Google Blocks Child Abuse Images on 100,000 Search Terms
Google will block more than 100,000 unique search terms that could lead to the discovery of child abuse images. Google has added 200 people dedicated to finding and removing sex abuse images. Microsoft is also preparing to announce its own efforts.
Rand & Wil Answer the Newbie’s Questions: ‘What is Content’ by Our Favorite CEOs
My name is Charlotte, and I have been working in SEO for the past 2 years and still consider myself very new to the SEO world. When we were told that the CEO swap was really going to happen, I decided to put together 10 questions to ask Rand and Wil about a topic that really matters […]
Google: 25,000 Government Requests for Data in First Half of 2013
Data released by Google shows that requests rose from 21,389 to 25,879 between the second half of 2012 and the first half of 2013. In total 42,500 user accounts were targeted and Google said 65 percent of requests led to some data being given up.
Google’s Matt Cutts: Don’t Duplicate Your Meta Descriptions
Google’s Matt Cutts, the head of search spam, released a video today providing an SEO tip on meta descriptions. Matt said, do not have duplicate meta descriptions on your site. Matt said it is better to have unique meta descriptions and even no meta descriptions at all, then to show duplicate…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google Wins Book Lawsuit: Judge Rules Digitization Service ‘Fair Use’
Google has won its eight-year battle with The Authors Guild over its Books service, with a judge ruling that Google’s use of copyrighted material was allowed under fair use. Google lets users search and view “snippets” of more than 20 million books.
After Two Years Of Broken Promises, Does Google Need To Explain More to Maintain Trust In Search?
For two years running, Google’s broken major promises about search. It began doing paid inclusion in 2012, which it once called “evil.” This year, it’s experimenting with banner ads it said would never be allowed. Both represent major philosophical shifts for the company…
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Make Way for YouTube Partner Channels in Online Video Rankings
The latest data from comScore showed that 189 million Americans, 87.1 percent of the U.S. Internet audience, watched 49.1 billion online content videos in October 2013, while the number of video ad views totaled 24.5 billion that month.
Was There A Google Update On November 14th?
Some of the automated tracking tools for detecting shifts in Google’s search results and thus showing evidence of a Google update went haywire on Thursday, November 14th.
Mozcast reported 102 degrees…
A Few Methods for Generating Online Marketing Ideas
Generating online marketing ideas that stick quickly becomes intimidating in the marketing strategy process, especially since it’s the phase at the very beginning. Image Credit The path to be taken from the initial idea to the final product for absolutely any idea is a long journey where one often looks back and says, “that turned […]
Brands over-dependent on SEO and social for content marketing
Too many brands are relying on SEO and social in a way which places the onus of branded content discovery on the consumer, requiring them to actively search for the brand’s content or leaving it to chance that they’ll stumble across it through social media platforms.
Given that around 95% of B2B and 97% of B2C companies in the UK are practising some form of content marketing, it pays for brands to take a more active approach to getting their content in front of their target users.
“If you build it, they will come” doesn’t cut the content marketing mustard.
Brands and marketers with experience in content marketing are aware of the need to actively promote their content to supplement search and social. They also understand that a concerted content marketing strategy is necessary to generate a strong ROI on content creation.
Brands can drive traffic to their content and build positive relationships with consumers by remembering a few content marketing tactics:
1. There’s more to life than SEO
SEO is, of course, fundamental to any digital marketing strategy, but there’s no guarantee on it being sufficient to drive significant traffic to branded content.
Used effectively, good SEO enables consumers who are looking for something specific to find it easily and click through to a website for more information. The best SEO is most effective when executed with extreme precision.
However, brands with a real understanding of content marketing know that the content they create is often only loosely related to the core keywords of their brand. For example, a leading bread brand might create an article for their site on the tastiest lunchtime sandwich fillings.
Yet with recent updates to search algorithms, it’s far more likely that consumers searching “tastiest lunchtime sandwich fillings” will be taken to content from a company who makes the tasty sandwich fillings, not the bread.
That’s one of the reasons why, according to research by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), only 45% of businesses rate their SEO ranking as a top measurement criterion for content marketing success. There’s more to content marketing than SEO alone.
2. Get the content out there
The main organisational goal for UK companies who undertake content marketing is brand awareness. Lead generation and boosted website traffic aren’t even in the top three things companies hope to achieve with content marketing.
According to the research by the CMI and DMA, promoting the content to raise brand awareness is what companies care about most. So it’s insufficient to merely promote it with some tweets if the company has only a few hundred followers.
Equally, there’s little value in brands developing content for their blog if it only receives ten hits per day. The content must be promoted, whether by emailing it to consumers who’ve opted in to receiving information from brands, or to prospective customers via content discovery platforms which enable marketers to place ads linking to branded content natively within relevant digital editorial.
Promoting content with ad formats which sit natively within relevant content ensures that the branded content is seen as part of a user’s browsing experience, rather than feeling like they’re seeing an ad.
3. Make the most of other relevant editorial
To communicate effectively with consumers, marketers have to seed their branded content around the internet in a way which reflects the many different ways digital content is being consumed.
The content marketing strategy must be compatible with consumers’ content consumption habits. Whilst some consumers actively search for a brand’s content, or come across it via a social media contact, many consumers move from one piece of content to the next via relevant links at the bottom of articles.
