Search vs Social Media

Posted by timaldiss on Jun 8th, 2010 | View Comments

It is a momentous day in digital marketing.

As tracked by Experian Hitwise traffic to UK websites from their Social Media category is higher than traffic from the Search Engines category.

However what Hitwise don’t explain in the blog post is that they measure traffic in a very different way from what you might expect from an analytics package.

Modern day browsing behaviour means that we very often have more than one tab open in our preferred browser (if not more than one browser open as I do as I type). UK Internet users very often check their Facebook feeds during the work day (some more than others) and when you refresh that page to update your feed this counts as a user action to Hitwise – something which inevitably inflates this figure.

This isn’t a bad thing – it’s merely Hitwise’ way of measuring human behaviour rather than just clicks so it represents an interesting measure.

For ThinkSearch this underlines the shift in emphasis for brands from traditional SEO marketing through to doing business in the social web and merely serves to underline the importance of ensuring your best practice SEO also embraces the benefits of the distribution and advocacy channel of Social Media which also often has direct benefits in the form of links to your website.

Read the full blog post from Hitwise here: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2010/06/social_networks_overtake_search_engines.html

Reclaim your Facebook content

Posted by timaldiss on Jun 3rd, 2010 | View Comments

I’ve worked on several Social Media campaigns that have naturally gravitated towards Facebook as a popular social platform that affords familiar sharing functionality and presents the lowest barrier to entry i.e. everyones already on it.

There are a lot of annoying things about Facebook, but the thing that’s been getting to me most (yes more than the privacy issue) is that whatever anyone contributes to Facebook remains ‘in the cloud‘.

It’s probably my SEO background getting the better of me, but I want to own that information, that content. I want it to benefit me in the traditional sense of content i.e. one that generates links, citations and attention to my websites.

Keeping an eye on the SERPs as we do at ThinkSearch we are now starting to see Facebook pages creeping into the Google results for more competitive search terms. If the balance keeps on as it does it will be Facebook that outranks you, me and our competitors. Obviously the supports the end goal of Facebook’s advertising revenue based business model so they are laughing all the way to the bank.

But what about that content. Well it occurred to me that there is plenty of talk about the new open protocol that Facebook supports - FBML (Facebook Markup Language) – but what everyone is scrabbling to do is support Facebook’s head long plummet to domination by integrating their content the wrong bloody way!

Why put widgets all over your Facebook page that plant your blog content into Facebook? Why integrate widegts into your blog that allow users to jump straight of back into Facebook leaving your site? Surely this must happen the other way. What about all that lovely user generated content? What about all those lovely references to your site and connections to others? Where is the benefit to all the effort that you have put in over the last 20 years of the web gone?

For the time being it seems like the FBML support is basic and developers struggle to implement the code in any other way than within the Facebook canvas i.e. inserting the content using an iframe as opposed to being written into your page, so the benefits are yet to be tested, but to me this is a treasure trove to open.

SME’s – don’t be fooled by SEO link networks

Posted by Administrator on Jun 26th, 2009 | View Comments

Over the last couple of weeks, I have noticed that there seems to be a lot of companies offering low budget SEO work that use graphs like this to explain the powerful results of SEO:

What a graph.

Two companies I have looked at recently are Local Web Ring – a ‘local’ link network associated with a small web design company, and Be Found or Die – a more proffessional SEO company bidding on the term ’search engine optimisation’.

The first, although containing a number of sites that I don’t think are ‘local’, and using very blatantly optimised anchor text, is almost forgiveable because of the fact that the majority of the sites are pretty small businesses, and in the Cheshire area.

The second is more suprising because I would have thought that this would not be effective for any of their clients, and that they might have been penalised for operating like this. They not only have a load of optimised text links to their clients in the footer of their homepage, as well as on links pages on their client’s websites, they also link back to their own site on ’search engine optimisation uk’ on some of their client’s websites.

Be Found or Die are not ranking in the organic results for ’search engine optimisation uk’ but their clients seem to rank ok for the niche terms that they are going for – (Nutley Tiles on the first page for ‘marble tiles‘). Am I showing my ignorance for thinking this was an ‘old school’ SEO tactic that shouldn’t work anymore?

I don’t want to – but all I can takeaway from this is: Link Networks Work

*Guest post by Rob Green

Say hello to Google Wave

Posted by Administrator on Jun 12th, 2009 | View Comments

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.

Interesting… I mean the timing is interesting… I’m sure any tool launched by Google in the web 2.0 era will be awesome (with this much fanfare > there are 1990 linked Google news articles to the original Reuters article on Wave in Google news as I write this morning) but it’s the fact that its’ launch is almost exactly timed as a response to Bing.

Now Wave isn’t Bing (and Bing Is Not Google!). Both are useful if not game changing – Microsoft finally appearing to have brought some brains in to create a new spin on search which will almost inevitably bring back market share. But as the social media/knowledge sharing, enterprise geek I am, Wave’s integration of all the typical communicatiosn tools we use into one platform looks really good.

One question: why are all the presenters on the clip Prject Managers?!

PS Wow – just seen the demo of multiple users working on the same doc at the same time, with real time doc updates – awesome!!

GoCompare ranking penalty (again!)

Posted by Administrator on Apr 23rd, 2009 | View Comments

Isn’t it great when the authorities in your field pick up on something that used to be such a hot topic within a much smaller community. I remember the last time round (must have only been a year and a half ago) when GoCompare incurred their last ranking penalty that it was only really picked up by the SEO community. This time round it was Econsultancy that broke the news which inspired Hitwise to release free data (wow) backing the story up!

The great thing about stories like this in the SEO community is that it defines boundaries. We all know how crappy Google has been at imposing it’s own ethical policies and that SEO is all about testing and pushing limits (not on client sites of course!) but it’s always a good thing to see just how far you can go before you get noticed.

What’s so funny about the story this time round is that GoCompare are going to suffer much worse than their 6 month drop first time round. This time their media spend is going to have to be enormous to counter their lack in visibility on brand terms. Hell I might even have a bid myself! Thanks again to Google’s relaxation in trademark bidding policies every man and his dog can bid on GoCompare’s brand terms and get away with it, making competition all the more expensive.

You’ve got to love them – Google and GoCompare too! Here’s a lovely graph for the wall courtesy of Hitwise.

GoCompare loose traffic from Google ban