SEO Web Tips blog

Using Social Media To Reach New Car Buyers

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:30:27 +0000

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, have a greater reach among new-vehicle prospects than search engines or portals, according to a new report from J.D. Power and Associates.

Automotive marketers that establish a presence on social networking sites can be effective at finding and targeting new- vehicle buyers. Using tactics such as creating profiles or fan pages on these sites may increase chances for interaction with prospective customers. It is important for marketers to know that obvious advertising on social networking sites tends to be received negatively by the target audience.

Highlights of the report include:

· One-third of buyers visit an automotive brand site or third-party site six months or more prior to making a vehicle purchase, while two-thirds of buyers have visited at least one of those types of sites three months prior to purchase.
· Nearly one in five buyers (19 percent) who shop online first turn to dealer sites, with 41 percent first visiting manufacturer Web sites and 40 percent visiting third-party automotive sites first.
· New-vehicle buyers who shop online consider 2.9 vehicles, on average.

“Social media is now shaping customer expectations in any and every way,” said Chance Parker, vice president and general manager of the Web Intelligence Division at J.D. Power and Associates.

“Listening to social media is increasingly on people’s radar screens and people are scrambling to understand it. It’s not enough simply to count the buzz, it is important to understand what that buzz really means to your brand.”

Google Launches Website Translator Gadget

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:26:24 +0000

Google has introduced a new tool aimed at helping webmasters expand their global audience.

The company has introduced a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that allows webmasters to make their site’s content available in 51 languages.

When Internet users visit a website and if their language is different than the language on the page, they will be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the language of the visitor is the same as the language on the page no translation banner will be displayed.

After clicking the Translate button, the automatic translations are shown directly on the page. It’s fairly simple to install by cutting and pasting a short snippet into the webpage.

Bing Now The Fastest Growing Search Engine

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:15:34 +0000

While Google continues to dominate the U.S. search market, Microsoft’s Bing has become the fastest growing search engine among the top ten providers, according to a recent report from Nielsen.

August 2009 data found total searches on MSNWindows Live/Bing Search increased 22.1 percent month-over-month making it the fastest growing search engine. Share of searches for Bing increased from 9 percent in July to 10.7 percent in August.

Google continued as the top search engine, with 7 billion searches and 64.6 percent search share. Google’s search share grew 2.6 percent month-over-month.

Yahoo landed in the second spot with 16 percent of all searches in August, but its month-over-month dipped 4.2 percent.

AOL captured 3.1 percent of the search market with month-over-month growth of 1.8 percent.

Ask rounded out the top five with 1.7 percent of the search share and month-over-month growth of 2.9 percent.

Yahoo Rolls Out New Search, Mail Features

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:21:21 +0000

Yahoo has announced it is improving three of its most popular global products, including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger and is testing a new Yahoo Search results page.

The test of the search results page is available randomly to users worldwide. The new features include a results filtering option that offers new tools for refining search results, such as exploring related concepts and narrowing results by different types of content such as people, videos and discussion forums.

Other features include intelligent search results that offer a more relevant experience based on prior searches. It is powered by search session science that detects intent by looking at search behavior over time.

Some of the highlights of Yahoo Mail include:

Streamlined Design - A new Application Box that people can personalize to fit their needs combines Calendar, Notepad and third-party apps, providing a cleaner, more streamlined inbox and making it easier to manage e-mail folders.

Enhanced Photo Sharing - New multi-select and drag-and-drop functionality makes it dramatically easier to attach more photos to e-mail, view thumbnail previews and rotate pictures.

Improvements to Yahoo Messenger include:

Video Calls - New high-quality video calling enables full-screen, face-to-face chats at no cost, using the familiar and easy-to-use Yahoo! Messenger environment.

Updates Tab - A new tab helps people easily discover Updates from friends and family, including status updates, recent Flickr uploads, Yahoo! Buzz stories, Twitter updates and more.

New Yahoo! Insider - Now customizable by zip code, this re-designed welcome window provides Messenger users with easy access to localized news and weather, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Buzz and Yahoo! Search.

Bing Making Slight Progress

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:08:18 +0000

Bing again slightly increased the Microsoft share of the US search market in July to 9.41 percent from 8.23 percent in June according web analytics firm StatCounter.

Sure Bing still has a long way to go to even come close to being a treat to Google, but an increase is better than going in the other direction.

Microsoft and Yahoo combined took 20.36 percent of the search market, up slightly from 19.27 percent in June.

