jon, Author at Outsource Force

Pinterest is Working Better With Brands

Posted on October 02, 2013 by jon

It’s a photo-sharing website that adopted the concept of pinboard-style of creating and managing theme-based image collections such as interests, hobbies and events. And it’s called Pinterest. Users can browse other pinboards for images. To “re-pin” images to their own pinboards, or “like” photos.

Users of Pinterest can upload, save, sort and manage pins – these are what images are called, and other media content such as videos through collections known as pinboards. It serves as a personalized media platform. The content of the Pinterest user and others can be browsed on the main page. The “Pin It” button will allow users to save individual pins to one of their own boards.

Businesses use Pinterest to create pages aimed at promoting their business online. Serving as “virtual storefront” such pages may contain images or photos of its products or brands. It has been found that users visiting from Pinterest are spending more than users coming from Facebook. Such users tend to spend less time in the company’s website and instead browse from the company’s pinboard. There are other studies that showed that Pinterest is more effective in driving sales compared to other forms of social media.

The first significant update of Pinterest focused on how the pinned images appear on the website. The images pinned contain various information right from the website origin including product purchase information or ingredient listings for recipes. Such images are called “Rich Pins”.

Pinterest has several types of pins that have added information on them. They include recipe pins, movie pins and product pins. This update is viewed by many as a better way of Pinterest working with brands that get their products pinned a lot of times. It also gives Pinterest users who access those pinned images more information about where one can find or buy the product.

The update also hopes to resolve the issues of those product images uploaded directly from a site but later removed, thus making it difficult for people to track down information about the product in the image. Big brand names such as eBay, Walmart, Sephora and Target were part of Pinterest’s launch of the new update.

Whether the new Rich Pins would generate revenue for Pinterest remains to be seen. As of yet, these Rich Pins don’t seem to have any monetary value for Pinterest. And Pinterest should look at how to earn revenue from the user’s business.

For instance, if you are a website owner whose images get pinned frequently, you can include specific meta tags to those image pages to have that information included on the Pinterest pin pages. Developers of Rich Pins can access the developer page of Pinterest for specific instructions on how to create Rich Pins.

And if you have pins that have been pinned to Pinterest previously, you can convert those images to Rich Pins as long as you have included the meta tag information on the page where it came from.

Yahoo’s Highly Competitive New Ad Format in the News Stream

Posted on September 30, 2013 by jon

In line with the recent launching of the new Yahoo news stream format and experience sometime in February of this year, 2013; Yahoo immediately followed up with the introduction of their newest advertising format – Yahoo Stream Ads. Personalized ads are displayed on Yahoo’s front-page news stream, alongside articles and other features.

Stream Ads are ad units that appear in-line with, and in the same format as the stories in Yahoo news feed. Ads run across desktop PC, tablet; smartphone and other mobile devices. Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer explained in a blog post that Yahoo aims to provide unobtrusive advertising which can also enhance content discovery in an effective yet seamless manner. Adverts are customized and tailored to various users – allowing Yahoo users to customize their stream in accordance with the topics users are most interested in.

Stream Ads earned the label as the “sponsored twin” to news feed articles, which are meant to deliver personalized content to users. As users perform more searches on Yahoo and engage with more content, their news feed becomes intuitive to their personal preferences. Stream Ads have been developed to deliver the same relevant content that is within the user’s news feed. The more users spend time with Yahoo, the more relevant and personalized the content and advertising becomes.

Following an industry trend that evolves display advertising to be more consistent with the user experience, Yahoo leveraged on the data it holds on its users and their personalized news streams, in order to provide its users a better experience and for advertisers; a higher performance. Yahoo is capitalizing on the level of science, investment and platform engineering that they possess which other publishers don’t have.

Yahoo made its Stream Ads to look and feel similar to the news articles it shares space with. It is a design based on the principle of an ad unit and ad format sharing the same information architecture with the content that it’s near to, making the ad format consistent with the stream content.

And so far, Yahoo users have positively responded to Stream Ads as majority of them are visiting more, staying longer and increasing their interaction with the content. Unobtrusive advertising is apparently appreciated by the Yahoo users. And based on data gathered after its launch, Yahoo seems to be enjoying the affirmation from the users for its Stream Ads.

