Please not these stats show the percentage of an age group who use social media, not the percentage of social media age group users.

The image shows the increase of the +30 age group using social media over time.

This is very interesting for business owners who are targeting different demographics, and shows the lure of social networking for internet users.

Click on the image to view it full size

In case you missed it, Yahoo and Microsoft have made a deal to integrate their search engines (Yahoo and Bing).

The end result of a deal signed a little over one year ago by the two companies has gone ahead so that Yahoo will now be powered by the Bing search. In the US this means that  combined, Microsoft now owns 28.1% of the search market and Google with 65.8% (in the UK Google has over 90% of the market).

The implementation of the change to the search, which has been in testing for about a month, is currently live only in the U.S.A and Canada, with “other worldwide locations and languages to come in the weeks and months ahead,” according to a statement from Microsoft.

Although there should not be massive differences to the search features from a users point of view, you’ll notice if you look at the status bar in your browser that data is indeed being loaded from Bing.

“End of Site Explorer”

Unfortunately they have announced the shut down of the incredibly useful tool “Yahoo Site Explorer” .

The Yahoo! Site Explorer team is planning tighter integration between Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center to make the transition as smooth as possible for webmasters. At this stage in the transition, it is important for webmasters to continue using Yahoo! Site Explorer to inform us about your website and its structure so you keep getting high quality traffic from searches originating on Yahoo! and our partner sites – even from markets outside the US and Canada that haven’t yet transitioned to Microsoft systems. To keep things simple, we will share site information you provide on Site Explorer with Microsoft during this transition period.

When Microsoft fully powers the Yahoo! Search back-end globally, expected in 2012, it will be important for webmasters to use Bing Webmaster Center as well. The Bing tool will manage site, webpage and feed submissions. Yahoo! Site Explorer will shift to focus on new features for webmasters that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites…

See the original blog post from Yahoo here

What does this mean for SEO guru’s and Website Owners?

Well for a start the useful site explorer features like the back link commands will be affected. Currently it is the most effective and accurate backlink search tool on the net.

One good thing though is that if you have been monitoring Bing Webmaster Tools recently you will have noticed some changes to the features and layout, so maybe it will compensate for Yahoo Site Explorer going under…….

It’s possible that SEO types have a sense of humour!

Evidence comes courtesy of the Daily Mail, which has hidden a job advert for an SEO manager inside a file that should only really be read by search engine crawlers.

The job ad was discovered by eagle-eyed SEO man Malcolm Coles in a robot.txt file, which blocks the crawlers from indexing certain parts of the site.

For those who don’t know, the robots.txt file is how you tell search engines which pages they can and can’t crawl on your site to include in their index.

It is a file that is not listed in search engines and users have to type the address into the URL address bar to find it.

Can’t Be Found On Google Search

It is located at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/robots.txt but the lines concerning the ad are shown below:

Disallow: /home/ireland/
Disallow: /home/scotland/

# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this then you’re the kind of techie we need!
# Send your CV to holly dot ward at mailonline dot co dot uk

# Begin standard rules
# Apply rules to all user agents updated 08/06/08
ACAP-crawler: *

Very clever. People who don’t read these kind of things need not apply, obviously.

Maybe this should be the way for companies to advertise SEO in the future – use files that any SEO enthusiast should know to check when analysing a website…….

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of making a website / webpage more search engine “visible”, “friendly”, “keyword optimised” and “content optimised” (A search engine being Google, Bing or Yahoo, etc).

Ultimately the goal of SEO is to increase traffic (people viewing a website) through search engines results pages (SERP) to your website.

Natural search results (Organic) = Search engines listing you website in the natural results section at no direct cost to the website owner/s. See the image below for Google’s natural search results.

Paid search results (SEM/PPC) = Search engines listing your website in the “Sponsored Search Results” at the top and on the right of the search engine results page, commonly referred to as Pay-Per-Click (PPC).

See the image below for Google’s PPC area. SEO techniques can still be applied to SEM. See SEM Explained for more info on this.

Why bother with SEO?

• Imagine a user searches Google for “Laptop Repair”. On google.com there are over 17 million results for this. If your site is not listed on the first few pages then it is simply lost and you will not be getting a great deal of natural traffic to your site.
• If you want to get traffic to your site without paying for continued advertising and relying on people knowing your website address then every business MUST apply SEO to their site.
• It can be the make or break for a business. Recently I designed a new site for a local business. Their old site was not search engine optimised and they were not getting much business. During and after I created their new site I optimised all the pages. Now they estimate 95% of their business comes though Google search results pages.
• If you website is for a small business or a multi-national corporation, SEO should be viewed as a standard for the internet and how websites should be structured and setup. This applies to all websites in all countries.

Why SEO rather than SEM (“Search Engine Marketing” = Pay Per Click & Affiliate Marketing)?

This image was from a study to show where a persons eyes focus on a search engine results page. It shows that the natural search results are where the majority of people look to. This means that if you can get to the top of the natural results, you will generally be noticed the most

Small businesses with target areas and less competitive keywords can spend very little on optimising their websites and achieving brilliant results. The small business I mentioned above (that now has 95% of its sales through natural Google results) does not pay any monthly costs or pay per click costs, etc.

