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Leading SEOs Discuss AMP, PWAs, URL Parameters, Featured Snippets, KPIs and More

Leading SEOs Discuss AMP, PWAs, URL Parameters, Featured Snippets, KPIs and More was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo ( SMX ) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.

Meet the SEOs is a key SMX session where digital marketers are able to ask four leading digital marketers any question they have. The panel, moderated by Search Engine Land Founder and Editor Danny Sullivan, features:

Duane Forrester: Vice President of Search Operations at Bruce Clay, Inc.
Mike King: President and Founder of iPullRank
Hillary Glaser: SEO Manager at Campbell Ewald
Alyeda Solis: SEO Consultant at Orainti

From left: Duane Forrester, Hillary Glaser, Aleyda Solis, Michael King, Danny Sullivan

What do you think about AMP, progressive loading web apps (PWAs), and web apps?

Forrester: I welcome our new PWA overlords. If Google wants it, Google will get it if it waits long enough for it. Google is doing this for a very good reason, because the average person will fail.

Glazer: If you are a newspaper or magazine or a site with a lot of content where the amount of content that is on your site is weighing down your site’s load time, AMP might be a quick fix. But if you rely on ads to produce revenue, AMP is not a good route for you. There are other ways you can go about decreasing your load time.

King:

What @iPullRank thinks about #AMP & progressive web apps, live from @smx. #smx #seo #apps #AMP pic.twitter.com/asx53FfSpx

— Kristi Kellogg (@KristiKellogg) September 29, 2016

Do people need to have apps?

Glaser: It’s situational. We have a healthcare client who it really makes sense for. Their clients can book appointments through the app, for example, without even having to log in. That makes the app valuable.

Forrester: I don’t know that AMP is going to have a long life span. If you don’t have an app already up and running and your app is two years away, I would reconsider building the app. PWA is blindingly fast and looks like a regular website … it just might crush AMP and apps.

Do we need URL parameters?

Forrester:

Do you need URL parameters? Here are @DuaneForrester‘s thoughts. @smx #smx #seo pic.twitter.com/p4GFAoPWcl

— Kristi Kellogg (@KristiKellogg) September 29, 2016

King: I don’t think inherently they’re bad, but they can create bad situations.

When creating tables does the formatting style influence whether you get a Featured Snippet?

Forrester: It’s not about how you formatted it, but how much the search engine trusts you. To get a featured snippet, you must be highly trusted and serve up highly relevant content.

Will Google make featured snippets sponsored eventually?

Solis: I don’t think that’s realistic.

Glaser: I don’t think that’s going to happen.

(Read our coverage of the SMX East session How to Earn Featured Snippets.)

301s vs. 302s?

Unanimous: 301s.

(Read our guide on How to Implement a 301 Redirect.)

Should we be delivering ranking reports or not?

Glaser: Yes, if you can tie back to something.

Solis: You want to monitor it and see how you are vs. your competition, because it does have an effect on the ultimate goals: traffic, conversion, ROI, etc.

What are the top three KPIs you need to report to management?

Forrester: That needs to be decided before you take on the work. Whatever that business wants or needs, those are your KPIs. Could be traffic, sign-ups, revenue, time on site — find out from them. Ranking is not a KPI, but a tool.

Solis: For a migration, however, I would say ranking is a KPI. It depends on the project.

Should I interlink related but not duplicated sites that my company owns?

Sullivan interjects and answers the question: No — you should only do it if there’s some value. Don’t do it for a boost.

Forrester: Maybe combine the content and make a single, stronger site. If you interlink them, you risk appearing like a link network and getting in hot water. Pull your content together, put it on a single strong domain, build a business and move forward.

If you had a brand new site and no budget, what would you do?

Glaser: Invest in really good content. Update your meta data seasonally and learn how to understand user intent and behavior. Learn why people come from both Google and Bing and dig into Search Console. Update your content with that knowledge.

Forrester: If you don’t have a lot of money, you better have a lot of personality. You need to have a reason for people to engage with you, and that can be writing style, tone and voice. These will get you a social presence. There’s no end to it and virtually no cost.

King: This is what guest posting is actually for. When you write something on a highly trafficked site, it’s one of the quickest ways to get eyes and links on your own site. It’s a good idea when you’re starting something from scratch. Realistically, if you’re going after a competitive term, search is not what you want to target at first with no budget.

What are some of your favorite tools?

Forrester: Bing Webmaster Tools.

King: Moz’s Keyword Explorer, KeywordTool.io and Keyword Studio.

Solis: Keyword Finder and SEMRush.

Glaser: SEMRush, BrightEdge, Raven Tools, Google Keyword Planner. 

Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO services , SEM PPC management, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk .

17 Ways Link Building Can Go Awry

17 Ways Link Building Can Go Awry was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo ( SMX ) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.

Link building specialist Sha Menz

Link removal specialist Sha Menz has a word of warning for SEOs: Manipulating the link game is like everything else — it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

A superhero SEO can come along and save your site, but there are much more powerful things your superhero SEO could be doing rather than link cleanup.

Menz shared 17 areas where link building can go awry and 3 ways link building can be done best!

17 Ways Link Building Can Go Wrong

1. Anchor Text

2. Paid Links

There’s nothing wrong with a sponsored link, by the way — but call it out. Note that it’s sponsored, like Search Engine Land Editor Barry Schwartz does in the below example.

3. Reciprocal Link Exchange

These seem to be having a resurgence, said Menz. If you’re shaking hands and agreeing to trade links with someone, it’s not necessarily a bad thing — if there’s some actual reason that both of your sites can link to the other in a natural and useful way. BUT if this is the case, don’t hesitate to use a nofollow tag. Getting traffic and being useful are the key things you’re doing here.

4. JavaScript and CSS Tricks

Don’t hide things here. Search engines will see it.

5. Irrelevant and Spun Content

6. Footer Links

People can get very sneaky. In the below example, the word “C-o-p-y-r-i-g-h-t” actually has a link on every letter.

