The Week in Review

How to Weed out Your Lowest-Performing Pages

The most applicable thing you can do with the recent Google Panda update is to try to target and weed out your own low-quality pages. This eight-step template involves Google Analytics, getting your hands on lots of raw data, sorting results by landing page, downloading data as a CSV file and creating an Excel table, Open Site Explorer, VLOOKUP, creating a pivot table, and filtering by bounce/visits and using conditional formatting. (SEOmoz)

Living URLs for Seasonal Content

Using living URLs is one thing – using them intelligently is another. “My recommendation is to keep the year in the page/html title (updating it every year) but to keep the year out of the URL.” You should also have a plan for archiving, relocating or eliminating the old content, and understand the social side of things. (Graywolf’s SEO Blog)

Analyzing the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns

This is a thorough rundown of the most important aspects of evaluating the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Setting business objectives comes first and is followed by establishing a Web analytics system, tracking ad campaigns and understanding indicators. This process doesn’t require expensive analytics tools, thanks to Google Analytics. (Search Engine Journal)

How to Target Affluent Facebook Users

Affluent consumers are an appealing segment for marketers, for obvious reasons. While there’s no easy way to target strictly by job titles, incomes or property values via Facebook, there are ways to think outside the box to get the information you’re looking for. The “secret sauce” is figuring out which pieces of information your target affluent market will share. Job titles are a great place to start. From there, hone in on where these well-to-do users live and use likes to drill down even further. You’ll be surprised at how targeted Facebook advertising can be. (Search Engine Watch)

Using Paid Search as a Branding Tool

While most think of paid search as a direct-response channel or for sales and lead generation, but it’s also a nifty way to raise awareness for your brand. An adult toys retailer took advantage of this, as its search agency knew that “hanging paid search ads off the back of popular news-based searches would drive a lot of awareness, with relatively few clicks.” (Econsultancy)

QR Codes Face Usability Hurdle

QR codes are everywhere these days, but they’re still on early-adopter ground. The major hurdle they face isn’t a creative one — it’s a usability one. Once you stumble upon a QR code, many questions arise. This hurdle may not look any lower to the average consumer until QR code readers are built into mobile devices. (WebProNews)

Google Getting Closer to Mobile Payments

Google is working with MasterCard and Citigroup to launch a mobile-payment service for Android smartphones later this year. "Citing anonymous sources, The Wall Street Journal reports that Google will allow people with debit and credit cards from the two financial giants to turn on an app and pay for a purchase from their smartphones. At no point would they need to take those cards out of their wallets to make a purchase." Also, Google will test ear-field communications systems in San Francisco and New York City. (CNET)

Quality: The Only Sustainable SEO Strategy

If there’s one thing you should’ve learned from Google’s Panda Update, it’s that high-quality, usable sites win. Understanding traffic yield of the URL, preserving the power of URLs, looking beyond links and being cognizant of the link factors in search algorithms are essential. "In industrial strength SEO, quality and scale must hold sway. On-page strategies, internal linking, and off-page strategies in social and link development, should always emphasize quality and scalable techniques." (Search Engine Land)

What to Do if Your Competitor Buys Spam Links to Your Website

Incoming links are not under your control, which means there’s no easy way to prevent your website from getting links from spammy sites built by your competitors. If you encounter this problem, be sure to track your incoming links with Google Alerts and Majestic SEO. It’s important to not get too caught up in this dance, however. Just focus on maintaining a clean, natural link-building profile. (Search Engine Journal)

Half of Content Consumed on Twitter is Generated by 20,000 Users

An in-depth study conducted by Yahoo Research found, among other things, that 50 percent of all content consumed on Twitter is churned out by just 20,000 users, or 0.05 percent of all users. Also, Yahoo Research found that Twitter isn’t a very "social" place, since users follow back far less than they’re followed. The notion that Twitter might not be that social after all poses an interesting question for businesses: Should they see it as a platform for marketing, content distribution or customer service? (Econsultancy)

Google Makes Scammers Pay

There are loads of those “easy cash” scams out there, and while most of us are savvy enough to ignore them, there are still plenty of everyday consumers who fall for them. Well, back in December 2009, Google filed suit against some scamming rings that were promoting “Easy Cash with Google,” and now the courts are taking the side of the search giant by ordering the rings to stop their dubious behavior and pay Google $1.6 million. (TechCrunch)

The Future of Search, According to 5 Visionaries

Where will search go from here? Here’s what five search experts think. Among the common themes were a shift in expectations of what search should be – from the single query box and an ordered list of results to results that focus on “master intent.” Other themes included having crawlers and parsers better understand human language, real-time search, the beginning of search as an application, and the growing importance of understanding the bond of trust and the cultural contract consumers have with large sites and services. (Search Engine Land)

Mobile Internet Stats Roundup

There were some juicy tidbits of information and data about the mobile Internet released into the news stream last week. Among them were findings that people used mobile search at home in the evening more than any other time or place; 84 percent of mobile searchers look for information on local retailers (e.g., opening hours, address, contact details); and that the U.K. is the fifth biggest mobile Internet market in the world. (Econsultancy)

Facebook Sponsored Stories: A New Era in Online Advertising

“Ask your friends” has been a tried-and-true method of getting help with purchase decisions, and now Facebook is set to leverage that very notion in the realm of advertising on its site with its Sponsored Stories. This is the beginning of a new paradigm of advertising – “truly social advertising” – so you’d better be paying attention. Here’s an overview of what this is and how to get started. (Search Engine Watch)

How Much Money Do Spammers Make?

