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84444 has expanded its mobile marketing and text message marketing solution to Canada. Now, Canadian companies can use the same advertising and the same 84444 short code to reach consumers in the United States and Canada.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada (PRWEB) February 21, 2012

84444, a leading provider of text message marketing solutions in the United States, has announced that it has opened a new text message marketing solution in Canada on 84444.ca.

84444.ca is a do-it-yourself text message marketing service that allows Canadian businesses and organizations to launch interactive and broadcast text message promotions from the convenience of a desktop computer. Businesses and organizations can now set up interactive text message promotions (Text RESULTS to 84444) and consumers will immediately receive a reply message from you. Once the consumer has provided a legitimate opt-in, you can now send them promotional broadcast text messages in the future.

For example, let’s say that you own a restaurant and you wish to complement your existing advertising by making it interactive through a text message marketing campaign. You would add Text PIZZA to 84444. When your customers and prospects sent the keyword (PIZZA) to the short code (84444), they would immediately receive a mobile coupon in return. Now that you have acquired a legitimate opt-in from the consumer, you can send them broadcast text messages in the future. A broadcast text message might tell them about a new special that you are doing on Monday nights which are traditionally slow nights for your business.

One of the great advantages that 84444.ca can offer is that it has reserved the short code 84444 in both the United States and Canada. This allows for easy expansion of your mobile marketing offering to both the United States and Canada. Thus, there is no need to create different advertising for each country. Moreover, since a large segment of the Canadian population lives near the American border, spillover advertising in cities like Toronto and Buffalo, Windsor and Detroit, and Vancouver and Seattle are able to utilize the same promotional short code 84444.

“If your business has customers in both Canada and the United States, being able to use the same 84444 short code is a huge advantage,” said Bob Bentz, president of Advanced Telecom Services. “Imagine the savings in not having to re-create advertising and the added benefit you’ll get from the bordering country customers.”

Text message marketing is the most ubiquitous of all aspects of mobile marketing. In Canada, 67.4% of all mobile subscribers used text messaging in September, 2011 (ComScore). In addition, 88.1% of all smartphone users in Canada used text messaging.

84444.ca is a product of Advanced Telecom Services which has been providing interactive telephone services since 1993. Advanced Telecom Services is a One-Stop Mobile Marketing Shop offering a complete suite of mobile marketing products including apps development, mobile websites, custom QR Codes, and text message marketing. You can follow 84444 on Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube, or Like its 84444 Facebook page.

# # #

ROBERT BENTZ
Advanced Telecom Services
(610) 254-7191
Email Information

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/message-move-mobile-marketing-text-message-marketing-canada-081645872.html

Lost the TV remote again? Don’t worry, says Google. In the future you’ll be able to verbally instruct your TV to turn off and on, change channel, and even flag the next rerun of Seinfeld for you — all using your Android phone as the microphone.

[More from Mashable: Twitter Partners With Google’s Russian Rival on Search Results]

That’s according to a patent the search giant filed a week before Apple launched the iPhone 4S and Siri, the voice-based personal assistant. (Coincidence? Yeah, we think so.) The patent, uncovered by Patently Apple, describes a system of voice controls that connects to Google’s cloud services — meaning if you have no data coverage or Wi-Fi where the TV is, you’re out of luck.

The advantage of doing things that way, however, is that you can turn the TV on wherever you are, and choose something to fit your mood. So you could be pulling into the driveway and asking your phone to prepare a sitcom you can wind down with when you reach the couch. (We’re not sure exactly how much of a labor-saving advantage that confers, but if Google also has a patent that can tell your fridge to prepare a beer for you, we’re all for it.)

[More from Mashable: How Google’s +1 Button Affects SEO]

SEE ALSO: I Want My Siri TV: Is Apple Aiming to Make the Remote Obselete?

Regardless, competition in the voice-activated TV world appears to be heating up. Samsung unveiled a remote at CES that offers voice recognition; it doesn’t control any TV yet, but there should be one coming later this year. And of course rumors persist that Apple is going to launch an iTV, with voice control from Siri.

That could mean you’ll have to own an iPhone; it could also mean that Siri is coming to the iPad, that there will be an iTV remote with Siri, or that the iTV itself will pick up the sound of your voice. There’s much we don’t know about the nascent voice-controlled TV market. Even the Google patent is open to a lot of interpretation; it suggests you’ll use a keyword to let the TV know you’re talking to it, but doesn’t specify the word.

Let us know what you’d name your TV, and whether talking to it at all sounds like a cool idea, in the comments.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/google-wants-talk-tv-via-android-video-153145408.html

Dow Touches 13,000 After Greek Bailout Deal, EarningsAP

The Dow Jones industrial average briefly touched 13,000 for the first time since May 2008 on Tuesday, powered higher …

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/research-markets-keyword-intelligence-keyword-135200967.html

Think about it: Most customers will hear your business name before they know anything about your products or services.

