Facebook is revamping its News Feeds ads as part of their continuous efforts to make advertisements on their site more relevant to users.
They released an announcement late last week stating, “When deciding which ad to show to which groups of people, we are placing more emphasis on feedback we receive from people about ads, including how often people report or hide an ad.”
Facebook did say they believe advertisers will ultimately benefit from the updates.
“If someone always hides ads for electronics, we will reduce the number of those types of ads that we show them. […] This is ultimately better for marketers, because it means their messages are reaching the people most interested in what they have to offer.”
That isn’t the only change Facebook is rolling out though. They also announced the ability to search your posts and status updates within graph search, stating, “Today Graph Search will include posts and status updates,” which which you “will be able to search for status updates, photo captions, check-ins and comments to find things shared with you.”
You might not have access to either feature yet, but you can expect to see them within the next few weeks as they are rolled out.
Do you remember last year when Bing aggressively marketed their “Bing It On” challenge? Back then, Bing also made the claim that searchers prefered Bing in the blind test 2:1. Now, a recent study from the “Freakonomics” blog harshly disputes Bing’s claims as well as strongly critiquing their marketing of the study as possibly constituting deceptive advertising.
Law and economics professor Ian Ayers explained the study and says the claims made by Bing came from a small sample of only 1,000 participants, too few to be a reliable sample of the population. He attempted to replicate the study at Yale Law School where he teaches:
I set up a similar-sized experiment using Microsoft’s own BingItOn.com site to see which search engine users prefer. We found that, to the contrary of Microsoft’s claim, 53 percent of subjects preferred Google and 41 percent Bing (6 percent of results were “ties”)…
The thing is the results of this study still aren’t too bad for Bing. Yes, it shows that Bing’s claims may have been disingenuous, and Google could very possibly still be the more favored search engine. However, Bing still came out with a very respectable number of people favoring their search engine. This could be a sign that Bing could very feasibly grow their market share further than they have. They currently take 18 percent of the market, compared to Google’s static 67 percent.
Of course, Microsoft has responded to the study already. They issued a formal statement from Matt Wallaert, behavioral scientist at Bing, which read:
The professor’s analysis is flawed and based on an incomplete understanding of both the claims and the Challenge. The Bing It On claim is 100% accurate and we’re glad to see we’ve nudged Google into improving their results. Bing it On is intended to be a lightweight way to challenge peoples’ assumptions about which search engine actually provides the best results. Given our share gains, it’s clear that people are recognizing our quality and unique approach to what has been a relatively static space dominated by a single service.
There was also a much more extensive response to the Ayers study in the form of a post on the Bing Blog.
And of course, Matt Cutts from Google couldn’t help but share his two cents on Google+:
Freakonomics looked into Microsoft’s “Bing It On” challenge. From the blog post: “tests indicate that Microsoft selected suggested search words that it knew were more likely to produce Bing-preferring results. …. The upshot: Several of Microsoft’s claims are a little fishy. Or to put the conclusion more formally, we think that Google has a colorable deceptive advertising claim.”
I have to admit that I never bothered to debunk the Bing It On challenge, because the flaws (small sample size; bias in query selection; stripping out features of Google like geolocation, personalization, and Knowledge Graph; wording of the site; selective rematches) were pretty obvious.
So yes, Bing’s study had a fair amount of problems, and their critics seem poised to take action about deceptive marketing, but there is an upshot for Bing. The search engine still performed very well in the results and could gain a fair amount of searchers in the future. But, it also confirms something Bing may have been more worried about. As Greg Sterling points out, “the Google brand and not necessarily search quality is now what sustains Google’s dominance in search.”
00TMOhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTMO2013-10-04 11:42:482013-10-04 11:42:48New Study Disputes Bing It On Challenge Claims
Typography has become a fundamental part of design in every way, even making its way into web design over the past few years. You can’t just spill out words and letters onto a page and expect it to look good, and designers have turned the art of making typography look great into a science over hundreds of years.
Somehow, designer Ben Barrett-Forrest manages to condense all of this into a five minute long fun and informative stop motion animation about the history of fonts and typography, called… The History of Typography.
The short film starts out at Guttenberg and Blackletter, but manages to trace the history all the way through Futura, to pixel type and the technology that allows everyone to create their own typeface if they desire.
