The search giant has always been recognised as an information-based engine, and a pretty good one at that. This has heavily relied on an established list of links to other websites. With the development of its latest “Knowledge Graph”, confidence is high that this is taking one of a series of steps towards producing more informed search results – search results that are not as linear and don’t only acknowledge keywords, but rather understand the context of the search.

About 3.5 billion different attributes are used in the Knowledge Graph to organise results based on your search. These help Google to determine the context of the search and then display summary boxes containing results that are deemed more relevant.

On top of this fresh method for calculating search queries, Google results pages will subsequently be getting a makeover. Space on the right hand side of the SERP will be used to display these results in order to stand out more. Tablets and smart phones will be optimised differently for these purposes. Where Search Plus Your World paved a way for personalised results, the Knowledge Graph takes this to a new level, aggregating common search queries from countless sources.

Amit Singhal of Google provided an example, explaining, “The information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him,” This just gives you an idea of how much search time will be saved by having the most popular information displayed on the results page without having to redirect to other sites. This could also result in users spending more time on sites that generate advertising revenue for Google.

There’s a general buzz in the air that Google’s revamped Knowledge Graph is a search milestone and only the beginning of plenty more to come. In a marriage of collective input and Google’s intelligence, search results are about to take a whole new shape. Arriving in America first, the rest of the world will be getting their surprise search soon enough.

Intelligent Search Results. Thanks Google Knowledge Graph

In this post I will be looking at what your fans want and how to go about acquiring some of their loyalty. We are not discussing Facebook advertising in the form of paid banner ads on Facebook  – I’ll leave that to another post in this series. For now we are looking at the community whom you can reach out to via messaging and your fan page. This of course presumes that your business has a place on Facebook. The argument for a Facebook presence is not equal for all businesses. Ecommerce stores fair quite well, however you will face some challenges if you are a B2B company such as law firm specialising in contract law.

It is vitally important that you evaluate where your audience is to be found and whether Facebook is actually the right platform for your business. Furthermore you need to decide what “Success” looks like in order to set some goals and expectations.

Given you have considered the above have defined our Facebook objectives then one of the first considerations relates to the quality of the fan base. Embarking on a mission to increase your numbers needs to be a targeted drive. You could ask your friends to like you and ask friends of friends, and then you could go hire an Indian company who will make up fake profiles and get you lots of Russian speaking fans. (OK I made that up, but you get the idea – that is not a plan for a successful campaign!) The quality of your fan base is going to directly affect your success to marketing to them. There are specialised companies who will create campaigns that will indeed win you the right type of fans however you will need budget to initiate such a campaign, and then you will need to have done some good sums to work out your break-even point & ROI.

Next we need to look at what your fans want. They certainly don’t want to be marketed to. They are on Facebook to catch up with who’s doing what and to get the low down on the latest. There are constant conversations happening, and what you want to do is become part of that conversation. You need to give your fans something worth talking about. So a luring prize contest, an unmissable special, or discount voucher is something that they may pick up and run with. It needs to be good enough for them to consider sharing it amongst their friends. Then you will get take-up on your offer, whether it is to acquire more fans and brand awareness or to actually move some product.

Cutting to the chase: Given that you have done the sums and have decided to take the plunge, you need a plan. Work out what strategy you will be adopting and do some reading. There are dozens of articles out there on creative ways to engage and increase your fan base. Some articles are old but bear in mind that you are addressing a community and play into their interests. Once you have formulated your plan you need to allocate resources to make it happen and to keep at it. Put a structure in place that periodically checks, maintains, and innovates. And then be sure you are able to measure your returns, whether it be via analytics or whether you are counting likes, get your monitoring tools in place. Create community guidelines and set expectations internally such that you are clear about how you will be engaging with your audience. Facebook themselves offer this Best Practice Guide.

Some other resources & interesting posts to help you along:

The 8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing

9 Facebook Marketing Success Stories you should Model

Facebook Marketing Guide

To Facebook or not to Facebook? That is the question: Part 2

Even the most experienced search ninjas cringe when confronted with the latest Google overhaul. Trusty SEO tools aside, the recent Panda and Penguin updates have succeeded in compromising the rankings of legitimate blogs and websites that were stuffing their content with keywords and spammy links. The result? Change.

