Welcome to Search & Tonic, where we like our links the same way we like our drinks; strong. Each Friday we will present links from the past week that wowed us, offered a unique opinion, or taught us something brand new.

Covered this week: ACE’s great new board of directors; why you should consider Pinterest for your social strategy; the Google Knowledge Graph explained; Facebook advertising loses GM; 29Prime gets shady; 7 tactics to boost order value; and Edmonton says goodbye to The Good Food Box.

New Advertising Club of Edmonton (ACE) Board Members

Maybe I’m biased, but I’m very excited about the new line-up of ACE board members! Dana is the new Communications Chair, and is pretty excited about it – wait until the actual work starts.

I became an ACE member after I took a second marketing class with NAIT instructor, Teresa Sturgess in 2011. We were talking about “breaking into the industry” and she got really animated about the Ad Club. She took a poll to see how many of us were ACE members and then heckled those of us who weren’t. She wisely pointed out that a student membership was only $15, and then pointed to my Starbucks cup and said that the $15 membership fee was probably less then three of my coffees. She was wrong about that part; I only drink straight-up americanos, not sugary, sugary Lattes. Teresa was right about getting the ACE membership though, and I’ve had one ever since.

Why Your SEO & Social Strategy Should Include Pinterest

I used to think Pinterest was just pictures of wedding dresses and bridal bouquets because my best friend is getting married and she exclusively (and obsessively) pins wedding things. Steve Beatty addresses that I was way wrong about this and explains how Pinterest’s reach is growing. One of the growth areas has been in the the male demographic, where male user percentage grew from 25% in September 2011, to 35% in March 2012.

The bottom line is that Pinterest is far from being an SEO miracle, but it provides valuable backlinks and gives companies a place to showcase creativity. It isn’t just for lifestyle brands either, Beatty points to the MLB Pinterest account and a bunch of pins about the “majestic moustaches” of Major League Baseballers that are collecting considerable repins.

Google Launches Knowledge Graph

Google’s Knowledge Graph will showcase the most popular facts about people, places and things while still providing traditional results as well. I read through this article with a whatever, whatever attitude until it answered the question, “How do you keep from getting overwhelmed with useless facts?” I’ve never googled Matt Groening before, but the image that accompanies the answer to that question taught me quite a bit about him, or more specifically his family. His parents and sister were clearly the launching points for naming some of his Simpson family characters.

Google knows that those names are frequently searched for, so it makes sense to showcase those facts for searchers. When you start searching for Disneyland, you see information on popular rides alongside fast facts that are frequently searched for. For example, Did you know that Space Mountain in Disneyland is only three minutes long? Some might argue that three minutes is a wickedly short time to spend on a ride that people sometimes wait upwards of 100 minutes in line for. However, speaking from a recent Space Mountain experience, three minutes is plenty of time to be jerked around a completely blacked out maze of tracks.

GM Pulls $10M in Facebook Advertising

Happy Facebook IPO day! Maybe you should celebrate by “poking” one of your Facebook friends. I can’t believe “poking” is still a thing.

GM pulled its Facebook ads simply because they weren’t working for them. Fair enough, but why announce it so close to the IPO? Not that it’s going to make any difference in how the IPO plays out…

I’ve always appreciated the way Facebook ads are targeted, even when the ads I get annoy me. When I was engaged, it was 24/7 ads for photographers, destination weddings, dresses, and flowers. Now that I’m married, my ads revolve around household goods, baby-bump photography, baby clothes, and maternity pants. GM has a much better chance of selling me a car on Facebook, then a maternity photographer has of selling me a photo package of my non-existent spawn.

29Prime – Good at the Photoshop, Not so Good at the Being Honest

This article blew my mind. I can’t wrap my head around this company’s way of doing business. Did no one at 29Prime take “Ethics in Business 425″? Even without that class, you’d have to be out of your mind to think that these moves were going to make the business stronger. I’m relatively new to the SEO game, but putting your tagline in your Google Places business name?!? Come on guys, it says right there on the page NOT to do that!

The tagline itself appears to be a significant overestimate of the actual number of customers served as well, but even that isn’t as jaw-dropping as the photoshopped location images. The article asks, “How many corners can one company cut?” I think a more apt question would be, “How many blatant lies can one company tell?” That’s what their location photo is, an outright lie.

7 Tactics to Boost Average Order Value

Who could say no to a Kitten Starter Pack? Bundles are about complimentary products – not just having them available around your site, but packaging them together and then clearly titling the bundles. I’m a sucker for free delivery thresholds! To the point where even if the free delivery turns out not to apply to international shipping, once an item is in my cart, it is going to get mailed to me – free shipping or not.

#4 on the list is Bolt-Ons, and these often come with clever wording, such as, “give your order the ultimate finishing touch.” You want to know where this works really well? Online food delivery systems. When you are already ordering two pizzas, do you seriously need cheesy breadsticks as well? No, of course you don’t! But… but they’re only $4 and look at that picture, they look so good! Yep, those breadsticks get me every damn time.

