Advertisers can now generate an HTML5 version of a Flash image ad with the click of a button, right within the Image Ad upload flow in AdWords. Because HTML5 ads can appear on browsers and devices that are incompatible with Flash, running an HTML5 version of an image ad alongside the Flash version in AdWords extends reach across devices. In this initial release, these converted HTML5 ads will show only on iPads, though we hope to extend support to additional tablet and mobile devices in the coming months.

It’s nice for advertisers to have an option for animated ads in the post-Flash era, but maybe not so nice for website visitors.

2. Produce a Resource and Set Up Alerts
Similarly, you can put together a video, white paper, or infographic, set up Google Alerts on the topic, and start contacting people. Any time a question about the topic comes up online, this is an opportunity to answer their question with a link to your resource. This is a great option because the answer is completely on-topic.

If you use this tactic, be sure to be as helpful as possible. The resource itself should be tremendously helpful, of course, but if it doesn’t answer every aspect of the question, make sure you address those directly in your comments, emails, etc. Don’t make it feel like a sales pitch, offer a genuinely useful answer.

Great suggestion to reap even more benefit from content development efforts. Do yourself a favor and read the whole post.

Remarketing

Perhaps one of the most promising branding strategies to come along during the last few years is “remarketing.”

Have you seen banner advertisements for the same advertiser, who you vaguely recognize, that seem to follow you as you browse different websites? If so, you are probably on a remarketing list.

At its most basic level, remarketing is the practice of tagging a website visitor and displaying advertisements associated with that website while that visitor browses other websites.

Advertisers use remarketing for a myriad of reasons; not the least of which is to increases brand exposure or induce “the one that got away” to come back and take action, whether that be ordering a product, contacting the business, etc.

Google, Facebook, and others provide platforms that enable remarketing. In particular, Google’s AdWords platform allows businesses that also use Google Analytics to easily and quickly create remarketing lists and ad campaigns. Because of the relatively low cost of display advertising, which is the term for traditional banner advertising, the cost of remarketing is generally low and thus the return on remarketing is generally quite high.

Currently, remarketing in the United States doesn’t require the permission of website visitors to opt in to remarketing lists; however, this could change through future privacy legislation passed by the U.S. Congress.

Email Marketing

Unlike remarketing, email marketing requires a website visitor to opt in to communications from a business. Of course, there are many ways to convince a visitor to opt in to an email list, but perhaps one of the most sustainable is the promise of value. For some businesses, that may be a discount on products or services, for others that may be entertainment, or for others that may be expertise and knowledge.

Like remarketing, email marketing can help a business convert “the one that got away” or increase brand awareness, but it is also inherently more personal. Unlike remarketing, a business often knows the names of the recipients to whom it sends emails and can personalize email salutations as well as other aspects of the email.

Perhaps the most compelling attribute of email marketing is attention.  Unlike remarketing advertisements, which are often distractions when a person is viewing a web page, a person’s express purpose when reading an email is, just that, to read email.

With great power comes great responsibility, however. Just because a business has an individual’s email address, doesn’t mean the business should flood that individual’s inbox with messages that are likely unwanted. Sometimes, less really is more. In order to become sticky, businesses should only send emails that will provide value or utility to recipients. This will help ensure that email recipients won’t unsubscribe and will remain interested in future email communications.

Social Media Marketing

While the hype associated with social media, thankfully, may be dying down, it still presents a viable method of communication with current and potential customers or clients. Similar to email marketing, the best way to convince people to follow a business is to provide value or utility. Unlike email marketing, the consumption of social media is generally less focused than reading emails because it is often filled with numerous short posts all vying for a person’s attention.

Although a single social media post may not command much of a person’s undivided attention, people don’t generally need to provide any personal information when choosing to follow a business via social media, which may be more appealing than providing the personal information often required to opt in to email marketing.

As with email marketing, if a business wants to become sticky it should take care to only post information that followers will find truly valuable or useful in order to keep followers interested.

While many strategies to make a brand sticky were once available only to businesses with deep pockets, even the smallest of businesses can now become sticky on a scale that fits them.

