Yahoo Says:

The Yahoo! Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.) is a suite of technologies, first developed in Yahoo! Labs, that delivers personalization and optimization to all of our services. Looking at past user behavior, algorithms are combined with human editorial expertise to allow us to carry out deep personalization to our more than 700 million users, giving them “must read” stories that are interesting and relevant. This C.O.R.E. data visualization reveals some of the factors that influence the display of articles in the Yahoo! Today module. Emulating C.O.R.E.’s ability to learn from visitor behaviors and return appropriate content, this data visualization allows visitors to quickly adjust several different demographic factors and article criteria to reveal typical reader habits and patterns.

For marketers it is an innovative and fun way to see what different demographic groups are interested in at the moment. You can break things down by U.S. city, age, sex and interests. It is basically an almost real time “trending” visualization. It is also stunning to look at.

Check it out at http://visualize.yahoo.com/core/

It is not often that a Google change makes front page news on CNN, but there it is. We all knew it was coming, but I’m not sure everyone knew it would happen so soon. Google is getting personal. +1s are going to count for more, facebook is going to count for less. What does this mean for Internet Marketers and what exactly has changed? According to CNN:

Miguel Helft, a senior writer at Fortune, which is a CNN.com partner website, says the change has the bonus effect for Google of giving lots and lots of exposure to its social network, Google+, which is aimed to be a direct competitor to Facebook.

“The change will expose Google+ profiles, as well as posts and photographs uploaded to the network, to hundreds of millions of search users whether or not they have Google+ accounts. In many cases, the changes will push content from other sites, including Facebook, further down on the search results pages,” he writes on Fortune.com.

Helft adds that social search has long been a “holy grail” in tech.

“Facebook has been working with Microsoft to allow that company’s search engine, Bing, to surface more personalized content,” he writes. “And the Facebook platform has allowed countless services, like Yelp, Pandora and Spotify, to become more personal by showing users content that is relevant to their Facebook friends.”

But the change is also likely to upset competitors who complain that Google gives preferential treatment to content from its own products — from Google+ to YouTube, he writes.

There you go, the target for 2012 is definitely social networking – and google+ at that.

A New Google Gold Rush has begun

Back to work time for many as we start into 2012! To start the new year off right, I’ve just updated the SEO 2012 report and I’m providing it free to anyone that subscribes to my mail list. There is no catch whatsoever, there are no affiliate links in the SEO 2012 report and you are free to share it around with anyone (though I prefer if you send them to me to sign up to my mail list first).

The report covers:

Important changes to search engine optimization that affect your rankings.

Uncover optimization strategies that will give your website an immediate boost in rankings!

Learn about “over optimization”, and how it can hurt your ability to generate traffic!

Get all this and more for FREE simply by subscribing to my mail list. I can assure you that I rarely send messages out to the list and when I do the content of the messages provide valuable information only and are not just filled with affiliate links and pitches. I look forward to sharing this information with you and I hope you enjoy the FREE bonus of “SEO 2012: Prepare your Site for 2012 and Beyond”.

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I figured I’d followup a bit on my post about article marketing. When I said that article marketing is not dead, I feel I should qualify that somewhat. Clearly the article marketing sites have lost traction over the last year. The Alexa traffic graph shows how drastically the traffic to ezinearticles.com has dropped over the past year. So how can I be saying that article marketing is not dead?

Article marketing is not dead because getting traffic to the article directories is not the purpose of article marketing. The purpose of article marketing is to get your content “out there” on the web and increase your online presence. Each article you get out there provides you with valuable back links in the resource box. Each article can represent three links back to your site. Each link should be different – don’t put them all just to your homepage. One link can go to the domain level, one to a deep page and one to an offer or even an affiliate offer, but I prefer to link through my own site so that I can change the final location if the affiliate offer closes. For that matter, don’t always link all of them to your “money site.” Some of your articles can (and should) link to your satellite sites (wordpress.com, squidoo, etc.) and they should link back to your “money site.”

Articles still need to offer value, though I have found that even heavily spun plr content can work for generating back links, original and useful content spreads farther, faster.

Now that you have written a bunch of articles, submitted them to the article directories and blogs, you have a bunch of free back links. Of course, unless the backlinks get indexed they won’t do much for your search rank. This is why I think many people think article marketing doesn’t work. The put articles out there and don’t notice an increase in traffic or ranking. But at this point they have only done half the job. Now you need to get all those back links indexed by the search engines.

Your articles should link back to your blog in the resource box, so each time they are republished elsewhere you will get a pingback notification (assuming you have pingback notifications turned on). All those ping backs now need to get indexed. You can do this manually, but it is much easier to use a plugin like Pingback Optimizer. Pingback Optimizer automates the entire process and will automatically generate an RSS feed of all the pingbacks and then submit the results to the directories automatically. Pingback Optimizer is a commercial plugin and sells for $47 for a single site or $97 for an unlimited number of sites. No fancy sales page, but you can purchase Pingback Optimizer right here.

