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Scope Of Career In Marketing

Posted on March 14, 2012 by admin

the sector of selling is among the so much numerous fields that provide quite a lot of career options to an individual. is, lately, regarded as as a very powerful component that fuels the development of a company. gross sales being the driving force of a company’s earnings, marketing is the issue that induces the income by means of providing upper visibility and bigger achieve to the audience. A industry may be a small undertaking with limited financial budgets or a large scale company with sturdy financial backup; it might built desire a discreet aggregate of the 2 elements, income and marketing.

is essential for generating income, the income powerhouse for a wide variety of group. to depart an have an effect on on the market and to contribute to income, marketing is a basic function. it is so a very powerful that if done in the correct method, it might raise up the income and in the end, the earnings of the company but when no longer, it will obstruct even the strength of the undertaking. In Jobs, firms are offering other posts like experts, Managers, administrators, affiliate marketing professional, and the like. For a short lived thought on these profiles, service on:

experts
As towards the belief that career in consultancy does no longer have a lot scope, it holds a lot of potential in long term. From massive industryes to small firms, each company seeks recommendation on dealing with their symbol and recognition robust. they want help in drafting marketing methods; to run suitable advertisement and promotional campaigns; to employ result orientated marketing projects and in coming with cutting edge tactics of boosting income. A marketing advisor is a consultant in marketing mechanisms who helps in all of these functions and in answering the comparable queries.

Managers
In current dynamic atmosphere, each company wishes right kind marketing management and so, also much all of them have a separate marketing department. to be able to handle the promoting wishes, industryes require managers who can administer and display all of the actions and the mechanisms strategy that are being built and applied by means of them. The marketing manager holds entire accountability of devising management plans to extend income and marketing functions further.

administrators
The Assistant Director is predicted to offer toughen to the promoting and advertisement mechanisms adopted by means of the group. The work comprises making surveys, growing new and cutting edge tactics of selling and coming up with new marketing developments. He/ She also are required to record the promoting and income mechanism development of the company. One achieves the extent of administrators after acquiring vast enjoy by means of spending quite a lot of years in the profession.

affiliate marketing experts
there is a massive potential in the field of online or web marketing as this industry is vast. In current instances, web penetration could be very top, therefore, making it an important medium of selling with a wider achieve as in comparison to different assets of selling. As marketing is essential for each industry providing any more or less products and services, so is web marketing important to the function of selling. online advertising is an extremely robust income technology as it is visited by means of million of other people on a daily basis. internet marketing specialists are required to plot new and cutting edge plans to boost web income and are paid incentives and bonuses for this reason.

professionals are frequently fascinated with marketing of 10 sorts of entities: goods, enjoys, products and services, occasions, places, right kindties, individuals, data, groups, and ideas. they are fascinated with growing marketing campaigns that advertise an organization’s product, service or thought.Their obligations will range relying on the dimension, sector and center of attention of the company.

Categories : Uncategorized

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The Importance of Mobile Ratios in Your SEO Strategy

Posted on March 7, 2012 by admin

Anyone involved in online marketing has an innate sense that mobile is a big deal. We’re never more than an arm’s length from our phones, and we have a curious tendency to do everything on them.

I once sat in front of a dark, Netflix-enabled flat-screen, watching Netflix on my iPhone. It was just easier, and I had it on, and I could switch back and forth with Facebook, and… ok, maybe I have a problem!

In any event, our personal fascination with mobile phones shouldn’t dictate our work decisions. And one question that needs deciding more and more these days is around mobile search: is there a mobile audience for this particular client? And how do we measure the success of our efforts to get a mobile website in front of mobile searchers?

Of course, our past experience with desktop search gives us a great starting point. Search volumes, traffic, and even rankings are useful metrics, both here and there. But mobile SEO brings some special considerations, not least of which is credibility: we need to prove that mobile SEO provides value.

To that end, I’ve been working on a set of metrics to help me get some perspectives on these questions. These aren’t replacements for visitor counts or conversions – rather, think of them as supplements to help us compare the new and somewhat unfamiliar mobile SEO data to our tried-and-true desktop data.

Today we’ll look at one of the most useful, particularly in the early stages of a campaign.