They simply have free target market visibility to their customers.

SEO Terms and Processes Explained

Search engine visible

By this we mean can the search engines see your site.

• Have you submitted the site to the search engine, has it picked the site up on another website (linking) and are there any factors preventing the search engine from not accessing and indexing the sites pages (“indexing” is the search engines way of putting a website in its records, therefore including the site in search results pages).
• There are certain ways a website might not allow a search engine to view it, e.g. adding a “”noindex,nofollow” meta tag (only in a html coded page) or maybe a “disallow” in the robots file. Also “nofollow” in links are becoming increasingly popular.

Search engine friendly

By this we mean has the website been made “browser friendly” and “search engine indexing friendly”.

“Browser friendly” -

• “cross browser checking” (does the website appear the same in all major web browsers, i.e. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, etc).
• “page loading times” (if a site takes 20 seconds to download it is not very friendly) and XHTML & CSS Validated (see http://validator.w3.org/ for XHTML and http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ for CSS).

“Search engine indexing friendly” -

• Human and keyword recognisable URL’s (e.g. instead of having “www.spottedpanda.com/djdidm?d=ddmkscd” we would have “www.spottedpanda.com/seo-explained”).
• Having a clear site structure and hierarchy (a main or home page with links to categories and sections) – any page that you want to be visible on Google needs an internal link to it in your site.
• Title & META Tags – In the code of every webpage in the “HEAD” section there should be UNIQUE title and META tags for each page. “Robots” tag or file and a “sitemap” – usually in XML format.

Keyword optimised

By this we mean have you selected your keywords (a keyword being the word or phrase that someone types into a search engine, i.e. “Cheap iPhones”.

This can be the website name, product name, a service, etc. For example to find this site you may have typed in “Spotted Panda” or you may have typed in “SEO Information”.

After you have selected your keywords have you placed them in the content of your site, in the URL (website address), in the page title, the meta tags, the alt tags, etc.

Also if you can get the keyword into the website domain name (separated by hyphens) then this is always a plus – www.fridge-repair.com has a descriptive keyword in the title.

Content optimised

By this we mean to make the text content rich in information related to the keywords you have for the webpage. You content optimise for 2 reasons:

• The search engines algorithms are now cleaver enough to scan a webpage’s content (the main body of text) for the searched keywords and assess whether it is well structured and will be of interest to the user. They can tell if someone is trying to manipulate the algorithm by “keyword stuffing” and apart from not showing the site high on a search engine results page they may also blacklist you.
• For the benefit of the users coming to your site. The majority of web users want clear and informative webpage’s that get them what they want in the quickest time. Optimise your content for what they want to see and you’ll find the search engines will rate this higher.

Image and link optimisation

By this we mean having the following:

• Link Optimisation: Have the link text related to the content it is going to, i.e. instead of having a link as www.spottedpanda.com you should have “Digital Marketing Free Information”. They both go to the same place but the latter is optimised. If the keyword optimised content is not on your homepage, but a different webpage then the link should go to the webpage (not the homepage without the optimised content). Also the code in the link is important. Have the “anchor text” as a descriptive keyword relating to where the link is going.
• Image Optimisation: Apart from making sure images load quickly (scale the image, make it a jpeg or flattened png instead of a bitmap or fireworks png, etc) the alt text of the image should be related to the keywords on the pages content. Also if the image has a link then the above link optimisation should be observer (anchor text can be observed, but there is no link text because it is an image, therefore the this makes links better to be done in text rather than images – keep in mind for your menus).

Which search engine should you optimise for?

Very good question. 10 years ago it would have been Yahoo. Nowadays Google is on top so generally people optimise for Google and they find the rest will follow.

Google, Yahoo& Bing (formally MSN) all have “Webmaster Tools” where you can submit your site, along with a sitemap and robots file.

Also a link building campaign will get you site indexed (when a search engine re-scans an indexed site and they find a link to your website they will index it).

The obvious one to focus on is Google (unless you’re in China). In the USA 72% of online searches are done on Google, in the UK it is more like 85%. This does not mean forget about the others – you wouldn’t turn away the chance to market to 28% more customers – that could mean a 28% sales increase!

The Google domination may seem strange to many new users, as most computers bought will come with Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer as the web browser, therefore Bing would be the default search engine. Google have been very clever in the marketing, name recognition and search engine algorithms that have made it so successful.

Next Step

Look at our Full SEO Campaign Guide, or alternatively the individual sections such as our Link Building Explained, Keyword Research & Implementation and On-Site SEO Techniques.

Google recently re-branded their “local business center” to the new name of “Google Places”.

“Google Places” – Do We Really Need Another Ambiguous Name?

The re-branding of the service also brings various new and interesting features.

Google’s objective is to make Google Places the largest local and international business directory on the web (competing with the likes of Yell).

Already more than four million businesses have been registered on Google Places, with large email marketing campaigns aiming to increase these figures on a large scale.

Re-brand Aside – The Analytics are Long Overdue!

A great feature for businesses is that Google.com has started to let businesses respond to user reviews on the Google Places/Local Business Centre/Maps (.co.uk and other geo-specific google sites are soon to follow).

