The Week in Review

What DMARC Is and Why You Should Care

DMARC is a coalition formed by companies like Google, PayPal and Microsoft, with the goal of creating a standard for how email authentication is handled so brand owners can protect their domains from phishing. To clarify, DMARC isn’t a solution to the problem of spam. What DMARC does is end criminals’ ability to send emails from a domain they don’t own. (MediaPost)

SEO Audits That Get Results

“It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” This phrases holds a lot of weight when it comes to an SEO audit. Gauging your audience, being pithy, being specific and arranging the audit in logical sections are among the key aspects. (Outspoken Media)

Microsoft Gets Social With Display Ads

Microsoft is teaming with Bazaarvoice to work consumer reviews and ratings into its display ads. “It’s the first of several socialish capabilities the company will offer advertisers in the coming months.” (ClickZ)

How Search Engines Celebrated Valentine’s Day

Here’s a look at how the major search engines changed their look for Valentine’s Day. Included are Ask, Baidu, Dogpile, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. (Search Engine Watch)

How to Create a Natural Backlink Profile

Here are four things to do to make sure your website gets a natural backlink profile: 1) create a linkworthy site, 2) solve other people’s problems, 3) get links to different pages of your site and vary your text links, and 4) avoid automated backlink systems. (SEOprofiler Blog)

The Small-Business Social Media Cheat Sheet

This handy cheat sheet offers an overview of the major social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and Digg. It includes pros and cons of each, along with tips on how to start with each social network. (Flowtown)

Google Knowledge Graph Could Change Search Forever

Google doesn’t understand you. While the search engine is capable of giving you results based on the keywords you include in your query, it doesn’t understand the questions you throw at it. The future of Google, however, could be very different. When you ask about “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S.,” Google “will not only understand your lake question but know a lake is a body of water and tell you the depth, surface areas, temperatures and even salinities for each lake.” (Mashable)

Google’s Recent Domain Registrations

Among the domains Google has been registering lately are GoogleWebLab.com, ChromeWebLab.com, screenwisedirect.com and adwords-community.com. (Search Engine Land)

10 Ways to Get More Traffic, Attention and Higher Rankings via Social Sharing

Increasing the number of shares your content gets across social media has a significant impact on getting traffic, attention and higher rankings. Among the 10 tips for getting people to share your content across the social Web are to make social sharing buttons very visible on your site, ask readers to share your content via social channels and multiplying your social sharing reach with Triberr. (Quick Sprout)

Wikipedia Is on Page 1 of 99% of Google Searches

Wikipedia pages appear on the first page of 99 percent of Google searches, according to Intelligent Positioning. “Beyond that staggering number, Wikipedia is the No. 1 result on Google for 56 percent of searches, while 96 percent of searches saw Wikipedia in one of the top five positions.” (Search Engine Watch)

Facebook Testing Sponsored Action Stories

Facebook recently unveiled its Sponsored Stories initiative. Now the social network is allowing “action” posts to be turned into ads and placed prominently in tickers and News Feeds. (WebProNews)

Time-Saving Keyword Research

Keyword research if a crucial task that’s usually dreaded because of how much time it can involve. Here are some tips to help save time and frustration when it comes to keyword research: use a system, follow a set process, build up reserves, check analytics and throw rules out the window. (Search Engine People)

5 Must-Have SEO Skills

“Whether you’re considering working in the SEO industry, or you’re looking to hire an SEO, there are five must-have SEO skills.” They are: 1) technical SEO, 2) social media marketing, 3) link building, 4) usability and information architecture, and 5) content marketing. (Search Engine Watch)

Blogging Trumps Traditional Advertising for ROI

A case study found that inbound marketing outperformed Super Bowl ads. A client’s blog generated twice as much traffic as its TV ads did during the observed time period. “To make matters worse, the ads resulted in no online leads, only 7 phone calls, and zero opportunities or customer conversions.” Marketers should see this as a reminder to keep focused on inbound marketing. (HubSpot)

Keyword Research: How You’re Doing It Wrong

Keyword research isn’t as simple as picking a keyword, stuffing your site with it then building an abundance of links back to the site using the same keyword. Here’s a discussion of how to do it right, with SpongeBob as a prime example. (Social Media Today)

Getting the Right URL Structure

The No. 1 problem seen when doing SEO work for clients is poor URL structure. Here’s a look at the basics, from URL canonicalization, to file extensions in URLs, to word delimiters in URLs, to directories in URLs and more. (Graywolf’s SEO Blog)

5 Essential Spreadsheets for Social Media Analytics

If you deal with social media marketing, these five spreadsheets should come be helpful: 1) fetch Twitter search results, 2) count Facebook likes and shares, 3) compare Facebook pages, 4) monitor social media reputation, and 5) extract and archive your followers. (Mashable)

Email and Social Integration Is About Testing

Email and social integration isn’t just about technology – it’s about testing. This involves scaling objectives to your organization, identifying key metrics, testing and repeating tests. (MediaPost)

Capture Mobile-Driven Actions for Targeted Ad Results

Mobile adoption continues to rise, which means there’s a broadened opportunity to help businesses track and monetize consumers’ movement in the buying cycle. “To capitalize on this opportunity, marketers must harness the valuable feedback offered through the action-driven nature of mobile search and ad content.” This involves ensuring content is mobile-friendly, tracking responses and demographics for different types of ads, segmenting mobile browser vs. app users, and monitoring call durations and times. (Marketing Land)

Facebook’s IPO May Boost ROI for Advertisers

Facebook’s pending IPO will turn the heat up on the company to monetize its traffic more efficiently. This will mean new ad formats and improved ROI for advertisers. (AllFacebook)

Pinterest’s Affiliate-Link Practice Stirs Controversy

Pinterest is earning affiliate commission off of some of those images its users “pin” on its site. This is getting some heat from some users, though Skimlinks, the company that makes this affiliate income possible, makes the case that it isn’t a big deal. (Marketing Land)

How to Score Your Leads

Inbound marketing can attract loads of leads, but the challenge is how to separate the good from the less good. Enter lead management, and lead scoring specifically. Here’s a rundown, from identifying what makes for a marketing qualified lead, to point values, to determining what makes a score lead sales-ready. (HubSpot)

17 Little-Known Social Media Tools to Use

There’s a lot of clutter in the realm of social media, so here’s a look at 17 little-known tools you should check out. Included are EditFlow, TweetReach, TweetLevel, ReFollow and Traackr. (KISSmetrics)

Bing Testing New Search Results Layout

Bing is testing a new design for its search results. “The new design seems a lot cleaner, fresher and more organized compared to the older design.” Some of the key differences are the absence of vertical tabs, a different search button icon and the absence of location information. (Search Engine Land)

The Time for Content Marketing Is Now

SEO and content marketing should talk with each other more often. “While there is some modest overlap, by and large, the two worlds keep to themselves on blogs, twitter, and even with having separate conferences. This strikes me as a missed opportunity for both industries.” (distilled)