The Mobile Ratio
One of the challenges in getting started with mobile search is proving the value of your efforts: is anyone using a phone to search for this client’s products or services?

To answer that with a simple, understandable metric, I’ve added a Mobile Ratio to the keyword research process. Basically, I’ll start by taking a desktop keyword list, and running the numbers to add mobile figures alongside. I’ll also expand the list if I find any mobile-specific keywords that seem interesting.

Then I’ll take the desktop and mobile volumes, and divide one into the other to compute the Mobile Ratio. For example, if I have a Mobile Ratio of 10, then I can tell the client that for every ten desktop searchers, we have the opportunity to reach one mobile searcher.

Straightforward statements like that allow a client to get their bearings, and start to form a mental model of what mobile means to them. Maybe they’d really like to add another one-tenth to their reach. Or maybe they have easier ways of getting access to those extra eyeballs. Either way, they now have some useful infomation on which to base a decision.

Getting Granular
Doing this at both the keyword and aggregate level allows you to compare and contrast mobile activity for different keywords. So if my aggregate Mobile Ratio is 10, but I have a group of keywords that have ratios in the 5-6 range, then I know these keywords are mobile-heavy: they are more likely to be of interest to mobile users.

This is key info for site-planning and budgeting activities, as it can provide a business justfication for heavying-up on landing pages that address those keywords. Likely examples of keywords that are mobile-heavy could include coupon keywords, or keywords that include a location name.

Driving Strategy

In the end, the Mobile Ratio doesn’t create another data point. Instead, it offers a more intuitive way of looking at the data you already have, turning it into a KPI that you can use to make decisions about your mobile marketing plans.

In upcoming articles, we’ll take a look at some other useful metrics for managing mobile SEO.

Link to original article: http://searchengineland.com/using-the-mobile-ratio-to-measure-mobile-seo-success-109727

Categories : Mobile Marketing, SEO/SEM

4 Easy Image Optimization Tips for Google’s New Sort by Subject Option

Posted on December 20, 2011 by admin

Google has unveiled a Sort by Subject feature for Image Search that allows users to sort photos more easily by subject and improves the general topic searches.

If you’re looking for a picture of a certain bird, for example, and perhaps can’t remember the exact name, rather than scrolling through a combination of every type of bird and hoping you’ll find the one you’re looking for, Google has come up with an algorithm to sort birds into groups, whether it’s a parrot, eagle, duck, cardinal, and so on.

Google said the sort by subject algorithm is adapted from Google Similar Images and Google Image Swirl. By identifying pixel values, relationships, and patterns, Google has created connections and groups for popular image searches.

Image Search Sorting: Bing vs. Google

The Google Sort by Subject technology is, and is not, the first to market. Bing has done this to an extent already, though on a less complex scale.

In the end, both methods of sorting are close enough that most web viewers would never know the difference. So, what is the difference?

Google Images Sort By Subject Ranking Optimization

Bing Image Related Searches

Using the [london] search example, Bing includes search query suggestions at the top of the image search results pages, such as Tower of London, London Underground, and London Bridge. Google also offers related search suggestions of London Eye, London at Night, London Flag, Big Ben, and others.

On Bing, you can easily modify your query by clicking on any of their search suggestions and see your desired images. Sure, all the groups are not showing thumbnails on a landing page, but you can navigate through fairly easily. On some searches, Bing will also serve more related searches in the left navigation (e.g., “Related Animals” for a bird search).

Google’s new Sort by Subject is located on the left navigation, under Sort by Relevance. The big difference is, if you don’t know the name of what you’re looking for but know what it looks like, Google’s feature may just do the trick. Google’s Sort by Subject seems to be limited to 15 choices, with no option for additional pages.

How to Use Sort By Subject for Image SEO Visibility

First and foremost, figure out what subjects Google is using for your niche. Niches like golf, fish oil, dogs, dog training, and other popular queries return multiple subject groups.

Here again, as with traditional organic web search, we can view total number of images ranking, but that figure isn’t very representative of the level of competition.

Fish Oil Sort By Subject Google Image SEO

The image ranking algorithm is much more difficult to reverse engineer because you can’t use third-party tools to view things like citations/references and links. The best thing to do until more research has been gathered is to stick to best practices for Image Optimization. Bill Slawski has also analyzed the Microsoft Patent for Image Rankings (thanks to @mongoosemetrics for sharing this oldie-but-goodie hyperlink).