Barrett-Forrest used 291 paper letters, 2,454 photographs, and 140 hours of work to create the film.
https://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.png00TMOhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTMO2013-10-03 14:29:292013-10-03 14:29:295 Minute Animation Tells The History of Typography
Just as with any field, there are plenty of supposed SEO experts who are more than happy to offer your services and guarantees they can’t back up in order to get you to sign a contract. There are a few different ways these scammers operate, but when it boils down to it they all promise online success while stealing your money.
Any time you are hiring a company for online marketing, it is best to do your homework and ensure you’re getting what you’re paying for. You can find great success online, but if an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Jaydeep Dosi from Search Engine Journal shares the most common claims you should be wary of.
We Offer Free Services
Proper SEO is time consuming to manage, the economy is unforgiving, and search engine optimization is a highly competitive field. How could any business with a long-term hope of survival offer free of cost services? The answer is they can’t. Yes, real SEO professionals are able to offer special rebates or low pricing occasionally. You will even see offers for one odd service offered for free within a larger transaction, but nothing comes entirely for free. SEO “experts” claiming not to charge you are likely more interested in your information and other details you don’t want them getting ahold of.
We Guarantee First Page Ranking
Watch the wording on these types of offer closely. Many SEO professionals emphasize their goal to get your site to the first page on search engine results pages (SERPs), but they can’t honestly guarantee it. They also can’t guarantee any level of traffic, though that is also certainly a goal. The reality is search engines guard their information closely, and they change their algorithms all the time. We work to stay on top of these changes and learn as much as we possibly can to gain exposure and visibility, but nothing is guaranteed.
We Submit Your Site to Hundreds of Search Engines
This isn’t a lie so much as a misrepresentation. Think for a second. How many people do you know using any search engine besides one of the main few. Google, Bing, and Yahoo are all still relevant in their own ways, but there aren’t hundreds of useful search engines. There aren’t even tens of relevant search engines. You really don’t need your site submitted to more than two or three of the most popular engines, so don’t get caught paying for wasteful services.
We Have Connections Within Google!
Any company advertising this way is a downright fraud. The majority have absolutely no connection with actual Google employees. But, more importantly, do you really think a Google employee is going to risk their job to help a friend rank their client’s sites higher? Nope.
We Know Everything About Google’s Algorithms
A company may claim to be an expert on Google’s algorithms, but you should press them to share exactly what they mean. While one might be an “expert” in that they keep up constantly with all the latest news and information about how Google’s search engines operate, it might be hard to consider them a real expert compared to an actual Google engineer. However, an SEO professional claiming to know every detail of Google’s algorithms is blatantly lying. These algorithms are dynamic and ever-evolving, not to mention they are so complex it would be impossible to know and understand the entire system. Search engines aren’t telling us their secrets.
We Have a Secret Formula for Success
The worst snake oil peddlers don’t even try to tell you what they will actually do. Successful SEO practices are no secret, and anyone who will help you achieve your goals will tell you so. To be truly successful in SEO, you just need to work hard and with focus from the very beginning and be responsible for keeping up to date with the current best practices and guidelines.
https://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.png00TMOhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTMO2013-10-03 11:31:232013-10-03 11:31:23The 6 Things SEO Con Artists Will Tell You
Google AdWords announced yesterday a major reporting update to conversion tracking called Estimated Total Conversions will be rolling out over the next few weeks. The new feature provides estimates of conversions which take place over multiple devices and adds this to the conversion reporting we are already accustomed to.
Once enhanced campaigns launched earlier this year, search advertisers have had more control to combine mobile and desktops with the ability to further modify bids by mobile as well as other targeting considerations. There was a missing piece limiting the effectiveness of campaigns. We had limited data on how consumers actually navigate and convert across multiple device options.
What is a Cross-Device Conversion?
The widespread use of mobile and tablet devices to browse and shop online has greatly influenced how we actually interact with businesses. From our couch, we can have three options for achieving our online goals within reach, and it has been shown that we choose different devices for different tasks.
A study from Google last month found that more than 90 percent of multi-device consumers move sequentially through several screen like mobile to desktop, or mobile to tablet in order to complete transactions. There are even those who move from desktop screen to desktop screen, likely going from work to home computers. Anytime a person begins the actions that initiate a conversion on one screen, only to complete the conversion later on another screen, that is a cross-device conversion.
