Some are newer, others are longstanding, but I wanted to gather them together and focus on the benefits for news and content sites.

A key point of emphasis is that the first two items are reflective of a growing trend away from the website as we know it. Traditional websites will continue to be the primary digital home for news organizations, but the lines are shifting and more change is coming.

Are you taking full advantage of these opportunities?

1. Hosted and Mobile-Specific Article Formats

As a user I like the new hosted and mobile-specific article formats, be that Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News Format or Google’s AMP project. Fast and clean is a good combination, especially on mobile.

For publishers there is promise, however it’s too soon to say if the pros will outweigh cons such as giving up some control and/or technical complications. The open source nature of AMP is a plus but I’m not a fan of having to create separate URLs. Regardless, streamlined templates is where things are heading so it is important to experiment and learn how to make the most of it.

2. App Indexing and App Store Optimization

App Indexing for both Google and Apple is another growing trend. There hasn’t been a major payoff for editorial content yet but with digital activity increasingly moving to mobile this is an important opportunity to take advantage of.

Emily Grossman wrote a couple of excellent articles on app indexing for Apple Search/iOS and Google Search that are well worth reading.

App store optimization (ASO) is another component that is important to dial in. For a good overview of the basic ranking factors see the checklists that Stephanie Beadell put together for the App Store and Google Play.

3. Structured Data Markup

Structured data markup and the schema.org vocabulary continue to grow in importance for conveying relevancy and taking advantage of additional features in the search results. For publishers schema.org article, video and organization markup are particularly important, and the new itemList markup for section pages has potential too.

The support information on the Google Developers site covers the main opportunities. It’s great that Google is increasing support for JSON-LD because generally speaking this makes it easier to manage and troubleshoot the markup.

4. Google News

It’s no secret that Google News needs a major overhaul; technical problems and indexation oddities are a frequent occurrence for most news sites. We spend a lot of time helping clients to troubleshoot news crawl errors that a more sophisticated Google News could eliminate altogether.

Despite all that, Google News and particularly the “In the news” module in the Web search results remain strong opportunities for publishers, so it is important to optimize for news search as best as possible. Also take advantage of additional opportunities such as the “news_keywords” meta tag and Editors’ Picks RSS feeds.

On the positive side, Google News has improved its outreach and support in the last year or two, making it easier for publishers to get information and assistance. Google News Publisher Center also appears to have greater impact than when it first launched, so be sure to submit all relevant information and actively maintain your profile.

5. Site Speed

Site performance is something that Google continues to push, and since it affects both the on-site user experience and SEO making improvements is worthwhile.

The exact SEO impact is difficult to quantify with certainty, but publishers that invest in site speed efforts typically experience gains in organic search performance. Both through improved ranking signals and indirectly through increased user activity and engagement signals.

Google PageSpeed Insights should be treated as no more than a rough proxy, especially because the scores are influenced in part by external resources outside of a publisher’s control. But it is a place to start, and when combined with other evaluation and monitoring tools like WebPagetest, Pingdom Tools and Rigor it can help you to develop a plan.

6. Panda and Other Algorithmic Changes

Google Panda and other forms of algorithmic filtering continue to impact even reputable brands with quality content. The long, slow rollout currently underway for Panda 4.2 may ultimately prove to be a good thing (i.e. fewer sudden, radical changes) but it’s also left some quality sites that were hit by Panda 4.1 last year stuck at reduced levels.

Glenn Gabe has some great analysis of where things currently stand as well as some significant fluctuation in September. So it is vital to be diligent and avoid potential risk factors that could have a major impact on search traffic.

7. Syndication and Sponsored Content

Syndication is an important audience development and traffic driving tool for publishers. It also comes with SEO risk factors, so it is critical to build safeguards into all syndication contracts. Cross-domain rel=canonical (when possible), an attribution link to the original and delayed release to partners are among the most important tactics.

The use of sponsored content and native advertising also continues to increase as publishers look for additional sources of revenue. For this, it is essential to adhere to search engine requirements such as making all links to sponsor sites nofollow and preventing indexation in Google News.

The bottom line with both syndication and sponsored content is they are good opportunities but when implemented incorrectly they can do more harm than good. So make sure to get it right.

8. User Actions and Engagement Signals

An interesting trend is the increasing influence of user actions and engagement signals on search engine rankings. This slide from Rand Fishkin illustrates how things are evolving:

The takeaway here is to factor in the entire searcher and visitor experience into your optimization efforts, and to improve those signals relative to your competition. Check out his full presentation on SlideShare for more information and tips on making this actionable.

One Final Thought

I want to finish by emphasizing that the largest SEO opportunity still is, and will continue to be, establishing a solid foundation and ensuring that technical, editorial and marketing best practices are proactively applied across the organization. Simply put, that stuff works.

Experimenting with new initiatives is strongly encouraged; it is important to test and learn, and continue to adapt. Just make sure you have the fundamentals covered too.

In working with a wide range of news and content sites, I know that becoming an approved source and maximizing Google News visibility (through avoiding news crawl errors and editorial optimization) continue to be important priorities.

But I was curious how much news search traffic sites are currently receiving and what percentage of total search traffic it represents.

To find out, I used SimilarWeb PRO to pull 2014 YTD figures for 80 major news sites representing a cross-section of print, broadcast and digital news organizations. My primary focus was mainstream news sites in the US, but to round things out I included some international and tech news sites too.

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list or a definitive ranking. But I’ve included enough sites to provide a good sense of the current news search opportunity for publishers.

SimilarWeb provides data on total search visits for a particular domain as well as a breakdown by vertical, for example:

For each site I captured total search visits for January through November 2014 and the percentage coming from news search, then used that to calculate the number of news search visits for each site.

[UPDATE: There were some questions about what qualifies as “news search” so I clarified this with SimilarWeb. The figures include clicks directly from Google News (i.e. news.google.com) as well as clicks from the News tab on Google search results pages. They do not include clicks from the “In the news” onebox in the main Web search results.

The news onebox tends to be a big traffic driver for news sites, which increases the Google News opportunity for publishers even further.]

SimilarWeb reports on search traffic from all engines so the news search data includes more than just Google News. However in going through the profiles it is clear that the vast majority of news search visits are coming from Google, as shown in this example:

So this data is a reasonable proxy for capturing Google News traffic. Keep in mind that figures from any third-party tool are an approximation. But the data offers a way to do a relative comparison of the news sites.

News Sites Ranked by Google News Traffic

Here are the 80 sites ranked by total news search visits from January-November 2014:

USA Today has received the most Google News traffic by a substantial margin. Reuters and The New York Times are closely bunched in the next tier and the Daily Mail Online is also doing well.

I also included sites like BuzzFeed and Quartz that are known to do much better in social than search. As expected both are near the bottom of the table.

News Sites Ranked by Percentage of Search Traffic from Google News

Here is the same data ranked by percentage of total search visits coming from news search:

The Christian Science Monitor jumps up to first, with 46.19% of its search traffic coming from news search. Assuming that figure is accurate that’s an unusually high percentage for a site of that type. Reuters is close behind at 43.65%, which is not surprising for a site of that nature.

It’s also interesting that BuzzFeed has the lowest reported percentage with just 0.69% of total search visits coming from news search. A lot of its content obviously wouldn’t qualify as “news” but since they’ve been building up their editorial team and expanding their news coverage there is certainly some opportunity there.

The Opportunity is Still Strong

As shown in this data, Google News is still sending a considerable amount of traffic to news sites. So publishers are right to continue to make it a priority.

I’d also like to point out that this is free traffic (hello Germany). I’d think a thank you is more appropriate than a lawsuit or legislation.

The bottom line: Google News still matters, and news search optimization efforts are worth your time.

Additional Data: News Sites in Spain

The announcement that Google News will close in Spain has prompted interest in getting similar data for Spanish news sites. So I pulled figures for the top 11 news sites in Spain according to ComScore. Thank you to Antonio Rull and Julio Alonso for providing the sites. (They each sent me a ComScore top 10 list but one site was different between them, so I included all 11).

Here are the top 11 news sites in Spain ranked by news search visits from January-November 2014, as reported by SimilarWeb:

We work with a lot of major publishers and nearly all of them have had at least a few titles get hit by Panda in recent years. The types of sites vary but most are trusted, authoritative brands with large audiences that have produced quality, popular content for years.

Here’s an example of site that was hit by Panda 4.0 and recovered with Panda 4.1:

The good news is that each site has eventually been able to recover. But it is not always an easy process and it often takes significant changes and considerable time. And when search traffic declines substantially for several months or longer that has serious repercussions for the business.

So I thought I’d share some of the most common causes of Panda problems for reputable publishers. For in-depth Panda analysis I also recommend checking out Glenn Gabe, who frequently shares useful information on the subject.

Hopefully this will help others to avoid a similar fate. Like it or not, taking a preemptive approach against Panda and other forms of algorithmic filtering has become a fundamental part of SEO. And nearly every site has some degree of technical, design and editorial issues that are potential risk factors.

Here are 10 things that cause good sites to get caught up in Google Panda:

1. Templates with limited text – many content sites have certain non-article templates that by design have relatively little editorial text. While not usually a problem by itself, when combined with other Panda risk factors this can be problematic. Instituting a minimum word count is helpful.
2. Slideshows – slideshows and photo galleries are frequently used by publishers both for the visual experience and to increase pageviews. But they can also be a thin content factory and a source of duplicate page elements. So it is essential to carefully manage their setup and design, in particular the amount of content per slide and whether or not each individual slide can be indexed. Many are moving to setups in which the full content is accessible on the main page and that is the only URL that can be indexed.
3. Mobile – with mobile averaging 40% of total traffic and continuing to grow, some editorial teams are modifying their writing style to be shorter and more succinct to make the content more digestible on mobile devices. Ironically this has potential to create thin content issues, so there is a balance that needs to be maintained.
4. Viewability – advertising viewability has become a top priority for publishers, which has the consequence of altering the content-to-ad ratio above the fold. There is some overlap here with the “top heavy” page layout algorithm but on templates with limited editorial text this becomes a risky combination. It is critical to maintain a substantial amount of editorial content above the fold. (Update: for more on this last point see the comment from Michael Cottam below).
5. Other advertisement and promotion issues – overuse of interstitial, prestitial and other forms of interruptive ads and promos can also be problematic, in part because they can lead to poor engagement signals. If it seems like it could be annoying to users, it probably is.
6. Duplicate content or page elements – having a significiant number of pages with limited text that also have duplicate content or page elements (such as title tags and headings) is another common problem. Publishing the same piece on more than one URL (which often happens unintentionally due to CMS or migration issues), URL canonicalization issues and duplication caused by tracking codes can also contribute to Panda problems, particularly when there are other issues at play.
7. Syndicated content – publishing a large amount of syndicated content has been problematic for some brands, particularly when that content appears on quite a few other sites. It is important that non-original content remains a small percentage of the indexable pages on the site.
8. Overlapping content – overlapping content can sometimes cause problems, particularly if one version is fairly thin. An example of this would be publishing a blog post, article and gallery all on the same subject, with each version repeating certain portions of the same text and sharing the same headlines and title tags.
9. Internal search and tag pages – internal search can be a source of an excessive number of thin, overlapping and partially duplicate pages. If search pages are allowed to be indexed (and often it is best not to) they need to be managed carefully. A similar issue can occur with tag pages. These are commonly used on content sites and by themselves they don’t tend to cause Panda problems. But when tag pages start to become a fairly high percentage of the total pages on the site, and many of them are overlapping or have very few links, this can be problematic.
10. Incorrect or empty pages – it is not unusual for a site to have a number of incorrect or even empty pages that were never meant to exist, let alone be indexed. This can inadvertently add a lot of thin, low-value pages and potentially soft 404 errors to the site. Legacy issues and unintended problems related to redesigns and migrations are the most common sources. While typically not serious enough to trigger a Panda hit on their own, they can be a contributing factor.

The Path to Panda Recovery

Recovering from Panda typically requires a mix of template and technical changes combined with the elimination, consolidation and de-indexation of low-value pages through strategic use of 404s, permanent redirects, rel=canonical and meta robots “noindex” tags, among other things.

When we do Panda analysis for a site I always emphasize a couple things:

• The path to recovery cannot be definitively known. The most likely causes will be identified but it takes a process of trial and error to address enough of the offending issues to break a site out of the filter.
• Even after the necessary changes are made the recovery will not be instantaneous. Once a site has cleaned up its profile, breaking free of Panda requires a rolling update by Google. For a while these would happen roughly monthly and it is apparently happening more frequently now, which is encouraging. But in some cases it takes a larger Panda update for a site to break out, and that happens only periodically.

So if you have been hit by Panda, time and patience are also a necessary part of the process.

I was curious where things currently stand so I pulled mobile traffic figures from SimilarWeb for a variety of well-known brands.

I started with the sites surveyed in my post on search and social traffic and then added several more newspaper, magazine and content sites, for a total of 70 brands.

These are all sites that we currently work with so I’m going to keep the titles anonymous. But if you have a SimilarWeb PRO subscription you can pull this data for any site.

On average, for the past six months (May-October 2014) mobile visits accounted for 40% of total site traffic for this group.

Here’s a breakdown by percentile. The highest figure was 70% and the lowest was 25%:

I also divided the sites into topical categories to see if there were any significant differences. Here are the averages for each category:

An added note is that sites with a younger demographic tended to have a higher mobile percentage. There was not a consistent pattern for sites with a larger male or female audience.

To help with that, I’ve put together a list of the best options for keyword research, competitive analysis and monitoring search and social trends.

There is a wide universe of tools out there and my intention is not to cover them all. Instead I’ve highlighted the ones I like best and regularly recommend to editorial teams. I’ve also focused primarily on tools that are free or relatively inexpensive.

If I haven’t included something that you frequently use, let me know and I may add it to the list.

Keyword Research

1. Google AdWords: Keyword Planner
Google’s Keyword Planner has become a hassle for new users to set up since it now requires having an AdWords account. But it is still the preferred choice for keyword research, and it is good to get the data right from the source. You can use Keyword Planner to compare terms, get new content ideas, explore topical categories, monitor seasonality and compare desktop vs. mobile, among other tasks.

2. Google Trends
Editorial teams like using Google Trends because there is no sign-up or login required. It doesn’t provide search volume figures but it’s a quick and easy way to compare various terms and examine both long-term and more recent trends. In addition to drilling down on specific timeframes and topical categories you can focus specifically on Web search, news, image, shopping or YouTube. You can also get weekly email updates on priority terms.

3. KW Finder
KW Finder is a newer tool that I like a lot. It pulls in monthly search volume data from Google Keyword Planner and “interest over time” graphs from Google Trends. This is complimented with competitive data on the top 10 Google results for the keyword and an overall keyword difficulty score. There is a free version (limited to five searches per day) and then the paid versions are very reasonable, especially if you pay annually.

4. Bing Keyword Research
Bing Keyword Research is available within Bing Webmaster Tools. You have to be logged into your profile so this one has less appeal to editorial teams. But it is a useful additional source of data for exploring topics for content planning.

5. Wordstream
Wordstream is a popular paid option. Their main focus is PPC but as with Keyword Planner the data is useful for SEO too. They offer several free tools including a basic keyword tool, a niche finder and a keyword grouper.

6. Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool is handy for pulling suggested search/autocomplete data for Google, Bing and even YouTube. Just enter a term (e.g. “football”) and you’ll get suggested search data for it plus every letter in the alphabet and some other combinations:

A good approach is to use Keyword Tool to explore keyword ideas and then plug your main candidates into Google Keyword Planner to get the search volume figures.

7. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest has similar functionality to Keyword Tool. It was first on the scene but Keyword Tool has become more popular of late. When doing more extensive research it’s good to check both because their data does vary a bit. One advantage of Ubersuggest is the ability to drill down on specific verticals like images, news, shopping, videos and recipes.

8. Google Webmaster Tools: Search Queries
While not a keyword research tool, the Search Queries section in Google Webmaster Tools offers a good way to find out what terms are currently driving search impressions and clicks for your site:

This will help you to understand what’s working and what isn’t, and what topical areas you can potentially expand on. And now that the vast majority of keyword referral data in analytics tools is “not provided” or “keyword unavailable” it’s one of the best available sources for referring terms. Extra tip: try using Supermetrics Data Grabber to extract this data and trend it over time.

Competitive Analysis

1. Site:[domain] searches
One of the easiest ways to mine competitors for keyword and content ideas is to do a site:[domain] search in Google: [site:example.com search term].

This will show you what content they’ve created around specific topics and provide insight into their optimization targets too.

2. SEMrush
Plug a competitor’s domain (or your own) into SEMrush and you’ll get a data dump of thousands of keywords that it has top 20 Google visibility for, as well as the specific URLs that are ranking. There’s also a domain comparison report that allows you to see what terms a competitor is ranking for that you are not (or alternatively what intersecting terms you share). In addition SEMrush is a good keyword research tool. It provides search volume figures for matching phrases and related keywords and it has a keyword difficulty scoring system.

3. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is fast becoming the preferred tool for competitive analysis projects. It provides fairly extensive data on the audience and traffic sources for any site (including direct, search, social and paid).

Specific to search, you can drill down on what percentage of total traffic comes from search engines and get a breakdown by engine and vertical (i.e. web, news, image, video and shopping search). It also provides data on ranking terms (for keyword ideas) and top performing pages and sections.

4. Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool
In addition to identifying keyword targets it is also important to get a sense of just how attainable they may be. The Keyword Difficulty Tool from Moz analyzes the top 10 ranking pages and provides data on domain and page authority, link signals and on-page optimization to help you understand what you are up against. A keyword difficulty score is also provided.

Search Trends

1. Google Trends: Hot Searches and Top Charts
By the time a trend makes it to the Hot Searches report in Google Trends it is often too late to capitalize on it. That’s by design. Google used to provide a fresher and longer list but too many sites used it to try to game Google News, so they modified the format. However it still has some basic value and you can also sign up to get email alerts when a new trending topic is added. There is also a Top Charts report that lets you examine popular topics in a variety of categories like business, entertainment, sports and more.

2. Google News: Top Stories
An easy way to see what topics are currently hot in Google News is to check the Top Stories module in the left rail of the homepage:

Clicking on a particular category like Business, Technology, etc. will also show you the trending topics in that section.

3. Bing News: Trending Topics
Bing News also provides trending topics on its home and section pages, as well as links to news that is trending on Facebook and Twitter.

Social Trends

There are a wide range of tools for monitoring trending topics and content performance in social, too many to try to cover here. But I’ll point out a few free and easy options that I often suggest to editorial teams. For additional suggestions see my post on social media analytics tools for publishers.

1. Social Mention: Trends
The Trends section on Social Mention provides a frequently updated list of the top 20 trending terms across various social channels. The quality of the data has varied in the past but in recent years they have tightened it up. So it’s a good source for a quick check.

2. Buzzsumo
I like Buzzsumo a lot. Enter any domain or topic and get a list of the most shared content across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+. You can filter by the last 24 hours to see recently trending topics or explore larger timeframes for content ideas and competitive analysis.

3. NewsWhip
NewsWhip, an offshoot of the social analytics tool Spike, provides real-time data on editorial content that is trending on social media. It doesn’t provide a list of trending terms but a quick scan of the top headlines will clue you into what the hot topics are. So it is a good source of both ideas and basic competitive analysis. You can filter by location and specific topical categories.

4. The Reddit Edit
The Reddit Edit is a simple dashboard that highlights articles that are currently doing well on the Reddit homepage and some specific subreddits. As with NewsWhip, this will give you a quick sense of who’s doing well and for what topics. There’s also a separate section that highlights trending stories from mainstream news sites.

5. Topsy Social Trends
Topsy’s Social Trends is a good source for monitoring trending topics and articles on Twitter. Select “English” and then “Links” in the left rail and you’ll get fresh data on what content links are currently being shared a lot in tweets.

It has put out what it believes to be the world’s highest press release:

While I’m not a particular fan of PR gimmicks or shotgun pitches I like this one, so I’ll bite. I also think if you manage to get your press release 27 miles above the earth that deserves a shout-out.

And it gives me a chance to point out that the release is free of links with optimized anchor text, which is something you want to watch out for these days (when you are distributing them on other sites, per Google’s guidelines on link schemes).

So what do you think – was this press release a good idea?

While most news search optimization efforts rightly focus on editorial best practices and avoiding Google News errors, there are some additional opportunities that are worth taking advantage of.

If you aren’t utilizing each of these I recommended adding them to the mix.

1) News_keywords tag – Use the news_keywords tag to provide up to 10 defining phrases for each article. While not as impactful as key news search optimization tactics, the tag offers another way to establish the topical relevancy of your content. As I covered in Google News news_keywords Meta Tag: More Cons than Pros? the key is to treat it as a supplement and not a replacement for fundamental editorial SEO.

2) Standout tag – With the standout tag you can highlight up to seven articles per week, which offers a way to give an extra boost to priority content. This can result in articles being given the “Featured” label within the news search results. I did a 90-day study of standout tag usage last year and found that “Featured” articles do appear in Google News multiple times nearly every day.

3) Editors’ Picks – Creating an Editors’ Picks RSS feed allows you to provide five links to priority content that will potentially be featured in a special module within Google News:

There are some specific guidelines to follow for the RSS feed. You can create separate feeds for the Google News homepage as well as specific sections (like Business or Technology) if you have applicable content.

4) Add images to Google News sitemap – Make sure you are including image-specific tags in your Google News sitemap. This will increase the likelihood of your article images being pulled into clusters and other locations in the news search results. There are some general guidelines for images that you should adhere to as well.

5) Google+ and Google Authorship – Google News will sometimes feature Google+ posts from brand pages and individuals among the regular news search results. In addition, through Google Authorship authors on Google+ can get a thumbnail image in the results, similar to Web search.

This is another reason that active participation in Google+, at least to some degree, is still worthwhile.

On a related note, if you embed Google+ posts in articles it is important to include enough additional editorial text to meet the 80 word minimum for indexation.

6) YouTube videos – Video content from YouTube is also featured within Google News. Videos embedded in articles can be crawled but setting up a YouTube channel and notifying Google News increases the likelihood of your videos being pulled in.

7) Spotlight – the Spotlight section and the module on the home and channel pages is algorithmically generated, but if you regularly publish longer-form articles and opinion pieces you have a chance of being pulled in.

Recommended Tool: Yoast News SEO 2.0

Yoast recently came out with an updated version of their News SEO plugin for WordPress. In addition to creating Google News sitemaps (including the image-specific tags), it supports the news_keywords tag and standout tag and it can create an Editors’ Picks RSS feed. Plus it has a number of other features that are specific to Google News.

So if you do not have the time or resources to develop some of these things in-house, the News SEO plugin is a great option.

There are a lot of options for social monitoring, tracking and analytics, with prices ranging from free to very expensive. I thought I’d share some of my favorites that are well suited to editorial content sites.

The primary focus here is on social media analytics and share count tracking, along with identifying content and topics with the potential to go viral. I have intentionally left off most of the wider-ranging management platforms and enterprise suites to try to limit the scope.

Real-Time Analytics

These real-time analytics platforms are among the most popular with news and content sites. Having one is worth the investment.

• Chartbeat Publishing
  Chartbeat Publishing was the first on the scene in this category and it continues to be the most popular. The functionality is broader than just social media but you can drill down on social referrers and activity. Check out their live demo.
• SimpleReach
  SimpleReach is a newer option that is well respected and making good gains. It has a greater degree of social-specific reporting.
• Parse.ly
  Parse.ly is another popular choice that has strong momentum. It also has a broader focus but the social data you need is covered.
• Spike
  Spike from NewsWhip is well-suited to news sites with good functionality for both journalists and marketers.
• HipDek
  HipDek is an up-and-comer; it hasn’t achieved the critical mass of the others yet but it offers good functionality specific to publishers.
• Nuvi
  Nuvi offers some useful real-time dashboards and reporting options. I don’t have first-hand experience with this one but the functionality looks good.

Competitive Analysis

These tools are useful for pulling social data on your own site as well as the competition.

• BuzzSumo
  I really like BuzzSumo; it has become my go-to resource for quick analysis of a specific site or topic. Currently the full functionality is free; there is also a Pro version in the works.
• Social Crawlytics
  Social Crawlytics allows you to crawl a domain to drill down on social metrics by URL and author. It’s a good way to get some basic competitive insight.
• Rival IQ
  Rival IQ is becoming popular for competitive analysis in social and other marketing channels.
• Shareablee
  Shareablee provides social engagement data and competitive benchmarking for a variety of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr and Vine.

Management Tools

As mentioned above I’ve left off most of the management tools to keep the size of this list reasonable. But here are a few that are a good fit for publishers. These shouldn’t be your only source of social analytics but they each provide useful data.

• HootSuite
  HootSuite is popular with editorial teams because it offers good all-in-one functionality without being overly complicated.
• Sprout Social
  Sprout Social is another popular choice that has strong features.
• Engagor
  Engagor is a comprehensive all-in-one tool with a good analytics component.
• Buffer
  Buffer has evolved from a nice choice for custom scheduling to a more comprehensive option. Buffer for Business is good for larger teams.

Other Analytics and Tracking Tools

Here are some other recommended options for social analytics and tracking. Most are not specifically tailored to publishers but they have good functionality.

• Simply Measured
  Known for its clean reports with strong visuals, Simply Measured is a good option for overall social analytics. If budget is tight their free tools are nice too.
• Moz Analytics
  Moz Analytics continues to incorporate more social data into its reporting, so this has become a worthwhile choice.
• Trackur
  Trackur made its name as an affordable alternative to the larger social media monitoring tools. Monitoring is its primary function but the analytics component is good too.
• Curalate
  Curalate is a great option for image-focused content on Pinterest, Instagram and now Tumblr.
• Bottlenose
  Bottlenose is nice too. The primary focus is on trend analysis but it has a wide range of useful functionality.

Share Counts by URL

Some basic free tools that provide the social share counts for a specific URL.

• SharedCount
  SharedCount is very basic, but it works and it’s free.
• Share Tally
  Share Tally offers more visual reporting and it provides the option to click through to see the specific shares on some sites.
• AudienceWise
  AudienceWise has a couple of handy tools that are free. The Social Shares by URL tool lets you pull the stats on up to 20 URLs at a time. The Social Shares by Sitemap tool lets you submit a Google News sitemap to get the tally for every article in it.
• Topsy
  Topsy doesn’t exactly fit in this category since it’s largely focused on Twitter and has wider functionality. But it’s a nice option for checking the tweet count for a given URL, and more usefully who tweeted it and how influential they are.

What Else?

There are a lot of great tools out there and it is easy to miss some. What else are you using that I didn’t cover? Let me know and I’ll add any that are well matched to news and content sites.

To get an idea of where things currently stand, I pulled 2013 referral data for a selection of 52 magazine and content sites, all well-known brands from major publishers.

Here are the averages for the year, according to each site’s Referrer Types report in Omniture:

• Search 37.8%
• Social Media 10.2%
• Other Web Sites 22.3%
• Typed/Bookmarked 29.7%

Organic search had a strong showing at 37.8%, so reports of its decline as a major traffic channel are simply not correct, especially for media sites.

The social media figure seemed a little low; I was expecting search to come in around 30% and social to be closer to 15%. Among the 52 sites examined 21 had social figures above 10%, the highest being 28.9%. But there were enough below 10% to pull down the average.

Strength of Brand Makes a Big Difference

It is important to point out that when it comes to setting benchmarks, overall percentages should be no more than a rough guide. A big reason is that the percentage of direct navigation traffic will vary greatly depending on the strength of the brand.

For instance among these 52 sites the typed/bookmarked average was 29.7% but two of the biggest brands came in at 59.5% and 62.6%, bringing their search percentages down to 18.5% and 16.2%, respectively. Despite this their total search referrals for the year were still much higher than many of the other sites.

So the bottom line is what constitutes good performance is relative, and you need to consider multiple factors including strength of brand, nature of the content, publication frequency, site architecture, level of promotion, etc.

Similar Findings from a Larger Data Set

After I pulled these figures our team at Define Media Group decided to do a larger-scale analysis. Published last week, it analyzed referral data for 87 sites from a number of major publishers, constituting 10 billion visits for 2013.

You can get all of the data here: Hey BuzzFeed, Search Traffic is Doing Just Fine

The findings were similar, with the organic search figure even higher and social media more in line with what I’d expected:

In addition you can see that while social continues to have strong growth, which makes sense since it is a less mature channel, search is also growing:

And fortunately I do this just for fun so in the end it doesn’t really matter.

In any event, here are my top posts of 2013 by pageviews:

1. The Most Common Google News Errors and How to Avoid Them
2. SEO Tips for Infinite Scrolling
3. SEO Guidelines for Sponsored Content and Partner Links
4. The Best Free (or Cheap) Tools for Blogger and Influencer Outreach
5. Google+ Engagement for News Sites: Top Performers and One-Year Growth Rates
6. Top Link Building Tactics for Publishers
7. A Year in the Life of 14 Million 301 Redirects
8. The Most Popular and Active News Brands on Instagram
9. A Simple Workflow for Keyword Research for Content Planning
10. The Google News Standout Tag: Does it Work?

I’m also adding one more that didn’t make the top 10 but I found interesting:

• Success with the Google News Standout Tag: A 90-Day Study

For those of you that stopped by, left a comment or shared a post this year, thank you, I appreciate it!

Hope you had a good year, and wishing you a happy 2014.

Today I thought I’d check to see just how many news and content sites are among the top 500 pages on Google+. So I went through the most followed rankings on CircleCount to see how many fall into this category.

For the purposes of this exercise I counted traditional news organizations, lifestyle publications, Web-only news and content sites and broadcast channels/programs with a companion site.

Here is the breakdown:

• Top 500: 29% (145)
• Top 100: 28% (28)
• Top 50: 22% (11)
• Top 10: 30% (3)

The three Google+ pages that made the top 10 are The Economist, National Geographic and TIME.

29% of the top 500 pages is a pretty good showing, and a wide range of content brands, areas of coverage and audience demographics are covered. This has been established for some time, but the Google+ user base goes well beyond young, tech-focused males.

A number of international sites fared well too, particularly some from Brazil and other parts of Latin America.

The Most Followed News and Content Sites on Google+

Here is the full list of Google+ pages, ranked by their CircleCount PagesRank (which is based on the number of followers).

It should be noted that the figures reported by CircleCount will not exactly match what is shown on a Google+ page. However CircleCount informed me that the data for any page shouldn’t be more than 24 hours old.

Follower count is not the most insightful metric (and it becomes quickly outdated) but I find it useful to take a snapshot at periodic intervals, as I do with my posts on Google+ engagement for news sites.

When I previously wrote about how to use the standout tag, I wished I could have provided some insights on how often “Featured” articles appear and which publications are most often cited. So I set out to gather some informal data.

For the past three months I’ve been checking Google News for articles with a “Featured” label, capturing which sites appear and confirming that they used the standout tag.

I want to emphasize that this study is not comprehensive. Basically most weekdays I’d check Google News once or twice a day. I didn’t check every day or frequently throughout the day. This is meant to be a random sampling, not a complete list of every “Featured” article that appeared.

As an additional note this is for Google News in the US, and I was not signed-in while doing the searches. It is also important to point out that not everyone gets the same Google News results at the same time.

The Results

In that 90-day timeframe I captured 89 instances of “Featured” articles.

The complete list with date, section, news organization, article URL and whether the standout tag was used is available in this Google doc, which is also embedded here:

Featured Articles by Section

Here’s a breakdown by Google News section:

It’s no surprise that Top Stories gets the most “Featured” articles, but I didn’t expect Entertainment to come in second. It looks like entertainment news sites are fairly active with the standout tag.

One thing to note is that when a “Featured” article appears in Top Stories it often appears in another category too. When that happened I only noted the Top Stories instance to avoid repetition.

The Most Cited News Organizations

And now a breakdown by news organization:

Deseret News dominating the field was certainly not expected. I’d have guessed someone like CNN or The New York Times might be at the top of the table for Google News in the US, but neither of those sites appeared at all.