Best Practices for Ranking for Image Subjects

Here are four quick image SEO tips:

Use the subject name in the file name.Surrounding copy (or text) should also be relevant to the subject name.Get more sites to use your image (be sure to allow time for Google to index yours as the original source of the image to receive the top ranking).Google isn’t shutting this off for brands. If you query [hotels] you will see the big brands as their own groups. Perhaps this means brands could rank with enough buzz around the web.

One thing is for certain, with the ability to sort by subject, there are new opportunities to have an image ranked consistently beyond users corralled by auto-complete. You just have to remember you have auto-complete suggestion keywords as well as image groups to try to rank your image for!

????The definitive event for Canadian marketers, SES Toronto 2011 (June 13-15) affords delegates a comprehensive learning and networking opportunity. Sessions cover PPC management, social media, mobile marketing, usability and more.

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Categories : SEO/SEM

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Six ways to strengthen your mobile marketing in 2011

Posted on November 27, 2011 by admin

Mobile marketing is exploding, growing significantly as new services and applications allow marketers to engage consumers in more innovative and fun ways. But as the mobile landscape changes, it is increasingly important, and challenging, for direct marketers to stay ahead of the trends and be prepared to take advantage of the newest developments.

To assist marketers, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) recently released its 10 predictions for mobile marketing in 2011. Direct Marketing News spoke with Michael Becker, North America managing director for the MMA to discuss these trends and get his tips for how marketers should approach mobile in the coming year.

Don’t think of it as “location-based.” Becker emphasizes that while “location-based marketing” might be the buzzword of the moment, the more accurate description of marketing campaigns that use QR codes or services like Foursquare and Facebook Places is, “location-aware.” “Whether it’s a store offering you a discount at the check-out line, or Stella Artois has a service where you can find the local pub — these offers reflect an awareness of the place you are and are true to that context,” says Becker.

Know your market. While new apps and clever marketing tactics raise eyebrows, the first priority for marketers is to speak to their market in a language they will understand. “In the North American market, 25% of people have smartphones, which means 75% do not, so an augmented reality app doesn’t make a lot of sense if the people you are reaching out to don’t have the type of phone it takes to make it work,” says Becker. “Because of mobile, there is a potential for every marketer to be a direct marketer. We have to have an intimate understanding of our consumers, what kind of applications they use, what mobile behavior you’re targeting.”

Strengthen your partnership with the carrier. “Increasingly you will see carriers who will focus on creating their own branded storefronts and value-added areas to create additional revenue streams for them and marketers,” Becker predicts. Since carriers know their networks and handsets best, it will be increasingly worthwhile for marketers to work with them when possible to create relevant and effective opportunities for users.

Bring your app to the browser. While apps have taken off in the mobile space, the fact that they are device specific may limit their penetration in the market. “A good thing to consider is to add app-like functionality to the mobile browser,” says Becker. “You potentially have the benefits of applications, but with portability of the service across multiple devices, so you don’t have unique software for each platform, but can work overall on all HTML5 browsers.” He adds that there will continue to be value in standalone applications, particularly when a phone’s not connected to the network, but that marketers would be wise to head into 2011 thinking outside the app.

Prepare for the growth of mobile micro payments. Services that allow customers to pay for products and services by using their smartphones as electronic wallets are “increasingly getting bigger,” according to Becker. He recommends that marketers seek out ways to get their message out through these services, and points to mobile banking services as having particular opportunities for providing users with much-needed services in developing countries.

It’s about more than direct mobile sales. As smartphones take on more roles in people’s daily lives, marketers must remember that mobile devices are valuable beyond just the direct sales they generate. “The head of Steve Madden marketing was at the Adtech conference talking about how they had sold over half a million items directly through mobile,” says Becker. “But he added that they had sold an additional two and a half, to three million through traditional channels that were mobile influenced.”

Becker gives the example of an individual scanning a QR code that takes them to an online training video and eventually decides to buy the product, or who tweets with a customer service representative who eventually sells them a solution to their issue. “It’s all happening on that single device in my hand,” says Becker. “Digital and traditional practices are coming together with mobile and it’s acting as that connective tissue bringing them together.”