They even offer advice as to how to respond to complaints and bad reviews. This should provide useful for raising customer service and show up to date activity from the business.

New Features

According to Google, users will still be able to utilize the different tools previously offered by the Local Business Center. However, the following new features are being introduced to Google.com (USA customers):

• Service Areas: If you travel to serve customers, you can now show which geographic areas you serve. And if you run a business without a storefront or office location, you can now make your address private.
• New Type of Adwords – TagWords!: For just $25 per month, businesses in select cities can make their listings stand out on Google.com and Google Maps with Tags. Recently, they rolled out Tags to three new cities — Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. — in addition to ongoing availability in Houston and San Jose, CA. In the coming weeks they also will be introducing Tags in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco.
• Chargeable Business Photo Shoots: In addition to uploading their own photos, businesses in select cities can now request a free photo shoot of the interior of their business which we’ll use to supplement existing photos of businesses on Place Pages. We’ve been experimenting with this over the past few months, and now have created a site for businesses to learn more and express their interest in participating.
• Customized QR codes – Barcodes and Smartphones: From the dashboard page of Google Places, businesses in the U.S. can download a QR code that’s unique to their business, directly from their dashboard page. QR codes can be placed on business cards or other marketing materials, and customers can scan them with certain smartphones to be taken directly to the mobile version of the Place Page for that business.

Additionally, Google Places users will be able to post real-time updates to their Place Page. This feature alone will make it easier to advertise any special event such as sales. Businesses can also add mobile-formatted coupons. Google Places is free, unless you decide to advertise using tags.

How Much do Reviews Count?

It will be interesting to see if Google will take anything from a company’s response, so if a company consistently answers its customers will Google give it a higher position on the map listings?

New Analytics View of Your Listing on Google Places

Should I use Google Places?

Google Maps is a great tool for SEO and your business but remember that the location takes precedence in your search.

If you’re searching for a shop or a business that is static and selling products locally then it can be really useful, but if you’re searching for a business that covers a large area or is national then it falls down (hence the old name “local business search”.

Still for any local business Google Places is a must! Even if you don’t have a website yet – all you need is a phone number, an email address and some photos!

Google Places Guides on Improving Your Listing (From Google)

Facebook launched its “Pages” setup aimed at moving business profiles away from personal profiles and groups.

Hugely Successful…

If you have a Facebook page then it may be the standard wall layout with some photos and maybe even a poll.

More advanced and successful Facebook pages have used the FBML application to create some eye-catching and very interactive landing pages on Facebook.

Good Graphic Design can Lead to Good Leads

This has proved hugely successful and we are seeing more and more advanced Facebook Pages from established companies to starter businesses.

Not to be confused with Facebook Groups (groups are different entities - the main difference being that they are not indexed by Google, therefore not listed) or Profile Pages (your personal profile about yourself), we would recommend every business have a Facebook Page for their on-line social media campaign.

Below you can find what we consider to be some of the best Facebook Page designs:

• Graphic Designed Facebook Page Examples
• Pages to Encourage People to “Like” You Examples
• Shop Style Facebook Page Examples

Graphic Design Facebook Page Examples

U2 Facebook Fan Page

Victoria’s Secret Facebook Fan Page

Starbucks Facebook Fan Page

Soul City Search Facebook Fan Page

Cranium Facebook Fan Page

Slightly Stoopid Facebook Fan Page

Porsche Facebook Fan Page

Jeff Dunham Facebook Fan Page

Dell Facebook Fan Page – Actual Dell Support on Facebook!

Actual Dell Support on Facebook! Beats the HP support site hands down!

Pages to Encourage People to “Like” You Examples

Our Very Own Spotted Panda Facebook Fan Page (Yeay!)

Redbull Facebook Fan Page

Cadillac Ranch Tempe Facebook Fan Page

Shop Style Facebook Page Examples

Livescribe Facebook Fan Page

Eco-Artware Facebook Fan Page

Bodum USA Facebook Fan Page

Clever one here - this actually uses an iframe to pull the shop into the facebook page!

All these are examples of what is capable on Facebook using the static FBML application tab….

What is Blackhat SEO?

Black Hat SEO,  or “Unethincal SEO” (I hate that term – search engine “ethics” is the not usually the first thing that comes to mind when creating a website…), is basically websites that try to rank higher on search engines by using techniques that are frowned upon by those search engines.

These techniques are designed to trick, or fool the search engines into thinking a website is more important for certain keywords than they actually are (or maybe they are, but there are not enough users who have yet found it and linked to it to think so themselves)…

Activities that compromise the quality of search results and gives a poor user experience…

The biggest problem with Black Hat SEO is that it tends not to provide a lasting solution of ranking well on search engines. White-hat SEO, in contrast, tends to have a much longer life span and growing potential.

Also there is the problem of possibly getting penalised by Google (or banned if you are a really naughty boy). This is where Google realises you have been trying to beat it’s alogorithms and they put you down in the rankings for keywords, kill your page rank and even throw you off all together.

How is Black Hat SEO used?

Well,  since you are interested you might ask for unethical route practices and how to define the Black Hat SEO.