Deseret News is using the standout tag more liberally than I would recommend, but at the moment it’s working. I’d be surprised if that continues to be the case, but as I’ve written before Google News is a strange beast.

As noted above I wasn’t signed in while doing these checks, and I tried checking with different browsers and computers in case my clickthroughs were impacting which “Featured” articles were shown in my results. None of that made a difference; Deseret News continued to be the most frequent source by far.

Putting them aside, National Journal did fairly well as did Decoded Science, Healthline and US Weekly. Another 10 news organizations appeared 2-3 times, and there were 20 that appeared only once. That seems like a reasonable distribution.

Featured Articles without the Standout Tag

It was also interesting that in three instances a “Featured” article did not have a standout tag (see the Google doc). Two articles were from USA Today and one was from Gulf News.

Two of those stories were serious – the Naval Yard shooting and a salmonella outbreak. So Google News occasionally gives an article the “Featured” designation for reasons other than the standout tag.

It’s for a new book of visual essays and poems by Debbie Millman, Self-Portrait as Your Traitor. With that kind of content it makes sense for the press release to have compelling visuals too, and I think they pulled it off well.

Props to Jennifer Abel Kovitz and 45th Parallel Communications for putting together an engaging press release that is well suited to the material. There is also a companion press kit with more information.

We’ve come a long way since email press releases circa 1999.

What do you think?

When embedding a Google+ post in a news article, be sure to include enough original editorial text to meet the 80 word minimum for Google News indexation. The same goes for Facebook Embedded Posts, Embedded Tweets and any other form of embedded multimedia.

The content within the embedded post does not contribute towards the total word count in the article.

It is fine to have editorial text before and after the embedded content, but aim to include at least 80 words prior to it.

As I covered in The Most Common Google News Errors, when there is not at least 80 words prior to a break in the article body this sometimes triggers an “article fragmented” error, or an incorrect “article too short” or “article disproportionally short” error.

I also want to emphasize that this tip applies only to articles and blog posts that are eligible for Google News indexation. There is no minimum word count for Web search indexation, although it is good to have more than 80-100 words regardless to avoid creating thin content pages.

For the technical details on Google+ embedded posts check out the support content on Google Developer.

Does the standout tag actually work? Yes it does, but only so often.

The primary way that it manifests within Google News is when an article in a lead story cluster is labeled “Featured.”

Here’s an example from today:

If you check the source code of that Los Angeles Times article you’ll see the standout tag:

Wouldn’t it be cool if I’d monitored how often the “Featured” label appeared on the Google News home page over a 6-12 month period and captured which publications were most often cited? Or put together a case study with several news sites to come up with a percentage on how often the using the standout tag generated a “Featured” label, and what kind of traffic it drove?

Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to do either of those things, which would certainly have made this a more interesting and data-driven post! Sounds like a good idea for a follow-up though, or if someone has already done something similar let me know and I’ll reference it here.

UPDATE: Check out my follow-up post: Success with the Google News Standout Tag: A 90-Day Study.

But I can share anecdotally that “Featured” articles from a variety of news sites do appear on the Google News home page with some frequency. And that sites I’m familiar with that use the standout tag do manage to get a “Featured” link from time to time.

How and When to Use the Standout Tag

The standout tag does work, and with Google News being a competitive space it is worth taking advantage of every available option to increase visibility.

So I do encourage news publishers to experiment with it; the key is to use it conservatively and have realistic expectations on what the return will be.

The purpose of the standout tag is to highlight limited instances of extraordinary work. To quote the Google News help page:

If your news organization breaks a big story, or publishes an extraordinary work of journalism, you can indicate this by using the standout tag. When determining whether to use this tag for your own article, consider whether that article meets the following criteria.

-Your article is an original source for the story.
-Your organization invested significant resources in reporting or producing the article.
-The article deserves special recognition.
-You haven’t used standout on your own articles more than seven times in the past calendar week.

Using the standout tag once in a while to attempt to give an extra boost to exceptional or high-priority articles is a good approach. Using it all the time or on articles that aren’t really all that extraordinary isn’t going to work.

That said, “big story” and “extraordinary” are subjective terms and it is not difficult to find examples of “Featured” articles for which those descriptions are debatable.

The LA Times article above is an interesting example in that the royal baby is certainly a big story, but what makes their article extraordinary compared to the others? I don’t know the answer to that, but they added the standout tag to their article while many others did not, and this got them in the Top Stories cluster.

So if you have multiple articles each week that roughly fit the Google News guidelines, by all means give the standout tag a shot on a regular basis. Just understand that you are not going to get a “Featured” article every day, week or even month.

At the end of the day the standout tag is a suggestion, not a directive. You are essentially nominating yourself for extra consideration, and there is no guarantee that you’ll get it. Other Google News ranking factors like what is happening in the news cycle, how many articles exist on a particular topic, which ones are most cited, etc. are still more important.

Be mindful of the seven articles (of your own) per week maximum too. The standout tag will likely be disregarded on sites that routinely overuse it.

Cite Articles on Other Sites Too

Using the standout tag to highlight coverage on other sites is a good idea too.

Google News is trying to encourage publishers to utilize it when they write an article that references the work of other news organizations. In practice this isn’t going to happen often as publishers aren’t usually willing to do it, even if it has to potential to be a win-win over time.

But for publishers with multiple titles, there are opportunities to employ the standout tag to support cross-network editorial coverage when appropriate. That is something that is worth testing out.

Will the Standout Tag Stick Around?

Another concern is that Google News has a tendency to promote new tags or features for a while and then discontinue them due to lack of adoption.

This has led some publishers to be leery of any new tag, for fear that they’ll apply valuable internal resources and staff training to something that doesn’t help that much and eventually just goes away.

The standout tag and the news_keywords tag have both raised such concerns from news organizations.

The fact is there is no way to know how long Google News will support the standout tag. If not many sites use it or too many abuse it, or if Google comes up with something else, it could certainly be discontinued at any time.

But the standout tag has just about made it to the two year mark, which is a good sign. And we know it works on a limited scale.

In addition the barrier to entry is relatively low. You need to create an option in the CMS to allow the standout tag to be added to an article (and preferably to prevent it from being used more than seven times per week). And you need to train the editorial team on how and when to use it, and as importantly manage their expectations on how frequently it will work.

Something that may generate a “Featured” link in one of every 10, 20 or even 50+ attempts (depending on how often you use it, and what you use it on) is hard to build a strong case for.

But it does offer a way to increase the likelihood of select pieces gaining prominent visibility in news search. That is something that nearly every publisher (that wants to be in Google News) wishes they had more of.

So I do think it is worth experimenting with.

Looking for more help with Google News?
Check out my post on The Most Common Google News Errors and How to Avoid Them.

I don’t think I’ve ever done a conference recap, but I had a good experience at MozCon and wanted to write something up. Rather than getting into the specifics, I thought I’d share some random observations about the speakers and presentations that I enjoyed.

You can find most of the presentations on the MozCon site or SlideShare.

I’ll cover them in order of appearance:

Richard Baxter – Richard sure knows how to make the most out of various tools and Excel, in this case for outreach research. His presentation was loaded with specific, actionable tips and instructions.

Aleyda Solis – energetic and enthusiastic! I’ve read a lot of Aleyda’s blog posts but had never seen her speak before. She knows her stuff, and props for the use of Lego Indiana Jones. Her deck on international SEO and ROI was a top presentation of the day on Slideshare last week.

Avinash Kaushik – Avinash did a great job as always of beating people over the head with the need for smart measurement. I couldn’t help thinking though that there is only so many times you can go crazy with the swearing before it loses its impact. Otherwise it starts to become more about watching him freak out than taking in what he has to say. But the man knows what he’s talking about and it was a strong presentation.

Ross Hudgens – Ross is another smart link builder and content marketer; like Richard his deck was full of specific tactics that are worth checking out.

Matt Peters – You can tell “Dr. Matt” gets a lot of respect from the Moz team, and it seems well deserved. I enjoyed how he walked through the methodology and findings of the 2013 Ranking Factors study with curiosity, and without claiming to know for sure what it all means (as that’s not how it works).

Matthew Brown – this was one of my favorite sessions and not just because Matthew is a friend. He did an excellent job breaking down the current state of semantic SEO and how marketers can take advantage of it.

Mackenzie Fogelson – Mackenzie could quite literally be the nicest, most friendly person at MozCon, and she’s a passionate and knowledgeable marketer too.

Dharmesh Shah – I really like how if he gets curious about something he goes and builds some kind of tool or script to find out more. For those of us who lack those chops, it’s important to come up with alternate ways to do that.

Phil Nottingham – this was another one of my favorite presentations. In addition to being entertaining, Phil really knows his stuff. If I had a business that was getting involved in video marketing I’d want his help.

Joanna Lord – Joanna seems genuinely passionate about building customer loyalty, transparency and some of the specific marketing efforts that big brands have undertaken.

Adam Audette – Adam is probably the king of ecommerce SEO, and he’s earned it. Pay attention to what this guy has to say.

Brittan Bright – I wasn’t sure what to expect from a presentation on relationship building and soft skills, but Brittan nailed it. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a speaker control a room like that through the tone of her voice and rhythm of her speaking. You could hear a pin drop at one point. It was an impressive performance.

Kyle Rush – interesting insights from the Obama campaign’s fundraising efforts. Test and learn, test and learn, test and learn.

Nathalie Nahai – Web psychology, specifically as it relates to gender and culture differences, is something I don’t know much about, so this was an interesting one.

Annie Cushing – Annie is awesome, and a serious analytics and Excel wiz. Do yourself a favor and find all her templates and tutorials.

David Mihm – I’ve already called Adam Audette the king of ecommerce SEO, so I won’t now call David the king of local SEO. But he is. His longer presentations must be monumental because the 30 min version was loaded with useful information.

Dana DiTomaso – I liked her ideas and her creativity, and she has lots of good ways for smaller brands to compete against the big ones in local SEO.

Allison Urban – I enjoyed Allison’s UX tips. My main takeaway was that monkeys are good. Or rather, a mascot can be a useful tool for businesses with a strong focus on customer service. As a customer/client I wouldn’t want every business to have one, but it works well in the right situations.

Will Critchlow – Will gets a special mention for throwing his real mobile phone off the stage and into the audience. I was slightly disappointed that this wasn’t a prelude to a stage dive. P.S. His thoughts on the present and future of user behavior were pretty good too.

Pete Myers – Dr. Pete delivered as always, sharing a bazillion examples of the various types of SERPs out there plus ways to make the most of the current landscape. It’s worth going through his slides.

Carrie Gouldin – this was another of my favorites. Carrie, you looked a little nervous – if you were, you had no reason to be because you were great! Also, more than one well-known speaker told me they found this year’s MozCon stage a little intimidating at first. The thing I liked best about Carrie’s presentation is that it underlined a key message for using metrics to build social engagement: there’s not one right answer for things like content, style, timing, frequency, etc. You have to find out what works best for your business through testing and experimentation.

Sarah Bird – really nice Japanese art in her slides. What I liked about Sarah’s presentation was all the ways that it’s not so easy to adhere to TAGFEE in everyday practice. But they believe it in and stick by it, and overall it works for them.

Wil Reynolds – Wil was just great. He’s an excellent speaker and smart marketer and he really tries to get people to up their game. But more than that he is inspirational as a person, be it through his industry work, his charitable work or just talking to him. Who else brings $1,500 worth of various books just to give them away to people he meets, if he thinks a particular book will be helpful to someone?

Jen Lopez – what an entrance! It was like a Zumba-esque dance party. She did an excellent job with her community building tips too. I also like how she called out Wil for something he’d said about how people use Twitter that she didn’t like.

Rand Fishkin – what more can you say, the dude’s a great marketer and he really cares. He cares about the attendees and their success, the industry as a whole, his company and employees, the larger community (and that’s just the work related stuff). That sensibility could be felt throughout MozCon.

Ok, that’s a lot of random observations so I’ll leave it there. For anyone I didn’t mention there’s no intended slight; there were a few presentations that I didn’t get a chance to watch like the Moz community speakers on the third day.

If you have the opportunity I’d recommend you check out MozCon next year. Not everything will be directly relevant to what you do, but it’s good to take some time to step back, get new input from a variety of voices and then figure out how best to apply it all to your own success.

But what about using search and social data to influence the editorial calendar over the longer term?

Mining keyword research, analytics and competitive data to identify new evergreen content opportunities does not always get the attention it deserves from busy editorial teams, despite this being an area with considerable upside for publishers.

To help with that I’ve outlined a basic workflow for using keyword research for editorial content planning. It can be focused on a limited number of priority topics or applied on a larger scale, essentially mapping out a site’s entire universe of coverage.

To be clear the aim here is not to encourage sites to create content solely for SEO, or to take things to a content farm-like extreme. But allowing search and social data to influence (not dictate) the editorial calendar and content planning process can reap significant benefits for traffic and audience development.

I also want to emphasize that this workflow is geared towards editorial teams at news and content sites that publish a steady stream of content in various forms. They are always looking for new content ideas and insights into what topics and terms to pursue, but they don’t have the time (or frankly the interest) in pursuing advanced keyword research techniques. So this workflow is simple and straightforward by design.

For businesses engaging in content marketing a more in-depth research and planning process is usually required, as content is often produced on a smaller scale and potentially with higher stakes.

For a more intensive approach check out a great piece that Stephanie Chang wrote called How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy.

Keyword Research for Content Planning

The overall idea is to start fairly broad and then get progressively more focused.

A top-level topic on a food site might be something like barbecue. The main categories within that topic would be things like grills, tools, techniques, recipes, sauces, marinades, etc.

Then the “clusters” within each category are essentially the root phrases that you’ll use to research specific keyword targets. So drilling down on barbecue sauces, for example, would lead to clusters like “barbecue sauce recipes”, “how to make barbecue sauce”, “homemade barbecue sauce”, etc.

Finally, researching the potential target phrases within a cluster will lead to candidates like “best homemade barbecue sauce,” “easy homemade barbecue sauce,” “how to make homemade barbecue sauce,” etc.

Step 1: Pick a topic

Step 2: Map out the main categories within that topic

Step 3: Identify potential clusters (or root phrases) within each category

Steps 1-3 are best accomplished through a mix of institutional knowledge, brainstorming, keyword and trend tools and competitor research. These three steps will provide a wide range of new content ideas. Then the remaining steps will allow you to focus in on the specific keyword targets for each.

Step 4: Evaluate and prioritize keyword opportunities within each cluster

Compare the search volume for potential target phrases within each cluster. Evaluate further by examining keyword difficulty and doing some basic competitive analysis.

Step 5: Eliminate keyword phrases that aren’t a good fit

Weed out things that are not a good match editorially, and those with a different intent (such as queries that are more transactional than informational). This will leave you with a decent list of keyword candidates.

Step 6: Cross-reference candidates with existing content and traffic

Determine what has already been covered and how well the existing content is performing. Also look at how much search traffic the site is currently getting for the candidates and/or similar phrases.

Step 7: Finalize your targets

Once you know what you want to go after, it’s just a matter of blending the new content ideas into the editorial calendar throughout the year. Or consider creating special projects to build out content in specific areas over time.

A Few More Things to Keep in Mind

This process seems pretty simple and straightforward, and it is. But it is important to point out that in practical application keyword research for content planning takes a lot of time and effort. So pace yourself and avoid overdoing it.

Remember:

• The editorial team is your best resource. They are the subject matter experts and can do a fair amount of this based solely on their knowledge and experience.
• Keyword research is more art than science. The data will guide you but it is the human element that makes the process work.
• There is rarely a 100% “right” answer. It often comes down to a judgment call based on feels right based on areas of coverage and editorial voice.
• It is not possible to create a definitive list in any category or cluster. So don’t get carried away; find some good opportunities and run with it.

Helpful Tools

I also wanted to point out some helpful tools to use at various stages of the process:

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool (soon to be discontinued in favor of the Keyword Planner which requires an AdWords account)
• Google Trends
• Other keyword research tools like Ubersuggest and Wordstream
• Site Analytics (Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, etc.)
• Search Queries data in Google Webmaster Tools
• Category and competitive data from Hitwise and comScore
• Moz’s Keyword Analysis tool (requires PRO account)
• SEMRush
• Simple searches (looking at all results or limited to a specific domain) to see who the competition is and what they are producing

It is one of the many reasons that content marketing has become so popular, as brands in other industries put an emphasis on content development and promotion and essentially become publishers themselves.

