Marketing Pilgrim Published: “The 2014 SEOs Silver Linings Playbook” plus 4 more

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• The 2014 SEOs Silver Linings Playbook
• Pop the Champagne! Display Ads up 32%, Paid Search 37%. Bing? Not So Much
• Google AdWords Ramps Up Their Push to Get All of Your Ad Money
• Have You Considered Channel Sponsorship?
• Pinterest Steps it Up Again with Pinterest Interests

The 2014 SEOs Silver Linings Playbook Posted: 28 Jan 2014 07:51 AM PST With all the discussion surrounding what's not working quite as well in SEO – from SSL encryption, to panda, penguin and humming bird updates. I wanted to focus our attention to what's really working for us and hence the SEOs Silver Linings Playbook! I'd like to discuss a couple of advanced SEO tactics and analysis – that work. Advanced SEO interlinking Acquiring high authority links to your site and building up domain strength is great but how can you effectively leverage the strength of your internal pages to further boost pages that don’t rank as well.  That's where advanced SEO interlinking comes in to play. Identify internal linking prospects The first step is identifying your high authority pages. There are multiple ways of doing this but I prefer SEOMoz or Ahrefs. Using SEOMoz: Export all the pages from the "Top Pages" tab – these are pages that have the highest page authority. Using Ahref: This method requires a lot more steps but it also provides a lot more data: Extract all the backlinks for your root domain in to an excel file. Use pivot tables to analyze top linked pages. To go one step further, you could merge both Ahrefs and SEOMoz data to give one giant list of top pages on your site (don’t forget to remove the duplicates though!) Analyze keywords with the content So now we have pages that we'd want to link from. Next we want to identify keywords and landing pages that we'd want to link to from these top pages. Create a list of your high priority keywords that you'd want to see increase in ranks. SearchMetrics is a great tool to help you identify keywords that are currently not ranking in the top 10. Lets assume we want to help drive up the link equity for some of these pages and keywords. We run these keywords as filters using Screaming Frog (another favorite!) to help identify if these keywords mentioned anywhere in our Top pages list. Screaming Frog then magically spits out pages that have these keywords mentioned in them. We can then use these pages for interlining to our preferred keyword/landing pages. Quick Note: Make sure you don’t overdo the interlinking, use some longer tail variations of the targeted keywords. Semantic Sitemaps Creating semantic sitemaps is extremely useful when it comes to getting a better understanding of your site and how search engines crawl/perceive it. Instead of creating one giant sitemap with all the URLs, its preferable to break out the URLs in to categories that are similar to your website. This helps you analyze which section of the site is being better indexed as compared to other sections of the website. If we take Allrecipies as an example – we'd want to create a sitemap that mirrors the sites taxonomy. If the site were structured well, with clear folders that segment each of the categories – creating these XML sitemaps would be a lot easier. However, if its not then its more of a manual process.  At the end, you'd want to be able to view each of the segments that have been created using Google Webmaster or Bing Webmaster tools to give you a definitive picture of how these sections are being crawled Here's an example of what a semantic sitemap would look like – In the example above, we see that certain sitemaps (home-décor.xml) have a low indexation rate. This data helps us analyze further which categories and sections of our site might not be driving traffic due to poor indexation by Google. Social Content Marketing No SEO playbook is complete without a strategy around content marketing! Social signals do help in increasing ranks. At AdLift we've done a number of tests on the impact of social links and SEO that hat proved that these help in driving up page authority and in turn rankings. This particular case study explains how social links increased ranks for keywords faster that keywords without the social links. However, just as you need a solid content marketing strategy you also need a strong social marketing network to help drive that effort.  Synergizing efforts between your content marketing and social media team is a great first start ! I hope this post was useful – If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments! About the Author An alum from Columbia University, Prashant Puri has over 10 years of digital marketing experience in building sites into multi-million dollar enterprises. Prashant Puri currently runs AdLift  - a niche Bay Area SEO Company focused on delivering digital marketing ROI.  Prior to AdLift, Prashant was Head of Global Marketing at eBay's comparison shopping arm where he was instrumental in establishing their footprint across 5 countries. Before that, Prashant served at Yahoo! where he worked on cutting edge technologies that focused on driving synergies between search and display. Being an industry veteran he's invited to speak at numerous digital marketing conferences around the world, including SMX, SES and Pubcon and as an expert in search marketing, contributed to several search marketing journals including Visibility, Website Magazine and Search Engine Journal. You can follow him on twitter @puriprashant

Pop the Champagne! Display Ads up 32%, Paid Search 37%. Bing? Not So Much Posted: 28 Jan 2014 06:07 AM PST We have a couple of reports that tell us that internet advertising grew quite nicely in 2013. First up, Techcrunch has details from a new Nielsen report showing display advertising spend is up 32%! Up next, The Search Agency would like you to know that the amount spent on paid search grew by over 37%! It wasn’t all good news, with Bing seeing a significant drop in impressions served: a 7% drop YoY and 29% from the previous quarter… So pop the champagne….except for you Bing. You need to go to the back of the room and think about what you’ve done.

