Now that Google, Bing and Yahoo have joined forces to create a common vocabulary for structured data markup it’s time to learn exactly what all that means. Trust me, this was a little over my head as well, but after I read the “getting started” section on Schema.org it all started to make sense.
“Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string “Avatar” in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text string means—”Avatar” could refer to the a hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.
“Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!
“You use the schema.org vocabulary, along with the microdata format, to add information to your HTML content. While the long term goal is to support a wider range of formats, the initial focus is on Microdata. This guide will help get you up to speed with microdata and schema.org, so that you can start adding markup to your web pages…”
About a minute into the video below Eli Paris explains how he asked two of his friends to input the keyword “Egypt” into Google and had them both take screenshots of the search results page. You may be surprised to learn that they both received different search results. This is because Google is starting to tailor search results to the individual. The million dollar question is how this effects search engine optimization if it effects it at all.
This news comes at no surprise really. I’ve known for a few years now that Google will rank sites higher in your individual search results if you “liked” that site on Stumbleupon.
If you don’t follow this advice carefully, you could find yourself banned by Google Adwords in no time flat! Tread very carefully if you want to use Adwords now and well into the future.
This looks promising. I too hate the fact you can never reach Google when something goes wrong. How refreshing it would be if we could actually reach a real live person!
“Not surprisingly, many businesses use Google’s AdSense platform to make money. It has given many publishers a tried-and-true monetization model to fall back on, so they can focus on the editorial side of the business.
Although Google has been very successful with its AdSense platform, it is known for targeting, primarily, large publishers. For this reason, Lijit Networks is aiming to provide an alternative to AdSense and reach out, specifically, to mid-sized publishers.
The company has provided publishers with audience engagement and analytics tools since 2006, but it added a monetization feature earlier this year. Since Q4 2010, transactions on the advertising platform have grown 74 percent. Lijit also recently closed a $10 million round of financing in order to expand its platform and compete directly with Google.
Todd Vernon, the CEO and founder of Lijit, told us that publishers, especially in the mid-sized marketplace, tell them that Google isn’t performing to its users’ expectations.
‘What we hear, time and time again, is, ‘when there’s something wrong, I can’t get a hold of Google… they only provide me error messages… I can’t actually talk to a human,’’ he said.
Because Lijit is reaching out to a niche market, it believes it can take on the advertising giant.
‘At the end of the day, they’re [Google] vulnerable in this area,’ pointed out Vernon. ‘Google’s not known for customer service,’ he added.
As for how Lijit plans to take on this endeavor, Vernon said, ‘We just want to have more relationships with more publishers in niche content areas that we know how to monetize that others probably won’t do as good a job with.’
Do you think Lijit can successfully take on Google?”
Have you ever called a business to inquire about their services and heard the person on the other end ask you, “Where did you hear about our business?” Sure you have, this is a pretty common thing and while it may seem like a small, almost meaningless question to the customer, the business takes this question VERY seriously. This is how they determine how effective their specific marketing and advertising campaigns are.
If a business is using, let’s say the yellow pages, fliers, and postcards to advertise their business, it is VERY helpful for them to know how many customers they are getting from each source. Once they tally how much they are spending on each particular campaign versus how many customers they acquire, they can decide which methods to continue with or which to possibly discontinue. This is EXACTLY the data that you need to be collecting for your website. Without it, you are just marketing in the dark.
The good news is, this data is EXACTLY what you can get by using Google Analytics, and actually much more than that. Google Analytics is a free program that Google allows ANYONE to use who has a website. You simply place a piece of java code on each page of your website and the program does the rest. This data is simply invaluable.
How so?
Well, when promoting your website, it is likely that you are hitting several avenues at once in order to get visitors. You may be using Google Adwords, Facebook, Press Releases, etc. Now I ask you, how do you know which of your marketing efforts is bearing the most fruit if you have no way to track where your traffic is coming from or which traffic source is producing more leads or sales?
Before programs like Google Analytics, collecting this data was not so easy or cheap. Most website owners spent all their time promoting their site never really knowing which methods were producing and which were not.
Now, it is incredibly easy to see exactly where your traffic is coming from and which campaigns are effective. Once you find out what areas are not as effective, you have the choice of either stopping those methods altogether and focusing more time and energy on the ones that are, or try to tweak the less productive ones to increase the traffic rate.
Google Analytics is helpful not only in showing you traffic data, but in showing conversion data as well. So at a glance you’ll know the percentage of visitors that have taken action by signing up to your email list or by purchasing one of your products. You’ll also know which traffic source brings in visitors that take action the most.
As you can see, Google Analytics can be a website owner’s #1 tool when it comes to producing a powerful and profitable website. So stop “driving” your business “blindfolded” and install Google Analytics already!
