Facebook’s Guide to Viral Marketing

A .pdf from Facebook about how to use their tools to promote yourself virally.

Nonprofit Best Practices: Use of Flash

I like to spread the news of innovative online strategies to engage activists, and Amnesty International has one that I’d like to share called tearitdown.org.

Visitors get to sign their online petition and get to “own” a pixel of a picture of prisoners at Guantanam. It’s taking action to “tear down” the prison.

The site is very well done and worth interacting with.

Website Audits

If you’ve attended one of my search marketing trainings, you’ve probably seen me conduct a site audit where I take a look at the code of the page to evaluate how well the site is optimized for search engines. I’ve discovered a site where the author (Scott Hendison) conducts videos of website audits. I think it’s a great place to review everything I cover in my trainings.

Google can now read forms

There has been yet another change in the Google algorithm - this time in a positive direction for web designers and for searchers.  For years it has been impossible for Google to read and execute forms, which means that content behind the form (a great example is McDonald’s site, where the spider would not be able to get to local country content without selecting a country from a drop down box). However, in most cases a drop down form like the one used on the McDonald’s site is a good option from a usability perspective.

Google is now filling out the forms and indexing the content behind the forms. Here’s the response from Google about how it fills out the forms: “For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML.”

Google won’t access the form if it’s blocked by the robots.txt or meta robots instructions, and they are avoiding forms that require any kind of user information like a password, login, etc.

So designers now don’t need to worry about creating a design that relies on form completion to access some of the content. The article on Search Engine Land by Danny Sullivan doesn’t mention if Yahoo and Live are also planning on indexing the content, but you have to assume that once Google starts indexing that content, the others will follow.

Change in Google’s Search Algorithm

Saw this on article about a change in Google’s search algorithm on Search Engine Land, and thought it was big enough to share with my blog readers. Google has been testing and will roll out this change soon a new way of displaying results based on the previous query made.

Like the article suggests, if you searched for “Spain” and then did a new search for “travel” your results  (paid and organic) for “travel” would focus on travel to Spain.

You can read more about it here.

Top 25 Blog List from Time Magazine

The list is categorized by content and online voting, so make of it what you will, though most also have a decent amount of traffic.

I’m twittering

No, I’m not imitating a bird, or really excited about something in particular. I’ve joined Twitter and here’s my page, thought there is nothing there yet.  http://twitter.com/kwatier.

80% of online searches are informational

A new study released this week from Penn State shows that the intent of 80% of online searches are informational, 10% are navigational and 10% are for transactional purposes.

This has implications for a site owner’s keyword research - showing that using keywords related to providing information might be more effective than keywords focused on transactional behaviors.

ClickPress: Send your press release as an RSS feed for free

Just stumbled onto a free press release distribution service that also submits your news to RSS/XML feed distributors and I had to share. Check out Click Press.

Page Load Speed Matters for Paid Search Ads

I don’t often talk about paid ads on this blog because they are more time consuming and nonprofits can get quite a return just using natural or free optimization techniques. However, studies have shown that if you have both a paid ad and a natural search result on the same page, you have greater brand recognition and click through rate.

If you are involved in placing paid search ads through the Google grant program, you should be aware that the speed of the load time for your landing page for your ad affects your quality score. And your quality score directly impacts how much you pay for your ad, and your ad’s position in Google and the Google Network.

There’s a great article here with tools that you can use to determine your page load time and improve your landing page performance.