Having some of the best SEO tools at our disposal, many professionals have learnt that the need to self-evaluate their list of best practices is an essential habit for remaining at the top of their game. In this case, optimisers have been forced to put on their camo-masks and run through the jungle of poisonous back links and webspam to reach the Promised Land: farm-fresh content and a fertilizer-type concoction of social media shares mixed with a portfolio of strong varied links. In other words, perform a site-search audit.

Free SEO Analysis Tools Needed to Perform the Audit:

1. Webmaster tools: An indispensable means for finding low page-ranking back links.
2. On-site SEO: Check your site for duplicate content, keyword stuffing, malware, performance and caching.
3. Off-site SEO: Get networking. The more social media, news sites and blogs providing you with niche back links and publicity- the better.
4. Google Analytics: The best SEO tool to measure search traffic and the effect of Google algorithm updates on your blog or website.
5. Back links: The main reason behind sites being ‘penguinated’, beware the use of unvaried spam links.

In terms of SEO tools, cultivating organic results is the equivalent of going green. No blackhat magic can replace Google algorithm’s estimation of unique, engaging copy. Using a balance of optimising techniques and back linking, sites that have lost their ranking will be able to regain the ladder in no time.

What’s New in the SEO Zoo? How to Handle Google’s Penguin and Panda Additions

As a long-time SEO copywriter, my knee-jerk reaction is to defend the tools of my trade and say that words will always be superior to images when it comes to SEO strategy; that a carefully-worded article crafted to perfectly balance optimisation with creative expression will do more for any SEO agency’s strategy than a simple “pretty picture” ever could. However, as a copywriter I also know that searchers respond better to articles that draw the eye easily to relevant points in the content by using:

•    Short and concise paragraphs;
•    Headings and subheadings;
•    Bulleted lists;
•    Infographics;
•    Images and video content.

This points towards a decidedly visual culture online, and highlights the need for agencies to adjust their SEO strategies accordingly. Like it or not, searchers are undeniably fond of those pretty pictures, and if you’re still in any doubt, the stats speak for themselves:

Facebook
Approximately 250 million photographs are uploaded to the social network daily, and according to a study by Harvard Business School, activities cantered around visual content account for around 70% of all Facebook activities. This includes image uploads, comments and Likes.

Pinterest
MediaVision has blogged before about the role Pinterest could play in SEO strategies, and the social photo sharing platform really is red-hot right now, with over 11 million registered users. These statistics have led SEO agencies to include Pinterest as part of their strategy for clients, particularly those in the retail sector.

According to Shareaholic, Pinterest is currently driving more referral traffic than YouTube, Google Plus and LinkedIn all put together! In fact, Pinterest could soon be giving Twitter a run for its money – check out Shareaholic’s referral traffic report for more details…

Instagram
This platform is a photo sharing favourite worldwide, attracting its first 1 million users a mere 2 months after launching and soaring to 15m by the end of last year, with a rate of 60 image uploads every second.

While skilled copywriting, both in onsite and meta copy, will always remain an essential component of any SEO strategy, it would be unwise to dismiss the importance of the role played by visual content; this is the age of the image, and the time has come to embrace visual content as a part of the “bigger picture”.

Picture Perfect: The Role of Visual Content in SEO Strategy

Bing has had a certain social media search presence but this re-launch aims at making it better, primarily by largely off-loading social elements into a new Toolbar area that will entice users to install. The new feature will be available to users in the United States as early as the next few days and the rest of the world over the next few weeks. Social media and social search play a fundamental role for many a Search marketing agency and their SEO strategies. Does this new evolution to a stronger social media search presence indicate a valuable source for SEO? Only time and its popularity will tell. In Microsoft’s post that pitches the new functions on Bing, they explain a three column design with Core Search, Snapshot and Sidebar panes.