Google unsurprisingly still has the lead of the US market with 77.54 percent in July. (78.48% in June).

“Bing continues to make slow but steady progress but the combined Yahoo! figures suggests that the deal announced last week will have to demonstrate major future synergies if it is to make any dent in Google’s dominance,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO and founder, StatCounter.

The challenge for Microsoft and Yahoo is even tougher in the global market. Microsoft and Yahoo combined took 8.77 percent of the global search market in July. Google still rules the search market globally with 89.23 percent in July.

Social Networkers In Russia Globe’s Most Engaged

Mike Sachoff — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:00:38 +0000

People in Russia are big fans of social networking, in fact they are the most engaged users in the world, according to a new study from comScore.

The study found social networking users in Russia spend 6.6 hours and view 1,307 pages per visitor per month.

Of the 1.1 billion people age 15 and older worldwide who accessed the Internet from a home or work location in May 2009, 734.2 million visited at least one social networking site during the month, representing 65 percent of the global Internet audience.

The Russian social networking audience had the highest engagement among the 40 individual countries reported by comScore. Brazil ranked close behind at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours).

“Social networking has become a popular online pastime not only in mature Internet markets like North America, but also in developing, high-growth Internet markets such as Russia,” said Mike Read, SVP & managing director, comScore Europe.

“In a country as geographically large as Russia, social networking represents a way of connecting people from one corner of the country to the other. The highly engaged behavior of social networkers in Russia offers significant opportunity for marketers and advertisers seeking to reach these audiences.”

Of the 31.9 million people who accessed the Internet in Russia in April, 18.9 million visited at least one social networking site, representing a reach of 59 percent of the total online population.

The most popular of these sites was Russian-based Vkontakte.ru with 14.3 million visitors, followed by Odnoklassniki.ru (7.8 million visitors), Mail.ru – My World (6.3 million visitors) and Fotostrana.ru (1.6 million visitors). Facebook.com attracted 616,000 Russian visitors, up 277 percent versus year ago.

10 Web Search Engine Ranking Tips to Improve Traffic Conversions

admin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:19:45 +0000

It’s a fact that if your product or service is not appearing in the top 10 SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) used to find your site, then your competition is there taking all the hits. SEO or Search Engine Optimization techniques are not rocket science; they can be implemented by anyone requiring increasing the exposure of their web site business.

You may have decided to pay an SEO company to do the legwork here. It’s actually possible with just some simple application to do the work quickly and effectively by yourself. SEO is all about optimization and is crucial for success on the web.

By optimization I mean two types of organic methods: On-Page Optimization and Off-Page Optimization. This can be achieved without using PPC plans (Pay per Click) which can cost a lot of money.

On-Page optimization involves editing the web site code and content – keyword research, choosing the best keywords used to find your business and coupling this with relevant content that is useful to your readers. In the code, the keyword and key phrases form part of the Meta tags and should also be in the Home Page title bar. Each page should be optimized according to the keyword that matches the content.

Off-Page Optimization involves back linking from quality sites that sell or display information related to your business. This is best achieved through contextual one-way links to your site from a high traffic site where your target audience will browse for information on your products. One-way links shine bright in the eyes of Google, if they are relevant.
Be aware of these 10 points in order to avoid a bad SEO plan or worse a bad SEO company, or even worse again – getting banned by Google:

1. No black hat techniques, don’t buy into link farms that just send traffic, you will not receive converting visitors.

2. Ensure you have your own web site domain rather than relying on free sites and article directories like Squidoo and Hubpages. These are good but use them to drive one-way traffic to a landing page on your own web site domain.

3. Ensure your Meta tags contain relevant descriptions. These should contain your keywords derived from your keyword research. Use Wordtracker to find out what daily searches contain those keywords, you may need to optimize further.

4. The content must be original, avoid duplicate content. Notice I am using the word ‘relevant’ a lot here, the reason being is that it’s often overlooked in favor of keyword density – forget it, you risk being banned if you use keyword stuffing techniques. Generally 3 to 5 key phrases (assuming long tail e.g. popular online games) per 500 to 1000 words.

5. Create blogs and mini-sites related to your niche that all serve your market with back links to your main business web site. This is a good time to use Squidoo, blogger and Hubpages as they are very high traffic sites. Include back links to your site in your bio.

6. Add ALT tags to all your images with relevant words related to your web page.

7. Submit a press release highlighting your product benefits to the top press release networks such as PRWeb and URLwire. If you don’t know how to prepare one, consult lulu.com as it teaches you the basics.