• Keyword Stuffing - The number of times keywords are used really makes a difference. Typically, keyword density (the number of times a keyword is repeated in the content) must be between 4% and 7%.Sometimes people deliberately increase the keyword density to try and tell bots that that word or phrase is an important keyword on that webpage. This is called keyword stuffing. This is the most common Black Hat SEO techniques.
• Keyword Masking – Basically this is keyword stuffing but instead of showing it to the user it is hidden in the website code or with using the same colour of text as background. This Black Hat SEO technique is also easily detect by search engines.
• Cloaking - Another form of doorway pages are using a method called Cloaking. They show a version of that page to the visitor, but different from the one provided to crawlers, using server side scripts. They know whether it’s a bot or a visitor based on their IP address and/or user-agent. Very naughty and and punishable by Google……
• Doorway Pages - Basically the indexed page has a redirect that sends the user to a completely different page. META refresh commands and htaccess files achieve this, but again search engines are becoming more and more advanced at tracking this kind of behaviour.
• Link Farming - Also called “spamdexing”. A link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group, trying to spam the index of a search engine. Search engines require ways to confirm page relevancy.A known method is to examine for one-way links coming directly from relevant websites. The process of building links should not be confused with being listed on link farms, as the latter requires reciprocal return links, which often renders the overall backlink advantage useless. This is due to oscillation, causing confusion over which is the vendor site and which is the promoting site.
• URL Stuffing – Sometimes you can find repeated in the same web domain. Search engines are intelligent and capable of detecting such duplication within the domain.

This sort of technology could help you achieve your goal for a short time, but it certainly does not help you maintain your success. If established, the website is prohibited and punishable by search engines, exposing yourself to all your online marketing nightmares.

Keep in mind that search engines are constantly improvise and make more intelligent. The short-term success is best to avoid. The aim of long-term success and benefits of the white hat techniques.

White Hat techniques definitely lead you through the long-term success…..

Email is a very effective and cost efficient way of marketing your business digitally.

It is much cheaper than traditional paper based marketing, has much better metrics and depending on your business finances can give you a much further reach (10,000 emails at 1 cent per email = $100; 10,000 leaflets printed and distributed = much more than $100).

So it must be simple right? Well yes and no!

Once you have a good distribution list and a fantastic email template, along with content that will interest the email recipient, then yes it can be easy.

To get to that level though can take:

- Years to do it properly…

- Days to do it via purchasing email lists…

- Hours to get blacklisted as a spammer for emailing random people!

Step 1 – How to build an email client distribution list…

If you have been very good with your business then you may already have this.

From selling your products/services, letting people register on your site and having the old “receive newsletter” checkbox option, or even historic data that you have taken over.

You already have the contacts…..

If you have the contacts then you now have 2 options. You can:

1. Email a nice template email asking if the user wants to opt in to your emails creating a double-opt-in list (really making sure the user wants that newsletter).
2. Send them the newsletters without asking again (hell, they’ve already said yes once!).

The main difference between these is that the double-opt-in users are highly unlikely to mark your emails as spam, whilst the other lists are more likely.

Keep in mind you will lose a lot of contacts on the list when you try and get double-opt in, but your IP will remain blacklist free (a beautiful thing).

You don’t yet have an email distribution list…..

You are a new business or one that has never bothered with all this record keeping malarkey (bet you wish you had now…). Well there are several options here:

1 – Start to build a good list up

Using you website (newsletter subscribe feature), emails you send to clients, any products sold, leaflets or feedback forms, etc.Get as many as you can from real customers who actually have an interest in your product or service. Let us stress this is the BEST, yet most time consuming way of building up an email distribution list (lists generally take years to build up).

2 – Buy a list from a reputable email distribution list dealer

These will be lists sold by companies such as you who may have sold up or gone bust, etc.These lists are usually 50% ok and may have some good contacts. Make sure they are relevant to your product, service and general target reach and geographical location.

Keep in mind this is not permission based email marketing, as the reader probably only accepted emails from the original company.

However for those people who did not uncheck the “receive emails from 3rd parties that we have carefully selected” …..then more fool you!

3 – Go for broke and buy a cheap list of the internet from some random company (urrrrghhh)

95% of the users on these lists will not be interested in your products and you have a large risk of being marked as spam if you use them, due to the unwanted and unasked for email you are sending these people.

It may not be pretty, but very occasionally if you have an amazing email template that is fun, exciting and really does relate to the readers then you may get away with it.

Watch out though as if you get marked as spam 1 too many times then OH OWWWW – You have been put on a blacklist and now your company is finding it hard to send emails to your customers!!!!Blacklists were created for a reason – to stop this practice……

Step 2 – You have your email distribution list and now need a design…

Emails are no longer rich text boring things. They can look like full websites with advanced HTML and brilliant images to entice readers to click on the links.

What you need to do is decide how these designs will be made.

1 – Do it in-house

You have an in-house web designer or graphic designer who can easily and effortlessly draft up a Michelangelo worthy email design template.

Brilliant – get it done but remember to try and stick to a similar theme so that readers will know it is your brand when they see the email (instead of just pressing delete or unsubscribe or worse – spam/junk).

Also remember the larger the images, the longer it takes to load in Outlook or any other email client. Anticipate what the email looks like when the images are not loaded, as in many email clients this is what the user first sees.