Like all first impressions, you only get one, so you better make it count.

Leonard Green, professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, suggests that a name be quick, unique and easy to remember. “You have 10, 15, 20 seconds to catch people’s attention,” he says. “Just get in there and do things differently than what everybody else is trying to do, because that’s where the home runs come from.”

That sounds simple, but the job of naming a business can be complicated. While there’s no formula to follow, here are five tools that can ease the creative process.

1. Google
If you aren’t familiar with the acronym G.I.A. (“Google It Already”), you should commit it to memory. The search-engine behemoth has a number of applications that are perfect to kick off your startup name search. Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool provides detailed information about the popularity of certain words and terms, including specific traffic numbers associated with them. Google also provides a patent search function that searches the entire U.S. patent database. Google Trends allows you to search through current and past search trends, so you can see when and why people have searched for your proposed business name. Most importantly, Google as a whole is a tool that gives you a macro view of the words and images associated with your idea. See what happens when you run your proposed business name through Google images, videos and even its translator.

Related: Five Tools for Social Entrepreneurs

2. Free worksheets
The Internet is a penny pinchers’ nirvana. You can find plenty of branding companies willing to dish out a little free advice for the opportunity to serve your company in the future. Companies like Wow Branding, Brandings and Brands For The People offer worksheets and e-books aimed at helping you brainstorm, focus your ideas and create a stellar brand name.

3. Your community
After you have come up with some ideas, turn to those you trust. Your friends and family make a great initial test group. Organize your potential ideas, present the concept and create a survey to keep the resulting feedback organized. Andy Smith, principal of Vonavona Ventures, an early stage enterprise consulting group and co-author of The Dragon Fly Effect, a book about brands, advises against long surveys that will turn off friends. “Make it focused and ask the bare minimum number of questions,” he says. “Take the extra step to make it interesting and fun somehow.” Pop Survey and Survey Monkey are two free websites where you can easily create your own professional online surveys.

4. NameChk.com, Domain Registries
Once you have narrowed the field to a few potential names, it’s time to start researching availability. NameChk.com is a tool that can save hours of research time. Just plug in some potential names into the search box and it will simultaneous check almost 100 different online networks and communities, giving you instant feedback on username availability. You might even find a few helpful networks you’ve never heard of before. Also check domain registries, such as Go Daddy, Register.com and DomainRegistry.com, that will allow you to check availability and secure your URL.

5. The Government
One of the last steps in the naming process is making your entity official. Searching the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database will reveal if your name is already in use (something you should have already Googled, remember?). If there’s a similar name registered, information will be available regarding what products it’s associated with, and if the company holding ownership is still active. Make sure to follow the trademark process outlined on the USPTO website and consider legal counsel before submitting an application. The cost associated with filing an online trademark application varies depending on the class of product, but generally falls in the $275 to $325 range.
 

This article originally posted on Entrepreneur.com

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/five-tools-naming-startup-180000194.html

Enterprise SEO is all about mitigating risk. Slow and steady, fix what is broken, don’t let anyone do anything radical chasing the latest fads, don’t push the envelope into anything black or even grey and keep your IT department from inadvertently destroying your rankings.

So what do you say when a large, branded site wants to go about changing a well-established domain?

For the last 6 years or more, moving a website from one domain to another has been fairly straightforward and low risk endeavor. Set up a 301 redirect that maps all of your old URLs to your new ones and then sit back and wait 1-2 weeks while the search engines crawl all of your primary URLs and you were good to go.

If you wanted to speed things along a little, you could also do a change of address in Webmaster Tools and submit critical pages through Fetch As Googlebot.

Sure, Bing and Yahoo would take longer to update and, yes, it might take months for all of the pages in the supplemental index to finally clear out, but in most cases, your site was above 80% of your previous traffic levels in a month and returned to previous levels within 60 days of your switch.

Re-branding was not painless, but as long as you were simply moving from one domain to another the results were predictable, the process was well defined and the risks were minimal.

If you took it as an opportunity to thoroughly audit your indexation and clean up some legacy issues, it could even be the foundation for some significant gains in your overall traffic.

This no longer appears to be the case; the experience of Nuts.com illustrates that there is now a greater risk when changing domains, especially for older, more established sites.

Case In Point

Changing your domain is no longer certain to be painless or low risk.

As a consequence of rebranding from NutsOnline.com to Nuts.com, The Newark Nut Company is losing thousands of dollars in revenue every day.

The Newark Nut Company is a multi-generational 83 year old family business started in an open air market in New Jersey at the beginning of the Great Depression. The company grew into a brick and mortar store with a warehouse and a mail order business for loyal customers.In 1999, one of the grandsons of the founder decided to try e-commerce and launched NutsOnline.com.

