Brian Massey, a conversion optimization scientist and widely published author, recently presented on how to measure and improve social media conversion rates. Massey, the owner of conversionscientist.com , emphasized that regardless of the size of a brand's "social footprint," it is important to measure conversions. It is this data that will ensure the site is properly converting the visitors from social sites into positive ROI. At one point during the presentation,

If you are new to SEO the collection of SEO resources below should be very useful to you. I tried to put them in order for those really new to SEO to those that maybe have a couple of months experience. I included a video from Search Engine Land first for those "very new" to SEO and/or for those that are looking to easily explain SEO to their clients. Happy reading!

Hua Marketing released an infographic called " How to Build Links " today that has a lot of great information on methods, characteristics, factors and management of link building. Take a look below or visit the Hua Marketing blog for more information. Click for a larger view.

Dan Zarella, a social media scientist for HubSpot , is one of the highlighted speakers at Pubcon's Master training this year. Zarella calls himself a scientist because he is tired of the "unicorns and rainbows" marketing advice - instead, he believes focusing on data and facts is more productive and the best way to invest our time.

Andy Beal, the CEO of trackur and the publisher of MarketingPilgrim , is one of the highlighted speakers at PubCon's Master training today. Beal, who specializes in reputation management, provided actionable advice on how to manage a company's reputation and conduct online reputation management audits. Keyword Research With reputation management, keyword research is focused primarily on protecting the brand, the branded products,

Using video to engage customers is the latest craze in the world of problogging. A lot of people are using it and a lot more are championing its use. But the way in which video is being used by most bloggers is, in my view, not the best use of video. How Most Bloggers Use Video The talking head, or the blogger sitting at their desk talking away into a webcam, is the most common use of video.

SEJ is trying to publish information that is educational and usable to our readers. However, our readers range from beginners to advanced in this industry. We publish some advanced material, but we don't want to leave out those that are just learning about the industry.

SEO's are always on the look out for tools to make their job easier. This is where Google Chrome's browser extensions can be such a great help. When you go to the Chrome store for SEO extensions you can easily become overwhelmed with the huge list of possible extensions? So which ones are the best? I'm glad you asked, I went through and tested most of them to see which SEO Extensions were Good, Bad, or useful but Ugly.

Perhaps, one of the first things any novice gets to learn about internet marketing domain is the significance of "original, unique, and relevant content", and quite rightly so. They do not say "Content is the King" for nothing; every bit of it is absolutely true. The importance of "original, unique, and relevant content" magnifies multiple times when it comes to PPC marketing, in particular. Unlike other domains of online marketing,

Google recently announced a search algorithm update that should promote fresher and more relevant search results. Although Google makes over 500 changes to its algorithm annually, the majority of updates do not affect a large percentage of search results. The new update, which seeks to build on the Caffeine web indexing system, will affect approximately 35% of all search queries. Amit Singhal, one of Google's primary engineers,

Facebook has recently made some huge updates to its interface, changes neither users nor brands have necessarily embraced. In fact, parties from both sides have expressed being downright irate over the tinkering. The tweaks that have most of the community in a frenzy are those related to the news feed, which as we all know, is one of the most important components in the Facebook experience. For marketers,

Wow, talk about a crazy week! So many fantastic things to read on so many different topics. Below are some of the articles I enjoyed most this week. There are a couple of older posts, but still fantastic and still being tweeted. SEO - Custom Reporting using Google Analytics and Google Docs - The Ultimate Analytics Mashup - SEOmoz - New Look for Places Results On Google.

For a while now it's been touted that 10% of searches are transactional in nature, while 80% are informational in nature and the remaining 10% navigational. What I don't like about this is it's very narrow in perspective. It fails to recognize that users who are looking for information may convert to transactional at some point, so what about this 80%? I actually see the potential for greater value of that 80% than I do of the other 20%,

WordPress Single Post Microdata Markup from Straight North's Blog SEJ recently published a best practices article authored by me about e-commerce microdata , but what about non-ecommerce sites? Unless your agency specializes in e-commerce, most of your clients most likely will be B2B companies. Numerous elements can be marked up on B2B corporate sites to improve search engine visibility. Every corporate website will be different,

Apple's iPhone, which currently captures approximately 27% of the smartphone market, is long overdue for a native iOS Gmail client. Yesterday, Google finally launched a Gmail app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users. However, due to negative user feedback and notification related errors, the Gmail app was pulled from the App Store several hours after its launch. Matthew Izatt, a Google product manager,

Better rankings? More traffic? More conversions? Stability? What exactly do you hope to achieve by building links? Without a clear objective, it's impossible to accurately measure your progress. Much of the time, I'm asked to predict about how many links it will take to get to spot x in the SERPs. Oddly, I am rarely asked to define a number of links that will bring more traffic or more conversions,

MobClix has released an infographic today called "Mobclix Index: Mobile in 60 Seconds". It includes some amazing stats for data usage on mobile phones for October 2011. The ads stats interest me the most and are an indicator that all of us need to consider and learn about mobile ads for clients. Ad Stats 4,111 Ads tapped 400,710 Ad requests 140,248 are rich media ad requests )part of above stat( $2,340 Ad dollars spent in the U.S.

Below are 7 fantastic PPC articles I found in October. Each title is a link to the article and I included a summary of what I liked about each one. Please let us know about your favorite October PPC articles in the comments below. How to separate match types in adCenter It's a common strategy in AdWords to break out match types in order to manage and optimize them separately. To do so,

Facebook Comments system, Disqus comments, and other similar commenting systems can enhance the end-user's experience by decreasing comment spam and allowing users to utilize one login across multiple sites. However, although these comment systems provide site owners and users with some benefits, search engines have had difficulty crawling and indexing the comments due to the JavaScript and AJAX. Since the popular commenting systems,

When you switch on your PC or smart device these days, a deluge of positive "sounding" news flows into your world, but the noises do not often match the reality. Amid this endless static though, the hope that social media, new channels, the digital evolution will somehow rescue us - that hope is still there. Well, maybe it is. In recent news, Google Hotel Finder, ITA software, DOT fines for inappropriate online advertising,