• Core Search loses many of the social annotations that Bing has added over the years
• Snapshot will provide additional information about a specific search listing without having to leave Bing
• Sidebar will serve as a new home for social integration within search queries

The Social side bar on Bing

The social side bar in Bing vs. Google is the biggest change to the search engine site. The side bar features an array of social elements that are displayed depending on how relevant Bing evaluates them to be in relation to a specific search. When performing a particular search in Bing, the following social media elements may be shown:

• Ask Friends
• Friends Who Might Know
• People Who Know
• Activity Feed

Bing is attempting to fill a gap where Google did not have much success at filling with Search Plus Your World. The new Bing is now also using open web data that apparently has more suggestions from a variety of social networks than Google does. It is even including Google.

Time will tell how this new search engine integration with social media search will pan out. Against search engine giants Google, it only seems beneficial and profitable to keep innovating an evolving with searchers as well as in Search Engine Optimisation.

Bing Re-launches With More Emphasis On Social Media

So what does this mean for an SEO agency and their strategy? Google’s free Analytics offerings are available to all and the new Social Report backlinking section will provide you with extensive information many paid for tools won’t. The Googlebot will trace all the information for your social report, including original postings, shares and full conversation tracking for the links. All of this is then displayed in easily readable graphs that can be analysed for further link development, and to showcase outreach projects to clients. With the added importance of social sharing in the Penguin update and the previous Panda algorithm, content that provides you with the most links and is widely shared can be clearly identified, and strategies replicated.

With the Google updates of SPYW and Penguin, The Social Backlinking reports may be one of the most comprehensive and accurate reporting options that analytics offers for backlinking analysis. Any outreach program conducted through social channels can be tracked and refined, and with the focus on shared content, no SEO agency should be ignoring the new offering.

Social Reports Get Backlinks Tracking from Google Analytics

The best ways to find negative keywords would be through:

Logic: Logic dictates that your ads should not display for certain keywords, without you having to do research or investigating to find negative keywords. If you are running ads for expensive computer software then logic should dictate that adding the negative keyword “free” would eliminate your ads appearing to users who don’t want to pay for computer software. This would make your ads more specific, most probably increase your CTR and conserve budget that will be spend on more targeted traffic instead of being used on clicks for far too broad searches.

Search Term Data: Sifting through search term data allows you to see exact search terms that garnered clicks. The keywords in your account and the actual keyword searches that lead to clicks are often very different, so it would make sense to examine search term data to see what relevant and what irrelevant keywords garnered clicks and spent your budget.

While sifting through search data you will find keywords searches that are irrelevant and resulted in clicks on your ads. Using this data to add specific negative keywords to relevant Adwords campaigns and adgroups will help with improving your ad performance.

Keyword Suggestions: Who would have thought that while looking for keywords to add from Google keyword suggestions you would be able to use the same data for negative keywords? When searching for new keywords to add to your adgroup with Googles suggestion, Google often gives  suggestions that are too broad or not relevant to your adgroups. These keywords that are not relevant or are too broad can be added as negative keywords. Since Google is suggesting these keywords it is highly likely that these are searches that are being performed online, and if your keywords aren’t tightly matched then there is a chance these broad keywords could trigger ads in your account. Again, this will result in your ads being clicked for searches that are not related or targeted to what you are advertising online.

Hopefully this will help those who are looking for avenues on how to add negative keywords to their Adwords account. It cannot be stressed enough how highly important adding negative keywords to your account can be. Adding negative keywords can be the difference between garnering clicks and making conversions and ROI, and losing money on irrelevant clicks that had no chance of converting.

Ideas for Finding Negative Keywords for Adwords

SEO benefits companies, big and small, but smaller companies will find this time to be most beneficial as they can now play SEO with the big boys. Bigger companies are tightening their belts and spending less on advertising, SEO included, while smaller companies are still spending the same budget on SEO, which brings them on par with bigger companies.

Due to the fact that SEO is so flexible, it can be customised to meet all companies’ needs. Even with a small budget businesses can hugely benefit from fleshing out their content to include more key phrases. Regularly updated content that is always optimised does not cost much when looking at the long-term benefits compared to the fleeting memory of traditional advertising. Thanks to less spending by bigger companies, current SEO benefits mean that your website can grow in size and rankings, putting it up there with corporations and conglomerates.