Through hard work, personality, and great customer service, the company became one of the premier online retailers of nuts, seeds, and bulk foods, as well as a category leader for decorative candies such as Jordan Almonds. In other words, the poster child for a family business going online and succeeding with a quirky persona and a commitment to quality.

Preparing To Move

Even though changing domains is usually straightforward, I am a data junkie and I favor a methodical approach that allows me to track the progress of the re-indexation, as well as monitoring rankings and traffic.

Prior to the move, site traffic and rankings were very healthy. During the seven month period prior, they averaged 30,000-44,000 visits each week from organic Google searches with traffic steadily rising 5-10% each month.

Every client engagement begins with an audit to discover and correct canonical issues, duplicate titles and descriptions, spiderability problems and any other technical problems that may be hindering rankings; in the case of a migration, this is especially important because we can address the issues before the move to eliminate potential variables and uncertainty.

The first step was to determine how many canonical pages the site contains and to build a sitemap that included those URLs and only those URLs. This provides a baseline to measure progress and be the first metric to gauge the indexation of the new site.

In the case of nutsonline.com, we determined that we had about 4,800 core content and product pages, 365 pages in the blog, about 500 tag pages, and 3,250 images that we wanted indexed. This works out to less than 6,000 pages to monitor. Before the move, over 98% of our core pages were being indexed in the sitemap for nutsonline.com.

While the target number of pages was under 6,000, the site: query for Nutsonline.com, depending on what data center we hit, showed between 198,000 and 245,000 pages in the index.

Some quick digging around found the usual suspects:

• About 100,000 URLs indexed at site:nutsonline.com/search
• About 60,000 URLs indexed at site:nutsonline.com/tag
• About 20,000 URLs indexed at one of the following subdomains:  cdn.nutsonline.com, staging.nutsonline.com or https://www.nutsonline.com
• About 10,000 URLs indexed with parameters such as GCLID, Sort, SID, item, source or department.

This list gave us an excellent starting point for changes we needed to make to the site during the transition in order to right-size our indexation footprint.

In a perfect world, we would have waited until the site was pruned to the correct canonical URLs before we changed the domain. It might have taken months for Google to clean out the extra URLs from the index.

Despite the obvious canonical problems, Google had no difficulty returning the correct pages in SERP. Of the top 500 landing pages for organic traffic, not a single one was a non-canonical version, and of the 645,000 organic entries in Q4 of 2011, only 464 were on non-canonical URLs.

Based on this, we decided to procede.

• We implemented “rel=canonical” throughout the http://nuts.com implementation to resolve the tracking and display parameters, since blocking them in Webmaster Tools parameter settings was not removing them from the index.
• We redirected all of the sub-domain on nutsonline.com to http://nuts.com.
• We put staging behind a password and used robots.txt to block http://cdn.nuts.com.
• We decided that the search results were not something we wanted in the index (despite generating 1,395 organic entries in Q4), so we added follow, noindex to the header of the search results template.
• Finally, we reviewed all the the tag pages and discovered how different navigation paths could generate 4, 5 and 6 level deep tag taxonomies with elements in different orders, creating a canonical nightmare.  We added robots meta noindex, nofollow to all tag pages that were more than 1 level deep.

The Big Switch

On January 6th, 2012, we implemented a global page-to-page 301 and did a change of address in Google Webmaster Tools.

Within 2 weeks, almost all of the queries and impressions on NutsOnline.com had disappeared. These Google Webmaster Tools charts very clearly show the drop off in impressions for nutsonline.com and the pick up of impressions for nuts.com.

NutsOnline.com

Nuts.com

Within a week, over 98% of our canonical URLs on nuts.com were indexed (4408 of 4484 in the primary sitemap) and 95% of the Google organic traffic was gone from NutsOnline.com.

The Big Drop

Unfortunately, 2 weeks after the transition, overall Google organic traffic for nuts.com was down over 70% and rankings were down across the board, much as though the site was hit by Panda or some form of penalty.

The third week, January 23rd to the 31st, showed promising signs of a recovery, reaching almost half of the pre-change traffic levels on the 31st. Instead of continuing to recover, however, traffic headed down again as if it were once again weighed down by Panda or some related algorithm.

It is very difficult to compare week over week traffic and account for seasonality.

It is noteworthy, however, that the week just before the migration (January 1, 2012 to January 7, 2012) represented the single best week for Google organic traffic in the history of the company.

The chart below shows incontrovertibly that traffic took a dive as a consequence of the change of address.

Ranking reports are generally not as valuable a tool as they once were, but of the 81 keywords I track for the baseline report, 19 of 25 top ranked terms dropped, along with 26 of 41 top 3 spots. In all, 39 terms have simply dropped out of the top 50.

