The Week in Review

Twitter Set to Offer Brand Pages

Twitter is going to take a page out of Facebook’s playbook and offer a new kind of profile page for business accounts. These brand pages will be similar to Facebook pages and offer more room for brands to communicate with visitors, beyond 140 characters. While business users will likely embrace this, will users feel the same? (ReadWriteWeb)

Facebook Ads: The Cheapest Traffic You’ll Ever Buy
Facebook ads do not perform poorly. This entrepreneur says that for the past four months, Facebook ads have been the "single best source for paid traffic for my startup CoderStack — I pay less for better converting traffic." This post includes numbers to back up his claims. (Imran’s blog)

How to Entertain Your Facebook Fans
So you’ve attracted a healthy number of Facebook likes and fans — now the real job begins. How do you keep all those fans entertained, and keep your brand visible in their news feeds and at the front of their minds? First off, understand why you’re on Facebook. Next, consider non-intrusive ways to go about the furthering of these relationships. Then reward loyalty with discounts and special offers, run competitions and use question polls, among other things. (Search Engine Watch)

Likes, Pluses and Tweets: Cleaning the Link Graph?
"These new methods for sharing and voting are exactly what the web needs to help cleanse the link graph." This should make link builders smile. Though much has changed recently, the only thing that changes for the link graph is the engines’ shifted focus toward where they feel the need to look for signals to improve each individual searcher’s experience. "The game now is understanding and recognizing which types of link graphs are trustworthy enough to help any given client with both organic search traffic and direct click traffic. In that sense, things haven’t changed at all. The medium remains the message, but the demographics dictate the tactics." (Search Engine Land)

How to Optimize Images for Search Engine Traffic
If anywhere from a beginner to an intermediate SEO, this post will help you with your image optimization efforts. This rundown includes tips on filenames (JPG and GIF files get better results, and hyphens work well), ALT text (finding the right balance), headings and bold text, image captions, image size, and expectations from image traffic. (Graywolf’s SEO Blog)

How to Fend off Your Biggest PPC Competitors
Running PPC campaigns isn’t much different from being chased by a hungry bear, 24/7. A story of two hikers and a hungry-looking bear sets the stage for this post about leaving PPC competitors in the dust instead of just keeping even with them. Understanding that short-term advantages vanish quickly is a key place to start. Then it’s on to differentiating between tactical changes vs. strategic improvements. The only sustainable advantage is better process. (Search Engine Land)

Technical SEO Tactics and Tools
"Some of the biggest problems negatively impacting SEO campaigns can be traced back to technical issues, since by nature they tend to hit areas around crawling, accessibility, redirects, and indexation. These are core, foundational areas that every hard working organic search marketer needs to be familiar with." The foundational concepts here range from the basic to the more involved. (Search Engine Watch)

Background Images in HTML Email
With so many marketers liberally using background images in HTML email, one has to wonder whether or not support for background images has improved. "These questions persuaded my own little investigation into the current state of background image support in HTML emails." After some testing, the bottom line is "background images can only reliably be applied on the email body. The ‘VML Hack’ may indeed force rendering of background images by Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010, but not without nasty drawbacks." (MailerMailer Blog)

Changes in SEO in the Past Year
Pandas, farmers, mayday, caffeine and speed are just some of the big SEO changes that happened in the past year. Among the takeaways are to put users first, don’t fret about the small changes and it’s all about marketing. (SEOmoz)

California Court: CAN-SPAM Applies to Social Networking Communications
On March 28, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California held that the CAN-SPAM Act’s restrictions extend beyond email and covers "communications to other electronic destinations, including Facebook users’ walls, news feeds, and in-network messages." (5 Star Affiliate Blogs)

Companies Are Too Slow in Following up on Leads
According to some research, many firms are too slow to follow up on online leads. “We audited 2,241 U.S. companies, measuring how long each took to respond to a web-generated test lead. Although 37% responded to their lead within an hour, and 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours—and 23% of the companies never responded at all. The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours.” (Harvard Business Review)

Amazon Exploring Mobile-Payment Service for Mobile Phones
Amazon has been dipping its toes in a lot pools lately. The latest appears to be the mobile-payments pool. Amazon’s Payments unit is looking into starting a service based on near-field communication, which would allow for payments to be made by simply tapping a mobile device against a specially equipped cash register. This move would place Amazon in contention with giants like Apple, Google and Isis. (Bloomberg)

What Google +1 Means for Facebook
Regardless of how shy Google appears to be at the notion, its +1 product is a clear jab at Facebook’s “like” buttons. Both companies are heavily dependent on their ad revenues, and Facebook has the more direct grasp of personalized data to target their ads. Since +1 requires a user to have a Google profile, this is the search giant’s shot at being able to delivery accurately targeted ads beyond simply using keywords and browsing data. “In short, Google needs other ways to gather data to target ads, and it needs huge amounts of this data very quickly. What better way to do this than by introducing a compelling search product with a social prerequisite?” Though +1 could finally be the social breakthrough Google’s been aching for, online ad spend isn’t a zero-sum game, which means we could be on the brink of witnessing a “long-term, multilateral tug of war to capture as much of that market as possible.” (CNN.com)

5 Ways to Break Through the PPC Wall
When you manage PPC campaigns every day, you eventually hit a wall. Here are five tactics to use to bust through these ruts: 1) leverage existing campaigns, 2) don’t neglect Microsoft adCenter, 3) go to display campaigns, 4) remarket and 5) go social. (Search Engine Watch)

7 Tips for a Killer Facebook Landing Page
A successful Facebook landing page should turn visitors into subscribers, engage people and encourage them to explore your products/services further. How do you make one of these? Making a custom landing page, adding a clear call to action, offering incentives and using images are among the seven tips for generating an effective Facebook landing page. (Econsultancy)

Can Facebook Become Your Bank?
Facebook Credits has snuck into the realm of virtual goods, which is said to be a market worth $2.1 billion this year. Why couldn’t Facebook eventually use Credits as real currency – why couldn’t Facebook eventually become your bank? There are hurdles to this seemingly outlandish proposition, of course – privacy concerns, its viability as a universal payments system and regulatory issues – but Facebook’s dominance on the Web and on smartphones gives it something to work with. (BusinessWeek)

What Makes an Effective Mobile Display Ad?
Spending on mobile display ads in the U.S. will reach $1.2 billion by 2015, according to ABI Research. So knowing what makes an effective mobile display ad is important. Among the key factors are file weight, size of the ad, position on the screen, restrained creative elements and limited clutter. (Mobile Marketer)

Sentiment Analysis Requires Context
Sentiment analysis, or “opinion mining,” is carried out to “classify an opinion according to a polar spectrum.” The long-term difficulty with understanding context is natural language processing, as discerning sarcasm, irony and hyperbole are essential to getting accurate data. (O’Reilly Radar)

Will SEO Be More Expensive in the Next Few Years?
Has SEO “become the playground of unscrupulous freelancers and spammers forcing Google to come up with updates one after another?” This means SEO will either be the cheapest service in the near future, or that it will be costlier. The end game will include cheap SEO service consultants killing each other off in their unsustainable battles, skilled and talented SEO pros getting more power and market demand, and a number of service providers disappearing as search engines get stricter. (Search Engine Journal)

Search Marketers Allured by Google’s +1
While the effect of Google’s +1 is hard to gauge, what we do know is that all ads (unless you opt out) will “will show a greyscale +1 button beside them, allowing consumers to +1 the ad, indicating approval of the brand, the offer, the copy — something about the ad.” Consumer behavior will be the key for how well (or poorly) advertisers fare. That is, if +1 data will be used for organic rankings and ad results. (Search Engine Land)

Google’s New Guru Turns Google Talk into a Search Tool
Google Talk Guru is a neat application that offers Google Talk users a “friend” that can answer questions via a chat session. While the types of questions the bot can handle right now are limited, it’s already a fairly dynamic tool. (CNET)

Google AdSense: Doomed to Be Left out of Facebook?
Google AdSense, and possibly DoubleClick, may never make it onto the list of Facebook-approved advertisers, which could result in ad revenue losses of 40-45 percent for developers. (All Facebook)

The Future of Advertising Looks Really Personal
With Google mining search data to make more predictions, and with Yahoo and Bing pushing the envelope when it comes to evolving the search experience, it’s clear that the future of advertising could get very personal. The idea of having ads appear next to Google search results was the start, but now we have ads in our inboxes, behavioral targeting and organizations like Rapleaf, which can tie our email addresses to what we buy at the grocery store. In related news, Google is planning on deploying a tailored advertising system for its Priority Inbox product. (O’Reilly Radar, Search Engine Land)

Google Introduces +1
Google has unveiled its +1 button. It’s social – basically Google’s answer to Facebook’s “like” button or Twitter’s “retweet” button. The feature allows users to share Google search results with friends and the Web in general. There are a lot of moving parts here, as well as consequences for ads and ranking signals. (Search Engine Land, TechCrunch)

NFC is Overhyped
Near-field communication, technology that can turn mobile phones into wallets, may not be all it’s purported to be, according to the president of Sybase 365. He says the “obsessions with NFC” is unjustified because we still haven’t seen how it’s superior than existing technologies – SMS, for example. The mobile-payments game may not unfold as many of us expect it to. (VentureBeat)