One must remember that during the time of a recession people don’t really want to be asked to spend, spend and spend some more. Most are looking for value for money. Offering that in your SEO will benefit a company tremendously. Reading your market and tailoring your SEO to their current financial requirements makes all the difference in the world to your website ranking.

SEO campaigns are extremely beneficial as they can be cross-linked between a business’ social media pages, public relations, and news and blog pages. There are so many benefits to SEO because social media also acts as a marketing platform that currently has very little competition, which means any product or bargain you place in this goldmine of advertising will plenty more attention compared to placing the same advertisement in the highly competitive display ad arena.

SEO benefits are plentiful and continue to grow thanks to the advancing digital and technological market, and the fact that campaigns can be long-running with half the costs of ambient and outdoor advertising, making SEO the top marketing tactic during a recession. SEO will definitely grow your ranking and, by extension, your client base. It’s an ethical and fruitful advertising option that can be realised on a minimal budget. The online advertising world is your oyster with SEO.

SEO is Optimised for the Recession

Recently a study was conducted to see how the information giant, Wikipedia, fared on the first Google results page as opposed to the SERP page for Bing. The search giants (perhaps one bigger than the other) were analysed for the amount of occasions Wikipedia appeared on the first and second pages.

Conductor recently published a study in order to establish the frequency of Wikipedia appearances on the results pages of major search engines Google and Bing. Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch covered the comparison and reported on the results. Google and Bing were to exhibit the search results of a 2 000 keyword set that was distributed across informational and transactional keywords.

Previously Conductor released report outlining the results for the prevalence of Wikipedia hits on Google’s SERP. Matt McGee of Search Engine Land suggested that Conductor amend their study by including and comparing the results from Google against those from Bing. These results have just been released and exhibit the following data, which can be more closely analysed in the charts further below.

In the previous study, Google results showed that Wikipedia appeared on page one in 46% of the keyword searches. Wikipedia appeared on Google’s second results page in 25% of the cases. After the new investigation, Wikipedia appeared on Bing’s first results page for 31% of the keywords/searches and on page two in only five percent of the cases. When results were compared between Google and Bing regarding instances where Wikipedia did not feature at all in the search engine results, this occurred 64% of the time in Bing’s case and 29% in Google’s, as is illustrated below:

Although Wikipedia appeared in the results on page one far more frequently on Google than on Bing, it appeared in the hyper-traffic top three results more often on Bing than on Google. When Google showed results that included Wikipedia on page one, 65% of the time these results were in the top three ranking. On the other hand, this occurred 83% of the time on Bing.

Search results are continuously changing and it’s hard to make a definitive judgement. Whether it’s Amazon’s or Wikipedia’s presence on a Google results page, when any report of this nature is made public it makes for interesting comparison and conversation within the current framework as well as in retrospect.

Bing Battles with Google Results for Wikipedia’s Company

It appears innumerable amounts of webmasters have come forward with stories of how their livelihoods have been decimated seemingly overnight.

Google’s Sergey Brin worried about ‘walled gardens’ such as Facebook and Apple which he felt paint an alarming future for the internet and how it’s controlled by a few.

Ironically now a similar ‘walled garden’ is being put up by the Penguin Update which appears to block smaller businesses from reaching top ranks for niche keywords which are often not even targeted by the big guns.

One example gathered was of a webmaster with a seven year old website that had SEO work done on it, albeit through old practices, but had not had continued SEO for the final four years. His website was heavily penalised and he considers that the four year old SEO work done had something to do with it. This only highlights how important it is to keep your SEO work up to date and compliant with every Google update; a lot of work, but necessary.

With every Google update many cry bloody murder for the death of SEO, but sure enough after a few weeks SEO stabilises and continues to grow strong. Consulting with an SEO company that doesn’t get out of the kitchen even though the heat is on is your best bet to ensure your company doesn’t flounder with the updates, but even may comply with them to stay ahead of the curve.

Did the Penguin Update Stomp Out the Little Guys?