WPP chief Sorrell wants thorough examination of Google-AdMob deal
Google's $750 million acquisition of mobile advertising company AdMob should be given a “rigorous” examination by federal regulators, WPP Group boss Martin Sorrell said May 10.
The Federal Trade Commission is examining the deal, but has yet to announce whether it will launch a formal investigation.
Speaking to reporters at the World Economic Forum on Europe in Brussels on May 10, Sorrell said: "[a regulatory investigation] should be rigorous."
The WPP chief executive also criticized the FTC's approval of Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of online display advertising company DoubleClick in 2008.
"I don't think in the case of DoubleClick it was deep enough and strong enough," said Sorrell.
The FTC concluded that the DoubleClick deal was unlikely to substantially lessen competition.
Google, which agreed to the AdMob deal last November, has said it is "confident the FTC will conclude that the rapidly growing mobile advertising space will remain highly competitive after this deal closes.”
San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, Sacramento, El Dorado Hills, Roseville, Granite Bay, Rocklin, Lincoln, Loomis, Elk Grove, Natomas, Citrus Heights, Folsom, Fair Oaks, Auburn, Placerville, Lodi, Stockton, Modesto, Galt, Tracy, Plumas Lake, Marysville, Yuba City, Chico, Redding, Red Bluff, Vacaville, Woodland, Davis, Dixon, Fairfield, Nevada City, San Jose, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Reno, Sparks, Tahoe, Lake Tahoe, South Lake Tahoe, Truckee, Toledo, Oregon, Cleveland, Detroit, Charlotte, Cornelius, Gastonia, Concord, Hickory, Salisbury, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point, New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami
View the Original article
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Sacramento Mobile Marketing
V. Sattui Winery adds iPhone app to direct arsenal
V. Sattui Winery entered the mobile space on May 13 with an iPhone app that includes mobile push functionality, so the vineyard can send communications in-app to customers. Los Angeles-based app maker Mobile Roadie created the application.
The winery will use the app to distribute marketing messages to consumers through their mobile phones.
“It is another way to connect with our customers and tell them about our events and new releases, and it is the perfect application to promote our videos,” said Claudette Shatto, VP of marketing at V. Sattui Winery. The company also sends out monthly videos to their customers to promote new products. The first video for the app will appear May 18.
The app also integrates with the business' social media efforts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. It is the latest part of the winery's direct response marketing effort, which also includes e-commerce, e-mail and direct mail.
“Direct response is very important to our business because we don't sell our wines in restaurants or stores; we solely communicate through direct channels,” added Shatto.
The winery also plans to release an Android mobile app this summer. V. Sattui is also working with Mobile Roadie to optimize the app for mobile commerce. The app's next release will allow consumers to purchase wine and tickets for events.
V. Sattui Winery entered the mobile space on May 13 with an iPhone app that includes mobile push functionality, so the vineyard can send communications in-app to customers. Los Angeles-based app maker Mobile Roadie created the application.
The winery will use the app to distribute marketing messages to consumers through their mobile phones.
“It is another way to connect with our customers and tell them about our events and new releases, and it is the perfect application to promote our videos,” said Claudette Shatto, VP of marketing at V. Sattui Winery. The company also sends out monthly videos to their customers to promote new products. The first video for the app will appear May 18.
The app also integrates with the business' social media efforts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. It is the latest part of the winery's direct response marketing effort, which also includes e-commerce, e-mail and direct mail.
“Direct response is very important to our business because we don't sell our wines in restaurants or stores; we solely communicate through direct channels,” added Shatto.
The winery also plans to release an Android mobile app this summer. V. Sattui is also working with Mobile Roadie to optimize the app for mobile commerce. The app's next release will allow consumers to purchase wine and tickets for events.
View the Original article
Search Engine Marketing Sacramento
we write adverts for pay per click, articles for link bait, and content for landing pages and websites in order to make sales. However, very often all of this content is not written with an online audience in mind. Just a few adjustments to style of prose and content format can take an uninspiring piece of writing and make it much more suited to purpose, increasing its chances of success in the virtual world.