No More Good Food Box in Edmonton

I only had the chance to enjoy two orders from Eat Local First’s Good Food Box, and I’m glad I did. The company, which carried 850 different local products from 80 different Alberta producers and vendors will make its final deliveries today. In the “we are closing” email I received, it was noted that $675,000 had been returned to local vendors since 2010. I had appreciated the concept of eating locally for a while without being an active participant, but then I watched Food, Inc. and you simply cannot un-see what that documentary shows you.

I can’t say that I’ll miss Good Food Box, but I suppose that is largely due to the fact that the Downtown Farmer’s Market hits 104th Street tomorrow morning and a lot of the vendors from Eat Local First sell there! Also, the waffles. Who can say no to an Eva Sweet waffle?

You can listen to it here.

Welcome to Search & Tonic, where we like our links the same way we like our drinks; strong. Each Friday we will present links from the past week that wowed us, offered a unique opinion, or taught us something brand new.

Covered this week: a new tool that strips the style away from web pages to reveal the true content; 11 elements that can increase conversions; a suggestion to rename SEO; and SEO tactics for small businesses. I also admit that email newsletters “talk” me into buying things and invite you to tonight’s Guru Gala!

BROWSEO

Made with love in Wiesbadan, Germany by ilscipio, BROWSEO gives you the meat and potatoes of a webpage without any distracting salad fixins’. Getting to see what a search engine sees allows you to view a page’s structure and determine relevance for specific search terms by changing the tool’s options. Plugging my personal blog into this tool really opened my eyes to the fact that I shouldn’t just title images with the first thing that pops into my head…

11 Overlooked Page Elements That Drive Online Sales

Don’t give your customers a reason to question security. Neglecting to put the padlock icon on a payment screen could be a signal to a potential customer that security isn’t a top priority for you.

Element #7 – Invest in the Writing, means the world to me because sure, descriptions in bulleted lists are easy to read, but what a wasted opportunity to be creative! I’m much more intrigued by the Think Geek’s “plush light saber zipper pull” then MEC’s “regular left zip.”

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SEO Should be Called Integrated Digital Marketing

Ray Cornstock suggests a new title for SEO because it’s evolved drastically over time and factors that were once far removed from SEO are becoming a much more integral part of it. The point is that SEO isn’t just SEO anymore, so isn’t it time for a more apt moniker? Also, no one outside of the SEO world can remember what it stands for (my mom just tells people that I “do something that has something to do with the Internet”). So, does the title Integrated Digital Marketing touch on everything that SEO has become?

How to Choose the Right SEO Tactics for Your Small Business

SEO can be overwhelming – the information overload can be tough to swallow and wading through all of the conflicting opinions is exhausting. Categorizing SEO into onsite and offsite columns might help you identify gaps in your current strategy and show you where to increase efforts in order to achieve your business goals online. As you become more comfortable with what you’ve learned about SEO, you can re-prioritize how you spend your time, because you’ll get more and more efficient with the tools.

Why Your Business Still Needs Newsletters

Behind only print material and direct website visits, email newsletters were the preferred means of communication for survey respondents. Just remember that DIY newsletters are still a bad idea!

The article recommends sending email newsletters out a couple of times a month and that doesn’t seem too intrusive to me. However, I get a newsletter nearly everyday from ASOS – where I once bought some Pantone socks (that basically fell apart in the dryer within a month), and I never even open any of them. I see them and I delete them. Apparently the sock incident has tainted the whole company for me. Like me, you might be wondering why I don’t just unsubscribe from the newsletter… I think maybe I just like my email alert tone a little too much. It sounds like a typewriter!

I was going to say that email newsletters never lead me to purchases, but then I remembered this newsletter I got from Ugmonk a couple of weeks ago… and the shirt I’m now expecting in the mail…

Celebrating a Digital Decade; GURU Digital Arts College turns TEN!

This evening Guru Digital Arts College celebrates its tenth anniversary at the Art Gallery of Alberta with its annual Guru Gala. The event details note a top-secret, ground-breaking exhibition and while I’m psyched about that for sure, I’m also crossing my fingers in hopes that the mini-burgers are as delicious and plentiful as they were last year. Would you believe that there were beef, turkey, AND bison burgers? I had to try all three. Twice.

2011 Guru graduate, Emma Butler, recently added a Jurassic Park poster to her Movie Parts Poster Series. It is available for purchase here. Jurassic Park is on TV all the time and whenever I see it, I can’t not watch it. The score is also my ringtone, but I never get calls.

Log into Facebook and then go to your Privacy page:
https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy

To choose who can find you on Facebook:

1. Click Edit Settings next to “How You Connect”.

2. In the option for “Who can look up your timeline by name?”, select Friends

3. In the option for “Who can look you up using the email address or
phone number you provided?”, select Friends.

4. You may also wish to restrict the “Who can send you friend
requests?” and “Who can send you Facebook messages?” options.