Google AdWords Ramps Up Their Push to Get All of Your Ad Money Posted: 27 Jan 2014 02:00 PM PST I don’t know if it’s just the new year or something more pressing but I’ve never noticed this level of push from Google AdWords before. They’ve always done a good job of keeping their blog updated with helpful information but in the last few weeks, it’s been overflowing with news. It started on January 15 with a post about upcoming features and improvements including – well. . . the title says insights for 2014 but it sounds more like a list of 2013 improvements.  . . .So last February, we introduced enhanced campaigns for AdWords. With enhanced campaigns, it became much simpler to manage campaigns across multiple devices while optimizing for your customers’ intent and context — like their location and time of day. . . . .So in addition to the manual bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns (see our “Bid Like a Pro” guide), we launched new, more flexible automated bidding strategies.” . . . . So in June, we introduced a valuable new audience-based capability to search ads: The ability to tailor your bids, ads or even keywords based on a user’s previous visits to your website.” We also introduced a new metric, estimated cross-device conversions, to help you better measure conversions that start with an ad click on one device and end with an online conversion on a different device. Finally, looking forward to 2014. . . . . . So you can expect substantial improvements around workflow efficiency, campaign planning, analysis and reporting, opportunity identification, and testing. So. . . what they’re really trying to do is make AdWords easy to use and less intimidating. I like that. The next step is a series of Google Hangout training classes. In February they’ll be discussing location targeting, mobile targeting and real bidding with audience targeting. These are excellent sessions for beginners and they’re totally free. Learn more about the Hangouts here. About a week ago, Google demonstrated their commitment to stopping bad ads and they released a series of ad mute surveys which will help advertisers understand why their ads aren’t working.   Last week Google rolled out a new, easier to read interface for AdWords then posted “The Performance Marketer's Field Guide to AdWords Ad Extensions.” Today, they want to remind you to use your six available deep linked sitelinks on your ads. Personally, I rarely click anything but a home page button on these ads but I can see how they might improve conversions. The most interesting thing I saw today was an email solicitation offering me a $100 credit toward mobile app promotion. I’ve seen these credits for general AdWords ads but never for mobile. What’s with the push? Are AdWord dollars slipping? Are people switching over to Bing? AdWords is still the biggest game in town but I guess even Google can’t rest on it’s laurels (which sounds extremely uncomfortable.) It feels like they’re trying to pull in a fresh, young audience. Yes, it’s all aimed at putting money in their own pockets, but if it helps you put more money in yours then it’s a win-win.

Have You Considered Channel Sponsorship? Posted: 27 Jan 2014 12:51 PM PST Have you considered placing your company in front of Marketing Pilgrim’s savvy audience of influential marketers? While we still have some great channels available, these companies are already a step ahead of you: Avalaunch Media – infographic design and promotion services. AdLift – get your free SEO audit today! ClickZ Live New York – the must attend event for digital marketers. SMX West – bringing the best internet marketing minds together in San Jose. Text Link Brokers – go beyond simple back links, with Text Link Brokers various packages. Marketing Optimizer – try their all-in-one web marketing platform. Trackur – the world’s leading social media monitoring tools. Your Channel Sponsorship not only gets your display ads in front of our audience, but you also get to display your brilliance with our native advertising options. Drop me a note if you would like to sponsor a channel.

Pinterest Steps it Up Again with Pinterest Interests Posted: 27 Jan 2014 12:20 PM PST Pinterest is already one of the fastest growing social media networks on the web but they’ve got their sites set even higher in 2014. The site is so simple, it doesn’t seem like they could do much to improve it and yet, over the past few months, they’ve added features that make it better and better. Or more accurately, they’ve added features that make it more accurate. Today’s update is the best one yet, a new explore option that looks at your images and suggests options you might enjoy. But there’s more to it than that. The suggests are grouped by sub-categories so the response is more specific (and specific is good.) For example, using the main Pinterest navigation menu, I can search DIY and Crafts. This nets me an enormous collection of everything from how to make cupcakes to turning a dirty pallet into a lovely wall divider. The new Interests tab sees that I’ve pinned Halloween cards so I’m given the option of viewing a page of nothing but Halloween cards. And yes, I could just type Halloween cards in the search box but the best images are the ones you didn’t know you were looking for. Here’s my interest page: Some of this is random because I often upload images of fun things I find at the thrift store. I’m not interested in the fire department or hula girls – those just happen to be items I picked for resale. But that’s not Pinterest’s fault, that’s mine. Universal Studios, Alfred Hitchcock, Sleepy Hollow, Steampunk – they’re all spot on. Once I started clicking. . . oh man. . I could do this all day. What I like best about this new way to search is that it’s a wider range of pins. When I view my home feed, it’s usually front loaded with half a dozen photos from the same pinner. Plus, just because I follow someone, doesn’t mean I’m interested in everything they pin. With the Interests page, I go right to my favorite items. Now, here’s an interesting note. I went back and clicked on my Hula Girls plate (top right on the image above) and guess what? I got a page full of retro kitsch items, including items like this cat that doesn’t even have the word kitsch in the description. That’s huge because it means the new Interests engine is capable of going beyond the text in the description box. Pinterest recently acquired a company that specializes in visual matching so this must be their handiwork. It’s huge, because so many people don’t properly label their Pinterest pins. If you use Pinterest for your business, Pinterest Interests is a great tool to help you find new people to follow (aka potential customers) and ups the chance of your pins being seen. And even though it appears to go beyond the pin description, I’d still recommend you fill that box out completely using appropriate keywords. There’s plenty in this world that you can’t control, so take full advantage of the stuff you can. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

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