1. Sentence structure
Content written for online publication should differ greatly to the published word in terms of sentence structure. Offline, we can sit comfortably in a favorite armchair or snuggle up with a book, making long sentences easier to follow. Online, sentences should be short and punchy, designed for an audience sitting at a desk, staring at a screen, and scrolling on a mouse.
2. Tone
Content can easily go awry if the tone of the piece is mistaken. Establishing the correct tone is easier offline where publications and the written word is more established. Online however, it can be difficult to strike a balance between chatty and professional. If you have an established brand and have spent money on an offline marketing campaign, setting the correct tone will be easy because you’ll already have a strong idea of your brand’s identity. If not, you must first let go of your traditional business writing practices and embrace a more informal medium. That’s not to say all online writing should be informal or unprofessional, but it must be easy to digest and resonate with the reader.
A good rule of thumb is to write as you would speak, set the piece aside, and then read back to yourself a day or so later. You can then make any needed changes, spruce up the style if need be and then publish.
3. H1, H2, H3 and Bold
When we read a newspaper or magazine offline, cross-headers are used as anchor points in the text. These help to orienate the reader and pick out subject changes and important points. This same format should be applied to online content but is often overlooked. Consider a newspaper article — a large headline at the top of the piece gives an indication of the content of the piece. Small, bold text blocks mid-way through each column pick out highlights and changes of direction. Applying this same principle to online content is a great way of helping the reader scroll through and pick out the important sections. Reading large amounts of text on screen is off-putting to many, so the use of H2 and H3 tags to highlight bold sections of text creates pre-determined anchor points which the reader can use to scroll through the prose.
4. Punctuation and Grammar
As with any written text, be it for offline purposes or online use, correct punctuation and grammar are invaluable. Spell checkers and grammar checks are included in most word processing packages free of charge, and there are lots of cheap books available to keep by the PC as a reference. The informality of the online medium means that we often write things in a rush
View the Original article
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Facebook Button, But Will SEO Toledo ?
will keep them tapped into the ever-changing and elusive social crowd. Before I go into the potential problems the SERPs are having with this new form of linking, let me explain in brief what the button is all about.
The Facebook Like Button allows users to click on a website’s Like button and share that site’s content with the user’s Facebook account. It creates a bridge from a website to a Facebook page that links up to a user and starts feeding them content within the confines of their Facebook feed. The user can then share the link with their Facebook friends, where a viral effect can take place seamlessly. They are an ideal link for news sites and any other website that has continual updates throughout the day. These buttons have been an integral part of Facebook for some time now, but as of a few weeks ago they are now available to place on any site with a few simple lines of code.
The problem that Google and other SERPs are having is that these Like buttons are not HTML friendly, but are rather part of a closed proprietary system that only Facebook can control. This closed system will not allow Google to index the links, information, and connections created. Where will the link juice go? How will these links impact page rank? How will the social links impact the order of the SERPs that Google has worked so hard to rank? These are questions that everyone in the SEO community is eager to get answers to. It may be some time before those answers come about.
With this move, Facebook is looking to become not only a bigger player in the social scene, but a new foe for Google. By bridging the gap between a company’s website and their Facebook presence, and taking some privileges to exclude the search engines, Facebook has taken yet another step in the direction of a making the web a more social scene.
View the Original article
Search Engine Optimization Sacramento
in today’s economy, if you can’t be found on the likes of Google and Yahoo, you are likely to struggle to make sales and turn a profit.
If you recognize your business in this scenario, it’s time to commit to getting your search engine optimization (SEO) program off the ground. Although some businesses are put off by the fact that SEO is not immediate, some benefits do start to filter through very quickly. And, the sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll start to see an improvement.
Deciding whether or not to conduct an optimization campaign or to invest those funds in another area of search engine marketing is not one that should be taken lightly. So many companies can tell tales of starting an SEO campaign, perhaps with unrealistic expectations or not enough of a budget to give the campaign the time it needed to be successful and then being disappointed when their interest presence didn’t improve. It is easy to blame the agency or optimizer in question when this happens, but it invariably leaves a poor impression of SEO – and sometimes online marketing as a whole
View the Original article
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Google Pay Per Click Sacramento
This area also has a link to the Page Speed browser add-on that, once installed, will provide a speed for each page, as well as detailed analysis and suggestions for improvements in much greater detail than the general Google analysis. Areas dealt with include optimizing caching, minimizing items such as round-trip load times, payload size and request overhead, and optimization of browser rendering. Each of the factors in the areas covered is given a score, so you can drill down and see specifics of what individual items might be able to be tweaked to improve your overall score and ultimately, the page load (and site load) time.
