1.  Facebook Deprecating 50+ Page Insights Metrics – Are You Ready? — if you are a developer working with Facebook’s Graph API, you definitely need to know the specifics of the page insights metrics that are no longer available. Thanks to Nathan Linnell at Search Engine Watch for providing the details.

2.  Skimlinks Is The Real Story Behind Pinterest’s Success – Mike Butcher of TechCrunch follows up on this week’s controversy over Pinterest’s use of affiliate links with a discussion of Skimlinks and its position as a monetization engine for startups.

3.  Facebook Taps Bango, Keeps Ad Model A Mystery – Steve Smith of Mobile Insider’s take on Facebook moving ahead with an ad option that involves Bango and “payment services.”

4. LinkedIn Announces Fourth Quarter and 2011 Fiscal Year Financial Results — one of the key takeaways from LinkedIn’s press release is that they’ve exceeded 150 million members.

5. From AdSense To SpamSense To Spam Cents — Aaron Wall at SEOBook.com dives into the controversy over the latest hit against AdSense publishers by Google.

Subscribe Now and Save 31% | Search Marketing Standard Magazine

Subscribe Now and Save 31% | Search Marketing Standard Magazine

In 2003, George W. Bush signed the CAN-SPAM Act, which outlawed sending email to purchased lists or addresses scraped from the web. However, the risk of getting caught is minimal due to lax enforcement. The river of spam keeps raging, especially to email addresses posted on the web that aren’t encoded with JavaScript. Although CAN-SPAM has failed to prevent spam, it does reveal something about the character of those who ignore or circumvent the law.

Several times per month one or more of my clients forward me email that arrived out of the blue, offering SEO services. These emails may include a diagnostic report based on vague or confusing criteria. I am always happy to speak with clients, but I would prefer to talk about ways to improve their websites, rather than combating disinformation in the marketplace. Sometimes clients even ask if I can help them send mass emails too, since everybody seems to be doing it.

Sending unsolicited commercial email is potentially illegal and definitely unethical when the sender and recipients have no prior connection. In many cases, addresses have been harvested from the web, either by robots or staff who scan Google sponsored listings looking for advertiser email addresses. If an address email addresses aren’t found, spammers may target standard addresses such as info@test.com or admin@test.com.

The spam flow often begins when we start advertising a client’s site. SEO spammers seem to recognize that search advertisers are more valuable prospects, because advertisers are willing to pay for traffic, and hence, may be willing to pay for SEO services.

Here are portions of a sample message a client received:

“I was recently doing some prospecting research and came across your website. I’m reaching out to see if you are currently testing the effectiveness of SEO. I work for (blank)… we’re a Performance-based SEO Services company. We do not require any set-up fees, and all pricing is upfront. As an example, our current pricing is $211 per month, if indeed we can help you achieve one of the Top 3 rankings in Google for the keyword “website security”.

I don’t know for sure if this same message was sent to a bunch of people, or if the sales representative is sending them one at a time. Whether or not this message is illegal doesn’t really matter. It’s bad for business. The company has promised top three rankings for the term “website security,” which seems like an unrealistic promise, or at least a confusing offer. Maybe the SEO will buy the listings (the only way I know to guarantee ranking). Many consumers of SEO services don’t even understand the difference between paid listings and sponsored listings. Taking advantage of their confusion isn’t right.

Here are excerpts from another specimen:

“I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting enough Social Media and Organic search engine traffic for xxxxxxxxxx.com.

1. Social profile is not available in top Social Media websites.

2. Your SEO score is 71%. We can bring it to 100% by implementing on and off-page factors which will fetch better results in major search engines.

3. Your site has 20 Google backlinks, this can be improved further.”

This email also included an offer for a free “website audit report” and a postscript informing the recipient that “I found your site from online advertising but did not click.”

The email states that the site has an SEO score of 71%. My physics teacher always told me that every number needs a unit of measure before it means anything. What exactly are these folks measuring 73% of? How did they come up with 20 backlinks and how are they going to provide a free audit report? Will it be something thoughtful, written by a knowledgeable expert, or is it some machine-generated garbage used to confuse and dazzle the unsophisticated customer?

Notice how the sender admits using “online advertising” to find the site and reassures us that he didn’t click the recipient’s ad. How polite!

We can’t know without further investigation whether this message violates CAN-SPAM, but it is untargeted, unsolicited, sent without permission, without any prior relationship, and therefore, by any common-sense definition, it’s spam.

If an SEO contractor is willing to spam (possibly breaking the law) or look the other way while their affiliates do so, I don’t think that contractor should be trusted. If willing to spam, they are probably also willing to take shortcuts like misrepresenting their services or providing risky SEO tactics that could hurt client reputations. Those skilled at SEO should have no need to email strangers asking for work. Why spam when SEO, social networks, and legitimate email marketing can generate demand?

To combat marketplace disinformation, legitimate SEO firms need to support and uphold standards for marketing SEO services. SEO spam gives all of us a bad reputation and reduces our opportunities. I am disappointed that our national and international search engine marketing professional organizations have failed, for nearly 10 years, to publish ethical standards. If we had standards, clients would use them to distinguish between legitimate search agencies and scammers. I could point to the standards whenever a client forwarded me one of these dubious SEO emails, and say, “This sort of communication is not allowed by our industry’s ethical and professionals standards.”

At SEMNE, a regional organization in New England, we wrote a Code of Ethics after discussions with our membership. Everybody agreed on what was right and wrong. Our rules permit any legal SEO practices, so long as risks are accurately disclosed to clients. By “legal” we mean legal per the law, not legal per Google. An example of a risk disclosure would be, “This tactic may violate Google’s guidelines. If you do this, it may work because Google isn’t as good at detecting violations as we wish they were, but eventually your site may be caught and penalized. Do you want to run that risk?”

Over the years, I have asked people why our professional associations have failed to set ethical standards. The usual response is that people do not agree on what is black, gray, and white-hat SEO. The hat color debate is a cop-out. Ethics are not about protecting the search engines from violations of their webmaster guidelines. Ethical standards would help clients identify legitimate vendors, and defend the reputation of our industry. It is not necessary to define or ban black-hat SEO. Instead we need to focus the discussion on standards of fair competition and fair dealing with clients.

Subscribe Now and Save 31% | Search Marketing Standard Magazine

So why is it that so many online advertisers continue to stick to the same old tried-and-tested methods? Why aren’t more people stepping outside of the box and thinking of new ways to interact with the target audience and promote their businesses via links?

Try out a few of the promoting ideas listed below and start making your Internet links work for you in different ways and to better effect.

1. Get listed on sites that REAL customers visit

Getting ranked on Google is one of the most important things for any business with an online presence. There is no doubt about it. Google is the most widely used search engine in the world and therefore, ranking on the first page of Google is a must for everyone.

However, there are other great ways of getting links to your site where people who are going to be even more interested in your services or products outside of the Google search. You need to get listed on sites that people are going to when they REALLY want to convert. You need to be visual on sites that clients who are further down the conversion tunnel visit before making a purchase.

Make sure that your business is listed on the following pages if you are looking to link better to your customers and connect your online business to the real world:

Yellow Pages — Yellow Pages is great because it is a directory that huge numbers of people use when looking for services. Therefore, categorizing your business correctly is imperative and getting mentioned on this site is an excellent way of directly interacting with your potential clients.

Google Maps — If people want to find a business close to them, which is common, Google Maps is the site they go to. Get listed on Google Maps and take more advantage of the real customer, in the real world, who is just a few blocks away from walking into your local and making a purchase.

Better Business Bureau — If you get a recommendation from the Better Business Bureau (BBB) you are going to gain the trust of many potential clients. Ranking high on Google search might be one of the most essential things for any company, but getting the thumbs up from the BBB can be the difference between your potential customer choosing to contact your business or the business listed below you on the SERP offering the same services, for example.

2. Blog about yourself or topics related to what you do / offer elsewhere

If you own a flower shop, start blogging (for free if necessary) on other sites about flowers, florists, plants and related subjects.

Offer yourself up as a “guru” on the subject in exchange for a link back to your site. This is a great way of reaching people who are interested on a deeper level in the products that you offer. If they see that you are a person who knows a lot about flowers and looking after plants, they might be more willing to trust you and buy from you (both online and in store if they live close by).

3. Connect your business to YouTube with your own Personal Channel

After Google.com, YouTube is one of the most visited sites across the globe. People spend hours watching videos on YouTube and it is time for every business with marketing campaigns online to start taking advantage of this site’s popularity in any way possible.

If you are an artist and you are trying to sell your paintings, make some videos of the painting process, or create a video which acts as a 360-degree walkthrough of your “gallery” of art work on sale.

Whatever happens, whatever your business, there is always something you can put up on YouTube for people to watch that will help to draw more attention to your business.

4. Be online when your customers are online

There is no point being online and tweeting all day long if your customers are not online to receive those tweets or those emails.

In fact, you need to think about when your potential customer might be in the mood or have enough time to want to open up one of your emails and read what you have sent them.

You could try testing out different times of the day for tweets, Facebook updates or email newsletters until you find the perfect social media networking approach for you. However, this might take some time. If you want to make your online marketing really work for your business you might have to approach this particular area of online advertising with a little more expertise in tow.

There are lots of up-and-coming online services, like Crowdbooster, which can help to show you when to tweet and when to post from the very start. However, you might need to take the time to investigate a little into how to get the most out of these programs as it would be foolish to think that you could get the best out of everything within devoting the time necessary.

5. Social network and make links offline… formally known as “in person”!!!

Whatever happened to the networking parties, face-to-face meetings, face-to-face flirting, face-to-face selling of your product / service, face-to-face closing of deals at the end of an evening full of champagne, dancing and business smiles???

Even though a lot of our world today is managed via the Internet, there are still plenty of opportunities to make business contacts face-to-face and to make hard sales in person.

If you own a tourism business, then you need to attend all the conferences on tourism possible. You need to sign up to seminars and training days that relate to tourism and you need to make the most of your time at these events by promoting your business first-hand.

Do you have up-to-date and attractive business cards to hand out with links to your site attached? If not, why not?!

What should you do first about linking to your customers?

Linking directly to your customer has never been more important in our ever-growing competitive world, but finding the most effective way to link also deserves time, thought and creativity.

Begin by using the ideas outlined in this article, but feel free to expand and move forward with your own ideas as soon as the ideas start flowing.

* David Chapman shares more tips about creating effective links for your business via the Webrageous Blog on a regular basis.

Subscribe Now and Save 31% | Search Marketing Standard Magazine

1.  How Will Google’s New Privacy Policy Affect You? – There has been tons of commentary on the new privacy policy on Google, and this article from Brent Rose at Gizmodo tells you how to easily countermand the major changes that are upcoming, as well as explaining the basics.

2.  Pinterest Drives More Referral Traffic Than Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn Combined — Shareaholic’s Janet Aronica has put together a traffic chart showing the change in share of referral traffic from December 2011 to January 2012.

3.  Google+ SEO — AJ Kohn has an incredibly comprehensive Google+ SEO guide that covers everything about how Google+ impacts search. Don’t miss the best practices section at the end of the post.

4.  Why Necessity Will Soon Make Facebook The World’s Largest Mobile Ad Network — Greg Sterling at MarketingLand discusses the future of Facebook insofar as mobile is concerned, according to insights from their IPO-related papers released this week.