For traditional publishers, link building typically falls within the third main bucket of a comprehensive SEO program, which includes technical, editorial and marketing initiatives.

However there are plenty of benefits to link development beyond SEO, in particular driving traffic, increasing awareness and building audience. So link opportunities that may not have direct SEO value are still an important part of the mix, and they often indirectly lead to additional links that do.

So what link building tactics are most effective for publishers? I’ve put together a list of some of the main opportunities in broad categories.

These activities typically involve collaboration with multiple groups including tech, edit and audience development as well as the SEO, PR and social media teams.

Recommended Tactics

1. Link reclamation

As a first step make sure you are getting the benefit of all the links you already have. You’d be surprised at how many existing links (both internal and external) may be pointing to incorrect or discontinued URLs.

A good way to investigate this is to review the Crawl Errors report in Google Webmaster Tools, which shows URLs with 404, 500 and other errors that Google encountered while crawling the site.

Click on a URL with an error and then the “Linked from” tab to get a list of pages that are linking to it.

Then address broken link issues as possible through 301 redirects, updating internal links and in limited, high-priority instances contacting external sites to update a link.

Link reclamation takes considerable time and effort and it is certainly the least glamorous of all the tactics. However the collective payoff can be substantial so it’s worth devoting some resources to it.

2. E-mail newsletters and RSS feeds

E-mail newsletters are a still a major traffic driver for many publishers and e-mail remains a powerful communication channel that isn’t going anywhere.

Specific to link building, newsletters offer a great vehicle for content discovery which indirectly leads to links and social sharing. So make sure to include not only brand new content but also high-priority evergreen and seasonal content when appropriate.

And if you are tagging the URLs in your newsletters with tracking codes make sure that you have rel=canonical tags on the linked pages to offset the resulting duplicate content issue.

RSS feeds are another good opportunity, both for content discovery and because users sometimes utilize them to power link modules on a blog or other site, in which case they become a direct source of links.

So maintain a decent selection of feeds and don’t let the impending shutdown of Google Reader move you away from RSS. Also on the technical side if intermediary URLs are used in the feeds make sure they have a 301 redirect to the canonical URL for each page.

3. Cross-network promotion

For publishers with multiple titles cross-network promotion is an excellent tactic. However it is important to do this in way that adds value on each specific site.

For example, creating a large extended footer with links to every site in your network, with anchor text that is clearly for SEO, is not the way to go. It looks cheesy, users will tune it out and the engines may discount or disregard those links anyway.

Instead focus on topically related links, and come up a mix of modules to be used in various locations that add value to users. Targeting cross-network related links at the page level is a good approach.

And when you do use larger and/or site-wide modules, stick with more natural anchor text. Using brand names for home page links and headlines (or touts) for content links provides clarity and avoids over-optimization.

4. Partner links

A popular tactic among publishers is forming partnerships to feature various link modules on each other’s sites. Similar to cross-network links, partner modules most commonly include a link to the partner home page plus a few headlines.

As I covered in SEO Guidelines for Sponsored Content and Partner Links, there are SEO implications to be aware of. Such links are not technically sponsored links because they are not paid for. But there is a business relationship involved so they are not editorial links either.

Therefore publishers need to decide for themselves how to treat partner links on their own sites and what they want their partners to do.

Regardless of their direct SEO value, partner links are a valuable tool for audience development and traffic building and something that is worth taking advantage of.

An offshoot of this approach is using a third-party service like Outbrain to get wider distribution. Since Outbrain links are paid links, its modules comply with search engine guidelines and do not pass SEO value (a good thing as this protects the participating publishers). But even though there are no direct SEO benefits there is plenty of upside, as Outbrain has proven to be a good traffic source for a number of publishers.

5. Smart syndication

Syndication deals are another popular form of partnership, as publishers syndicate content on other news sites, or in the case of evergreen content, portals like Yahoo! Shine or MSN Living.

With syndication the primary SEO aim is protecting the original source and reducing the risk of being outranked for your own content.

But in addition to providing an attribution link to the original URL (in accordance with SEO best practices for syndication), syndicated content often includes additional inline and related links back to the original publisher. So it is a vehicle for link development too.

In some cases like Yahoo, the links within syndicated content are nofollow (and they often point to Yahoo tracking URLs with 302 redirects) and thus do not pass SEO value. But they are still a valuable tool for building traffic and awareness.

6. Sponsorships, contests, special promotions

There are lots of different opportunities within this category, but the main idea is going beyond regular editorial content to come up with special events, contests, promotions, etc. that will draw interest, activity and ultimately links.

The primary motivator here isn’t typically link building, but the resulting accumulation of links and social shares is a nice side benefit.

7. Widgets and badges

Utilizing various forms of widgets and badges is a tactic more often used by other types of businesses, but it is applicable to publishers too.

For example the BBC’s GoodFood offers a content widget that users can embed on their sites:

From an SEO perspective, the main thing with widgets and badges is being very careful to avoid things that could get you in trouble, such as including hidden links or requiring the display of a text link with specifically optimized anchor text.

But beyond the SEO implications, widgets offer a way to help promote new and featured content so there is value in the right situation. Similarly, badges can provide win-win scenarios in which users are happy to display either an affiliation with or recognition from a particular publisher.

8. Media relations

While links within press releases may not have much direct SEO value, including links to specific pages calls their attention to journalists, bloggers and others who may come across the release. (See Press Release Optimization Checklist and Tips for more information).

This increases the likelihood of links to some of those pages making it into the resulting media coverage, if they help to tell the story or provide additional background or details.

The same goes for media relations in general. When the PR team is pitching a corporate announcement or a new feature, package, etc. for a particular title, including a relevant URL among the key talking points helps to facilitate links within the resulting coverage.

It’s also worth pointing out that blogs and smaller news outlets will occasionally publish press releases verbatim, which creates additional opportunities for embedded links.

9. Blogger and influencer outreach

As I mentioned in The Best Free (or Cheap) Tools for Blogger and Influencer Outreach, this type of monitoring and outreach tends to be driven by PR but it has nice crossover with SEO and link building too.

Identifying and building relationships with subject matter enthusiasts, influencers and brand advocates helps to facilitate new ideas for outreach, content development and promotion.

Bloggers in particular are a great potential source of links when you have something they care about, or you come up with a creative idea that’s a win-win for both of you.

So the more you can do here the better.

10. Social media

Last but certainly not least is social media in general, for a number of reasons.

Specific to link building, as I covered in 5 Ways that Social Media Impacts SEO it is a good vehicle for secondary links, in which users discover content through social media and then link to it in other places.

And as referenced above monitoring social media activity is a good way to find influencers and advocates, and more specifically bloggers. Bloggers tend to be the best candidates for outreach activities that can lead to inbound links.

Beyond that, social media has other direct and indirect SEO benefits, and social signals at the domain, page and author level will continue to evolve as ranking factors over time.

Plus social media is a significant traffic driver, regardless of the SEO value of links in tweets, likes, shares, +1’s, pins, etc. So increasing social media activity and engagement is vital in its own right.

There are lots of tactical opportunities, but at a minimum make sure you are optimizing your on-site buttons and og: tags, and allowing for editorial customization of those fields when needed.

Then establish a coordinated program for active participation and engagement at the brand and the individual level. And implement an ongoing content promotion plan that includes not just new but also priority evergreen or seasonal content (when appropriate).

What Else?

Ok, that’s a high-level overview of some of the main link building opportunities for publishers.

How many of these things are you actively doing, and what is and isn’t working for you? I’d also be interested to learn about anything else that you’re doing, be it another broad category or a specific tactic within one of the categories above.

For publishers it typically involves identifying users that are sharing, discussing and linking to content from your brands and their competitors, and about specific topics. Then building relationships with those users over time and coming up with ideas for outreach, content development and promotion. But the same general approach applies to any industry.

Social monitoring tools like Radian6 and PR suites like Vocus and Cision offer the greatest range of functionality for research and contact management. However utilizing enterprise-level tools is not always an option for smaller organizations, or even large ones with budget constraints.

Fortunately there are plenty of useful tools that are free or inexpensive. I’ve put together a list of the ones that I typically use and recommend to others. Each tool is free unless otherwise noted.

Finding Bloggers and Influencers

Followerwonk
Followerwonk from SEOmoz is a great tool for researching Twitter users. The Twitter bio search allows you to easily find and evaluate users in specific areas. Just search on something like “fashion blogger,” “foodie” or whatever topic you need and you’re on your way. You can also sort and analyze your own followers to get a better understanding of the potential contact points you already have, or take a look at competing brands. The basic functions are free. An SEOmoz PRO membership is required for full use of the tool.

Topsy
Plug any URL into Topsy and see who tweeted it and which users were most influential (and which have a blog). Or search specific domains, brands and topics for more extensive research. You can also use Topsy Analytics to compare profiles, domains or keywords and see what content has received the most links.

Klout and Kred
The value and methodology of services like Klout and Kred has been much debated and discussed, so I’ll leave you to your own opinion there. But if you are looking for a simple way to do a relative comparison of users, these tools offer a basic metric you can use. Klout’s search functionality also lets you find influencers on specific topics.

Google+ Tools
Twitter is often the easiest social gateway to finding bloggers since people with a blog tend to be on Twitter too. But Google+ is a decent method as well, since Google Authorship participation results in people adding links to their blogs and sites they contribute to on their profile. And since social media and Google+ in particular have an impact on SEO there are also secondary benefits to locating influencers there.

CircleCount and FindPeopleonPlus are decent databases of Google+ users. All my + is a useful tool for evaluating the activity and engagement of specific profiles, as I did in my post on Google+ engagement for news sites. You can also use Google+ Ripples to examine shares and comments for a specific URL or Google+ post and see how it spread.

Pinterest Tools
If Pinterest is a priority, there are a range of Pinterest analytics tools available that can help you find brand enthusiasts and influential users. Most are fairly inexpensive. Curalate, Piqora, PinReach and PinAlerts are among the popular choices.

Finding Mentions and Links

Fresh Web Explorer
Fresh Web Explorer is a new tool from SEOmoz that lets you find recent mentions and links, searchable by URL, domain, brand, keyword, etc. The tool indexes millions of RSS feeds and a Feed Authority score is applied to each. SEOmoz PRO membership is required to use it.

Google Blog Search
While it is no longer included in the main navigation on Google, Google Blog Search is still out there and it’s a decent way to find recent posts and links, and to research blogs.

Google Alerts
Google Alerts don’t seem to be working as well as they used to, but it’s still a useful way to get instant notification of new mentions and links.

Mention
I’ve been using Mention for a few months now and I’m happy with it. It finds mentions and links in Web content and social media, and you can use it in a desktop app or a browser, or just get e-mail alerts. One thing I like is that it finds links in tweets that did not include your @username, which you might not have otherwise noticed. There is a basic free plan plus some more robust plans that are reasonably priced.

Talkwalker Alerts
Talkwalker Alerts is free alternative to Google Alerts. I’ve just started using it but it seems to work well.

Contact Management

Once you’ve started your research and developed various lists for bloggers, influencers, advocates and all those other fun names, it is important to develop some kind of system for tracking activity and interactions.

BuzzStream
BuzzStream offers nice functionality in this area. It is more popular in SEO circles for managing link building activities, but they also have a PR & Social Media tool that offers good functionality for blogger and influencer relations.

Nimble
Another option is Nimble, a social CRM system. While it appears to be somewhat sales focused, the features seem well suited to other types of relationship management too. Thanks to Jim Thornton for suggesting it.

Excel or Google Docs
If a paid tool is not an option, you can always create spreadsheets in Excel or Google Docs for tracking activity and contact management. A shared Google Doc is a workable option for team collaboration.

So that’s a good group of tools to get you started. What else are you using?

Please let me know in the comments and I’ll expand the list as appropriate.

While there are pros and cons from both a technical and usability perspective, and it hasn’t worked for everyone, in the right situation it can be a good fit.

Social sites use infinite scrolling as a way to offer a never-ending stream of new content, and it has appeal for sites that want to offer a seamless browsing experience for large groups of items. Publishers are starting to use it more often too on their home and channel pages.

Don’t Forget SEO

In reviewing infinite scroll implementations on a number of sites, one thing I’ve noticed is that not all of them offer a crawler-accessible path to the deeper content. This creates an obstacle for SEO.

A simple test is to view a page with infinite scrolling in a browser with JavaScript disabled. At the bottom of the page there should be an accessible link to a static URL with the next group of results, and on the subsequent pages both next and previous links. Even better is to provide a series of links that expose more pages, for example “Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next”.

Essentially you want to build the infinite scroll functionality on top of simple, paginated archive pages. This type of progressive enhancement is good for usability as well as SEO. It allows the content to be accessible within the main framework of the site and better integrated into the internal link graph.

If desired (and as appropriate) pages 2+ can be given a “noindex,follow” robots meta tag to prevent the paginated results pages from being indexed, while still allowing the links on them to be crawled and pass value. Or rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags can be experimented with.

Mashable is a Good Example

The latest Mashable design, which makes heavy use of infinite scrolling, offers a good example of how to ensure that all site content is still easily accessible to crawlers.

Viewing the home page or any channel page with JavaScript disabled reveals a module with links to static archive pages organized by year and month (like this April 2013 page):

This creates a simple, easy jumping off point to all the content pages on the site.

The concept is essentially the same thing as a comprehensive HTML sitemap, the difference being the links are accessible through a module on the home and channel pages instead of just a footer link.

This approach, and organizing the archives by date, is a good fit for a news site. In other cases providing paginated, static pages directly within each site section, or organizing the site-wide archive by topic instead of date, may be a better fit.

The bottom line: choose whatever approach makes the most sense for your site, but make sure you are providing easy crawler access and sufficient internal link support to all of your content pages.

This topic has been in the news recently with Google first issuing a reminder that any links within sponsored content should not pass PageRank. This stemmed from the incident in which Interflora and some UK newspapers were penalized for links within advertorials.

Then in a second reminder Google made it clear that they do not want sponsored content indexed in Google News, and sites that mix in promotional articles with their regular news content could be excluded from Google News entirely.

To clarify, the second warning refers to advertorials or articles created entirely by or for a sponsor, along the lines of what BuzzFeed does or the Washington Post article referenced in Search Engine Land’s coverage of the announcement.

It does not apply to instances in which regular editorial content is given a sponsor treatment. For example The Huffington Post is allowing brands to sponsor a section on the site which (in some cases) includes only regular HuffPo editorial content, as opposed to brand-created content. For those articles only the first warning (do not let sponsor links pass PageRank) applies.

Sponsored Content Compliance

How do publishers ensure that sponsored content and native advertising complies with Google’s guidelines?

1. Make sure that links within sponsored content have the “nofollow” attribute or are coded so that they are inaccessible to crawlers. This includes any links to the sponsor on the template (logos, package treatments, etc.) and any sponsor links within the actual editorial text.

   This applies to all forms of sponsored content, be it specially created content or regular editorial content that is given a sponsor treatment.

2. For sites in Google News, separate sponsored content from your main news articles if possible (such as hosting it in a separate directory) and exclude it from Google News via either robots.txt or a meta robots tag. In addition, do not include sponsored content in your Google News sitemap.

   As noted above, this only applies to advertorials or articles specifically written by or for a sponsor. Regular editorial articles with a sponsor treatment are still eligible for Google News indexation.

   Also remember that complying with #2 only requires excluding Googlebot-News, not Googlebot. Your sponsored content can still be indexed for Web search, just not Google News. I’d suggest doing this via a “noindex” meta tag vs. robots.txt to avoid creating any dead-ends on the site.

Be Careful with Ecommerce Partnerships Too

Partnering with ecommerce sites is another revenue growth area for publishers. The most typical approach is to incorporate affiliate links within product-related editorial content such as reviews, guides and round-ups.

While Google claims to already discount most affiliate links, from an SEO perspective the safest course is to treat them like sponsored links and make them nofollow or inaccessible to crawlers.