Of course, there are a variety of independent tools that do the same thing and will test the same factors — a topic for a future blog post. You certainly should check all of the factors uncovered via the Google tools in another, independent, tool. Then gather all the data, correct what you can, and look into any areas where the different tools have returned significantly different data (if any exist). You may need to dig further to discover which is more accurate, but if your main goal is your ranking on Google, you may have to settle for fulfilling Google’s expectations first and dealing with any inconsistencies or others later.
Whatever you do, don’t panic if your site load time falls into the “slow” category. Many of the fixes will be easily accomplished and any that you are able to take care of with little fuss will immediately confer some benefit to those accessing your site, especially if they are still using older equipment that magnifies differences in site load time by virtue of its relative slowness.
View the Original article
PPC Pay Per Click Sacramento
My process for negative keyword sourcing:
1. Apply industry standard lists on the campaign level.
These should be self-produced, and consist of keywords that you will never want to show against. For example, for software clients with a sales objective, you might have a standard list with words such as “jobs,” “torrent,” “hack,” etc. These lists should not be too exhaustive as it poses a risk of excluding pertinent searches by mistake.2. Brainstorm additional negative keywords for the specific campaign.
Think long and hard about if you want to show against words such as “free” if your product costs money. This is a tricky one. In the case of software, if your price point is very good, you might be able to entice people to go for a trusted brand instead of freeware. For example, for a past client, one of the top-converting phrases contained the word free; whenever the client did a 50% discount drive, the conversion rate of this phrase shot through the roof.3. Add any obvious irrelevant keywords that are found through the keyword research.
If you plan to use broad match keywords in the campaign, also add irrelevant synonyms to avoid them triggering ads.4. On the ad group level, add negative phrase and exact matches (embedded) as required, to avoid broad matches to trigger where there is an exact match in another ad group.
5. Constantly add negative keywords as sourced from search query reports (e.g., keywords that are irrelevant, or don’t convert).
What’s your process and tools for sourcing negative keywords?
Share This Great Content With Your Friends Today:This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
View the Original article
Friday, May 14, 2010
SEO Reputation Management Sacramento
The Internet Age has nurtured a new breed of empowered individuals. For the first time in the history, anyone can take the stage with a global audience. While this wonderful sense of empowerment can be invigorating, it can also have its downsides. Blogs, forums, social media, and sites like The Ripoff Report can allow for fraudulent negative postings by anonymous users with zero accountability. Managing this from an SEO perspective is a top priority for most companies these days.
Without journalistic oversight and with the absence of editorial, ethical, and moral accountability, social media — and the Internet in general — opens anyone up to a potential attack. And when these attacks appear near the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), they can throw a CEO into a hissy fit that puts my 4-year-old’s tantrums to shame.
Picking out the fraudulent attacks from the legitimate concerns is the first step in online reputation management. Most legitimate complaints come from the customer side, when they feel like their problem with a company was not resolved in a timely and positive way. These are a much easier fix. If a company puts the resources into taking care of online customer complaints as they appear, most of the time the complaints will not have the chance to appear to high in the SERPs.
The truly fraudulent attacks can take a bit more work. These can come from disgruntled employees, competitors, and customers who are not looking for a resolution to their complaints. They can bring bad press at a devastatingly quick pace. Exaggerations, lies, and malicious spin are all legitimate to the SERPs and it can take a comprehensive SEO strategy to combat them. Setting up corporate blogs, micro-sites, customer complaint forums, corporate social profiles, and sister sites are just a few ways to help control the top listings for a company’s branded terms in the SERPs. Properly optimizing a portfolio of web properties can help push down the fraudulent and irreconcilable pages that can bring a company to its knees.