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Categories : Mobile Marketing

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SEO for Small Businesses: Get Into Action

Posted on November 21, 2011 by admin

Web marketing can seem overwhelming sometimes, even for professionals, let alone for small business owners just starting out with promoting a new site. There are so many areas and there is so much to learn – and the goal posts are always moving. Google is constantly developing their algorithm, and there seems to be something new in the world of social media every day.

However, the single most important thing when it comes to marketing your small business, whether online or offline, is simply getting into action. No amount of expert knowledge will help you if you’re not using it, and even a little knowledge will get you a long way if you’re out there putting it into practice.

Learning everything you can before you start is great if you can do it, but all too often it turns into a mental block. We get overwhelmed and end up doing nothing.

Anyone who has worked with a personal coach in any area of business or life will have heard this mantra over and over again: get into action with what you can manage now (however small), build your confidence and knowledge over time, and work toward larger tasks; don’t get bogged down by being too ambitious or by trying to do everything at once. Long to-do lists are the enemy!

Applying Habit Forming to SEO and Web Marketing

The biggest problem you will face as a small businessperson is that most tasks associated with SEO fall into the category of importantbut not urgent(as are most tasks associated with working on, rather than in the business). We get caught up with all the super-urgent day-to-day stuff (deadlines to meet, bills to pay), so the long-term development of our business suffers.

Now, if you’re incredibly disciplined or have a boss breathing down your neck, this doesn’t pose so much of a problem. But if you’re like most of us mere mortals or are working for yourself (or if you arethe boss!), then we need to do some work. The answer is to develop a system or structure, combined with small, short-term targets, to get you into the habit of regular action.

I use the word “habit” very deliberately here. It too often goes along with “bad,” but habits don’t have to be negative things at all.

We all have plenty of habits, both good and bad, that together make up our daily routine. What we’re talking about here is making those non-urgent but very important SEO tasks a part of that daily routine.

Using a system is important, as it ensures regular action and the measurement of that action (and associated results), regardless of your level of mood, energy or inspiration (let’s not kid ourselves: if you’re working by yourself, these can be huge factors, even if they’re not meantto be). It’s easy to get into action around something if you’re feeling inspired or bursting with energy, but what about when that initial enthusiasm runs out? The tasks still need to be done.

Just as with exercise or dieting, so many people start out with the best of intentions and ambitious goals, but peter out quickly. However, the benefit only comes with the long term.

How you will put this system together is up to you. It depends on where you place your focus (link building, content generation, social media?) and what works for you personally. However, any successful habit-forming system will have the following components:

Frequent action: At least once per week, if not more often.Regular action: Those actions need to be done at the same time of day or the same day of the week every time. Your brain doesn’t fix the habit otherwise.Records: Make a note whenever you complete one of your regular actions, so you can go back and review your progress.Short-term targets: Manageable targets that you can see yourself progressing towards with every step.A stick and a carrot:These are more personal, but most people work best when there are both rewards and punishments in the offing. One or other by itself isn’t as effective. Set them yourself but get someone else to enforce them for you if you don’t have the discipline!

Setting Targets

We’re trained from a young age to set big, ambitious and long term targets… and always bigger and always more ambitious! These are fine in the right context, but are often misused. They can be very disconnected from everyday actions and become fictional very quickly, as soon as your original enthusiasm has died out. This is a great way to get conditioned to failure rather than success… so we set another big, ambitious goal and the cycle repeats.

This is a especially true when it comes to SEO: the payoff can come a longway in the future, and it can be disheartening to work away at building great content and links for no immediate return. This is why you need small, short-term goals to work toward. They make it clear to yourself that you are making progress.

Again, these goals will depend on you and what you’re doing. However, they must always be challenging but something that you fundamentally know that you can do – not a pipe dream. They must also be something that you control fairly directly (rather than relying on external forces).

So, if you’re starting a new blog, instead of setting “A-list celebrity blogger within a year” as your goal, try setting “250 visitors in my first month” (or whatever seems realistic to you, depending on your niche). The target for your next month might be more ambitious, based on how you did in your first, or you may decide to concentrate on something else (“be mentioned 25 times by other bloggers in my niche this month”).