The most important (lucrative) keyword used to return as #1 with a sitelink with 4 entries and almost 10,000 visitors a week. For that same term, the site now fluctuates between 14 and 20.

The domain nuts.com was used previously and the Webmaster had acquired a spam penalty. My client purchased the domain in October of 2011, registered it with Google Webmaster Tools and submitted a reconsideration request that detailed the history.

The domain was reviewed and we were told that the penalty had been lifted.

Despite this assurance, 17 days after the switch over and 10 days without any significant ranking improvement, we theorized that we may be suffering from some legacy penalty against the nuts.com domain and submitted a reconsideration request. A few days later we were informed that no manual penalties existed against the site.

Why Has Google Forsaken Us?

NutsOnline.com has been operating almost as long as Google has been in existence. As such, they had a domain history, trust, and other social signals to rank well despite whatever issues may have been sub-optimal.

As soon as the site switched domains, we found ourselves in a position where Google is not ranking the new site the same way as the old. I believe we are suffering from the loss of domain history and trust that accompanies a change of address.

This has sufficiently weakened the domain strength that we have been pushed over some penalty threshold. Nothing on the site has changed significantly since the switch but we are no longer the old, crusty domain that has earned trust. We also lost all our our social signals, including thousands of Likes, Tweets, etc.

You May Be Nuts To Try This

Regardless of the underlying cause, the bottom line is that changing your domain is no longer painless or low risk.

As a consequence of changing their domain, The Newark Nut Company is losing thousands of dollars in revenue every day. The options going forward (apart from Google recognizing this is unintentional and somehow fixing the issue) are all less than ideal.

• We could reverse course and redirect the search engines to nutsonline.com instead of nuts.com.
• We could implement cross domain rel=canonical on nuts.com to nutsonline.com while still using Nuts.com in marketing materials and for PPC. Not only would this be a terrible example of engineering for search engines, it would also create tremendous cost, confusion, and potentially loss of trust from our actual customers.
• We could roll back for Google only. Bing seems to be delivering about 80% of traffic we got before the 301 and they are gradually getting better. Bing reportedly doesn’t honor cross domain rel=canonical in any event. This would create no less cost or confusion, but it might be slightly less damaging.
• We could embark on a massive link building campaign and hope that new links will over power whatever is holding us down but high quality, organic link building takes significant time.
• Face Mountain View and Pray.

Google went to great pains to develop tools and educate webmasters who want to change domains.

As a result, many companies have succeeded in changing their domain and lived to tell about it. Now, however, with the ever increasing emphasis on brand and the indirect benefit of social signals, it appears that search engines do not have a mechanism to transfer the complete history of the domain, not just its PageRank.

Be warned, if your enterprise is planning to rebrand, you may find yourself swimming against the tide and desperately trying to avoid getting swept out to sea in what started as a “simple” change of address.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Enterprise SEO

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/you-don%E2%80%99t-have-to-be-nuts-to-worry-about-changing-your-domain-111957

The arena of app stores is much like the way organic search results used to be. Knowledge on app store optimization (ASO) can still provide a big advantage over your competitors and it can be a very lucrative way to exploit your old fashioned SEO skills. Algorithms aren’t as advanced yet and the competition is still discovering ways to game them.

Various App Search Engines

Like in the old days of SEO there are multiple platforms to optimize for, but luckily this time you can do it with separate app versions for each of them. The biggest ones are Apple App Store and Android Market, but Blackberry App World, Samsung Apps Store, Nokia Store, GetJar and Windows Phone Marketplace are just a couple of the alternatives.

All app stores require you to build an app according to their technical and ethical guidelines. Once your app has been added to an app store, you can start to focus on a high ranking.

Growing a huge following for your app is mainly done through social media recommendations, popularity lists on the app stores, and a high ranking within their search engines. In many cases they all lead to each other and you can start with any one of them.

App Store Ranking Factors

The aspects that determine your ranking in an app search engine can be divided in textual aspects, popularity, and rating. While all platforms have their own ranking factor weights and algorithm particularities, the ideal situation of these factors is quite similar.

Textual Ranking Factors

App Name

The name of your app is the most important relevance factor. Besides a catchy name it should include what it does and represent the most important search phrase. “Angry Birds: Puzzle action game!” would be better than just “Angry Birds!” In some engines alphabetical order is also used in lists, so starting with an A or a number might be sensible.

App Publisher

The publisher name can also include keywords and you might even want to publish under several subdivisions of your company. “Badabing Financial Apps” and “Badabing Navigation Systems” would help you rank for those respective search terms.

Keywords and Description

Keyword rich descriptions work similar to normal SEO text, but because install popularity is a huge ranking factor you could also include existing popular themes (popular app names, popular people, news hypes and more) that you could also rank for. Great text, screenshots, app icon and instruction videos in the description all need to get people to install your app.