7. Comment Spam

8. Wiki-loading

9. Bad Directories

10. Guest Posting

11. Kiss-of-Death Domains

Learn about suspect domains at DomainTools.com.

12. Link Networks

13. Redirect Madness

Watch out for third-party redirect passes through high-quality domains. This might appear in the form of intentionally misspelled domain names in the code. Use the SpamFlag Chrome extension in conjunction with Majestic SEO.

14. Coupon Capers

15. Link Builders You Forgot to Fire

This may sound ridiculous, but it can happen. Ensure previous link builders have been informed and are not building additional links.

16. Rogue Themes, Toolbars and Plugins

17. Black Hats Masquerading as White Hats

3 Ways Link Building Works

It’s all about doing the work. None of the tricks are worth it. Investing your time in actual work is much more profitable. Consider, then, doing the following:

1. Help Others to Help Yourself

Sometimes you’re just out there in a forum being really helpful, or you have written a blog post that’s really valuable. Those kinds of things can pay you back dividends with links.

2. Share Your Expertise

Loan a developer, teach a local class, etc.

3. Do the Unexpected

The Elephant in the Room: Penguin in the Wild

Menz would be remiss if she didn’t bring up the elephant in the room: Penguin. Is the newly hatched real-time Penguin the light at the end of the tunnel for your site, or are you clinging to a runaway train?

“Recognition of your cleanup work will be quicker by the search engines, but results will be harder to spot,” said Menz, adding that the only real results she’s seen (so far) have been people who are ill-affected.

One thing she wants to note is that disavows are still important, which we also confirmed with Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes earlier this week:

@BruceClayInc we haven’t changed our recommendations for the disavow tool with this launch

— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 26, 2016

Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO penalty repair, SEO services, SEM PPC management, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk.

Featured Snippets in Search ‘Build Near-Instant Credibility’: Glenn Gabe on How to Earn Them in 2016

Featured Snippets in Search ‘Build Near-Instant Credibility’: Glenn Gabe on How to Earn Them in 2016 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.

Want to earn Featured Snippets in Google Search? Glenn Gabe, the president of G-Squared Interactive, shares how to increase your chances of earning a Featured Snippet at SMX East.

Featured Snippets are incredibly powerful and can drive more traffic than a No. 1 result. According to Gabe, Featured Snippets build nearly instant credibility.

Gabe shares a client case study. A Featured Snippet yielded 41,444 clicks in 90 days, accounting for 73% of the client’s traffic from Google. The CTR? 13.2%.

A word of warning, though: the Google algorithm can be fickle when it comes to Featured Snippets. A different client Gabe had earned a Featured Snippet, but then lost it … along with 39,000 clicks within a two week period. The client then won the Featured Snippet, and then lost it again, proving Gabe’s point about Google’s fickleness.

Ways Featured Snippets Appear

Text
Bullets
Images
Bullets with images
Tables
Knowledge Graph
Text with a link to another Featured Snippet

Common Questions about Featured Snippets

Do you need to rank No. 1 to receive a Featured Snippet?

No! But always Page No. 1.

Are they displayed just for “question” queries?

No. They appear for head terms and topics, as well.

Is Structured Data a requirement?

No. Though John Mueller’s team once considered making this a requirement, they decided against it. They didn’t want to bog down webmasters with even more code.

Can Featured Snippets be personalized?

Yes, depending on whether or not you’re logged in, your location, and your search history.

What are some tools to find and/or research Featured Snippets?

Google Search Console, SEMRush and Moz.

Is there something even better than Featured Snippets?

Yes: the huge SERP real estate winner that is a Featured Video.

Can you refine Featured Snippets?

Yes. And it works fast. Gabe did this and saw his result change in seven minutes. He reminds digital marketers to be careful, though – you could lose your Featured Snippet in the process.

How to Earn a Featured Snippet

Cover a topic as thoroughly and clearly as you can.
Answer the question concisely and provide both the question and answer on the page.
Provide a concise section that answers the core query.
Use bullets or numbered lists for processes.
Provide a strong image near the answer for possible inclusion in the Featured Snippet.
Use HTML tables where appropriate.

The Power of Google Featured Snippets in 2016: Analysis, Case Studies and Recommendations By Glenn Gabe from Search Marketing Expo – SMX




Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO services, SEM PPC, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk.

SEO Godfather Bruce Clay & Search Insider Duane Forrester Field Digital Marketers’ Questions at #SMX

SEO Godfather Bruce Clay & Search Insider Duane Forrester Field Digital Marketers’ Questions at #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.

Representing Bruce Clay, Inc., Bruce Clay and Duane Forrester hosted an AMA (ask me anything) session at SMX East 2016. The audience is packed and ready to dive into hot SEO topics including:

Starting an SEO business
Reviews as ranking factors
Inorganic link clean-up
Redirects in light of link penalties
Communicating SEO priorities to developers
Moving to HTTPS

Where do we start with SEO and how do we get the most out of our site as a garage-based business? What’s a good blueprint for the next six months?

Bruce: If you haven’t taken a formal course, I’d recommend it. Read books, pay attention, go to conferences – invest your time and money in understanding SEO. Don’t violate any rules, write content that is worthy of being linked to and then let people know you created it.

Are reviews ranking factors?

Duane: Reviews are about a trust-level factor. Mentions indicate sentiment at a consumer level. Google and Bing will not look past that.

Reviews are good and extraordinarily powerful. Millennials and Generation Z have a huge impact on consumer spending and on businesses, so it’s very important to understand what matters to them.

You want to hear from them and know what they think is good and bad. Millennials and Generation Z trust anonymous grouped results more than friends and family.

Generation Z is still figuring out what matters to them. They have no brand loyalty.

Do not auto-generate reviews. Absolutely not. If you were our client and you did that, we would fire you. That will destroy your domain and your SEO career.

Bruce: It’s all about trust. The Google Quality Rating Guidelines talks about expertness, authority and trust. These are the three most important things they look at when determining how a site should rank. (Learn more about the Google Quality Rating Guidelines.) There’s actually a fourth factor, too: maintenance.

