We always loved reading free eBooks when we were learning the trade, and this year we made it a point to start releasing our own. We did the research, pulled from our own experience, grabbed  a designer, and put together some eBooks we're really proud of. We never released them in a single place before though, so here is the list of free eBooks from Wikimotive, covering everything from social media to small business SEO services. You can get any of them you'd like for free by following the links below. If you want the whole library, you can shoot Sean Haney an email and he'll send you the big file directly.

Thanks for reading!

THE LIBRARY:

Landing Pages: The Incredible True Story of How Vistors Become Leads:

• Learn about landing pages, what they are and why they benefit you
• Build your very own landing pages from start to finish
• Easy to follow bullet points and advice on getting started

Optimizing for Conversion:

• Advanced landing page theory
• Testing procedure
• How to further promote interaction

Social Link Building:

• The value of links
• The three C’s of good content
• How to attract more attention to your brand on social media
• How you can boost your visibility by making guest blog posts
• What kind of blogs get the best readership

Internal Linking: Sometimes The Most Powerful Links… Come From Within:

• The principals of internal linking
• How to build an effective internal link
• Where your internal links should point to
• How to apply effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to make your pages rank in search

Blogging For Business:

• The principals of blogging
• How to build an effective blog
• How to apply SEO to the blog’s backend
• How to write effectively and build an engaged readership

Twitter Tips for Local Marketing:

• The principals of Twitter
• How to build a Twitter pro?le
• What to Tweet about
• How to ?nd and capitalize on sales opportunities
• How to get the best possible community response

Social Media Spellbook for Marketing Wizards:

• Analyze your competition
• Produce top-notch content quickly and easily
• Craft a strategy for each specific social network
• Stream-line your process to get everything done more efficiently
• Promote your pages outside of social networks

Are you familiar with Google snippets? Basically, they are the chunk of information you see under the title of search results. They usually include the URL, a date, history, and most important, a description. In the past, you've been able to define your own description in the metadata of your site, so you had control over what was displayed under your page in results. Now though, Google is changing things so that you may have less control, or at least less direct control of your business's search engine results.  

Late February, Google had another patent granted to them. This one allows them greater flexibility in pulling and arranging snippets for web results. Here is a selection of the patent:

A first set of search results responsive to a first query during a search session is identified. A snippet is identified for each search result related to the first query. The snippet can be selected based on the location the search tokens from the query in the search result. A second set of search results responsive to a second query during a search session is identified. Repetitive search results can be identified.

A second snippet for the repetitive search result is identified. The second snippet can be selected based on the location of the second search tokens in the repetitive search result and the content of the first snippet.

It's a little convoluted, but essentially it's saying that Google may return different description data with your snippet from one search to the next, even if you have defined what you wanted that description to be.

It's strange they are going around what the developer of a site intended, but they seem to mean well by it. The idea is that if you rank highly but don't get clicked, then next time around Google will pull description data from the body of your text and see if that increases your clicks.

Where will they pull from? Like all Google algorithms, the inner workings of this are guarded, but it seems the majority of the time they will pull from the section of the text that contains the words that were searched. There's nothing you can do to change how Google displays your snippets, so your best bet is to make sure your copy is great (like you needed another reason!) and your description data is well defined.

Original post about snippets can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "Google Snippets are Going Rogue." 

Long tail keywords are becoming a very integral part of small business SEO. Essentially, long tail keywords are longer (duh!) and more specific keywords. These keywords are less common than short keywords individually, but when taken as a whole, they account for the majority of searches and search-driven traffic. There are a few large benefits to long tail keywords, and they shouldn't be overlooked by marketers in any industry.

The main benefit of long tail keywords is that they're so specific. This means that even though you get less searches per term, the searches you DO get will be more targeted, and thus more readily convertible. Additionally, because these long tail keywords aren't as commonly seen on analytics tools, they are generally less competitive for both organic and paid search marketing.