8. Create discussions on facebook and MySpace related to your niche and invite potential customers to voice their questions, concerns, etc. Include back links to your site in your bio.

9. Promote your web site services in free high traffic classified ads such as USFreeads. Include back links to your site in your bio.

10. Offer support to people needing your products by finding questions on Yahoo Answers and showing them the solution with a link to your site and a reason to visit. Be honest, show the benefits.

What’s next? Simple, rinse and repeat for every product you are marketing on your site. SEO is a long term marketing plan. You will reap the rewards if you can play the game and set out to dominate the search engines in your niche.

Facebook Sees 700 Percent Increase In Growth

Mike Sachoff — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:22:27 +0000

In the U.S. the total minutes spent on social networking sites has increased 83 percent year-over-year, according to a new report from Nielsen Online.

Total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009, making it the No. 1 social networking site for the month.

“We have seen some major growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace. Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space. The one thing that is clear about social networking is that regardless of how fast a site is growing or how big it is, it can quickly fall out of favor with consumers,” said Jon Gibs, vice president, online media and agency insights.

“Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force? Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune. Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment’s notice.”

While Facebook is now the most popular social network, MySpace has been doing well with its online video. With 120.8 million video streams, MySpace was the No. 1 social networking destination when ranked by streams and total minutes viewing video on the site, with an average of 38.8 minutes per viewer.

In comparison, Facebook visitors spent only 113.5 million minutes viewing video in April, with an average of 11.2 minutes per video viewer.

“So maybe the better question to ask is who does each site reach–not who is ‘winning.’ What audiences are they drawing and how are they building for the future to maintain the loyalty of their visitors, who to this point have shown little long-term loyalty to any specific platform,” said Gibs.

Facebook Gets $200 Million In Funding

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:52:59 +0000

Facebook has landed a $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies (DST), an Internet investment group with significant stakes in Eastern European and Russian Internet businesses.

The investment in Facebook is in exchange for preferred stock, representing a 1.96 percent equity stake at a $10 billion valuation.

“This investment demonstrates Facebook’s ongoing success at creating a global network for people to share and connect,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“We’ve worked hard to bring more than 200 million people – 70 percent outside of the U.S. – onto Facebook to share with friends, family and co-workers. A number of firms approached us, but DST stood out because of the global perspective they bring – backed up by the impressive growth and financial achievements of their Internet investments. We’re looking forward to working with the DST team.”

In addition, DST has indicated that it is planning to offer to purchase at least $100 million of Facebook common stock from existing common stockholders that would facilitate liquidity for current and former employees’ vested shares in the company.

The details of the plan are expected to be announced to eligible participants during the summer.

“Our investment experience in other regions reveals the tremendous value social networking companies create as they redefine how people communicate and interact,” said Yuri Milner, chief executive of DST.

Half Of Mobile Users Access Content Weekly

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:02:15 +0000

Just over half (51%) of mobile phone users access content using their mobile phone on a weekly basis, according to a new study by Magid Associates.

Mobile content consumers spend about the same amount of time with content (39 minutes) as the average user does texting (38 minutes) or talking on their mobile phone (44 minutes).

Mobile users are no longer using their phones just for communication, instead their using them to manage entertainment, news, and social information important to their lives.

Overall the most popular mobile content being accessed is news, weather and sports scores. The majority of mobile social networking is among 12-34 year olds, while news consumption is dominated (79%) by 18-54 year olds.

“Young people are driving a lot of the mobile content usage,” said Vicki Cohen, Executive Vice President.

“Anything entertainment oriented is a draw for the younger demo — games, music, movie times, entertainment news — it all exhibits a big opportunity for companies targeting younger demographic groups.”

The tween and teen markets are significant revenue opportunities. Twelve to seventeen year-olds are particularly interested in consuming mobile content; seventy-two percent do so weekly. Of these, fifty-two percent buy content regularly, while only 39 percent of all content users do the same.

Non-users of content say they are most put off by the cost of accessing mobile content; however content relevancy is just as important. Fifty-two percent of non-users (versus 22% of users) said they do not feel a need to access mobile content when they are away from more traditional content outlets.

“Lack of familiarity with mobile content and no clear perception of value are the primary barriers for non-users, who are more likely to be older Americans. The perception that it has to do with the handset isn’t entirely true,” says Jill Rosengard Hill, Senior Vice President.

“41 percent of those who don’t have a smart phone are accessing mobile news, music, and playing mobile games.”