Any company who has dealt with negative attacks to their online reputation will tell you it can be one of the most frustrating aspects of doing business in the Internet Age. By being proactive and establishing yourself deep in the SERPs for your branded key terms, you will save yourself a lot of time, money, and headaches down the road.
Without journalistic oversight and with the absence of editorial, ethical, and moral accountability, social media — and the Internet in general — opens anyone up to a potential attack. And when these attacks appear near the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), they can throw a CEO into a hissy fit that puts my 4-year-old’s tantrums to shame.
Picking out the fraudulent attacks from the legitimate concerns is the first step in online reputation management. Most legitimate complaints come from the customer side, when they feel like their problem with a company was not resolved in a timely and positive way. These are a much easier fix. If a company puts the resources into taking care of online customer complaints as they appear, most of the time the complaints will not have the chance to appear to high in the SERPs.
The truly fraudulent attacks can take a bit more work. These can come from disgruntled employees, competitors, and customers who are not looking for a resolution to their complaints. They can bring bad press at a devastatingly quick pace. Exaggerations, lies, and malicious spin are all legitimate to the SERPs and it can take a comprehensive SEO strategy to combat them. Setting up corporate blogs, micro-sites, customer complaint forums, corporate social profiles, and sister sites are just a few ways to help control the top listings for a company’s branded terms in the SERPs. Properly optimizing a portfolio of web properties can help push down the fraudulent and irreconcilable pages that can bring a company to its knees.
Any company who has dealt with negative attacks to their online reputation will tell you it can be one of the most frustrating aspects of doing business in the Internet Age. By being proactive and establishing yourself deep in the SERPs for your branded key terms, you will save yourself a lot of time, money, and headaches down the road.
SEO Service Sacramento
If you run a small business, you most likely don’t have huge marketing resources. In such a situation, self publishing an online PR will allow you to get your news out as soon as something breaks. Although a single press release won’t deliver the same extensive coverage as a sustained search marketing campaign, it can be a strategic and effective launch pad for better online brand awareness.
Press releases can really boost both search engine visibility and SEO results, so when something newsworthy happens, it’s worth putting finger to keyword or asking your search engine optimization agency to do the write up for you. One of the benefits of having a website optimization specialist or trained online copywriter do the writing is that they will know what to include to get maximum mileage out of the resource. This is probably the best route if you have a big story and little previous experience, but for everyday news, you can create and distribute the release yourself for much of the same impact.
1. Planning
An online press release is a great way to tell people about awards your firm has won, sales promotions, special offers, or to announce the launch of new products. It’s also a quick route to search engine visibility when correctly distributed. Increasingly, we are seeing self published news on major internet news portals including Google News. These stories are often pulled from PR distribution channels, citizen journalists, or social media sources. It’s therefore vital that an online PR is sent out to the right recipients at the right time. To get this right, plan your distribution day and time before you even start to write. You must think about the interruption of weekends and public holidays, other national and local events as well as lead times for some websites and publications. The last thing you’ll want to see after you have spent hours writing a carefully constructed, search engine optimized PR is a poor pick up rate due to avoidable clashes with other stories.
Likewise, if you know a particular period of the year, month, or weekend is traditionally big in your industry, be sure to have a story created in time and ready for distribution at least three or four days prior to when you expect the peak of interest to hit. Check industry journals, last year’s sales figures, and keep an eye on competitor websites to get an idea of when you’re most likely to need to see an increase in interest.
2. Outlets
Any social media distribution of an online PR will also require a preexisting account with the site in question, so should be organized beforehand. Experience shows that existing social media accounts with an established interest base are best placed for PR distribution so it’s wise to start drip feeding information to target sites early in order to prime the audience for a more significant release later.
If an online PR is something you’re doing as a short term solution to a lack of internet visibility, focus your efforts on just a handful of social media sites. Don’t fall in to the trap of trying to maintain a presence on every social media site you come across just in case you have a news story to release at some point in the future. This is like trying to paint a whole house with a single can of paint – focus on a specific area and be consistent with updates for the best results.
Test which outlets are best for your industry or product by keeping abreast of news stories on Google News. Simply visit the news tab and type in a keyword or two. Look at the media source rather than the story itself to build a list of distribution sites harvested for your particular section of the economy. Good general outlets to try with a regular presence in Google News include I-Newswire.com, BigNews.biz, Click Press, Open Press and PR Web. For free distribution you could also try PR-USA, Pr-Inside.com and Live-PR.com.