The average keyword people target is called a "head" keyword. These keywords are usually about 10-25 characters in length, any shorter and they tend to be too general and there isn't much benefit (there are always exceptions). Long tail keywords are about 26-40 characters in length, any longer and you just don't see much search volume.

So, using an automotive dealership as an example, "Boston Honda" is a head keyword, while "2013 Honda Accord Boston MA" is a long tail keyword. Clearly the shorter keyword will be searched more often, but you can also see how the long tail keyword will make each search more valuable, as it's more specific and likely more ready to purchase.

To further illustrate the benefits of long tail keywords, here's a great infographic from the fine people at HitTail.

Original post about long tail keywords can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "Long Tail SEO Infographic."

Everyone acknowledges that Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media sites, but just how relevant it is still seems to be up in the air. According to recent studies, Pinterest was behind Marketing with Twitter and Facebook as well as Google+, but a new survey is offering a different opinion on the matter.

The Survey in question is the "Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project Post Election Survey." Lets look at their results:

As you can see, Pinterest is coming in at a strong number 3 on this survey. According to other recent surveys, that spot was held by Google+, and Pinterest was lower on the list. The big surprise here is that not only has Pinterest surpassed Google+ to essentially be ftied with Twitter, Google+ is nowhere to be found.

Why the discrepancy between the two studies?

The study that has Google+ ranking higher is pure numbers. You may say that numbers are all that should matter, but that's just not true when trying to measure genuine social usage. People are accessing Google+ because they want to use other Google services. I wouldn't be surprised to learn some Google+ users aren't even AWARE that they are frequenting the social network! When they're asked to actually name what they use, they leave Google+ out, because they don't USE it, it's just a key they turn to get to services they've always had.

When it comes to marketing, the Pew survey has the most valuable data, because it represents a truer level of use, and use is what we care about.

Original post about Pinterest can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "Pinterest New Social Leader?" by Zach Billings.

You know who just won't stop bothering Webmasters? Google. Those guys are always updating things and sending out alerts. In fact, the sultans of search send out hundreds of thousands of messages to Webmasters every single month. Until recently, we weren't sure how these messages related to Business SEO, but Matt Cutts just released a new video dropping some knowledge on us. 

In the video, Matt answers a Webmaster-submitted question about the content of all those messages that are going out every day. At first, it seems like hundreds of thousands of messages a month is overkill, but Matt cites a stat that MILLIONS of spam pages are built every HOUR, so actually Google is just struggling against the tide.

So what kind of messages are they sending and how do you avoid getting one? It's pretty simple:

90% - Blackhat SEO. The only surprise here is that it's not higher. 90% of all messages sent by Google are to people performing bad SEO, everything from cloaking to scraping to bad redirects.

4% - Poor Content. Google wasn't joking about wanting quality content. 4% of their messages are alerting Webmasters they'll NEVER rank with the caliber of content they currently run.

3% - Hacking. It's a little surprising that Google deals with this at all, but 3% of messages are sent to hackers telling them to cut it out.

2% - Link Buying. Do people still pay for backlinks? Apparently they do, because Google has to send out messages. If this is you, just take that money you spend buying links and pay for some guest blogs. Quality content will do more for you and WON'T EVER get you penalized.

1% - Link Selling. Doing drugs is bad, selling them is even worse.

Original article about Webmaster Messages can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "The Messages Google Sends." 

Google's newest patent will prove to be both beneficial and terrifying to users, which is just about par for the course for the search engine juggernaut. It involves tracking you wherever you go and then collating and analyzing that data for personal identification trends. Creepy? For sure. Useful for Business SEO and social media? You betcha. The patent, granted last week, is primarily about identifying people who would use your credentials t0 impersonate you on the web. The logic goes that if Google sees you logging in from work in Boston at 9 am, that's habitual and likely right. If they then see you giving a rave review to local businesses in England, someone has taken your information and that review will be disregarded as spam. Here is the patent in abstract:

A computer-implemented method and system of building a user reputation database for use in a user location data system. The method and system receive user location information containing personally identifiable data of a user and user position data. The user position data may or may not represent one or more actual geographic positions of the user.