By all means, keep your big goal in mind – but focus on the small steps. You’ll be much more likely to get where you want to be.

Summary

By far the most important thing is just getting into action. Don’t worry about what you don’t know, or what other people say you should be doing – just do what you know you can do and build from there. Create a system that will let you form habits around doing those important, but not urgent, tasks.

Image credit: Richard Dudley

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Categories : Local Search, SEO/SEM

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SEO & Website Redesign: Relaunching Without Losing Sleep

Posted on October 25, 2011 by admin

Redesigns can make an ugly site pretty, but they can also make a high traffic site invisible. Keep these tips and no-nos in mind and you can keep yourself out of the CEO’s office.

SEO Redesign: Teamwork First

It should go without saying, but SEOs, developers and designers must work together cohesively during the site redesign process.

Too often, companies look to refresh the look of their site, and in the end, destroy their search engine presence. How? This can come from a myriad of reasons from coding errors, SEO unfriendly design practices, to even more disastrous practices (e.g., content duplication, URL rewriting without redirection, information architecture changes away from search engine friendly techniques).

Starting the redesign process with a collaborative call between the SEO team, designer, developer, and company decision maker(s) is always the best first step.

Often there are two attitudes present. Either, “We are redesigning our site and are not open to your ideas…but don’t let us do anything wrong,” or the other attitude (and my favorite), “Let’s work together to achieve a refreshed look and functionality and instill any missing SEO opportunities if possible.”

To satisfy both scenarios, your information delivery as the SEO should be to inform designers and developers of the mistakes you shouldn’t make and also to announce to all parties what SEO revisions should be made to the site along with what search engines have recently been paying attention to.

Page Load Time

A site redesign gives you the opportunity to re-code, condense externally referenced files, and achieve faster load times.

Don’t let the designer use the word “Flash” during your call(s). In an attempt to make a new site look pretty, the reliance on multimedia usage can have a negative effect on site speed. Ignoring this is bad, as Google has stated in the last year that site speed is a ranking consideration – also, slower sites annoy users.

Content Duplication

Ensure that your development environment or beta sections of the site are excluded from search engine’s view. Relaunching your site when these elements have been indexed by the engines means your cool new site is a duplicate and you will be in a mad dash trying to redirect the development environment that was leaked. Also, make sure there are no live copies on other servers that have visibility with the search engines.

Another form of content duplication is the creation of new URLs without properly redirecting old URLs via a 301 permanent redirect. This will leave search engines wondering which page should be ranked.

It’s also worth mentioning that 301s are a must and that 302 temporary redirects should not be used. Make it commonplace in the redesign process that no one used the word delete in reference to site content. You should never delete any pages, these should be permanently redirected to the most relevant launching page.

Content Restrictions

It’s important before you throw the site to the web that you make sure that you have identified what pages shouldn’t be crawled.

Are there new parts of the site that shouldn’t be seen by search engines, login pages, etc.? Does the new site utilize dynamic URL creation or parameters that will need to be restricted?

Inversely, what pages might be restricted that shouldn’t be? Is there a folder in the robots.txt file that is inaccurately excluding pages that should be visible? Have meta robots tags been placed on pages that shouldn’t have been tags?

Tracking

Make sure that your analytical tracking code is placed back in the page source before the site goes live. Additionally, any conversion pages should have the appropriate conversion tracking code appended. Nothing makes an SEO want to cry like lost data.

Information Architecture

A redesign is the perfect time to rethink the direction of the site. Go beyond the need for a refreshed look and analyze the hierarchy of your content. Google is looking at this so be sure there is a clear view of the overall site theme as well as sub-themes flowing into the site through an appropriate folder structure.

URL Rewrite

If you’re redesigning and shaking a site down to its core, there’s no better time than now. You have the attention and devotion of the site developer to make your URLs right.

This is a continuation of the Information Architecture revisions. Be mindful of folder structure as well as relevant, keyword-rich text usage in page names.

Want to go the extra mile? Have the filename extensions removed so down the road if you redesign the site again and use a different script language you won’t have to do another URL rewrite.

Lastly, make sure all rewritten URLs include a 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the new URL.

W3C/Section 508/Code Validation

Take advantage of this period to address code issues and how your site adheres to W3C and Section 508 compliance factors. Search engines want to see your excellence here and now is your chance to make their visit successful as well as your human site visitors.

