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Before You Add That Shopping Cart to Your Search, Read These Helpful Hints from StayonSearch.com

Your business may not require the use of a shopping cart on your site. But if it does, you need to be sure it’s performing all of the duties you hope it will for you. It’s very easy to put up a cart and not get everything out of it that you should. However, guest blogger Mark Thompson at StayonSearch.com has some recommendations regarding “5 MUSTS for Integrating a New Shopping Cart” for you to take into account. Here’s what he says: Use dynamic meta-data. Pretend your online business lists 100,000 items for sale. Are you going to spend the time coming up with 100,000 different meta tags? Of course not. However there are ways to dynamically pull in a product’s name, category and other info without spending a lifetime typing in thousands of titles. Use this capability and it’ll save you lots of time. Use high-res pictures and multiple images. Bad pictures result in bad sales. The better your photography, the better the perceived quality of the product. Use multiple photos whenever possible, since chances are your product can’t be examined in person. Encourage Newsletter Subscribers. If a person buys from you, that person will probably do it again if their shopping experience was pleasant. Make sure they don’t forget about your website by signing up for your company newsletter. It’s a great way to market to them several times over the year. Alert them to new products, sales, improvements, promotions, etc. Integrate your Shopping Site with Google. Whenever someone searches for a product, Google lists its own search results first. By using a shopping cart that integrates Google Product Search, you won’t miss out on any important sales opportunities. Offer payment options. The more options you give your customers, the more likely they are to find a way to buy from you. Thompson also says you shouldn’t “require” your customers to leave more information athat what you need to send them their order. He says to give them an opt-out option, since many customers don’t like to leave a trail. Respect their wishes and they’ll come back.

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The 2011 Question: Will Yahoo! Be Around in 2012?

The answer: No, if Yahoo! Doesn’t do something quick about its leadership. The company’s recent layoff of more than 4% of its workforce (560 people) leads one to ask what everybody’s been thinking for a while: is this it for Yahoo? Like any good company in trouble, the Yahoo PR department has been trying to put the best light possible on the layoffs (roughly 560 people worldwide): “Today’s personnel changes are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo! for revenue growth and margin expansion and to support our strategy to deliver differentiated products to the marketplace. We’ll continue to hire on a global basis to support our key priorities. Yahoo! is grateful for the important contributions made by the employees affected by this reduction. We are offering severance packages and outplacement services to these employees.” That’s all well and good but it doesn’t really get to the point of the matter: Yahoo! has no idea what it is anymore, or what it wants to be. The problem appears to lie with Carol Bartz, CEO. While she appears to be good with numbers, she’s not very good at innovation and creativity. There’s some speculation that she couldn’t even describe what Yahoo does until very recently. By turning over its search engine capabilities to Bing in 2010, the assumption was that it would free up the time for many Yahoo! employees to work on new, exciting projects. Now, we see it for just what it is: an attempt by Bartz to save some money and still keep Yahoo’s relevance as a search engine alive. Disgruntled employees report a company in “shambles,” and digging a hole from which it may not be able to escape. So what's best for Yahoo!, from an outsider's point of view? Here’s hoping that Yahoo! is able to get its act together in 2011, before it becomes the latest name at the top of a list that includes such past also-rans as Alta Vista, Infoseek, Cuil, etc.

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Content Marketing Institute’s Heidi Cohen Has Three Ways to Keep Bloggers Interested in Writing for You

Blogging is easy. Blogging well is hard. Blogging well for a long period of time is almost impossible without real incentive. Even professional bloggers get bored after a while So what do you do when you have people you’re paying to blog for you, and their energy toward your site is waning? Heidi Cohen at Content Marketing Institute (CMI) has three suggestions on “How to Keep Bloggers Engaged”: 1. Set goals and related metrics for your blog. Make sure your bloggers understand blog analytics and what you’re trying to accomplish. Your bloggers will feel more compelled to write more exciting copy, since they know they are competing with other bloggers for rank. Be sure to track the amount of content provided, content effectiveness, page views, Social media shares, Email shares, Comments and Business-related actions to the post. 2. Incorporate blog responsibilities. Create corporate guidelines for your bloggers to follow. Get senior management involved. Tell them to provide feedback to your bloggers. A little encouragement from the guys upstairs can do a lot to boost a blogger’s ego. And while this sounds odd, anytime you hire a blogger, make sure human relations puts “blog participation” in his or her job description. 3. Celebrate Your Bloggers. Give praise and credit where it’s due:

