How to Charge for Social Media Services Know your value! I've been through it myself. For New Social Media Managers starting out in the industry it can be difficult to work out how to price your services. But the tables are turning in 2012... Now is the time for Social Media Agencies and Freelance SM Managers. 1. Simply by offering nicely packed services in "Basic", "Standard" and "Premium" Packages makes it easy for the less decisive client but the main advantage is that you keep your service fixed to a particular set of activities. 2. This is a favourite of the businesses that are brand new to Social Media. 3. A great proportion of clients want bespoke services. Once you have the right info, you can knock their socks off with a killer proposal and really build some value into it. 4. Ok, so what is a "Bolt On"? For Social Media Management, my agency charges between $500 - $2000 per month, per client and $100 per hour for Social Media Consultancy. Connect: Authored by: Mark Paddock See complete profile
Rich snippets: testing tool improvements, breadcrumbs, and events Webmaster Level: All Since the initial roll-out of rich snippets in 2009, webmasters have shown a great deal of interest in adding markup to their web pages to improve their listings in search results. When webmasters add markup using microdata, microformats, or RDFa, Google is able to understand the content on web pages and show search result snippets that better convey the information on the page. Thanks to steady adoption by webmasters, we now see more than twice as many searches with rich snippets in the results in the US, and a four-fold increase globally, compared to one year ago. Testing tool improvements Despite the healthy adoption rate by webmasters so far, implementing the rich snippets markup correctly can still be a major challenge. If you’ve added markup in the past but haven’t seen rich snippets appear for your site, we encourage you to take a few minutes to try testing the markup again on the updated testing tool. Rich snippets markup for breadcrumbs Events
SEO: The Free Beginner’s Guide From SEOmoz Welcome to your SEO learning journey! You'll get the most out of this guide if your desire to learn search engine optimization (SEO) is exceeded only by your willingness to execute and test concepts. This guide is designed to describe all major aspects of SEO, from finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that can generate qualified traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site. The world of search engine optimization is complex and ever-changing, but you can easily understand the basics, and even a small amount of SEO knowledge can make a big difference. Combine this information with some practice and you are well on your way to becoming a savvy SEO. The basics of search engine optimization Ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Our founder, Rand Fishkin, made a similar pyramid to explain the way folks should go about SEO, and we've affectionately dubbed it "Mozlow's hierarchy of SEO needs."
The Social Media Salary Guide [INFOGRAPHIC] Social Media Week is upon us, so we thought it would be appropriate to delve into the social media industry and see how its salaries stack up. Social media is an evolving and cutting-edge field, so it should come as no surprise that you can make a great living managing a brand's presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare and other social platforms. In the infographic below, produced by OnwardSearch, you can see where the social media jobs are concentrated, the breakdown of job titles in the industry, and how much dough the average social mediate is bringing home each year. (The graphic shows the 25th and 75th percentiles for salary, pulled from Indeed). Does this stack up with what you've seen in the industry? Infographic courtesy of OnwardSearch Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities.
Introducing Rich Snippets Webmaster Level: All As a webmaster, you have a unique understanding of your web pages and the content they represent. Google helps users find your page by showing them a small sample of that content -- the "snippet." We use a variety of techniques to create these snippets and give users relevant information about what they'll find when they click through to visit your site. Today, we're announcing Rich Snippets, a new presentation of snippets that applies Google's algorithms to highlight structured data embedded in web pages. Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. and now with microformats markup: or alternatively, use RDFa markup. To prepare your site for Rich Snippets and other benefits of structured data on the web, please see our documentation on structured data annotations. No. What's next?
