Tuesday, August 30, 2011

SEO Work | Hot At Sphinn: How To Avoid Social Media Time Sink, Google SEO Tips & More

There are still several good discussions from last week happening over on our sister site, Sphinn. SEO pricing, fixing broken links for SEO, and the social media time sink were all hot topics among commenters.

That last one was the subject of our "Discussion of the Week," which asked How do you keep Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. from being a timesink/distraction? Our favorite reply came from Sphinn member Matt Bowyer of AccessDirect , who shared these ideas:

If I'm checking my personal information, I do it during lunch or during my morning or afternoon break. If I'm checking out our company stuff, I do it in two blocks, once in the morning, once in the afternoon, as work permits. Only in a slow stretch, though.

It's not too late to add your tips, or just see what others are doing to manage time on social media/networking. Other popular discussions are listed below in the "Most Comments" section. Meanwhile, an article offering tips about Google SEO - and why your website might not be showing up in search results - was the most popular story on Twitter last week, and another one offering SEO tips for the new expanded sitelinks was close behind.

All of last week's Sphinn activity is below.

How do you keep Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. from being a timesink/distraction? – A client recently asked me for tips to stay focused and not let Twitter and Facebook become a distraction. It's something that social networking newcomers probably struggle with a lot - but speaking from experience, those sites break my focus at times, too, even after many years using them. In our "discussion of the week," please share your tips for making sure social media doesn't turn into a daily timesink. (Squirrel!)

Discussion: How Do You Determine SEO Pricing? – We all know it's not as simple as taking your hourly rate and multiplying by X hours. Some niches simply take more time then others to get results. So the question is, how do you determine your pricing on a monthly basis for each client?

Broken Link Building In Action: REAL Email Example Inside! – Broken link building is the talk of the link industry at the moment. Nick LeRoy gives us the basic method along with a real-life example of how this concept works.

Google+ is failing! [DATA] – I have been monitoringGoogle+ traffic levels with Alexa from the beginning of August. It was doing OK in the first half of the month. This is why I didn’t pay much attention to it.But then the percentage of Google+ traffic from total of Google.com started to fall.

The money has been spent, what now? 5 steps to iterate content development for results – Nice post about how to better existing content by adding rich media, using Google sets, and utilizing SEOMoz's LDA tool (currently in labs) using a real-life example.

5 Mobile Marketing Tips From Cindy Krum – "This year, mobile web access has risen to nearly 15 percent of all UK web traffic, which means the number of websites missing out on this prime traffic is also increasing,"Heart Internet director Jonathan Brealey said.

5 Reasons Why Your Website Doesn't Show Up in Google – A good, 101-level look at reasons why your website may not be getting the visibility you want.

Google Expanded Sitelinks: Optimize Opening Text in META Description Tag – Adam Sherk shares some quick tips on making the most out of the new expanded 12-pack of sitelinks.

Detecting "Undetectable" Link Networks – Interesting article that asks the question, Are there really such things as undetectable link networks? Good stuff in the comments there, too.

Step By Step Plan To Measure ROI For SEO Campaigns – Kenny Hyder gives us some of his favored methods for measuring the return on investment for SEO campaigns.

It’s 2011. Do You Know Who Your Competitors Are? – Lisa Barone discusses competition outside of just brick and motor businesses.

Is the Tail Killing Your Bing PPC Program? – Could low volume, low cost keywords decelerate an entire ad group?

Google Plus alters the landscape of Google Image search – Read this *BEFORE* you comment on that funny (but somewhat risque) photo on G+ :)

Experiment: Do Google +1s Impact Your Rankings? – Interesting experiment to show the impact of rankings following Google +1 votes

Short vs long form: hitting the target with landing page depth – Good post detailing the pros and cons of lead generation form length.

Google Hates Your New Ads – Alright, so maybe that’s a bit much. Google doesn’t hate your new ads, it just don’t know them yet. I’m sure once they spend some time together they’ll get along just fine. Allow me to explain…

Facebook Falters While StumbleUpon Races By – StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp, was all a Twitter on Friday when he got the news that StumbleUpon now drives 50% of all social media referral traffic in the US. The added bonus, they crawled up over Facebook to do it.

What’s The Difference Between Mobile Desktop SEO? – One of the questions I get most often about mobile SEO is this: I’m already doing SEO- do I really need to do mobile SEO separately? What’s the difference between the two?

Science, Not Guesswork, Will Bring Social Media Out of the Dark Ages – Some solid analogies are put forth in this piece. Worth a read if you consider yourself more of a marketing scientist than artist.

AdWords Filters To Help With PPC Management – Filters can help you easily evaluate the performance of keywords, ads, or campaigns. Here are 5 AdWords keyword filters to evaluate and improve PPC performance.

Google Begins Verifying Google+ Accounts – Google has started adding small verification badges to certain Google+ accounts. The badges initially appear as a small, gray, circular checkbox to the right of the account name, and then expand on mouseover to say "verified name."nbsp;

This is the latest in a weekly look at the stories that were "hot" on Sphinn in the past week. We'll post these recaps every week.

Related Topics: Features: General Sphinn

About The Author: Matt McGee is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus . See more articles by Matt McGee

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