Finding Themes is Now Faster & More Visual

by Matt Wiebe

I want to let you in on a little secret: when we launched Lovebirds and Ever After almost two weeks ago, we reached 200 active themes on WordPress.com! With so many amazing new themes coming out, we thought it was time for an overhaul of the Theme Showcase.

More Visual

I always judge books by their covers and themes by their screenshots, but the old Theme Showcase’s tiny screenshots made that last one really hard. That problem is now just a fading memory:

And, like everything on WordPress.com these days, these screenshots are HiDPI/retina-ready!
Faster

We now only show the first 20 or so results, loading more as needed with Infinite Scroll. This, and a bunch of other behind-the-scenes improvements will keep things nice and snappy while you look for the perfect theme for your blog. To top it off, all your searches and filters are quickly returned on the same page.

Happy theme browsing, and here’s to the next 200 themes!

Google's SEO Advice For Your Website: Content

by: Joel Walsh

The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don't get so caught up in the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, that you forget your site's content.

I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web.

Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise, considering how often officials at Google proclaim the importance of good content. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing.

Does Google, the world's wealthiest media company, really ignore traditional standards of quality in the publishing world? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point?

Apparently not.

Most Common On-the-Page Website Content Success Features

Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.

I looked at Google's top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffic delivered by Google.

The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features:

* Updating: frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.

* Spelling and grammar: few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word's check feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? I can already hear the scoffing on the other side of this computer screen. Before you dismiss the idea completely, keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google's algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same.

* Paragraphs: primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.

* Lists: both bulleted and numbered, form a large part of the text.

* Sentence length: mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.

* Contextual relevance: text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword.

SEO Bugbears and Sacred Cows

A hard look at the results shows that, practically speaking, a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows may matter less to ranking than good content.

* PageRank. The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. Of course, this might simply be yet another demonstration that the little PageRank number you get in your browser window is not what Google's algo is using. But if you're one of those people who attaches an overriding value to that little number, this is food for thought.

* Frames. The top two web pages listed for the most searched-on keyword employ frames. Frames may still be a bad web design idea from a usability standpoint, and they may ruin your search engine rankings if your site's linking system depends on them. But there are worse ways you could shoot yourself in the foot.

* JavaScript-formatted internal links. Most of the websites use JavaScript for their internal page links. Again, that's not the best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do.

* Links: Most of the web pages contained ten or more links; many contain over 30, in defiance of the SEO bugbears about "link popularity bleeding." Moreover, nearly all the pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. Of course, it's not clear what benefit the website owners hope to get from placing irrelevant links on pages. It has been a proven way of lowering conversion rates and losing visitors. But Google doesn't seem to care if your website makes money.

* Originality: a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, the content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: the reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually the majority of the page.

Recommendations

* Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site's content, particularly in the case of a search-engine optimization campaign. If you are an SEO, make sure you get a pro to do the content. A shocking number of SEOs write incredibly badly. I've even had clients whose websites got fewer conversions or page views after their SEOs got through with them, even when they got a sharp uptick in unique visitors. Most visitors simply hit the "back" button when confronted with the unpalatable text, so the increased traffic is just wasted bandwidth.

* If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through the hands of a skilled copyeditor or writer before going online.

* Update your content often. It's important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can't afford original content, use free-reprint content.

* Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for the right to publish the content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a "duplicate content penalty" for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified.

In short, if you have a mature website that is already indexed and getting traffic, you should consider making sure the bulk of your investment in your website is devoted to its content, rather than graphic design, old-school search-engine optimization, or linking campaigns.

Keyword Targeting Strategy In Your Site

by: Rakesh Ojha

Once the keywords have been decided for the site one has to come up with a strategy to target those keywords across the site. Here is a primer on that.

Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword of Single word:
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Keyword of Single word is useful to attract general audience and helps in getting high rank ,if the web site is new. Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword of Single word is that they should be more used in the root level pages or top level domain pages. This is because these pages are the ones that attract the general traffic & are generally the pages which do not specify specifics. Hence single word keywords based on themes can be targeted for on these pages.

Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword of Multiple words:
----------------------------------------------------------

Keyword of Multiple words are useful for attract targeted audience therefore should be used topic wise for each page according to subject of that web page. Relevant set of Keywords should be use in Title tag, Header Tag, Meta tag, Body tag, Alt tag, Anchor tag, Comment tag and in the url (uniform resource locator) of that specific web page. Use underscore or hyphen to differentiate Keywords. These keywords are normally targeted upon in deeper level or sub directory level pages.

Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword based on Theme:
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Keyword based on theme is useful to attract targeted audience therefore they are strongly recommended to be used. Typically, although it is not a hard and fast rule but in theme based keyword we use general keywords in root level and uses specific keyword in directory level.

Overall one can safely say that in keyword targeting one uses a dart board strategy. Wherein the smallest circle attracts your core audience & hence should have theme oriented multiple word keywords. As we move up on the theme (dartboard) the circle ( traffic) tends to get larger & the keywords tends to get simpler( singular) even though they are theme based.

KEYWORDS and KEYPHRASES usage in Domain Name:
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Keywords and keyphrases use in Domain Name & urls of directory pages is also a factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as it helps to inform targeted audience, about the sites content . Therefore, special care should be exercised in choosing a domain name. All the search engines start reading each web page with its respective domain name.

Having said that, let me add that there is a raging debate amongst the seo community to determine the exact importance of keywords in the domain name. One camp believes that it is hugely important to have keywords in domain whereas the other maintains that brand building domain name is more important than keywords incorporating one.

Whether keyword is a factor or not is debateble however it has been observed that domain name extensions do definitely play a part in rankings. Search engines ( specially google) have a predilection for sites having extension .gov,.edu,.mil in domain name. Search engines believe that information available at these domains would have a greater likelihood of being authentic as no commercial interest is served here.

Domain Name can be classifieds into two categories:

1. Keyword Specific

2. Brand Name Specific

Keyword Specific Domain Name
----------------------------

When Keywords and Keyphrases are used in a Domain name then its called Keyword specific Domain name.

Keyword in the domain name to my mind has two advantages.

One It is better to have a keyword domain name for it is worth remembering that most of the people link to you using your URL. If your URL has the keyword or the keyphrase then you are automatically using the keyword in the very important anchor tag.

Secondly, though marginally, in a ranking scenario with every other parameter remaining equal, the Keyword Specific Domain Name will enjoy a slight edge over the other web site. However remember Keyword used in Domain name should be primary and generic. Specific keywords can be used in the sub domains. Read about the use of subdomains.

Keywords and Keyphrases uses with hyphen/underscore in Domain name are said to preferred as they are read by search engines as separate words. So the domain name can have a search phrase incorporated into it. However the flip side of it is that domain names with hyphen or underscore are inconvenient to carry.

Brand Name Specific Domain Name
-------------------------------

When company or organizations’ name is used in Domain Name to brand it then it’s called as Brand Name Specific Domain name.

Brand Name Specific Domain Name does not help online searches at all. However they are very powerful tools for company identification in the mind of users. In the anonymous online world a brand spells loyalty, trust & value. So if you choose to go for building your brand rather than deep rooted optimization, one way of incorporating keywords is through your directories & pages names.

KEYWORD DENSITY
---------------

Keyword Density is a proportion of the searched term ( Keyword or Keyphrase) against the whole words written on a given page. The ideal Keyword Density is 6%-8% though various search engines have various tolerance levels before their spam filters get activated. Higher Keyword Density does help to boost a pages’ ranking.

Keyword Density can be increased by using target keywords repeatedly in Title tag, Header tag, Body tag, Comment tag, Alt tag, Anchor tag, Paragraph Tag , Domain name and in diretory/page names.

However one disadvantage of trying to hike the keyword density is that the visible text on the page starts to look spammy if it is not carefully crafted. That makes for a bad copy.

About the author:
I'm an Online Marketing consultant at Mosaic Services- an SEO Company. I regularly write and submit articles on various SE specific topics.

Re: Is Facebook building an iTunes/Google Play competitor?