Use Open Graph to Get Video Thumbnails into Search Results Joel Harvey is, among other things, the Video Scientist at Conversion Sciences. Over the past four years, he has developed video strategies for a large number of online retailers. We’ve found that video is great for drawing and converting qualified search traffic, so I asked Joel to tell us his tricks for getting video ranked on Google. He doesn’t disappoint. Search marketers are always looking for strategies to give them an edge. Ever since Google first announced Universal Blended Search results in 2008, search marketers have been looking for ways to consistently use the blended results to their advantage. The Opportunity According to Joel, one of the most mysterious and difficult universal channels has been video, particularly getting video thumbnail images associated with the search results that you rank for with your domain. Notice how video thumbnails make search entries stand out. The Problem In the beginning of Universal Search, Joel used a process that was relatively easy: eBags Zappos
How much does Social Media cost companies in 2011? UPDATE: If you would like to view my Social Media Consulting Rate Sheet to see what I charge for my services, please click here. Click here to get the 2012 Price Update to this post. Last February I wrote a post about the prices companies could expect to pay for basic social media services. So I wanted to update that post for 2011, with a bit more information, and greater clarity around the numbers. As I mentioned last year, when you are trying to set your social media budget for a project, there are several questions you need to ask yourself, such as: What are your goals for using social media? When you contact a consultant or agency, they should be asking you questions as well. Here’s the prices: Blog: Launch a blog from the ground-up, outsource all content creation (including customer interaction, handling responses to comments, etc) – $1,000-$12,000 a month Most Charge – $3,000 – $5,000 a month Launch a blog from the ground-up, outsource some content creation – $1,000-$8,000 a month
Specify your canonical Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version. Let's take our old example of a site selling Swedish fish. Imagine that your preferred version of the URL and its content looks like this: However, users (and Googlebot) can access Swedish fish through multiple (not as simple) URLs. Or they have completely identical content, but with different URLs due to things such as a tracking parameters or a session ID: Now, you can simply add this <link> tag to specify your preferred version:
The Death of Link Building and the Rebirth of Link Earning - Whiteboard Friday We've all known someone who got hit by Google's algoupdates. Whether you've personally been affected or you know someone who has, it's not fun to bounce back from and can can impact your SEO efforts if not addressed appropriately This week, Rand discusses the egress of old link building practices and the ingress of new (old) link earning strategies that will help your site stay relevant in the SERPs and drive your traffic with a better user experience. "Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Which Advertising Agency Compensation Structure Is Better For Me? Part 1 of 3 « Free Advertising Candy There are a myriad of ways in which advertising agencies can be compensated. For full-service shops, it typically consists of some form of hourly billing, media commission and/or production commission. While there are standard industry norms, it is common practice to engage in negotiations specifically tailored to the unique needs of each client. Finding an agreement that is fair and mutually beneficial is the foundation to building a successful long-term partnership. Part 1 of this series is going to solely focus on non-commission forms of compensation. This is generally the foundation of the agreement. What are “hours”? It’s often a vague concept to dissect, but billable hours are the core of most shops in one facet or another. How are hourly rates established? Typically, hours are compensated in one of two ways: monthly retainers or per-project estimates. A monthly retainer is an agreement to purchase a preset amount of hours every month. Pros Cons Cons FAQ’s Like this: Like Loading...
sitemaps.org - Home The Fresh Rank Algorithm, Is It More Important Than PageRank First of all let me confess the term ‘fresh rank’ has been stolen from fellow SEO blogger Justin Briggs, I am going to refer to one of his excellent posts throughout the rest of this one. You will no doubt know about Google’s new QDF upgrade, an algorithm tweak designed to get you to ‘fresh’ content quicker, rather than bringing up old static results. You can see an example of it here; They’re not site links but links to fresh content on the BBC for the search term ‘football’. Google has stated that this affects around 35% of search queries, don’t get that mixed up with searches. 1) How does Google decide what is fresh? 2) Is the link graph involved when deciding ‘freshness’? 3) How do links from these ‘fresh’ pages influence rankings for the taget website? I wrote a really short post a few months ago based on fresh links vs text links vs links placed in old content. How Does Google Determine Freshness? Document Discovery Proportion of Change Fresh Rank Is Freshness More Influential Than PageRank