How do you deal with spammy links. Getting spammy links every month. What is the best practice to clean up?

Bruce: We have a free guide to link pruning that gives you the complete how-to procedure.

TL;DR: Identify the bad links with Majestic, sort by lowest trust, add them to a disavow file. (Do a free check of your backlinks against backlinks others have disavowed at DisavowFiles.com.)

There are four terms worth understanding: organic, inorganic, transactional and navigational.

Organic links should be experts in my field and the link should support my business. Suppose I’m an SEO company and you link to me but you have a site about cowboy boots, Google won’t count that. Organic is subject-related.

Inorganic is when they’re not related and those will not be counted by Google. Google gives them no weight.

Then there’s transactional and navigational. Transactional is when you’re linked to with a keyword. If 80 percent of your inbound links are transactional, Google will see you as a spammer. Navigational is anchor text like “click here.”

Duane: We like to think of this in terms of bad actors. If a dentist links to me, that is irrelevant to me – I’m not associated with the world of dentistry. It’s not just about spam – it’s about cleaning up irrelevant links.

We have multiple sites, two of which sell similar offerings. Do you have any ideas on how to market one of them that’s newer without cannibalizing the established brand?

Duane: You need to take one of those horses into the backyard and let it go. The best way forward is to determine which one should live and migrate (301 redirect) the other. Focus on the stronger site and move forward.

Bruce: If your content is replicated, use canonical tags. I would at least consolidate links and PageRank. If you have multiple instances on multiple domains of the same source, Google will consider it spun content and it won’t benefit you on either site.

We changed domain names and 301 redirected our old site to our new site. Where do I check for bad links?

Bruce: Both sites. If a domain had a penalty and it was totally trashed, what you redirected it to will inherit the penalty. Analyze and purge both.

How important are things like heading tags, image names and alt tags in terms of ranking factors? If they are important, how do I convince my designers and developers to use those things correctly?

Duane: All these things are a fundamental piece of the work you need to do. If you don’t do it and your competitor does, your competitor will be shown ahead of you. If everything else is equal, they’re just a little more useful than you.

Bruce: According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, you must have an alt attribute. (Learn more about image optimization and alt attributes in Point 11 of our SEO Checklist). Also, a designer who uses a heading tag to format something is lazy.

Can you disavow an entire domain?

Bruce: Yes, but not a TLD.

Do you consider m-dot site for ecommerce?

Duane: No.

At what point do you make the jump to HTTPS?

Bruce: Now. Make it your initial 301. Spammers with 50,000 websites are not going to pay for those certificates. This is the cost of organic ranking.

I believe Google’s plan is to give a boost to HTTPS in the future. Officially, it’s just a tie breaker. But understand that Google is going to evolve to where HTTPS is going to be a requirement for top rankings.

Why do some exact match domains still rank well?

Bruce: I would assume they’re also legacy domains that have been around for quite a few years.

Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO services, SEM PPC, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk.

What’s New & Cool with Google AdWords & Analytics: Keynote by Jerry Dischler & Babak Pahlavan

What’s New & Cool with Google AdWords & Analytics: Keynote by Jerry Dischler & Babak Pahlavan was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.

With a keynote delivered by Googlers (complete with product announcements!), it’s a full house at SMX East 2016.

Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management for AdWords, and Babak Pahlavan, Senior Director of Measurement & Analytics, field questions from Search Engine Land editors Ginny Marvin, Greg Sterling and the SMX audience.

Read on to learn about:

Expanded text ads
Device bidding
Store visits
Audience Suite
Data Studio
Analytics Insights Cards
And announcements of new tools and features!

Ginny Marvin acts as a moderator for the SMX East keynote with Googlers Babak Pahlavan and Jerry Dischler.

Expanded Text Ads

Who’s succeeding with expanded text ads?

Editor’s note: Expanded text ads are the next generation of standard text ads on the Google Search Network and Google Display Network optimized for the mobile user experience. The format was rolled out to advertisers this past July.

Dischler: Advertisers who are using a dynamic, creative elements. Those who aren’t getting good results are only dipping their toe in the water. They’re only using one creative element, not going dynamic, aren’t optimizing as strongly.

What we’re hoping is that folks will jump in with both feet and start devoting the effort they devoted to standard text ads to expanded text ads.

Another observation: with branded terms, we’re seeing shorter headlines perform better.

Device Bidding for Ads

Earlier this year, device-level bidding was reintroduced. Talk a little bit about that decision to bring back separate device bidding and you expect to see advertisers take advantage of that?

Editor’s note: Here’s the quick and dirty background on device bidding. In 2013, Google took away its advertisers ability to bid differently based on the consumer’s device (mobile, tablet, desktop) in an initiative called Enhanced Campaigns. This year, device-level bidding was reintroduced to the Google advertising networks. Read Marvin’s write up on Search Engine Land for more on how advertisers are organizing campaigns by device.

Dischler: What we were seeing was a number of advertisers come to us with use cases for tablets that were really different. Let’s say you’re looking for NY hotels on your mobile phone vs. looking for NY hotels on your tablet. On the mobile phone, you’re going to have much higher conversion rate and would want to bid aggressively accordingly. Folks are thinking in a very mobile-first way, and this was happening more and more.

In the time before Enhanced Campaigns, we were seeing mobile avoidance. But here is the opposite. Advertisers have fully embraced mobile but the controls we had weren’t robust enough.

Take a look at your current bids – they represent a blended ROI. If you are able to get better performance on desktop and worse performance on tablet, adjust them in a way that is symmetric. In general what you should be doing is looking at your blended target across platforms in order to set your bid. This will achieve the right ROI mix. You have to figure out what’s right for you.

Store Visits Metric in AdWords

Google announced that they were expanding the store visits metric and that more than one billion store visits have been measured. Where is this going? What are the metrics today? Why is this important?

Dischler: In this multi-device, mobile-focused world, you should be measuring entire ROI whether they’re online or offline or calls, etc.

We want to help you work in an omni-channel way and measure the total value of your ad spend.