How Estimated Total Conversion is Calculated
Google calculates these types of conversions for advertisers based on how their customers convert when they are logged in. Then, they use this data to extrapolate out data to estimate what the total conversions from cross devices may be. The data is only used in aggregate and is not personally identifiable according to Search Engine Watch.
00TMOhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTMO2013-10-02 13:20:352013-10-02 13:20:35New AdWords Update Includes Estimated Total Conversions
Last week SEO and online marketing professionals all had a collective freakout as keyword data stopped showing up in Webmaster Tools. They even made memes! Well there is good news, Google has said the issue was an unintended bug, and should be fixed soon.
Google made a very public switch to secure search last week, in an effort to encrypt all search information and provide “extra protection” to searchers. Webmasters immediately noticed nearly all of their keyword referral data disappeared and was replaced with “(not provided)”. The best way to deal with the issue was to access similar keyword data under Search Queries within the Search Traffic section of Google Webmaster Tools.
But there was a problem, when secure search was implemented that keyword data stopped being reported or provided within Webmaster Tools. Many questioned whether this was a mistake or a change in policy, while the regular anti-Google group proclaimed Google had lied and was intentionally hiding the data; Matt Cutts had previously estimated only one to two percent of keyword data would be affected by secure search.
Now, John Mueller, a member of the Google Webmaster Tools team in Europe, as well as a separate Google spokesperson have both clarified the missing data was the result of the bug, and they are working hard to solve the problem.
Mueller posted to the Google Webmaster Central forum, “The team is aware of the problem and working on speeding that data back up again. Thanks for your patience in the meantime.” The spokesperson told Search Engine Watch, “We’ve recently fixed a small bug related to data reporting in Webmaster Tools. We expect reporting to return to normal in the coming days.”
00TMOhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTMO2013-10-02 12:38:292013-10-02 12:38:29Missing Keyword Data to Return to Webmaster Tools
Google made some changes to how you can design display ads to help ease the challenges advertisers and SEM agencies have been complaining about for what seems like forever. Today they rolled-out Ready Image Ads within AdWords, which aims to make it easier to create ads for multiple sizes that look good across all devices. The tool is currently Google’s best attempt to solve this issue and they hope to get more AdWords advertisers to run display campaigns, according to Ginny Marvin.
The tool works by simply entering a URL from your website. From there, the Ready Image Ads tool automatically pulls images from your site to create various ads in various IAB standard sizes. These ads are also HTML5, making them compatible for viewing on mobile and desktop devices alike.
Ready Ads can also be used to create dynamic ads, engagement ads (including hover-to-play and lightbox ads), video ads, and general purpose ads from a variety of templates. View Google’s introduction video for Ready Ads below:
As it comes time to prepare for business strategies going into the next year, many are wondering exactly how much they should be planning for in their SEO budget. Well, there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is SEO continues to yield great returns on your investment. The bad news is SEO is getting more and more expensive to do well. Jayson DeMers put together five reasons you should be asking for more for your SEO in 2014.
1)You Can’t Cheat With Cheap Backlinks
Not too long ago, you could just buy packages of a huge number of cheap backlinks and skate into high rankings on Google. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. However, Google has made it very clear they won’t let you play that game anymore. They’ve started penalizing those who try to use cheap shortcuts to a lot of backlinks, and they’ve gotten great at spotting when you do try to game the system.
Article spinning, excessive social bookmarks, paid links, duplicate content, and keyword stuffing have all been ruled illegal in Google’s book. You’ve got no choice but to go legit now.
2) Recovering from Google Penguin Can Be Costly (And You Need an Audit Anyway)
While many have already managed to recover from a drop in the rankings thanks to Penguin 2.0, there are plenty who haven’t been able to make a full recovery yet, and even more who are likely to be penalized in the coming year. But, recovering from Penguin takes a lot of time and effort, and time means money.
Usually, site owners need to undergo complete SEO link profile audits to identify all of the problems costing their site and begin recovery. Even if you haven’t been hit with an unnatural link warning within Google Webmaster Tools, it is still wise to perform an audit to spot any potential trouble links before Google does.
3) Good Content Marketing Isn’t Cheap
Google has begun to favor quality content pretty heavily, but this also means the bar has been raised. You used to be able to write just a few short blurbs every work and get reasonable traffic and authority in Google, but now every brand has a blog. You have to put in more work to stick out.
