1. I received an email promoting EWG’s 2011 safe sunscreens report (side note: It’s awesome you should check it out!)

2. I clicked through to the report. The URL contained Google Analytics tracking tags as follows:

http://breakingnews.ewg.org/2011sunscreen/?inlist=Y&utm_source=2011sunscreen2&utm_medium=email&utm_content=header&utm_campaign=toxics

Nothing uncommon about this.

3. I wanted to share the report on Facebook, so I clicked on the Facebook button provided. Notice the URL in the screenshot:

The URL with the Google Analytics tracking variables is now passed to Facebook and is shared among your friends. As you can sell from this Google search, pages with the Google Analytics tracking tags are already in Google’s index for this site.

Update: I’ve just noticed that Search Engine Land is using the same combination (Google Analytics with tracking tags and the ShareThis widget) but the GA tracking tags aren’t attached to the shared URL. I wonder what they’re doing differently?

1. Google manually returned JCPenney.com to its previous rankings, once again showing favoritism to a big brand. I highly doubt they’d do the same for a small website that got caught doing the same thing.

2. Other big retailers competing in the same space such as Kohls.com missed a window of opportunity to accelerate their own SEO programs and grab rankings.

Page owners can post a question with a list of answers and also allow fans/friends to add additional answers. Additionally, when a fan/friend responds to a question, it appears in their profile which allows their friends to respond as well and broadens overall reach

Some well-known brands have already begun adding Questions on their pages. A great example is the Buffalo Wild Wings Facebook page, for which you can see an example question above.

To start using Facebook Questions on your pages, follow these steps after signing into Facebook:

1: Go to the “Account” tab at the upper-right side of your Facebook account and click “Use Facebook as Page.” Click “Switch” next to the page you would like to be signed into, which should be the page where you want to add the Questions app.

2: Go to the Facebook Questions page, which both outlines the product and is where you add Questions to your Page. Once there, click on the bright green button that says “Get Questions Now.”

This should add the Questions app to your personal page and for all pages for which you’ve got admin privileges. If not, repeat step one and two for the specific Page in question. A pop-up box will open confirming that Questions have been added to your Page.

3. Start asking questions!

You can quickly see the problem with non-unique hashtags. For example, various Oregon State and Ohio State Twitter accounts both use the hashtag #OSU, so their tweets are always categorized together, even though they shouldn’t be. While it’s not as short, I recommend that each university use a more unique hashtag. Perhaps #ORESTATE for Oregon State and #OHSTATE for Ohio State?

Consider this for your own tweets. If you want to track them later, using generic hashtags such as #monday isn’t going to help.

1. Make it as short as possible – think Amazon.com, Facebook.com, Google.com.
2. Make it unique – see above examples.
3. Make it dead obvious and related to the core topic – Weather.com is a great example.

The domain name for the recently redesigned Ohio 529 plan website, makefriendswiththefuture.com, fails to follow any of the rules. It’s too long and about as un-unique as a domain name can be due to its overuse of generic words and absence of words connected to either the site’s focus (college savings) or the “brand” (Ohio’s college savings plan). Data suggests that it’s failing:

• Not appearing in Google Insights for Search
• Not appearing in Compete.com traffic reports.
• Not appearing in Google page 1 results for “Ohio 529 plan“

Domains like this will almost always fail because domains aren’t designed to be branding exercises, they are tools to reach a website. My recommendations would be:

• Ohio529.com (if it wasn’t already taken)
• Ohio529.org (still available!)

A domain like Ohio529.org isn’t sexy, but would be highly effective.

Comments? Fire away! Be sure to watch the other videos also. The lunch was packed with dynamic speakers providing great insights for 2011.

The impact of this change seems to be any website that doesn’t have a physical address in the location that people are searching for will probably no longer be able to rank for local based queries. To state it another way, if a website ranked highly on the old map listings, it will probably rank highly in the new organic listings.  Check out this search for pizza Columbus Ohio – note the absence of national pizza chains:

Check Google results for your website. Is it time for some changes?

How do you get noticed online?

In three words, it’s about your Total Internet Presence (TIP), a concept that I created in partnership with Bryan Huber. Vice-president of Interactive Services at Paul Werth. This post kicks off a series on the seven elements of Total Internet Presence, a process we apply to make your digital brand more exciting, visible, transparent, accessible and competitive.

Today’s post is about the element of measurability — the yardstick for your online presence. There are some very sophisticated tools for measuring your “worth” on the Web, and most often we refer these as Web analytics.

What are Web analytics?

The Web Analytics Association defines Web analytics as “the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.”

That sounds very academic, doesn’t it? Bottom line, Web analytics provide answers to a couple of fundamental questions:

•  How did visitors find my website?
• What do visitors do once they reach my website?

Why measure?

There’s an old saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Taking that a bit further, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Some of favorite specific benefits of using Web analytics are:

• Determine if your investment in website visit drivers such as advertising, SEO and social media is paying off. For example, is the company Facebook page really driving visits to the website?
• Provides historical benchmarking. For example, are visits increasing or decreasing?

What to measure?

All of the data in the world are useless if you haven’t established some specific metrics (i.e., measurements of success). Do you know if you’re winning or losing?

Some of the most common website metrics – and the data used to determine if they’re being met – are:

Increase site traffic:

• Total visits
• Unique visitors

Improve site visibility:

• Traffic sources (i.e., search engines and other websites sending visitors to your site)
• Search engine rankings

Improve Site Engagement:

• Average visits per unique visitor
• Average page views per visit
• Site bounce rate
• Return visitors

Increase Conversions:

• White paper downloads
• Contact forms submitted

How do you measure up?

Drop me a note if you want to look into assessing your company or organization’s measurability. We can discuss the analytics that will best meet your unique needs.

To make matters worse, Googling “oil spill ideas” returns nearly 100% negative results that contain zero organic results from an official BP website. BP is running a paid search ad, but it takes you a standard PR page with way too much information and no mechanisms for consumers and non-BP experts to post an idea.

Here are a couple of ideas for BP:

• Emulate Dell’s IdeaStorm with a twist – provide a website for consumers and experts to easily post their ideas then let BP experts review and rate them. Make it transparent and archive for when (not if) there’s another huge oil spill.
• Invest in some SEO!