SEO

The post Yahoo! And Tumblr: It’s About Display, Streams & Native at Scale appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.The world is atwitter about Tumblr’s big exit to Yahoo!, and from what I can tell it seems this one is going to really happen (ATD is covering it well).   There are plenty of smart and appropriate takes on why this move makes sense (see GigaOm) but I think a lot of it boils down to the trends driving Yahoo’s massive display business. If there’s one thing we all know, it’s that a new form of nativeadvertising is spreading throughout the Internet. It started with Google and AdWords, it spread to Twitter and its Promoted Tweets, and Facebook quickly followed with Sponsored Stories. At FMP, we have sponsored posts and our Native Conversationalist suite, which we are scaling now across the “rest of the web” – the smaller but super influential independent sites that we believe are major suppliers of  ”the oxygen of the Internet” – the content that drives true engagement. Other companies are adopting similar strategies – Buzzfeed is building a content marketing network, and Sharethrough has moved past its “wrap a YouTube ad in a player and call it native” phase and into more truly native units as well. The reason native works is because the advertising is treated as a unit of content on the platform where it lives. That may seem obvious, but it’s an important observation. When a brands’s content competes on equal footing alongside a publisher’s content, everyone wins. Those search ads – they win if they are contextually relevant and add value to the consumer’s search results. Those promoted tweets only get promoted if people respond to them – a signal of relevance and value.  The same is true for all truly “native” ad products. If the native ad content is good, it will get engagement. The industry is evolving toward rewarding advertising that doesn’t interrupt and is relevant and value additive. That’s a good thing. Left out of this evolution, until now, has been Yahoo!. When you break it down, Yahoo! is a Very Large Display Advertising business, with a hefty side of search and a bit of this and that on top. And that display advertising business is going through a wrenching shift, as buyers move to more efficient programmatic channels (for a visualization, see my last post). CPMs (cost per thousand, the unit of value for display advertising) are rapidly declining for “standard display” units – the boxes and rectangles that built Yahoo! and much of the rest of the web. It will take a couple of years for those ads to A/evolve into new forms that are standardized and B/be driven by data and real-time programmatic rules in ways that brands can really trust (it’s already working for direct response, but that’s not the end game). Display will always be around, but as I said, it’s in a significant evolutionary phase, and the short to mid term reality is this: CPMs are dropping, and Yahoo! has a massive display business. At the same time, we’re all shifting our attention to mobile devices, and we’ve adopted the “stream” as our preferred method of content discovery and consumption. That stream doesn’t work so well with standard display. But it’s great for native units. Yahoo! is already shifting its home page and other content sections to a stream like interface. Tumblr offers only native ad units (founder David Karp lifted his strategy pretty much wholesale from Twitter’s “the ad is the tweet” philosophy). And Tumblr was built from the ground up as an activity stream. I’ll write another time about how I believe that display and native will eventually merge – via the programmatic exchange. For now, Yahoo’s move gives it an asset that its branded display sales force ca

Google and Microsoft have been facing up to each other all week over the Windows YouTube app which has yet to be settled - although Google's 'Cease & Desist' letter might hasten Microsoft's decision about whether to allow ads and prevent downloads. In other news, YouTube's 'Comedy Week' starts tonight - we can't wait!

The SEO practices you implement in site design that optimize for search engines should be invisible. Modern day web design success requires a multi-function, multi-skilled approached to ensure maximum impact for your business. Balance is key.