DeMers goes as far to suggest the standard minimum word amounts to rank well are going to go up, even as high as 2,000 words per article. He uses Google’s new in-depth article section as an indicator of this move, though Google’s own words paint a slightly different picture. “Users often turn to Google to answer a quick question, but research suggests up to 10% of users daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic.”
I don’t think article word count will necessarily go up as more blogging continues, but exploring your topic more thoroughly is usually a good idea. Google will still allow succinct content into the rankings for those who are looking for quick and ready answers, but that content can’t be weak. Even the shorter content you put out needs to offer a real and identifiable value to visitors.
4) You Need a Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing doesn’t simply consist of publishing content. There is much more that has to be done to get that content out in front of your audience’s eyes. That’s why many have called content marketing the new SEO, even though many SEO professionals are expected to handle content creation as well.
There is some truth to the idea however. Publishing useful and interesting content builds your brand and generates brand signals that do get your content ranking in search engines. However, this just shows how important it is to have a plan put in place ahead of time for your content marketing. If you don’t plan ahead, you’ll likely fall into the low quality content pattern with less flashes of quality unique work.
If you are expected to handle SEO and content marketing at the same time, you’re going to need more resources to ensure everything is done right.
5) Outsourcing Social Media to Scale Up
Social media appears to be ingraining itself into search engine rankings at an alarmingly fast rate, and as such it requires a lot of attention. It is gaining steam both as an outreach and audience engagement strategy as well as driving traffic and boosting rankings.
The problem is, depending on the size of your SEO team, you likely don’t have the time and means to properly handle your social media on your own. Business owners don’t have the spare time to be investing heavily into social media, and an SEO professional’s time is already spoken for by a multitude of tasks. If you’re brand can afford it, outsourcing social media means your social efforts will be focused and well planned, while your other responsibilities won’t falter.
00TMOhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTMO2013-09-27 11:32:222013-09-27 11:32:22You’re Going To Need a Bigger Budget to Do SEO Right in 2014
Logo design is one of the most deceptively difficult jobs in all of design. It sounds so easy, pick a font, type out the company name, and maybe underline or circle it. There are designers out there who really do think that way. But, if you actually care about delivering a quality product, its much more complicated.
There are endless brands and logos out there today, and the vast majority fall away into the noise. To create a truly successful logo in the modern day, you have to design something simple but brilliant enough to make people instantly take note. In the best logos, the viewers don’t even realize why they are so attracted to the logo.
But, how do you actually create a logo that accomplishes this? It takes some studied knowledge of design and a bit of ingenuity. Joshua Johnson from Design Shack has a few ways you can approach logo design to create something truly remarkable.
1) The Visual Double Entendre
Many of my favorite logos can be interpreted in at least two ways. The visual entendre is exactly this tactic, which wraps two images into the same visual object. There are quite a few examples of this design strategy out there, but the example Johnson uses is too perfect to ignore, the WinePlace logo.The logo is shaped like a thumbtack, seemingly marking a place or location, but if you look for more than a split second you will easily see the object also looks like an upside down wine glass. This sort of visual “trickery” encourages viewers to look a little longer and absorb the image (and brand name) more than the average glance. It is memorable for its creativity, but also because you force people to pay attention for longer.
Another added benefit of the strategy is that by nature your design must be simple to play two objects into the same image. As you’ll see, simplicity is a great rule of logo design.
2) Pay Attention to Color
One of the most basic facts of design is that color is not simply an aesthetic decision. Every color and tint carries a specific set of meanings and ideas, which often seem so embedded in our brains that our reactions are subconscious.
Many brands will have already noted this and might very well require you to stick to a very specific brand palette, but thats not always the case. On the chance that you have freedom to choose the colors of the design, you will want to pay close attention to picking the colors that will not only look good together, but also represent the nature of the brand.
On top of this, you should make sure the logo will also look clear and distinguishable if it must be printed in grayscale. Not every memo and press release will be full color, and you don’t want to lose the impact or recognizability of the logo just because someone xeroxed a company report.
3) Avoid Cliches
Trends are something that are unavoidable, but you might think twice before playing into what is hot at the moment with your logo design. Sure a popular styled logo might gain you some favor in the moment, but your logo is intended to represent your brand for years to come. You want it to be memorable enough that your logo outlives the current trends.
