Merchants Can Have Access to Tools to Better Control on How Their Information is Presented Online

                                          www.locationtraffic.com

How can a merchant be sure that the locations of their business is correct on search engines, websites and mobile apps? There are some great tools that they can use to clean up location data.



1. Placeable: Control location data through a unified dashboard.
Agencies and brands with multiple locations can use Placeable’s new Placeable Plot feature to ensure the accuracy of their business data across hundreds of websites, mobile apps, and third-party sites like maps, networks, and directories. Businesses can import their location data from spreadsheets, and then clean up that data using Placeable’s tools. Once the local data has been “normalized,” Placeable puts it into a standardized format and sends it to location-based platforms like Facebook and Google Places. Placeable charges clients a $299 “monthly platform fee,” and $2 per location, per month.

2. Locu: A data-cleansing solution for small and medium-sized businesses.
Locu works with small and medium-size businesses to ensure their contact and product information is accurate. Restaurants, home service providers, and personal care services can manage their business listings, menus, product lists, and company photos from within Locu’s digital platform. This information is then shared across the web—to publishing partners like Yelp, Facebook, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, YP, OpenTable, and CitySearch—each time an update is made. Locu offers its basic plan for free. Users can upgrade to Premium accounts for $25 per month.

3. Yext: Instantly updating local information on 50+ websites, maps, and apps.
Yext offers a location data cleansing solution that’s scalable for businesses of all sizes. Businesses can run a scan to see how their listings look when customers search online, and Yext will pinpoint how many “location data errors” it finds. Businesses can fix those errors by entering the correct information into Yext’s PowerListings system, and the company will automatically push those updates across a network of 50+ websites, maps, and apps.Pricing for Yext’s PowerListings packages ranges from $17 to $67 per month.

4. MomentFeed: Merging and deleting duplicate entries for multi-location brands.
Large brands with multiple locations can use MomentFeed’s PinSync tool to improve engagement and discoverability at the local level. By utilizing the correct latitude/longitude coordinates (also known as “geocodes”) for each of a client’s physical locations, MomentFeed is able to pinpoint outdated listings, adjust inaccurate geocodes, merge duplicate listings, update listings with correct address information, and upgrade local pages on platforms like Facebook, Google, and Foursquare. Pricing for MomentFeed varies depending on the number of locations being monitored.

5. SweetiQ: Identify inconsistencies in local listings.
SweetiQ is an all-in-one location-based marketing platform for agencies, brands, and franchises. One of the vendor’s key features is its local business listings management tool, which clients can use to find out how their business listings are presented across the web and make unified corrections to any inaccuracies. Businesses can also see how their listings are ranked in search engine results, and which keywords are most likely to bring those listings up. SweetiQ offers a free 14-day trial. Paid plans start at under $100 per month.

6. Universal Business Listing: Take ownership of your online profiles.
Businesses can use UBL to unify the information that shows up about their companies on local directories and search engines. Inaccurate phone numbers, addresses, and website links are updated within UBL’s platform and then pushed out to 150 “points of distribution.” These updated listings will appear as “verified” or “claimed,” depending on the site. By partnering with anchor databases like Infogroup, Factual, and Dun & Bradstreet, UBL is able to expedite the process of having its clients’ old listings removed or changed. UBL’s listings packages range in price from $79 to $799 per year.
http://streetfightmag.com/2013/10/08/6-tools-merchants-can-use-to-clean-up-location-data/

What Are the Glitches of the Government Website For Obama Care Sign Up?

                                            jim hoft

You may wonder why the Obama Care Health Insurance website was not prepared for the amount of traffic by Americans wanting health coverage.  According to sources there were many problems and Department of Health and Human Resources are trying to solve the glitches in the process. What exactly are the problems?

Basically, the website needs more server capacity to improve efficiency and design changes as well. Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the DHHS says,"We can do better and we are working around the clock to do so."

The government is making software and hardware changes to smooth the process of creating accounts needed to gain access to the marketplace, federal officials said.

The website is troubled by coding problems and flaws in the architecture of the system, according to insurance-industry advisers, technical experts and people close to the development of the marketplace.

Among the technical problems thwarting consumers, according to some of those people, is the system to confirm the identities of enrollees. Troubles in the system are causing crashes as users try to create accounts, the first step before they can apply for coverage.

Experian EXPN.LN +0.35% PLC, an information-services firm, holds a federal subcontract to support that system. The company declined to comment.

Information technology experts who examined the healthcare.gov website at the request of The Wall Street Journal said the site appeared to be built on a sloppy software foundation. Such a hastily constructed website may not have been able to withstand the online demand last week, they said.

Engineers at Web-hosting company Media Temple Inc. found a glut of stray software code that served no purpose they could identify. They also said basic Web-efficiency techniques weren't used, such as saving parts of the website that change infrequently so they can be loaded more quickly. Those factors clog the website's plumbing, Media Temple said.

The identity-checking foul-ups are also triggering problems for state-run exchanges, which rely on the federal system. The problem caused delays last week for users of MNsure, Minnesota's exchange, as they waited for federal confirmation to create their accounts, said April Todd-Malmlov, MNsure's executive director. She said the issue in her state was largely resolved by Friday.

