Did Michael Dubin at Dollar Shave Club get it right to make sure people hear about his startup venture and sign-up for the club?

This is their Internet marketing strategy: Do a funny video and put it onto the Internet …

What do you think? See for yourself what you think and let us know.

‘Vote’ with the blue buttons above where it says ” Facebook It “:

p.s. Don’t forget to ‘vote’ on the video using the blue Facebook buttons at the top.

The Original Post is Located Here: A funny video as an Internet marketing strategy to get $1 mil funding?

My personal list of the best Android Apps for 2012:

Best Android Apps 2012

1. AVGAntivirus Free
2. Google +
3. Facebook
4. Twitter
5. GoogleMaps
6. Firefox
7. WordPress
8. AdobeFlashPlayer
9. Skype
10. YouTube
11. Meebo (mobile chat)
12. Dropbox (file access)
13. Android Assitant
14. WhatsAppManager
15. LookoutMobileSecurity
16. HelloTxt
17. Hootsuite
18. Tweetdeck
19. MyPhoneExplorer (Synchronization manager)
20. AdvancedTaskKiller (closing background apps)
21. Dolphin (browser)
22. Xing (D, A, CH)
23. GPS Status
24. KeePassDroid
25. AdobeReader
26. Bambuser (video reporting)
27. Barcoo
28. BarcodeScanner
29. CamScanner
30. GoogleTranslate
31. Shazam (song recognition)
32. TuneIn (radio stations)
33. DB Navigator (Germany)
34. GoogleStreetView
35. Navigation Europe
36. GoogleEarth
37. GoogleSkyMaps
38. GoogleGoggles (background information)
39. ZedgeRingtones
40. MathManiac
41. AngryBirds
42. JungleRunner
43. SoundHound

For a review of the Android Apps mentioned here, please see the specific apps. The number of apps and the order of which they are displayed on the list might change over time.

Any decent comments and suggestions on my personal list are welcome.

The Original Post is Located Here: 15 Best Android Apps 2012

Canonicalization SEO Tip

Canonicalization is almost harder to say than to understand since it just is a way of organizing your URLs to a) get maximum ranking benefits and b) avoiding ‘duplicate content’ penalties.

How does ‘Canonicalization’ work?

Canonicalization is simply the process of picking the best url when there are several choices. Most people think that similar URLs are the same and that those URLs won’t cause any problems.

Canonicalization errors using the default settings on the two most common web servers:

Apache web server:

• http://www.yourdomain.com/
• http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html
• http:/yourdomain.com/
• http://yourdomain.com/index.html

Microsoft Internet Information Services:

• http://www.yourdomain.com/
• http://www.yourdomain.com/default.asp (or .aspx depending on the version)
• http://yourdomain.com/
• http://yourdomain.com/default.asp (or .aspx)
• or any combination with different capitalization.

Producing these different versions of URLs is a problem since the ranking benefit for the site gets divided and spread over various versions of your website’s URLs. What you wnat instead is the maximum ranking benefit combined on one page, not divided over different versions of the same page.

From a technical point of view these urls are different for the search engines and a web server might also return very different content for all these urls.

“When Google ‘canonicalizes’ a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set. One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.” says Google’s Matt Cutts (Matt Cutts SEO Advice On URL Canonicalization Issues).

How do I make sure Google (Bing etc.) find the version of my website that I prefer?

If you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can force resolution to one URL only. To do this, you can use

• Google Webmaster Tools that provides an area where you can specify which version of URL Google uses
• a 301 redirect. You can structure your website so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.). 

Warning: DON’T just remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, since you might be removing your whole domain for six months!  If you have used the url removal tool to remove your domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain, simply do a reinclusion request and mention that you removed your entire domain by accident using the url removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded.

Top (Google) Rankings and Canonicalization

If you want top rankings you need to sort out ‘canonicalization’ matters on your website (blog). “If the search engines sees a page as being published at many separate URLs, the search engine may rank your pages lower than they would otherwise, or not rank them at all.

Canonicalization issues can split link juice between pages if people link to variants of the URL. Not only does this affect rank (less PageRank = lower rank), but it can also affect crawl depth (if PageRank is spent on duplicate content it is not being spent getting other unique content indexed).” PeterD, SEOBook

