After seeing the potential social media has for the whole online environment, Google obviously wanted a big piece of this market and launched its own social service – Google Buzz. Buzz was a major failure so it has been left aside, however the guys at Google started to dig deeper and deeper in social area.

After the rumors that SERPs are influenced by the “buzz” a certain website has in the social media environment, Google recently launched its +1 button (quite similar to Facebook’s Like) and recently they have acquired a social analytics online service called PostRank.

Basically, PostRank’s main mission is to track and measure social posts so this movement from Google is not a surprise, while trying not to being left aside in all this popular social thing. It seems that they will use data provided by this new “department” to understand more how social works and where can they find a breach to jump in this boat.

It is not the first acquisition Google makes in this niche, PostRank following a large number of social media companies like SayNow or Fflick. However, it seems that PostRank’s main objective will be to keep track and analyse all things related to online social.

Again, it is not a surprise that Google bought this company right after they have launched into the wild their +1 button – with this new technology in their hands they will be able to track +1’s social impact and analyse whether it is a successful social launch or not.

Compete, a web traffic analysis site from the large family of Kantar Media, recently revealed the top 50 websites’ ranking for April 2011. Many popular website suffered major declines, following a constant trend in the last months and many others gain more visitors, but let’s see below more about each of them.

One of the biggest surprises was the NYTimes website, which suffered a 20.4% dropped in terms of unique visitors for April and a total of 24.9% drop when compared to April 2010. On the other hand, when it comes to sport subdomains such as baseball, basketball and football ones, the traffic for those pages increased with over 57.8% – readers seem to be more interested in these sports rather than general news or politics.

The popularity of Groupon seems to have went up through the roof with a 5.4% increase in terms of unique visitors (that is around 24 million unique visitors per month) while when it comes to year-to-year traffic the numbers are fantastic: 655.8% increase in visitors when compared to April 2010. Following closely, LivingSocial.com reached around 11.5 million visitors per month but when it comes to percentage growth they have grown with around 32.7% in April and seems to have an upward popularity scale.

Top 10 of this report does not come with spectacular changes (at least in terms of traffic increase), furthermore, it seems that all top 10 occupants suffered some losses in terms of unique visitors, when compared to last month.

You can check the entire top 50 on Compete’s blog here.

There are many website owners that are trying to optimise their websites, some for very difficult keywords and others for easier ones, also known as long-tail keywords. However, depending on the keywords’ difficulty there are different approaches in creating an SEO strategy for outranking your competition.

Of course, the most important aspects related to optimising a site are on-page and off-page SEO but what happens in the case of very low competition keywords? There are sometimes phrases that get lower numbers of searches each month but on the other hand a perfectly optimised page can get top results only by doing on-page optimisation like title, description, tags and so on. With a couple extra anchor text links one could get on number 1 in a matter of days.

On the other hand, when it comes to more competitive keywords things are changing. This does not mean on-page optimisation should not be used (in fact this is probably the most important aspect of SEO) but when you are dealing with difficult keywords is the number (and quality) of inbound links that count more. From anchor text diversity to link relevancy, these are the features that count more when doing off-page SEO.

One important aspect to keep in mind is the fact that high-optimised pages for long-tail keywords tend to be the best approach for trying to rank later on for more difficult keywords as well. Say you are trying to reach top rankings for “web design”, you should be probably going first with easier terms such as “affordable web design in London” or something alike. Once you have started gaining some good ranks for that keyword you will definitely have more chances in going after that bigger fish, in our case the “web design” keyword.

Building links has the sole purpose of getting high rankings in search engines, increase in traffic and getting conversions. “Writing for the web” is still a fantastic way of building links, getting exposure and directing laser-targeted traffic to your products/services. Although most folks say article marketing is dead, we are not talking here about mass article submission and so on but creating unique and researched content that attracts people.

If you feel you are not so familiar with writing articles than you should probably hire a professional article writer. Watch out when choosing them, nowadays there are thousands of so-called article writers that have no clue about writing content!

The first question is what you should write about or what you should pay your writer to write about? It is very easy: if you plan on getting at least 1 article published per week you should do some analyses with Google Keyword Tool, Question and Answers websites and even Google’s related searches. You will notice that most articles should be answers to what people are searching for. Tip: always take notice of what questions your customers/prospects ask and create articles based on those. If they want an answer to that, there will definitely be other hundreds, maybe thousands searching online for that very answers.

Once you article marketing strategy is up and running you should start searching for places to publish your work. Whether we are talking about creating Squidoo lenses, publishing on Ezine or even going with guest blogging, this strategy can definitely bring you some laser targeted traffic and not only – you will get as much as possible online exposure and you can (and will) become an expert in your field, whether we are talking about SEO, dog training or wedding planning.

In our last post we talked about how to increase conversions from our PPC campaigns, in today’s post we shall talk a little about how to increase the click through rate because without many clicks it’s natural that you cannot get many conversions.

Here are the tips below:

1.      Laser targeted Vs. General keywords

Although a keyword like “web design” can get a great traffic, targeted keywords are definitely the way to go while they can get way more conversions. So in our case, bidding on keywords like “cheap web designers from London” can definitely bring more clicks/conversions than the general “web design”.

2.      How much does it cost?

If you know you are the cheapest service/product provide in your niche you can definitely include it in your ad copy. On the other hand, higher prices will bring less clicks and conversions.

3.      Keywords in title/body

We all know that Google bolds the keywords when appearing in search results so using those very keywords in the ad copy will make them get more clicks.

4.      Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!

Seasonal headlines always attract clicks while most of the times they mean discounts/sales. Using titles like “Christmas web design sales” or something alike usually work best. Each and every holiday should be targeted!

5.      Use only relevant keywords!

There are many negative keywords that you can use to remove those unwanted clicks but also you should use only strictly related keywords to the product/service you sell. Again, more emphasis on long tail keywords!

Many SEO’s use advanced search queries in order to find information from potential link partners and to analyse competition. Searching through search engine results for real goldmines cannot be easy without these combinations of keywords and search operators. Each one can reveal interesting data about competition, link building opportunities and many others, as shown below.

Here are some of the most important ones you can use in your daily tasks:

1. Site:

This one can be used for checking how many pages a website has indexed in Google and also it can be a powerful operator (when used with a tool like SEOQuake) for searching blog posts with high PR to comment on (for those that are still running after high PageRank).

2. Allintitle:keyword

This is great when trying to find out how difficult a keyword is to rank for. Of course, there is no limit on how many results should appear in order to classify a keyword as a medium-low competition one but you can get an idea when searching for multiple keywords.

3. Allinanchor:keyword

The allinanchor operator is fantastic to check what pages are intenselu building backlinks for a certain term. The results from top 10 should reveal an interesting image related to how many links you should build, where competition grabs its links and what kind of links are they running after. Very powerful operator, a must use.

4.Link:site.com

Although search engines do not reveal all links pointing to a certain website, you can get an idea from this operator on what kind of links someone is building to that very site. Mixed up with the operator site: you could also see whether competition is building links to inner pages as well or only to homepage.

There are many other operators very useful when creating a link building strategy, we will definitely reveal more of them in the future.