2- Pay a design company

Plenty of em out there. You’ll pay anywhere between $80 and $1000 for the designs (£50 and £600), but usually you pay for what you get.

Make sure you specify exactly what you are after (best look at examples and find one you think is appropriate for you business).

Once you have a great design, theoretically you can use it for years, or until you fancy a rebrand or just a change.

3 – Don’t bother with the design – the content is so good that who needs fancy images, etc….

You can make some good emails that look professional without loads of images and maybe just your logo placed well (even for this a basic knowledge of tables is needed).

Just remember that every email should have a purpose, be it to get a phone call, an email response, a click-through to your website or even a facebook follow (or “like”, depending on if you use a group or page).

Design the email to fit the purpose!

If you get an special offer email from GBK you would expect it to be like the one below, very graphic and a clear purpose in its use. Great call to actions. Strong visible message!

Click to view this full size

If, however, you are a chartered accountant and you are sending an email out to 1000 lawyers then perhaps you would want the email design to look more professional, as this would attract the target audience more:

Click to view this full size

Some of our Favourite Email Design Examples -

Step 3 – Got the contacts and the design – Now the content!

The content (copy/text/images) is crucial to make readers engage with the email.

- If it is a more professional email (chartered accountant) then short, INTERESTING and concise content with clear headers breaking up the email in easily readable sections.

- If it is a more design based email (GBK) then make sure to really focus on the call to actions and not have them overshadowed by the design.

Now we are not going to start lecturing you on how to write good copy, as the delivery all depends on the subject matter and the target audience.

However try and follow these simple rules when creating the content, for any email, and hopefully it will make less of you emails deleted in a microsecond.

1 – Make the “First Glance” Count…

2 – Don’t Bore the Reader…

3 – Call to Actions…

4 – Unsubscribe links…

5 – Experiment…

Step 4 – Right done all that – Now how do I send the emails?

Lots of choices = lots of opinions on which is best.

“Bulk Email Program” or “Online Email Marketing Software”???

We would recommend an Online Email Marketing Software for the following reasons:

1. Your work server doesn’t crawl to a halt from being exchange being clogged up.
2. The emails still come from your email address, if not your server. Think of this as a buffer between you and the blacklist companies (although you can still get blacklisted – hence why permission based marketing the standard these days, not to mention the higher conversion rates..)
3. The stats generally will always be superior from the EMS’s to what you can install on your server (unless you pay mega-bucks).
4. Although difficult to integrate with any CRM you may have, there are possible integrations with XML and feed data to EMS’s.
5. If sent from a bulk email system on your server, other people can mark the  email as spam can inform your ISP. Your ISP gives your company a spam rating and can blacklist you or worse, withdraw your account. This can cause major issues on your company’s emailing as you will be on international blacklists. It can take weeks of bureaucratic arguing to sort this out, if you actually ever manage to.

Spotted Panda recommends the following:

1 – Campaign Monitor

- Very popular and very good stats for each email sent.

- Campaign monitor are quite aggressive to the number of emails marked as spam, but mostly this is justified.

- At 1 cent per email this is a great platform for sending out your emails.

2 – Mailchimp

- Again very popular with some different pricing options.

- Possibly not as good stats but great as a starter (there is a free deal).

3 - Vertical Response

- More salesy and not as good stats as campaign monitor, but still very good

4 – Constant Contact

- Just as good as the other boys

- has a 60-day “free” trial

Bulk Mailer – If You Must…

Atomic Mailer

- Does what is says = atom bombs peoples inboxes.

- Warning – nothing to stop your IP being blacklisted here.

Some Comparisons!

The images below show some comparisons of the well known Email Marketing Software’s (EMS).

Pay Per Email Comparison

Pay Per Subscriber Comparison

Other Email Marketing Resources

3 Techniques That Will Actually Make a Difference In Your Email Marketing

- Great PDF from Infusionsoft.

Campaign Monitor Email Design Guidelines

- Good instructions on designing emails – tables, images, mobile viewing, etc.

Subject Line Comparison

- Good study on the best subject line to have when sending mailshots.

Let us repeat that – 20 BILLION!

To put this into perspective there are only 6 billion people on the planet. Obviously this is mainly due to the type of user who has thousands of Tweets, but it is still an incredible figure.

Massive Acceleration in Twitter Usage

To show the massive rise in acceleration of Twitter usage, the past 6 months have seen 10 billion (1/2) of the total tweets on the microblogging service to date. The service started in 2006.

These stats come from GigaTweet, and they show the rise of the social media platform. Twitter can be used as a great research and marketing for all types of businesses.

While GigaTweet’s count is declared unofficial by Twitter, the guys at Twitter itself indicated earlier this year that they’re seeing more than 50 million tweets per day.

Marketing & ResearchTool

Twitter is great for research into what people are talking about, especially when you narrow it down to your chosen keyword. Even the government have been using it to see latest trends and topics on the online social web.

It is also a great marketing tool where you can quickly rack up a massive amount of followers and market your website and services to them.

20 Billionth Tweet

Take a look below at the 20 billionth tweet – can you figure it out?

The 20 Billionth Tweet - Wonder what is says......

Facebook has officially launched its “Facebook Questions” on a limited beta test basis–and it could well have some major implications for the World Wide Web.

