and the Airbnb website. Clever!

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/4-digital-marketing-strategies-airbnb-case-study/95007/

How to Get More Twitter Followers for Your Brand with Content Marketing

Content marketing and social media are integral to any successful blogger or publisher’s revenue-generating strategies. But how can you be sure that you are taking the right steps to build your fan base while also trying to monetize? This is a task that many online publishers struggle with. However, Mayhem Studios’ Calvin Lee pointed out that building your following is as simple as creating valuable content and positively interacting with your social media followers.

                    

In a recent interview from South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, Calvin chats with Murray Newlands about how to generate more Twitter followers for your brand via content marketing and offers up his own personal tips for growing your Twitter following with great content.


http://www.searchenginejournal.com/get-twitter-followers-brand-content-marketing/94463/

How Can Mobile SEO Help my Non-Mobile or Local Business?

Google recently said that mobile search volume could exceed desktop search volume by the end of 2014. Don't panic, though; there's quite a bit more nuance to the trend than most people realize.

        In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps us understand that nuance, and talks about how we can level-up our mobile game in ways that will benefit our businesses regardless of whether and when Google's forecast comes true.

                 
                         



http://moz.com/blog/how-can-mobile-seo-help-my-nonmobile-or-local-business

When Building Communities Isn't the Best Way to Build Links

I entered SEO as a link builder. In 2010, my job was easy and my toolset mainly consisted of article marketing software, directory submissions, comment posting and link networks. Fast forward four years >> I now solely create visually engaging content in an effort to scale link building. I didn't make this career shift because "link building is no longer effective;" quite the opposite: I changed focus from manual to scalable link building because I now work in more competitive industries and my clients generally need 100+ links per asset to move the needle—content helps me meet that demand to acquire large amounts of new linking root domains at once.

                             

Over the past two years I've become obsessed with content (and Reddit, unfortunately). I've started to keep the companies that are producing the best and most successful digital content on my radar. Two companies that have recently started to stick out are Movoto and Airbnb. Both are scaling link acquisition via content, but they are going about it in entirely different ways. Airbnb is growing its own grassroots community, while Movoto is actively targeting existing and passionate online communities with its content marketing.

http://moz.com/blog/when-building-communities-isnt-the-best-way-to-build-links

4 SEO Benefits of Responsive Web Design

In simple terms, responsive design means a website’s pages reformat themselves depending on which device they are being displayed on, ensuring that whether the content is viewed on a phone, tablet, or desktop computer, the website will remain user-friendly. Why has this made such waves in the web industry? This is remarkably different from previous mobile solutions of creating a separate mobile site or a dynamically served mobile site.

But when it comes to SEO, can a responsive layout increase the chances of a website succeeding in the SERPs? (SPOILER ALERT!) The answer is a resounding yes, and here’s why.

Google Loves Responsive

And since Google is the divine being you’re trying to impress with your website, it is wise to pay attention to what Google loves. Google not only recommends RWD as the best way to target mobile users , but also favors mobile-optimized sites when presenting results for searches made on a mobile device. This is especially true when mobile users search for local services.

There is still some debate surrounding the issue of whether a separate mobile website or a single, responsive site is the best route to take, but from an SEO perspective, the latter is generally the better option. Separate mobile websites have their own URL and different HTML to their desktop counterparts, whereas responsive sites use one URL and one set of pages and files, making it simpler for Google to crawl and index content.

One Website, One URL

Building a separate mobile website does have a few benefits of its own, and in some cases creating a standalone mobile version works well. If a website features a lot of content (a news site, for example), a responsive version of the website could soon become the “scrolling version”, with users having to give their index fingers a serious work out just to navigate through the content. This is where a mobile site, with content which has been carefully refined for mobile browsing, can come in handy.

From an SEO perspective, one of the main challenges posed by having a separate mobile site is that you will need to build the authority of this site from scratch, and most separate mobile sites do not rank well in search engines, as they are canonicalized to their desktop counterparts. On the other hand, redesigning your website as responsive will enable you to maintain your backlinks, and will mean that you can focus your SEO on one single site. This means all of your links will be directed to one domain (as opposed to one mobile website and one desktop site), giving your responsive website a boost in the SERPs.

Furthermore, if you have a responsive website, you can build social shares for just one URL, and when the site does get shared, wherever the link is viewed – whether on a mobile, tablet, or on desktop – all of the content will be clear and easy to navigate.

                        

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/4-seo-benefits-responsive-web-design/92807/