The Web Squad

Google’s social search is beginning to make its appearance on search result pages. Social media sites including Twitter and blogging sites can now be used as a search result depending on how well connected the person who is searching is connected to those sites. For example, if a person searches for something, the usual websites will still show up, but suppose that person’s friend writes a blog about whatever the person searched for. That blog page will be included in the social search results.

For businesses, this could prove to be very useful in order to get their site’s visibility increased. There are some tips that a business should follow when trying to capitalize on social search:

1. Make sure to have as many connections as possible.

Having a lot of connections makes sure that a business’s site will be seen by more people in the social search results.

2. Make it easy for customers to follow through the social networks.

This means having links on a site that will either automatically make them follow the business or go directly to the business’s social media page.

3. Post content on those social media sites for interaction with potential and current customers.

Letting a Facebook page sit there won’t do anything but hurt the business. Businesses should answer any questions that come up and post relevant content to keep the people engaged.

4. All social network info should be included on business cards, signs, and online advertising.

This is important to get future clients involved in the network. That way once they start to follow the business, need a service, and search for it, the business will be a search result, possibly ahead of competition.

Remember, traditional SEO is still important. Users might not understand how to see those social results and therefore would still rely on those organic results. These social search tips are still useful in pulling ahead of local competition.

Social Networks

Reports say that the average time spent on social networking sites in the United States is over 6 hours in 1 month with over 140 million unique visitors (http://www.nielsen.com/). Companies of all sizes want to take advantage of the amount of traffic on these sites.

But with the number of social sites growing at a fast pace, how should a company approach their social networking strategy? Should a company try to make a profile on every single site in hopes of attracting some from each, or put the focus on the most popular sites and optimize their profiles there?

Let’s compare the two choices. For the quantity approach, while the traffic going to a company’s profile per site may be low, the fact that one could have lots of profiles spread out means that the traffic could match those who only have a few profiles. But is that traffic really worth it?

The quality of these profiles might not match what one could do when focused, and therefore might not attract the right kind of consumer. People may think one is only doing half the work to keep their profile up to date and might not give the traffic any reason to follow the link to the site.

Now, as for the quality approach, traffic might really enjoy coming to one’s profile page and actually read the content that is posted. The conversion rate might be higher due to the professionalism of one’s page. Optimizing for those popular sites would also prove useful as any visitors to one’s page might reference it to their friends. Those references will not happen on the quantity approach.

The major difference that can be seen between these two approaches is the kind of traffic that will be driven to a site. Through the quantity approach, a lot of random traffic may be driven to a company’s site, but what will the bounce rate be of that traffic, or how many people will actually stay? Due to quality of one’s profile, relevant traffic will be pushed to a company’s site, almost guaranteeing a lower bounce rate. Any company should see an improvement if the time it takes to build profiles on other sites is put towards optimizing the profile on the most popular site.

Google recently released their new product, Google Buzz.  Buzz can be compared to other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Here is a video that shows what Buzz is capable of doing.

So what does this mean from a search and marketing perspective for businesses?  Well, most will treat it similar to Facebook and Twitter where they will be sending out business information and updates to consumers.  They will be able to follow their customers and competitors alike, just like in other social media sites.

But it can open up other possibilities that those other sites might not be capable of doing.  The quickness of responses from other people in your network would be much higher than that of Facebook, even though they are both in real time.   Google Buzz is based on Gmail, and if people get involved with Buzz on the business side, they would never leave their email all day, considering that anything posted on Buzz would show up in your inbox if it is important.  Facebook is more of a check and leave type social media.  People there go on every once in a while to check updates, etc, and then leave.

On the search side of things, Buzz may offer more than what can be shown on other media sites.  Buzz updates could be integrated with social search, which can be very important for the business uses of social media.  When a customer does a Google search, and they are connected to a business that is part of their social circle, anything relevant from the business will be shown up near the top of their search results.

It would be interesting to see if this feature would extend outside the first degree of contacts in the customer’s social circle.  For example, if a customer’s friend did the same search, would they see the same results due to the business being two degrees of separation away?  This could open up many possibilities and would make connections in Buzz that much more important for businesses.