Along with Stream Ads, Yahoo also introduced Yahoo.com Billboard Ads – a more traditional “billboard” that sits on top of the Yahoo front page for an entire day. It’s an interactive ad format that includes rich content. Yahoo’s Billboard ad format would contain a movie trailer, for instance, and links to more information about the film, and the option to buy movie tickets straight from the ads.

With these two new ad formats, Yahoo is covering the advertising spectrum from end to end – with Stream Ads made accessible to a broad swath of advertisers and the Billboard targeting bigger companies that obviously have deeper pockets.

Bing Adds Direct Facebook Interaction to Social Sidebar

Posted on September 26, 2013 by jon

The power of social media cannot be underestimated because in today’s online world, it seems to be the most effective and fastest way to get a crowd excited about something. So, if your company is planning an important event that will need the engagement of your customers, the best way is to engage them is through social media sites. This is probably the reason why several applications have found a way to somehow link or connect their sites or applications to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn.

Bing, for one, has continuously been releasing pockets of innovations on its home page. Since May 2012, Bing has been regularly adding features to its applications, to wit:-

May 2012 – Bing introduced the Social Sidebar. It was a product of a big search results redesign. A 3-column design with organic search as the main pane, “entities” in the middle, and social on the right.
August 2012 – Bing added Facebook Friend Tagging to search, Quora, and Facebook photo search. Bing introduced the ability to tag Facebook friends while doing a search. This aims to help users share easily search results with friends to ask for suggestions on the best items or location returned in a Bing search result. This feature allows a user to tap into the collective intelligence of his/her social network.
September 2012 – Bing added Klout and Klout added Bing as an Influence metric. This time, collaboration between Bing and Klout resulted in including Klout Scores into the Social Sidebar. When a search query is made on Bing, the Social Sidebar’s “People Who Know” section will include people Klout believes to be influential about the searched topic.
December 2012 – Bing changed the Social Sidebar from gray to white. Bing cleaned up their social sidebar where the background has been changed from dark grey to white. The “hover cards” have been removed which makes the entire page look more consistent and less segmented. There were two new section headers display that distinguished content from friends or experts and general content found within the social media sites. Images appear directly in the sidebar feed to make the section more attention grabbing.
January 2013 – Bing allowed tagging to become public and 5x more than Facebook results. Previous to this change, tagged search results pages were only visible to your friends. Bing now allows that tags are made for everyone to see.
April 2013 – Bing added Pin it button to image search. You can now Pin images directly from Bing to your Pinterest boards.
May 2013: Bing moved “Klout Experts” answers to the top of search results. This is a Q&A feature of Klout which is now part of the Bing search results.

With all these segmented modifications and adding of new features geared towards maximizing the strength and power of social media, Bing doesn’t seem to have completed its task yet. Now, Bing is adding a feature that has the ability to comment on Facebook directly from the Bing Social Sidebar. This feature also allows users to ask questions or make comments or answers on posts which are relevant to the search.

This new feature according to Bing, allows for direct interaction by commenting on Facebook. For example, if you are searching for an event in your area and you have friends from Facebook who are talking about attending that event, you will find them easily using the Social Sidebar and at the same time join in the conversation without the need to leave the page.

Google+ Gets Big, Image-Heavy Redesign

Posted on August 11, 2013 by jon

All Google+ users did not have to wait that long to see another major layout redesign, the Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra revealed at the I/O 2013, when Google+ made available the new design and layout of Google’s social network. That’s all the more reason why one should use Google+ now.

The redesign resembled the attractive Google+ layout adopted for its iPad and Android tablet apps in June of last year. It has a three column-wide grid of cards that replaces the long list of photos, posts and comments which currently make up the Google+ stream. Its image-focused design features high-resolution photos and videos take up the full screen width.

One Column View

An option to switch to a one-column view is also available. Google seems to be expecting that by exposing the users and visitors to more visual content at once, they might find something that intrigues or pokes their interests quicker.