In retail, where 90+ percent of sales are offline, or in auto where 99.9% of sales are offline, it’s very important that you be able to measure online ROI.

For many advertisers, we’re seeing that the offline benefit is greater than the online benefit and we want advertisers to be able to measure that as easily as possible.

Earlier this week, Brad Bender announced that we’re adding the store visits metric to display, as well.

We have hundreds of millions of people who’ve opted into location history. We take that anonymized data and aggregate it, combine it with tradition signals including Google Maps and 3D modeling of building, Wi-Fi data and more to increase precision. We also have more than 5 million human reviewers working with us. Google has more than 99% accuracy with its store visits.

Google Analytics 360 Suite

Regarding the enterprise Audience Suite, how does audience targeting work and what does it mean for marketers?

Dischler: Advertisers who are using our RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads) say that this is the biggest change we’ve made that allows them to target their customers. Some largely sophisticated advertisers are still hesitant to experiment with RLSA, and I’d really encourage them to try it out.

Announcements

What’s going with Google Analytics Data Studio?

Pahlavan: Data Studio is our dashboard and reporting tool. There are two fundamental things about it that people love.

First, you can be up and running to do reporting by just connecting to the data sources.

And there’s collaborative sharing. The notion of collaboration is something we really focused on – you can very easily share a report across organizations and make the data available to everyone. The free version and enterprise version are available in 21 countries as of today; it was only available to U.S. advertisers before.

What new tools are coming?

Pahlavan: Our objective is to enable measurement for all businesses, no matter the size. Today we are announcing the free version of Optimize; sign up here: g.co/optimize.

Smart Goals were created for AdWords advertisers to be able to take advantage of crowd-sourced machine learning analytics that will help inform marketers of sessions that likely would have converted. How does this work? 

Pahlavan: We have a set of investments around how to leverage Google machine learning capabilities to make business a lot more efficient when leveraging the data they have. It’s being used by tens of thousands of advertisers. You can get a preview of what the performance could look like even if you’re not yet using it.

Recently, the Google Analytics mobile app launched with Insights cards. Can you talk about what’s going on with that? 

Pahlavan: Insights cards is in the bucket of our efforts around leveraging Google’s machine learn capability. Inside our Google Analytics app, it looks at a series of signals and tells you things like products that are performing much better. It looks at all permutations automatically. What channels are under or over performing? What are the areas you should pay attention to more? These are the kind of things it looks at. Insights cards will also be available on desktop in the future.

Will expanded texts ads be available for call-only ads?

Dischler: We’re in the process of testing out some things.

Do you want to talk about the thoughts behind the changes to Keyword Planner as far as data available to non-paying customers?

Dischler: We had this situation where what we wanted to do is have good actors be able to use our Keyword Planner and keep some bad actors out.

Our limits are really low so the vast majority of advertisers who have any spend should be able to use our tool. We can now accommodate most use cases while keeping the bad actors out.

Does Google Analytics have a plan to better address referrer spam?

Pahlavan: We have an active project internally. It’s been going on for sometimes to combat spam traffic. I can’t share the stats externally but this is something we take very seriously. We are constantly monitoring.

Some people just rely on Google Analytics for tracking and goals rather than implementing the AdWords pixel. What do you recommend?

Dischler: We recommend implementation for both.

Pahlavan: The have complementary use cases.

Are you going to add more and more ads to the search results page? Will organic disappear?

Q & A with @google‘s @jdischler & @babakph at @smx. “Are you going to add more and more ads? Will organic disappear? #SMX #SEO #PPC pic.twitter.com/xJnVCtWbFm

— Kristi Kellogg (@KristiKellogg) September 28, 2016

Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, SEM PPC services, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk.

How to Strengthen Your Retail Presence on Amazon, Pinterest, Facebook & Polyvore

How to Strengthen Your Retail Presence on Amazon, Pinterest, Facebook & Polyvore was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.

When it comes to driving retail sales online, Google is the biggest game in town but it isn’t the only game in town.

Revenue is revenue and you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t explore possibilities beyond Google — we’re talking major opportunities on Amazon, Polyvore and eBay.

SEM pros Chris Humber and Elizabeth Marsten leverage Amazon, Pinterest, Facebook and more to drive traffic and sales. Read on for their ecommerce expertise.

Strengthening Your Retail Presence on Amazon with Chris Humber

Chris Humber, the head of search at GroupM, starts with a fast tip: within seven to 10 days of optimizing your product database, you will see an increase in visibility.

Where do consumers go when they’re ready to purchase products? Many turn to their local stores. They walk in and get it … it’s immediate gratification. This is traditional shelf space.

But what about digital shelf space?

Amazon plays a key role in the shopping journey. Consumers use Amazon as a top destination for product searches.

44% of consumers start their product search with Amazon.
39% of consumers say Amazon has better product search capability while 8% say Google does.
43% of U.S. shoppers say the main reason they choose Amazon is the ability to intuitively find or predict exactly what they want more quickly.
73% of shoppers say they will make a purchase on Amazon at least once during the holiday season.
87% of shoppers say they will check Amazon at least once during their shopping process this holiday season.

Here are the leading e-retailers beyond Google:

Amazon
Wal-Mart
Target
Best Buy
The Home Depot
Kohl’s
Macy’s
Walgreens
Sears

What about social shopping? Sites like Pinterest, Polyvore, ModCloth, Wanelo, OpenSky and Fancy are frequented more and more.

Pinterest is where the world’s ideas are catalogued and stored, and it’s also one of the most advanced visual-based search engines that exists today.

On Pinterest, 55% of users shop for products, not to talk with friends or brands. Compare this to 12% on Facebook and 12% on Instagram, according to Forrester research.

Optimizing Your E-Retail Presence

Traditional optimization tactics can help your e-retail efforts in numerous ways:

Rankings
Relevancy
Traffic and conversions
Version control and syndication
Organic, traditional search results

To identify keywords, leverage multiple tools. Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA) Premium provides your top 100 search terms each month.