To choose whether or not your Facebook page comes up in non-Facebook
search results, such as Google:

1. Click Edit Settings next to “Apps and Websites”.

2. Click Edit Settings next to “Public Search”.

3. If you don’t want to show up in non-Facebook search results,
uncheck the “Enable public search” box.

As promised, here’s a list of the websites and resources that I mentioned during my talk. If you have further questions, please get in touch.

Interesting Stats:

• By 2015, more people will access the internet through a mobile device than through a computer.
• One out of every five searches has a local intent – good restaurants in Edmonton. On mobile, it’s even better – one in three searches.
• 40% of consumers look up more information on their mobile devices after seeing it advertised in outdoor, newspaper, radio or TV.

Resources, Websites, Things I Mentioned:

Here’s some information about responsive web design.

Google’s free mobile landing page builder.

Foursquare (and Diamond Gentlemen’s Club on Foursquare)

Yelp Edmonton

For tracking social mentions – Google Alerts and Trackur (also: Tracking Your Online Mentions)

Creative QR code examples

What does your website look like on a smartphone?

Google Places and Building Your Local Search Foundation with Citations

The #yegfood hashtag on Twitter – Edmontonians talking about food.

And Finally, Your To Do List:

• See what your website looks like on the major mobile platforms. Is it awful? Fix it.
• Search for what you do in Edmonton – does your business come up? No? Fix it.
• Search for your business on the social and check in services that I mentioned – did you know you were listed there? Start paying attention and start responding.

Want to share this with others? The short link is: tinyurl.com/yegmobile

Want social media training? I’m running a training session on October 26th, here’s the link to register.

Thank you!

This smacks of lazy marketing. This ad says:

1. Only women shop at IKEA.
2. Only women like home furnishings.
3. The only sport that women enjoy is browsing through the IKEA catalog.
4. It’s funny because usually the phrase is “Gentlemen, start your engines”. We’re making it equal-opportunity!

Do marketers really think that all the female demographic needs to be excited about your brand is a mention? Oooh, they’re talking about women! Take my money, please!

In January, IKEA was searching for agencies with “retail experience with a specific focus on the female demographic“. I find it difficult to believe that this is the very best that Leo Burnett could come up with.

Let’s not fall for this. Call IKEA out on their crap on Facebook and Twitter. Tell ‘em what you think of lazy marketing!

At least the ad isn’t pink.

If I was, then I too could have a site with no actual content and irrelevant links ranking in the top 3 for a popular local search term.

Here’s the culprit:

I was doing this search on behalf of one of my clients, and I noticed this odd little site (burlingtonaccountant.ca) cropping up in the top 3.

If you check out the site itself, there’s no actual content. The WHOIS is hidden, so I have no idea who registered it or why. It’s been around less than a year.

Here’s the best part – checking out their backlinks. It’s mostly blog spam – things like “thanks for the post” and “that was funny!”. Some of the links are no followed, but that isn’t stopping them from ranking well. Many of the links aren’t no followed at all.

113 links, none of which actually have anything to do with accounting, or Burlington. And yet they rank in the top 3.

Personally, I’m excited about local search – so excited that I’m making it a major part of my business in 2011. But this sort of crap clogging up the results just makes me shake my head. And then get back to work to bury these sites where they belong.

Two things to take away from this:

1. There are clearly huge opportunities in local search if it’s this easy to get in the top three.

2. It absolutely demonstrates the power of anchor text. Every single one of those blog spam links had targeted anchor text.

Do you have similar examples of bad local search results? Share them in the comments.

Why would I do that? Because homophobia exists and I worry about losing a client because they’re not comfortable working with me as a result. Which is pretty sad – why would I want to work with that client if that’s the case?

Almost everyone on my Facebook feed today is wearing purple today. It’s a lovely thought – wear purple to show your support for gay folks – but it can also be slacktivism at its finest.

My friend Robyn put it well – “I’ll know we’re better when gay friends stop reflexively fudging their pronouns in unknown company.”

Wearing purple isn’t going to stop bullying. I feel like we’re missing the point in what’s going on. Important points like the fact that it’s all boys that are killing themselves, that gay taunts are so destructive to a young boy’s sense of manhood that he feels that the only recourse is suicide.

Wearing purple does show that you care, but there’s deeper issues afoot that I feel are being overlooked. You can say that these problems are only happening in small communities where social change takes a long time, but that isn’t true, either. How many times have you heard “that’s so gay” in Toronto, a supposed bastion of queer liberation?

I don’t want people to wear purple and then forget about what brought us here – the consistent, pervasive, ongoing assumption that somehow being gay is less than being straight.

And now, to end off with a nice, heartwarming tale from my friend Donna.

This morning in Tim Hortons in Burlington a girl I would guess to be around 15 was ahead of me in line and she kept looking back at me. When I went out to go to my car she was standing there and she said I like your purple shirt and she showed me she had one on too. I said…today is purple shirt day! She very suddenly blurted out that she is gay and she picked today to say that out loud for the first time. So while this does not fix everything…I feel like purple shirt day can still do some good…for that girl I think it did anyway.

That is awesome. I love that purple shirt day made a difference for that girl.