Create “About the Author” blurbs with pictures that appear at the bottom of each post.

Credit bloggers in company tweets. Let everybody know when a blog post is worth reading, and who wrote it.

Mention posts with the author’s by-line in marketing emailings.

Reward your bloggers. Gift certificates, recommendations, cash bonuses; all go towards creating a happy blogger.

In short, Cohen says if you keep your bloggers in the spotlight, they’ll right highlight copy almost every time out of the gate.

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A Holiday Tip: 5 Signs that Your Holiday Party is “Over Optimized”

‘Tis the season for holiday parties, and if your office is like ours, you’ve done a lot of planning to make our company party special. This got us to thinking, though; is it possible to do too much planning for your corporate holiday event? As a result, we came up with 5 signs you have "over optimized" your holiday party:

Sign #1 - The name tags have way too much information:"Hi! I’m John Smith, CMO, Internet Marketing and SEO Specialist, 10 Year Employee, Employee of the Month 3 Times, Based in the Phoenix Office. I like to Wakeboard!"

Sign #2 - The award ceremony is two hours long because HR has came up a hugely confusing scheme for how to fairly distribute prizes. Example: Years of service,Number of merits, Pay Scale, Gender, Family Status (Single, Has Kids etc..), Personal hobbies etc..

Sign #3 – Not wanting to offend anyone in your multi-cultural staff, your holiday party is separated into themes to accommodate the personal and religious preferences of all attendees. Different rooms, different drinks, different decor etc..

Sign #4 - The party’s official name is "The Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Three Kings Day, December Birthdays, New Years Celebration and Festival"

Sign #5- First meeting for the next holiday party: immediately following the closing ceremony of this one.

We hope you have a wonderful and safe holiday season! We look forward to working with you in 2011.

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Google Expands its Places Services and the Competition is...Shocked?

Is Google favoring its Places, Place Search and Place Pages services over similar sites on the web? Predictably, if you ask other sites, yes. If you ask Google, no. A December 13 article by Clint Boulton at eWeek.com covers Google’s reaction to a story published on in the Wall Street Journal the day before that many startup companies think Google is favoring its own results services over those provided by businesses that depend on Google results to generate business and provide a decent search rankings. Search for a restaurant in your town, for example, and the lettered “pins” that come up on the map are more likely to be locations signed up with Google Places than those found exclusively through other search sites. Google says it’s simply trying to get information to people as quickly as possible. Boulton quotes Google’s Carter Maslan: "When people come to Google looking for information about places like restaurants, shoe stores, parks or museums, our goal is to provide them with answers as quickly as possible and presented in a way that's easy to read and understand." Google may have a point; the improvements it’s making to its location software is simply an attempt to make the information provided more complete. This might anger some of the competition, but complaining may be all they can do.

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Prepping Your B2B Site for the Holidays is more than Fancy Graphics

Great news for B2C companies: This year’s “Computer Monday,” the Monday after thanksgiving, set amazing records. However. If you’re a B2B marketer, you probably didn’t see your sales go through the roof. That’s because December is traditionally the month when most companies cut back to bare bones while they plan their budgets for next hear.  

Fortunately, there are still ways to pick up some extra sales through clever use of your social media campaign. Jeffrey Cohen at SocialMediaB2B.com hopes you’re doing this work already. But in his article “Does B2B Social Media Drive Holiday Sales?” he says that simply doing holiday touches, such as  adding a Santa hat to your Twitter avatar, or adding a holiday message to your website isn’t enough to drive traffic in a B2B environment.  Success in social media for B2B relies on building long-term relationships that can benefit from such holiday touches, rather than be created from it.