Popularity Ranking Factors

The most important ranking factor for most app platforms is based on install trending and install base.

Installs so far

The amount of machines that have installed your app so far is logged and shown by almost all platforms. A huge amount of installs provides you a higher ranking and evokes trust for additional installs.

If the number of installs was the only factor, then the big would keep getting better and newcomers would never stand a chance. Luckily, newcomers can benefit from install trends that are also monitored and used by most app stores.

Install Growth Spikes

When you receive a lot of new installs in a short timeframe you end up in both generic and categorized popularity lists. It also helps you to rank for the keywords in your app description and reviews.

Most app stores use the amounts you grow and the previous week is more important than the previous month. Because this isn’t always fair to newcomers, some stores also use the percentages you grow and the steady growth you show over time.

Current Installs, Uninstalls, Active Installs

To combat manipulation it’s much smarter to look at current install base instead of the amount of people that once installed the app. App stores that are able to monitor this can see how satisfied people are with your app and how many people uninstall it.

Some experiments on app store algorithms show which platforms conclude a big drop in ranking after a big drop in installs. Only a few platforms seem to look at active installs. If a machine never requests update availability or communicates with a server they can also be seen as inactive.

Ratings and Reviews as Ranking Factor

Ratings and reviews are available in most app stores, but there is a huge difference in their affect on your ranking. Just a few of them use the review text to answer a keyword search in their search engine.

A test with near unique phrases shows which platforms use it. Ratings are used by most stores to aid or ruin your ranking, but all in varying strength. Android Market also uses Google Plus endorsements and “mark as inappropriate” opinions.

Special Lists

Take a good look at the additional lists that each app store seems to show and figure out what their respective ranking determination is. “Users also installed” and “Users also viewed” might not seem that easy to influence, but ranking for related keywords are a great start. “Editor’s choice” is still something hard to manipulate, but we’re slowly discovering ways for all of them.

Lucrative?

Mobile business models are already great, volume is enormous, customers are loyal, and app store competition is still relatively low. This new frontier holds great opportunities for people familiar with all aspects of SEO and social media. Let the battle begin!

Save up to $400! Register now for SES New York 2012, the leading search social marketing event, taking place March 19-23. Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik will keynote. Early bird rate expires March 2.

Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2152859/App-Store-Optimization

It’s a hectic time of year for high school seniors. As graduation approaches, most of you are busy applying for college and have narrowed down your choices to one or two schools. But in the midst of college application season, don’t forget that this is also prime scholarship season.

As you continue your search for scholarships, think about what sets you apart from other students. It may be your grades—we all know there are plenty of academic scholarships out there—or it may be your athletic talents. But for those of you who aren’t academic or athletic all-stars, don’t get discouraged. There’s a scholarship out there for everyone.

[Consider these four unique college scholarships.]

Think about what makes you unique, then do a keyword search and see what comes up. You may be surprised at the results. We did a quick search of scholarships for atypical students—and here are just a few we discovered. Maybe one of these opportunities is the perfect scholarship for you. And if not, keep searching!

• Vegetarians: Are you opposed to eating meat? Have you been vocal about the benefits of becoming a vegetarian? Your devotion to veggies could pay off after you apply for The Vegetarian Resource Group’s scholarship for vegetarians.

Applicants are judged on showing compassion and commitment to promoting a peaceful world through vegetarianism. And, lucky for you, an anonymous donor has allowed the organization to increase the award amounts to two $5,000 scholarships! But don’t delay—the application is due February 20, which is right around the corner.

• Amputees: Losing a limb is extremely devastating, and can be even more devastating if medical expenses get in the way of your dream of attending college. Thankfully, there are some wonderful scholarship opportunities out there for amputees. The Claude S. Weiler Scholarship for Amputee College Students, awarded through the National Amputee Foundation, gives six $500 scholarships to prospective or current college students who have suffered a major loss of a limb.

Another excellent organization for scholarships is Ye Notorious Krewe of the Peg Leg Pirate. Though their name sounds funny, this organization is serious about providing assistance to amputees, and one of the ways they help is through scholarships. The deadline for applying for a scholarship is March 15; award amounts differ ever year.

[Check out some more unusual scholarships.]

• Cancer survivors: There are few things harder on a family than battling cancer. With the disease comes extreme financial, emotional, and psychological pressure. If you’ve battled or are currently battling cancer, you know how it can affect your schoolwork, extracurricular activities, and after-school job opportunities. Understandably, saving for college is probably the last thing on your and your parents’ minds.