Administration officials, who reported nearly nine million unique visitors to the federally run exchange as of Friday night, said the system underwent maintenance over the weekend.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304441404579119740283413018.html

Amazon Is Taking on the Style of Pinterest with "Amazon Collections"

                                                 www.engadget.com

Amazon has quietly launched its own direct challenger to Pinterest with the debut of a feature called “Amazon Collections.” It’s a more attractive, image-heavy website where consumers can save, share and discover new products by browsing those others have saved. Like Pinterest, users create separate lists, called Collections, such as “Want List” or “Fashion,” for example, and they can find and follow other users who share their same interests through the service.
The company had been testing this feature beginning with a number of bloggers ahead of a larger, public debut, and some of those with early access have already detailed their experiences using the site to put together outfits, or other initial impressions. Some were even paid to be advisors. The earliest references we’re seeing from beta testers writing about the service were posted in late April.
Today, the link to “Your Collections” appears in the list of options when you hover over “Your Account” from the drop-down menu on Amazon.com’s homepage, which gives the service a more prominent placement on Amazon’s site.
Initially, all users start off with a few empty collections (“My Style,” “Want List,” and “Possibilities”) but you can make your own Collections, too.  To add an item to a Collection, you simply click on an “Add to Collection” button below the product image on Amazon.com’s website. However, because Collections is a new feature, this button has not yet been rolled out to all the products on.

                                              techcrunch.com

To work around this problem, Amazon provides a “Collect” button that can be dragged to your browser’s bookmarks bar, letting you add any product on Amazon to your collections. This does not appear to be a way to “collect” non-Amazon products at this time, though, as nothing happens when that buttons is clicked off-site.
Users can add descriptions for their saved items, edit or remove them from their lists, or even delete entire collections at once. The service also offers a way for users to browse through default categories like Books, Men’s Fashion, Movies, Music, Women’s Fashion, Featured, and more, all of which are laid out in a Pinterest-inspired image pinboard format where there’s heavy emphasis on the item photo and little other info besides the product name and a “heart” button for favoriting things. In order to see pricing and further product details, you have to click through.
Currently, Amazon Collections’ friending and following model is limited — the site shows the popular items others are pinning to which boards and when they posted those items (e.g. “3 minutes ago”), and you can then click on those users’ names in order to follow them on the service. But there doesn’t seem to be an option for discovering your friends who are on Amazon Collections, such as through address book upload or Facebook integration.

This is not Amazon’s first experiment with providing consumers with an alternative way to shop its site, we should point out. In years past, it has launched a number of other product visualization tools, like its 2008 grid-like storefront Amazon Windowshop, which later arrived on iPad in 2010, or its 2011 dabble in augmented reality via Amazon Flow. It has also worked to make the site more social, through integrations with Facebook for tracking birthdays or figuring out what things Facebook friends want as gifts.
But this is the first time Amazon has gone so far as to boldly duplicate the overall look-and-feel of a competing service, which, to some extent, validates the traction Pinterest is seeing with e-commerce referrals. The move also comes at a time when Pinterest has been beefing up its e-commerce efforts, with new tools for online retailers, including web and mobile product pins, analytics, personalized recommendations, and, just today, price alerts.

Read more :https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+collections+pinterest&client=firefox-a&hs=Tkc&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=fflb&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=icX7UaPOGbXc4APvn4HYAw&ved=

Best Practices in Optimizing SEO Videos

The following article has great advice in using videos in providing information to potential customers for your business or organization.

                                                www.internetsearchinc.com

The Best Practices in Optimizing SEO Videos

SEO videos are a great way for you to expose your brand to users who are not familiar with your brand, your products or your services. All marketers and site owners continuously experiment with video as a way of intercepting their target markets. And because of this, we see more and more video-driven content surface on the Web. The popularity of video content on the web depends on the study or data you're reviewing and the results always vary.

Nowadays, there are a lot of vids out there that are useless and lacking in information in their content. Although there are a lot of great "How To" videos out there, there are still a lot of video footage that are just a noise and an interruption to those who are looking for useful and relevant information.

The growth of SEO videos has been quite explosive. Because of this significant growth, the need for online video optimization should take place. These are some best practices that one should consider when planning to optimize online vids.

1. Make sure that the clips of your videos are relevant and informative. You must ensure that your video gives useful and informative information. Vids that show step by step procedures are great while videos that express opinion about a specific topic can also be useful. Some videos that have nothing to do with your brand or service offering and also a general or vague one in nature will only confuse your audience. Save your viewer some trouble and don't upload for the sake of uploading a vid.

2. Give your video a catchy title - The best way to get users to view your vid is to give it a catchy title that should contain related key phrase which are relevant to your product, service or brand. This is one search engine optimization trick you can use.

3. Use your video as a portal to other contents on your website. You can upload some vids to Youtube and provide links back to your related content as well as other vid content on your website.

4. Optimize your video for important key phrases. Tag your vids with terms then, consider naming the file-name with terms in mind.

5. Provide transcripts of your vids. In order for your video to rank well, you need to give the search engines something to index and rank.

6. Keep your SEO videos to five minutes or less. Make sure your vid is just five minutes or less because if it's of long duration, it makes it boring to watch and your visitors might lose their interest in watching it.

7. Make use of a Video-Sitemap. Ensure that users and search engine spiders can find your content; and the easiest way to do this is by using video-sitemap on your site. Make sure you use important keywords in the anchor text links on your videos.

8. Brand your vids with Logo.

9. Offer the option to embed your SEO videos. You can allow the users to access the coding that will allow them to embed your video on their site or blog.

10. Allow your users to rate your Video. Let your users rate your vids because vids that have high ratings are the ones that users tend to favorite and save.

11. Submit your video to RSS.

The best way to optimize your vid content is to think about the user and the people you want to engage in your video. Don't just post a video just for the sake of posting it. Consider your audience. Keep in mind that SEO videos are also important factors for search engine optimization

 Article :http://www.promotionworld.com/se/articles/article/130716-best-practices-optimizing-seo-videos