8 Canonicalization Best Practices

1. Use 301 redirection to ensure that your home page is only found at one URL. If you don’t know how, read Stephan Spencer’s column about rewrites and redirects.
2. Link consistently to your home page from within your own site. Use a single URL for your home page. Don’t mix in instances of ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/index.html’ with ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’. If you aren’t doing this properly right now, a quick change may have a big impact on SEO.
3. Don’t use tracking IDs in internal site navigation. A lot of sites add stuff like ‘?source=blog’ in their navigation. That lets them use their analytics reports to track user movement within, to and from their site. Instead, learn to use your web analytics referrer and navigation path reports. If you must use tracking IDs, change your software to use a hash mark (a ‘#’ sign) instead of a question mark. Search engines ignore everything after the hash, so you’ll avoid confusion.
4. Don’t use tracking IDs in organic links from other sites. If you get a link on another site, and want it to help with your SEO, don’t put a tracking ID in that, either.
5. Be careful with pagination. Many sites have pagination, where visitors can click a 1, 2, 3 etc. to jump to later pages in search results, product lists or articles. That’s fine, but make sure that the each page has a single URL. For example, if page 1 of the article is ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/article.html’ when I click the article link from the home page, make sure that the number ’1′ in the pagination takes me there, too, instead of to ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/article.html?page=1′.
6. Set up preventative redirects. Make sure that ‘iansnerdvana.com’ 301 redirects to ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’.
7. Exclude ‘e-mail a friend’ pages. Most content management systems that have ‘e-mail a friend’ options direct the user to a unique page that has the same form and content. But every instance of that page has a unique URL like ‘ID=123′, to tell the server which product or article to forward. It’s canonical higgeldy-piggeldy. Use robots.txt and the meta robots tag to exclude these from search engine crawls.
8. Use common sense when building your site. Think, man/woman! If you need to change the header, footer or other page element based on where on your site the visitor came from, do it with cookies, or by sniffing out the referring URL. Design to do this ahead of time.” Ian Lurie, Search Engine Land

Note: ‘rel=canonical’ is NOT a best practice since Yahoo! and Bing haven’t confirmed support for that tag yet, plus search engines might chage their mind about the use of that tag later on. This has happened before!

Note: use absolute URLs for your internal linking structure not relative links. This avoids canonicalization mistakes and gives you some rewards even when your content gets scraped.

Canonicalization Problems

If you haven’t canonicalized your website pages yet your site might face some duplicate content and other problems.

As duplicate pages often get thrown into the supplemental index, appearing in the supplemental index can be an indicator you may have canonicalization issues. If some of your pages (or your entire site) are not indexed frequently, and you think they should be, chances are the pages might be residing in Google’s supplemental index. (See Michael Grays technique for monitoring the Google cache.)

Which could mean your site has a duplicate content issue, which could mean it has a canonicalization issue, which in turn could mean your website might not get ranked as high as it could be.

Plus “you lose link authority. If blogger 1 comes to ‘www.yourdomain.com’ and links to that page, blogger 2 lands on ‘yourdomain.com’ and links to that URL, and blogger 3 lands on ‘www.yourdomain.com/index.html’ and links to that page, the Googlebot sees three links to three different pages, and applies 1 ‘vote’ only to each one. These three links could have sent three authoritative signals to Googlebot for your site’s home page! Instead, they’re split into three weaker individual votes for three different pages.

And search engines won’t crawl your site as deeply as they might. Search engines allocate resources for each crawl. No one knows exactly how, but it’s safe to say Googlebot won’t just wander around your site until its found every page. At some point, it gives up and leaves. If multiple pages on my site have multiple URLs, then visiting search bots waste time tracking down all of those different versions. That’s time they could spend crawling other unique pages, instead. So fewer unique pages of my site end up in the search index, and I have fewer chances to rank”. Ian Lurie, Search Engine Land

HTTP and HTTPS: Sometimes Google indexes both the http:// and the https:// versions of a website. One solution is to tell the search engine bots not to index the https:// version. Tony Spencer outlines two ways to do this in .htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO. 

Different versions of a webpage: some softwares, such as blog and forum software, aggregate posts into archives. When you link to your articles in your archive, link to the original version of the post, as opposed to the archive one. For example www.yourdomain.com/todays-post.htm , not www.your domain.com/archive/december/todays-post.htm.

If your software program links to a duplicate version of the content (like an individual post from a forum thread) consider adding rel=nofollow to those links.

“One common mistake when implementing canonicalization fixes to accidentally create a infinite loop between http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/index.html. The solution to this common glitch is discussed in this post about redirecting an index file to your domain without looping.” SEOmoz

Further Canonicalization Reading

If you want the entire story of where the term ‘canonicalization’ comes from, read this: Canonicalization – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Google Lets You Tell Them Which URL Parameters To Ignore, Search Engine Land, Stephen Spencer

URL Rewrites & Redirects: The Gory Details (Part 1 of 2), Search Engine Land, Stephan Spencer

The Original Post is Located Here: Canonicalization for Best Google Rankings

Facebook

This calendar year, Facebook will receive nearly $2.2 billion in Internet based ads, accounting for 17.7 percent of the market, with Yahoo capturing 13.1 percent. With more than 500 million customers, Facebook’s display ad earnings has more than doubled in the past 2 years and accelerated by 81 percent this year, according to the analysis.