So if you’re set on going to college, take advantage of the scholarships that are offered to cancer survivors, and let paying for college be one less thing you have to worry about. The Cancer Survivors’ Fund grants college scholarships to those who have survived cancer or are currently battling cancer. The catch with this one is that if you receive the scholarship, you also agree to do volunteer work to help cancer patients and survivors cope. This application is due March 23.

The American Cancer Society’s Young Cancer Survivor Scholarships are awarded to pediatric cancer survivors who reside in an area that is served by that particular division of the organization. Most, but not all, of the divisions of the American Cancer Society award scholarships; the award amounts and number of scholarships awarded depend on which division serves your area. Amounts typically vary from $1,000 to $10,000.

[Explore the U.S. News guide to paying for college.]

• Older applicants: Finally, if you’re over the age of 50 and have always wanted to earn your degree, don’t automatically assume you’re not eligible for scholarships. True, most scholarships are for graduating high school seniors or current college students, but the AARP Foundation’s Women’s Scholarship Program offers fantastic scholarship opportunities for low-income women over the age of 50.

Priority is given to applicants who have been out of work for over a year, are in low-paying jobs, women veterans, and those with dependants. Scholarships range from $500 to $5,000; the number of awards varies yearly. Applications are due by March 30.

Michelle Showalter joined Scholarship America in 2007 and is an alumna of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

Article source: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/the-scholarship-coach/2012/2/16/discover-scholarships-for-atypical-students?s_cid=rss:the-scholarship-coach:discover-scholarships-for-atypical-students

If you’re looking for a customizable gallery site for your digital photos, or want to try to sell images online, SmugMug is a very capable option. But SmugMug’s interface looks outdated compared with Flickr’s seamless one, and its community is dwarfed by Flickr’s, which has abundant ways of exploring the work of and connecting with other photographers of every interest type. What’s more, Flickr and most other competitors offer a free account option, while SmugMug has a minimum $40-per-year membership fee.

Signup and Setup
Though SmugMug offers no free account like Flickr, Picasa, PhotoBucket, and others do, there is a free 15-day trial, and thankfully, this doesn’t require credit card info. You can sign up either by entering and email address or through Facebook Connect. Right when you first sign up, you get a personalized URL at the smugmug.com domain. Next, you name your gallery, choose a category for it (over 60 choices, from Airplanes to Zoos, with Births and Funerals in between.) Or you can create a category name of your own. The gallery gets its own URL, using a slash after your main one.

View Slideshow
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Your homepage in SmugMug by default shows your user picture and any biographical info you’ve supplied, followed by thumbnails for your galleries. You can add horizontal entries for slideshows, individual large photo views, communities, a keyword tag cloud, or most popular or recent photo. You can easily move any of these sections up and down on your homepage. It’s more configurable that Flickr or Picasa’s, but one basic behavior I prefer in those two competitors is that the basic site URL takes you to your own gallery dashboard page; in SmugMug, this takes you to SmugMug’s advertisement page.

Uploading
SmugMug offers drag-and-drop uploading on its site if you’re using an HTML5-compliant browser, where Flickr requires installing a desktop uploader app for that. Both also let you upload via an email address. If you use standard software like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Apple Aperture, though, none of this matters, since both services have included publish exporters. SmugMug does offer a good deal of third-party integration, but most apps, like the popular iPhone image editors are more likely to have built-in uploading to Facebook and Flickr than to SmugMug, and Flickr’s flourishing App Garden makes SmugMug’s look tiny.

Video
One area SmugMug beats Flickr is in video hosting: You can upload videos of up to 20 minutes, compared with Flickr’s 90 seconds. Then again, if you’re going to do that, why not use the free YouTube or Vimeo sites? Flickr’s HD video quality is among the highest I’ve seen, so the shorter limit makes sense. Flickr’s video capability is more for “long photographs” than for video. The SmugMug video player offers “Stretch” and “HD” options. SmugMug reported being done with the uploads very quickly, but when I tried to view the images online, a “Processing” icon displayed in place of the image thumbnail.

High definition video looked great in both services. Both also let me download the video, but in SmugMug it came back with a 3,279 Kbps bitrate, wheras Flickr sent a much higher-quality 24 Mbps bitrate file. Audio was similarly compressed, even though I’d chosen “Hidef” from the SmugMug download menu.

Organizing
After you upload images to a SmugMug gallery, you’re simply taken to the gallery. Flickr, by contrast, offers the chance to add titles, captions, and tags right after uploading. You can add these from links at the bottom of an image view in SmugMug. An even bigger missing tagging component is SmugMug’s lack of face tagging, for which both Picasa and Flickr offer strong implementations.

SmugMug does offer a Map This button, which does a nice job of showing where your image was taken on a Google Map if the location data was included—as is the case for most smart phones. But again, competitors offer deeper map integration, showing a map thumbnail alongside the photo on its page, and Flickr even shows a world map where you can browser your own or all members’ photos. For the ultimate in photo mapping, though, check out Panoramio.