The current example is the dramatic overuse of the circular logo, generally styled vaguely like an old college patch or badge. Circles are popular in design and these types of logos are slightly retro, but just modern enough to have become a terribly common site across the web. But, it also means they are all interchangeable. I don’t remember any brand using the style because they all look the same eventually.
4) Custom Type Never Goes Out Of Style
Some of the most popular logos throughout time rely on very little to be successful. Just think of Coca-Cola’s logo. All they need is their signature red color and a custom typeface so notable it has become the source of countless rip-offs and parodies.
The best part of using custom type is that it isn’t immediately able to be copied. Designers looking for a quick and easy way to jump on a potentially successful bandwagon are quick to begin using a font. But, if you have your type hand-designed, it takes a lot more effort to mimic. The irregularities that make custom type so special also make it too unique for a simple conversion to a font.
5) Keep It Simple
While custom fonts are certainly a simple but effective way to make your mark, some designers don’t specialize in illustration or typography. That doesn’t mean they are out of luck. Many of the most famous logos in the modern day don’t feature any type whatsoever.
These logos take design to an even simpler stage, where all you need are simple shapes that are as iconic as they are refined. Apple began with their trademark bit apple shape, but originally it was striped with color. Gradually, they began to shift the logo to what looked like a brushed metal apple, but these days you won’t find any of those flourishes. All they need to be memorable is the silhouette of the apple, with that special bite taken out.
Conclusion
There are of course many other approaches you can take to making a memorable logo. For example, Johnson also brings up a discussion of symmetry and proportion in logo design that is better fit for a more in-depth analysis. Simply put, great logos don’t leave things to chance. But the truth is, if you want a truly memorable logo, you might start by trying to create something unlike those before.
00TMOhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTMO2013-09-26 12:58:112013-09-26 12:58:11How Do You Design A Truly Great Logo?
What’s the best way to rank highly right now, according to Google? Most SEO professionals would say some one of two things. Creating a quality site will get your site ranked highly, and quality content is the most powerful way to improve the quality and value of your site.
According to Ryan Moulton, a software engineer at Google who Barry Schwartz from SEO Roundtable implies works in the search area, high quality content doesn’t necessarily work like that.
The assumption is that the “high quality” content Google favors is the most accurate and informative text available. But, Moulton says we misunderstand or forget about actual usefulness.
He was defending Google in a Hacker News thread on why Google ranks some sites highly despite the content not being entirely accurate, and in some people’s eyes low quality. He explains that some sources may be the most accurate, but they are often way too high-minded for the average searcher.
He states, “there’s a balance between popularity and quality that we try to be very careful with. Ranking isn’t entirely one or the other. It doesn’t help to give people a better page if they aren’t going to click on it anyways.”
Ryan then continues with an example:
Suppose you search for something like [pinched nerve ibuprofen]. The top two results currently are mayoclinic.com and answers.yahoo.com.
Almost anyone would agree that the mayoclinic result is higher quality. It’s written by professional physicians at a world renowned institution. However, getting the answer to your question requires reading a lot of text. You have to be comfortable with words like “Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs,” which a lot of people aren’t. Half of people aren’t literate enough to read their prescription drug labels: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1831578/
The answer on yahoo answers is provided by “auntcookie84.” I have no idea who she is, whether she’s qualified to provide this information, or whether the information is correct. However, I have no trouble whatsoever reading what she wrote, regardless of how literate I am.
Google has to balance many factors in their search results, and the simple fact is most searchers aren’t looking for comprehensive scientific explanations for most of their problems. They want the most relevant information for their problem in terms they can understand.
It should be noted Google does allow access to these academic sources in other areas of their search, but when writing for the main search page, your content needs to be accessible to your audience. Your average SEO news source can get away with using technical language to an extent, because those reading your information likely already have built a vocabulary for the topic.
However, if you are offering a service or attempting to educate to the general public about your field, you need to use terms they can easily understand without a dictionary and address their needs head-on.
There is still certainly a place for more extensive content. For instance, the Mayo Clinic and WebMD still rank higher than Yahoo Answers for most medical searches, simply because they are more reliable.
Facebook is revamping its News Feeds ads as part of their continuous efforts to make advertisements on their site more relevant to users.
Google AdWords announced yesterday a major reporting update to conversion tracking called Estimated Total Conversions will be rolling out over the next few weeks. The new feature provides estimates of conversions which take place over multiple devices and adds this to the conversion reporting we are already accustomed to.
Last week SEO and online marketing professionals 