Usability

Can you make the intended funnel of visit shorter or easier? This is great time for you think about what you want visitors to do. You may be able to remove a step in the purchase/goal funnel and increase your site’s convertibility.

Benchmarking

To truly assess the success of the redesign from an SEO and sales standpoint, ensure that you have recorded several site statistics as well as focused monitoring in post-launch. You will be happy you did because it will either be a visible success story or a lifesaver for finding problems once the site launches.

These include:

Run a ranking report.Check your pages indexed in Google and Bing.Run a page load time test.Perform a W3C code validation report.Note the bounce rate, time on site, pages per visits, and goal completions. Granted, this can be reviewed in analytics after launch, but be mindful that you should be watching this.Run a site spider crawl of the live site to get a good list of URLs on the current site. You may need this for any clean of missed redirects.Note the average time for Google to download a page and average pages crawled per visit in Google Webmaster tools. Also, “fetch as Googlebot” so you have a previous copy of what Google used to see.

Conclusion

Taking into account all of the mistakes you or the others on the redesign team shouldn’t be making will ultimately leave you much less stressed after the site launches. Meanwhile, minding all the opportunities that a redesign presents from an SEO and usability standpoint can lead to a successful launch and a fruitful post-launch environment.

Now get out there and show them how it’s done!

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Categories : SEO/SEM

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Constant Contact to Deliver Mobile Marketing Solutions

Posted on October 10, 2011 by admin

Mobile Marketing Constant Contact to Deliver Mobile Marketing Solutions Constant Contact, a well-recognized and formidable presence in the world of small business email marketing, is forging into the waters of mobile marketing.

Now serving some 450,000 small organizations worldwide, Constant Contact is launching new mobile marketing integrations through strategic AppConnect partnerships.

“These integrations,” says the company in a formal release hyping the new service, “will help small businesses and organizations build contact lists; manage promotions, events, and social media programs; and conduct quick, online surveys – all using mobile devices.”

“It’s clear that mobile is becoming a big part of marketing, and we’re working with our partners to make it easy, effective, and affordable for small businesses and organizations to be right on the forefront of this trend,” said Steve Johnson, vice president of Constant Contact. “Using our innovative online marketing tools and the new integrations with mobile apps, companies of all sizes can deepen relationships with existing customers while building new business pipelines.”

Constant Contact points to a recent survey which found that the most common single action after a smartphone search was to visit a store in person, while one in five US adult mobile phone users used their device in making a purchase in the last month.

According to Constant Contact, all of the mobile marketing integrations hyped in the announcement are available now.

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Categories : Mobile Marketing

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Stealth Mobile Advertising Startup “Kiip” Aims To Turn Mobile Ads Into Real-Life Rewards

Posted on September 13, 2011 by admin

Mobile Marketing Stealth Mobile Advertising Startup Kiip Aims To Turn Mobile Ads Into Real Life Rewards A brand new mobile advertising startup just launched out of stealth mode late last month has introduced a whole new way to entice mobile gamers to take notice of advertisements.

The startup, dubbed “Kiip” (pronounced “keep”) operates under the mission statement “real rewards for virtual achievements,” and the way the company achieves this is rather brilliant. Put simply, the company understands the problem with forcing mobile gamers to view advertisements and instead recognizes that people want real-life rewards that recognize their engagement.

So how do they do it? The company offers users tangible rewards, offers and discounts when they hit in-game milestones or earn difficult achievements. The premise is that a brand can better reach a user with timely rewards that “come at positive moments and are timed with the natural pauses in game play.” By doing it this way, brands can build better engagement and loyalty than if they utilized a more traditional, persistent display ad, which are often distracting or intrusive if not ignored altogether.

As an example, if a user passes a particularly hard level or completes a large achievement, Kiip would send a push notification that displays an earned reward. This reward would be something along the lines of a free coffee at Starbucks with no strings attached, rather than a traditional ad that simply promotes Starbucks in general. The user simply enters their email address to redeem the reward. Founder and CEO Brian Wong said the idea for Kiip grew out of frustration with the current state of mobile advertising, which often felt like a miniature version of traditional display advertising and didn’t take into account the unique personal nature of mobile phones.

