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!

Have you ever heard of “sitelinks?” Sitelinks are those extra list of links that you see below a main search result in the Google search engine. [See my example of sitelinks below where I searched for "maine popcorn"] Google’s secret algorithm determines whether sitelinks will appear under a particular search result or not. The idea behind sitelinks is to give the user an easier way to immediately navigate to interior pages of the site within that search result. Although they have been around for a while now they have changed, and continue to change announcing their most recent update this week.

Here’s what’s new with Google Sitelinks:

• Now, when you see sitelinks, you’ll notice that they are larger and resemble the main search result more.
• The maximum number of sitelinks possible to appear for a search result is now 12 (up from 8 previously).
• Sitelinks are being ranked now. Before, a site would be given a fixed set of sitelinks that would either appear in a search engine result or not show up at all. Now, the original query will influence the sitelinks that appear for a given result.

What does this mean and why should you care?

As a Google user– The goal of Google’s search engine is to make our lives easier by simplifying search results and saving us time. By delivering us the results with additional sitelinks that are relevant to our queries means we can find what we’re looking for quicker. Thanks Google, you rock!

As a marketer –  Google does a great job of making continuous updates to their products that will improve the relevancy of their search results to the user. Our job is to follow suit – make the content that we provide to our users as relevant to them, their needs, and challenges as we possibly can. By creating consistent, informative, helpful, and relevant content to our users will boost our chances of benefiting from those associated sitelinks in Google’s search results for our website. Plus, with additional space required for sitelinks, that’s more real estate that we could possibly own on the search engine results page. And who doesn’t want more real estate there?

How do I get sitelinks for my website’s search results?
Since Google’s algorithm is under strict lock and key, there isn’t a handbook on how to get sitelinks for your website. However, sitelinks are based on your site’s linking structure and there are a few things you can do to make sure that’s good to go:

• Ensure your site can be crawled successfully
• Use informative anchor text
• Optimize your website with various on-page SEO elements
• Create content for your site that proves your are an authority on your subject matter

Even though we don’t get a particular say in which pages actually show up as sitelinks, we can request that Google demote certain sitelinks that we don’t want to appear, but even that isn’t guaranteed.

With this update that Google has made, and many in the past, for me it is just a reminder on who the focus is on – the user. Site rankings, Twitter followers, and Facebook Likes don’t mean much if I’m not getting traffic to my site and converting that traffic when they are there.

I’ve been using Google Alerts for about 2 years now and can tell you that they save me lots of time!

As a Sage Preferred Vendor, we work with many different Sage Partners who work with a variety of industries, selling an array of different products – from accounting software to CRM systems! To be proactive I try to stay updated on the latest news with all the products. So instead of spending a couple of days researching each product individually I set up Google Alerts to let me know whenever a news item, blog, video or discussion is happening based around the product name. The news comes to me instead of me to it! My suggestion is that anyone selling a product from a parent company should create a Google Alert using the product name to “listen” to conversations online about that product.

Another thing that I use Google Alerts for is content creation. I set them up for things that I blog about and present webinars about – I can read what’s new in the space and interesting blogs on the topics. That helps me brainstorm and think about new content that I can create around those subjects for our blog.

There are so many uses for Google Alerts, here’s what my pals here at Hall use them for:

Public Relations
Caitlin says that using Google Alerts is a great addition to your Public Relations campaigns as it can help you determine when certain press releases are picked up in the media. Monica also mentions that she keeps Google Alerts set up for the different clients that she works with. This can be helpful to catch any negative comments and proactively respond.

Hobbies
We have to have a little fun right? Andre really likes Omega Watches, in fact, he likes them so much he has created a Facebook page, Omega Timepiece News, dedicated entirely to news about the brand. He set up Google Alerts to get the latest news or chatter online sent directly to him to post on the page. He also wants to make sure the information he posts on the page is timely and even mentioned that once he posted news about Omega Watches before Omega Watches did! That’s pretty cool!

Reputation/Brand Management
Lot’s of people here at Hall use Google Alerts to manage their reputation by setting up a Google Alert for their name – Sorry John Smith, this might not work as well for you. Amanda mentions also setting them up for her Twitter Name and for Social Media Breakfast Maine. She does note, however, that she realized it won’t work for all names, like Hall Internet Marketing. It was too generic and we received too much clutter related to things like “town hall meetings.” RC mentions that for low-level social monitoring, Google Alerts are a good way to manage your brand to see if people are talking about your company in those spaces.

Keyword Research
Monica has used Google Alerts in the past for specific keyword research to learn how certain keywords are used. She also says that they can be handy when you’re working on a link building campaign.

How to Set Up Google Alerts
They are super easy to set up – follow the screen shots below:

1. First, go to http://www.google.com/alerts and log in using your Google Account.
2. Then, type in your query or the word you’d like to set up an alert for, you can preview the results to see if you need to alter the word you typed in.
3. If you get the desired results then you can continue on and select the type of content you’re looking for. You can choose between Everything, News, Blogs, Video, or Discussions. I usually choose “everything” but depending on what you’re using it for you might only want one, like news for example.
4. Choose the frequency at which you want to be alerted: As-it-happens, Once a day, or Once a week. For public relations reasons you might need to be alerted as things happen but if you’re only staying on top of product news, then once a week will probably suffice. Choose what fits the specific scenario for you best.
5. Google Alerts allow you to filter the results a bit; between Only the best results and All results. Basically this determines how many results you will get – you can choose the best results that Google thinks are most relevant to your query or you can get all the results that Google finds.
6. At this point you’re pretty much all set, you just need to choose where you want the alert delivered to – your Google Reader or your email. Amanda usually dedicates a portion of her day to reading items in her Google Reader and finds it most convenient to have her alerts sent there. Since I am usually checking emails frequently throughout the day, it’s best for me to have them sent to my inbox. Again, it’s up to you and what will work best.
   