3. Dealing With The Media
Dealing with the logistics of issuing an online PR as well as building up an enviable contact list of editors and journalists online can be time consuming and requires a certain level of media or PR experience. If you decide to outsource this aspect of your campaign to a professional make sure you ask for samples of previous PRs first, check that amendments are permitted to the text at no cost before approval, and inquire as to what tracking facilities are available.
If you decide to go it alone, you’ll need to dedicate a day or two to identifying relevant outlets and finding out the correct contact details at that website or publication. You can look on the website or better yet, call the outlet directly if possible. Ask to be put through to the newsroom, explain that you’re calling from X company and have a news story about X to email over and would like to know who the best person to send the information to would be. Get an email address, name and contact telephone number, and keep in a spreadsheet for future reference.
Press releases can really boost both search engine visibility and SEO results, so when something newsworthy happens, it’s worth putting finger to keyword or asking your search engine optimization agency to do the write up for you. One of the benefits of having a website optimization specialist or trained online copywriter do the writing is that they will know what to include to get maximum mileage out of the resource. This is probably the best route if you have a big story and little previous experience, but for everyday news, you can create and distribute the release yourself for much of the same impact.
1. Planning
An online press release is a great way to tell people about awards your firm has won, sales promotions, special offers, or to announce the launch of new products. It’s also a quick route to search engine visibility when correctly distributed. Increasingly, we are seeing self published news on major internet news portals including Google News. These stories are often pulled from PR distribution channels, citizen journalists, or social media sources. It’s therefore vital that an online PR is sent out to the right recipients at the right time. To get this right, plan your distribution day and time before you even start to write. You must think about the interruption of weekends and public holidays, other national and local events as well as lead times for some websites and publications. The last thing you’ll want to see after you have spent hours writing a carefully constructed, search engine optimized PR is a poor pick up rate due to avoidable clashes with other stories.
Likewise, if you know a particular period of the year, month, or weekend is traditionally big in your industry, be sure to have a story created in time and ready for distribution at least three or four days prior to when you expect the peak of interest to hit. Check industry journals, last year’s sales figures, and keep an eye on competitor websites to get an idea of when you’re most likely to need to see an increase in interest.
2. Outlets
Any social media distribution of an online PR will also require a preexisting account with the site in question, so should be organized beforehand. Experience shows that existing social media accounts with an established interest base are best placed for PR distribution so it’s wise to start drip feeding information to target sites early in order to prime the audience for a more significant release later.
If an online PR is something you’re doing as a short term solution to a lack of internet visibility, focus your efforts on just a handful of social media sites. Don’t fall in to the trap of trying to maintain a presence on every social media site you come across just in case you have a news story to release at some point in the future. This is like trying to paint a whole house with a single can of paint – focus on a specific area and be consistent with updates for the best results.
Test which outlets are best for your industry or product by keeping abreast of news stories on Google News. Simply visit the news tab and type in a keyword or two. Look at the media source rather than the story itself to build a list of distribution sites harvested for your particular section of the economy. Good general outlets to try with a regular presence in Google News include I-Newswire.com, BigNews.biz, Click Press, Open Press and PR Web. For free distribution you could also try PR-USA, Pr-Inside.com and Live-PR.com.
3. Dealing With The Media
Dealing with the logistics of issuing an online PR as well as building up an enviable contact list of editors and journalists online can be time consuming and requires a certain level of media or PR experience. If you decide to outsource this aspect of your campaign to a professional make sure you ask for samples of previous PRs first, check that amendments are permitted to the text at no cost before approval, and inquire as to what tracking facilities are available.
If you decide to go it alone, you’ll need to dedicate a day or two to identifying relevant outlets and finding out the correct contact details at that website or publication. You can look on the website or better yet, call the outlet directly if possible. Ask to be put through to the newsroom, explain that you’re calling from X company and have a news story about X to email over and would like to know who the best person to send the information to would be. Get an email address, name and contact telephone number, and keep in a spreadsheet for future reference.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