Reblogged From Dan Farber

Facebook isn't pressing the panic button as its stock price dipped below $30 this week, but investors are not showing much love for the company.

They want to know soon whether the honeymooning Mark Zuckerberg can turn Facebook's massive pool of personal data, and billions of user interactions per day, into a super-profitable business, like Google or Apple.

Zuckerberg seems to have a different near-term agenda, following Jeff Bezos' Amazon school of management -- attain dominant market share before profits. The formula is to focus on creating an extraordinary customer experience and sign up a few billion users, constructing a moat that competitors can't easily cross.

As Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to prospective shareholders about his company's culture, "Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services."

Facebook has the moat, given its lead in audience and time spent on the site versus competitors. With more than 900 million members, and nearly 60 percent visiting at least once a day, Facebook is the Internet's megalopolis. The planetary colonization continues, with accelerating growth in India, Brazil, Indonesia and other countries.

But achieving Google-like revenue and growing into a $100 billion or $200 billion valuation won't be easy. Facebook's advertising efforts and paid services, mostly in the form of credits used to buy virtual goods on social games from Zynga and others, yielded $3.7 billion in revenue and $1 billion in profit in 2011. Those are nice numbers for an 8-year-old Web company but not great in comparison with the 14-year-old leader in search.

Google, which has the advantage of user intent in selling its core search results, had $37.9 billion in revenue and $9.7 billion in net income for the same year, and grew revenue at 29 percent year-over-year.

So far, Facebook has focused on unobtrusive, small display ads and Sponsored Stories, which display a user's name, photo, and a tagline asserting that the person "likes" an advertiser. The more splashy, high-priced ads that take over substantial real estate on the pages of most sites are not part of the Facebook playbook. GM reportedly pulled its $10 million ad buy because Facebook wouldn't allow the car maker to run a full-page takeover ad on the site.

The rise in mobile usage of Facebook is proving more difficult to monetize than the desktop, despite the increase in time spent on mobile apps. Facebook warned potential investors in its IPO prospectus that the more people who access its mobile version instead of the Web, the worse its business performs.

So how does Facebook grow its revenue and profit at clip that will elevate the stock even to its IPO price of $38 per share? Certainly, Facebook can make improvements to its display advertising, with more precision targeted units sold at higher prices based on mining the 100 petabytes of data it has gathered about its users.
But even at larger scale, with 2 billion users if Facebook's growth in emerging countries continues at pace, Facebook's basic ad model won't result in a higher revenue per user. In fact, users outside the U.S. are worth far less monetarily to Facebook, and it costs the same to serve them a page.

Facebook does have a Trojan horse, though it's not clear if the company is going to exploit it any time soon. Facebook Payment and its currency, Facebook credit, generated about 15 percent of company revenue in 2011 -- $557 million. Facebook takes a 30 percent cut of each transaction. Only about 15 million users gave Facebook a credit card and bought virtual goods with Facebook payments last year, which leaves a lot of runway. That's less than two percent of Facebook's current addressable audience.

Just prior to the IPO, Facebook introduced its own app store, Facebook App Center. Facebook can take a fee for apps sold through its store as well as for digital goods and upgrades once an app is installed. App Center is more open than other app stores, routing Facebook users to Apple's App Store and Google Play, while collecting data for its social graph. In May 2012, Facebook routed an estimated 90 million users to Apple's store. That kind of lead generation could be a source of revenue.

A next step would be to unite Facebook Payments and the App Center, creating a full-blown store of digital goods, from movies and books to music and apps, that caters to the growing base of Facebook addicted and media consuming users.

Facebook will take a cut from apps sold in its forthcoming App Center, similar to how iTunes and Google Play operate their stores

The rumored Facebook phone could also play into this digital department store strategy, in the same way that the iPhone, Google phone and a rumored Amazon phone play into a branded one-stop shopping device for everything digital.

Apple's iTunes store generated $1.9 billion in revenue in the second quarter of this year. It will be hard for Facebook to resist getting into competition with Apple, Google, Microsoft Samsung, Sony and others seeking to become the hub of everything digital.