Brands and marketers who position their content within relevant editorial are maximising the likelihood of consumers clicking to their content and initiating relationships with the brand.
4. Rework, rewrite, repurpose
The CMI and DMA research discovered that companies in the UK cite ‘producing enough content’ and ‘producing engaging content’ as their top two challenges in content marketing.
It’s an issue partly because of how naively many businesses approach content marketing, assuming that they have to create new, shiny, high-quality content – whether articles, video, or images – on a regular basis and at great cost.
Many companies are overlooking the ways they can repurpose existing content to maximise ROI. A talented copywriter can turn the research conducted in order to write one feature article into several features, each making the same brand-consistent points in a diverse number of ways.
Similarly, a decent video editor knows how to turn a recorded internal meeting on new product developments into an engaging three minute Q&A to go on the company’s YouTube page. Ensuring you have access to talented content creators – whether in-house or outsourced – is crucial to developing a sustainable content marketing strategy for your brand.
5. Listen to your audience
By analysing comprehensive metrics of consumer interaction with the branded content marketers can assess which types of content are having the most impact with consumers and ensure future content fits this mould.
A home gym equipment manufacturer might find that consumers are significantly more likely to share and interact with their “Top 10 Worst Things About Public Gyms” content than their “Top 10 Best Things About Having A Home Gym” article.
This insight enables the creative teams to tweak their content creation towards what consumers actively want to engage with. Content discovery platforms which promote branded content enable brands to assess metrics such as duration of interaction with the content, viral activity, and the sources and volume of traffic.
If a certain type of content is failing to generate a response from consumers, it can be retired, in favour of the types of content which are garnering more attention. Good content discovery platforms are also geared for real-time updates, meaning marketers can place ads which display fresh, relevant, on-trend branded content which can display with each refresh of the page.
When executed effectively, content marketing can be a powerful tool in building brand awareness, and enables brands to build and maintain valuable relationships with consumers. Yet brands must be proactive about promoting their content, and can’t afford to simply rely on consumers to find the content.
An SEO and social media focussed content marketing strategy simply can’t provide the same guarantees for brands as actively pushing the content to ensure the quality content marketers have spent time and money creating is going to be seen by consumers.
7 Ways Your Content Can Increase Facebook Engagement
A study conducted via Facebook set out to investigate what type of content was more effective to engage the target audience for an advertiser on social media. Here are seven key points from their findings and some recommended actions you can take.
Google & Microsoft Agree To Block Child Sexual Abuse Material From Search Results
The Mail Online reports Google and Microsoft Bing have adjusted their search results to block child pornography and other child sexual abuse content from being accessible through their search engines. The news is being widely covered, some claiming tha…
How & When You Can Turn SEM From A Checkbox To A Core Business Component
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is no longer a “nice to have” for businesses, but rather a “must have.” This wasn’t the case 10 years ago, when SEM got dumped into the “test budget” if there was any money left over after TV, radio, print, out-of-home,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
The Google House?
What is going on with Google? Google barges, floating show rooms, renting out spaces throughout various cities and now “The Google House”?
Publishers Slow To Try Google AdSense Experiments
Earlier this month, Google launched AdSense Experiments, an automated and seamless way to test variations in ads so that you can see what types of ads earn you more money.
Google’s Future Based On Interface Tests?
Last week, Dr. Pete at Moz posted Future SERP: A Glimpse at Google 2014. What he did was look at a bunch of the more recent Google interface tests, many we have been covering
Google & Bing To Block Child Pornography Terms & More
The news this morning is that Google and Microsoft are working together to with the UK’s National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation to block and prevent child pornography images and other abusive images from their search engines…
In Quality Raters’ Handbook, Google Adds Higher Standards For “Your Money Or Your Life” Websites
Google’s continuing push toward identifying expertise and authority on the web takes another step in the form of a new type of website/landing page classification: “Your Money or Your Life.” It’s explained in detail in a new version of Google’s “Search Quality…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Claim 2014s Biggest Easy Traffic Opportunity in 3 Easy Steps
Want to quickly grow traffic from the content you already have or what you already rank for? This guide to auditing your existing content will give you the best possible chance of ranking it to attract as much traffic as humanly possible.
Building High Quality Backlinks with Dofollow Relationship
Had a request to write an article specifically about this topic: how to build high quality links with a “dofollow” relationship. Of course, “dofollow” is a figurative label we apply to any link that a search engine is likely to follow and allow to pass value. There remains, to this day, no “rel=’dofollow’” link attribute in the standards. I think that still has to be said because we are starting to mentally blot out the basic facts of link architecture. A link is just a reference to a document. It neither conveys sentiment nor measures quality. Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally tested their citation-analysis link strategy against a very small set of documents, found only on the Stanford University Website, which were anything but representative of the Web in general. Manipulative links already existed in volume before Page and Brin typed up their little white paper on PageRank. Paid links were already rampant on the Web. When Google stepped into the search space, it was easy fodder for link spammers and their SERPs made that plain and clear. Nonetheless, despite the many spankings that spammers handed to the Google engineers over the past 15 years, they have persisted with […]