G = E x M x D x F x V x B x P. This equation led a group of researchers at UC San Diego and the International Science Institute to conclude that a spammer grosses about $7,000 per day. (Wired.com)

Is Facebook Marketing Really That Important?

Facebook marketing works – just ask the guy who launched Pitbulls.org and got 40,000 likes and a top-three Google ranking in less than six months. Nevertheless, the question remains: are social media marketing experts worth all they’re cracked up to be? One advertiser says absolutely not. While having a page or group on Facebook is certainly smart, dishing out $250,000 to some analytics company with “experts” to help you get likes and so on is just plain ridiculous. (Problogger.net, ClickZ)

The New Era of Email Marketing: No More Batch-and-Blast?

Marketers need to understand how much the world of email messages is changing. This isn’t to say that emails won’t be as powerful or relevant – it’s just important to note that trends and realities will force email to truly deliver on its promise of being a true one-to-one communications channel. Among the five trends driving email’s progress are the social inbox freeing up email’s old workload, more readers getting their online content from mobile apps, and the affordability and availability of marketing automation and innovation. (MediaPost)

Nearly 30 Million U.S. Mobile Subscribers Access Mobile Financial Services

In the fourth quarter of 2010, 29.8 million Americans accessed financial services accounts with their mobile devices, an increase of 54 percent from the same quarter in 2009. “With the proliferation of access channels, knowing how and where consumers are interacting with their financial accounts is essential for efficient allocation of marketing dollars and resources,” according to comScore. “Among mobile banking and credit card users, nearly half prefer going online via a fixed device as the primary way to access their accounts, with 47 percent of mobile banking customers and 44 percent of mobile credit card users doing so.” (comScore)

10 Tips for Avoiding Invisible SEO for Product Listings

Accessibility, relevance and authority – these are the three keys to optimizing for search and shopping engines. Sometimes the basics are forgotten and as a result, product listings fall into the no- or low-visibility zone. Among the 10 tips to check the SEO soundness of your product listings are checking robots.txt on every subdomain, not embedding HTML in the code of your feed and duplicating meta titles. (Search Engine Land)

Yahoo-Microsoft Search Alliance: Good or Bad for Search Marketing?

According to data Microsoft recently revealed about its Search Alliance with Yahoo, Bing gained major ground in the last five months of 2010, while Google flatlined. Despite this good news, there have been complaints about the Search Alliance and what it’s done to business relationships. Yahoo, meanwhile, continues to offer some unique value in its front end. However, Yahoo is expected to see its share of search ad revenues dip from 10.4 percent in 2010 to 8.1 percent in 2011. (WebProNews, eMarketer)

Yahoo/Microsoft Search Alliance: Enough to Draw Marketers Away from Google?

Will the Yahoo and Microsoft Search Alliance be able to lure marketers away from the dominant Google? The alliance is already off the ground in the U.S. and is set to take off in the U.K. by the end of the second quarter. In the U.S., the Search Alliance has boosted Yahoo and Microsoft’s share of paid-search impressions by 4 percent, and has increased its share of clicks by 2 percent. Nevertheless, both companies know that even with their powers combined, they must increase usage of their search engines. (Marketing Week)

Google, Yahoo and TRUSTe Advance Self-Regulation Plans

Google, Yahoo and TRUSTe have made progress in advancing self-regulation for online behavioral advertising. “Google and Yahoo are switching to the standard behavioral ad icon associated with the Digital Advertising Alliance’s self-regulatory initiative. Meanwhile, TRUSTe is trying to help consumers prevent online tracking by bad actors.” This is just a part of a bigger picture – one that involves cookies, “Do Not Track” and the FTC. (ClickZ)

What Social Media Marketing Teaches About Conversion Optimization

Conversion optimization has a lot to learn from social media marketing. “Social media thrives because it eschews” the superficial/artificial nature of traditional marketing. So, for example, marketers should take a page from social media and introduce real people on landing pages. Also, include testimonies from real people, with full names. (Search Engine Land)

Facebook Tests ‘Related Adverts’ Targeted Based on Status Updates and Wall Posts

Facebook is testing “Related Adverts” ad units, which target users based on the words used in their status updates and wall posts. In addition to this, “Related Stories” have also been introduced, a sidebar showing relevant posts from friends based on content found on a user’s wall posts. While “Related Adverts” is only appearing to a small number of users, it’s obviously something advertisers should get excited about. Facebook must be keen to the concerns its users may express if this effort is broadened. (Inside Facebook)

How to Keep Emails Relevant to Subscribers

Before recipients can unsubscribe from your marketing emails, is it possible to pre-empt this and re-engage them? HMV, for one, made an effort to make its emails more relevant to recipients. While its approach is flawed, it highlights a good idea that warrants some discussion. (Econsultancy)