This may be one of Facebook’s biggest product releases yet, due the the potential to undermine the current search technology employed by Google.

When you ask a question on Facebook, you’re asking it not to a small community or group, but to the 500 million users (As of July 2010) that are on Facebook. All questions are completely public!

This is a far cry from Facebook’s origins as a simple networking service.

“Direct Challenge to the Dominance of Google”….

CNET have reported that “for members to get acquainted with a Facebook feature that’s entirely open to everyone with no option to lock it down, a Facebook representative said that there will be a pop-up window explaining this before any member asks his or her first question.”

Earlier this year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the future of the web was one where friends, or what he called “your social graph”, guide you online.

Many interpreted this as a direct challenge to the dominance of Google’s automated search.

How it Will Work…..

Around about 1 percent of Facebook users currently have early beta access to the new “Facebook Questions”, and it will be gradually rolled out to the rest of Facebook’s 500-million-plus active users after that.

Any Facebook user can ask a question from a new “question dashboard,” the profile “publisher” that lets members update their statuses and add photos, or through the search box.

They can tag their questions with category keywords, too, and those tags will eventually be used to fill up an aggregate “questions” tab on relevant Community Pages on Facebook.

Of particular interest is the fact that a brand’s “fan page” on Facebook will be able to ask questions too, as well as respond to other questions, providing an opportunity for some “conversational” marketing and impromptu market research.

The new feature allows people to quiz the entire Facebook community by clicking on the “Ask Question” button.

Security Issue?

Facebook has been plagued with privacy and security issues these past few months, and one thing that people will have to keep in mind is that the Facebook questions are open to everyone on the internet!

If you only want to ask a question to your friends or a specific group of people, you can still pose it as a status update on your profile targeted to those people.

Users can also create polls, add photos to questions and tag them with a specific topic.

The questions you ask will be shown to people who have expressed interest in the particular topics you tag, as well as to your friends and friends of friends.

Social Media is, for 90% of small businesses, unused and misunderstood.

The reason for this is that social media is seen by many people as a “social” or “non-work-related” activity, and they miss the enormous benefits and marketing potential that they could achieve with it.

Positive ROI…

End of the day business is business. The only reason to undertake a social media campaign is if you can see a positive ROI.

The thing is, I cannot think of 1 business that would not get a positive ROI from social media, if implemented correctly!

If you are a SME and are thinking of dabbling in social media, or alternatively don’t think it is the worth investing time, effort and money into then you need to do more research.

Facebook, for example, has over 500 million users. Now if 10 users “liked” (linked to) your “Facebook Page” and each of these users had 200 friends then that’s 10 x 200 = 2000 users that might see your page……starting to see the chain reaction potential yet?

Ok so maybe it won’t work quite as good as getting 10 to like your page gives you 2000 likes, as it all depends on how interesting the group of page on your business is!

The key is creating a page that users will fing interesting or amusing.

You are the expert in your field, so create something interesting.

“Benefit all SME’s”

If you are a music speaker business, don;t create a page called “Smiths Music Speakers”, but create a page called “I Want Amazing Speakers That Shatter My Car Windows”……

This video is a nice visual on how social media can benefit all SME’s, as well as large corporations and even the individual. It shows the potential ROI, if not in the most exact way….

Who could have predicted that the Friends Reunited platform would explode into an array of networking sites where joining Texas Hold-em-up poker applications and posting your situation in the bathroom would be common place?

Monitoring the social networking trends is vital to understanding the current market and how you should utilise these free tools for your business.

500 Million Active Users

Only last week, Facebook has announced that it now has over 500m active users, whcih is an amazing feet considering it was only created 6 years ago in a university dorm room in the US.

Facebook has now become the poster child of social networking on the world-wide-web. Worldwide it is the dominant force but when you look into specific countries you will find that some others have seen growth.

MySpace, Flickr and Bebo appear to have declined in the past year, according to these figures from Nielsen, yet in the US MySpace still has 46.5 million active users (FB has 127 million), compare with the UK where it is a comparatively small 2.7 million users (FB has 24.2 million).

International Variations

Interesting international variations are seen, both in the amount of time Facebook users spend on the site each month and in the competing networks’ popularity in different countries.

This is the kind of research that SME’s need to do when targeting social networks. Why spend all your time and effort on Myspace in the UK when it is mainly used now for musical purposes, as oppose to Facebook which is used vastly more by social networking users.

Check out the image below which should give you a good starting point on social media optimisation….

Click the image to see it full screen - image courtesy of BBC © MMX

View the raw_data from nielsen on social networking

There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic.

Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links.

If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic.

Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site.

“Spread the word”

Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content — something that lets your expertise shine — people will want to recommend it to others.

Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools.

A promising way to create value for your target group and earn great links is to think of issues or problems your users might encounter.

Visitors are likely to appreciate your site and link to it if you publish a short tutorial or a video providing a solution, or a practical tool. Survey or original research results can serve the same purpose, if they turn out to be useful for the target audience. Both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility.

This can help you gain lasting, merit-based links and loyal followers who generate direct traffic and “spread the word.” Offering a number of solutions for different problems could evolve into a blog which can continuously affect the site’s reputation in a positive way.