For more on the increasingly blurring lines between editorial and commercial sites see the article I wrote last year on What The Convergence Of Publishing & Ecommerce Means For Enterprise SEO.

What About Partner Links?

Another common practice for publishers is to feature partner links in various locations such as sidebar modules or just above the footer.

I’m not going to provide specific examples to avoid calling attention to anyone in particular, but go to nearly any major news or content site and you’ll see a variety of partner links in use. The modules typically include a link to the partner home page plus a few recent headlines.

Such links are not technically sponsored links because they are not paid for. But there is a business relationship involved so they are not editorial links either. Basically it’s the big brand version of an old fashioned link exchange.

Most publishers utilize relationships like this as an important part of their audience development and traffic building mix, not specifically for SEO. But crawler-accessible partner links do bring an SEO benefit as well, although the headline links appear on partner sites for only a short time before being replaced with fresh ones.

In reviewing examples on a number of major news brands, the partner links sometimes have the nofollow attribute and/or are inaccessible to crawlers, but many are regular, accessible links.

Google’s guidance on link schemes doesn’t specifically address these types of partner links, which don’t really fit the mold for “excessive link exchanging.” But it wouldn’t be surprising to see them defined as a form of sponsored links. At a minimum the links may get devalued regardless of how they are set up.

So publishers will need to decide for themselves how to define partner links, how to code those modules on their own sites and what they want their partners to do.

For clarification, I’m not talking about things like Outbrain modules, for which there is a financial component and thus Outbrain is already using a combination of JavaScript modules and nofollow links to ensure they are compliant. So no SEO concerns there, and Outbrain is a solid traffic source for a number of publishers.

While doing some research I was surprised to see that search interest in the keyword phrase [celebrity gossip] peaked around 2009. Despite occasional spikes it has been declining ever since:

By comparison [celebrity news] has been more consistent over the years but it has always trailed behind. However according to Google Trends it overtook [celebrity gossip] for the first time in October 2012:

In the Google AdWords Keyword Tool [celebrity gossip] still has more than twice the average volume, so the figures aren’t in sync:

However the rise and fall of overall interest in [celebrity gossip] is apparent.

It is important to note that what we’re talking about here is search volume for the actual phrase “celebrity gossip” as opposed to search activity in that topical category.

Searcher interest in all things celebrity – be it news, gossip or otherwise – is still going strong. But the majority of that activity is reflected in searches for celebrity names and more specific related queries.

As for celebrity gossip, despite the decline it is clear that it is still a priority term. In looking at seven major celebrity sites, five have the phrase in their home page title tag:

Time is Doing Well Online

One is that among the news magazines examined Time.com has the largest online audience by far:

Despite this it didn’t make the list of top news sites by Facebook interactions, as rated by NewsWhip:

So there are apparently opportunities for further growth there.

News Magazine Readers are Old

Another is that news magazine readers are apparently old, middle aged, or just the right age (with plenty of income), depending on how you define those terms:

The median age of news magazine readers is 49 years vs. a 45.8 for the adult US population. The Economist’s readership however comes in at a spry 44.3 years old:

The median ages remained the same in 2012 vs. 2011. It will be interesting to see if this holds steady over the next 5-10 years, or if the figures will age along with the core audience these magazines currently attract.

AARP Kicking Butt on Circulation

Speaking of demographics, I didn’t realize AARP magazines had the largest circulation:

Their figures are up a little in 2012 too, while several others have dropped.

Mobile Creates Additional News Consumption

One encouraging aspect of the study is that as mobile news consumption grows it is not at the expense of other channels. Instead it is creating additional news consumption:

Combined with the modest but rapidly increasing mobile ad market, there’s a potential bright spot in a world of otherwise declining ad revenue:

I keep coming across things like the Simply Measured study showing that 59% of top brands are now active on Instagram and the news that Instagram has surpassed 100 million active users. So it seems like a good time for media organizations to take stock of their efforts on the photo sharing site.

(Yes, there was also the recent backlash over privacy and the terms of service that prompted Instagram to backtrack, but that’s another topic).

Instagram may be a better fit for lifestyle publishers like the sites I covered in my posts on StumbleUpon traffic declines, Pinterest traffic gains and links from Pinterest. But today I thought I’d focus on news organizations.

So I took a look at the Instagram profiles of major news sites, starting with the group I compared in my post on Google+ engagement. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but it provides a good cross-section of print, broadcast and Web-only media organizations.

Not all of those news sites are on Instagram at this time, so I removed several and added a few others that I’d come across. If I’ve left out any particularly active media outlets please let me know.

For each profile I captured the three available data points: photos, followers and following.

Looking at follower counts is not particularly instructive since these figures quickly become outdated. But it offers a basic snapshot that allows for a relative comparison. And the larger the audience the greater the opportunity for impressions and engagement, so total followers does have some value.

In addition the photos and following counts give a rough sense of which news sites are most active in terms of posting and interacting with others.

Here are the news brands ranked by total followers:

NBC News leads the pack by a considerable margin, with TIME, NPR and CNN iReport also doing well.

Only the top five profiles have more than 100,000 followers, and only the top 19 have more than 10,000.

Wired wins the prize for most photos shared with 790, and CNN iReport, National Post and USA Today are following the most other users by far.

A number of sites have essentially set up placeholder profiles that have little or no activity. Interestingly Sky News has attracted 12,000+ followers despite not having shared a single photo.

Noticeably absent were media outlets like The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, The Guardian, Mail Online and Business Insider.

If I missed any of those profiles please let me know. I was unable to find them using what seemed like all the logical profile name possibilities. Several of the brand names are being used by individuals with no affiliation.

Have Fun with the Photos

I may do another post on the types of photos the news sites are sharing and what seems to be working.

In the meantime I just wanted to point out that I like what NPR is doing with their “I Love NPR” signs, like this one with the Downton Abbey cast:

A year ago a publisher that we work with decided to discontinue a large domain and migrate only a small portion of its content to a new subdomain on a different, existing domain.

I realize that sounds a bit cryptic. I’m not at liberty to identify the domains involved, but I’ve found it interesting to follow the resulting indexation counts and wanted to share that in general terms.

The day of the migration Google had 14,100,000 URLs from the discontinued domain in its index, according to a [site:domain.com] search. Bing had only indexed 360,000 URLs (whaddup Bing?).

An interesting aspect of the migration is that only a small portion of the content was being republished on the new subdomain. Those pages got a 301 redirect to the corresponding new URL; everything else was given a 301 redirect to the new home page.

With so many URLs involved, and with a large number of 301 redirects all pointing to a single URL, I was curious how long it would take Google and Bing to process all the redirects.

A year has now passed and I can report back that, at least for Google, it is still a work in process.

Here is the timeline to-date:

A few things to note:

We were not directly involved in this migration so I don’t have all the details on how it was managed in terms of the redirect mapping, XML sitemaps, updating links to the old URLs as possible, etc.

[site:] searches are considered a rough snapshot and the reported figures tend to fluctuate quite a bit. So you need to account for some oddities and inaccuracies when monitoring index counts over time. But I still found it interesting how Google’s reported index counts jumped around quite a bit, especially from 500K in late May back to 8 million in early June.

In looking through the remaining indexed pages in Google today I see that about 270 URLs are on a subdomain of the discontinued domain that is no longer maintained but is still active and accessible.

Nearly all the remaining URLs in Bing’s index are also on this still active subdomain. So based on that it looks like, except for some periodic fluctuations, Bing had mostly taken care of business (albeit it with a much smaller number of URLs) within a couple months.

As for the remaining 2K+ www pages in Google’s index, after jumping to page 20 of the [site:] results the reported figure drops to 192 along with an omitted results message:

So the migration process is largely completed but it can take quite a while to clean things up entirely.

To get a better sense of the situation I pulled StumbleUpon referral figures from 2010-2012 for a group of 47 news and content sites that we work with at Define Media Group, primarily magazine brands.

The examined sites can be roughly divided into five main categories: food, home, fashion & beauty, health, entertainment and news & tech.

For confidentially reasons I am not able to reveal the specific titles, but they are all well-known brands from major publishers. Many of the sites were also included in the comparisons I did last year on Pinterest traffic and Pinterest links.

While this does not represent any kind of comprehensive analysis the number of sites and range of topical coverage does offer enough of a sampling to gain some general insights.

Not every category has the same number of titles and some sites have larger audiences than others, so to keep the information both anonymous and meaningful I’ve used a combination of total and average figures for the group as a whole and the individual categories.

One thing that is important to point out is that some publishers participate in StumbleUpon Paid Discovery which has an impact on their traffic figures. Participation, budgets and timing varies greatly for the sites in this group and I am not able to segment that in the reported data.

Declines in StumbleUpon Traffic: 2012 vs. 2011

To start with here are the year-over-year declines in StumbleUpon traffic for the combined group as well as each category:

StumbleUpon referrals are down 27% for the group as a whole, with each individual category experiencing larger drops than that.

One thing to point out is that not every site experienced a decline in 2012. 14 of the 47 sites experienced a YoY increase of varying degree.

However that is a pretty small minority, especially considering that from 2007-2011 many content sites (not just the ones in this group) saw nice gains in StumbleUpon traffic each year.

StumbleUpon Traffic Declines: Three-Year Trend

With that in mind I also pulled 2010 data to see if YoY performance for 2011 vs. 2010 had been better.

It had; only 10 of the 47 sites saw a YoY decline in 2011, compared to 33 in 2012.

Here is the three-year trend line for the entire group:

As well as 2010-2012 broken out by category:

Grouped together, the home and fashion & beauty categories have experienced a more gradual decline over the past three years while the 2012 drop in the other categories has been more significant.

If I backed this out a few more years you’d see nice gains overall gains from 2007-2010.

I should emphasize that these results represent the experiences of the specific sites in the surveyed group and not necessarily other sites that cover similar topics. In addition there are exceptions within each group where a specific site has a much different three-year trend than the others.

What Next for StumbleUpon?

So what does the future hold for StumbleUpon? Has the rise of Pinterest unseated it as the preferred choice for browsing and discovery? Is the dominance of Facebook and Twitter, coupled with increasing Google+ engagement, proving to be too much?

Personally I’m a fan of StumbleUpon both for users and as a source of traffic for publishers. StumbleUpon Channels and Paid Discovery are good opportunities to take advantage of, and I think their latest iPhone and iPad apps offer an excellent experience for non-desktop users.

So hopefully StumbleUpon will continue to have success moving forward.

If anyone has any experiences or data they’d be willing to share, it would be great to hear from you in the comments or please reach out to me personally.

Anyone involved with a news or content site can attest to the importance of Google News and news search optimization. And I’d venture to say just as many people have experienced a range of technical and formatting issues that have impeded the indexation and performance of their news content.

To help with that, I’ve compiled a list of the Google News errors – and publisher mistakes – that I most often come across, along with a recommended solution for each.

Eligibility and Indexation

Let’s start with a few basic mistakes that do actually occur with some frequency.

• Not an approved source – site not showing up in Google News? First make sure you are an approved source, otherwise there is no point in creating a Google News sitemap or complying with the technical and content guidelines. A quick way to check is to do a [site:domain] search in Google News. If you are not an approved source you can apply using this form.
• Mixing domains – a related issue that sometimes crops up is when a news property is spread out over multiple domains. If the additional domains are not in the Google News database they won’t be considered part of the approved source, and thus won’t be indexed. If a Google News sitemap has been submitted for an unapproved domain this will trigger an “unknown news site” error in the Google Webmaster Tools profile.
• Google News sitemap – another mistake, or rather a missed opportunity, is not creating a Google News sitemap. Your articles will still get indexed via regular site crawling, but the news sitemap helps to expedite the process. It also enables you to segment your news content (i.e. articles and blog posts) from other forms of editorial content that are not eligible for indexation. With breaking news and trending topics speed counts; don’t put yourself at a competitive disadvantage. Along those lines also make sure that your Google News sitemap is updated immediately whenever new, eligible content is published.

The other plus of a Google News sitemap is it gives you the ability to provide additional information such as image-related tags, keywords and genre tags.

• Unknown publication name – an error that I frequently come across is the “unknown publication name” error for the Google News sitemap, which is reported in the Sitemaps section of the site’s Google Webmaster Tools profile. This error is triggered when the publication name used in the <name> tags in the Google News sitemap is not an exact match to the publication name in Google News’ database. To determine the correct name to use do a [site:domain] search in Google News and see what publication name is displayed for the indexed articles.
• Improper URL structure – Google News requires that articles be published on unique, permanent URLs that contain at least three digits. The three-digit requirement is not enterprise-friendly but fortunately it is not required if you use a Google News sitemap. Just make sure that your Google News sitemap contains all eligible news articles and that it is frequently updated (which you should be doing anyway).

Article Format / Content Errors

Beyond the fundamental issues covered above, the majority of Google News errors are related to the format or content of specific articles. Many of these errors are reported in the Crawl Errors section of a site’s Google Webmaster Tools profile.

There is a good rundown of all the news-specific crawl errors in the Google News publisher help section so I’m not going to cover them all here. But I will point out the ones that I most frequently come across:

• Non-literal headlines – this is an editorial mistake as opposed to a technical error, but it is one that comes up a lot so I want to emphasize it. Unlike regular Web search, Google News places more weight on the article headline than the HTML title tag. So the tactic of offsetting witty, print-style headlines with customized title tags works relatively well for Web search (although this is still sub-optimal) but it does not work for news search.

The news_keywords meta tag was launched to help offset this issue and give publishers more leeway. But as I covered in Google News news_keywords Meta Tag: More Cons than Pros? you still need descriptive, well-balanced headlines for Web search, social media and even for news search. So treat the news_keywords tag as a supplement to your Google News optimization efforts, not as a replacement for sound, fundamental editorial SEO.

• Headline not H1 – make sure your on-page headline is in an H1 heading tag, and that it is the only H1 on the page. Doing so makes it easier for Google News to correctly extract the headline. On a related note, heading tag coding is changing with HTML5, but for SEO purposes there should still be only one H1 per template at this time (especially on articles).
• Title not found – this error is less common but occasionally an article template is coded in such a way that the editorial headline is not easily identifiable or even accessible to crawlers. Be sure to place your headlines in simple HTML text right at the top of the article body, in an H1 tag.
• Incorrect byline or date – every now and then Google News will pull in an incorrect author or date for a particular article. This is usually related to the template design or the way it is coded. Make sure both the author byline and the date are close to the headline and easily accessible to crawlers. Also avoid including additional names or dates in prominent locations that could lead to a misinterpretation.
• Article too short or article disproportionally short – these two crop up with some frequency especially on blogs, which are more likely to publish some fairly short pieces. The minimum requirement for Google News is 80 words, but I’ve seen articles just over that figure still trigger the error. For any news content that you want to be indexed, include a minimum of 100 words and preferably 250+.
• Article fragmented – this is another common error that typically occurs when the article body is broken up with things like lists, tables or sometimes embedded multimedia (or even embedded tweets). Another thing that can trigger the error is placing interstitial “speedbump” links too high up in the article body. These issues can usually be offset by including at least 80-100 continuous words prior to inserting such elements into the article. A blog post with a string of very short paragraphs (many just a single sentence) will also trigger this error on occasion.

I should point out that many of the article too short, article disproportionally short and article fragmented errors (and sometimes the title not found errors) reported in Google Webmaster Tools end up being for non-article content like galleries that were encountered during a site crawl. Since such content is not eligible for Google News indexation anyway those errors can be disregarded. Just make sure your Google News sitemap includes only articles and blog posts.

• Article too long – this one is fairly rare but every once in a while an article gets flagged for being too long. Google News does not provide a maximum word count, but the cases I’ve seen were very long blog posts that covered several different topics at length. Beyond the indexation issue, in such cases it is better to create a separate article for each topic so that each one is more focused and better able to compete for related searches.
• No sentences found – I’ve seen this error recently on articles that do in fact have multiple sentences on the page. It could be a glitch, but it seems to be triggered by blog posts in which all of the editorial content is contained in a single, large block of text instead of being broken up into separate paragraphs. That type of formatting should be avoided regardless since it is more difficult for users to read.
• Page too large – this does not come up often, but on occasion something gets added to a template (usually in a sidebar or other module outside of the article body) that greatly increases the size of the page. The maximum permitted size is 256KB. You don’t want pages that large for a variety of reasons, so stay well clear of that figure.
• Date too old – this is one of the most frequently reported news crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Anything that was encountered in a site crawl that is older than 30 days will trigger this error. Since content that old is no longer eligible for indexation these errors can be disregarded. Just make sure your Google News sitemap contains only recent articles. The Google News guideline is to only include articles from the past two days.

