Below is a video from David Evans of TKO SEO explaining what Penguin 2.0 is and how to ensure your SEO strategies are in alignment with Google’s vision. Penguin 2.0 with David Evans from TKO SEO

If your rankings have been affected, we can help! Please contact us today and we can get you back in good health and good standing with Google.

On Friday May 17th, 2013, Ninthlink welcomed two member of Google’s UI Team – Susan Petrick and Anya Kogan – to their offices in San Diego for a meet & greet. Both Susan & Anya came to Ninthlink to learn about all of our interactions with Google AdWords. Ninthlink was pleased to have such distinguished guests from the Bay Area; and even prepared a welcoming sign in the Google font and color scheme. We loved the outreach and hope to see more Googlers in our offices, more often.

Sweating the small stuff? If it doubles your website’s conversion then it’s definitely worth exploring. There’s always ways to improve the user experience of a website, and we always like to gear it toward making the experience easier and more convenient for the user, and boosting conversion rates while we’re at it. To see the latest and greatest of handy user experience funnels and tools, Little Big Details (www.littlebigdetails.com) is a great place to check in and see a gallery of goodness.

I googled it, I found it, I tweeted it, and I’m still stoked, so here’s a quick blog post : Simple Social Icons is an understatement of a title. Rather than reinventing the wheel over and over, why not use something as simple as this? It’s always nice when WordPress plugins do exactly what you were looking for, right?

my 1st time using Simple Social Icons @wordpress plugin wordpress.org/extend/plugins… super quick, super clean! well done @nathanrice @studiopress

— alex chousmith (@chousmith) May 9, 2013

Well done indeed, nathanrice & StudioPress. Oh and if you want to see it in action on one of Ninthlink’s latest launches, check it out at BabysJourney.com!

1. Enhanced Campaigns
2. Phone Numbers In Ad Text

As a result of the first change, Enhanced Campaigns, advertisers will no longer have the option to target desktops, mobile phones and tablets independently. Instead, each campaign will appear across all devices. The thought behind the new upgrade is that we live in an ever-connected, multi-device world and it should become easier to create and manage campaigns that can more effectively target all devices.

Google describes the key features of the upgrade as follows:
1. Powerful marketing tools for the multi-device world
2. Smarter ads optimized for varying user contexts
3. Advanced reports to measure new conversion types

While this is undoubtedly a huge change that will affect every advertiser currently running Mobile Campaigns, some features that advertisers and marketers have become especially fond of, namely “click to call” and ad extensions will remain available after the upgrade.

Google’s second change, Phone Numbers In Ad Text, forces all advertisers to utilize Google’s “call extensions” feature and no longer supports the display of phone numbers inside ad text or sitelink extensions. In Google’s announcement regarding their decision to alter the way phone numbers are used in advertising, they stated, “We are making this change to foster a safer, more consistent user experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.”

However, what this change really does is allow Google to charge for mobile ad engagements as part of its transition to enhanced campaigns.

What This Means For You:

1. We have already seen CPCs begin to climb over the past couple of weeks and it is projected that they will continue to rise over the next few months. After all, advertisers that have not concentrated on mobile and/or tablets will now flood the market, creating a much more competitive space.
2. Decisions will need to be made as to whether advertisers will want to participate in Google’s “call extensions”. Currently, “call extensions” have two unique settings. The first allows advertisers to utilize their own phone number but limits exposure strictly to mobile phones. The alternate setting allows the call extension to be shown across all devices but displays a unique Google call tracking phone number that forwards the call for an additional $1 (cpc charges will still apply).

Although these changes are huge, Google still provides the best online advertising opportunity to reach prospective customers/clients who are actively searching for what your business has to offer. And while these changes will undoubtedly take some “getting used to”, ultimately, they will provide users with a better experience and more relevant results whether they are at work or on the go!