Galleries
SmugMug’s galleries of your uploaded photos and videos show the thumbnails of all gallery content on the left, with a larger image taking up the right sides of the browser window. Under the photo are Tweet, Facebook Share, and Facebook Like buttons. When you hover the mouse cursor over the image a flyover panel slides from the right side, offering Thumbs Up and Down, other viewing sizes, EXIF information, and a folder icon for downloading.

You can change a gallery’s appearance by choosing among SmugMug’s 70-odd themes at any time. But this seems more of  MySpace style approach, while Flickr and Picasa offer a more Facebook-like approach—choose one consistent, well designed interface for everyone’s photo galleries.

Clicking on a picture opens a larger version that takes up most of the window, but unlike Flickr’s equivalent view, SmugMug still displays the distracting menu bar across the top, with size choices, purchase options, and social buttons. I did like how SmugMug’s Slideshow button switches the browser to full screen mode automatically.

Article source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1859061,00.asp

Open up some space on your daily planner for some of the webinars this week. If you see webinars offered that would be of interest to SearchEngineJournal.com readers, please email them to me at laura@searchenginejournal.com. Thanks!

Raven Tools Walk Through

February 16th at 11:00 EST
Presenter: Raven Tools
Cost: Free
Description:A general walkthrough of all of the tools within the Raven platform.
Register

Advanced Paid Search Campaign Strategies

February 21st at 2:30 EST
Presenter: Hubspot
Cost: Free
Description: Want to get more out of your paid search campaigns? In this webinar series, you’ll learn how to audit your pre-existing campaigns, how to get more mileage out of your campaigns, and some very advanced paid search strategies. Note: this series is for experienced paid search practitioners
Register

Advanced Call To ActionTactics and Optimization

February 23rd at 2:00 EST
Presenter: Hubspot
Cost: Free
Description: Calls to action (CTAs) help you turn visitors into leads. In this CTA bootcamp, you’ll learn why CTAs are so important, how to create well designed CTAs that work like a charm, and how to test different variations to get the very best conversion rate possible out of your CTAs. You’ll even learn the secrets of where you should place your CTAs for the best possible results.
Register

Data-Driven Content Strategies

February 28 at 10:30am PST
Presenter: SEOMoz
Cost: Free for SEOMoz Pro Accounts
Description: “But I don’t know what to WRITE!” We hear that a lot. Sometimes it’s hard to develop great topics. It’s even harder to come up with topics that build on current events. Watch this webinar with Ian Lurie, CEO of Portent Interactive, and learn how to take an analytical, methodical approach to content while still being creative.
Register

Introduction to keyword research

February 29th at 11:00 EST
Presenter: WordTracker
Cost: Free
Description: Free online training is available to help you get the most from Wordtracker’s Keywords tool. Click below to register for our next scheduled webinar, view a recent one, or read a transcript.
Register

Article source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/weekly-webinar-round-up-for-2152012/40165/

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how to use your first meeting with a client to understand their business and collect information that could later inform your keyword research. Now, you’re back at your desk and wondering what to do with all that information.

To begin with, you should have three lists of keyword-types (I call them seeds):

Elements to include in keyword research

1. Seeds most important to your clients (note that these may include jargon and industry-specific terms that need further research)
2. Seeds that accurately describe the business (these would be your own layman’s terms for what this client does)
3. Seeds that are not relevant or core to your client’s business

I like to refer to these as seeds because they are a seed of an idea that could grow into giant “trees” of information and possibilities.

There’s no need at this point to distinguish between “deck” and “decking” for example, and this is a mistake SEOs often make; trying to narrow the field too much too early.

Let’s dive into each of these a little more deeply using an example of a client I did work for: Artisan Construction Services.

Note that all of these lists have far more than 2-3 keywords on them, but for purposes of example, I’ve simplified them. This client is a local (to Raleigh, NC) remodeling company that specializes in building decks and screened porches and remodeling kitchens and bathrooms. (Those are my own words for List Two).

The owner of the company, when asked to describe the product in his own words, said:

“We provide decking, siding and window replacement, and interior remodeling.”

Seeds most important to the client (based on the above description and the keywords he mentioned) are decking, siding, windows and interior remodeling. This would be List One above.

Seeds that aren’t relevant (List Three above) are things the client prefers not to do or sub-contracts out, such as roofing (says he can never do it as cheaply as professional roofers), plumbing (he hates it) and highly specialized design work like tile inlays. He’s also not a licensed electrician. So these are keyword seeds to avoid.

Example of Keyword Seed Lists

List One

List One is based on jargon, and requires further research. The first thing I do with keywords like this is to look at competitors’ websites. I’ve gotten a list of competitors from the client that I’ll research, and I’ll also put these terms into Google or Bing and look at the sites that come up in the results (I’ll localize to Raleigh, NC so that I’m getting the most accurate set of competitors).