Reaching Out to Google News

Simply put, Google News is a strange beast and despite your best efforts there are going to be odd situations and errors that occur from time to time. Many will be triggered by something you’ve done (or haven’t done), but sometimes there will be no readily apparent cause.

Those of you who work for well-established news brands probably have some degree of contact with Google News, as publisher relations is something that is important to them. So you can utilize those relationships when needed. For those that don’t the Google News help forum is a decent option.

But even if you have a contact point, you don’t want to be hitting them up very often; save that for when you really need it.

Most of the time your best course of action when typical troubleshooting efforts have failed is to fill out one of these forms:

• Report an issue
• Report an update
• Step-by-step problem solving

In my experience these forms do actually get paid attention to, particularly if you are an established news site. It may take some time to hear back but you will typically get a response. And if it is in fact something on their end, they’ll address it as possible.

It’s been a year since I took an early look at engagement rates for news organizations on Google+, so I thought I’d revisit the topic and do a fresh comparison.

As with my previous comparison, I used All my + to pull data on +1’s, shares and comments for every post on the official Google+ pages of a selection of news sites.

I used the same news organizations as last time with a few changes and additions, bringing the list to 48. The group includes a cross-section of print, broadcast and Web-only news organizations, and is not intended to be a definitive list.

It is important to note that the performance of the Google+ pages varies depending on what is examined.

Personally I like to look at the per post averages as this helps to level the playing field and provide a general sense of how much user activity and engagement typically occurs. However this comparison gets skewed by a few pages with fairly limited post activity.

So I also compiled the total engagement counts for all of the Google+ pages. News organizations that post more frequently have a strong advantage in this comparison but it helps to present another side of what’s happening.

Since it has been a year since my first comparison I also calculated the one-year growth rates for both the average engagement and total engagement figures.

Google+ Pages: Average Engagement Per Post

Mashable is the winner here by a considerable margin, with BBC News also faring better than most. Last year’s top performer The New York Times drops to #5. There are 12 news organizations with a combined average above 100.

I should point out that a few of the pages have not been active for some time. As of today Bloomberg News and The Telegraph have not made a new post since July 2012, and the most recent post on the CBS News page is dated September 2012.

Also I was once again unable to find an active Google+ page for CNN. Last year I used CNN iReport but as of today it has only two posts and is no longer active. So I replaced it with the CNN International page, which hadn’t been created yet when I did the first comparison. I also added Anderson Cooper 360.

Google+ Pages: Total Engagement

In this category The Verge dominates; they are certainly putting some effort into posting on Google+. Mashable at #2 is also doing very well. 12 of the of the 46 news organizations have more than 100,000 combined engagement actions.

As with the average engagement figures, the disparity between the top, middle and bottom of the table is significant.

Some news organizations have larger audiences and produce more content than others, which gives them a leg up. But there is plenty of opportunity for news sites to increase their Google+ activity and improve engagement.

Google+ Pages: One Year-Growth Rates

Here are the one-year growth rates for average engagement per post:

And the one-year growth rates for total engagement for all posts:

Both comparisons are skewed by the fact that a year ago some of the news sites were just getting started with Google+ and hadn’t made a lot of posts yet. But it is still interesting to see the differences one year later.

CNN International, Anderson Cooper 360, The New Yorker and CNBC are not included in the growth rate tables because they were not part of the 2012 comparison.

These roundups may be overdone, but personally I like doing one because it is interesting to look back and see what made an impression.

With that in mind, here are my top 10 posts of 2012 by pageviews:

1. The Best Free Tools for Twitter Analytics
2. Beyond Facebook Insights: Useful Facebook Analytics Tools
3. News Organizations on Google+: Which Pages Get the Most Engagement?
4. 5 Ways that Social Media Impacts SEO
5. The Fastest and Slowest News Sites in 2012
6. Media Relations Gone Wrong: How Not to Pitch a Journalist (Video)
7. 5 Good Ideas for News Media Facebook Pages
8. 8 Social Media Questions Publishers Should Be Asking Themselves
9. SEO Metrics for Publishers: How are You Tracking and Measuring Success?
10. Publisher Survey: Reddit Traffic Way Up, Digg Way Down

The Facebook analytics tools post is actually from December 2011 but since it was a top performer this year I’m letting it make the list.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to my press release buzzwords post from 2010 which continues to do well. It pulled in the second most pageviews of any post this year. Thank you search referrals!

5 Ways that Social Media Impacts SEO was the big winner in terms of social traction; 500+ tweets is a lot for me.

And the most fun to do award (yes, I’m giving out awards now) goes to the media relations gone wrong video. I was recently contacted by a global communications firm that wants to use it in their training program on media relations fundamentals.

As a side note, I also wrote five columns for Search Engine Land this year on enterprise SEO, which was a good experience.

Thanks!

This was a challenging year in terms of keeping up with workload. That’s good for business but it means certain things had to give, and this blog was one of them. So I didn’t publish here as frequently as I’d have liked, but I still managed to put out some posts that I was happy with.

I hope you found some of them useful.

To everyone that sent a pageview, comment, link or social share my way this year, thank you, I appreciate it.

Have a great 2013.

I love reading magazines, and I love my iPad because it lets me carry 8 million titles around in one lightweight device. I can read my favorites anytime, anywhere – at the airport, in the subway, at the park or at home. But I like looking at print magazines too, checking out the covers at the local kiosk and sharing publications with friends and family.

Content, in all its forms, is more than information: It’s part of our identity. You can get clues to people’s true selves by checking out the magazines they have on display in their homes. A while back, I visited the home of someone I had never met before, and prior to our introduction, I noticed that he had a cool surfing magazine from Costa Rica next to his sofa.

I quickly formed an impression of him prior to our meeting, imagining a carefree, tanned, super-fit guy. When we actually met, he was nothing like I’d imagined, but during our conversation, I learned that this was who he wanted to be. The magazine symbolized an aspirational identity.

A coffee table magazine spread used to be considered an important part of a home decorating scheme – and it still is in some quarters. The magazines selected for display provide clues about the person who chose them, whether the topic is finance, sports, decorating or art.

This industry is shifting, though, with the publishing sector moving toward a digital business model. Newsweek, a prominent U.S. news magazine, recently announced it would cease print publication and move to an all-digital format at the end of the year. Editor Tina Brown described the move as an embrace of the future of publishing.

Some have criticized Newsweek’s strategy, and many prominent authors are famously suspicious of e-books, preferring to see their work preserved in print because it seems more tangible and sustainable. And it’s true that when you see someone on the subway reading a book, you might envy him his literary adventure, whereas if you observe someone looking at a tablet, you might assume she is playing Angry Birds.

Print publications give us a feeling of permanence. Magazines and books have a physical presence that can remain in the home or office for months or even years, while Internet content and ads can disappear into cyberspace in an instant. If publishing is inevitably moving toward a digital format, what does this mean for the future of publications as an identity marker?

I think the interconnected nature of our devices will make all the difference. We’ll still share our identities – maybe even on coffee tables. But instead of sharing them only in our homes and offices, we’ll share them with a wider circle via social media.

Print media isn’t going away anytime soon, but savvy publishers will build a bridge to the digital world, giving print advertisers a more permanent home on their pages in cyberspace and allowing readers to share their identities – actual and aspirational – with people they meet online. We are what we read, and this will remain so.

Mik Stroyberg is Director of Consumer Engagement and U.S. Sales at Issuu, the world’s fastest growing digital publishing platform, with more than 4.5 million publishers and host to over 8 million publications.

This always makes me smile, so I thought I’d share a handful of them here. It would be a shame for so much unbridled positivity to never make its way into the world.

There are the simple, straightforward compliments:

And it is hard to argue with this:

A pat on the back is always nice too:

But I like the longer, dare-I-say philosophical comments best:

Bringing someone back from the precipice makes all this worthwhile.

Finally, you have to admire the “it’s them not me” approach of this one:

I have to say Akismet does a good job of catching spam comments like these. A few make it through each week but the vast majority are caught before they are published.

It has already snagged more than 100K on this blog:

An achievement worthy of some actual praise.

How many great ideas and concepts from early startups are out there just waiting to be heard? Ironically, more than you may realize.

It turns out that even the most brilliant visionaries, startup founders – dreamers of the next big thing – struggle to communicate that vision to investors, client prospects or suppliers.

I know this first hand. A close friend of mine came up with a concept with a mobile tie-in that would be unique, fun and game-changing but after the initial development he became frozen over what to do next. With a strong fear of cold calling and attending networking events, he wasn’t getting his complete concept heard and he wasn’t going anywhere fast.

This triggered me to change my strategy around traditional PR work and focus on ‘micro-PR’ campaigns.

The practice of spending time and money on online, print or broadcast campaigns with big commitments and investments needs to change. Social media, mobile marketing and such are great additions to a large PR campaign, but a startup company with limited resources or sales experience becomes overwhelmed with what to take on. As a result they may do too little or too much, risking momentum and their reputation right out of the gate.

A micro-PR campaign allows a specific audience to be targeted, say 10-15 investors for a founder looking for capital, or a handful of talented engineers for a startup that is looking to recruit key talent.

The point being, founders in early stage startups struggle to successfully recognize that early micro public relations campaigns are needed to tip momentum in their favor during critical stages of their growth.

The true advantage of a micro-PR campaign is that startup founders can mimic the results from larger campaigns while maintaining the flexibility to turn on a dime and react to market changes. This type of mini-campaign allows a more fluid level of resource commitment than a larger, more traditional PR campaign may require.

Everyone in theory faces the same demands when it comes to starting a company, gaining investors and growing their customer base. The key is taking what’s been done before and repeating it with changes tailored to your business and overall goals.

Why spend valuable time coming up a full-blown marketing campaign to promote your idea when you can do one or a few micro-PR campaigns much more easily? Take the best of what’s already been done, tweak it and determine the best course of action for you. Factor in not only what your competitors are doing, but what they have already done.

My friend has since taken this advice and his company now has inbound sales and a growing positive reputation that has given him further confidence to start another company. There’s an entrepreneur in all of us; sometimes the best way to gain traction is to mimic rather than innovate.

With over 15 years of sales, marketing and public speaking experience in the CPG and Tech industries, Wendy Dulaney is the co-founder of Easy.PR, a boutique public relations company specializing in communication on behalf of startups and entrepreneurs to create exposure and generate momentum. Easy.PR works for you to become the promoter of your ideas. Let us be your voice in commanding the attention of your audience. www.easy.pr | wendy@easy.pr

Frankly I’m not sure why they’d be sending a press release about their new VP of Communications to me. But I always liked the Globetrotters as a kid, so when I saw the team logo at the top I actually thought it was kind of neat.

To be fair I do write about PR and I occasionally cover sports and social media, so it’s not completely off base. But there isn’t any reason why someone would think this personnel announcement would be relevant to me.

The answer is that I’m in some PR databases so I get press releases every week of varying degrees of appropriateness.

And based on the accompanying pitch it is clear that this wasn’t specifically targeted to me:

Now it seems like I’m calling out the Globetrotters communications team and their PR firm (which sent this out) but the truth is I actually did enjoy receiving it.

So instead I’m going to use this as an opportunity to do two things:

1) Embed a video of the Globetrotters in action.

Life is better with buckets of water and confetti:

2) Prove the point that blogs (and other news sites) sometimes do publish all or parts of press releases verbatim, as I referenced in a post about a PEJ study on original news reporting a couple years ago.

So here is the complete press release.

While personnel announcements don’t tend to get picked up much outside of industry or trade outlets, I do like the success statistics they included.

The Globetrotters are also a case in which you can actually use a phrase like “legendary team” without it being an overused buzzword or marketing speak.

But the real winner was the logo; that’s what appealed to me most. I think it just looked cool:

HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS PROMOTE BRETT MEISTER TO SENIOR VP OF COMMUNICATIONS

(PHOENIX, Oct. 18, 2012) – Harlem Globetrotters CEO Kurt Schneider announced today that Brett Meister has been promoted to senior vice president of communications for the legendary team for which he has spearheaded successful domestic and international publicity campaigns for 15 seasons, placing the Globetrotters front and center in the media spotlight with their millions of fans.

“Brett has done an amazing job of re-igniting the Harlem Globetrotters’ pop-culture flame,” said Schneider. “He, and his team, have worked tirelessly to make stars of this new generation of Globetrotters; from national appearances on ‘The Amazing Race,’ ‘The Bachelorette,’ ESPN, ‘Sesame Street,’ ‘Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader,’ and more, to creating local headlines in all 220-plus North American markets the team visits, Brett gets the word out in creative and compelling ways. He also spearheaded the development of our popular character education program for elementary school children and the new bullying prevention program we are about to launch.”

Meister completed his 15th consecutive season with the Globetrotters in 2012, leading the team’s overall domestic and international publicity efforts. He has grown annual coverage for the Globetrotters by nearly 507 percent over a six-year period (2007-2012), including an all-time record of more than 2.8 billion media impressions in 2012. Meister’s communications team was honored by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) in 2010 for excellence in reputation management, and won two straight Silver SABRE Awards from the Holmes Report (2009 and 2010) for Best Arts, Entertainment or Media Campaign.

In addition to overseeing the Globetrotters’ Hollywood outreach efforts, Meister is routinely responsible for securing national TV hits on “TODAY,” “Good Morning America,” “Fox & Friends,” and numerous segments on the ESPN family of networks. Other highlights during his tenure with the Globetrotters included a visit he arranged with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in 2000, two separate visits to Iraq as part of the team’s annual holiday military tour to entertain troops, and two trips to the White House as part of the Annual Easter Egg Roll.

Prior to joining the Globetrotters in November 1997, Meister worked in the Continental Basketball Association for seven years, where he served as the league’s VP of Communications. He also worked as part of the basketball press information team for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.

A native of Marcus, Iowa, and a graduate of Briar Cliff University, Meister began his professional career as a television reporter and news editor (KTIV-TV, NBC) before serving as a college sports information director for three years.

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It is nice that Google News is trying to accommodate publishers and allow for more witty, print-style headlines. But in the bigger picture encouraging the use of this tag has as many potential cons as pros, so publishers should be careful about how they promote it internally.

It’s actually kind of funny to see a form of meta keywords tag making a comeback. You’d think that Google News would be sophisticated enough to determine relevancy based on the article content even when a non-literal headline is used. And that it would prefer to do so for both accuracy and reliability.

But it is fair to say that Google News has always been a strange beast.

It will be interesting to see how much weight the news_keyword tag is given and how Google News accounts for inadvertent misuse as well as abuse of the tag.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see it eventually discontinued although I do expect it will get greater adoption than some of the other Google News tags that never gained traction, since the perceived direct benefit is greater.

Regardless it is worth experimenting with and I encourage publishers to do so.

Just keep a few things in mind:

• Anyone involved in publisher SEO has spent a lot of time and effort encouraging editorial teams to find a balance between creativity and editorial voice and the use of clear, literal language. Don’t let the existence of this tag create misperceptions that such a balance is no longer needed.
• It is important to emphasize that the news_keyword meta tag is only for Google News. Articles still need descriptive, well-balanced headlines for regular Web search as well as social media (and really still for news search too).
• In addition the tag is not applicable to content like slideshows and packages that is not eligible for Google News indexation. So make sure that the editorial staff isn’t spending time adding keywords to content that won’t benefit from it.
• Remember that effective optimization is not just about relevancy and ranking, it is also about increasing clickthroughs. Be it in news search, Web search or social, you want headlines that grab attention but they still need to give users a rough idea of what the content is about or you will lose clicks.
• Encourage editorial teams to use the tag reasonably. A maximum of 10 phrases per article is allowed but stick to a limited number phrases that accurately convey the main subject(s) of the article. Judicious use of the tag (by all publishers) may ultimately make it more effective.
• Many editorial teams already have a misperception that adding tag links to a page (most commonly on blog posts) helps their content to rank better for those terms. Don’t let the news_keywords tag add fuel to that fire. On-page content tagging should still be done conservatively with efforts made to avoid overlapping and seldom-used terms. See Blog Tag Optimization Tips for News Sites and The Huffington Post’s Kim Kardashian Tag-o-Rama for more on this.