“People take their phone out over short spurts for 5-10 moments of joy,” Wong said. “Achievements may not occur, but when they do they’re meaningful and we want to be there at that time and give brands the ability to take that attention and provide value as well. That’s been the missing piece. It’s not just the attention exchange but the value exchange. Marketers wants to get attention but by doing that, you sometimes prompt negative effects. You want to get attention but also give a good first impression.”

Wong said the redemption rates in early usage have been more than 50 percent, meaning users are clicking on the rewards over half the time to redeem them. While obviously still in its early stages I see a lot of promise with this model. The company has already signed some pretty big names, such as Sony Dash, Sephora, Dr. Pepper, popchips, Homerun.com, Vitamin Water, 1-800-Flowers, GNC and Carl’s Jr as customers, who will provide the rewards to users. Kiip will tailor the rewards to the user so they’re relevant and demographically appropriate. We’ll be watching this one closely.

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Categories : Mobile Marketing

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Google’s New Search Layout Test: Borrowing From Blekko & DuckDuckGo?

Posted on August 14, 2011 by admin

What seems to be a rather large test of a new Google search results layout caused a mixed reaction from users on Twitter and blogs over the weekend. The new looks don’t seem all that new, especially if you’ve ever visited Blekko or DuckDuckGo, which both sport similar, though not identical, search layouts.

Google’s New Looks

There are actually two new Google layouts floating around. The first layout Google is testing puts a much larger emphasis on white space between the website links and descriptions, as well as between results — which likely is pushing down organic results further down the page, and would make it harder to rank “above the fold” and further increase the value of a top spot in Google. Google also inserts a dotted line between the organic search results. Additionally, Google’s blue links to websites aren’t underlined:

Here’s a version with AdWords ads:

The second design Google is testing looks to be the same, except minus the dotted lines between the results:

Google vs. Blekko & DuckDuckGo Blekko and DuckDuckGo aren’t household names or even close to challenging Google or Bing for market share. However, Google’s been known to borrow a few ideasfrom other search engines in its time. Perhaps these young search engines inspired Google’s new designs. First, we’ll compare it to DuckDuckGo:

DuckDuckGo doesn’t underline its links either, though there are some noticeable differences. DuckDuckGo includes a site icon beside its search results (Google doesn’t) and uses the color red for its URLs (Google uses green). Google’s layout also has much more white space and includes Twitter integration. And comparing to Blekko, which also doesn’t underline links:

Here, the main differences are the link and URL colors, and Google uses a bit more white space, though not much more. What People Are Saying Reviews of Google’s test from bloggers and users has ranged from “ugly” to “cleaner” and “less cluttered.” What do you think of the new design? Let us know in the comments.

Google • Duck Duck Go • Blekko • Twitter • Web search engine • AdWords • Uniform Resource Locator • Hyperlink

Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC.

Incisive Media AOP Digital Publisher of the Year

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Categories : SEO/SEM

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Breaking News: Google Adds News Headlines to Search Results

Posted on by admin

People searching for news, breaking news, or mainstream newspapers or cable television news channels on Google are now being served clickable news headlines rather than a site description. Not sure if this feature is a test or fully rolled out, but I’ve asked several people today who are all seeing it.

Here’s what the new feature looks like:

Compare this to what you find on Bing, which is CNN’s usual description about delivering the “latest breaking news and information on the latest top stories, weather, business, entertainment, politics, and more.” Also, notice Bing highlights the “Latest from cnn.com” which are being pulled straight from CNN’s RSS feed.

Similar to Google’s sitelinks, but without any of the obvious visual cues that there is actually a link there (e.g., color blue, underlining) unless you hover over it.

Clicking on the text takes you directly to the story. This feature obviously isn’t as “fresh” as its realtime/Twitter results, as this is highlighting stories from 12 and 10 hours ago for CNN, and even older stories for the Los Angeles Times.

Wonder whether comments, pageviews, or social sharing determine how Google is pulling in these headlines, as it seems the stories that are highlighted by Google have high numbers of Facebook shares and lots of comments.

So far, I’ve found these headlines are appearing on the big three cable news channels — CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC. Fox actually has the freshest headlines, all coming within the past hour.

Newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times are among the websites with the headlines

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