Done properly article marketing can still help you rank higher in the search engines and bring you increased traffic.

I have heard many people say that article marketing is a waste of time. I have to disagree. Article marketing is time consuming, but I can tell by the pingbacks and links when my articles are accepted that it is time well spent. Well written articles will rank for the keyword you have optimized for and at the very least provide you with a backlink. Well written articles are also more likely to be accepted by other people for inclusion in their own blogs and assuming they follow the rules and include your bio box you get more backlinks from them as well. I believe the people that say that article marketing is dead are just doing it wrong.

Just as it was years ago, content is king.

When article marketing your article must be a quality piece and it must provide value. If the article is fluff, poorly written or worse yet, poorly spun then the article may not be picked up by the article directories. It is a good idea to submit a quality article to each directory and while you can submit similar articles to multiple directories they MUST be substantially different from each other. There are software packages available to “spin” the content (often just by replacing synonyms), but you still need to read each submission to make sure it is human readable. Otherwise you end up with passages like:

I’ve noticed many individuals state that report promoting can be a waste of time. I’ve to disagree. It is actually time intensive, but I can inform with the pingbacks and hyperlinks when my posts are acknowledged that it’s time nicely invested.

This is clearly machine interpreted language and it does not read well and will likely be rejected by the article marketing sites. If you do spin an article using software (as opposed to rewriting by hand) you must make sure to edit the result. There are some software packages such as Article Samurai and The Best Spinner that do a good job with spinning text and will help avoid the poor sentence structure shown in the sample above.
Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when writing an article for submission to an article directory.

• Make sure to optimize the article for your chosen keyword, but again make sure that the article is readable.
• Make sure to include an author’s bio box. Most directories restrict the links you are allowed but they usually allow two links in the bio box and one “below the fold” in the body. One of these links should go to you homepage, one to a relevant section on your site and one to your product or call to action.
• Don’t pitch anything in the body of your article, save that for the bio box.

Here is a list of directories you can submit articles to:

Article Marketing Sites

Well, it looks like the XXX domain is not entirely working the way that ICANN had intended. As Mashable point out, many of the domains registered thus far are for “protection.” Pornographers don’t really want to be sandboxed into an XXX “red light district.” In fact, many porn sites rely on people entering legitimate sites incorrectly through typos and the like. It is to the advantage of a porn site to have a regular TLD such as .com to capitalize on the potential typos. Also as mashable noted, porn sites are not above using a domain name that seems to indicate something innocuous such as the famous whitehouse.com domain that once linked to a porn site. There are many more that are still active, but I’d rather not include them as example for obvious reasons. This is a family site  and I don’t want to link to porn. For similar reason, many of the people that have paid the rather exorbitant price for an XXX domain (in comparison to a .com the price is almost 10 times as much), grabbed the domain to stop pornographers from grabbing the name and possibly using their name against them.  It seems that at least GoDaddy is aware of the prime customers for the XXX domain since their advertising copy starts with

“Secure your brand. Protect your reputation.

Perhaps you’d like to create an adult entertainment website. Or maybe you’re here to keep your brand from being registered as a .XXX by someone else. Whatever your reasons for wanting a .XXX domain, you’ve come to the right place. To check the availability of your domain, type the name you want into the search box above.”

“To enable our customers to discover who’s sharing, voting and bookmarking their content on the social web, cross-network measurement needs to become easier. So today we’re inviting social networks and platforms to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics. Through these integrations, marketers and publishers will be able to discover off-site engagement, optimize their engagement within each social community, and measure the impact of each social channel and its associated digital investment.”

Google already has most of the big social networks in the list and they will certainly add many more. I do notice a few glaring omissions from the logo above that Google posted earlier today.

.XXX is the new domain for pornography. As of yesterday, the XXX domain registry is open to all. The “sunrise period” during which people and organizations with trademarks to protect could register XXX domains ended on November 25 and general availability opened up on December 6th. During the sunrise period over 100,000 XXX domains were sold (not really a massive number when you consider that the .com registry sells over 100 million domains a year) The land rush is now in full swing. I find they policy of “protecting” names an interesting marketing concept. As indicated on the BBC “Companies and individuals that do not want their name associated with pornography will be able to pay a one-off fee of between $150 and $300 (£100 to £200), depending on which company they register their domain with.”

“In all, 58 percent of all adults said that they use the Internet to pass time or have fun at least occasionally. Of adults who use the Internet, nearly three-quarters surf the Web for no reason.”

Given how many people are constantly connected to their iPhones and Androids, I wonder how the percentage would break down between those that go online for no reason at their desk versus those that go online on their phone. From other indications, I think it is likely the latter that is contributing the most to the percentage of people that go online “for no reason.”

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