Understand the search landscape beyond Google. Look at organic search results with tools like STAT, BrightEdge, SEMRush, SpyFu, AdGooRoo, Mozenda and Deep Crawl. Determine what has the top share of voice on search (paid and organic) and Amazon (paid and organic) to pinpoint market trends.

Don’t forget to optimize your product pages!

4 Best Practices for Increasing Conversion Rate

21 reviews is the sweet spot. At this point, there is a 3% to 5% increase in conversion rate (depending on the presence of negative reviews); after that the increase drops off.
Use 3 or more images.
Availability – always have your product in stock.
Have at least one piece of supplemental content.

Top 5 Factors that Correlate with a Better Ranking

Amazon Best Sellers Rank
Items Sold (fulfilled by Amazon)
Keywords in product title
Prime-eligible products
Discounts

Strengthening Your Retail Presence Beyond Google By Chris Humber from Search Marketing Expo – SMX

 

Get Found More, Sell More on Pinterest, Facebook & More with Elizabeth Marsten

Elizabeth Marsten, the director of paid search at CommerceHub, is going to dive into some other platforms. Some of them, like Polyvore, you may have never heard of.

Pinterest

100 million active users
80% of Pinterest users access the platform via mobile
Promoted Pins drive 5X more incremental in-store sales per impression
Retargeted Ads target at act-alike audiences increased CTRs by up to 63% and reach by 30X in early testing
Pinterest referrals have an average order value of $50
Rich Pins are free but you need metadata on that page of your site.
Product Feed needed for Promoted and Buyable pins. You maintain ability to edit or designate which products are promoted. Buyable requires a partner to handle the transaction.
Retargeting (you need a Marketing Developer Partner)
Video (you need a Pinterest Account Team and this is not yet available to everyone)

Facebook Dynamic Product Ads

CommerceHub has seen an average return on ad spend (ROAS) among clients at 900-1200%. These clients have product catalogs ranging from 350 to 1,000.

Keep in mind that this is still a remarketing method. You first need engagement channels to create audiences. It cannibalizes other channels with a last-click attribution. Use your revenue numbers, not just Facebook’s.

Yahoo

Some useful things to leverage on Yahoo:

Custom Audiences for Search Retailer for an unnamed big box store saw:

225% increase in CTR
230% increase in CR
51% reduction in CPA


Search Retargeting on Native for an unnamed big box store saw:

23% conversions from native
14% lower CPA on native than search (text) ads



Polyvore

This Yahoo-owned social commerce site’s users are 84% female and 50% of those females are millennials under the age of 34. On the site, you make “sets,” which are outfits. More than 3 million sets are created each month.

Marsten said ladies shopping on these sites have money to burn. The average order on Polyvore is $270. Comparatively, the average order value on Instagram is $228, Twitter is $155 and Facebook is $130.

Fast facts about Polyvore:

41% increase in clicks YoY
27% increase in sales Yoy
11% Decrease in cost

Connexity

This marketplace connects retailers and influencers. Note: influencers lift purchase intent by 2X. 49% of users rely on recommendations from influencers.

eBay

They have partnered with Facebook to monetize message apps (i.e. sending auctions through Messenger) and create collections for sharing. They’ve adopted AMP. They’ve adopted ASIN pages, which improve SERPs to be static pages, not auctions that have ended.

Build Your Own Awesome Mix Tape – Retail Search Beyond Google: Get Found More, Sell More By Elizabeth Marsten from Search Marketing Expo – SMX




Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, SEM PPC services, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk.

Creating Better Ad Copy: PPC Problem-Solving for B2B & B2C

Creating Better Ad Copy: PPC Problem-Solving for B2B & B2C was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.

There are more than 1.2 million advertisers in the Google Search Network. With so many business and brands competing to show up in paid search ads, how can you stand out?

Standing out is something search engine marketing leaders Pauline Jakober, Virginia Tonning and Marty Weintraub spend a lot of time thinking about.

From tips to crafting headlines to the results of testing ad copy to the effect of ad extensions, these three shared their insights and tips at SMX East 2016 through case studies and experience. Here’s what they had to say.

From left to right, Marty Weintraub, Pauline Jakober and Virginia Tonning on the SMX East 2016 stage.

Testing B2C Ads with Pauline Jakober

Are you tired of seeing the same ads? So is Pauline Jakober, the CEO of Group Twenty Seven. She asks the audience, how can we be different? Will being different increase our bottom line?

Here are the things that Jakober starts with when creating ads. First, there’s an initial client interview and questionnaire. She talks to many people, including customer service reps, the sales teams and the product team. She looks at customer testimonials and customer complaints, and looks at competitor ads. She also learns the customer pain points and works to understand her audience

One of her clients is a B2C business that sells all types of dance shoes. Jakober learned the following things about her audience of dancers:

They replace shoes often.
They break in a few pairs at a time.
They want shoes that mold to their feet, are lightweight and flexible.
Their feet hurt.
They are brand conscious, and once they trust a brand, they stick with it.

In an effort to see the difference being different can make, Jakober set about testing whether or not a message really matters and what exactly can be achieved in the 80 characters available in a search ad.

For the dance shoe retailer, Jakober came up with this industry standard ad:

From Hip Hop to Jazz, Shop Our Shoe Brands For Your Favorite Style of Dance.

As well as ads that addressed the pain points she discovered during her research.

Always Replacing Your Dance Shoes? Buy a Few Pairs Instead. Buy More, Save More.
Sore Feet and Toes? Protect Them By Wearing Top Quality Dance Shoes. Shop Now.
Buy Shoes Or Slippers That Are Lightweight And Will Mold To Your Foot’s Shape.

Why Are Text Ads All The Same? By Pauline Jakober from Search Marketing Expo – SMX

 

B2B Ads: Leverage Everything and Think Smarter with Virginia Tonning

Virginia Tonning, the global manager of paid search at Schneider Electric, is interested in finding out how to take advantage of the precious space of characters in an ad – space is especially critical to her as the name Schneider Electric takes up so much space.

Use Ad Extensions: a callout, a structured snippet, a review, sitelinks, link to an app, call, location, etc.
When Tonning added more ad extensions to her clients’ ads, she saw a 23% higher CTR.
Sitelinks give you an opportunity to highlight other services people might not know you offer. Think of the space as a digital bill board.
We all think we know who our customer is. But that’s not enough. Test to find out what they’re interested in. When using the buzz word “Arc Flash,” there was a 43% higher CTR.
Consolidate similar messages/offerings. Don’t confuse your customer by having three competing ads come up from your company.
Help your national or international brand compete locally where it makes sense. Target by zip code and offer free shipping or same-day shipping; local rebate offers; and messages based on local events.
When we look so closely at our brand, we can forget what the customer is looking for. Do your research. Search for terms you are bidding on as well as known competitors.
Test your headlines. Tonning saw non-branded ads (i.e. brand name removed) perform significantly higher than branded ads for Schneider Electric, to the tune of a 96% higher CTR. The takeaway? Test.

Stand Out In a Sea of Search By Virginia Tonning from Search Marketing Expo – SMX

 

Marty Weintraub: Building Fantastic Ads in a Variable-based & Human Driven Creative Framework

The founder of aimClear Marty Weintraub asserts that there is a waning need for marketers when it comes to ad copy and targeting. Analysts are taking over tasks that were once the marketers’. Furthermore, in five to eight years, artificial intelligence will be at the point where AI will be able to write the most high-performance ad creative.

Ad creative is still a mostly human endeavor, so he’ll take a look at the tools available to you. With expanded ads, you can take advantage of so much more SERP real estate and have more opportunity to be creative. He’s particularly excited about mobile ads because they take up so much space.

Crafting Headline Theories: Nimble Brainstorming

The most natural thing to do is think of the finished product headline. But don’t do that. Instead, theorize and come up with every possible way to talk about something. Rather than think of the finished headline, Weintraub advises marketers to think terms of theories.

Get Approval for Creative Elements, NOT Finished Ads

Get approval for creative elements, not complete ads. It allows you more flexibility. Lock down the two keywords that are most important and key to the ad and go from there. It looks like this:

In addition to looking at synonyms, look at definitions. Use the Google Dictionary; at the bottom of every entry, there is a graph that shows a word’s use over time. This can be helpful in choosing the right word.

Google Dictionary’s use over time graph for the word “intentional.”

His final tip is to make every part of the purchase path cohesive. Every part of the funnel should work together. The person who designs the ad should design the landing page, and the pages that follow. They shouldn’t be disparate experiences.

Building Fantastic Ads In a Variable Based & Human Driven Creative Framework By Marty Weintraub from Search Marketing Expo – SMX




Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, SEM PPC services, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk.

The Long-Anticipated Real-Time Penguin Is Live

The Long-Anticipated Real-Time Penguin Is Live was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Editor’s note: We’re updating this post as we get more news and comments.

Big news in the world of search this morning. Google released a major update to its link analyzing algorithm, Penguin, today. This latest update is the long-anticipated upgrade that will help sites previously penalized by Penguin get out from under the SEO shadow of spammy paid links.

If you’re an SEO services or penalty assessment client of Bruce Clay, Inc., expect to hear from your analyst with a Penguin Update impact report ASAP.

The announcement was made by Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes this morning on the Google Webmaster Blog.

As the fourth significant enhancement since its initial launch in 2012, Penguin 4.0’s most noteworthy upgrades include:

Real-time data refreshes as part of the core ranking algorithm and
A more granular approach to the way it filters spam.

Bruce Clay, Inc.’s VP Duane Forrester‘s response to the Penguin update? “About time! But now the real work for many begins. Those working hard on managing their link profiles or cleaning up old link building programs have reason to be optimistic. Those thinking old tactics will still work are about to fall on hard times.”

What a Real-Time Update Means

“With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page,” writes Illyes.

With real-time data refreshes, Penguin becomes part of Google’s core algorithm, which “also means we’re not going to comment on future refreshes.”

We turned to Duane again for comment: “A real-time factoring of link quality into the mix means as soon as they see it, they decide. Everything is on the fly, so it’s the algo at work here, making the call on good, bad and ugly as it sees links. If you’re still thinking buying links works, you’d better be careful. Those days are behind us.”

What a Granular Filter Means

In his blog post, Illyes writes: “Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.”

SEO industry news outlet Search Engine Land requested further comment from Google on what “granular” means in this context.

Previously, Penguin was a sitewide penalty. So, does being “more granular” mean that it’s now page-specific? Yes and no, it seems. We asked Google for more clarity about this, and we were told: “It means it affects finer granularity than sites. It does not mean it only affects pages.”

More Answers on the Penguin Update

Illyes took to Twitter to answer SEOs’ questions about the latest Penguin update.

On how many pages are affected by the Penguin Update:

@emerikusz_ we don’t have a number to share. The number is never stable with realtime algorithms: today it may be 1, tomorrow 42

— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 23, 2016

On whether the roll-out of Penguin is complete:

@dr_pete it will never be “complete” for a recrawl+reindex may change its effect on pages any time.

— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 23, 2016

On how manual actions are now handled:

@SEO @JohnMu yes, manual actions haven’t changed with this launch

— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 23, 2016

Stay tuned as we learn more on how Penguin 4.0 is affecting our clients’ sites.

Keep It Fresh: Steps for Updating Your Website Content

Keep It Fresh: Steps for Updating Your Website Content was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

There are four pillars of SEO content: expertise, authority, trust (E-A-T) and maintenance. These are exactly the qualities search engines look at to rank your site. Google even says so outright in its Quality Rating Guidelines.

To demonstrate expertise, you publish comprehensive content about your topic.

To demonstrate authority, people share your content through links and linkless mentions.

To demonstrate trust, you publish examples of your successful projects, client testimonials and reviews, and make your privacy and security statements clear.

To demonstrate maintenance, you keep your content up to date and ever-relevant.

Be mindful of these four things and you’ll be on the right track for developing high ranking, highly engaging and useful content for users and search engines.

