Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Ahh… Here it finally is! My favorite day of the entire year; Christmas Eve Day! It’s full of so much excitement and anticipation! This year I tried to stretch it out as long as possible. I think I started listening to Christmas music the first week of November! It seems Google got in the spirit this year too. Has anyone noticed any of the fun effects they have added to their search results over the past month?

• By far one of the most fun toys I’ve played with this season; brought to us by Gmail, you can send a call/video from Santa! I highly recommend checking this out!
• Type “let it snow” in Google’s search engine, watch the snow fall, and then scrape the snow using your mouse (only works in some browsers).
• I absolutely love Christmas lights and, apparently, so does Google; check out their holiday doodle. You click on it and it lights up and then plays a song!
• Try using Google’s search engine and type in words including “Christmas” and “Santa.” Google’s results page becomes decorated with a string of holiday lights.
• YouTube even got in the spirit by adding a snowflake button to some of the videos so, when you click it, it starts to snow inside the videos!

It’s been fun to see how Google has gotten into the spirit. It seems like it was contagious too; people searching for the words “let it snow” increased more this month than it ever has! It’s nice to see that Google is helping spread Christmas cheer! Now I’m off to do the same thing!

I hope you all have a wonderful and safe holiday season!

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!

Google+ announced on Monday that they are now allowing businesses and brands to create their Google+ pages. For information on Google+ for business, please see the list of resources below.

What I want to talk about is the importance of claiming your business name on sites like Google+. Like many of you, the launch of Google+ makes me anxious – another presence to manage, create content for and try to build an online community on.

No one is sure what will become of Google+, if it will defeat Facebook or exactly how it is going to relate to search results. What we do know is that they sure are going to try and with the forces of Google behind them, there will be some impact.

If you don’t have a content strategy yet for Google+ or know how you are going to integrate it into your other marketing efforts, it is still important to grab your business name on Google+ page for branding purposes. This is also important for other popular social media sites you may not be participating on yet.

At this time, anyone can create a business page for anything they want without proof that that are associated with that URL or entity. Big brands will soon have a verification process but for many of us that will not apply. So in theory, anyone can set up a page under your business name and URL. I doubt it will turn into the Wild West but it makes sense to protect your brand before an issue arises.

We probably have all heard by now the struggles some businesses have had getting control of Facebook pages and Twitter accounts set up by a fan, an enemy or a rogue employee. Let’s not let that happen with Google+ too. Setting up a Google+ business page takes a matter of seconds. Trying to reclaim your business name by complaining to Google or the page creator could take hours, days, or even months.

Not ready to fully participate yet?

If you are not ready to participate on Google+ yet, that is fine. Set up your page, fill in the fields allotted and let it rest until you are ready.

Depending on your corporate voice you could:

• Leave a first status update that you set up the page but are working on the best way to use this new space
• Update your status with other ways people can currently connect with you
• Post links of some of your best older content from your site or blog that could use new eyeballs etc.

There are plenty of options on how to start your Google+ strategy but the first and most important thing is claim your space and protect your brand. Also, with Google+ brand pages you can create multiple pages. If you have a popular event, product or service that should stand alone from your business page – you should claim that too.

Resources on Google+ for businesses:

• Upcoming Hall Webinar – What are Businesses Supposed to do with Google+?
• Search Engine Land – Google+ Pages Now Open For Businesses, Brands, Places & More
• Google Blog – Google+ Pages: connect with all the things you care about
• Mashable – Google+ Launches Branded Pages
• SocialFresh – How To Create A New Google+ Page And Connect It To Google Search

Photo credit: Elke.Fleing

By now we know that beyond your site design and ease of navigation, the heart and soul of your site is the content that is provided there. Often times we ask our clients to figure out what content is working for them; what brings them traffic, what is being shared, what gets people to stay and convert? In some cases it might be obvious what content is popular but many times you have to do a little digging to really see which content are your real all stars.

Thanks to my pal, Google Analytics, the Content Report offers a variety of ways to look at the content on your site and will offer you a better understanding of what kinds of content to continue expanding on. Just by viewing your Content Dashboard you can see the top 10 most visited pages (organized by pageviews for that given time period) and then you can click “view full report” to see more data about those top visited pages. You can start to see which content is:

• Most popular – Organized by the number of pageviews. You can change the date range if you want to see what content was popular over a longer period of time or at a different time altogether.
• Stickiest – In Google Analytics you can click on the top of each column to reorganize the pages by different information (see image of columns below). By organizing the pages by average time on site, you can see which pages people spent the most time engaging with certain content.
• Best retainer – Find out which content keeps the visitor on the site. Organize your website by bounce rate to see which pages kept the user from leaving (the smaller number the better!).

Dig Deeper

After completing the exercise above you’ll start to see some content pages as all stars for your website. With some other content reports available you can dig a bit deeper to see why they might be performing so well.