The bottom line: treat the news_keywords meta tag as a supplement to your Google News optimization efforts not as a replacement for sound, fundamental editorial SEO.

For details on how to use the tag check out the keywords and search queries help page for publishers.

What enterprise SEO truisms can be found in famous TV catchphrases? Quite a few it turns out.

If you’re still here let’s hope words like “clever” and “fun” are now coming to mind instead of “incredibly cheesy” or “embarrassing.” Either way I had a deadline to meet!

In any case, here are eight truths about enterprise SEO as told by famous TV characters:

1. “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout Willis?”

Arnold Jackson, Diff’rent Strokes

In large organizations the various departments and business units tend to speak their own language and everyone has different priorities. As such it is vital to establish a framework for SEO initiatives and communication that resonates with each.

This also emphasizes the importance of advocacy and training. The details of SEO are still unknown to many people and as importantly there are a lot of misconceptions out there.

2. “D’oh!”

Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

SEO mistakes happen often, especially with large sites. To be abundantly clear I am not comparing tech and product teams to Homer Simpson! However the fact is that whenever there is a redesign, migration or new project there are bound to be SEO issues that require attention.

For this reason regular monitoring and periodic site audits and reassessments are essential. In addition SEO feedback should be provided at each stage of the development cycle to catch things ahead of time.

Mistakes aren’t always technical either. SEO missteps from well-intentioned editorial and marketing teams are just a common, which is why ongoing training and oversight are needed.

3. “Danger, Will Robinson!”

Robot, Lost in Space

In managing multiple sites and millions of pages it sure is nice to have some tools. Enterprise-level suites like BrightEdge, Conductor and seoClarity are a good place to start.

Also take advantage of the Webmaster Tools API to gain full access to all of the Google Webmaster Tools error data for your sites.

For more suggestions check out Ian Lurie’s What Is In Your Enterprise SEO Toolkit? and Adam Audette’s Enterprise SEO Tools, Part 1 and Part 2.

4. “Yada, yada, yada.”

Elaine Benes, Seinfeld

The main point here is don’t skip over the details!

Not everyone needs all the information at every phase, but when it comes to execution make sure the right people have the proper specs and documentation.

5. “Make it work.”

Tim Gunn, Project Runway

I have to admit that I’ve never seen Project Runway but this is apparently a well-known saying from the show.

When it comes to enterprise SEO you’re never going to get everything you want and things can take a lot longer than you’d like. But you’ve still got to deliver results so find a way to make it work.

Prioritizing recommendations helps to ensure that the most important things get attention. Assigning a level of impact and level of effort to each gives you a meaningful system to use in making compromises.

6. “Dyn-o-mite!”

J.J Evans, Good Times

Analytics and reporting are critical. You need to tell the story well to win hearts and minds, maintain momentum and secure new resources when needed.

The level and style of reporting should be tailored to specific audiences. In most cases keeping it simple is best. Graphs and charts are a great way to illustrate the key points.

7. “Aaay!”

Fonzie, Happy Days

Successes like significantly increasing YoY non-branded search traffic or effectively leveraging social media for SEO are actually really cool. Just saying.

8. “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Hannibal Smith, The A-Team

Enterprise SEO is as much about project management and interdepartmental coordination as it is about analysis and solutions. Putting a solid plan in place and seeing it all the way through is going make all the difference.

Most images from the corresponding Wikipedia page, used under Creative Commons. Arnold picture from Jason Huffman. Homer picture from Simpson Crazy. Hannibal picture from Northern Planner.

Sports teams are among the biggest offenders:

Now don’t get me wrong. As a marketer I appreciate the use of a call to action to increase activity and engagement. It is an effective tactic and there are plenty of good ways to do it.

But as a user I find it annoying to frequently see posts in my Facebook news feed that directly ask, cajole or downright beg me to “LIKE” it.

Brands of all shapes and sizes do it, but as I mainly follow news organizations and sports teams on Facebook it is the teams that negatively caught my attention.

The counterpoint is that most of these posts are getting a lot of likes, comments and shares. So at a minimum the “LIKE” begging isn’t turning users off and maybe it is even helping to increase engagement. But popular sports teams tend to have such a large following that I suspect these posts would do very well regardless.

Maybe I’ll do a quick study in a future post or perhaps someone like PageLever or EdgeRank Checker has good data on this.

Here are some more recent examples.

What do you think – annoying or effective?

How does social media activity impact search engine optimization? That’s a common question these days as publishers try to make the most of search and social for audience development.

While the role of social media signals in Google and Bing’s ranking algorithms is still evolving there are already a number of ways that social media is having a clear influence.

Here are five ways that social media impacts SEO, or more specifically search engine visibility, rankings and traffic:

1. Annotations in the Search Results

Both Google and Bing use social data to annotate select listings on their search engine results pages.

The annotations include things like a thumbnail image or an indication that someone the user is connected to (be that a person or a brand) has shared or liked the page.

For example:

This extra visual information attracts user attention which leads to improved clickthrough rates and thus increased traffic from search engines.

2. Personalized Rankings

In addition to annotations the engines also personalize the order of their search results based on a number of factors including social connections and activity.

Google’s “Search Plus Your World” puts the most weight on Google+ activity but other social signals are taken into consideration too. Bing has stronger relationships with Facebook and Twitter so it is in a better position to utilize their data.

This means if a user has +1’ed or liked or shared a particular Web page that page is more likely to appear higher in their search results.

Similarly if a user is connected to a brand’s official page things the brand has shared or posted are more likely to be given prominence in the user’s results (as seen in the screenshots above).

The ranking changes are most apparent for signed-in users but personalization impacts the results of users that are not signed in as well.

Beyond personalized search results the engines are also looking at social activity in aggregate to help evaluate the popularity or relative importance of content and the authority of both sites and authors.

Thus social media activity can impact overall rankings too although still to a limited degree at this time.

3. Secondary Links

When it comes to ranking factors links are still much more important than social shares. A link from a quality, trusted site has considerably greater weight than a like, tweet or +1.

Fortunately a good deal of social activity revolves around sharing links. Unfortunately many social media sites add a “nofollow” attribute to any links within user generated content. This is a necessary step to combat spam but it takes away the SEO value of the links.

However links from social media still have considerable indirect SEO value because users discover content through them which leads to links in other places (like blogs) that do have SEO value.

As a result social media activity is a good source of secondary links. Dan Zarrella’s look at the correlations between social sharing and inbound links helps to illustrate this point.

For more on this topic see my analysis of what types of sites get the most links from Pinterest.

4. Highlighting Authors

In some instances Google is now highlighting author information in its search results.

Highlighted authors get a thumbnail headshot, Google+ information plus as a “More by” link that surfaces more of their work:

As with other forms of social annotations this extra exposure has the potential to increase clickthrough rates so it is worth taking advantage of the opportunity.

Participation requires creating a Google+ profile and connecting it to the sites that the person is writing for. See the Google help link above for details.

5. AuthorRank

Beyond author markup in the search results, both Google and Bing are beginning to utilize the concept of AuthorRank in which trusted, popular authors may be given a boost in search and social media visibility.

The engines have long used factors like domain authority, trust and link popularity in their ranking algorithms for websites and pages. Now these concepts are being applied to individuals too and social media activity is an important signal in making those calculations.

In essence, the work and activity of writers with a strong social presence may be given greater weight in determining search and social media visibility. So authors that have an active following with good engagement, and whose content is frequently shared and linked to, will have a leg up.

Ultimately it is about establishing things like trust, credibility, popularity, influence and topical authority, all of which are good for both SEO and social media marketing. It is still early days in terms of the impact of AuthorRank but it is something that is worth experimenting with.

——

So there you have it.

For tips on integrating search and social initiatives at large organizations see my column on Search Engine Land: 5 Ways To Better Integrate Social Media & Enterprise SEO.

Also be sure to check out my thorough, painstakingly created SEO and Social Media for Publishers: A Low-Rent Infographic.

I spend a lot of time auditing websites which means I am regularly in the Google Webmaster Tools profiles for a variety of sites.

Lately I’ve been noticing some impressive Pinterest link counts in the linking domains report under “Links to Your Sites.” For example:

What stands out is not just that Pinterest is becoming a top source of links for a number of content sites but that the links tend to be spread out over a lot of different pages:

This got me curious so I took a look at the Pinterest link figures in Google Webmaster Tools for a group of 60 popular sites in a variety of topical categories. The surveyed group includes the magazine sites in my Pinterest traffic survey plus quite a few more that we work with at Define Media Group.

For reasons of client confidentially I am not able to reveal the specific sites but they are all well-known brands from major publishers. To make the survey more meaningful I divided the 60 sites into eight categories.

Here are the average Pinterest link counts for the sites in each category:

Not surprisingly the sites in the Food and Home categories are dominating by a large margin. Fashion and Beauty is also doing well compared to many categories although I expected those sites to be closer to Food and Home.

These are the exact averages for each category:

And here are the counts for the most linked site in each category:

No big surprises here as the link figures are roughly in line with what tends to be popular on Pinterest and the demographics of the user base. Lifestyle content is the big winner but there are good opportunities for publishers in nearly any topical area.

But What About Nofollow?

External links on Pinterest have the nofollow attribute which takes way their direct SEO value (a necessary step to combat abuse). However links from Pinterest still have considerable indirect SEO value as users discover content through them which leads to links and social shares in other places.

It is also important to remember that the value of links (from any site) extends beyond SEO. A high volume of links from Pinterest to a diverse mix of pages creates plenty of opportunity for exposure, engagement and traffic.

These are the findings of the annual ForeSee American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report that was released today.

In the News and Information category FoxNews.com leads by a considerable margin. Its satisfaction score of 84 is six points higher than the #2 news site, ABCNews.com. Its 2.4% increase over last year is also the highest rate of improvement in the group.

Most of the others including ABCNews.com, CNN.com, USAToday.com, NYTimes.com and MSNBC.com are clustered together with satisfaction scores from 73-76.

Only HuffingtonPost.com scored considerably lower than the pack with a 69 for the second straight year.

So what is FoxNews.com doing right? Apparently it is giving the people what they want. According to the report it “has a good understanding of its visitors’ wants and needs and has done an incredible job at not just meeting expectations, but surpassing them.”

That sounds like it is mostly about content to me. I think it is fair to say that the FoxNews.com audience is generally speaking in favor of the site’s choices in and style of coverage.

Conversely HuffingtonPost.com, which scored 15 points lower, is described as “difficult to navigate, cluttered, and ad heavy.” That describes user experience as opposed to content. Not a surprising assessment as HuffPo is not exactly a simple, streamlined site.

However the report commentary also suggests the site “seems to suffer from more diffuse targeting. The site began as an opinionated liberal news commentary, but has evolved into a more general news and information site since its acquisition by AOL.”

How Do Ads Impact User Experience?

The Huffington Post’s “ad heavy” description aligns with the ASCI study’s findings on advertising on news sites.

HuffingtonPost.com has the highest score for “I don’t pay attention to the ads” and “ads interfere with my experience.” Similarly it has the lowest score for “I frequently look at the ads.”

Interestingly USAToday.com ties for the highest ad relevancy score and more users apparently pay attention to its advertisements than any other news site.

For example, take a look at the +1 Audience Report from the Google Webmaster Tools profile of a major fashion site.

Its Google+ gender breakdown is 80% female, the largest majority I’ve come across to-date:

Gender breakdown of unique users that have +1’d a page on the site.

Women are the strong majority in every age group:

Now for a fashion magazine site with a largely female readership that is hardly surprising. But in the first year of Google+ it has not been all that common to find audience data with women as the majority.

The main reason has been that many sites with a largely female audience have not had enough +1 activity to generate the audience characteristics reports, as seen in this example:

This is still fairly common but it is slowly changing. The fashion site referenced above has less than 10K unique users that have +1’d a page but the numbers are growing and the +1’s are being driven by women.

And even if Google+ is not a strong traffic driver or seemingly natural fit for a particular site, +1 activity has a direct and indirect impact on search engine visibility. So for any type of site it is worth experimenting with Google+ promotion and engagement (see 8 Social Media Questions Publishers Should Be Asking Themselves).

Here are a few more examples. I am not able to reveal the exact sites due to client confidentially but they are all well-known, established brands.

Women’s Site

Food Site

Entertainment Site

Specific to lifestyle publishers the Google data was never all that useful anyway since it was dominated by topics like breaking news, sports and entertainment.

So what’s a lifestyle site covering things like food, fashion or home to do?

One good source is @YahooSearchData on Twitter.

I’d given Yahoo! Search Data a shout-out in Search Trend Optimization for Evergreen Content but it continues to be a useful resource so I wanted to bring it up again.

While it covers trending topics in all areas, searches that are relevant to lifestyle publishers are often featured.

Take a look at some recent tweets:

Crafts of all types are buzzingon @Yahoo including “paper crafts”, “kids crafts”“duct tape crafts,” “4th of July crafts”

— Yahoo! Search Data (@YahooSearchData) June 25, 2012

How to questions are buzzing during grilling season on @Yahoo, “how to grill corn on the cob”, “how to grill salmon” “how to grill chicken”

— Yahoo! Search Data (@YahooSearchData) June 22, 2012

This week on @Yahoo searches are spiking for “picnic ideas” up 68% this week “picnic tables”“picnic baskets” “picnic foods” “picnic games”

— Yahoo! Search Data (@YahooSearchData) June 22, 2012

TRENDING: Searches for “online coupons” are up 3052% this week and searches for “ice cream coupons”and Couponmom.com spiking online

— Yahoo! Search Data (@YahooSearchData) June 27, 2012

Rompers: Searches for “rompers” are up 57% this week as mainstream fashionistas are searching on @Yahoo!

— Yahoo! Search Data (@YahooSearchData) June 13, 2012

Now just because something is trending on Yahoo/Bing doesn’t mean that it is trending on Google too but it will certainly be a possibility. And they share a wide range of data that will be of interest to a variety of different publishers.

So I’d recommend including @YahooSearchData in your toolkit for monitoring trending topics.

Today Kim Wilson and I are leading a social media workshop for a group of local TV and radio stations. In preparing for the Pinterest portion I took a look at the pinning activity of local TV news teams.

It is fair to say that it is still early days for local TV newsrooms on Pinterest. Many stations are not yet on it and among those that are activity and engagement is fairly low.

There are some good examples out there however such as Fox 8 News in Cleveland, KARK 4 News in Little Rock, Seattle’s KING 5 and WHSV 3 in Harrisonburg, VA.

For more see Kim’s Lost Remote post on what local TV newsrooms are pinning which gave me a great start to my research.

Among the types of boards that are popular are lifestyle content (recipes and food, fashion, home, etc.); local scenery and special events; news and weather; meet the team and behind the scenes photos; and contests and promotions.

I particularly liked what KARK’s morning show team is doing with behind the scenes photos.

This was my favorite pin, featuring KARK’s Matt Mosler and Mallory Hardin:

The takeaway: have fun with it and show some personality! It is a good way to foster a connection with users/viewers and to encourage repins, likes, comments, etc.

I’d also add that it is important to pin strong, high-quality images whenever possible. In going through a number of TV news boards I came across quite a few photos that were lacking in quality.

Pinterest users have an expectation of interesting, compelling photos and without that it is difficult to succeed.

At my first PR job I had to type in contact addresses from the hard-copy Bacon’s guide so we could mail merge and send out the press materials. Or stand over the fax machine feeding through one press release at at time.

Being required to do cold-call follow-ups as a junior employee was one of the main reasons I gravitated toward other forms of online marketing as soon as they started to emerge.

Fortunately today there are much better tools at our disposal be it PR software suites like Vocus and Cision or networking services like HARO and Seek or Shout.

And while the phone is still the best option in some situations, email and social media have made it much easier to interact with the media in ways that are better for all.

However, even though the tools and communication channels have improved many of the mistakes with regards to distributing press releases and following up have stood the test of time.