Google added 41 new features to Google+ as part of an effort to make it more intuitive and look smarter. Bigger pictures and related hashtags will all help towards that end. The giant search company apparently didn’t just want a new layout for Google+ stream but they were turning it into more of a proper app instead of a website. Included in the new design are some neat and stylish animations that can make using Google+ more fun than before. Clicking on a card will flip it over to reveal comments. And when you want to write a new post, a click on the button on the top right flies a window onto your screen to give you the spot to compose your post.

Hashtag

Google also added related hashtags to the stream to allow users and visitors to share and follow. If say, you’re following a sports team, Google+ will tag it for you by adding #SFGiants, for example. Or sharing the new Google+ may be done #googlepluslove. Alternatively, you can always speak your mind using the Google+ official page with the Google+ community manager or with the Google Feedback feature in Google+.

Auto Awesome

Google also made announcements on a series of features to improve photos. There’s “auto awesome” which uses a set of photos in your library to create an animated GIF. Google says it can do a lot of enhancements on the photos through “auto awesome”. There’s “auto enhance” which improves the quality of your photo with a click of a button, making auto adjustments on contrast, brightness, focus, saturation and other elements that make a high-quality and fantastically-rendered photo.

Auto Backup

And there’s also “auto backup” which is also known as instant upload. This feature will automatically backup mobile pictures immediately after they are taken. And for all of these enhancement features, Google gives you a place to play around with it before doing them on the actual pictures.

In addition to all photo-related features, Google’s messaging service Hangouts is integrated into the Google+ redesign, releasing Hangout apps for iOS, Chrome and Android. Full streamlined platforms get rid of the messy Google Talk, Video Hangouts and Google Messenger. This is a long-overdue change that Google users will definitely welcome.

With these changes and redesign features, Google hopes to attract users to Google+ just like other social media sites attract users to their platforms.

Google Keep

Posted on July 30, 2013 by jon

Google is bent on not stopping at giving its users more reasons to stick with it. Around third week of March, 2013, Google shook up the cyber world when it relaunched its old Notebook service as the new “Keep”. The note-taking service is currently dominated by Microsoft’s OneNote and Evernote which save text, web links, audio recordings, and photos in an organized manner. This application is equivalent to a life organizer, managing day-to-day errands and tasks at work and can be used regardless of the device being used that has access to the Web and Android.

Google’s Keep is now available for devices running on Android 4.0.3 and up. Alternatively, it can be accessed through the Google Drive web site, which will automatically sync the Web and the Android app.

Google Keep Features

It just takes installing the Android app to select the Google account you want to use with Keep and you can begin keeping your notes. Google’s Keep has four ways to use and enter a note:

Directly from the text box on the initial screen
By tapping on the check mark icon, you can add a checklist
By tapping on the microphone, you can create voice memos which are instantly transcribed. Both the audio and text can be stored in the note
By tapping on the camera, you can add a photo as a note

If you want to add a checklist to an existing note, you can tap on the menu button and select “Show Checkboxes”. Also, colors can be assigned to notes by tapping on the color palette at the top of the screen. Color coding will come in handy when trying to organize notes. However, this can only be done manually. When creating categories, it will be best to assign a color for each category.

Adding a photo to any existing note can be done by tapping on the camera icon along the top of the screen. However, this function is limited to the photos taken at the time it is added. The function does not allow adding previously snapped photos from the gallery.

To archive notes, you can swipe in either direction across the note while tapping and holding on a note and dragging it anywhere you want is how you can re-arrange your notes. Similarly, the layout between multicolumn and single-column view can be done through the menu.

Two widgets are included with the app. The first widget is for creating notes with using a shortcut bar as you scroll through your existing notes from the home screen. On the other hand, the second widget is only a shortcut bar.

Keep has a powerful bookmarking tool. With its uncluttered interface, you can easily focus on a quick task, dictate a memo or a message, or even snap a photo. If you want to save a site, you can click “share” link where a preview image can also be saved. Unfortunately, this bookmarking feature is only available on the mobile app, and not on the web app, as of yet.

Apparently, for some Google users, Keep is the best way to keep organized despite some limitations. The fact that Google Keep has emphasized simple functions, auto-saves and can provide reliability, Google Keep users are bound to enjoy its reliability as a note-taking application.

Image Credits: Google Images

Shodan: Breaching Security Systems Through the Internet

Posted on July 24, 2013 by jon

Where the name was derived, SHODAN means Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network – the villain and fictional artificial intelligence in the cyberpunk role-playing games (RPG) namely System Shock and System Shock 2.

The name Shodan was used by John Matherly when he created what is now considered the scariest search engine on the Internet. According to Matherly, it is simply not true that if Google can’t find stuff on the Web, no one can. In fact, Shodan navigates the Internet’s back channels which, is very much unlike Google which crawls the Web as they search for websites. Shodan is said to be a ‘dark’ kind of Google which looks for webcams, routers, servers, printers and all the peripherals and stuff connected to and that make up the Internet.

Shodan: Collecting Information from Everything Connected to the Net

Shodan, running 24/7 has the ability to collect information on about 500 million connected devices and services every month. And they’re all interesting stuff – traffic lights, home automation devices, heating systems, and security cameras, if connected to the Internet will be easy to spot.

So far, using Shodan, searchers and cybersecurity researchers were able to:

Find control systems for a water park, a hotel wine cooler, gas station, and a crematorium
Locate command and control systems for nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron

Judging from these great “finds”, what would really be noteworthy about Shodan’s “locator” ability is that very few of those devices have any kind of security built into or around them, which indicates a massive security failure, as attested by HD Moore, chief security officer of Rapid 7 who uses a Shodan-like database privately for his own research.

If you make a quick search for “default password”, you will be shown search results of countless servers, printers, and system control devices that use default passwords as “admin” or “1234”. Some connected systems don’t even require password. With just a web browser, you are able to connect to them without difficulty.

Some other results obtained by Dan Tentler, an independent security penetration tester when he used Shodan include:

Finding a car wash that could be turned on and off
Finding a Denmark hockey rink that can be remotely defrosted
Finding a city’s entire traffic control system that can be put to a “test mode” with one command entry
Finding a control system for hydroelectric plant in France with two turbines generating 3 megawatts each.

Scary Picture of Shodan’s Power

Do you get the picture? It’s very scary and seriously alarming. What if Shodan is used for other purposes? And why are those devices connected with almost no security? If any consolation, there are some things that are designed to be connected to the internet like door locks that can be controlled using iPhone are believed hard to find.

What’s probably more alarming is how people are being careless and negligent when it comes to security consciousness. Most of the devices make use of systems that allow remote control or manipulation from a remote place. If done right, the device should run on its own server and not plugged directly into a web server which practically shared the device and the system with the rest of the world. If done this way, where the rest of the world can gain access to the device and the system, you can’t really talk about security. They don’t have business to be on the Internet in the first place.

Having seen such vulnerability, Shodan creator Matherly made sure that Shodan is almost exclusively used for good purposes. After completing his pet project three years ago, Matherly limited the searches to just 10 results without an account and 50 with an account. Matherly places his personal involvement if someone wants to see what Shodan has to offer. He requires more information about the intents and purposes of such search with corresponding payment.

In the event that cyber criminals have turned their fancy in blowing up a building or shutting down a city’s traffic light system, Shodan is expected to be used to avoid such scenario by spotting the unsecured, connected devices and alerting those operating them on their vulnerability. Hopefully, the detection will be quicker than the cyber criminal’s identification of potential target unsecured devices and systems. In the meantime, attention should be directed to those devices connected to the Internet that are bare and open to security attacks.

Meta description: Shodan, said to be a ‘dark’ kind of Google, has the ability to collect information on about 500 million connected devices and services every month. This poses security problems for unsuspecting operators who had their system wired to the internet.

Image Credits: Google Images

Keyword Planner Google Adwords New Tool

Posted on July 18, 2013 by jon

In the tradition of Google’s continued efforts in enhancing the functionalities of existing algorithms, tools, matrices, etc., the search engine giant rolled out the AdWords Keyword Planner to chosen PPC/AdWords accounts in April. But unlike the Google updates tradition, this one went almost unnoticed. It is one of the biggest overhauls Google Keyword Tool ever had and yet it was also the most quiet.

