UPDATE

Facebook IPO By the Numbers

While there will no doubt be tremendous demand for Facebook stock today, as it begins trading at 11 AM Eastern time, there should be plenty of it available. As David Angosti reported for Search Engine Journal, the social network raised its target IPO price range to $34 to $38. The move prompted a number of Facebook's major stakeholders to increase the number of shares they plan to offer - and in some cases, that number went way up. I am not a stock broker; I don't even play one on the Internet. But I think even the people who crunch these kinds of numbers for a living would be amazed by the c...

Using Semantics for Keyword Research

Sujan Patel wrote a fascinating article on this topic for Search Engine Journal. After explaining how Google figures out what searchers mean when they enter keywords, he discussed five steps you can take in your keyword research that will help you get found more often by your target audience. I'm unspeakably grateful that we're passed the days when optimizing your keywords meant pick a single target keyword and cram it into your web content as many times as you can, as Patel characterizes the obsolete style. He correctly notes that That ship has sailed. Thanks in part to Google's Penguin u...

Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson Resigns

Activist Yahoo shareholder and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb brought the truth about Thompson to light, discovering that the CEO did hold the financial degree he claimed on his resume, but not the computer science one. Normally, one would think that Thompson's experience would make this a non-issue. As Greg Stirling pointed out, he had many years of experience as a successful tech executive in Silicon Valley...the paper was a technicality of sorts - not to minimize the ethics issue. Apparently it's the ethics issue that Loeb couldn't abide. He pushed hard, not letting the issue die; it bec...

Bing Launches Social Sidebar

In its blog post on the subject, the Bing team describes this as the most significant update to Bing since we launched three years ago. They'll be phasing it in over the next few weeks. So what can we expect? Danny Sullivan got a preview of the new features to try out. He noted that the new design featured three columns with Core Search, Snapshot and Sidebar panes. It comes across as a very functional design, and a surprisingly useful way to incorporate the social graph into search. For example, let's take a look at the Social Sidebar. It presents as a vertical gray sidebar to the right of y...

Write Content For the Four Buying Personalities

Once again, I owe a hat tip to Stoney deGeyter for discussing this point. In his article, though, he draws indirectly on a philosophy dating back to Hippocrates. Back in those days, and for a long time afterwards, doctors believed that both illness and one's personality stemmed from four humors, and treatment aimed to balance these humors. While science discredited the medical part of this theory, it turns out the idea of four different basic personalities has some merit. To be honest, we're all a little too complicated to be easily broken down into one of four categories. But in trying to b...

Write SEO Content for Your Visitor`s Goals

Stoney deGeyter covered this topic recently. He approached it from the perspective of building a mental image of visitor personas. You form a persona based on a visitor's motivation. What do they need? Why are they on your website? Once you can answer those questions, you can think about what kind of content will help your visitors, and create it accordingly. I don't disagree with deGeyter, but I like to think more in terms of goals. If you really want to try to think like one of your customers, don't just ask yourself what they need; ask yourself what they're trying to accomplish. If your w...

Guest Posting: How to Find and Seduce Your Editor

I'd like to tip my hat to two people here. The first one is Matt Goffrey. He's written articles for SEO Chat for the last quarter, and he's done just about everything a guest poster should do. The second one is Matt Beswick. He wrote a piece for Search Engine Journal on how to cheat at guest posting and get away with it. Some of the tips I'll be including here I got from his article - but I'll be talking about them from the other side of the desk. So let's assume, for the moment, that you're an expert in your field, and you want to find someone - or many someones - who will appreciate that ex...

Title Tags: Not Just for Keywords Anymore

First, let me give credit where it's due. I just finished reading a post by Michael Martinez in which he digs more deeply into this so-called basic topic than anyone I've seen. Martinez's contrarian views, eloquently expressed and supported, can make any reader rethink a cherished position. If he's right, then the way most of us do our page titles or title tags is - well, not wrong, exactly, but a little misguided. We all know how you're supposed to write title tags, right? Start by doing some keyword research for your topic, build a title using those keywords, then lather, rinse, repeat. Make...

Penguin Joins Panda in Google Web Spam War

Google webspam guru Matt Cutts explained the rationale behind Penguin in a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog. He noted that We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings. Penguin represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. It's supposed to decrease the rankings of sites that violate Google's terms of service. Cutts gave two examples of websites whose ranks he expected to see drop after Penguin. One displayed egregious keyword stuffing. The ...

Facebook Releases Negative Report Before IPO

According to a quick item from David Angotti for Search Engine Land, Facebook reported that its net income fell 12 percent in the first quarter of 2012. Looking at the previous quarter's total revenues, the latest quarter saw total revenues fall six percent, to $1.06 billion. That may not be cause for serious concern, however - especially when you consider that the previous quarter included the holiday shopping season, and Facebook makes its money from ads. Indeed, the company itself noted that the downturn was due to seasonal trends. Compare Facebook's revenues to the year-ago quarter, and ...
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