While Amazon and Apple especially have a huge lead on the competition, and offer a high level of convenience and personalization -- which is a kind of ambient lock-in -- Facebook has enough users, personalization, technology, and convenience to gain a foothold. Competing with partners who offer music, videos and other digital goods that integrate with Facebook's platform would prove tricky, but it's part of what every giant company does as its hunger for usage and profit grows.

In response to a query about building a store similar to iTunes, a Facebook spokesperson said, "We have no plans for that at this time."

It's not clear whether "at this time" means never or maybe sometime. Part of Facebook's mission, as drafted by Zuckerberg, is to build products that are "social by design" and to "build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries." It's hard to imagine that Zuckerberg isn't considering weaving a digital department store more deeply into the fabric of Facebook.

SEO - Natural Linking Strategies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be the difference between a small, barely profitable or visible website and a traffic magnet website. There are a lot of ways, both good and bad, to influence the search engines. Some search engines react to certain strategies better than others. Some even have conflicting strategies that they react to. To document all of these things would require a significant number of pages and research that goes beyond the scope of this article.

However, there are a number of things that can be documented that will work for most if not all search engines. And let's face it; there are really only 3 that make a difference between a successful and an unsuccessful SEO strategy. They are the big three: Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines in any given month are responsible for over 90% of all internet searches.

So, what is this article about? It's about what you can do as a website owner that will influence the search engines using commonly accepted practices of linking to other websites (outbound) and getting website links (inbound) back to you. There are basically 4 strategies that a website owner usually will employ to increase their website value in the eyes of the search engine. They are reciprocal linking, one-way linking, multi-site linking and directory linking. A website owner should not think that using just a single strategy is the right answer - sure it will help your SEO but it won't be the Best answer. The Best answer is to employ all 4 techniques and to do it naturally.

Each of the four linking strategies has specific descriptions that can be summed up as:
1. Reciprocal Linking = Site A links to Site B, Site B links back to Site A
2. One-Way Linking = Site B links to Site A
3. Multi-Site Linking = Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, Site C links to Site D, and Site D links back to Site A. Could be 3..N number of sites involved.
4. Directory Linking = Site Directory A links to Site A

That seems simple enough but it takes time and effort to perform all 4 strategies and most website owners aren't willing to spend the time or don't have the time to spend on it. As a website owner, SEO needs to be one of the highest priority tasks that you need to address, just after Order Processing and Fulfillment and Customer Service. Without free traffic from the search engines, other traffic generation strategies that usually require payment must be engaged.

Now doing the 4 strategies above is great, but it gets even harder because you have to do it in a way that doesn't trigger the search engines to enforce a penalty upon your website. No one except the search engine engineers know all of the exact penalties but we have some good theories for some of them.

The first is the rate at which links are created. There is a certain threshold for creating links that is too fast. It's possible that the threshold is a sliding scale and is related to the age of the website according to the engine. For example, a young low-traffic website should not normally be getting 1000 links a month whereas an older website that gets a lot of traffic could be OK to get 1000 links a month. As you progress in your linking strategies make sure you keep this in mind, especially if you are thinking about buying links.

The second is that having a link to every site that links to you will likely reduce the value of the links. In other words, if all you ever get is Reciprocal Linking, you will likely move up the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page's) but you won't reach your sites full potential. Having a mixture of all 4 strategies will appear more natural to the engines.

The third is having all inbound links to your site on "linking" pages will make those links less valuable than having a natural link on a contextually relative page for a percentage of the inbound links. The higher you can drive this context percentage, the better your website will rank. These types of links are often some of the most difficult links to generate an exchange for because it requires more time and effort for both website owners.

The fourth is to have links inbound from all different ranking sites. If all you have linking to you is page rank 6 and 7 sites then you are likely to be sending the message that you purchased your links and that is not natural to the engines. Some would argue that purchasing links for driving traffic is just fine and it is. However, you should not expect the search engines to give those inbound links very much weight when calculating your SERP positions. It is significantly more natural for you to have a large number of rank 1 and 2 inbound links and a decreasing number of inbound links as you move up the page rank scale (0 - 10).

The fifth is to have the text of you inbound links varied. It isn't natural to have every website that links to you to have the same text on the link description. The natural tendency would be to have a certain percent be the sites name, but after that it should be a wide variety of description. Your link text description is a key factor for how your site/page will rank, so make sure that you keep that in mind as you specify your preferred link text description on your website.

Finally, it would be best for a good percentage of your inbound links to appear within the text of a page that appears natural for the reader of that site. And for those links to not all point back to the home page of your website. It's most natural for a good high quality link to appear in the text of a page and have it point internally within your site.

So, when you begin or continue your SEO activities keep all of these things in mind and don't be impatient. Impatience could incur penalties or worse. Your website could end up in the "sandbox". It is rumored and becoming more concrete that Google supposedly uses a sandbox that questionable sites are put in until they have aged to a point that Google no longer feels that they are being manipulated. Many of the search engines use similar protection schemes to eliminate spam sites and manipulation sites to keep their SERP's from being cluttered.

Reblogged

PayPal Now Marketing In-Store Payments to Consumers!

Reblogged From Duane Barnhart | @dailydisrupt
PayPal Inc. says 15 retailers, including Abercrombie & Fitch, Office Depot and Jamba Juice, are adding its online payment system in their stores.

PayPal, which is owned by eBay Inc.  (Nasdaq: EBAY), already is in place in about 2,000 Home Depot (NYSE: HD) locations nationwide.

This week, the company announced that its payment system also will be available at Abercrombie & Fitch (NYSE: ANF), Advance Auto Parts (NYSE: AAP), Aéropostale (NYSE: ARO), American Eagle Outfitters (NYSE: AEO), Barnes & Noble Inc. (NYSE: BKS), Foot Locker Inc. (NYSE: FL), Guitar Center Inc., Jamba Inc.  (Nasdaq: JMBA), J.C. Penney Co. Inc.  (NYSE: JCP), Jos. A. Bank Clothiers Inc.  (Nasdaq: JOSB), Nine West, Office Depot Inc.  (NYSE: ODP), Rooms To Go, Tiger Direct and Toys “R” Us.

All but six of the retailers have stores in Hawaii, and most of them have locations in the state’s largest shopping malls, including Ala Moana Center and Pearlridge Center on Oahu.

“Consumers are relying on technology now more than ever to simplify their lives when it comes to shopping and paying, and retailers must adapt to this shift or risk becoming irrelevant,” PayPal CEO David Marcus said in a blog post announcing the initiative.

Additionally, PayPal has made deals with point of sale systems developers, like Leapset, Shopkeep, ERPLY, and Vend, as well as point of sale terminal manufacturers such as Verifone and Equinox.  These partnerships give PayPal access to over 40 million payment terminals across the world through which it can handle transactions.

What does all of this mean for us, as consumers?  Well, hopefully this will mean that if you have a PayPal account, it will be seamless and easy to purchase goods and services in many retail locations with it by just using an app on your phone.  PayPal stresses that its system does not require NFC capabilities or require retailers to massively upgrade their point of sale systems, so adoption for both consumer and retailer is smoother than with other mobile payment platforms.

Even though mobile payments are still a relatively new concept for many, the scene is divisively fragmented already, with many players all trying to put their hat in the game and use their own proprietary systems. Google Wallet, which was at the forefront of mobile payments last year, still has yet to gain traction thanks to device and network compatibility issues, while the Isis mobile payment joint venture from AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile still hasn’t launched.  For consumers, who generally just want something to work wherever they go without hassle, these incompatibility issues present major roadblocks to the adoption of mobile payments.  With PayPal investing heavily in its own mobile payment solution, consumers will have yet another choice on their plate, but that doesn’t mean they will eat it up, despite PayPal’s best wishes.

Google Analytics Product Update: Social Measurement, Content Tracking, Attribution & New Sharing Tools

The following is a guest post contributed by Daniel Waisberg, Owner of Conversion Journey, a Google Analytics Certified Partner, and Founder of Online Behavior, a Marketing Measurement and Optimization portal.