The user location information is temporarily stored and analyzed to provide a spam score associated with the user position data indicative of whether the user position data represents the actual geographic positions of the user. Data indicative of the spam score is also provided to user reputation database to store a user reputation score associated with the user.

This patent is still new, but Google has been using similar data to track things like local search SEO and social review sites for awhile now. With this patent, they're only going to get better at it. It's good for businesses, bad for spammers, and I'd say just a little concerning for anyone who truly values their privacy.   Original post about Google Location Data can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "Google Location Detection."

Blogging is the new writing medium for the masses. Some people lament the fact that anyone can go about publishing content for the world to see, but those people are probably the great-great-grandchildren of the guys who threw rocks at Gutenberg. I honestly believe that the more people writing, the better off we are. This is especially true for industries like ours. Business SEO is becoming more slavishly devoted to content every day, and I'm always impressed with what friends and colleagues are able to come up with when they sit down and start putting words on the page. People are always looking for writing tips though, and I'm tired of the same generic blogging advice. I thought it might be valuable to look at some words of wisdom from other writers, namely novelists.

So let me offer up a few of my favorite pieces of advice from some great writers:

 "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted." - Kurt Vonnegut

This quote is from Vonnegut's advice to young novelists, but I think it's even more relevant for bloggers. In the great rush for content production, everyone has lost sight of the reader now and then. A bad novel will waste weeks of a person's time whereas a bad blog will only waste minutes, but they aren't your minutes to waste. Endeavor to spend your reader's time well, it's okay to fail, it's just not okay to be apathetic.

"Sh*tty First Drafts" - Anne Lamott

Anne Lamont is a wonderful writer and terrific lady who uses curse words in all of her advice (not really.) This quote from her book Bird by Bird should be celebrated by writers the world over. The point of it is that you should NEVER be afraid to put pen to page (or fingers to keyboard, as it were). Write fearlessly and let all of your ideas flow out while the river is raging. Even if your raging river is more of a dammed up stream, still let it flow. You might feel like it's bad, and it may even BE bad, but it's just a first draft.

 "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink." George Orwell 

This is another quote that is great for novelists but may be even better for bloggers, especially marketing bloggers. Don't pretend to give advice just to have a wrapper for your sales pitch. You can include your links and a modicum of self promotion, but the posts themselves should have value for more than just yourself and Google's robots. Either write for people to read it, or don't bother writing. People can smell genuine emotion from a mile away, and insincerity stinks worse than Orwell's cuttlefish left out in the sun.

"Kill Your Darlings" - William Faulkner

Luckily for his loved ones, Faulkner was only talking about writing. When you write, you tend to latch onto phrases or lines or metaphors that you love. Usually, they are great in the first draft, but after a few revisions, they can seem a little forced or otherwise out of place. You'll try to shoehorn them in because you find them powerful, but you aren't writing for you, you're writing for the world. This is just as true for blogging as it is for novels. So, when it comes time for the final draft, good writers aren't afraid to kill their darlings.

Original post about Writing Advice can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "Kill Your Darlings and Other Novel Advice" by Dan Hinds.

There are many lessons we can take from this Super Bowl this year. Important, crucial information like Beyonce has still got it, always pay your electricity bill before you have company over, and murderers can go on to do great things in life. Even more important though, are the lessons we can learn about Marketing with Twitter and Facebook. Let  us here at Wikimotive share some of these with you.

We're going to look at a graph of some interesting statistics posted by Jumptag that outline the usage of mobile devices during the big game.

This simple graph tells us a lot about the best times to engage in social media marketing during a major event like the Super Bowl. Let's break down the activity real quick. Leading up to the game, everyone was talking so mobile traffic was pretty high, but as kickoff nears the traffic begins to slacken. As the game starts in earnest, the traffic drops to a low as people focus on watching the game. The first big spike of activity is the fumble from San Fran.  The traffic quickly drops back to a relative baseline, and then has a sustained spike during the blackout.

