The Week in Review

6 Best Practices for Using Images in Email

It’s no secret that images grab a reader’s attention and enhance the message being conveyed. However, it’s important to ensure that images are supplemental and not the main carrier of information, since many recipients may have their email settings set so images aren’t shown. Among the six best practices you should consider are related to color, location and size. (MailerMailer Blog)

Google’s Evolving Approach to SEO

Here’s a helpful, engaging visual flowchart detailing how Google’s cat-and-mouse approach to SEO has changed during the past decade. The bottom line is that "Each change is a new opportunity!" (SEO Book.com)

Time Spent Doing SEO

Unless you’re a beginner, spending more than an hour a day reading about SEO instead of doing SEO is a waste of your time. Here’s a cold-turkey solution: "For one week stop reading your rss feeds, forums, and twitter. When you come back give yourself 2 hours to read what’s most important, if you stay within the 2 hour limit you’ll be able to identify what you think is the most important things you need to read, and forget the rest." Start doing more SEO with that extra time. (Graywolf’s SEO Blog)

Finding Hidden SEO Opportunities on Twitter

Social media-related activities are more important to SEO than ever. Start by focusing on your Twitter profile, hashtags, vanity links and Twitter lists. (Search Engine Land)

What Makes a Killer Link Target?

Getting really good links is often a painstaking process. To lighten the load, take note of the factors you can use to determine what makes for a killer link target: authority, relevance and accessibility. "We may develop linkable assets with the hope that it will appeal to a wide audience and attract unexpected attention. But we may also want to hedge our bets by having a few specific people and places in mind that we want to reach out to when the time is right." (Search Engine Watch)

True Optimization and the Slippery Slope of SEO

You’ve heard it once, twice and maybe even three times: SEO done right works and shortcuts aren’t needed. Google’s recent Panda update has highlighted this. Up until now, many SEOs have relied on less-than-average links and poor-quality content. The future of SEO will require the abandonment of quick and easy tactics. “True optimization will begin on-site with creating content that is not only credible but enticing and worthy of the buzz factor. This in light of the trend that social citations are now monitored to some extent and likely with more a factor down the road.” (Search Engine Watch)

Know Who Your Competition is

If you’re running an SEO campaign, you must know who your site is competing against in search engine results pages. Competitive research isn’t only good for surveying competitive link-building tactics – it can also show you which of your potential strategies is mostly likely to provide your site unique value. Once you’ve got the simple stuff down, dig deeper and aggregate data from multiple searches and sum the click-through rate for each domain across these searches. Next, it’s time to get creative with how you organize the data. Then it’s on to tweaking. (SEOmoz)

Sentiment Analysis: The Future of Ad Optimization

Consumer sentiment analysis promises to help brands understand what consumers are thinking and saying about their products. However, sentiment analysis isn’t a solution unto itself. It can be a real-time feedback loop for advertising effectiveness and may eventually predict advertising results. (VentureBeat)

Mobile Content: Brevity vs. Optimization

In the traditional online realm, there’s an SEO tug of war between simple site design and site copy. When this battle is shifted to the mobile arenas, things get a bit more interesting. In this area, designers have an even stronger argument to keep things simple and brief. But how do you reconcile this need for brevity with the need for keyword-rich optimized content? “The key is to recognize that broadly-applied standards are not helpful or even necessary. Mobile webpages should be looked at individually, assigned a purpose that aligns with user needs, and designed accordingly.” (Search Engine Land)

Local Digital Ad Revenues: $42.5 Billion by 2015

According to BIA/Kelsey, local online/interactive advertising revenues will reach $42.5 billion by 2015, nearly double the $21.7 billion from 2010. “As digital media — delivered to consumers through mobile, Internet or other electronic methods — continues to gain traction with local advertisers, BIA/Kelsey predicts it will represent 23.6 percent of all local ad spending by 2015.” The increasing number of smartphones and tablets, the continued erosion of newspaper revenue, political advertising, and the increasing use of social and mobile formats are cited as key drivers of this growth. (BIA/Kelsey)

3 SEO Myths About Information Architecture

In order to bridge the gap between SEOs and information architects, here are three of the more common myths and misconceptions that SEOs have about information architecture. For one, SEO isn’t IA and IA isn’t SEO – information is content and architecture is links. Also, “SEO architecture” is a loaded phrase that often involves goals in a high-ranking, frequently abandoned and poorly converting site. The third myth is that Web searchers are not site users. (Search Engine Land)

Ignore SEO and Produce Good Content

Google isn’t the only one who won’t like content produced just for the sake of satisfying SEO targets and pressures – website users won’t like it either. This writer asserts that “if you’re in the content publishing business, always have content that you genuinely believe is interesting, that is useful, that is informative. It has to have a purpose, else why are you doing it?” (Econsultancy)

Top 5 SEO Questions Answered

In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, five of the most common SEO-related problems are confronted in a video, which is accompanied by a transcript. Among the SEO issues covered are whether to go www or non-www, what to do about 404s and how page reporting works. (SEOmoz)

Are Poorly Performing Sites/Placements All Bad?