Google Analytics has recently launched a new set of reports called Social reports, which can be used to analyze on-site and off-site interactions with social networks in reference to your own website content. The reports’ ultimate goal is to enable brands to measure the return on investment for social media activities and make more accurate, data-driven decisions about social. 

The most significant change that it brings to the game is we are now able to better tie social activities (on and off-site) to online behavior and revenue. This is especially accentuated for the Social Data Hub Partners, a group of networks that use the platform provided by Google Analytics; for all these networks we can learn deep information about off-site behavior. 

I have recently written a guide to Google+ Analytics, where I discussed how to use Google Analytics in order to understand Google+ on-site interactions (e.g. +1 button clicks) and off-site interactions (e.g. comments, posts, shares that happened on Google+). In this post I will recap the main points of that guide and add actionable tips that will help marketers and analysts use these reports effectively.

Setting Up Goals - First Step to Social Media Measurement

Before using the Social reports, it is essential to configure your website goals on Google Analytics, otherwise the reports won't be as useful (here is a step-by-step guide). Thomas Carlyle wrote: "A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder." The same is true for Google Analytics accounts: if a goal is not configured, the stats will not help improving the performance of websites, no matter how good the reports are.

Google+ Social Referral Traffic - Quantity and Quality

According to Google Analytics, the Social Sources report, the first in the list of Social reports, is described as follows:

The Sources report shows engagement metrics (Pageviews, Avg. Time on Site, Pages/Visit) for traffic from each social network. This report is also enhanced with off-site data for Social Data Hub partner networks. Click on a partner network to see the URLs that were shared on that site, how they were shared (for example, via a "+1" or "reshare" action), and the public conversations that took place about your content.

In this report we will see the number of visitors that came through Google+, the number of pageviews that they saw, time on site and number of pages per visit. Nothing surprising.  However, since Google+ is part of the Social Data Hub, we can click through to get more detailed data on what kinds of interactions happened off-site, i.e. on plus.google.com. 

As you will see, when clicking through to the Google+ row (see screenshot above) we will have two reports on the Social Referral tab: Google+ Shared URL and Google+ Social Network and Action (the tabs can be found above the graph, and the reports below the graph).

Google+ Shared URL

The Google+ Shared URL report shows which URLs were shared in Google+ and what traffic they drove. It will also provide a Data Hub Activities metric, which tells how many interactions they drove on Google+ including: +1, post, comment and reshare.  

Actionable Tip: use this report to find out which content drives the most social activity on Google+. Based on that, you might consider increasing the exposure of this content on prominent website real estate.

Google+ Social Network and Action

If you click on the link to Social Network and Action (see arrow above), you will be able to see all interactions performed on Google+, segmented by action type. 

Google+ Conversations - Activity Stream

Moving over to real interactions with real people, Activity Streams allow us to see the conversations as they happened inside Google+ (for activities that have occurred publicly). The conversations are organized starting from the newest and we can do the following actions for each conversation:

1. Page Analytics: leads to more information regarding traffic that was resulted from the post.
2. View Ripple: leads to the post Ripple, an interactive visualization of the public shares of the post
3. View Page: leads to the website page that was shared
4. View Activity: leads to the actual publicly-shared post on Google+ 

Actionable Tip: use this report to discover people that are evangelizing your brand on Google+ and interact with them. Once you find those people, create a circle with them (call it "Evangelists") and start interacting with them in an ongoing basis.

Google+ Conversion Rates - Assisted vs. Last Interaction Analysis

This report uses the same functionality as the Multi-Channel Funnels reports. It provides both the last touch interaction value (i.e. conversions that happened in a visit attributed to Google+) and also the assisted value (i.e. conversions that happened in a visit following the visit from Google+). Above is a screenshot of how it looks and the explanation given by Google about the metrics in the chart. 

Assisted Conversions and Assisted Conversion Value: This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the social network assisted. An assist occurs when someone visits your site, leaves without converting, but returns later to convert during a subsequent visit. The higher these numbers, the more important the assist role of the social network. 

Last Interaction Conversions and Last Interaction Conversion Value: This is the number (and monetary value) of last click sales and conversions. When someone visits your site and converts, the visit is considered a last click. The higher these numbers, the more important the social network’s role in driving completion of sales and conversions. 