As computer and internet technology start taking shape in the form of cell phones, marketing through those means could take a different role in the future.  As smart phones become completely mainstream, advertisers can see the mobile market as a medium to get brand names out.  What does this mean for optimization?

As of now, optimization is clearly favored towards search engines.  Having that organic traffic to a website is virtually irreplaceable.  A website that is optimized for a search engine can see exponential growth in traffic and can mean increase sales in products, if the site is part of e-commerce.  Right now, not having a website provides a business with no possible way to grow and increase sales, as there is zero traffic unless that business has a television commercial.  They can’t even have advertisements posted on the web due to the fact that the ad wouldn’t be able to lead the potential customer to the correct place.

Thousands of Apps

In the future, as people become ever so reliant on their mobile phones, a trend might form where optimization may shift towards mobile apps.  These work similarly to sites as users will search for an app using keywords; those keywords need to be tagged by the mobile app in order to have any visibility.  The comparison right now between websites and mobile apps is that the number of websites greatly exceeds the number of apps (the difference is probably inconceivable).  The amount of apps available across all platforms of cell phones might not even reach 1 million.  Currently, keyword optimization for apps can be successful.  As the market begins to be flooded with countless apps just as what happened with websites, optimization for apps might shift to what search engine optimization is like today.

Just with websites, moving to a new media sooner can mean a greater chance that your business will be found.  Creating a professional app in the future may be just as important as creating a professional website with a great design, the two of which could go hand-in-hand.

With more businesses looking to increase traffic to their websites, it is imperative to find quick but resourceful ways to separate from the crowd.  RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) provides this to add extra information into their Google search result.  From a technical standpoint, RDFa allows websites to embed rich metadata which will then be picked up by search engines, like Google and Bing.

With RDFa in place, the search result will be enhanced with a “rich snippet”, where users will see reviews, ratings, and other information that can possibly spark more interest than the description alone.  For example, a restaurant can have a rich snippet of their n-star rating, n number of reviews, and show the price range of their menu items.  Another example is a company selling different products.  When a user searches for one of the products sold by this company, a rich snippet could include a photo, price, description, and a URL that leads directly to the product page.

How can this help your website?  “It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through,” said Google on their webmasters blog.

Reports have shown that this simple change has big results.  Businesses using e-Commerce websites have reported an increase in traffic of 30% or more when using RDFa, and search engines are seeing that more users are clicking through the site instead of returning to the search results page.

Technorati Tags:

RDFa, SEO, Search Engine Optimization

RDFa – The Next Step for Search Results by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

ICANN Urges Adoption Of IPv6

The available number of unallocated Internet addresses using the older IPv4 protocol has dropped below 10 percent, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).ICANN says there are just 24 address blocks (each block is about 16-million IP addresses) that it has not yet allocated to the Regional Internet Registries around the globe.

“This is the time for the Internet community to act,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and Chief Executive Officer.

“For the global Internet to grow and prosper without limitation, we need to encourage the rapid widespread adoption of the IPv6 protocol.”

IPv6 is the new protocol the Internet engineering community designed to deal with the increased demand for IP addresses, which are the unique identifiers that allow computers to communicate with one another over the Internet and to which DNS servers translate domain names. IPv4 addresses contain only 32 bits of data, while IPv6 addresses contain 128 bits.

“Quite simply it comes down to the fact that IPv6 is the future of the Internet,” said Beckstrom.

“The Internet now defines communication and commerce and to accommodate its explosive worldwide growth we need to act now to guarantee an online future that accommodates growth with few limitations.”

Beckstrom also said it is important for people to understand that many blocks of IPv4 addresses that have been allocated to registries have not yet been distributed to the public, so there will be no immediate global shortage of IPv4 addresses at the consumer level.

2010/01/18-Las Vegas, NV-The Web Squad’s article ranks number 1 out of 555 million results

The Web Squad blog titled “Are You Getting The Most From Your SEO?” currently ranks number 1 out of 555,000,000 million competing search results and articles for the search term “Are You Getting The Most From Your SEO?”. This article also ranks at number 3 out of 36,200,000 million results for “getting the most from your SEO” , a broader, more searchable keyphrase. While it has become increasingly more difficult to get your information seen in Google as the internet is so rapidly expanding, The Web Squad is staying on top with good old fashion hard work.