Does your job require you to make “the internets”? Do you often find yourself working on things “online”? I do. And if I got a new computer, here are some programs that I would want to install right away, so that I could continue to do the do. Let me know if I missed anything?

• Your computer probably comes with the latest in Internet Explorer, but if you are developing websites for anyone other than Microsoft themselves, you should at least pretend to check that your work works in other browsers:
  • https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/ Google Chrome
  • http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/ Mozilla Firefox
  • http://www.apple.com/safari/ Apple Safari

  * I’d recommend downloading at least these 3, as each has a tool or two unique to that browser, which can help you out. But that’d be a separate blog post…

• http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads.html TortoiseSVN , our go-to for working with SVN subversion version control, keeping track of all our clients’ projects code goodies
• http://filezilla-project.org/download.php FileZilla, our go-to open source FTP program of choice
• http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html XAMPP , a handy 1-click install to get the Apache + MySQL + PHP setup running on your localhost
• http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.3.html really this link, for Notepad++ , is I suppose just a placeholder for your editor of choice. Notepad++ is easy
• http://www.openoffice.org/download/ sometimes you have to reference Microsoft Office documents. If your new machine didn’t come with Office already, and you don’t want to buy it, and you don’t want to just use Google Docs, then OpenOffice is for you. It’s for me too.
• http://www.syntevo.com/smartgithg/download.html SmartGIT – because sometimes projects’ version control is in GIT, instead of SVN?
• http://messenger.yahoo.com/download/ Yahoo Messenger, so we can IM each other
• http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/ Skype, so we can IM and video conference?
• https://www.spotify.com/us/download/ Spotify, so if we aren’t video conferencing, you can listen to something?
• http://www.putty.org/ to cover any SSH or other such needs

Of course if you are doing any real heavy lifting work doing your own Designing as well, or if you are expected to work with designs from designers to do theming or whatever else, you may find yourself in need of the beast that is http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite.html Adove Creative Suite

And that’s what I got. Let me know if I missed anything? I know I neglected mentioning specific browser add-ons, but that’s probably another other blog post too.

After a review of Medifast’s existing PPC campaign, we developed a strategy to help increase conversions (phone calls) and overall ROI. As a result, year over year traffic is up 125% and call volume has increased 300%.

Upon taking over the account, we quickly realized Medifast was misspending a large monthly budget on ValueClick, which wasn’t a source of high quality traffic for our offering.  At the same time, we proved that by adding new PPC campaigns, such as geo-targeting popular cities, implementation of retargeting ads, local, and mobile specific ads – we could affect a much better result for them.

Within 3 months, we moved the entire ValueClick budget over to AdWords and haven’t looked back.  While ValueClick was providing a lot of impressions, we weren’t generating enough conversions. With AdWords, we moved into more of a direct response approach, which resonated much better with our target audiences.  As is usually the case, quality beats quantity and the numbers back it up.

As of this posting, both San Diego and Nor Cal had great weeks call wise. San Diego had a total of 155 calls and Nor Cal had 105 calls. This was the highest week for San Diego in Q1 so far and the second highest week for Nor Cal.

If you think your pay-per-click campaign could be doing better, we’d love to hear from you.

In support of Kodak’s new Unique DS™ lens technology, we created an interactive product training brochure for the web and Ipad highlighting features, benefits, and technical specifications to better assist sales reps and eye care professionals.

Whether researching the product online or giving a quick overview at trade shows, our interactive PDF provides an easy, visually rich method for introducing the latest innovation in lens technology, while providing eye care professionals and lab technicians instant access to the information they need.

We gave Petunia’s homepage a refreshed look to support early release announcements for 2 new collections; Petunia Handbags and Sons of Trade, a lifestyle collection for men.  The announcements for each collection were given prominent space on the homepage and direct interested users to a landing page where they can submit their email address to stay up to date on important details regarding each product’s upcoming launch. In addition to generating awareness and building buzz around these new collections, Petunia will have the opportunity to stay connected and communicate with everyone who signs up.