After several days of rehash about search, I am running out of energy for topics related to information retrieval. Hello, hello, search today is not much better than it was five years ago. In fact, when it comes to locating high value information, I think we are now regressing. I took a moment to read “Welcome to Google Island.” It’s a Condé Nate thing. I am okay with trendy writing, but at age 69 I think a trend is a Silent 700 terminal with a fresh roll of thermal paper. There you go, young folks. The main point of the write up is that Wired found the Google conference in mid May 2013 sort of disconnected from the mainland. I ignored the utopia stuff and I shudder when me too companies do the innovation thing. Here’s a passage which I marked with my trust yellow highlighter: “Governments are too focused on democracy and rule of law. On Google Island, we’ve found those things to be distractions. If democracy worked so well, if a majority public opinion made something right, we would still have Jim Crow laws and Google Reader. We believe we can fix the world’s problems with better math. We can tear down the old and rebuild it with the new. Imagine Minecraft. Now imagine it photorealistic, and now imagine yourself living there, or at least, your Google Being living there. We already have the information. All we need is an invitation. This is the inevitable and logical end point of Google Island: a new Google Earth.”  And I realized I believed him. I believed in him, even. Sure, he’s a weird guy living in his own world. But what vision! And I wanted Google to make my world look like its own. And I wanted to give it all my information, about everything in my life, even my most private shameful thoughts. I put the glasses back on, and took off my pants. We stood, naked, before each other with no secrets, no rules, and no shame. And I knew I never wanted to leave Google Island. Even if I could. I assume that the write up is Swiftian, but with Condé Nast one never really knows. Several thoughts: First, we are returning to the walled garden view of technology. Sure, there’s lots of talk about open, but big companies are gunning for lock in. Second, when outfits operate with sweeping visions, some of the faithful may not follow along. Even cults experience some attrition. Third, Google is embroiled in a dispute with England over taxes. The fix may be to set up a summit between England’s prime minister and Google’s chairman. Net net: Google is not an island. Google may be operating more in the Luxembourg or Monaco mode. The prince, I believe, is a strong advocate of the blue fin tuna. And Luxembourg is really into money. I am not sure the island metaphor is the right one. Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2013 Sponsored by Augmentext

Image from: Political Parties / shutterstock News and political blogs grew 11% in April with over 14 million Unique Visitors (UVs)–making it the one of the Top 20 fastest growing categories (according to Compete PRO). It was a busy news month–reflected in the second fastest growing site online: CNN.com. Below are ten of the news and political blogs with the largest increases in monthly UVs. The list naturally split almost evenly along party lines: six lean left and four lean right. The top two sites in the category both made the list: The Blaze, with over four million UVs and Politico with just shy of two million UVs. I noticed major differentiator between the liberal and conservative blogs on the list: their incoming traffic sources. The Liberal blogs[1] received more traffic from Google, while Conservative blogs[2] received more traffic from Facebook. All six of the liberal blogs on the list received more referral traffic from Google than Facebook. Google was the top incoming traffic source for all but one of the liberal blogs–The Ledge, which is a subdomain of NYTimes.com. Facebook was the top incoming traffic  source for three of the four conservative blogs. Facebook was not even on the top 25 list of incoming traffic sources for one of the conservative blogs, RightPundits.com. Not surprising, as their Facebook page only has  357 ‘likes’ [as of 5/17/2013]. [1] Liberal Blogs: politico.com, thelede.blogs.nytimes.com, good.is, firedoglake.com, americablog.com, globalvoicesonline.org. [2] Conservative Blogs: therightscoop.com, rightpundits.com, freebeacon.com, theblaze.com.

We’ve compiled a list of the most popular digital marketing stories online this week. Enjoy and happy competing, marketers! Buying Tumblr will give #Yahoo an additional 15 billion pageviews a month. Multiple sources claim Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, is near closing a $1 billion deal to purchase Tumblr–and its 107 million microblogs. Besides the impressive numbers, Tumblr would make Yahoo look cool again. But, Tumblr is already hugely successful on its own. Do you think the deal will go through? How to get your back link data, how to analyze it, and how to quickly see if you have problems. Search Engine Watch put together a comprehensive and easy to understand beginner’s guide to link analysis. Benchmarking your site against competitors can help decide where to focus your online efforts. Have you tried these 5 new Google AdWords features? If you are an advertiser or PPC manager, you’ll be excited about upgraded sitelinks, a new keywords planner, display planner, ad group level mobile adjustments, and an upgrade center for enhanced campaigns. Google+ is the latest social media site to adopt hashtags. Google announced a handful of updates to their social media community at their I/O conference this week, which you would have already experienced if you’ve logged into your account since Wednesday. The most useful update to marketers is the new ‘related posts’ tags, similar to hashtags on Twitter–making it easier to share and discover related content. Missed all the I/O news? Get caught up with this summary and analysis of the 2013 Google I/O from Jeremiah Owyang.