Although both queries have the majority of the article’s title in them, the amount of competing traffic is staggering and rising. “When we first published this article on our blog last month it debuted at number 4 out of 225,000,000 million results. This wasn’t unusual since it was just published, but we expected it to drop in the SERP’s fairly quickly…” said The Web Squad, “Instead, the amount of competing results increased as with our ranking.”

The Web Squad said, “We hoped this article would shine some light on the amateur tactics many SEO firms are using”.  Gaining more visibility in the marketplace has always been cornerstone to the methodologies that The Web Squad uses in their Online Reputation Management campaigns and just in this case they have seen an increase faster indexing results in the SERPs as well as stronger rankings. “We feel that low quality SEO and Reputation Management only hurts the customer in the long run. We hope to be the solution.”, said The Web Squad Online Reputation Management Team.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, talks about how Google will rank links coming from Facebook and Twitter.

In the latter part of 2009 both Google and Microsoft struck deals with Twitter almost simultaneously. This gave both search engines the ability to have real-time results for search queries. Microsoft hit the ground running with the deal and immediately released their version of real-time search also announcing that users with more followers will have their tweets ranked higher and those who essentially retweet will have those tweets ranked lower. Google, on the other hand, took its time to release its version of real-time search.

Google integrated real-time search with its traditional SERPs with its sources being a number of social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter of course. Sticking to tradition, Google did not release how they will rank tweets initially. However, in a recent interview with Amit Singhal, who led the development for real-time search for Google, with MIT’s Technology Review reviled one part of Google’s ranking algorithm for tweets.

From what Singhal said in the interview, Google will rank tweets in the same way it ranks web pages. It is, in essence, Google’s PageRank algorithm rewritten for Twitter; replace links with followers and you got its “TweetRank” algorithm. Singhal said that tweets will be ranked based not only on how many followers you have, but also “how reputable those followers are.”

The common practice of using hashtags in tweets may be a bad thing for those trying to rank their tweets. Hashtags are commonly a sign of low quality tweets and will become a part of Google’s spam control strategy. This may, in fact, cause a significant reduction in the usage of hashtags by Twitter users.

Being Google, they did not tell us everything about how they will rank tweets. Keep in mind that Twitter is Google’s only source for real-time search; Facebook, MySpace, and other social network, as well as blogs, will play a big role in real-time search. Though they have not released any official information, it is probable that Google will rank things like Facebook posts in the same way it will for Twitter.

Technorati Tags:
Google, Bing, Twitter, Search Engine Optimization

Google to Rank Tweets by http://thewebsquad.com/wordpress/index.php/2010/01/14/google-to-rank-tweets/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.technologyreview.com.

A lot of people in business go by the old saying “First impressions are everything”, however, with Google and the other search engines this is completely opposite. With the search engines they base their results on the last time they crawled the web in order to provide the most up to date results to searchers. However, the search engines do not crawl equally, in fact they are very biased on who they crawl and when. In order to get crawled and indexed often you have to earn Google’s trust.

Today, search engines are looking for the latest and greatest to display in its SERPs. This means that classic link building techniques are going to be less effective than they have been in the past. Google is going to start looking for the best, most up to date content to display to its users so site age will come into effect but so will site trust. This keeps brand new start ups from dominating the first page, but also keeps stagnate, out of date sites from clogging up the works as well. This is where the Google cache comes in. The cache is a carbon copy of how your site looked the last time Google visited it, and it will tell you when that was exactly. Google, like any other company, does not like to waste time and resources so it crawls sites only when they need to.

If you have a static website the last crawl date is not that big of deal because you site is not any different now than it was then. If you have a blog or a blog on your main website, then this cache date should be very important to you because it tells you two things. First, it tells you what content Google has indexed for your site, and, second, it tells you how much Google trusts your site. You can figure out your trust rank with Google and other search engines based on how quickly they index and cache your site after publishing new content; the quicker they crawl your site, they better your trust ranking with that search engine. To improve this ranking all you have to do is publish quality, unique content. When you do this Google sees that every time they visit your site it has changed, and will, in a sense, bookmark it for quick indexing every time you publish something. Like everything with search engines (except maybe PPC), this will not happen overnight.

Tech Tags:
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Google

How to ‘Cache’ Google’s Eye by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.