Cohen advises adding some holiday cheer to Twitter accounts where you already have an established relationship. This contributes a human element to your business. Similarly, add a holiday landing tab on your Facebook page to encourage holiday stories from your customers. 

These and other holiday ideas are fine, Cohen says as long as you use them to appeal to your current clients. Just like you wouldn’t send Christmas cards to strangers; you don’t want to market the holidays to them, either.

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Are You “Freetarded?” Aaron Wall Can Tell You if you are – and He’s Naming Names

If you own a business or freelance your time to many clients, you know the drill: “Can you help me out on this? I just need some advice…”

What the person is really looking for is your expertise – expertise that your own clients pay hundreds, even thousands of dollars for. Yet there’s always some guy who has a problem and wants you to help him solve it without thinking about the fact that this is how you make your living.

Aaron Wall at SEOBook.com calls these people “Freetards,” and he’s apparently had quite enough of them. In a lengthy blog entry, Wall says that freetardation often starts with people who are frustrated because they bought a product or service that didn’t work. When they can’t get satisfaction from the actual supplier of the product, they take it out on anyone in the industry that they can. Wall says it’s amazing how many times he gets blamed, and even threatened with legal action – for things that he had neither anything to do with or even knew existed.  When he tries to explain this, the angry consumer gets angrier and wonders why he can’t fix the problem – for free- now.

Wall says freetardation is everywhere. He points is finger at one popular site that refused to link to SEOBook.com at first, because the site used infographics. When it caught on to the quality of the infographics, they started running those charts on their own site without giving credit to SEOBook.com. Wall says there are thousands of freetards like that out there, with pretty famous names, including Huffingtonpost.com.

Small wonder, says Wall, that “free” was one of the top ten searched for keywords on the web this year.

Wall also discusses a phenomenon he calls “The Penny Gap.”  This is the consumer’s tendency to want to try anything free, rather than risk even the smallest investment into something that might actually change their lives for the better.

Bottom line: Freetards are not customers. Customers pay you to do things; Freetards expect you to do things.

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Amidst All the Google/Facebook Fighting, Did You See All the Search Engines This Year?

If you were a search engine developer this year, sorry. When it came to sustained press, it just wasn’t going to happen for you, what with Google and Facebook baring their teeth and going at each other with one new development after another. Still, it’s admirable what you accomplished this year – four unique sites with four distinctly different ideas on what constitutes great search. You really should have had your moment in the sun before you took on the big guys, who will probably always be the big guys. But lets give each of you your 15 minutes:

Quora: If people were willing to help other people as quickly as they’re willing to jump on a review site and trash a restaurant, Quora might be better known and better used than it is. The concept is simple: Type in a question or search term. If somebody’s answered the question, you’ll get the answer. If they haven’t, well, at least your question is there. Advantages: If someone has answered a question in the ballpark of the answer you chose, you might find the information you need. Disadvantages: While probably millions of questions have been posed, very few answers seem to exist so far on Quora. Have you ever been there? Check it out before people forget about it completely.

Swingly: Ask a question on Swingly and you are definitely going to get answers. Lots of answers. The secret? It’s developers gathered together more than 100 billion question and answer pairs of information. Swingly takes all that an pulls in answers from billions of sources on the internet. Most of the time, you come away with your answer. If not, at least you come away wondering why they use emus as their mascot. Advantages: Swingly is a truly unique approach to search. Like most unique approaches though,it can have its down side. But for finding out answers to basic questions or for trivia, this is the site for you. Disadvantages: Swingly is NOT very good at prospective questions, such as questions starting with “will” or “did.” Go to Google for that.