• Keyword Traffic – One way to understand why certain pages are performing better than others is to determine if the subject matter is something that your audience is interested in. First off, you have to understand what keywords are bringing organic traffic to your site.  Then, in the top content section, you can click a content page and then select secondary dimensions to review for those pages; like traffic sources, visitors, technology, and content. Since I know that the blog, “What is a QR Code” was one of my most popular pieces of content, I want to look at what keywords (under “Traffic Sources”) people typed into search engines that then navigated them to this post. I can know that a large amount of organic traffic was driven by the keywords “smartphone scan box” and “scan box code”and that is verified when I look at the keywords that drive traffic to that particular blog post.
• Entrance Sources – Using secondary dimensions again, you can find out where the traffic that ended up on a certain page had been prior to coming to the website. It might be helpful to understand that your most popular or most engaging content pages came from visitors who were on Twitter. You can find that out by reviewing your entrance sources for certain content pages.
• Navigation Summary – Use the navigation summary to understand more about the how the traffic moves throughout the site while interacting with your known “all star content.” You can see where they had been before a particular page and where they went to after visiting that page. You can see how often a certain page was an entrance page as well as how often a certain page was the last page that a user was on before leaving the site. This just gives you some depth of knowledge about where your opportunities might be or areas of the site that might need to be improved

Big Opportunity

The whole point of understanding which content is making a splash is to continue producing more content around the topics that are more popular to help drive new traffic to your website. You should also take a look at the actual content page – what is your offer? Is it clear? Are you obtaining leads from that page? Understanding your content all stars reminds you that those pages are a good opportunity to get the engaged traffic to take action and convert.

Authorship markup is a way to attribute certain content back to its author.

Updated 11/17/11 – New information about authorship markup: Authorship Just Got Better

Using existing standards for HTML5, the “rel” attribute is used by search engines to get more information about a certain link. In this case, rel=”author” is telling search engines who authored a specific article online. This is great for those who publish content online as a way to compile their work.  Plus, Google is testing a way to display the author’s information within search results which is something we, as marketers, should pay attention to.

Here’s an example of how Amanda’s blog about Twitter photo galleries would display in Google’s search results:

How do I set it up?

Setting up is pretty simple, so I’ll give you a (super) brief overview. For more information, here’s what Google has to say about setting up authorship markup.

Step 1: You Need a Google Profile

If you have a Google account, chances are you already have a profile.  Remember, like any profile you should probably make sure all the fields are filled out as much as possible.

Step 2: Add Links to Your Google Profile

As you’re editing your “About” section on your profile, add links to the websites your publish content to. In the example below, Amanda has linked to her author page on Hall’s website. Linking to your author page is a good option for business blogs with multiple contributors.

Step 3: Link Your Author Page to your Google Profile

Add a Google profile link to your site. Google says,

“Your link must contain the ?rel=author parameter, and your anchor text must start or end with a + character. (You don’t need to be a Google+ user to do this, and you can use any anchor text you want.) If either of these is missing, Google won’t be able to associate your content with your Google Profile.”

• You can add it to a common place that appears on every page of the site; like a footer.
• Some people include a link on each blog post.
• In our example below, since we have multiple authors contributing this this blog, we include the link on our individual author profile pages.

Google makes this part super easy for us. Here is a link to the  Google Profile button tool to easily add a Google+ button to your website.

Step 4: Link Your Articles to Your Author Page

Make sure your articles include a link that relates back to your author page, using the rel=”author” attribute. See below.

Step 5: Test and Wait

Use Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool to check your work. Then you wait. For bigger sites like The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly you can already see these in action. In fact, Google is showing the author image on the left hand side versus the right hand side now (a change I just noticed from earlier this week!). This feature, similar to Google Sitelinks, is all dependent on Google’s algorithm – so the author information might not always appear in the search results.

The best thing to do now is get this set up for the different websites you contribute content to. Then, when Google has rolled it out to everyone, you’ll already be ahead of the game!

I’m a B2B, what does this mean for me?

The impact on authorship markup as an author is pretty obvious; it’s a great way to keep a compilation of the content that we publish as well as a way to attribute our work back to us. Here’s a few reasons why authorship markup is important to businesses.

1. Attraction – People are more likely to click on something that catches their eye, like an image that shows up when you post a link on Facebook. Imagine this scenario: Someone searches for “golden retriever dental care” and they get 10 results on the first page.  But if one of those results displays an author’s image, it might catch the searcher’s eye enough to get them to click on that link versus any of the other results that rendered. Plus, with with the addition of author images it expands your real estate in the search engines results page; another nice plus.
2. Trust – You might be a well-known blogger or author or even have a niche audience. Once more and more of these author images are showing up in search results, it will be helpful to you to be in that space. People who know and trust you can immediately find what you say on a particular subject.
3. Authority – Very similar to trust is the idea of authority. When searchers query a search engine and start to see the impact of authorship markup, they are going to start to see those with author images as an authority on that subject versus those who don’t have an author visually tied to their links.
4. Branding – Authorship markup is a great way to visually brand you to the content you create online.

Follow the steps above to get your content ready for authorship markup!