Here we drill down into maintenance — keeping your content up to date and ever-relevant.

BCI is deep in the process of a full content inventory to maintain and upkeep BruceClay.com. With this process fresh on our minds, we walk you through the full program on how to update website content.

Read through from start to finish or skip to a section with the links below:

Define and set up conversions
Inventory content, identifying updates
Analyze current performance
Get user feedback
Put your strategy in place
Update content
Test changes

Game Plan

Wrap your head around the situation that is your website. You know what you want it to do for you: assist your business. To get your game plan in order you want to:

Get specific about the goals your website should accomplish for your business and its visitors. This is where you get your conversions in order.
Have a full and clear understanding about the content that exists on your domain. This is where you take an inventory of your content.

Define and Set Up Conversions

You have probably already defined and set up your goals in Google Analytics at some point but it’s worth doing again — from scratch.

BCI brought together our managers and stakeholders to define every conversion and micro-conversion we want tracked on the site.

List the conversions you want performed on your site. Maybe there are new ones since you last did this exercise. Maybe you forgot about something that you needed to be reminded of.

If you didn’t have a list of conversions as part of your website strategy from before, now you do. Let it guide your site design and content offerings.

Conversion examples include:

Quote request
Phone call
Store locator
Appointment scheduled
Subscription
Video viewed

With your conversions defined, your team’s techie can match your conversions and micro-conversions with online actions.

One can configure goals in Google Analytics with great flexibility and granularity. For instance, Destination goals are usually thank you or order confirmation pages. Event goals can track things like downloads and clicks. Think of Destination goals as the page a visitor lands on and Event goals as actions a visitor takes.

Read all about creating your goals in analytics here.

Inventory Content, Identifying Updates

If you find the process of organization cathartic, you’re about to get your zen on. You’ll start with a crawl of your webpages and end with a clear view of the content to update, optimize or even cut.

For the last website crawl I needed, I turned to my team techie who wrote some custom code that spidered a site and dropped into a spreadsheet the following:

URL
HTTP status
First-level directory
Last modified date
Title tag
Description tag
Keywords tag
H1 tag
External links
Snippet of body text

Then I add columns to sort through what has outdated content and pages that are 404s are other errors. I also identify the pages that are the main theme hub pages that should be getting link juice from deep, supporting content. A column that spells out the goal of the page or goal that it supports is critical too. By the end of this, you have a clear view in of the shape and focuses of the site.

Take an inventory of your web pages. Instead of using the Dewey Decimal System, you’ll catalog your content in Excel.

How to inventory your website content is a topic hole here on BruceClay.com, so for more how-to info, I’ll point you to Facebook UX expert and content strategist Jonathon Colman’s recommended hub on all things content inventory related.

Dig Into Content

Before you freshen up, you’re going to get your hands dirty. Start digging into the pages.

Analyze Current Performance

To analyze current site performance, check your analytics and figure out what people are doing on your site. What keywords are bringing in organic search traffic, social traffic and other sources of traffic? What pages are visitors hanging around on a while and which pages are they bouncing from? Use this data to inform your priorities and next steps.

Get User Feedback

Along the way you’ll be reading your website. It’s so close to you yet it may have been on autopilot for a while now. It’s time to rekindle your familiarity with the site navigation, information, conversion paths, search traffic. Ask friends to read pages. Other eyes see things you won’t.

Do user tests. Hire UserTesting.com to do some user tests on your site. Or have a friend navigate a conversion path. Draw up a scenario that happened at the office today and ask your friend to try to navigate to the solution. Do they get hung up anywhere? Have them talk as they’re walking through your site. Specify an action they should try to accomplish and record their experience. This information is critical to your understanding of how your customers are experiencing your site.

Update and Test

Put Your Strategy in Place

At this point you’ll have an understanding of what users are coming to your site for, what they’re doing when they’re there, and anything they might be having trouble with on the site. From this understanding you can make improvements. This happens in two ways:

Creating new content to address unanswered questions and needs.
Updating current content so that it’s optimized for search and the user experience.

Consider site architecture. This is the point where you’ve taken inventory of the pages of your site and can decide whether the way the pages are connected is the best way.

Are you familiar with siloing? Does your site’s hierarchy match the way a user navigates your site? Basically, each big idea or category of your website is a pillar of your website. There will be a main page on that topic, usually reachable through the main navigation. Depending on the size of the site or the topic, there may be a group of pages containing supporting content on that topic.

All the pages about a topic would link together as appropriate to answer a reader’s questions on the topic. This gets a little technical, but only link from one silo to another from the top landing pages; this is done to maintain a concentrated theme in that section of the site, increasing chances of good rankings due to subject relevance.

So in short, there’s three things to think about at this stage:

Navigation that fits what users are looking for when they hit your site.
Information structured as strong themes with supporting content.
Linking throughout the site in a way that maintains the individual themes.

Addressing a website’s architecture might be considered an update or the changes may be drastic enough that it’s like starting new. Whichever the case, the site architecture structures your site as a topic expert. From here you can position and build up content.

As you create and update content, link thoughtfully to support site themes across the site and help your users navigate to the content they need on your topics of expertise.

A clear site architecture is key to building your content themes. Design your site as an architectural masterpiece of the finest quality content.

Update Content

Update old content and add new content. Break out that spreadsheet. Add rows for new pages that will need to be written under your site architecture. For all new pages, assign keywords that will ensure that page supports its theme.

Write content that informs, engages, sells, serves, collects information … whatever it is the page is meant to do, including containing keywords and a call to action to move them down the intended path.

For all pages that already existed, make sure the assigned keywords are appropriate, and also make sure they’re actually used in the content on the page. Use a tool like the SEOToolSet Single Page Analyzer (free SPA here) for a report of content optimization, including the phrases most commonly used on the page.

Ask yourself if the page accomplishes what it’s intended to, and if it’s clear what you want the visitor to do. Make sure the answer is “yes” before you check off the columns for body content and calls to action on the spreadsheet. Consider where a page links to help a user through the funnel and discovering more useful content.