Blekko: Blekko got the most press probably, simply for calling itself the “slashtag” search engine. Granted, it’s pretty unique. Blekko invites the user to “slash” search, literally, by breaking down search queries using a slashtag. Example: political/conservative gets you Fox News as your first result. Political/liberal returns Washington monthly. Advantages: Blekko can break things down by category and search term. That’s pretty convenient, to be sure. Disadvantages: Blekko is sort of hard to use. It’s the only search engine here that wants you to add a task to your search activities. Geeks don’t care, but the rest of the world? Yes.

Qwiki: Qwiki is currently in Alpha testing (go to Qwiki.com to get on their troubleshooter list; this is going to be fun). Of all the search engines to enter the fray this year, Qwiki is definitely the best looking, most interesting and creative. The only question is, is it necessary? Advantages: Qwiki makes search fun. It’s not just words; it’s graphs and pictures and narration and scrolling copy and anything else the site’s searchbot can dig up. It’s fast, too. Schools are going to love this. Disadvantages: Qwiki is basically a one-result-at-a-time search engine. Its heavy graphics take up too much room to leave any space for a long list of results.

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The Six Most Common Social Media Marketing Questions Heard By Dan Zarella

This much is true: You need to have a social media presence. However, once you establish that presence, you still need to attract people. That’s the roadblock most companies run into; that’s also when they start asking questions. According to Dan Zarella, they ask six questions in general, which Magdalena Georgieva covers in her article “Answered: 6 Frequent Questions about Social Media Marketing,” at Hubspot.com. According to Georgieva, the most frequently-asked questions that Zarella confronts are: 1. When you put up a company Facebook page, how do you get somebody to “like” you? Answer: Give people a reason to like you. Free stuff is always good – free food, a discount on a purchase, a free download, whatever works to raise attention to your product or service. 2. Can social media be anti-social? Non-social? Too social? Answer: Social media can be any of these things. Of course, you’re not going to get very far being antisocial. If you don’t like people, get someone else to handle your social media. Ditto if you’re ambivalent. On the other hand, if it looks like you’re having fun creating new stuff on your social media sites, it’s almost impossible to come across as too social. 3. What tools should be used to track specific social media metrics? Answer: Two paid sites that Zarella recommends and Trendrr and Radian6. On the free side, Georgieva recommends Hubspot’s own social media monitoring platform and marketing automation software. She also likes Twitter Grader, calling it a quick, free way to evaluate your current social media influence. 4. Should the company have a landing page tab on Facebook? Short answer: yes! It’s a perfect way to use a call to action that doesn’t look overbearing. People can decide to click it or not. 5. What’s the best way to engage influencers? Influencers are people who “like” you who are also most likely to get excited about your product or brand. They can spread the word to their friends, etc. about you. Often, the simple act of acknowledging these people on your site is enough to get them talking about you in a positive way. 6. How do you stay personable on line without tweeting about yourself? Don’t tell people you’re a genius; show them you’re a genius by making intelligent comments about your industry. Become the expert people come to with questions.

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Tips on what to Read, what to Avoid from SearchEngineWatch.com’s Duncan Parry

Search is one of the most actively changing news topics in the world. And given the somewhat limited audience that cares, you’d be forgiven if you through everybody was talking about it these days. Duncan Parry at SearchEngineWatch.com says no, most people aren’t talking about it; it’s just that the ones who do are very, very noisy. In his article “How to Keep Up to Date In Search,” Parry offers some pointers on what to take note of in this business, and what to ignore, since it will eventually change anyway. 1. Ignore noise. Getting right into the “noisy” argument, Parry says that with all the blogs and articles published every day, there are more “experts” entering this field by the minute. Most should be ignored. Ask others who the trusted SEO names are and follow them. 2. Get an RSS Reader. This lets you put all relevant articles into one easy-to-find place, and allows you to add more at any time. Parry recommends Google Reader for its ease of use, and Feedly, which looks great, is easy to use and can be linked to Google Reader. 3. Watch the mainstream press. News sites by their very nature get the news first. By the time it reaches most SEO sites, you’ve heard about it elsewhere. Parry recommends subscribing to feeds from the New York Times, USAToday, BBC News, etc. 4. Learn about digital technology in general. Parry provides a large list of popular sites that you should be reading. 5. Some search sites are musts. Specifically, Parry recommends SearchEngineWatch and SearchEngineLand for daily newsletters and feeds, plus Search Engine Roundtable, which is often the first site with hot news from Google. 6. Don’t be afraid to cut sites from your reader list over time. Things change. Expect it and do something about it. Parry says that there’s good stuff to be found out there, but even the good stuff can get overwhelming. Determine which experts are worth your time and trust and take it from there.

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Google’s Change from “Sponsored Links” to “Ads” Causes Unexpected Spike in Clickthroughs

If there’s one thing you can say about people, it’s that they like simplicity. It’s why you don’t say “automobile,” you say, “car.” It’s why you don’t say, “aquatic biota,” you say, “fish.” Now Google has discovered the importance of KISS (Keep It Simple, stupid): An 11.4% spike in PPC click throughs. Maybe you didn’t notice it, but about a week ago, Google changed the phrase “Sponsored Links” in the PPC area of their results pages to say simply,“Ads.” According to researchers at TheSearchAgents.com, that little change (to some of the smallest type on the page) may be all it took to create the spike. It seems odd, to be sure. So The Search Agents team performed a pre/post analysis of user behavior between the last week of “Sponsored Ads” and the first week of “Ads.” Their findings:

Across all AdWords campaigns examined, the average position increased 1.5%

Total impressions decreased by the same amount.

Clicks increased 9.7%.

Average cost per click dropped 2.3%.

Total cost increased more than 7%.

And Click throughs increased 11.4%.

Needless to say, that huge increase was an even bigger surprise to the Search Agents team. So what caused the change? Would a tiny copy change really have that much of an influence? And why was the change made, anyway? It could have been due to pressure from the FTC to be clearer to consumers what PPC ads are. They may have said that most people don’t know what a sponsored link is, and ordered Google to use a terminology that everyone understands. Experts agree that if this is what happened, no one at Google was expecting such a click through spike, since simplifying things for the consumer usually pulls people away. However, just the opposite happened. Will this inspire other companies to start “dumbing down” their online copy? If the spike turns into a trend for Google, then you can bet they will.

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Facebook email: It Makes Total Sense, Says Ruud Hein at SearchEnginePeople.com

Facebook’s recent (and it turns out, bug-laden) attempt at introducing e-mail to its Facebook Messages system has raised a lot of eyebrows, both with excitement and with skepticism. Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook officials are quick to say that this is not a “new Email” or the end of e-mail. Rather, it’s a convenient addition to the other communications services Facebook offers. But it is pretty obvious that the social giant is taking on Google for some of its email audience. And they should, says Ruud Hein at SearchEnginePeople.com.His copiously illustrated article “The Three Reasons Why Facebook Email is a Big Deal” explains why. 1. Facebook Overtakes Everything. Hein says that not long ago, people in general did things differently online. They got pictures from Flickr, watched videos on YouTube, IM’d on Live Messenger and made announcements on Facebook. But now, Hein says more and more people are using Facebook to do all of these things – except email. Why not bring that aboard, too? 2. Facebook’s Social Graph Gets Larger. Using a graph to show the way all social networks used to be connected (Yahoo to LinkedIn to Gmail to Facebook, etc.), and another to show how social integration will work with Facebook email , Hein says: “By also overtaking email and incorporating as many types of social connection streams as possible, the Facebook social graph of you -- and as a result of its whole 500 million user network -- becomes much, much more complete.”His point is, Facebook will now not only know whom you connect with on Facebook, but also whom you connect with outside of it. 3. Email is Huge. Don’t listen to your kid, who’s telling you email is dying. It isn’t. Most people aren’t your kid and his friends, an age group that doesn’t use email much at all. Hein points out that Email marketing is still the #1 social list-based moneymaker. So Facebook is entering the email market at the right time. What this all means to you, Hein says, is that you need get people to “like” your company on Facebook. Messages from people who “like” you will be given a different “weight” than those out of that sphere, which could ultimately determine everything from search rankings to what people are notified when you make changes to your site. In addition, keeping your company’s emails off people’s “spam” lists will be vital. Facebook has become, Hein says, “the world’s most efficient spam filter.” Similarly, you’ll have to target your ads even more pointedly to reach your demographic.