Reviewing these sites will give me more seeds to research based on that jargon. In this case, I found specific types of decking, such as composite and pressure-treated, and I found that many competitors also refer to screened porches as sunrooms or patios (which are slightly different, but may cover more potential customers).

One additional thing the client told me is that customers often aren’t sure of what they want until they call him in for an estimate, so I’m keeping this in mind. Also during my research, I found another competitor in search that wasn’t mentioned as a major competitor. I’ll put this on a list of things to ask the client about in our next meeting.

Example of List One Expansion based on Competitors research

Next, I’ll look at how customers are actually referring to the different products and services.

I’ll use the “related searches” area at the bottom of Google’s SERPs, Google Insights to look at trends, and the “Discussions” search option (click “More” under “Search” on the left side of a Google SERP page).

Based on what I found here, I’ve learned that many people are asking what the differences are between screened porches and sunrooms, as well as that they’re sometimes referred to as lanais or three-season porches. I’ll add these seeds to my research.

I also learned that many people are interested in enclosing an existing deck into a screened porch, or “winterizing” a screened porch. More seeds for my research.

To review, I’ve taken the keyword seeds [screened porch], [patio], and [sunroom] and added:

• enclosing deck
• winterizing porch
• lanai
• three-season porch

These are all things that my client’s customers are looking for that his competitors aren’t servicing. They should be easy wins.

Example of List Two expansion based on Google “Discussions”

List Two

I can research List Two in much the same way I did List One. I’ll add these seeds to the research as well.

List Three

List Three is a little different from the others. I won’t add these as seeds to my research, but I will save them for the elimination and refinement process later.

This is where instinct and experience becomes particularly useful, as it’s likely that I can take any list of keywords to avoid and expand it on instinct.

For example, based on what I know of this client, he already wants to avoid roofing, plumbing, tile, and electrical. But here are a few more statements I jotted down at our meeting that give me more clues:

• “I’m not the best priced contractor out there, because I don’t hire any undocumented workers and I pay my taxes. But I am very experienced and my clients are always happy with my work.”

Now I know I need to avoid [cheap], [free], [low-cost], [best priced], and other keywords like that. [Quality], [experience] and [ethical] are possible modifiers that are allowed.

• “I prefer to work with composite materials rather than pressure-treated lumber for decks. It’s much higher quality and creates a nicer finished product.”

So it’s a good idea to focus on any searches asking for the differences between those materials. Also I’ll probably weight the research more heavily to different types and brands of composite materials.

Another note I’m jotting down from this statement is to suggest the client create a page that discusses the pros and cons of composite vs. pressure-treated materials.

• “A lot of customers get a quote from a company like SEARS home improvement when they’re thinking about doing a remodeling project. This makes it tough for me because the materials that SEARS uses are limited to less-expensive ones. It helps me a lot if I can get a sense of a client’s budget beforehand; a single project can vary by thousands of dollars depending on the materials used. But of course, nicer materials create a nicer finished project.”

I’m not exactly sure what I could take from this, but there are likely to be a lot of keywords related to home improvement and/or SEARS.

I’ll be careful of those keywords and use something like Google Insights to determine if those trend higher at a certain time of year. I might even put them into a tool like ComScore to see if I can determine if people who search for [home improvement] related terms are in a lower income bracket. Of course, I also know I’ll have to avoid any keywords having to do with the television program of the same name.

Example of expansion of List Three based on notes from the client meeting

This is just the tip of the iceberg for keyword research. The proverbial “rabbit hole” can get very deep sometimes, so it’s important to make good decisions about which keywords to expand and which to keep at surface level.

I’m sure at this point, you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned Google’s Keyword Frequency Tool. Researching search frequency can be very useful, especially in determining how far to expand a certain keyword seed. For example, I found almost immediately that [lanai] has very low search frequency. So I didn’t spend a lot of time on it.

Conversely, I found that [enclosing deck] is actually quite large, especially when viewed through Google Insights in the spring and summer months, localized to North Carolina.

Ultimately, I’ll put all of these keyword seeds into the Google Keyword Tool to find the most highly searched combinations of keywords and an overall estimate of the search frequency of one service (decks) over another (window replacement). This will help me guide the client on what content should be created for the website.

I prefer to do most of the research in the manner discussed above, and then use search frequency to refine, categorize and prioritize it. I have certain tools and formulas that I use to do that. Next time, I’ll give you these tools and explain how to refine what you’ve found and present it to your client.

Thanks to Artisan Construction for allowing me to use them as an example.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: How To: SEO | Keywords Content | SEM Tools: Keyword Research

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/the-keyword-research-rabbit-hole-110489