Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

Will Google+ Project Challenge Facebook?

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011
Google’s latest attempt to challenge Facebook’s continuing dominance of the social web is coming in the form of the Google+ project featuring a series of functions that allow users to share updates, photos and other information and media, not too unsimiliar to Facebook, although there is a difference. Users will be able to share between different groups with different interests within their real life social circles such as school friends, collegues, fellow sports lovers and so forth rather than on set list of friends or the entire internet. Circles, Sparks, Hangout and Huddle are the main elements of this sharing platform which include video chats over mobile phones. Circles, described as a sharing engine, allow users to drag contacts into different groups to enable sharing of content from the web. The Google+ project follows the demise of Google Wave, Google X and Jaiku, the microblogging platform, but the emergence of the Google +1 button to counter Facebook’s spread of social tools onto the wider web. One fact remains, Google have substantially more users compared to Facebook and by keeping these users on Google sites for longer they may well influence another shift in the social web landscape.

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Posted in Social Media |

Getting Social with SEO

Friday, May 13th, 2011
socialseoWith the announcement of Bing Social last year and now with the recent launch of the Google +1 button to challenge the famous Facebook ‘Like’ button, it is crystal clear that Social and SEO are on the same course. With Google’s +1 button users will be able to vote up search results, and pretty soon search results will be recommended to you based on whether any of your contacts have +1ed a webpage. Admin will show Activity stats such as who has +1′d your site as well as age and sex and location. Facebook’s social tools such as commenting, like buttons and the recent addition of Share buttons are quickly spreading across the web. So do they have an effect on your SEO? Well not in Google, as they cannot read Facebook data, therefore cannot see how many ‘likes’ your webpage has, for example. But Bing can thanks to their exclusive deal with Facebook. Both Google and Bing have confirmed that Tweets now impact rankings. Twitter should certainly now be considered part of your SEO strategy. However the real impact will be when you actually get Tweeted and Retweeted by “influencers” on Twitter. Both search engines look at the social authority of the person Tweeting, so someone with a lot more followers than they follow themselves carry a lot more weight. Whilst traditional SEO methods aren’t suddenly disappearing – going Social should be top of your list.

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media |

Silicon valley says businesses need to get more social

Monday, November 22nd, 2010
socialThe message was clear to businesses at last weeks annual web 2.0 summit in San Francisco:  Get Social! Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, having announced his sites’ new social messaging system, stated that “over the next five years almost every product vertical on the web is going to be rethought to be social – Get on the bus.” He also referred to the massive growth of the mobile market: “every company will also have to think about how they interact with mobile.” In an interview with the Daily Telegraph Mike Jones, chief executive of the troubled MySpace platform, explained his vision for the site as an entertainment and social destination. He also talked about the ‘social web’, taking the example of a clothes shop where you might view shirts by brand. Jones argued that it would be much more interesting and valuable to see the shirts your friends and people with similiar interests had bought or were considering purchasing. The site is then organised socially and not by category. So how does business get more social on the web? Your business needs to sell stuff and the best way is by being social. Selling through referrals, by word of mouth and through friends is as old as the hills, but very few businesses are harnessing the power of social on their websites – yes ‘like’ and ‘retweet’ buttons are prevalent but social log-ins such as Facebook’s Connect, Twitter, OpenID and Disqus provide a deeper level of interaction. Right now the Internet is in the social (web 2.0) stage and businesses that have buried their head in the sand may be wise to look at offering a social element as well as something fun.

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Posted in Social Media |

The Changing Face of Online Search and SEO

Thursday, February 25th, 2010
The world of Internet search is changing fast, especially the world of Google search. You may have noticed when doing searches that there are a lot real-time results such as Twitter, Facebook and other social network content, although Google can only index status updates from Facebook Pages – which are “for organisations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner.” Bing have a deal in place with Facebook that goes further, indexing individuals’ status updates which have been set to public and Yahoo! have also started to integrate Tweet content.

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Another big change on Google is the personalised search. This had an effect if you were logged into your gmail or any other Google account, but now you don’t have to be logged in. This means individuals will see an increasingly different result to another individual. This isn’t great news for those concerned with SEO as you no longer know where your website will rank. When a result has been clicked a number of times, then that site will start to appear higher up in the search rankings for that visitor. Personalised search is nothing new. It all started in 2004  with a beta release through Google labs allowed users to refine search results based on their interests. Then, in mid-April, 2005, Google rolled out its search history feature called “My Search History.” This kept track of all the users’ searches and every page that they viewed from the search results. This time Google required users to have an active Google account. The process has been refined along the way climaxing with the recent change. Personalised search involves many, many factors.  Among them are:
  • Geo-graphic factors (local top-level domain, IP address and query analysis)
  • Technical factors such as browser, OS capabilities, cookies and toolbars)
  • Time of day, time of year and other historical data
  • Behavioural query history, interaction with search engine result pages and interactions with advertising and surfing habits).
So what actions can be taken in regards to personalised search? Well best SEO practices still stand and these factors have become more important: Factors such as demogaphics, keyword/phrase targeting strategies, quality content, search result conversion, freshness, site useability, social bookmarks, and analytics will all have an impact on your SERPS. Practically this means:
  • Get to know and research your audience and give them the (great) content they want
  • Titles and Snippets that are compelling will attract a better click through rate which will in turn help these sites/pages rank better
  • Make social bookmarking available and easy to do on your website
  • Google Analytics will help in measuring both paid and organic traffic flows
  • A logical navigation and architecture for a quality end user experience
Google Caffeine Google also recently introduced Google Caffeine which ranks pages faster, giving you quicker results. And your page load times will now be a factor in ranking on Google. Simply put, the slower a page loads, the lower it will be ranked. Google describes Caffeine as: “a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.” Of course this all has implications for your search engine optimisation and your online business strategy and something to be well aware of! :-)

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media |