Figuring out which sites/placements haven’t been working and weeding them out sounds like a fine plan until you stumble on the question of, “How bad is really bad?” The topic at hand is scalability, something that deserves more attention than it’s getting right now. (MediaPost)

ICANN Approves .xxx

We’ve heard about the possibility, but now it’s reality: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has given the green light to the .xxx top-level domain for pornographic websites to carve out a more defined space of the Internet. There’s opposition to this, of course. What may come as a surprise is that the adult entertainment industry is one of the parties crying foul. (Wired.com)

Google to Research Online Advertising for 3 Years

Google is going to dive deep into the subject of “market algorithms and Internet economics” with the help of 20 professors from three universities. This could be a transparent and public attempt by Google to fund research that will ultimately improve its own understanding of monetization models, but it’s likely that the online advertising industry as a whole will benefit. “Thinking of the bigger picture, if Google really does intend on the results of this research being a wide-spread industry affair, this means that everyone from Google to Bing to affiliate networks and otherwise could improve the quality, placement, and utilization of ads, campaigns, and similar monetization avenues.” (ZDNet)

25 Tips for Mobile Commerce

Mobile commerce is growing in prominence and is giving retailers good reasons to consider hopping on board. If you’re thinking about making a move into m-commerce, here are 25 essential tips to help maximize conversions. Among them are to provide the “wow” factor if you’re not going for an app, offer a prominent search box and use photos effectively. (Econsultancy)

E-commerce: $188 Billion in 2011

According to eMarketer, which used U.S. Department of Commerce data, retail e-commerce is expected to reach $188 billion this year, up 13.7 percent from last year’s mark of $165 billion. Mobile commerce and daily-deal sites like Groupon are expected to be two main drivers of this growth. (eMarketer)

What Group-Buying Sites Mean for E-mail Marketers

Groupon has sparked a lot of entrepreneurship in its hometown, Chicago. While the business model is appealing, there are obstacles to overcome. The adoption of a sophisticated e-mail marketing campaign can help foster engagement and loyalty. To build loyalty, daily-deal sites need to build it not just around the offers, but around the subscriber experience as a whole. To engage customers, subscribers should be put in charge of subscription options. (MediaPost)

Facebook Asking Developers to Leave AdSense Behind

Some application developers who use Google’s AdSense ad network say Facebook has contacted them to ask them to stop using AdSense “because Google has not signed its Platform Terms for Advertising Providers.” This marks the first major case of such enforcement by Facebook. “Kicking AdSense off of Facebook directly impacts developer business, though. Some might see the policy enforcement as the precursor to further restriction in the future, and could cite it as a reason why not to build on the Facebook Platform.” (Inside Facebook)

Top 13 Social Media Ranking Factors for SEO

Which social media metrics influence your SEO results? Here are 13 of the most important ones you should be aware of. Included are the number of quality Twitter followers, the number of comments on Facebook and the percent of likes vs. dislikes on YouTube. (Search Engine Watch)

What Amazon SES Means for E-mail Marketing

Amazon Simple Email Service is the online retailer’s new e-mail server platform. How important is this? Here are four conclusions that this writer made after talking with some experts: 1) a lot of interesting apps will be built on top of Amazon, 2) Amazon will do a good job of preventing the worst spam from being sent from its system, 3) Amazon SES won’t replace most e-mail service providers and 4) Amazon SES isn’t a magic bullet for deliverability. (MediaPost)

Top 4 Reasons to Abandon SEO

SEO isn’t for everyone. Here are four reasons why SEO might not be for you: 1) none of your sales come from your site; 2) you have a limited budget; 3) you have limited time; and 4) your website has been banned. (Marketing Pilgrim)

Google Promises to Crack Down on Advertisers Selling Fake Goods

Finding advertisers who are abusing AdWords to sell phony items is a difficult task, but Google is up to the task. It shut down about 50,000 of these bad accounts in the second half of 2010 alone, but the search giant knows there’s more to be done. It plans on implementing three improvements to its online ad system: 1) offering an online form for brand owners to file complaints about counterfeit goods, 2) focusing on bad AdSense ads and 3) setting up a new help page. (CNET)

Writing About SEO vs. Doing SEO

There are two camps in the wild world of SEO: those who write about SEO and those who actually do SEO. This division is often blurred and it doesn’t have to be as harsh as it might sound. “With that said, my ultimate opinion here is that the SEO industry operates better because of the variance between those who simply write about SEO and those who do SEO… When you take that full spectrum into consideration, there are people all along it who represent varying degrees of ethics, experience, agendas, etc. The end result is a melting pot of opinions in a thriving industry that stands to benefit from the collective intelligentsia despite the bad seeds encountered along the way.” (ZDNet)