Assisted/Last Interaction Conversions: This ratio summarizes the social network’s overall role. A value close to 0 indicates that the social network functioned primarily in a last click capacity. A value close to 1 indicates that the social network functioned equally in an assist and a last click capacity. The more this value exceeds 1, the more the social network functioned in an assist capacity.

Actionable Tip: use this report to understand where in the buying cycle is your Social Media traffic. This may help you understand which kind of offers will be most effective on Social Networks.

Google+ Social Plugin - On-site Interactions

The Social Plugins report provides an account of the social actions that happened inside the website and in which pages they occur. +1 buttons spread in the website content will be available in this report automagically (for other social buttons, coding is required). 

Actionable Tip: use this report to understand which content is being +1'ed in-site. This will help you optimize the position of +1 buttons to increase exposure through Google+.

Google+ Visitors Flow

This report uses the same functionality used in the flow visualization report released by Google in 2011. Basically, it provides the path through which visitors experienced the website. In this report we will be able to segment just by visits originating from Google+. You can find the report at http://onbe.co/GXYQMN  

Actionable Tip: use this report to understand how well optimized your site is for social traffic. If you find a page that is receiving large amounts of social traffic and is not persuading visitors to click-through (i.e. high drop rate), you might consider testing that page.

Concluding Thoughts

As seen above, Google Analytics has created robust tracking and analysis abilities for Google+, which puts Google+ in an excellent position when it comes to other Social Networks. In general, many other social sites don’t provide detailed metrics into what happens inside their walls, which makes investments less measurable. If marketers can easily measure how well each social networks perform, more resources might be devoted to them.

Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

Reblogged from Google Blog

Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist.

Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.


With Google Drive, you can:

Create and collaborate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.
Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just... there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.
Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.



Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future.

This is just the beginning for Google Drive; there’s a lot more to come.

Get started with Drive today at drive.google.com/start—and keep looking for Nessie...

Expand Your Facebook Page With More Likes

Online marketers should be paying attention to the major role Facebook is now playing on the internet. The fact is, no matter what you're promoting online, you can no longer afford to overlook Facebook as a source of leads and traffic. By creating a Facebook page you make things easy for yourself when it comes to reaching out to your target audience. Creating a page is only the first step, though; then the real work begins, which is getting lots of "likes" for your new page. So what does it take to achieve this? Let's find that out in the following article.

Remember that not all of your friends on Facebook will be in your niche, but you can still let them know about your fan page. So, you can entreat your friends to like the page, and then maybe some of their friends will, and you can go to Fiverr and get even more likes. One thing you need to do on Facebook is heed the terms of service because they seem to be serious about spamming. Once you get a few targeted and interested people to like your page, it can turn into a snowball effect and the word may spread virally. Look into offline marketing for your fan page, too, and there are many options with this. You can easily have your Facebook vanity URL printed on your business card, and what's more there are tons of ways to spread the word about your page off the web. Some marketers are providing a lot of information about mobile ad networks, and this is something that will only grow. Do not be lazy about testing things, and you can get your feet wet without the need to spend a lot of money.

It is vital to understand that simply building the page won't be enough, you'll need to put work in to get people to actually like it. Facebook must become a part of your main marketing plan and you need to come up with some strategic steps to take to help yourself. Become action oriented when it comes to getting more likes to your page as it will help you get targeted likes in the long run. Understand the primary purpose of your fan page is to help you pass along the right kind of message to your target audience. Remember, simple things can make a big difference. The more techniques you employ for getting more likes to your Facebook page, the faster you'll collect them. You can use many of these ideas even with a new Facebook page, so get started as soon as possible. This is the ideal time to get moving with this Facebook fan page strategy, as you can be sure others in your niche are doing it and you don't want to lose ground. Getting likes to your page is how you can start to wield some real influence on Facebook. While all of these techniques are practical and helpful, remember that they're just a handful of the many ways you can use Facebook to grow your business. Just go ahead and start taking some real-world action and you will see more likes dropping in to your page in no time.