Another great edition of White Board Friday from Rand at seomoz.org on How to Increase the Odds of Your Content Going Viral

There are four key parts to the Timeline that will help you tell your story:

1. Using the Subscribe button,
2. Adding a great Cover photo,
3. Crafting your About page, and
4. Adding activity and Life Events to your Timeline.

Let’s take a look at each of these four more closely …

4 Simple Steps to a Facebook Timeline that Tells Your Marketing Story

In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

You can Pin videos.

So much for my idea to build the “Pinterest of Video.” Pinterest is the Pinterest of video.

It’s my opinion that if SPYW continues to roll out to all logged-in Google users and Google stays as aggressive as it’s been in the last 10 days with pushing Google+ for even logged-out users, the service will become a necessity for search and social marketers. In 2009 and 2010, Google’s integration with Twitter was remarkable – helping content get indexed in seconds, earning featured spots for logged-in users who were connected to each other on Twitter and showing up in all sorts of specially-marked-up results. Google’s taken that much, much further with SPYW, and while I’m no particular fan of using your market power to force users onto a platform they may not want, I’m also a realist.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-every-marketer-now-needs-a-google-strategy

http://www.businessinsider.com/london-baker-makes-102000-cupcakes-groupon-deal-2011-11

Avinash Kaushik is a web analytics guru, blogger at kaushik.net, author  of Web Analytics 2.0 & Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, and Co-founder of internet marketing training & certification firm Market Motive.

Avinash writes some of the best stuff on web analytics of anyone in the field, and he has a classic post on web analytics 1o1 that is a must read for anyone looking to develop an understanding of web analytics.

Kaushik writes:

There seems to be genuine confusion about the simplest, most foundational, parts of web metrics / analytics. So in this short post let’s try and see if we can fix this really basic problem.

Definitions and standard perspectives on these terms will be covered in this post:

1. Business Objectives
2. Goals
3. Metrics
4. Key Performance Indicators
5. Targets
6. Dimensions
7. Segments

A standard definition will be provided, but more than that my hope is to solidify your understanding with concrete examples and pictures.

Read the post here:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-101-definitions-goals-metrics-kpis-dimensions-targets/

There’s a lot of advice on the internet — some good, some bad — about how to get high rankings and traffic from search engines. And since Google is constantly changing its algorithms to stay ahead of spammers and cheaters, there’s a small army of professional search engine optimizers who are constantly running tests and promoting their newest theories.

No doubt, gaining and maintaining an egde requires keeping up with the latest changes and advances. However, my approach is to start with fundamentals and ignore the latest tips and tricks until you’ve completed the basics.

So what are the SEO basics? You can get good advice from a number reliable sources (SEOMoz.org, searchengineland.com, I got started years ago with Aaron Wall’s seobook.com) but I think it makes sense to start with Google’s own SEO Guide.

The introduction states:

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications
to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes
might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with
other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your
site's user experience and performance in organic search results.

None of the topics covered are secrets and all of them can be found elsewhere, but I think it makes sense to read the closest thing to Google’s SEO user manual. Complying with the recommendations being made directly by Google is the first phase of a new SEO project.

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo