Does Google Use Facebook Shares to Influence Search Rankings?
June 13th, 2011 – Posted by Matt Peters at SEOMoz – he concludes:

• Facebook shares, at least as related to Google searches, act as a sort of “super-metric”, encompassing a variety of different factors (similar to SEOmoz’s Page Authority and Domain Authority).
• Don’t stop sharing and generating brand engagement through Facebook!  Driving deeper engagement through social media can only help your brand and likely has other positive benefits (by generating tweets or links, for example).
• Earning Facebook shares (probably) will not directly boost your Google rankings (though it may have positive effects that indirectly promote links, tweets and other signals Google may use).
• The process of doing this type of correlation work and sharing the results openly started a great dialogue in the search community, and through that we all learned more about how search works. We plan to do more work like this, and are planning a project for the Fall to compare Google and Bing results.

Experiments on Google+ and Twitter Influencing Search Rankings

July 5th, 2011 – Posted by Cyrus Shepard to Social Media concludes:

At this time, I haven’t found direct evidence of improved rankings with Google+ beyond basic

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Introduction

An Important Warning:

Whenever you’re dealing with Facebook, it’s crucial that you provide accurate, compete information. Facebook does not hesitate to deactivate personal and business accounts along with any Fan Pages or Advertising Accounts associated with them if they suspect anything even a tad fishy. Deactivated accounts are unrecoverable.

Personal and Business Accounts:

You can have only one Facebook account in your name, that account can be a business account or personal account – on this point Facebook is pretty serious. Only create a new account to administer Facebook ads if you don’t already have a Facebook account.

Business accounts do not appear in search results and have limited functionality; they’re mainly used only to administer Fan Pages and advertising. Personal accounts let you have friends on the site and interact with other Facebook users. A business account can be upgraded to a personal account, but not vise versa.

Unless you’re an advertising firm whose combined clients will spend more than $10,000/month on Facebook, you will only be able to create one advertising account per personal/business account. Because the amount of accounts we’re able to create in house is limited, we ask each of our clients to

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When you dig a little into the Groupon story, this company does look a bit like a Ponzi scheme.  Any company that is touted by the financial press as the “fastest growing company ever” is starting to look like tulip-mania right from the start. These are the same publications that named Enron “the most innovative company in America” for six years in a row, fawned all over Worldcom as it grew 500% in five years through acquisitions, and cheered the massive over-leveraging of the american consumer durring the real estate boom until all these miracle growth stories blew up in their faces.

You don’t have to look far on the web to read stories by skeptics of the Groupon miracle.  But most of these stories are not to be found in the mainstream press.  I don’t have time to recap, but I will refer you to an article that summarizes the financial games that this company is playing.

As Groupon grows 2200% per year, losing money in every single quarter since their founding, they pay out the bulk of their sold deals after 90 days.  I am not a mathematician, but it sounds to me like the only way that the

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Challenges and Trends of Lead Generation in 2011 from B2B Lead Roundtable on Vimeo.

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Brian Carroll, Executive Director of Applied Research for MECLABS and author of the bestseller, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, and Brandon Stamschror, Senior Director of Operations, MECLABS Leads Group,  discuss the true cost of telephone prospecting.

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1. Traffic to the top 10 review sites grew on average 158% last year (Compete.com)
2. 97% who made a purchase based on an online review found the review to be accurate (Comscore/The Kelsey Group, Oct. 2007)
3. 92% have more confidence in info found online than they do in anything from a salesclerk or other source (Wall Street Journal, Jan 2009)
4. 90% of online consumers trust recommendations from people they know; 70% trust unknown users, 27% trust experts, 14% trust advertising, 8% trust celebrities (Econsultancy, July 2009, Erik Qualman, Socialnomics)
5. 75% of people don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertisements (Yankelovich)
6. 70% consult reviews or ratings before purchasing (BusinessWeek, Oct. 2008)
7. 7 in 10 who read reviews share them with friends, family & colleagues thus amplifying their impact (Deloitte & Touche, Sept. 2007)
8. 51% of consumers use the Internet even before making a purchase in shops (Verdict Research, May 2009)
9. 45% say they are influenced a fair amount or a great deal by reviews on social sites from people they follow (46% say reviews in newspaper or magazine influence them.) (Harris Poll, April 2010)
10. 34% have turned to social media to air their feelings about a company, 26%

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Find out how useless Google AdWords Keyword Tool is at this post by David Naylor SEOs. We have seen the same thing many times where Google’s tool is so off base its a laughable. Frankly I don’t believe any tool gives good results. When I want to get real data, I just set up an AdWords campaign and run it for a few days with a low bid just to see impression counts.

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Dr. Paul Berson and Dr. Harold Yafee at The Dental Spa in Center City Philadelphia called us in May of 2009 to help them promote their site on the web. At first the practice were not seeing good results because we were targeting generic keywords like Philadelphia Dentist. But in a quarterly review of results the doctors told us that they were primarily cosmetic dentists who did not take insurance in most cases. So we focused all our efforts on getting them top rankings for keywords like “Cosmetic Dentist Philadelphia“, “Implant Dentist Philadelphia”, and “Invisalign Dentist Philadelphia.”

By targeting their core business keywords we were able to get them more valuable leads at a lower cost. They now typically show up at number 3 on natural search and number 3 or higher on AdWords. For Google Local listings we are working on getting them more reviews. For now they are very happy with search results like the screenshot below where they rank number one in local search and number two in natural search:

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This guy is brilliant.  Just wanted to share this with our customers:

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