So in the spirit of my post on buzzwords and marketing speak in press releases I thought I’d have a little fun by capturing the essence of how not to pitch a journalist in a video.

Ever been involved in something like this on either side, although I hope not as extreme?

Here’s a transcript of the dialog:

Hi, I’m a busy important journalist.

–Well at least until the next round of layoffs. LOL! Seriously though, did you get my press release?

What?

–My press release. Did you get it? I emailed it to you. Three times.

We get a lot of releases.

–But mine is really important. I sent it to you on Twitter. And Facebook. And Google+. I took a picture of it and shared it on Pinterest.

I have no idea what release you are talking about. And what the heck is Google+?

–Seriously though, my press release. It says “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.” That means you should write about it right away.

How did you get in here?

–I left you a voice mail every day this week but you haven’t called me back. So I had to sneak into your office. Now about my press release. Aren’t you going to cover it?

Why on earth would I pay attention to you?

–Because I personalized my email pitch. I used your name in the email. I mentioned that I like your work. And each of the five follow-up emails I sent were also personalized.

I’ve got to go.

–But my press release is really good. It is filled with buzzwords and jargon. I used unique, revolutionary, one-of-a-kind. My news is best of breed!

News? Please go away.

–But I embedded multimedia in my release. Images! Video! And I socialized it too.

Do you even know what I cover?

–First you write an article about my press release. Then a bunch of other sites will take your article, barely change it and then publish it on their own sites. It is called aggregation!

Security!!

–Please. I’m begging you. My client thinks I have an actual relationship with journalists like you.

I’m going to enjoy kicking your butt.

–So will you publish the story today?

That’s where tracking and measurement comes in. When it comes to SEO publishers need to understand and effectively communicate progress and success.

SEO is a never-ending process and without good benchmarks, clear and realistic goals and solid reporting it is easy to lose momentum within the organization.

So what are the best ways to track and measure success?

I’ll leave the in-depth answer to the analytics experts and Excel ninjas out there (along those lines a good recent post is Ian Lurie’s SEO Analytics, Middle Earth-Style).

In this post I’d like to highlight some of the key metrics for publishers to focus on.

Primary Success Metrics

• YoY natural search referrals – this simple and straightforward metric is the #1 measuring stick for news and content sites. It is best to look at YoY growth since month-to-month can be too easily skewed by seasonality. YoY and rolling three months are a good combination.

  Remember though that YoY can also be strongly impacted by the news cycle. When things like Tahrir Square or the Royal Wedding hit, if the same month one year later does not have the same traffic levels that isn’t necessarily a negative sign. When it comes to analytics everything is relative.

• Branded vs. non-branded – publishers with well-established brands tend to pull in a lot of branded searches, so separating non-branded referrals is a better way to judge your overall content optimization efforts. However you want to measure branded referrals too since this is a way to monitor growth in brand awareness and popularity (which can also have an impact on SEO).
• Search traffic by site section and content type – to make the data more meaningful it is important to segment it both by channel/section and content type (articles and blog posts, features, slideshows, video, etc.)
• Total number of pages receiving search traffic – looking at the total number of pages that receive at least one visit from search is a decent way to measure total indexation, how older and archived content is performing and how well the site is doing for longer-tail queries. SEOmoz covered this a while back in a post on indexation for SEO and I thought it was a good idea.
• Total number of referring keywords – this is less insightful than it used to be due to the Google secure search “keyword not provided” issue, but it is still worth capturing this data.
• Top referring keywords – this is also less insightful now but still useful to examine, both for the site overall and for specific sections and high-priority content. The search queries data in Google Webmaster Tools can be used to offset “keyword not provided” deficiencies in Omniture or Google Analytics.
• Pageviews, time on site, bounce rate, etc. – searcher intent and behavior varies depending on the type of query and content (as well as the individual). In some cases search traffic is more likely to be “one and done” since a successful search outcome means the user found what they were looking for; in others a multi-page visit might be more the norm.

  Regardless of the circumstances, you want to do what you can to keep visitors on the site. These metrics help you to measure that and to compare search with other types of site visitors (like social media and direct navigation).

• Conversions – this comes into play much more in fields like e-commerce SEO, but publishers have desired conversions too. At a basic level this might be print, email newsletter or RSS subscriptions. Getting search visitors to click through to a second piece of content could be another. It can even be things like increasing follows/likes/+1s to help with social media efforts.

Secondary Metrics

There are a wide range of additional metrics that can be evaluated, in particular things that do not directly define search traffic or searcher behavior but do have an impact on SEO success.

On the technical site this includes tracking Google and Bing Webmaster Tools errors combined with the crawl data from enterprise SEO toolsets. This provides a way to measure the progress of technical fixes and improvements and a way to identify new issues that arise (as they always do).

For editorial teams this can be a roll-up of feedback based on periodic spot checking: how effectively search-friendly language is being utilized, how well key page elements are being optimized, the depth and volume of content around important topics, etc. Such things are more subjective and harder to report on comprehensively but there are still meaningful insights that can be gained.

In the marketing category secondary metrics include tracking domain authority and page authority (for key pages) over time, along with internal and inbound links, social shares, additional brand signals, etc.

What about Rankings?

It is hard to talk about SEO analytics without any mention of rankings, but particularly for news and content sites it should not be a primary success metric.

The increase in personalized search rankings (for both signed-in and not signed-in users) combined with QDF (query deserves freshness) and the Google Freshness update, which give a temporary boost to brand new content around hot and trending queries, means that everyone’s rankings are a bit different, and rankings are frequently in flux. So it is not possible to provide truly accurate ranking data.

For these reasons it is better to move away from rankings and focus on YoY and rolling three-month natural search referrals (branded and non-branded) as the primary success metrics.

This can be supplemented with the available keyword data from Omniture or Google Analytics plus Google Webmaster Tools and third-party tools like SEMRush to gain general insights into what types of terms are bringing in search traffic.

If you still want to monitor rankings for a select group of high-priority terms that is fine, just remember the limitations and make sure everyone else understands them too.

Reporting Format

One last tip: how you share the data within the organization is nearly as important as what you are tracking and measuring.

There is a lot to be said for clean, simple, visual reporting. The main thing being that people may actually read it!

The best approach is to utilize a multi-tiered format since not everyone needs or wants to see all of the reporting.

Start with a simple one-page summary that conveys the top-line data in a clear and meaningful way. Then use additional spreadsheets to provide in-depth analysis for those looking for more detail or who want to drill down on specific things.

Sharing the basic reports across the organization can also help to foster a little healthy competition between titles and/or site sections, which in turn helps you to gain more SEO buy-in and execution.

What Else?

These are the primary and secondary metrics that I like to utilize. What else are you tracking and how are you reporting the data?

Let me know in the comments.

So I thought I’d check in on the PageSpeed scores for a selection of major news sites.

Page speed is not a major ranking factor (according to Google it impacts roughly 1 in 100 searches) but it does have a direct and indirect impact not only on SEO but also on social media activity and the overall user experience. For these reasons it is something that is worth paying attention to.

For this year’s comparison I started with the group of sites I looked at last year (see Google Page Speed Ratings One Year Later) and added in the majority of sites from News Organizations on Google+: Which Pages Get the Most Engagement?

For the sake of simplicity I pulled PageSpeed Online scores for the home page of each news site. PageSpeed scores are on a 0-100 scale with a higher number indicating better performance.

Here are the fastest – and the slowest – news sites in 2012:

Yahoo! News is the winner, coming in with a very high score of 96. The UK’s Mail Online and Business Insider round out the top three with similarly high scores.

The top 10 all received scores of 90 or higher with six sites tied for fifth place.

It is not surprising to see sites like Business Insider, TechCrunch and Mashable in the top group (and The Huffington Post close at #11) but it was good to see some traditional news organizations make it in there too. Their sites sometimes lag behind due to a legacy CMS or other site architecture issues.

I didn’t expect to see NPR near the bottom of the table as their home page appears to load rather quickly in my own browser. But I checked it a few times and as you’ll see below 67 is actually an improvement over last year.

Whenever I do a search or social media comparison post for news sites The New York Times tends to be near the top of the group. But site speed is one area in which the competition has a leg up.

Note that for The Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Financial Times the PageSpeed tool was redirected to the URL for the US version of their home page. So the US URLs were used in the comparison.

One-Year Gains and Losses

Since I did a similar exercise with a smaller group of news sites last April I can also provide some data on changes in site speed over the past year.

Keep in mind that the content and particularly the advertisements on a home page are frequently changing so the PageSpeed scores will regularly fluctuate too.

But capturing scores at periodic intervals does provide a general sense of whether the pages are performing better or worse than previously.

Among the smaller sampling of news sites here are the home pages that have seen the greatest YoY improvement:

Reuters should probably be put into a special category since its home page score of 20 last year was bizarrely low (I recall checking that one several times to confirm it). They may have been having some kind of technical issue at the time that has since been resolved.

Among the rest of the group all but one site received a higher score this year. Two sites had 30%+ gains, two had 20%+ gains and the top 12 all improved by 10% or more.

Only The Telegraph saw a drop in home page PageSpeed; 18.6% is a considerable decline.

I’ve checked that one a few times but it continues to receive a 70. They were having an odd 404 issue with their home page yesterday which was resolved before I pulled these scores, but perhaps there are still lingering issues.

I have not done a sports team comparison post in quite a while, mainly because the figures quickly become outdated and total reach is not all that important to look at.

But one advantage of having done this in the past is that I have previous figures to compare against.

Since it has been two years since I did The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook I thought it would be interesting to revisit this and capture the growth rate for all the teams.

MLB Teams on Twitter

First the teams’ official Twitter profiles.

Here are the 30 baseball clubs ranked by two-year growth rate:

Not surprisingly the baseball teams with massive growth rates are the ones that were just getting started a couple of years ago. But nice to see those clubs connecting with more fans.

I did not expect to see the Phillies at the bottom of the list but with all the success they’ve had in the past five years or so helped them build up a large following early on.

Plus the Phillies and Yankees were on Twitter’s old Suggested Users list which gave them a big advantage at the time.

Here are the teams ranked by current total followers:

I thought the Yankees and Red Sox would be at the top but nice job by the Phillies to be #1 despite the poorest two-year growth rate.

We’ll see if all the attention the new look, new stadium Miami Marlins are getting (both positive and negative) will start pushing their Twitter numbers up.

Right now approximately 30K followers is the bottom of the range. That is still fairly low (hey teams near the bottom, do some more promotion!) but up considerably from the low end of 1.5K two years ago.

MLB Teams on Facebook

Now a look at the official Facebook pages.

First the two-year growth rates:

The Rangers have nearly twice the growth rate of any team which is not surprising considering they were in the World Series the last two seasons.

The Dodgers have also seen a lot of growth. This might partly be a large market getting more active or perhaps all the attention around the team sale has sparked more fan interest.

Overall the Facebook growth percentages are considerably smaller than Twitter but the teams have attracted much larger fan bases on Facebook. In many cases the 2010 Facebook numbers are still larger than the 2012 Twitter numbers.

Now the MLB team pages ranked by total likes:

Here the Yankees and Red Sox take their expected positions and the Yankees are #1 by a large margin.

The Phillies are still top 10 but they are more in the pack on Facebook (again a testament to the power of the Twitter Suggested Users list).

The Nationals’ last place position on Facebook and #29 ranking on Twitter gives them the smallest combined following.

It is well established that Pinterest offers great opportunities for lifestyle publishers but how well is it paying off in actual site traffic?

To get a clearer picture I pulled referral data from the past six months for a group of 25 magazines sites that we work with at Define Media Group.

I am not at liberty to share the specific sites due to confidentiality requirements but they are all well-known brands. I selected sites from several different major publishers that are a natural fit for Pinterest, specifically those that cover food, home, women’s fashion and entertainment.

The level of brand presence and direct participation on Pinterest varies considerably among the examined sites.

Six-Month Traffic Trends

First the six-month traffic trends. To anonymize the data I combined all 25 sites’ figures into a monthly total.

These figures represent visits, not pageviews:

I was surprised to see the combined figures dip in February and March but this is skewed by the fact that one site had a massive spike in January. The overall trend line paints a clearer picture of the six-month timeframe.

In February Pinterest traffic for 19 of the 25 sites increased compared to January and with one exception the declines were modest.

However in March 16 of 25 sites experienced a decline compared to February, though again largely modest.

Late January and February was red carpet season which could explain the lower March figures for the sites covering fashion and entertainment. But some of the sites in other categories experienced declines as well.

It will be interesting to see what happens in Q2 this year.

Quarterly Gains

Here is a look at the quarterly gains both for the combined group and separating them into four topical categories:

A 141% increase represents nice quarterly growth for the group as a whole.

I did not expect the homes sites to have considerably less growth than the other categories although 45% growth is still substantial.

However in drilling down it was clear that some of the home sites were already doing pretty well in Q4 2011. So the difference is partially attributable to some of the sites in other categories catching up in Q1 2012.

Some Other Points of Interest

Among the 25 sites that were examined:

• In Q4 2011 the most visits that any site got from Pinterest in a single month was 240K+. In Q1 2012 it was 400K+.
• Quite a few of the sites are getting less than 100K visits per month on average and some are still under 10K per month.
• In Q4 2011 the highest percentage of total site traffic that Pinterest represented for any site was 2.5%. In Q1 2012 it was 5%.
• After a few top performers Pinterest represents 1-2% of monthly traffic for a handful of sites but for most it is less than 1%.
• In Q4 2011 Pinterest was a top 10 referring domain for 4 out of 25 sites. In Q1 2012 this rose to 9 out of 25.

So even for lifestyle sites with content that is a natural fit for Pinterest the actual number of visits is still modest. But traffic is continuing to rise (with a much better trend line than poor Digg. See Publisher Survey: Reddit Traffic Way Up, Digg Way Down).

Also keep in mind that the examined sites are all well-established brands that get considerable traffic from direct navigation, partner sites, search engines and other social media outlets, among other sources. Breaking in among their top referring domains is not any easy task.

What traffic gains are trends are you seeing from Pinterest?

The figures on where users get their news links from is already being covered as a sign that Facebook and Twitter may not be as strong of a news source as previously thought.

But when I look at those charts I just see common sense:

Facebook is still dominated by real, personal connections so why wouldn’t friends and family be the primary source?

Things like Facebook Pages, the Open Graph protocol and frictionless sharing, as well as the Subscribe button for journalists, are giving news organizations an increasing number of ways to forge relationships with users and gain prominence in their streams.

But your mom is always going to care a heck of a lot more about what you are sharing (whether it is a family photo or a news link) than what a newspaper or local TV station shares.

Another thing to remember is that even when Facebook and Twitter are not the primary source for news they are an amazing supplementary source.

Users regularly look to news organizations and reporters (as well as individuals) on Twitter for additional information particularly in breaking news situations. And a Facebook Page is a good place to aggregate and curate user-generated content to tell more of a story, particularly at the local level.

Furthermore, Twitter and Facebook are about much more than just news delivery. A diversified social strategy incorporates a wide range of methods for growing audience and making meaningful connections with users.

Thus through social media news organizations offer not only news and information but also community and even entertainment.

One last thought on the Pew study: hey social, search still owns you!

It is not quite that simple, but it is good to remember that natural search is still a major traffic driver to news and content sites. So don’t let social push SEO out of the mix.

Since infographics are still (kind of) the rage I’ve been meaning to publish one here. But since I lack any artistic ability and I don’t have the time to pull any meaningful data I thought I’d try something a little different.

The result of tireless brainstorming and minutes of sheer hard work is the following low-rent infographic:

You have to admit many infographics have WAY too much crammed into them. Aren’t they supposed to make information easier to digest?

Maybe I’m on to something here.

This week I took part in an OPA Social Media Day panel on social media for audience development with Lisa Brewer from Time Inc. and Sasha Koren from The New York Times.

To provide a strategic overview and set a framework for the discussion I came up with a list of questions that summarizes the types of issues we frequently encounter in helping publishers with social media.

I received some positive feedback on the approach so I thought I’d share the questions here along with a brief summary of what I touched on.

Here are eight social media questions that publishers should be asking themselves: