Google To Buy Yelp For $500 Million?

Google To Buy Yelp For $500 Million?: "TechCrunch is reporting that Google is “advanced acquisition negotiations” to buy Yelp for $500 million or more. TechCrunch has been generally correct about many of the rumors it has reported recently (i.e., Google Phone) so we should take this seriously.
Yelp has raised a little over $30 million over several funding rounds. Revenues are heading toward [...]



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Search engines: Is Social Media Ruining Search Results?

Is Social Media Ruining Search Results?: "I preferred search engine results pages (SERPs) before other forms of social media became the rage. I think the commercial web search engines are giving social media items far more attention and validation than they deserve. Do you?



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Usman Farooq SEM Pakistan: The Ultimate Reason Your SEO Is Underperforming

The Ultimate Reason Your SEO Is Underperforming: "In the first installment of this series I asserted that your SEO performance is suffering in proportion to how powerfully you are able to communicate the opportunity to executives. Winning the resources required to grow the channel requires a basic set of metrics. In the subsequent installments, I showed you how to use “Jedi” performance [...]



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SEO Services: New Feature Spotlight: Analytics Intelligence

New Feature Spotlight: Analytics Intelligence: "How would you like to have 24-hour a day access to a dedicated assistant who is focused exclusively on your site's analytics? Your assistant would be so diligent and detailed that they wouldn't miss a thing. Sound too good to be true? We're giving you one. Say 'Hello' to Analytics Intelligence.

Your new hardworking assistant, Analytics Intelligence, can't replace you or a professional analyst. But, it can find key information for you and your professional analysts -- so that your team can focus on making strategic decisions, instead of sifting through an endless sea of data.

Analytics Intelligence constantly monitors your website's traffic. Anytime something significant happens, it adds an automatic alert in your Intelligence reports. If your bounce rate suddenly jumps on one of your referrals, Analytics Intelligence creates an alert. Of course, it's up to you to go find out that the bounce rate jumped because someone inadvertently changed the landing page. But you might not have noticed that there was a problem that needed fixing if your trusty assistant hadn't alerted you.


Behind Analytics Intelligence is a sophisticated algorithmic intelligence engine that detects any anomalies in your traffic patterns. That means it's smart enough to know the difference between a change that's actually part of a larger trend versus a change that you might need to look into. But, from a user perspective, Analytics Intelligence couldn't be simpler.

Navigate to the Intelligence reports and you'll see three reports -- Daily Alerts, Weekly Alerts, Monthly Alerts. Daily Alerts contains all the alerts that are based on daily data. Weekly Alerts contains alerts based on weekly data. Monthly Alerts contains, you guessed it, alerts based on monthly data.

When you look at your alerts, you'll notice that your trusty assistant has already gone through your historical data and posted alerts. This highlights a key feature of Analytics Intelligence: you don't have to do anything -- alerts automatically get posted to your account.

The best way to come up to speed on Analytics Intelligence is to take a look at the alerts that are being created for your data. You can learn everything you need to know about how to interpret your alerts in this 2-minute video.

You can also instruct your assistant to be on the lookout for specific things that you want to monitor. Let's say you are running a billboard campaign in New York's Times Square. You want to be proactively informed regarding how the campaign is impacting traffic from New York. To do this, go the Manage Intelligence Alerts page,


and set up a custom alert (see the example, below).


You might even want to set up a second alert that checks for decreasing New York traffic, so you can see if the campaign is starting to wind down.

You'll then receive a custom alert, posted in your Daily Alerts, whenever one of these things happens. You can be notified by email as well, so you'll know what's going on even if you're not checking your reports.

If you're ever unsure about how to set up an alert, try starting with one of the templates on the Manage Intelligence Alerts page. Just click Copy, and then modify and rename the alert to fit your needs.



As with automatic alerts, the best way to learn about custom alerts is to try them out on your own data. You can also refer to the articles on Analytics Intelligence in the Google Analytics Help Center.

SEM Services Pakistan: Google Analytics launches asynchronous tracking

Google Analytics launches asynchronous tracking: "

Google Analytics now provides a new Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet as an alternate way to track your website!

Think of the asynchronous tracking code snippet as a script that uses a 'separate lane' to handle part of the processing of your webpage. As the number of cars (or in this case, scripts on your webpage) increases, the asynchronous tracker uses this lane to reduce webpage load time. Websites that use many scripts or rely on rich media content will especially benefit from this new method, but even lightweight sites will see improvements.