5.  Utilizing Second Tier Link Building For Massive ROI — Ross Hudgens educates on building second tier links.

Subscribe Now and Save 31% | Search Marketing Standard Magazine

1.  Domain Age

The search engines take the age of your website into consideration when determining rank.  The search engines want to provide users with the best possible results, so they favor sites that are trusted.  Inbound links are one indicator of trust, but so is domain age.  To the search engines, a new site needs to earn trust and that takes time.  A website that has been around for a few years will succeed in getting a new page to rank for specific keywords faster than a brand new website.  Any website, regardless of age, should utilize SEO but an older website will see a quicker return.

2.  Competitors

Any smart business has a website and is marketing it online, which means that your competitors are hungry for the same search engine and online real estate that you want.  If your competitors are smart, they’ve been working at SEO for years.  Just getting started now means that you are late to the game and have a lot to catch up on.  Analyze their strategy to find a weakness that you may be able to capitalize on.  However, chances are good that it will be very difficult to ever outperform them if they’ve been executing a thorough white hat SEO strategy on a regular basis for awhile now.

3.  Search Engine Complexity

Google is becoming more transparent and is providing more information to webmasters regarding the algorithms, but we will never know everything.  The algorithms are always changing and personalization has become an important ranking factor.  It’s impossible to determine what the rank will be from one user to the next since results aren’t always the same.  We are at the mercy of the search engines and all we can do is play by the rules.

Conclusion

Just because certain ranking elements are out of our control doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t bother.  Business websites across all industries, new or old, need SEO to survive online.  Results won’t be immediate and depend on many factors, but they will come eventually as long as you keep at it and understand that it takes time.

Subscribe Now and Save 31% | Search Marketing Standard Magazine

This issue is another jam-packed with great how-to advice and tactics for succeeding online. Some of the articles that will be included are:

• Exposing The Real Deal: Must-Know Daily Deals Advice by Matthew Young of BruceClay
• A Step-By-Step Approach To Successful Content Marketing by Tim Breen of CatalystOnline
• 5 Ways Mobile Will Disrupt Your Business by Tom Shapiro of DigitalMarketingNOW
• Search, Social and Real-Time Marketing: An Interview With Rob Garner of iCrossing

and much, much more

If you are not yet a subscriber, go here to subscribe. The deadline for subscriptions to meet the mailing date for the Spring issue is February 6th, so don’t delay! You can choose print+digital or digital only … it’s your choice.

Subscribe Now and Save 31% | Search Marketing Standard Magazine

The complete article follows:

Subscribe Now and Save 31% | Search Marketing Standard Magazine

Some people on their hunt for the perfect partner go to extreme lengths and even draw up a checklist that they can use to assess and compare their prospective partners with their ideal image. Singles columns are full to the brim with coded language to help attract that perfect someone, with GSOH (Good Sense of Humor) being top of the list.

What about if you are on the hunt for the perfect Google AdWords Consultant? Do you have a checklist? Do you know what qualities you should be looking for? Do you know where to look for the Google AdWords Mr. or Mrs. Right?

When people find it difficult to find a partner in their personal lives, it is sometimes just down to the fact that they aren’t looking in the right places.

For instance, they’re looking for someone who likes to read lots and snuggle down with DVDs every night, but they’re looking for them in the biggest nightclubs in the city on the weekends. Doesn’t this just sound like a little bit of a wasted effort? The same applies to a Google AdWords Consultant. You need to know where to look.

Below is a list of effective ways to find that perfect Google AdWords Consultant

1.  Place a Lonely Heart Advertiser’s Ad (these can be successfully posted all over social networking sites, particularly when you narrow them down and you select groups or pages where lonely Google AdWords Consultants are likely to be hanging out).

2. Find out where your neighbor, friend, competitor, work associate got their Google AdWords Consultant from (there’s nothing better than having the recommendation of someone in the flesh, even if you don’t end up following through with their recommendations).

3. Search through some online directories that can be trusted professionally (for example, have a look at who the Better Business Bureau considers to be the best in the Google AdWords Consulting business at present and this might help you sift out the diamond in the rough).

Guidelines For Must-Have Qualities The Best Google AdWords Consultants Have

You need to know what you’re looking for. You need to know what qualities your Google AdWords Consultant should have before you start the search and most definitely before you decide to tie the pay-per-click knot.