“Facebook’s supreme attractiveness – both in terms of numbers of users and amount of time they devote there – creates a plethora of display ad impressions, mainly for its unique form of banners”. said David Hallerman, an EMarketer analyst. “That acceptance is also boosting what promoters will pay”.

Other conclusions from the research point to Google improving its display ads by 34 percent this year and will account for 9.3 percent of the industry.

A lot more customers are making use of Facebook for their on-line buying needs. According to the 2011 Social Shopping Study of more than 1,000 buyers by PowerReviews and the e-tailing group, one-third of answerers make use of social media for their analysis, as well as Facebook to search for offers on the Internet.

The Original Post is Located Here: Facebook becoming leader in web advertisements industry

Facebook

Facebook could be worth $100 billion while users are leaving!

Last month Facebook, the world’s largest social network lost about 6 million users in the US alone with large numbers of users leaving the network in Canada, UK, Russia and Norway, too.

These numbers might worry Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, since he is apparently planning to float Facebook next year. A recent funding round valued the network at $65bn and if the network can indeed reach 2bn in earnings for 2011 it would push the network’s potential value to $100bn.

The site is continuing to grow its global presence but its growth rates are slowing (12m additional users in May compared to 20m the year before).

Eric Eldon of Inside Facebook a famous developer website monitoring Facebook statistics says “Facebook’s growth tends to curtail in a given market after reaching around 50% penetration.”

It is no surprise then that Facebook pushes hard in China where its potential lies around 500 million users. However to conquer China will need a special approach in a country where Google failed in displacing Baidu, the local search engine as the number one spot.

The Original Post is Located Here: Facebook News

Linking

You probably have heard before that link building has certain advantages:

Major search engines pay close attention to link popularity in determining how important your site is and how high a ranking it deserves.

Advantages of Contextual Links

Building contextual links is a good way to promote your website. It works like this:

Use your internal website pages to point links from some of your pages to your important landing pages, also called squeeze pages. These are the pages that you want to get ranked as highly as possible on the search engines. And you enlist the help of some other internal pages to get these special pages ranked.

And yes, you sacrifice a bit of ranking potential of those internal pages that link to your landing pages. But that’s the trade-off you are making. You are concentrating your search engine ranking authority on your most important pages first.

Once these pages have reached the number one listing on the search engine results pages (SERPs) you can start testing if you can de-link some internal pages. If your landing page still stays in the same listing position, you are save and can build some ranking authority for the pages you have just taken out of the internal linking pattern.

If your landing page starts dropping in the rankings, you need to link the pages, that you have just taken out, back into the pattern.

That should get your landing page back to its number one position.

The most important aspect of any link patterns is that you need to have profitable keywords, and great content to keep your reader interested and willing to click on the links within your pages.

Do you have a linking strategy for your internal and external pages to get your landing pages (squeeze pages) to rank highly on the search engines?

Any questions, let me know. You can use the ‘Comments’ section below.

best,
Karl

The Original Post is Located Here: Search Engine Marketing Tip: Website Links

Local SEO

Google changed it’s shortcut to the top of the natural search results: Until now you could get a listing on top of Google’s natural search results by setting up a free Google Local Business Listing (Google Places) and by optimizing it. This listing also had pretty good conversion rates since Google kindly put its Google map next to your local listing.

To get a top listing for certain keywords and a good number of potential customers to your website was pretty straight forward, until now:

When Google introduced Place Search, Google’s new kind of search result that organizes information around geographical locations, Google separated the actual listings from the Google map: the listings get spread out throughout the listings on the first page and the Google map appears in the top of the left sidebar above the Google (PPC) ads.

What does this mean for you?

Will it now become easier or more difficult to get a local listing onto Google’s first search results page?

Will it now become more difficult or easier to get any natural listing at all in the top ten on Google’s first page?

Here are some indicators of what Google’s latest change could mean for anyone who wants to get a local listing on Google’s first page:

If you do any local SEO for small business owner’s, make sure that you check their rankings now.

Until now, when you entered something like ‘Plumber Miami’, you’d always get a map on top wit the businesses listed in the so-called 7pack. (Google Places)

Not anymore, the map moved to the right and the 7pack is gone, it’s now spread over the whole first page.

Google merged the Google Places listings with the business’s websites.

This is a game changer.

You can’t manipulate map results that easily anymore and SEO is playing a major role now when it comes to local search and Google Places.

That’s great news in my opinion. I’ve been following all my clients’ rankings in the last couple of days, they all rank even better now because I never offered local optimization without SEO.

Also, if you’re into local search, make sure that you find out more about Google Boost, a new service that Google is testing to make money from local small business owners.

