2010

In the last month there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about search engines changing their algorithms, social media sites tweaking their privacy settings and other ‘game changing’ internet marketing kerfuffles.

I picked 6 of the alleged changes that have folks talking, from SEO to social media, and rated each one on my personal truthiness scale

A fantastic article (as ever) from Ian Lurie, examining 6 trends/rumours about supposed changes in the online marketing world. From our experience, he’s absolutely bang on about every single one.

Well worth a read.

If you’re an SEO beginner, Google Webmaster Tools is a great place to start a site tuneup. If you’re buried in SEO minutiae and need to pull together some intelligent, actionable to-do items for your site, you could do a lot worse than signing in at Google.com/webmasters/tools

Do you use Google Webmaster Tools? You should, with the recent enhancements it’s become really invaluable.

Think you need to spend another 10,000 hours perfecting your writing skills? Probably not. Actually, the solution may be a lot easier than you expect.

Writing less and styling your text so it’s easy to read could be all you need to do to attract and hold attention.

Nothing new or particularly ground-breaking in this article, but some good advice anyway on making it easier to engage readers of your content.

Google’s new emphasis on local makes perfect sense when you clearly understand consumer behavior and how users research online before transacting offline: 95% of retail transactions are offline but 70% to 90% of online consumers research on the internet (depending on the category) before making purchase decisions and heading into stores.

Great article on where Google are at with local search at the moment. Google have obviously been ploughing a huge amount of resources into local search. The new format for presenting local searches, for example, shows a big shift in focus.

We’ve been attempting to track these changes and how they translate to SEO, and the pace of change is so great that even as professional online marketers, we’re struggling to keep up! It seems the rules change on a daily basis.

I cringe when I read copy that drags on and on, is full of lingo and clichés, or that seems to be trying too hard.

So when I come across a site that has copy that doesn’t beat around the bush, is honest and sincere, and reflects the company’s brand in every which way, I give a cheer for the writers.

What do you reckon? Which other websites have great, stand out copy?

Many of us have been faced with the conundrum of how to collect email newsletter signups offline. I mean, nobody really enjoys manually transcribing hand-scribbles and business cards, do they? So it’s with a big dose of relief that we were introduced to Counter Culture, an iPad app, specifically for collecting subscribes in-store, at events or quite simply, IRL.

If you ever collect email addresses from people in-store, or at events, etc. (or even if you haven’t but should have!), this iPad app looks simply amazing.

Just $4.99, and even works offline – it syncs your collected email addresses once you get connection again.

Well worth a look see.

In short, both Google and Bing do use some of these signals in their organic web search ranking algorithm

In days gone by, good old-fashioned ‘backlinks as votes’ were pretty much Google’s primary way of determining the relevance and quality of web pages.

That situation hasn’t changed, but sure as eggs are eggs, Google are most certainly working on newer ways to decide which pages to rank above others.

More than ever, ordinary users have the power to let the search engines know which websites they find valuable, without ever having to give traditional backlinks (and in fact, most users of social media wouldn’t know how to give a link anyway), via Like buttons, re-tweets, etc.

That’s not to say Twitter and Facebook should be part of an SEO campaign. It should be part of your overall online marketing efforts for your business, with increasing knock-on benefits for SEO.