1.  Qualifications

Find a Google AdWords Consultant who is Google AdWords Qualified. It is not a prerequisite to be qualified, but without these qualifications a consultant might only be able to offer a mediocre service.

2.  Work Ethic

Generally, the people who live, eat and breathe pay per click are the best at it. If you call your potential Google AdWords Consultant, or email them, in the middle of the night and they respond within half and hour, that means they were probably still working away at someone’s campaign. Wouldn’t it be great to have a consultant on your team who just didn’t stop working for you and your pay-per-click success, despite their own lives and personal health? (witty reading tone is needed here)

3.  Personal Qualities

A GSOH might be the kind of thing that you need from the perfect partner that you’re searching for on a single’s internet site, but is it really that important in a Google AdWords Consultant? Well, actually… maybe so! Pay-per-click management can be a very frustrating and tiresome job at times and you’re going to need someone who can remain on top of things, but who isn’t going to shout down at you on the phone when you admit for the 54th time that you really don’t understand why a 50% increase in conversions is such a cause for happiness.

4.  The X Factor

Google AdWords Consultants can be found all over the place and so you can afford to be picky. The thing to consider at length, in order to select the Google AdWords Prince from the many, many Paupers, is the X-Factor.

While this is not an advert for Simon Cowell, nor an opportunity for anyone to spontaneously launch into their own rendition of “Ben” by Michael Jackson, the X-Factor can teach us something about how to select the perfect Google AdWords Consultant… follow your instincts.

We’ve heard many a time on the X-Factor TV show … “You just don’t do it for me, son” and that’s the end of what might have been a beautiful career in the music industry for a distraught 14 year old with nothing else planned in his life careerwise. But it’s the same with the Google AdWords Consultant.

Some that you come across are going to inspire you with confidence and others aren’t. Follow your instincts and trust in your general impressions. We do the same when we finally meet that special someone. We just “know” that they are the one. Let’s use our sensory radars to employ the best in AdWords Consulting too.

In Summary

Forget about managing on your own and all that malarkey. Start searching for your Google AdWords Consultant with a GSOH in the places suggested above. Throw away that over-extended and useless checklist that you once had and just focus on qualifications, work ethic and personality. If your potential Google AdWords Consultant passes these first three hurdles with flying colors, just ask yourself one last thing…

Have they got the X-Factor for you and your company?

David Chapman is an expert in Google AdWords Advertising, and he provides useful tips on a number of areas of Paid Search Advertising via the Webrageous Blog.

Subscribe Now and Save 31% | Search Marketing Standard Magazine

1. So Are Google Results Crap, Or Aren’t They? — There has been a lot of discussion lately re: Google’s increasingly complicated search results, and the addition of Google Plus is only making the view murkier. Andrew Goodman of Traffick has a nice opinion piece on the debate.

2.  10 Form Optimization Tips — Over at Search Engine Land, Mona Elesseily nicely lays out 10 optimization tactics for online forms. As a heads-up, Kim Krause-Berg will be contributing an article on form optimization for the Spring issue of Search Marketing Standard magazine. There’s only a week left to subscribe to make sure you receive this issue.

3.  Google Penalty or Algorithm Change: Dealing With Lost Traffic — David Harry at Search Engine Watch has a nice diagnostic for figuring out whether a drop in rank is due to an actual Google penalty or is the result of an algorithm change. Since you will take differing actions depending upon which it is, it’s vital that you figure out which has befallen your site so you can counter.

4.  Comparing the Top 4 Retargeting Companies — With retargeting a hot topic in paid search, a review of the pros and cons of four of the top contenders in that market is very welcome (from SEOmoz).

5.  US Mobile Ad Spending Soars Past Expectations — If you needed any proof that mobile is officially a game-changer, eMarketer reveals that the experts have underestimated the spend on mobile advertising in the US.

Subscribe Now and Save 31% | Search Marketing Standard Magazine