Humor can be another way to gain both great links and get people to talk about your site. WithGoogle Buzz and other social media services constantly growing, entertaining content is being shared now more than ever. We’ve seen all kinds of amusing content, from ASCII art embedded in a site’s source code to funny downtime messages used as a viral marketing technique to increase the visibility of a site.

However, we do not recommend counting only on short-lived link-bait tactics. Their appeal wears off quickly and as powerful as marketing stunts can be, you shouldn’t rely on them as a long-term strategy or as your only marketing effort.

“No positive impact”

It’s important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation.

Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time.

If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them.

Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality.

If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.

It can be a good idea to take a look at similar sites in other markets and identify the elements of those sites that might work well for yours, too. However, it’s important not to just copy success stories but to adapt them, so that they provide unique value for your visitors.

Social bookmarks on YouTube enable users to share content easily

Finally, consider making linking to your site easier for less tech savvy users. Similar to the way we do it on YouTube, offering bookmarking services for social sites like Twitter or Facebook can help spread the word about the great content on your site and draw users’ attention.

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Google has found an intelligent way to arrange the results for a search query.

But an interesting question is – where we can find that intelligence?

A lot of people have conducted research into the indexing process and even more have tested ranking factors on their weight, but we wondered how smart Googlebot itself is.

To make a start, we took some statements and commonly used principles and tested how Googlebot handled them.

Some results are questionable and should be tested on a few hundred domains to be sure, but it can give you some ideas.

Speed of The Crawler

The first one we tested was Matt Cutts on his following statement: “… the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank”.

This brings us to one of the challenges large content sites are facing – the problem of getting all pages indexed. You can imagine if Amazon.com was a new website, it would take a while for Google to crawl all 48 million pages and if Matt Cutts’s statement is true, it would be impossible without any incoming links.

To test it, we took a domain with no history (never registered, no backlinks) and made a page with 250 links on it. Those links refer to pages that also have 250 links (and so on…). The links and URLs were numbered from 1 to 250, in the same order as they appeared in the source code.

We submitted the URL via “addurl” and waited. Due to the fact that the domain has no incoming links, it has no or at least a negligible PageRank. If Matt Cutts’s statement is correct Googlebot would soon stop crawling.

As you can see in the graph, Googlebot started crawling the site with a crawl rate of approximately 2500 nodes per hour. After three hours, it slowed down to a crawl rate of approximately 25 pages per hour and maintained that rate for months.

To verify this result we did the same test with two other domains. Both tests came up with nearly the same results. The only difference is the lower peak at the beginning of Googlebot’s visit.

Impact of Sitemaps

During the tests, the sitemap manifested itself as a very useful tool to influence the crawl rate. We added a sitemap with 50,000 uncrawled pages in it (indexation level 0). Googlebot placed the pages which were added to Google by sitemap on top of the crawl queue. This means that those pages got crawled before the F-levelled pages. But what’s really remarkable is the extreme increase in crawl rate.

At first, the number of visits was stabilized at a rate of 20-30 pages per hour. As soon as the sitemap was uploaded through Webmaster Central,  the crawler accelerated to approximately 500 pages per hour. In just a few days it reached a peak of 2224 pages per hour. Where at first the crawler visited 26.59 pages per hour on average, it grew to an average of 1257.78 pages per hour which is an increase of no less then 4630.27%.

The increase of crawl rate doesn’t  stop by the pages included in the sitemap. Also the other F- and 0-levelled pages take advantage of the increase in crawl rate.

It’s quite remarkable that Google suddenly uses more of it’s crawl capacity to crawl the website. At the point where we submitted the sitemap the crawl queue was filled with F-pages. Google probably attaches a lot of value to the submitted sitemap.

This brings us to Matt Cutts’s statement. After only 31 days Googlebot crawled about 375,000 pages of the website. If this is proportional to it’s PageRank (which is 0) this would mean that it will crawl 140,625,000,000 pages of a PageRank 1 website in just 31 days. Remember that PageRank is exponential.

In other words, this would mean you never have to worry about your PageRank even if you own the largest website on the web. In other words don’t simply accept everything Matt says.

Amount of Links

Rand Fishkin says: “…you really can go above Google’s recommended of 100 links per page, with a PageRank 7.5 you can think about 250-300 links”

The 100 links per page advice has always been a hot topic especially for websites with a lot of pages. The reason the advice originally was given is the fact that Google used to index only 100 kilobytes per page. On a 100 kb page the amount of 100 links seemed reasonable. If a page was any longer, there was a chance that the page would be so long that Google would truncate the page and wouldn’t index the entire page.

These days, Google will index more than 1.5MB and user experience is the main reason for Google to keep the  “100 links” recommendation in their guidelines.

As was described in the previous paragraph, Google does crawl 250 links, even on sites with no incoming links. But is there a limit? We tried the same set-up as the websites described with 250 links on it but instead we used 5,000 links per page. When Googlebot visited that website something  remarkable happened. Googlebot requested the following pages:

• http://example.com/1/
• http://example.com/10/
• http://example.com/100/
• http://example.com/1000/

On every level Google visits, we see the same page requests. It seems like Googlebot doesn’t know how to handle such a large amount of links and tries to solve it as a computer.

