SEOMOZ just had a HUGE study of the future of SEO and here are the findings:

SEO strategies on the decline:

• exact match domain names
• effectiveness of paid links
• anchor text in external links

WebBizIdeas.com summary:  basically building crappy links in article directories & paid links are coming to an end

SEO strategies on the increase:

• content readability / usability / design
• usage dat (CTR, bounce reate, etc…) (big increase)
• social signals at domain level (will increase the largest)
• analysis of perceived value to users (will increase the largest)
• social signals at a page level (will increase the largest)

WebBizIdeas summary: If people actually want to find, read, and use your website it is going to rank #1.

Here is SEOMOZ Full Report:

Image coutesy of Burt K

Business is increasingly moving to social media. This allows business of any size to engage directly with their target market and done correctly can create a lasting relationship. We wanted to highlight a story from TechCrunch and it’s overview of six business case studies.

Out Take

It’s great to see case studies like this popup. One of the things we like to do with case studies is to tear them apart and find one thing that we can take an employee in our own business. Years ago when I started reading business books I made a practice to write down key ideas that go beyond that—find ways that I could implement these ideas in my business professional life. We suggest you do the same thing with the six case studies.

Google Seller Ratings

Google introduced seller ratings to its growing lot of ad extensions last month. In addition to titles, prices, and thumbnail images, a searcher now gets treated to a 1 to 5 scale indicating past customers’ satisfaction with a particular merchant. A great roundup from Paul Burani on this move.

Our Take

As with all things Google you know this went through a series of testing. As Facebook steamrolls towards 500 Million members and super high engagement Google house to take notice. The next step for Facebook could be merging social media and shopping. We already know that one of the biggest reasons why people choose to follow companies and Brands within social media is for special deals in special offers.

Is it that far of the leap to think that this could be used as a direct channel for sales. Now we know social media is not for selling but if it was inherent within the experience this could be a game changer. All we have to do is look towards games like Farmvillle to see how social media has changed a dynamic. Social networks have virtually made some of the biggest names in the casual gaming world. Why couldn’t this be done for E-commerce?

Twitter is considering offering a product where users would pay to have their accounts promoted on the website, All Things Digital reported recently. How it would work and whether the users would pay per added follower or a base rate is unclear. Studies have been conducted by Sysomos. The firm recently looked at the authority rankings of five celebrities, five social media heavyweights and five media organizations – and focused on the kind of Twitter users who follow these people. It determined while celebrities have a large number of followers, most of them are low authority users. View More here >.

Mom and Motherhood Market

The motherhood market is both graying and greening, according to a new report from Experian Marketing Services, and the changes are fairly sweeping. Do you sell to this market? If so this story is worth a read.

Facebook claims (Facebook Market Research, Q4 2009) to reach 65 percent of all moms online in the U.S., and to have 17 million mom users who have kids at home. They tell us that 94 percent of moms use Facebook at least once a week, and 53 percent of Facebook moms have children under the age of 5. How does Facebook stack up in the Mom market?

Social Circles in Real Life

I saw this great slide presentation a 216-slides-with-footnotes presentation posted on SlideShare, Google UX researcher Paul Adams. He covered quite a few points from social circles, how we interact with people online and offline, ties of relationship. I enjoyed it and we talk mainly about that presentation. View the slides and check out the podcast here.

NPV, Buzz on a comback, Attorney’s spend money on digital and cause marketing.

Is buzz on it’s way for a comeback? Tech blogger Robert Scoble appears to think Buzz may be ready for a comeback (it did start with much hype, but that has since faded out for the most part). He wrote an interesting post highlighting 9 reasons why such a comeback could be possible. Among these are superior mobile features (compared to other social networks), the addition of features in general (he says its getting “close to matching FriendFeed”, a service Facebook found significant enough to acquire itself), a good search tool, and possible SEO opportunities to name a few.

The New York-based plaintiffs’ firm set up websites with names like bigspills.com, oilspillclaims.com and oil-rig-explosions.com, and it filled them with news related to the disaster and invitations for visitors to provide their names and contact information. More than 1,000 people have now completed the forms on the websites, and Parker Waichman, which has 23 lawyers, has filed about a dozen suits related to the oil disaster. view the full story here >>

Cause marketing. As the popularity of social media continues to grow, the opportunity for having millions of eyeballs engaged and pushing an organization’s messaging or specific cause is moving marketers to constantly devise new strategies for driving the call to action. View this story here also a good example of this Toms Shoes.

Bing is not giving in even though Google–the king of the hill–continues to knock them down. With Google’s recent announcement that Caffeine is in full release it’s Bing’s turn to talk about it’s future releases.

Bing Webmaster

First from Bing is a no cost toolset for websites and webmasters. It’s built on Microsoft Silverlight 4 and with feedback from webmasters and others with SEO knowledge. Part of this release is the “Index Explorer”, think tree view for webmasters to see how Bing is crawling their site.

There could potentially be huge news here. First this looks like it will allow webmasters to access specific items and management controls. URL blocking, cache blocking, and even possible re-crawl requests. If this is something that catches on I’d expect Google Webmaster Tools to follow suit.

Real Time and Social Search Results

Bing released in May real time results. This new search is called Bing Social and can be found here. Social and real time results is really the next frontier for both Google and Bing and I would anticipate we will see tremendous growth in these spaces.

What Does This Mean?

Now more than ever does it matter that you have a social strategy. A strategy that focuses on trusted accounts and connecting with your target market. It used to be just a nice extra to be on Twitter but now if you want want a total digital solution it’s a must. There’s also the advent of searching within Facebook. We’ve mentioned before this is the true power of the platform.

In closing keep Bing on your radar and check to see what you opportunities make be as they continue to keep relevant.

Jason Baer from Convince&Convert had a great post yesterday on the Opportunity Economy. Here is the best example I’ve seen of this in a long while:

Musician Dave Carroll has been widely lauded for his “United Breaks Guitars” YouTube video that has now been seen more than 8.5 million times, and takes United Airlines out behind the woodshed for a musical ass-kicking. And while Carroll’s demonstration of the power of a single, scorned customer will populate business text books for decades, there’s another, better angle to the story.
Just 4 days after the United Breaks Guitars video launched, Bob Taylor and the folks at Taylor Guitars in San Diego (the brand played by Dave Carroll and broken by United), launched a “video response” on YouTube. Titled “Taylor Guitars Responds to United Breaks Guitars” it features an unedited Bob Taylor in the factory unspooling an array of helpful tidbits about airline rules, TSA guidelines, and the protective qualities of guitar cases. Useful and appropriate. And then the video wraps up with a reminder from Bob that the Taylor Guitars factory service center can repair all makes and models of guitars, not just Taylor’s and that they’ve seen it all. Guitars that were thought to be ruined, were brought back to life by the nurturing hands of the Taylor team. 450,000 views on YouTube, and counting

Taking advantage of this opportunity is understanding a couple of key elements. First that your response has to be extremely value based. Second, you have to be relevant to the topic and conversation, third you have to be authentic.

How Do You Take Advantage of That?

The first step in which you already should have accepted is that you have to become a content creator. You have to set up your organization, your business, and yourself to create content at a moment’s notice. Also you have to focus on understanding your target market and understand the opportunities that may present themselves for you to add value and be relevant. Let’s go a little deeper and go over how to implement this.

Step one is you have to listen. Setting up alerts within vertical networks, web alerts, and staying in tune with conversations in relation to your target market or brand. This should be the first step in any social engagement plan but is even more important when you look to engage in real time.

How many friend and friend details can we possibly track? With how many friends – or brands – can we sustain meaningful engagement? Using a loose definition of “friend” including those whose updates or status we follow on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and other social networks or communities, the attention required to manage all those updates has grown in multiple and exponential ways.

So what does this mean for you if you are trying to a build a meaningful relationship with your target market? Here’s a few tips to keep focused on what is important as more people start using social as a channel and more consumers start tuning it out.

Relevancy

Keep what you do relevant to your followers or groups. People go through peaks and valleys with social media. I’ve seen news lately of people doing what is called “social media cleanup” where they go through and unfriend people they don’t truly know. For you to make the  cut you want to make sure you have relevancy. If someone is doing some cleanup within their social network you want them to look at your name and instinctively know they are getting value and something from the relationship.

Value

Focus on delivering value to your target market. Value in information and value in entertainment. This is often overlooked but is important. People spend time in social media to connect and have fun. They will tolerate your interactions as a business only if you play by these rules. So knowing what is important to your target market and what they find valuable will be the key.

Consistency

Being consistent in your communications and delivering what you promised when someone started following is also important. If someone goes through their friends or follower list and starts checking and notices you only interact once a week–that might not be enough for their expectations. If you are consistently giving valuable and relevant information someone will have no reason not to unfriend or unfollow you.

3 Core Elements

While these three core elements are the backbone of any social media campaign they also play a role in the value that someone gets from following you or your company. Focus on excelling at each one of these by understanding the needs and wants of your target market.