A couple additional tips:

Assign priority. Take a list of site pages and silos and give them a rank of importance to the business goals. On your spreadsheet, indicate the goals a landing page or silo is responsible for. Key pages and/or sections of your site can be addressed first. You can use this spreadsheet throughout the refresh project to manage the updates to keywords, body content, Meta data and calls to action. Create a column for each of those essential elements on your spreadsheet as well.
Set deadlines. Time management 101. If you have set dates for when you want certain pages or sections of the site reviewed, edited, optimized and published, the project is likely to keep moving forward.

Test Changes

All the insight you got from asking friends and testers to use your site? You should get that for your new content, too. Testing lets you serve different versions of a page to segments of your visitors and gives you information about how each performs.

Use the testing tool Content Experiments in Google Analytics and see which versions of your new page (or old pages with new modifications) get more of your desired actions. This overview will get you up to speed on Content Experiments, how it works and what you can do.

Now isn’t that nice and fresh?

Let us make your content work harder for you.

Our SEO content services are driven by SEO objectives. We develop content that feeds the appetites of search engines and visitors and builds a loyal lifetime customer base. Learn more.

This post was originally published on Aug. 9, 2012! #refresh

What Is the Facebook Algorithm?

What Is the Facebook Algorithm? was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Photo credit: Facebook Newsroom

The Facebook algorithm takes into consideration engagement, relevance, timeliness, and thousands of other factors in an effort to populate people’s News Feeds with more of the stuff they want to see, as inferred by Facebook.

Unlike sites where everything you post automatically shows up for every person who follows you, Facebook uses an algorithm to dictate what content appears in an individual’s News Feed. In Facebook’s official words, “The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you. To do this, we use ranking to order stories based on how interesting we believe they are to you.”[1]

In a sentence, the Facebook algorithm weighs factors to determine on a post-by-post basis whether a post is qualified to pass into an individual’s News Feed. And given Facebook’s impressive stats (1.71 billion monthly active users at last count[2]), it’s worth finding out how to extend your content’s reach organically on this platform.

What’s in the Facebook Algorithm?

Facebook calculates the authority and importance of Facebook Pages based on several factors — the most prominent of which is social interactions. The social site rewards engagement, so the algorithm considers the ratio of engagements to total number of followers.

The number of people “liking” your Page isn’t the main criterion. Content creators having real interactions with people, even if the audience size is smaller, carries more weight in the algorithm than an account with thousands of mute (and possibly fake) followers.

But that’s on the Page level. Individual posts have ranking factors, too.

The engagement cues that count in the algo include likes, clicks, comments and shares. But the social network also looks at the length of time spent viewing a post in the News Feed as an indicator of content people want to see more of.[3] The lesson here isn’t surprising — quality counts.

The News Feed filtration system — once called EdgeRank but now simply referred to broadly as the Facebook algorithm — takes into consideration as many as 100,000 individually weighted factors to deliver the most authoritative, relevant, and timely content to individuals.[4]

Sheldon explains the friendship algorithm on The Big Bang Theory. His algorithm has more to do with real, in-person friendship and less to do with news feeds, but you get the idea.

Of those 100,000 considerations, the three original EdgeRank factors — Affinity, Weight, and Time Decay — are still relevant and prominent ranking factors. In other words, EdgeRank hasn’t gone away. Its principles have simply been folded into a much larger, more advanced contemporary Facebook algorithm.

4 Factors the Facebook Algorithm Takes into Consideration

Facebook keeps adjusting its algorithm. It’s not just trying to find the right balance of ads and content, but also the right mix of shares from various sources.

Interaction a post is generating: Not just how much, but also what type — liking, commenting, clicking, sharing, or time spent viewing. Each of the interactions has its own weight depending on the amount of effort it takes to perform.
Who made the interaction: How directly connected is the user to the poster? It’s based on manual friendship designations, the user’s preferences, closeness inferred by interaction, and other factors.
When the post was made: Time decay happens because the News Feed rewards freshness.
Post popularity: If a post is losing the freshness edge because of time decay, but lots of people are still actively commenting on or sharing it, the engagement can trigger a bump that expands the post reach.

4 More Factors Brand Pages Need to Know to Increase Organic Reach

Social sharing is a critical part of content marketing. But Facebook isn’t going to appreciate a business Page using Facebook just to promote its own content. Short of boosting posts with actual money, here are a few tips to help you keep your posts circulating through the network.

Don’t use click-bait: Facebook’s algorithm weeds out click-bait headlines, the kind that give little information about what the person will find if they click through.[5] So make sure to put enough description in your headlines.
Link the right way: Facebook favors links shared as link posts. The algo frowns on image and status posts containing a link in the text.[5] You’ll get even more reach if you leave off the link altogether! Sharing in a variety of formats is best, with and without links. With our own Facebook Page (see here), we get 10X more organic reach on posts without a link — probably because Facebook likes keeping people on its own site.
Mobile site load time must be fast: To improve the mobile UX, Facebook announced that “website performance and a person’s network connection” are considered when delivering promoted (paid) posts.[6] We can assume that how fast a page opens for a mobile user can affect the reach of organic link posts, as well. (Tip: Publishers can make sure their content loads fast using Facebook Instant Articles.)
Go for engagement: The social network’s tips for effective posts include: keep it short; use big, beautiful images; and respond to people’s comments quickly.[7]

Want to boost your social media engagement? Our social media services may be the answer!

Sources:

1 – http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/07/updated-controls-for-news-feed/

2 – http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

3 – https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/04/news-feed-fyi-more-articles-you-want-to-spend-time-viewing/

4 – http://marketingland.com/edgerank-is-dead-facebooks-news-feed-algorithm-now-has-close-to-100k-weight-factors-55908

5 – http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/news-feed-fyi-click-baiting/

6 – https://www.facebook.com/business/news/improving-mobile-site-performance

7 – https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-page-effective-posts

Editor’s Note: This is an update of an article originally posted by Chelsea Adams on Sept. 30, 2013.