I just returned from the UK. On my return I saw this news item: “Google’s Schmidt to Meet Britain’s Cameron as Tax Row Rages.” If the link goes dark, just run a query for “Google tax UK” and you will get some of the information. You can watch a video snippet at “Ed Miliband Accuses Google of Avoiding Fair Share of Tax” as of 6 am Eastern, May 18. I watched a bit of the discussion between a UK elected official and a Googler on the telly before I had a wonderful flight back to the United States. I thought the discussion was one of those technical misunderstandings. I recall a phrase which suggested that Google was not communicating clearly. Wired Magazine, UK edition, ran this story: “MP to Google: You Do Evil When It Comes to Tax.” As I understand the issue, Google pays what it owes within the boundaries of the regulations. The UK is struggling economically, which is evident in the number of folks who seem to be wandering about Hounslow without much to do at 10 30 am of a morning. My bus ride to Heathrow was an eye opener. The impression I had on the secondary streets to the airport was that High Street Kensington is different from the bus route from Hammersmith to Heathrow. Wired said: At a Public Accounts Committee hearing on 16 May, chairperson Margaret Hodges accused Google of “deliberately manipulating the reality of their business” and claimed to have whistleblower evidence that UK Google staff had sold advertising and invoiced UK-based customers. “You are a company that says you do no evil,” she told Google vice-president Matt Brittin. “I think that you do do evil in that you use smoke and mirrors to avoid paying tax.” My view is that if rules and regulations exist, those rules must be followed. Some people are able to interpret the rules one way. Others see the rules differently. I think Google has its view of what is required, and the UK officials have another view. If the quick trip by Google’s chairman is going to happen, will Google be able to explain its point of view and carry the day? My hunch is that there may be some further discussion about taxes which will require more than Google Glass to get the elected officials to see the world as Google perceives it. Apparently millions of pounds are the point of the discussions. In my opinion, some countries do not understand how nation states should react to Google. Countries, in some situations, may be less influential than companies. Annoyed officials may be clinging to an outmoded view of what rules and regulations are supposed to do. What’s clear is that Google’s comments reported on May 16, 2013, have sparked some phone calls and a possible meeting between the highest levels of the British government. Quick actions such as buying Motorola and meeting with David Cameron can signal some of the consequences of quick thinking and even quicker actions. In my opinion, some countries and their officials don’t understand the Google systems and methods. Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2013

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Google’s Matt Cutts: Domain Clustering To Change Again; Less Results From Same Domain Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a new video about a new change coming to Google’s search results related to the diversity of the results being displayed. Matt said that Google is launching “soon” a new change that will make it less likely to see results from the same domain name, if you [...] Yandex Announces “Interactive Snippets” & SERP Redesign At Moscow Conference Yandex has presented what it claims is a new concept in search engine results pages to a Russian audience at an online industry conference in Moscow. They’ve nicknamed the new concept “Islands,” but are describing it functionally as “Interactive Snippets” and the next step on from rich snippets. To be launched in a few weeks [...] Search In Pics: Google Blimps, Sullivan Junior At Google LA & A Google Mohawk In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the Web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google+ Blimps: Source: Google+ Danny Sullivan’s Kid At Google LA: Source: Google+ Android Statue Placing Android [...] Google Updates AdWords Express Sign-Up Process, Ad Copy Preview And Dashboard Google has updated the interface for AdWords Express, Google’s AdWords product designed for small businesses. Among the interface updates are a redesigned dashboard to show an at-a-glance look at ad views (impressions), clicks and calls generated as well as a pie chart that tracks monthly budget expenditures. A new performance graph allows advertisers to compare results [...] Analyzing Competitiveness In Your Paid Search Account The auction-based industry we work in involves a number of metrics which help search marketers identify where they are doing better or worse than the competition. Just to name a few, the most common metrics search marketers usually look at are the Quality Score (QS), the average cost-per-click (CPC), the impression share (IS), and the [...] Yahoo Wins $2.75 Billion Appeal In Yellow Pages Case Yahoo announced yesterday that it had prevailed in an appeal of a $2.75 judgment in Mexico obtained by former joint venture partners: The appellate decision overturned all monetary awards against Yahoo! Inc. and reduced the monetary award against Yahoo! Mexico to $172,500. Yahoo! Mexico was awarded $2.6 million in the original judgment, and this award [...] Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing: Google: “Game Changing” Features Will Boost Google+ Adoption Federal Appeals Court To Decide If Facebook “Likes” Are Protected Speech Twitter, NBA Score Deal For Basketball Game Highlights, Ads In Tweets Will Tumblr Be Yahoo’s Big-Splash Acquisition? Managing The Migration To A New Affiliate Network GAN’s Closing May Push Retailers Toward Better Affilliate Advertising Results Live Blog: Fireside Chat With The Android Team Google On Glass Privacy Issues & Congress: “Social Cues” Will Help, Plus It Takes Trust Seriously Congress Sends Google CEO Larry Page Letter Asking About Google Glass Privacy Concerns Live Blog: Grow Your Audience With Google+ Search News From Around The Web: Local Search & Maps Google Local Adds New Troubleshooter to Move Reviews When a Business Relocates, Mike Blumenthal How Google Made Maps Human, Savvy, and Monetizeable, Fast Company Sharing on MapQuest apps for iPhone and Android, blog.mapquest.com Link Building How to Calculate the Value of a Yahoo Directory Listing, seobraintrust.com Mozscape API Wiki Update, SEOmoz How to Be a Badass Link Builder, Search Engine Watch Paid Search A BETTER Guide to Call Tracki

How to Build a Google Analytics Tracking Code was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips. Need more input? As an optimizer who is regularly looking to learn more about how my recipients are interacting with content, I find myself regularly consuming analytics reports filled with Google Analytics tracking code data like Johnny Number 5 eats the Encyclopedia Britannica in the above clip from the 1986 gem Short Circuit. Google Analytics tracking codes —  also know as custom campaigns or UTM codes — are custom tracking parameters that communicate to Google Analytics granular information about how your referral traffic is interacting with your calls to action. To implement a UTM tracking code simply add your desired parameters to the end of the URL you want to track insights for, like this: http://www.YourWebsite.com/your-CRO-landing-page-article?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=viral&utm_campaign=CRO-0513-JThompson UTM tracking codes can help you analyze traffic from banner ads, email newsletters, social media content, and any other campaign that links people to a property that you own (such as your website or your blog). You cannot use UTM tracking to analyze clicks to external websites, like YouTube or Link-To-Related-Content.com. To track click activity on links that send people to properties you don’t own, Bitly is a great free resource. How To Put Together a Google Analytics Tracking Code Bruce Clay, Inc. does not recommend or condone using “awesome” as a Google Analytics UTM code parameter. (But we may or may not find it amusing.) There are five possible parameters you can set for each UTM tracking code: Source, Medium, Campaign, Content and Term. You don’t have to use all of them. For this blog post I am going to show you show to create a UTM tracking code for a link that directs people from a blog post to a page on my website. To keep it simple, I am only going to discuss the parameters needed for this scenario — Source, Medium and Campaign. Note: When and how to use Term and Content parameters is really a whole separate blog post; leave a comment if you are interested in seeing us write about it. The Medium (&utm_Medium) is the most broad parameter and tells Google Analytics — big picture — how to classify the medium by which your link was presented to the user. For example, was the link presented in a Facebook wall post? Then the Medium might be “viral” because the link you posted to your Facebook wall is now spreading virally all over the Internet and, accordingly, was delivered via a “viral” medium. (If viral is too abstract for you, “social” could also work.) Was the link transmitted to the end user via an email newsletter? Then your Medium might be “email,” or even more specifically, “ConstantContact” or “CheetahMail” to identify the service that delivered your newsletter. In our example above, our link was a blog post, so we used &utm_medium=viral. Getting one step more specific from Medium, the Source (&utm_Source=) tells Google Analytics where the click came from, where the person was when they clicked the link. In our example above (utm_source=blog) the person clicked on a link that was posted to my blog (so the Medium is “viral,” and the Source is “blog.”). Other Source options might include Twitter, Facebook or newsletter (Medium equals “email” and Source equals “newsletter”). The Campaign parameter (&utm_Campaign=) is one step even more specific than Source, and the parameter where you can really start to get granular with your tracking. The Campaign is how you identify the specifics of a link, from the details of where it goes all the way down to the color and size of the call to action. In the example above I used &utm_campaign=CRO-JThompson-image because I wanted to identify which of my silos encouraged the most clicks, the longest time on site, and — at the other end of the spectrum — the most site exits. I also wanted to collect data to hel