Plus keep any eye on Google’s changes to the local listings, since they probably will change again, soon.

Have your or your client’s local listings been affected?

Discuss by leaving a comment below.

The Original Post is Located Here: Google changed the Shortcut to Local Customers

Amazon

Amazon S3 sent me a message about their new hosting for static websites offer. I have posted excerpts of the message below along with my thoughts about the offer:

“We’re excited to announce new features that make it easy to host static websites on Amazon S3.

Customers already use Amazon S3 to host images, video, and other content for their websites, but until now they haven’t been able to effectively host their entire website on Amazon S3. That’s because even though customers can configure an Amazon S3 bucket as a website, users accessing the root of the website (e.g. http://www.mywebsite.com/) would see the list of objects in the Amazon S3 bucket instead of the website’s home page…

With these new features, Amazon S3 now provides a simple and inexpensive way to host your website in one place. For more information on hosting your static website on Amazon S3, review the Amazon S3 Developer Guide or attend the Introduction to Amazon S3 Website Features webinar on February 24th.”

While this sounds great on the surface – my videos, images and websites all in one place my questions are:

• Does the offer include blogs as well?
  Since blogs (WordPress especially) have become so important for online marketing I would be more interested in Amazon’s new offer if they included blogs for hosting.
• What kind of support can we count on?
  The deciding factor on choosing a host for me these days is whether the host has great customer service support (not just sales support). In the life of a website or a blog there are a number of instances where we need to be able to get questions answered and issues taken care of fast. This is especially important if we are acting on behalf of a client.

  One big difference in hosting is the support of WordPress installations. We recently had to move a couple of websites from http://www.1and1.com since they have there own blogging platform, give you only limited space for your WordPress blog and do not help you with any problems you might get with your WordPress blog. That is the reason we moved the websites with their WordPress blogs to http://www.hostgator.com despite a small local hosting disadvantage. Hostgator so far has provided great support for the WordPress installations even when it was outside the scope of their usual range of support.

  Other factors to decide which host to choose such as price and outage times are very similar now and they don’t influence our decisions greatly.

Hope this helps.

Karl

The Original Post is Located Here: Amazon S3 for Static Websites?

Keyword Density or How Often Should Keywords Appear in my Texts?

Search-Engine-Marketing-Training

Keyword density is still one of the most over-hyped search engine ranking factors.

Business owners, SEO experts and webmasters have, for some time, tried to find one formula that would explain how often you need to include a keyword into a certain size online text to get a good listing on the SERPS. You might hear that the ‘Keyword Density’ (which means how often a keyword should be used in a text) should be about 2% – 3%.

Although including targeted keywords within your page content is a must, the truth is that there is no fixed density percentage which can be applied to any website page or blog post. The perfect keyword density varies according to keywords targeted, niche, content, page and website etc. Though a targeted keywords should be used a number of times, the flow of your text should appear to be natural and not hop from one keyword to the next.

However, you can use Keyword Density to evaluate your competition and what you have to do to get a top ranking for a specific keyword. At least to a certain extent.

See an example how to use Keyword Density on your website pages or blog posts.

The Original Post is Located Here: Search Engine Marketing Tip: Keyword Density

McKinsey’s new research: companies using the Web intensively gain greater market share and higher margins!

Web 2.0 Technologies

Below are excerpts from a McKinsey article about how taking Web 2.0 technologies on board can lead to market leadership, greater market share as well as higher margins.

“New McKinsey research shows that a payday [for Web 2.0] companies could be arriving faster than expected. A new class of company is emerging— one that uses collaborative Web 2.0 technologies intensively to connect the internal efforts of employees and to extend the organization’s reach to customers, partners, and suppliers.

We call this new kind of company the networked enterprise. Results from our analysis of proprietary survey data show that the Web 2.0 use of these companies is significantly improving their reported performance. In fact, our data show that fully networked enterprises are not only more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share but also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.

Over the past four years, McKinsey has studied how enterprises use these social technologies, which first took hold in business-to-consumer models that gave rise to Web companies such as YouTube and Facebook.

Recently, the technologies have been migrating into the enterprise, with the promise of creating new gains to augment those generated by the earlier wave of IT adoptions. The patterns of adoption and diffusion for the social Web’s enterprise applications appear to resemble those of earlier eras: a classic S curve, in which early adopters learn to use a new technology, and adoption then picks up rapidly as others begin to recognize its value.

The implications are far reaching: in many industries, new competitive battle lines may form between companies that use the Web in sophisticated ways and companies that feel uncomfortable with new Web-inspired management styles or simply can’t execute at a sufficiently high level.”

The Original Post is Located Here: Web 2.0 to Gain Greater Market Share and Higher Margins