For example, we manage sites where PageRank has gone up, but the volume of organic traffic from Google appears unaffected. We also manage sites, where PageRank has decreased but organic traffic from Google increases simultaneously or within a few days.

While PageRank may no longer be a trustworthy indicator of a site’s authority, various third-parties, e.g. SEOmoz and Majestic SEO, have attempted to formulate other indicators. Some of these third-party indicators attempt to determine the authority of a domain through various factors including the position of websites in search engine results pages (“SEPRP”), the citations to a website, the number of mentions in social media, the authority and links to a website, and others.

A word of caution, however, third-party indicators like SEOmoz’s Page Authority and Domain Authority are just that, third-party indicators and may range from very inaccurate to very accurate.

Ed Parsons, the Geospatial Technologist of Google,  has indicated in a recent talk at Google PinPoint London 2012 that “about 1 in 3 of queries that people just type into a standard Google search bar are about places, they are about finding out information about locations. …this isn’t Google Maps just people normally looking at Google”.

In other words, Google users are looking for local retailers, local restaurants, local service providers, etc. 1/3 of the time. While some, maybe most, people still rely on word-of-mouth, that appears to be changing in light of the other historical data in the post.

I want to talk today about a prediction that I’ve got around not the complete death of anchor text, but that anchor text is actually diminishing as a signal and being replaced by something else, something Google has gotten very clever about. I think Bing is using it as well. That is co-citation, so co-citation of terms and phrases along with a brand or a link, and I’ll show you what I mean.

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You can see a lot of articles on the web that mention cell phone ratings and reviews and mention Consumer Reports. They don’t necessarily link to this page. In fact, very few of them link to this page. But many of them will do exactly this. If you look at a text snippet on the page, it’ll say, ”Cell phones as rated by Consumer Reports.” This doesn’t even link. This is not a live link. It’s not even pointing to their website or to that specific web page. But Google is noticing the association. They see the words “cell phone.” They see the word “rated,” and they see “Consumer Reports.” They put two and two together and say, “You know what? It seems like lots of people on the Internet seems to think that Consumer Reports and cell phone ratings go together.”

Although PageRank was a brilliant idea, i.e. using backlinks to determine the general authority of a web page, the concept of anchor text has been been an awkward, unnatural way to determine the authority of a page for a particular subject. Co-citation better accounts for how humans analyze, discuss and communicate.

Signing up on our business site allows you to specify your business name (instead of first name and last name) and go through an optimized new user flow to help you:

• Verify your website. The verification badge helps people identify high-quality sources of content and more easily find the business they want in search results.
• Add new buttons and widgets. Integrate the Pin It button, Follow button, Profile widget, or Board widget to get more engagement from pinners and traffic back your site.
• Access to upcoming features. Receive updates on future products and services that will provide more powerful ways of reaching and understanding your audience on Pinterest.

Although people using Pinterest might not be searching for a lawyer, meaning the traffic is not “qualified,” great visual content can spread virally through Pinterest and possibly lead to authoritative backlinks.

After a summer of no SEO growth, the site did a Groupon in October.  Shortly after that, its rankings and organic visits started to grow.  Two weeks later they did another one and grew even more (+84%!).  Last week, they did another and grew further.  They are now averaging over 20% weekly organic growth.  Pretty cool.

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That said, this got me thinking that there could be a big opportunity in generating links from Groupon if you could figure out a way to do Groupons profitably.  Even for those merchants that are not making money from Groupons, by adding in the linkbuilding benefit, the ROI might become positive.  Even better, what if you could figure out a way to do Groupons that got no redemptions?  You’d have a free linkbuilding program.

This could be interesting for attorneys, especially in jurisdictions with bars that openly permit Groupons.

And so what a healthy account has is roughly 70% of impressions at a 7 or higher.

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If it’s at 60%, you should spend some time on quality score, but don’t go crazy obsessing about it. If you see about 40% is 4 or less, you have to fix quality score fast. If you don’t, you can run into domain level penalties or account level penalties. Bad things happen if you leave a huge number of impressions at low quality score numbers.

Well, there you have it, or at least one man’s take. Quality score can be a cruel mistress.