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Social Media B2B’s Cohen Discusses Starting a Blog Without Dragging IT into it

When you decide to create a blog for your company, you have two ways to go about it. You can try to work with the IT department, which may or may not cause a series of fights, setbacks and negotiating for setup time. Or, you could just set up the blog yourself. Don’t be scared; setting up a business blog these days is easy. In his column “4 Ways to Start B2B Blogging Without Tech Support,” Jeffrey L. Cohen talks about the four easiest ways to start an IT-free blog that’s simple to set up and even easier to manage. Those four methods are, in fact, all popular blogsites that you may already be familiar with: 1. WordPress.com. Cohen says the biggest hassle with Wordpress is deciding whether you want Wordpress.com (where they host your blog) or Wordpress.org (Where you host your blog). Cohen recommends the .com version, as it allows you to learn how the platform and features work. You can’t use Google Analytics on a Wordpress site, but that hasn’t stopped millions of people – and companies – from hosting their blog on Wordpress.com and taking advantage of its VIP package. 2. Tumblr. If you’d like to use your own domain name, Tumblr may be the one for you, Cohen says. And unlike Wordpress, it does support Google analytics. Posting any kind of content is extremely easy, and you can post content from other sites such as YouTube. What’s more, if at any time you decide to move to Wordpress, all of your Tumblr posts can be easily exports. 3. Posterous. This easy start site allows you to submit posts by email if you want to, which makes it very easy to upload up-to-the-minute reports and photos. There’s easy integration with Twitter and Flickr and the like, and you can autopost to other sites as well. Posterous integrates with Wordpress, so you could actually upgrade a Wordpress blog at the same time you add content to your Posterous blog. 4. Facebook. Cohen calls this is easiest option of all. Create the page, then an editorial calendar for the page, and you’re good to go. Use your messages to drive traffic back to your website, encourage comments and more.

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Distilled’s Caitlin Krumdieck Discusses Reputation Management – what it Is and what it Isn’t – On BBC

If you think people make a lot of noise about personal privacy and the general lack of it on the web over here in the United States, you’re not even close to the amount of concern that some foreign countries have on the subject. The UK is one such place, and SEO/Reputation Management experts are suddenly being sought after to help people deal with having their personal data online. One such professional is Caitlin Krumdieck of distilled.co.uk. In her article “Never Forgotten (Online),” she discusses her recent appearance on the popular television show BBC Newsnight. Krumdieck says that the sticking point with many countries is that their governments feel that no information should be permanently available on the web. If a person decides that certain information should be removed from public access, they should have the right to request this. While this may seem impossible, this “Right to Be Forgotten,” or the “European Union Strategy,” is a major topic of discussion in Europe. Krumdieck implies that it is frequently referred to as Reputation Management, when in fact it is not. “This measure is really only addressing the need for increased information and education around how to be careful online,” Krumdieck says. Where it falls short is that It only protects users from attacks on social networking sites. The real issues of reputation management, though, are more often found on company blogs, news items and private websites. The legislation being discussed by the European Union would not affect any of these things. Krumdieck says that the tried and true methods of Reputation Management are still the best: 1. Push down the negative content so it doesn’t compete with your name. 2. Promote positive or neutral content, optimized to outrank the negative stories.