What does this tell us for marketing?

The best times to hop on and do a little marketing during major events are at points of interest. Live Tweeting and the like is great, but your audience is limited. You should start before the event and join in on the hype, but don't waste your effort during the parts of the event that people are actually watching. The blackout was a great time to be engaging people, because the game was put on hold, so obviously they had to go somewhere. Now, most events won't have random blackouts, but they will have sudden exciting events like the fumble. Your success will be entirely dependent on your ability to identify these events as they happen, and tie them back into your business in an interesting way.

If you're fast enough, and clever enough, yours just might be the comment that goes viral.

Original post about Super Bowl Social Media can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "Super Bowl Lessons" by Zach Billings.

We know everyone in this community loves Business SEO. We work at it all day, poring over analytics data and tweaking this or that to stay in Google's good graces. Honestly, it never gets old. Just between you and me, when we lay our heads down at night, we have beautiful dreams of Matt Cutts.

Still though, we're not going to argue that it's the most exciting subject in the world. It has more than its fair share of minutia and tedium. As you've probably experienced, when you explain it to an outsider their eyes tend to glaze over and a fine string of drool slides down their chin. The unfortunate thing is that this happens even when you're explaining it to a decision-maker who NEEDS the info.

So, how do you cover the basics with someone who has only the most tenuous knowledge of SEO and its esoteric vocabulary? Well, in lieu of having a long, patient conversation (which would be our real recommendation), you can show them this amazing video by Charles Lewis, the rapper MVP of SEO. The video is a little dated, so it's not pure gospel, but an amazing amount of the content is still truly relevant today.

Check out the video below!

Original post about SEO Rapping can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "You're Nobody ('till Somebody Ranks You) by Andrew Martin. 

Stumbleupon is one of the most interesting social media sites around, and by interesting, I mean it is a complete and total time-sink. Essentially, it's a toolbar that has a "Stumble" button you can press that will bring you to a random page on the web based on your interests. You can also upvote and downvote pages, which is how Stumbleupon gets better at finding stuff that you'll like. If something isn't already ON Stumbleupon when you vote on it, you'll be given the option to add it. This is what I'd like to talk about today, as it can be a great little social media addition for Business SEO.

I know, I know. Stumbleupon isn't exactly breaking news, but many businesses and marketers aren't utilizing it. If that includes you, go to their page here, download the toolbar for your browser, and make an account.

Once you have Stumbleupon installed, navigate to one of your pages that you would like to share with the world. Don't pick a page that is just an inventory list or something else overtly spammy. Instead, add an interesting blog post (you blog, right? right?) or a product page with some cool pictures and engaging copy. Once you've found the page you want to add, just give it an upvote with the "I Like It" button, and you'll be greeted with the following:

As you can see, it's a pretty simple form. The website will be automatically filled in because you are upvoting from the page you are adding. The NSFW tag is obvious, and the comment is up to you, just avoid being overly self-promotional.

The most important parts are the "Add Tags" and the "What's This Page About?" sections. You only get to select one category for the "What's This Page About?" so make sure you choose the most relevant thing.  You can see some of the most popular ones here. You should add tags the same way you would when you post a blog or add metadata. Include all the relevant keywords that pertain to your page. Take a look at  that popular page again and try to hit the ones that work.

Add a few of your older pages to start, ones that aren't experiencing much traffic fluctuation. Do some light A/B testing (some pages with "About" category A, and some with category B) and see what results in the best traffic. Know that Stumbelupon traffic is pretty broad, so not as valuable as more direct messages, but it's a great supplement and it only takes about 20 seconds to add a page!

Original post about Stumbleupon Marketing can be found on Wikimotive's blog titled, "Stumbleupon and You."