The new tracking snippet offers the following benefits:

• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection and accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn't fully loaded

The asynchronous tracking code is now in Beta and available to all Google Analytics users. Using the new tracking code is optional: your existing Google Analytics code will continue to work as-is. But if you want to improve your webpage load times and fine-tune the accuracy of your Analytics data, then we think you'll love this new option.

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SEO and Social Media Benchmarking

SEO and Social Media Benchmarking: "

Posted by RobOusbey

Introduction

We'll often rattle off various metrics quite casually in conversation, but it's easy to forget that others (such as your clients!) might not know whether these are big numbers or small ones. For example: 'We've just published a guest post on a site with Domain mozTrust 5.67. Mr_Gadget mentioned it to his 64 thousand followers, and it managed to get over 1,000 Diggs.'

This post should be useful to anyone who needs to orientate themselves around such numbers. The Website Benchmarks section shows metrics for around half a dozen sites from ten different niches (based on the list originally prepared for comparing SEOMoz Trifecta data.) This is followed by Social Media Benchmarks, to give an idea of the impact and influence of votes and people on three popular social websites.

Links and Traffic: Website Benchmarks

This section uses three particular metrics:

• Domain mozRank: the strength of a website, based on the sites & pages that link to it,


• Domain mozTrust: the trustworthiness of a website, based on links from trusted sites & pages,


• Unique Vistors: Compete.com's estimate of the number of monthly unique visitors to a site.

N.B.: The 'moz' metrics use data exposed by SEOMoz's Linkscape, and are on an exponential scale from 0 - 10. Data collected in 2006 suggested that the no visitor metric - Compete included - could be used to precisely estimate unique visitors to blogs at the time.

Arts & Entertainment

Website	DmR	DmT	Visitors
AllMusic	7.05	7.26	545,038
Art.com	6.73	6.58	1,595,173
Art Cyclopedia	6.41	6.94	244,849
AMC Theatres	6.23	6.60	1,294,011
Art.net	5.73	6.32	17,122
Shihad.com	5.55	5.65	1,170
The Official Whitlams Website	4.77	4.95	822
EntertainmentTonight.org	2.87	3.01	401

Business

Website	DmR	DmT	Visitors
Business.gov	6.87	7.37	185,142
Business.com	6.47	6.75	4,882,836
Prudential	6.40	6.86	1,028,829
Kansas Insurance Commissioner	5.71	6.18	8,826
WorldBiz.com	5.48	6.03	4,033
HRM Business Practices and Notes	3.89	4.11	114
Chevron Corporate Solutions	2.76	3.01	n/a

Economy & Politics

Website	DmR	DmT	Visitors
The White House	7.90	8.55	1,976,338
Barak Obama	6.93	7.38	1,180,883
The Democratic Party	6.49	7.01	261,288
Republican National Committee	6.22	7.13	27,592
Democrats.com | The Aggressive Progressives	5.71	6.36	131,764
Iowa Democratic Party	5.15	5.67	1,009
Republican Party of America	4.32	4.70	2,873
Vote Brian Sayrs	3.11	3.74	123

Health

Website	DmR	DmT	Visitors
WebMD	7.35	7.66	19,871,120
HealthWorld Online	6.18	6.73	88,180
Health.com	6.08	6.41	1,795,763
Men's Health Network	5.71	6.28	6,817
Healthy Child	5.14	5.25	7,409
Healthy Living Natural Foods	4.41	4.79	1,199
All American Healthcare	2.76	3.00	n/a

Home & Housing

Website	DmR	DmT	Visitors
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development	7.62	8.07	1,716,602
HGTV	6.83	7.05	3,334,973
RealEstate.com	6.55	6.48	527,147
HousingMaps	6.08	6.70	19,219
Get Decorating	5.02	5.32	53,819
Eastern Corner	4.77	4.81	4,722
RentSpeed.com	4.73	4.68	74,571
WeBuyHouses.info	2.76	3.00	n/a

News & Media

Website	DmR	DmT	Visitors
CNN	7.40	7.72	10,055,985
Anchorage Daily News	6.57	7.11	183,065
News-Record	6.17	6.68	207,799
Happy News	5.57	6.15	120,209
News Directory	5.56	6.24	1,610
Napier Mail	3.60	3.77	434
Kingsburg Recorder	2.35	4.78	4,011

People & Society

Website	DmR	DmT	Visitors
U.S. Department of Education	7.63	8.33	6,270,175
ConsumerReports	6.94	7.24	4,339,086
Consumer Web Watch	5.97	6.31	12,213
Consumerist	5.63	5.91	796,933
South Carolina Department of Education	5.44	6.12	4,467
No Nonsense Self Defense	4.86	5.34	18,278
Inner Strength	3.71	4.32	1,055
Acqua Beauty Bar	3.55	3.84	1,383

Science

Website	DmR	DmT	Visitors
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration	7.35	9.14	4,811,397
U.S. Science Portal	6.35	7.33	6,763
Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society	6.02	7.25	6,745
Association of Clinical Research Professionals	5.47	6.39	11,478
SciNet Science & Technology Search Engine	4.73	5.86	4,093
Cafe Science Dundee	3.82	4.51	n/a
Society of Natural Science	2.76	3.00	n/a

Sports & Recreation

Website	DmR	DmT	Visitors
Fox Sports	7.18	7.29	6,294,958
Official Site of Major League Baseball	6.57	6.84	9,969,301
FIBA - Home of International Basketball	6.16	6.23	8,369
NCAA Football	5.44	5.90	232,497
Sports Illustrated for Kids	5.09	5.48	166,599
North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance	4.33	4.43	3,057
Swimwatch	3.03	3.19	1,138

Technology

Website	DmR	DmT	Visitors
Apple	8.84	9.33	21,407,512
Google Mail	7.22	7.14	9,336,542
Blackberry	7.10	7.30	2,551,692
Government of India, Department of Information Technology	5.82	6.47	1,862
Internet History	5.72	6.43	20,749
The Society for the History of Technology	4.98	6.32	688
The Loop	3.71	5.58	17,332

Social Media Benchmarks

Digg

Digg is a well established social media site. After a user submits a link (refered to as a story) other users 'Digg' the story if they like it. Stories with a greater number of Diggs are more likely to be promoted to the site's front page, be seen by more visitors, and receive more traffic. Users can also 'bury' stories that are off-topic or duplicate. Read more at How Digg Works.

# of Diggs	Likely success	Example Story
1+	Little or no exposure	Example
10+	A little exposure	Example
100+	Mild exposure, moderate success	Example
500+	Reasonable exposure, good success - likely to have been promoted with the submission category	Example
1,000+	Good exposure & likely to be promoted to the front page, successful content	Example
2,000+	Lots of exposure, highly successful	Example
10,000+	The very top echelon of articles, extremely successful content.	Example

Reddit

Reddit is a newer, but increasingly popular social media site. Users can up-vote and down-vote submitted links to give a link a total number of 'points'. The most popular stories are promoted to the front page of their category, or the site. Read more at the Reddit FAQ.

Points	Likely success	Example Link
1+	Little or no exposure	Example
10+	A little exposure, may send some visits page	Example
100+	Good exposure & likely to be promoted to the category's front page, sends a moderate amount of traffic	Example
500+	Very good exposure & likely to be promoted to the front page	Example
1,000+	Excellent exposure, highly successful & will send considerable traffic to the page	Example
3,000+	Amongst the top links on the site, extremely popular and widely viewed	Example

Twitter

Twitter is a networking website where individuals share their 'statuses', and follow others doing the same. The most fundamental metric available on the site is the number of 'followers' a user has - and provides a reasonable indication of their popularlity and influence. Read more at Twitter's Getting Started page.

Followers	Typical behaviour	Example User
1+	Very new, or dormant user	Example
10+	Likely to be using the site for social purposes, has influence within a close circle of friends	Example
100+	Connecting with a modest number of people, has influence amongst a wide circle of friends or industry colleagues	Example
1,000+	Fairly well known within their industry, and likely to have influence well beyond those they know personally	Example
10,000+	Very well known with their industry or niche; likely to have some off-line awareness	Example
100,000+	Popular amongst a wide variety of users; likely to very influential and be widely 'retweeted'	Example
1,000,000+	Amongst the top 200 users and very influential within the site; almost certainly a genuine off-line celebrity	Example

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UsmanFarooqSEO: Twitter Movember!

Movember!: "
Once a year there is a very special and potentially awkward event: Movember. Here's what it's all about according to Movember.com:

Movember is an annual, month-long celebration of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues - specifically prostate and testicular cancer. A Mo Bro starts Movember – the month formerly known as November – clean shaven, and grows a moustache all month long, garnering support from friends and family in the form of donations. What’s more, a Mo Bro is a walking billboard for the cause as his new look opens the door for him to talk about cancers affecting men – making the moustache a symbol, much like the pink ribbon is for breast cancer.

Prostate cancer will strike 1 in 6 men in their lifetime. Testicular cancer is the most common cancer for men aged 18-35. This Movember, the money raised in the U.S. will be split between the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

The Prostate Cancer Foundation will use the money raised by Movember to fund research to find better treatments and a cure for prostate cancer.
The Lance Armstrong Foundation will use the money raised by Movember to fund:

• the LIVESTRONG Young Adult Alliance program which has the goal of improving survival rates and quality of life for young adults with cancer between the ages of 15 and 40.

• research initiatives to further understand the biology of adolescent and young adult cancers.

At Twitter HQ, a group of us mo-bros have been spending the month making everyone uncomfortable because we believe in the importance of raising awareness around men's health.

If you'd like to join us in support, please check out our Twustache Team!

"

Search Engine Busted: Three Boneheaded Paid Search Myths

Busted: Three Boneheaded Paid Search Myths: "Paid search marketing is complicated enough, and several long-held industry myths aren’t helping make your job any easier. Debunk these SEM tall tales once and for all, and your campaigns will be well on their way to higher ROI.



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SEM services pakistan: Canada, Australia Give OK To Microsoft-Yahoo Deal

Canada, Australia Give OK To Microsoft-Yahoo Deal: "The governments of Canada and Australia have given their okay to the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has published its findings, which say that “the proposed agreement was unlikely to result in a substantial lessening of competition.” The ACCC points to an existing deal in which Microsoft is using Yahoo’s [...]



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SEM Pakistan: Try Google’s New 3 Pane Look

Try Google’s New 3 Pane Look: "That new Google look that’s being tested, that we covered last week in our Google Tackles Its “UI Jazz” Problem, Tests Streamlining Search Options Feature post? Now you needn’t just read about it. You can try it out yourself!
Google Blogoscoped has code that you can copy and paste to make it happen. Check it out, [...]



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Search Engine: Key Capabilities of Next-Generation Project Managers

Key Capabilities of Next-Generation Project Managers: "Project managers might just have the toughest job in IT, responsible as they are for ensuring that high-stakes IT projects are completed on time and on budget. According to a new report from Forrester Research, the project manager's role is getting even more demanding and difficult to fill."

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SEO Expert: Five Tips To Avoid Getting Burned When Starting Social Media Campaigns

Five Tips To Avoid Getting Burned When Starting Social Media Campaigns: "If you’re not already tapping into social media, you should, as the channel offers brands tremendous opportunities to foster community and engagement. But many marketers jump into social media efforts with little more than a “cool” idea. This is a mistake. Not only could it pose serious implications for a brand, but it could also [...]



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SEO pakistan: Good Wine and Books

Good Wine and Books: "We're just getting started as a company, but we believe thinking long term about making a positive impact will allow us to grow in the right direction to make a difference as both a technology and a business.

For Twitter to be at its peak in utility, people who would have never had access to the world's information need to be able to not only receive it but engage with it, too. Room to Read, a San Francisco based non-profit, will help us make that happen by bringing libraries and literacy to the world's poorest regions.

Together we'll be making some awesome wine over the course of a year to benefit @roomtoread, and with each case sold they'll be able to supply about 60 local language children's books to educate the 300 million kids around the world who can't read.

You can follow us throughout this initiative and even participate in barrel tastings and other activities along the way thanks to the folks at Crushpad. If you want to get a bottle of our limited Pinot Noir or Chardonnay, visit the Fledgling Initiative and contribute. Good wine has never been better!

"
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Search engine marketing expert: What Makes a Link Worthy Post - Part 1

What Makes a Link Worthy Post - Part 1: "
Posted by chenry
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
I was recently inspired by a post by MikeTek, Examining the Top 150 In-Linked Posts at SEOmoz.  While the information was very informative, it was taken from a limited sample of the over 3,800 post on SEOmoz.  Along with the small sample size, the data was not proportional to other categories and posts.  Mike encouraged anyone with a little automation skills to look into all the data on SEOmoz and really look into what makes a post link worthy. 

For this post we will be looking only at In Linking Domains (ILDs) which is a great way to determine if a post is popular throughout the net.  For example if you have a site like dummy-domain.com that links to your post 1,000 times throughout its site, it would count as 1 ILD.  A great viral post will have a large number of ILDs along with a large number of links.

LET'S START WITH THE DATA

Much like Mike’s data, there were some categories that collected more links than others.  In fact there were five categories that have the most domains linking to them, Link Building (1,448 domains), Google (1,419 domains), Technical Issues (1,243 domains), Miscellaneous (1,215 domains), and Whiteboard Friday (1,044 domains).  See the graph below for the top 30 of the SEOmoz categories.



The data in the chart above can be a little misleading because some of those categories have many more posts than others do.  To make all the data proportional, I took the total number of linking domains and divided it by the number of posts.  The chart changes considerably when the data becomes normalized.  From the chart below you can see that the top 3 categories are Webdev (19), Technical Issues (14), and On-Page Issues (10).



From the charts above it’s easy to say that “Link Building” is a very popular blog topic but it doesn’t always draw in the links like other topic can.  Part of that could be because of the difference in options on link building techniques.  Topics like “Technical Issues” and “On-Page Issues” the types of content that most people will agree on and possibly want to share with others in the business.

To take the study a little further, I stored all the post’s title’s and created a title word cloud for the top 10% of the 3,800.  This hopefully will give you an idea of what topics could have the possibility of being link worthy in your future post.  I was going to try and come up with a “Super” title based on the words in the cloud but couldn’t come up with anything catchy.  Maybe one of you Mozzers can come up with something amazing from the cloud.



Like Mike did in his previous post, let’s take a look at the content in the posts: images, list, and videos.  In the chart below you will see that having a just a list in a post compared to just text, doubles the average number of linking domains.  Have a video compared to just text will almost triple the average number of linking domains.  A post that has an image and a list will also triple the average number of linking domains to the post.

I’m sure many of you are like me and do a quick scan of the post before actually reading it.  By adding images, videos, and lists, it makes it easy to get a quick synopsis on what the post is about, encouraging people to go back and do a full read along with a possible link.  Adding Images and Lists are easy to do and could result in a post that is more link worthy.



I also recorded the length of the post to see if it had an effect on the average number of linking domains.  The length recorded was only that of the post and not the comments or other areas of the page to keep the data accurate.  I’ve read that most blog post should be kept to 500 words or less.  That information seems to be incorrect if you are going to post on SEOmoz and want it to be link worthy.  The chart below shows that posts with 1800 or more words have a much higher average of linking domains.



BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS

I feel the real take away from this post is in the last two graphics summarized below:

• Content is most important thing to a posts but posts with extra visual content attract extra links.
• By adding simple visual content, like lists and images, can increase the number of ILDs by good percent.
• Posts with videos included will attract almost 3 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
• Posts with all three media types (videos, images, and lists) will attract almost 6 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
• Contrary to common beliefs, large posts seem to attract more links than posts with 900 words or less.
• Posts with between 1800 and 3000 words will attract more than 15 times more ILDs than a post with less than 600 words.

The first part of this study was only with SEOmoz data and in the next part of this study I have decided to take on a huge project and taking a look at some of the top SEO/Internet Marketing blogs on the web.  With a larger sample size we may be able to find out if the information found during this study will hold true in other areas.  Stay tuned!

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Usman Farooq: Mozilla unblocks one sneaky Microsoft plug-in

Mozilla unblocks one sneaky Microsoft plug-in: "Mozilla has unblocked one of the two Microsoft-made add-ons that put Firefox users at risk from attack and will probably unblock the second in the next 48 hours, the company's head of engineering said today."
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Attribution Wars: In Defense Of The Last Click (Part I)

Attribution Wars: In Defense Of The Last Click (Part I): "I went to a party last week. It was put on by a big online player, mainly to thank agencies who buy large gobs of display ads for their clients. And strangely, one of the hosts began apologizing to me (over the gurgling sounds of me thanking him for the free drink—how they let me [...]



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