Getting my SEO fill @ SMX Advanced

Haven’t blogged in forever. At SMX Advanced in Seattle and can’t wait to fill my brain with knowledge!

Microvolunteering – online

wow. Work at Ketchum PR has kept me busy (and away from this blog) but I wanted to share a micro volunteering site I just discovered called Sparked.com. It allows you to providing all sorts of advice (including non profit advice) to non-profits that really need your help. If you have a few minutes, hop on the site and help out.

Impressive Search Engine and Social Media Stats

I’m always looking up new stats about search engine and social media use and behavior for various online marketing presentations, and I decided it would be more useful to share them with the world (and have a convenient spot for me to reference them in the future). So here you go:

1. More than 81% of all Internet users find their destination via a search engine. - Jupiter Research, 2008
2. 87% of people click on the natural results (vs. paid)  & Organic results convert 5.66x that of paid ads
3. Organic results convert 5.66x that of paid ads http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html
4. US: Google 65.5 %, Yahoo 16.8%, Bing 11.5% http://www.intelliteaminc.com/search_engine_facts.html Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in February with 65.5 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (16.8 percent), and Microsoft Sites (11.5 percent). Ask Network captured 3.7 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.5 percent.
5. Only 48% even see paid ads
6. People click on the word in results that matches their query word¹
7. 58% of all queries are three or more words
8. 68% click on result in first page
9. 39% think that companies appearing at the top of search results are leaders in their field.
10. The clickthrough rate on a PPC ad when supported by a top organic listing is 15%
11. Based on eye tracking research
12. Companies in search leader in their field: Iprospect Study: http://www.iprospect.com/about/whitepaper_seuserbehavior_apr06.htm
13. First page of search results: iProspect 2008 http://www.iprospect.com/about/researchstudy_2008_blendedsearchresults.htm
14. 39% of search engine users believe that the companies whose websites are returned among the top search results are the leaders in their field
15. Videos are 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.
16. 36% click on news results, 31% click on image results, 17% click on a video results
17. Video & first page result: http:/techcrunch.com/2010/03/10/video-seo-top-google-search/
18. News & conversions: http://www.iprospect.com/about/researchstudy_2008_blendedsearchresults.htm
19. “On the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.” – Forrester Research about video and first page ranking.
20. Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering, “20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before.”
21. 94% of bloggers see measurable SEO benefits from blogging within 12 months.
22. More than 8 out of 10 internet users have searched the internet to answer specific questions and 87% of online users have used the Internet to get some type of scientific information

Do you have other stats that could be added to this list?

Levi’s Creates “Friends Store” using Facebook Like

I’m impressed by the turn around with this considering Facebook only announced it’s “like” feature that webmasters can imbed on their sites…what, like a week ago?

But here you go. You can shop online with your friends and see what jeans they like.

Google to stop supporting old news sitemap format

They announced that there are two weeks left to transition in case you missed the first announcement six months ago. More info here.

Ning Announces shut down of it’s free service, fires 40% of staff

Just announced today. If you have a free Ning network, you will now be forced to upgrade to a paid account or take your business elsewhere.

Read more about Ning’s shut down of free service.

How to Get Over 1 Million Visitors a Month Presentation

I had a great time speaking yesterday at PRSA’s Association and Non-Profit Day in Washington, DC about how to get over 1 Million visitors to your website using an integrated digital strategy using SEO, PPC, traditional press, social media and blogger outreach.

Here’s the How to Get 1 Million Visitors to your Website a Month presentation.

Adding Google analytics to your Facebook Fan Page

I thought this article would be useful for folks interested in tracking actions on their Facebook Fan pages using Google Analytics.

Facebook Fan Pages Now Showing in Google Search Results

SEO for Facebook Fan update pages is more important than ever now that Google announced that it will be displaying the results from 3 million fan pages in Google search results.

You can see their announcement via Twitter.

Google doesn’t have access to personal profile updates because of Facebook’s agreement with Bing, and for that I’m glad. I like using Facebook to quickly get in touch with all of my friends, but I’m sure items that my friends share with me (like updates on their pregnancy, clumsy moments, etc) are not ones that they want found via a Google search.

If you have personal profiles elsewhere you might want to be careful of what you post where, and adjust your privacy settings appropriately. In December 2009 Google announced that it would add data from Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Indenti.ca and Twitter to its search results (and now Google Buzz of course). From an organizational perspective, this is good news if your deploying good SEO practices to your updates on those sites. For a person, you just want to be a bit more careful about what you share with the world.

The recent news around PleaseRobMe is a perfect example of this. As a single woman, I’ve always been wary of revealing too much online about where I was physically in the world, and this site has been broadcasting when people update via their Twitter account from geographic locations that are not their house – announcing to the world that their house is up for grabs from a robber’s perspective.

When social media sites and search engines change their privacy policies so frequently, it’s certainly hard as an individual to keep up. Perhaps when everyone’s information is public we will stop caring?

YouTube now has auto captioning

Not only is this development amazing for those who are deaf (including my friend Christie) but there are also SEO implications. Here’s the announcement from the Google blog.

Here’s the summary:

You Tube now has autocaptioning using the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. Machine generated captioning is not ideal, but with their auto-timing you can upload a simple text file with the transcript/script that you used to create the video and Google will figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video.

From an SEO perspective, this means that Google will have text that they can crawl to understand your videos, so when drafting your video script, keep your keyword strategy in mind. Having a text version of your video content will be great for optimizing your videos and reaching a larger audience.