7. If any of the alerts aren’t working the way you had intended you can easily log into your Google Account and manage them by changing how often they are sent to you or how you receive them.

How are you using Google Alerts? Use the comments section to share other ways that you are using Google Alerts!

Photo credit: Stéfan

Panda, Panda, Panda… Pandas haunt me again*.

I am sure most of you know about the big Google Panda (or Farmer) update and now it is suspected the next version of that update is rolling out. This update is meant to help websites with unique content rank higher than content scraping sites.

In theory this is perfect but in real life some businesses who were practicing good SEO got hurt in the process. We know some customers, peers and vendors who saw their search rankings go down after this update was launched.

One big example is if you are selling a product and a bunch of different retail outlets are selling your product. In most cases they take the approved copy from you and post it on their own site. To a Google bot that looks just like scraped text – which is a big no-no, especially now.

Picking up the Panda pieces

In his live video chat, Matt Cutts got a lot of questions about the Panda update and he let us know there would be an update at some point (soon). Many people in the chat and on blogs have expressed their frustration with the slap on the wrist from Google after this update and they want to know how to get back in good standing.

I just read a blog from Search Engine Watch about their Top 5 Google Panda Update SEO Survival Tips. The biggest being – don’t rely solely on SEO for your website’s success. That makes a lot of sense! If you can spread your traffic sources around, your site will be building in other areas even if it takes a hit in one. You can read more about types of traffic sources on this blog post here.

PPC can help

In the Search Engine Watch article Garry explains why he feels PPC has several advantages over SEO:

• Product: Guaranteed exposure to only those products and services you want to promote in search results. Match keywords to exact product offerings and watch conversion skyrocket.
• Price: In this case, it’s not the price of the product or services offered, but the price your business pays for the traffic itself. Don’t forget to factor in all the time and effort invested into ranking for keywords in organic results, and how often changes may be required.
• Promotion: While you can change the content surrounding your products, you may not have the same amount of creative license to change that content as quickly for mainstay (SEO targeted) pages versus paid search landing pages, nor will you necessarily have control over which pages Google chooses to display in results pages for any given query.
• Place: Distribution of your product won’t change, but distribution of your product in organic SERPs may be highly elastic versus highly-controllable paid search campaigns.
• People: Perhaps the most important component is your inability to control and target behavioral cues in search queries using SEO. It doesn’t get much better than the complete control that multiple keyword match types, negative match keyword lists, and advanced query performance reporting affords a search marketer.

Pretty smart. There is some security in a well-planned and targeted PPC campaign. Pandas or no Pandas – PPC can help bring some new website users to your site that you couldn’t dream of with SEO alone.

Are you prepared for Panda 2.2? Did you even notice a change with the original Panda update?

* Who is haunted by Pandas right? Want to know the ONLY word that rhymes with ‘Amanda’? You guessed it – PANDA! Know what I got for every holiday and birthday? Pandas! Panda clothes, stuffed pandas, panda radio, panda jewelry box, walking pandas, panda air freshener, panda coloring books, panda EVERYTHING. It was actually a bit scary if you saw my room as a child. I should probably see a therapist that specializes in panda overload.

So there I was playing Farmville/Gagaville while tweeting and not doing any work and I saw this tweet from Matt Cutts.

Well hey… that sounds interesting. So I Skyped my search nerds, Alex and Monica, and we followed along for the hour and a half information fire hose from Google’s famous employee.

So pretty much Matt just started a YouTube live video chat with everyone who wanted to join. In it he was his charming self and took questions via the live chat and the Twitter hashtag #askmatt.

YouTube Live Streaming

Here is a screen shot of the YouTube live chat with Matt Cutts:

This platform in itself was news… YouTube is apparently testing out and rolling out this live streaming. This could be great for live events, for webinars and e-learning. Matt didn’t have any real information on this but now we know it is coming down the pipeline.

People could ask questions live right on the right hand side. Some of the questions were great and his answers, in my opinion, were super helpful. Monica was really excited when he actually answered her question live.

Google Correlate

One of my favorite parts was the discussion about Google Correlate, which is now in Labs. What is does is takes other people’s searches around a topic and makes some educated guesses on other searches other people are looking for around that topic. This is experimental and based on patterns, no Google cannot read minds but it can sure help you take note of trends.

It also shows you where these searches are taking place geographically.

Apparently this whole idea started with the flu and all the different searches people enter in and around flu symptoms and the flu. There is a whole comic explaining how this got started.

For an test I added ‘hr software’ to Google Correlate and I got some good information on some other keywords like: employee management, employee performance, employee development, employee assessment, partner software, training management software etc.

This is not only kinda cool (and I love the map feature) but this is great for making some good decisions about keywords you are targeting, where to have your ads display, perhaps a tool for discovering new keywords.

I wish I was a faster typer and that there wasn’t a major bee incident during this broadcast so I could have gotten more of Matt’s great questions and answers. There was of course a lot of questions about spam and the Panda update. For me, the new YouTube live streaming and Google Correlate were two of the high points on this random hour and a half chat.

Did you tune in? What were some of your favorite takeaways?

I am not sure if this chat was recorded or will be archived but if it is I will be sure to update this post with the info.

5/25/2011 – Search Engine Land has a great recap of the Matt Cutts stream today: Google’s Matt Cutts Riffs On J.C. Penney, Panda Update & Other SEO Topics In Live Webchat