Last week, Tandem's own Joe Laratro flew out to Vegas for PubCon, a three-day event considered by many to be the top conference for Search Engine Marketing. Basically, it covers every aspect of Online Marketing. PubCon is hosted by Webmaster World and its founder, Brett Tabke. Joe goes out to Vegas to act as a moderator for the conference and also as a speaker, offering up information from his SEO Diet.
Several attendees have already blogged about this year's event, and there is a comprehensive recap of the conference available on Search Engine Land. As you'll see in this breakdown of links from the event, PubCon covers everything from e-commerce to Wordpress, social media to mobile marketing, and much more.
The next PubCon will be held in Austin, March 8-9, 2011. More information is available on the official PubCon blog.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Google Places Gets a Makeover
Recently, Google launched "Place Search," which is designed to be a type of local search that combines Google's standard search with Google Local. The change has local search results looking something like the regular Google engine search results, but with a map on the right side that scrolls down the page as you do too. This is in part because Google has increased the amount of information that is displayed with each listing.
Now, rather than just listing the business name and phone number, Place Search listings will have the business description, customer reviews, and a picture of the building--as well as links to other review sites.
The plus side of the Google Places makeover is that ideally, you should get more traffic since these results rank in search. People can find you without ever visiting your website. Businesses with acutal physical addresses will fare better, just as they would in Google Places (which requires an address for mapping purposes). The best practice would be to monitor your data and how this change is affecting your search results, and see if anything needs to be changed in your current search/PPC campaign.
Now, rather than just listing the business name and phone number, Place Search listings will have the business description, customer reviews, and a picture of the building--as well as links to other review sites.
The plus side of the Google Places makeover is that ideally, you should get more traffic since these results rank in search. People can find you without ever visiting your website. Businesses with acutal physical addresses will fare better, just as they would in Google Places (which requires an address for mapping purposes). The best practice would be to monitor your data and how this change is affecting your search results, and see if anything needs to be changed in your current search/PPC campaign.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Google AdWords Call Metrics
In May of last year, Google canceled their call tracking feature intended for Google Audio Ads. But now, Google's bringing it back under the name of AdWords Call Metrics, a combination of Google Voice and AdWords.
Google's goal in this is to show advertisers that AdWords is more valuable than they realize, including driving offline traffic. The feature is available on PCs and high-functioning smartphones with full internet browsers.
For now, the Google AdWords Call Metrics will be a free service, but perhaps down the road a fee will be associated in a "pay-per-call" way. AdWords Call Metrics routes calls from the VoIP tracking number to a designated business number that Google is able to monitor. The metrics will capture the time and length of the call.
While access is currently limited, more and more people will be invited to see what its all about in the near future.
Google's goal in this is to show advertisers that AdWords is more valuable than they realize, including driving offline traffic. The feature is available on PCs and high-functioning smartphones with full internet browsers.
For now, the Google AdWords Call Metrics will be a free service, but perhaps down the road a fee will be associated in a "pay-per-call" way. AdWords Call Metrics routes calls from the VoIP tracking number to a designated business number that Google is able to monitor. The metrics will capture the time and length of the call.
While access is currently limited, more and more people will be invited to see what its all about in the near future.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Blekko Seeks to Improve Search Results
The new search engine Blekko has launched, so now seems like a good of a time as any to delve into the site and see what it's all about. Blekko was designed around the goal of eliminating spam results in internet search, via "slashtag technology" that narrows down the web into a select group of results. Specifically, the seven slashtag groups are: health, colleges, auto, personal finance, lyrics, recipes, and hotels. These are of course only the initial categories, with plans of expansion in the near future.
Blekko seeks to stand out against search big shots like Google and Bing, and here's an example of how: when a searcher types "health" into one of those engines, the results are a lot of low-quality content farms and spam. On the contrary, Blekko's results are only from high quality sites.
Blekko seeks to stand out against search big shots like Google and Bing, and here's an example of how: when a searcher types "health" into one of those engines, the results are a lot of low-quality content farms and spam. On the contrary, Blekko's results are only from high quality sites.
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