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Links are as close as your own site, says Caroline Bogart at FathomSEO.com

Let’s say for a moment that you have collected every single possible relevant link for your site that you can. Where can you find more? They’re out there, and you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your own website to find them. They are, of course, interlinks – the internal “juice” that you can direct to other parts of your own website simply by cleverly linking from one page to another. Caroline Bogart at FathomSEO.com has “10 Tips for Effective Interlinking,” that show you now to use this valuable SEO skill to boost your rankings with very little effort: 1. Your link structure should provide easy access to every page on your site. 2. Use the keywords you’re targeting for on each page in your anchor text. Attract browsers to the page. 3. Decide on the best page hierarchy for your site. This will help to manipulate your page flow. 4. Calls to action work better than any other kind of approach. Tell people to do something. Put your Calls to Action before, inside or after your link. 5. Link pages with similar keywords. 6. Make sure every page links to at least one other page. Search engines love this and they’ll love your site, too. 7. Avoid Javascript if at all possible. It slows down search. 8. Too many links make a page impossible to read. Don’t get overexcited and overdo it. 9. Make sure all your pages make a point. Fix any pages that are just sitting there. 10. Nofollow links really serve no purpose in this case. They block spiders, which is not what you want. Try to avoid them.

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Danny Sullivan: Google is the “California” of Search Companies Now

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand.com grew up in California in the 1970s, considered by many to be the heyday of the state. By the 1980s though, Sullivan says living there wasn’t as much fun anymore. Home prices rose and more and more people started moving in. Traffic got worse, and suddenly people started leaving because it was too crowded. That, Sullivan says, is what’s happening right now to Google. The recent defection of many prominent employees for greener pastures imitates the behavior of people in California during – and just after – its heyday. In his article “On Google Growing Up, Losing Employees & Being The New “”California’,” Sullivan specifically discusses the departure of two prominent Google employees for the apparently new search promised land, Facebook. Sullivan says Lars Rasmussen, the creator of the highly popular Google Maps and the nearly forgotten Google Wave is headed to Facebook, where he’ll join Facebook COO and former Google bigwig Sheryl Sandberg. This, Sullivan says, mirrors the “California” behavior. A place gets so big that its best people want out. It’s all part of growing up for a company though, Sullivan says. No one can be counted on to stay anywhere forever. When you begin to feel constricted or that you have done all you can do at a business, it’s only natural to move to somewhere with more “breathing room.” Yahoo was the “new California” in search before Google was Sullivan says. Facebook will no doubt be that target in a decade or so. But that’s to be expected in a very large company.

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Writers: Tires of Scanners Ignoring Your Work? Follow the Three S’s from Abigail Rossbach at Fathom SEO

Those of us in SEO who write for a living are a tough bunch. You have to be. Because if there is one constant to being a blog poster or content provider, it’s this: Most people scan over your work. They don’t stop to admire your careful prose and witty descriptions. They’re looking for facts. Until you grab them, they won’t stop for you. So what’s the secret? Abigail Rossbach at FathomSEO.com explains in great detail in her article “The Secret behind Getting People to Actually Read What You Write.” Rossbach says the first thing you need to do is realize three factors about people and the internet: 1: People are scanners. They’re looking for keywords and phrases that satisfy their urge to stop and read. 2: You need to learn how to use those words to keep them from scanning away from your dynamite prose. 3: Put scan-busting methods to work so people will stop scanning and start reading. Rossbach says this is easy to accomoplish when you use the “Three S’s:” Substance, Subheads and Scannability. Substance: Create content with value. People only read things that promise some benefit -- more information, a price, ingredients, materials, etc. Your headline needs to be fantastic, too. Promise them something with a good call to action. Subheads: Subheads are essentially mini-headlines that break up copy blocks. They help organize what you’re talking about into workable blocks. Whichhelps scanners to find what they’re looking for, slow down and read your copy. Scannability: Finally, Rossbach discusses the need for making your article ultimately scannable. Break your message into manageable, sections. When the scanner finds what he wants, you’re ready to tell him everything he needs to know. Make all of your content entertainint and to the point.