The new Keyword tool – Keyword Planner, was born out of the combination of two existing keyword tools, i.e., Google Keyword Tool and the AdWords Traffic Estimator. The new keyword tool hopes to have a more structured and integrated workflow and many other new features.

The new Keyword Planner will eventually replace both the Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator in the very near future, and expectedly it will have an impact on the workflow.

Keyword Planner

This is a more focused or directed version of the two keyword tools, which is to make it easier for advertisers to get through the process of creating new ad campaigns and ad groups which is important in kick starting the PPC accounts off to a good start.

Differences from Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator

Google Keyword Tool was meant to be general-purpose and unstructured. The tool can be used for almost anything including Keyword Research for SEO.

The new Keyword Planner, on the other hand is similar to an ultimate AdWords campaign building workshop. It has a wizard-type interface. The first step is determining the mechanics of creating ad campaigns and ad groups. Out of the three possible paths, you need to pick one:

Search for Keyword and Ad Group Ideas

Google Keyword Tool and the AdWords Traffic Estimator.

When a new campaign in AdWords is created, you rely on Google to provide you with keyword suggestions. The next stage of the Keyword Planner is researching and picking the keywords to be added to your account.

Filtering keywords from the Keyword Plan. The new Google Keyword Tool has filtering capabilities that can allow you to be really picky with your keywords to be added to the PPC account.
Setting Targeting Parameters. It’s important to have keywords that make sense for your business. Google allows you to customize the keyword stats and performance such as search network, country, and language.
List View vs. Grouped View. Keywords may be viewed either in list view or in grouped view.
Keyword Plan. You can add the promising keywords to “Your Plan” – a temporary storage area for saving interesting keywords and keyword-groupings. The Keyword Planner allows keywords added to Your Plan to be saved while still in the process of looking for keywords. In the two old keyword tools, this saving feature involved separate processes of saving to Google Keyword Tool and copy/paste it as input to AdWords Traffic Estimator. In the new Keyword Planner, the separate processes were integrated into a single process.
Getting Estimates & Reviewing Your Plan. This involves setting a keyword bid and daily budget for your portfolio of keywords and keyword groupings. To customize your estimates, you need to provide Google with information on budget, bid, location and other competitive factors. Doing so, would maximize the tool’s reach to one’s targeted market.

Enter or Upload Keywords to get Estimates

You can start using your own keyword list – maybe from several years of Web analytics data. If you have this data, it’s better to use this list instead of the generic keyword suggestions generated by the Keyword Planner. When you press the Get Estimates button, the Keyword Planner will generate daily estimates for Clicks, Impressions, Average as position and costs.

Multiply keyword lists to get Estimates

This involves mashing up and multiplying keyword lists. An example would be multiplying a bunch of names of products with colors and word modifiers to arrive at unique keyword permutations. You can mash up a total of three lists and get estimates for the keywords born out of multiplied lists.

Conclusion

Keyword Planner tool supports various workflows for building ad groups and ad campaigns– from generic keywords generated by the tool or based on existing keyword lists and the determination of negative keywords for effective PPC campaign. It provides more solid and consistent user experience by integrating keyword selection, grouping, analysis and filtering aspects of the workflow entailed by keyword selection.

The Satisfaction Algorithm

Posted on July 10, 2013 by jon

All webmasters will agree that all the algorithm updates, all the ranking signals used by Google are intended to serve just one purpose – to satisfy the user. Google has never stopped and is continuously finding ways to give the best search results for the users. And most of these efforts are geared towards achieving that goal. This makes ‘Satisfaction’ an actual ranking factor.

But not like the other ranking factors, satisfaction as a ranking factor is difficult to measure as it is based almost entirely on Google’s own internal data. And that is something Google is not willing to share. With that unknown, one can only surmise what metrics Google use to evaluate the performance of its own search results. And it looks like Google and other search engines place so much importance in satisfaction when ranking a website.

Measuring and Predicting Satisfaction

Understanding User Behavior in Search Results. A description on how Google engineers discovered how to improve search results is contained in the excellent book “In the Plex” by Stephen Levy. That portion on the book explains the “pogosticking” practice or behavior manifested by the users. This means that users click on a search result, then “pogostick” back and forth between the search results pages and the different websites, searching for the page that will make them stay long because they found the information they were looking for. If users go to the next page of results, it could signal that they are not happy.
Search Quality Raters. Google’s Search Quality Raters evaluate search results using the abbreviated copy of Search Quality Rating Guidelines which was released in 2012. Quality raters assign the highest score to a page as “useful”. This means that the pages are of high quality and relevant to the search query. In addition, the pages should be authoritative, entertaining, recent or current and highly satisfying. If the webpages are well organized, they might end up with a “useful” tag.
Panda. Google is given by Panda the ability to predict satisfaction instead of evaluating results. Google patterns it after actual human surveys and apply it to every site in its index. Every few weeks, Google updates the index with new data based on Panda’s predictive tool.

Every Marketer’s Goal

While it’s obvious what Google is looking for after all these years, that is, to satisfy users with the search results, search marketers and webmasters should target the same goal by:

Creating pages that will satisfy user’s experience that they don’t return to search page to check another URL
Building sites that comply with Panda’s quality requirements
Surprising and delighting visitors that they will look for your site every time they make a search query

Improving User Satisfaction

A few ways to improve visitor satisfaction and earn praises from Google include:

Using Google’s free website satisfaction surveys. The recently released free customer satisfaction surveys can be embedded in the websites. This will help get feedback about visitor satisfaction.
Removing barriers to make the site more accessible for both the search engine robots and the users.
Speeding up loading of the page can definitely make a user satisfied with the site experience compared to pages which take years to load up.
Empathy. By putting yourself in the shoes of the users or visitors, you are a step towards satisfying your users or visitors. If you are the user, you would want a comprehensive reference material with answers to their questions, relevant links and resources to click for verification or cross referencing, and with surprises and extras here and there.
Linking out can increase user satisfaction and this is according to AJ Kohn in his SEO article “Time to Long Click”. By linking out to other valuable resources, you are fully satisfying the user’s hunger for information. Having those links or long clicks will keep your visitors wanting for more so they’d come back repeatedly on the site in search for those links.

In summary, it’s all about satisfying robots and the users or visitors.

Images via Google Images

Designing a Content Strategy to Destroy Your SEO Nemesis

Posted on June 23, 2013 by jon

Normally, SEOs are asked by business owners to devise an optimization plan for the website so that the business gets on top of the search engine results page without being particular about getting ahead of one specific brand competitor. But for some business owners, being generic may not be their measure of success but rather in being successful in taking the lead over the topmost rival in the industry.

So when challenged by a client towards this objective, how would you plan your SEO tactics? The following content strategy methodologies may be of help:

Expanding visibility in areas which are considered business threats
Understanding the points of competition between your business and your rival
Understanding ways to gain advantage over your competitor
Expanding your visibility by focusing on areas where customers are being underserved.

In order to achieve your specific objectives towards beating your top rival, you may consider:

Using Keywords and Click Curve Data. For any SEO-friendly content, relevant keywords still play a critical role. Your keywords should be grouped by topic and for each keyword you will need data about your organic rank, your rival’s organic rank, and exact match local search volume. In addition you need click curve data in a separate table. With these data you can estimate the current traffic for your site and your competitor’s for specific keywords. This is done by multiplying the exact match search volume by the CTR (click through rate) figure that corresponds to the current rank. This article would help you determine which keyword to use for your website.
Determine Traffic Differences. You can check the percentage difference between your traffic and your competitor’s. A negative figure is an indication that your competitor receives more traffic for a keyword.
Classify Each Keyword. Keywords are classified based on the following criteria:
- Keywords which people search but neither your brand or the competitor receives traffic
- Keywords where your site receives 100% more traffic than competitor
- Keywords where potential traffic is being shared equally by both brands
- Keywords where your competitor receives 80% more traffic than your brand

These data will give you the keywords that you should be interested in using.

Get Visual. You should have a clear picture of how much traffic your brand and your rival is getting or the size of the business success sector in relation to the business threat sector. You should be able to visualize how well the content of your brand serves the interest of the consumers and which topics content creation should be focused on in a bid to steal the rival’s SEO market share.
Prioritize Terms. In order to generate effective content for your brand, you should prioritize the most important terms or keywords. You can use Moz’s tool – keyword difficulty estimator. This will give you an idea of the challenge your rival will have in improving the ranking for said keywords. Multiplying the difficulty score by the search volume for each keyword will give you an idea of how important a keyword is.
Brainstorm. It’s always useful to brainstorm on the methodologies especially on the topics identified as priority.

Conclusion

In order to value these methodologies, a content strategy template may be downloaded to facilitate the processes outlined above. Such template should enable you to compare and contrast your content strategy and SEO performance with what your rival is implementing and eventually find a way to quell the effectiveness of your rival’s strategy.

Keyword research is integral to SEO cycle. It is not a one time process that your SEO company must provide you at the beginning of the project; keyword research and analysis must be provided whenever there are changes in the keyword statistics. Doing this, will help your business serve its clients better by providing them what they need and what they want.

Relevant and Personalized Tweets’ Now a Part of Yahoo News Feed

Posted on June 17, 2013 by jon

Another important milestone for Twitter and Yahoo happened last week as Yahoo announced its partnership with social media giant Twitter in a bid to integrate tweets directly into Yahoo’s home page’s news feed both on web and mobile. This was following February’s re-launch of the front page where the redesigned site increased emphasis on personalization and a more modern design.

Yahoo’s Personalization

Yahoo’s mission on personalization is apparently the company’s focus as Yahoo aims to “seamlessly include relevant and personalized tweets alongside stories from Yahoo! and other sources.” Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer calls it #bestoftheweb. It’s apparent that Mayer is campaigning towards Yahoo becoming a more personalized experience. And this partnership with Twitter is just one of the personalization plans in the pipeline.

At the beginning of the year, Mayer, in an interview with Bloomberg, talked about developing powerful and strong personalization technologies through the “interest graph”. Referring to dominating organizations such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, Mayer says, there is always an opportunity for distraction. This partnership with Twitter may just be the one.

One can easily draw conclusions as to the direction of Yahoo towards the personalization paradigm based on its recent deals and announcements, the latest of which is the homepage revamp back in February.

Other indications of gearing up to reinventing itself under Mayer’s leadership include launching well-received apps like a revamped Flickr and its new Weather app for iOS which may be one of the highest rated iPhone applications, gobbling up startups and paring down its scattered lineup.

How It Works

Yahoo news feed offers an endless scrollable stream of content and tweets will now appear directly on these feeds. Yahoo divides its news feed into sections like “News”, All Stories”, “Local”, “Entertainment”, “Sports” and more. Headlines coming from Twitter accounts will be indicated by referencing the source by its Twitter handle, e.g., @ABCWorldNews instead of ABC News. Expectedly, there will be “follow” buttons to the right of the stories which will allow users to click to add the news organization to their Twitter feeds.

Politicians, media outlets, celebrities and other publishers can release their updates and they will become an important source of real-time news and information. With Twitter’s 140-character limit, athletes can connect with their fans, inspire global debate and capture live chatter from the red carpet.

Twitter Update is Part of the Plan

Mayer had indicated her plans for the company as executed in a series of sprints that focus on different areas of importance. This was evident during Yahoo’s 2013 Q1 quarterly earnings call in April.

The first completed sprint was about building the culture and talent at Yahoo. This will be followed by the next sprint which is about delighting users of Yahoo with new features “making continuous improvements and adjustments over time.” Mayer also indicated plans on Yahoo’s products which will be released with small changes much more frequently. And signs are showing up that Yahoo’s Q1 financials to be going up since Mayer assumed her post as CEO in summer of 2012.

The integration of Yahoo and Twitter is currently rolling out all over the United States for mobile and desktop users. Anytime soon, you will see tweets in Yahoo’s news feeds which could only mean that the rollout is done and successfully working in your area.