I recently saw a story that illustrates the power of social media. Instead of doing some Monday morning quarterbacking–which to me is never a fair type of interaction let’s discuss this objectively.

The first is from At&T wireless and Giorgio G. He had a few complaints about his iPhone wireless service. Most of us would complain to our friends, maybe on Facebook or Twitter but he went to the top. He sent an email to CEO Randall Stephenson, not once but twice. After the second email he received a phone call from AT&T thanking him but also offering if he contacts the CEO again that they would issue a cease and desist letter.

Given that information what do you think someone in this modern connected world would do? Giorgio posted it on his website and it quickly went viral.

Take Away

You’ll hear many people say that when you enter social media that you lose control. That’s true to a point – you do lose control of what people say about you and your messaging. There is one thing you don’t lose control of and that is your response.

You control if you respond or if you don’t. You control the tone, the frequency, and medium. Instead of me giving advice I’d just say before you send out any customer relation communication just make sure it adds value, is authentic, and can be clearly justified.

You Might Get Slapp[ed]

strategic lawsuit against public participation, or Slapp, are meritless defamation suits – meritless because unless someone is outright lying about a specific incident the First Amendment gives people the right to voice opinions. (check out this from New York Times)

The bill, in the House Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy, would allow someone who believes he is being sued for speaking out or petitioning on a public matter to seek to have the suit dismissed, the Time reported. If a case is dismissed for being a Slapp, the plaintiff would have to pay the defendant’s legal fees.

While it’s unclear on the direction of this bill it is still something we have to watch out for.

Keeping organized is a major component of promotional marketing.  When you’re dealing with thousands of bloggers, figuring out who wrote what, when to send out a product, and how you should rate your bloggers is critical.  We developed a control panel that shows all the stats necessary in a simple to follow format.

Promoters Control Panel: Overview of Promotions

When logging into tomoson.com you will first be able to see an overview of your promotions and what’s happening with them.  This birds eye view tells everything from how many promotions you have to what products you need to ship out.  Each of the promotions on the overview page will have links going directly to the stat or information details.  The best part of the overview is you can see the total POTENTIAL traffic, twitter followers, and facebook friends who are part of your promotional network.

WIREFRAME OF PROMOTION OVERVIEW CONTROL PANEL

Promoters Control Panel: Blogger Stats

As a promoter you want to know what each of the bloggers are doing for each promotion.  The blogger stats page will show who is writing reviews, if you need to enter a tracking number on a product shipped, and the traffic each blogger has.  After each blogger writes a review you can view each review, see the amount of keywords written in the review, and if the blogger created any links tracing back to your website.

Shipping products is also easy with the control panel.  From the blogger stats page you can mass upload tracking numbers using an excel csv file.  This way you can manage large numbers of products being shipped daily.  The system can also export blogger shipping information into the same easy to manage csv file.   This can be uploaded to any shipping module like stamps.com for quick shipments.

WIREFRAME BLOGGER STATS

Blogger Control Panel: Overview of Promotions

Bloggers can also see what’s going on with the promotions they’ve applied to.   An easy to view display will show if they’ve completed all the steps to apply for a product and when they need to review a product.  When a promoter ships a product the blogger he/she gets notified and can log back into the system to see the tracking number.  Once the review is written the blogger can verify the review on the system with a few clicks.

WIREFRAME BLOGGER CONTROL PANEL

Next week we will be reviewing the custom message center which allows promoters to answers multiple blogger questions with one message.

Besides selling more products by getting bloggers to write reviews on them, you can increase your search engine ranking from the links created during the review process.  As many of you know building links coming back to your website helps increase your websites search engine ranking.

When you send a product to the approved blogger they will write a review and most likely add a link in that review going back to your website.  This one-way link is a huge benefit to your websites search engine goals.  Most of the time Google gives bloggers higher search engine rankings because they are updating content regularly.  Your review will be one of those pages that are weighed heavily, talking about your product, and linking back to your website.  These are the three major components to any link building campaign.

How Do I Tell What Links Were Added In A Review?

The power of Tomoson is its reporting features.  After a blogger writes a review they need to verify it with a simple piece of code they copy into the review.  This piece of code serves two purposes:

1.       It will display an icon stating this is a review the blogger got a free product for (Which is now required by law for all bloggers to do)

2.       It will capture the review so we can display it in your Tomoson.com control panel.

The second purpose gives you, the promoter all the power to review what was written, how many links are in the review, and where they link.  This makes Tomoson.com not only a powerful sales tool but a powerful SEO tool as well.

Next week we’ll review the tomoson.com Control Panel.

Tomoson.com Link Management Control Panel