Semantic Intelligence

One of the SEO myths used on almost every optimised website are the links placed in heading tags. Recently it was mentioned again as one of the factors of the “Reasonable Surfer patent”. If Google respects semantics, it definitely attaches more value to those “heading” links. We had our doubts and put it to the test.

We took a page with 250 links on it and marked some with heading tags. This was done a few levels deep. After a few weeks of waiting nothing pointed in the direction that Googlebot preferred the “heading” links. This doesn’t mean Googlebot doesn’t use semantics in it’s algorithm, it just doesn’t use headings to give links more weight than others.

Crawling JavaScript

Google says it keeps getting better in recognizing and executing JavaScript. Although JavaScript is not a good technique to use if you want to be sure that Google does follow your links, it’s used quite a lot to reach the opposite goal. When used for PageRank sculpting the purpose of using JavaScript links is to make those links only visible for users.

If you use this technique for this purpose it’s good to keep yourself updated on what Google can and can’t recognize and execute. To test Googlebot on it’s JavaScript capabilities we took the JavaScript codes as described in “The professional’s guide to PageRank optimization” and put them to the test.

The only code Googlebot executed and followed during our test was the link in a simple “document.write” line. This doesn’t exclude the possibility that Googlebot is capable of recognizing and executing the more advanced script. It is possible that Google needs an extra trigger (like incoming links) to put more effort into the JavaScript crawling.

Crawling Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a typical element on a webpage specially created for users. Sometimes they are used to support the site structure as well. Last month we encountered some problems where the Googlebot was not able to crawl it’s way up, so we did some tests.

We made a page a few levels deep with some content and links to higher levels on it ( http://example.com/lvl1/lvl2/lvl3/ ). We gave the page some incoming links and waited for Googlebot. Although the deep page itself was visited 3 times by the crawler, the higher pages didn’t get a visit.

To verify this result, we did the same test on an other domain. This time the test page was a few levels deeper in the site structure (http://example.com/lvl1/lvl2/lvl3/lvl4/lvl5/). This time Googlebot did follow some links which referred to pages higher on the site structure.

Despite the fact that Googlebot does follow the links, it doesn’t seem to be a good method to support a site structure. After a few weeks Google still didn’t crawl all the higher pages. It looks like Googlebot rather crawls deeper into the site structure then higher pages.

Takeaways

In short, the lesson learned is that one can influence the crawl rate with a sitemap. This doesn’t mean that you should always upload a sitemap for your websites. You only want to increase the crawl rate if the bulk of your crawled pages get indexed. It takes longer for a crawler to return to an “F”-levelled page than to return to an indexed page.

So if most of your pages get crawled, but dropped from the index you might want to consider getting more incoming links before using a sitemap. Best thing to do is to monitor for every page when Googlebot last visited it. With this method you can always identify problems in your site structure.

The amount of links isn’t limited to 250 links (even if you have no incoming links) although 5000 seems too much. We haven’t found the exact limit yet, but if we do, we will give you an update.

Links in heading tags for crawl purpose seems to be a waste of time. Though you can use them for usability purposes, because you’re used to it or because WordPress does it anyway and maybe if you’re lucky it’s still a ranking factor.

Another conclusion we can make is that the Googlebot isn’t very good in crawling breadcrumbs. So don’t use them for site structure purposes. Google just doesn’t crawl up as good as it crawls down. In contrast to breadcrumbs, you can use JavaScript for site sculpting purposes.

Googlebot isn’t top of the bill if we’re talking about recognizing and executing JavaScript links. Remember to keep yourself updated on this subject, but for now you definitely can use some “advanced” JavaScript to do sculpting.

A last result that came up while performing research on the crawl process was the influence of the URL length. A short URL gets crawled earlier than long URL’s, therefore always consider the need for indexation and the need to be crawled if you choose your URL.

What BP have done is invested in keywords such as “BP”, “Florida Gulf Coast”, “leak” and “oil spill” and they have put an ad against these keywords.

This is represented with a positive message about how BP is helping the clean-up.

This, for obvious reasons, is fairly amusing and ironic since it was BP who caused the oil spill.

But in the world of PR it might not look great if the ad text wrote:

BP is investing in cleaning up its environmental disaster that it has caused due to negligence, click here to see how we are spending multi-millions in appeasing governments and the media….

“Learn more about how BP is helping”…

While this might make sense as a cautious PR strategy, casting a wide net means that BP will be associated with unrelated and sometimes ironic topics.

That decision overlooks “bp” also being an abbreviation of blood pressure, or that for anyone looking for information about fixing a basement problem, perhaps BP can help.

This broad match strategy caused BP’s ad to appear on 400+ keywords they had not appeared on before, including:

• bp 1000s battery
• systolic bp
• China oil company
• Environment tshirt
• Environment friendly cars
• Florida gulf coast vacation home rental
• Gulf coast weddings
• How can I help the environment
• Repair roof leaks
• Spa leak
• Minolta bp 200

Google search showing BP's PR campaign - unfortunately it is not predicted this will work on residents of the Gulf Coast....

They sure weren’t buying the phrase “Alaska oil spill” last month.  Appearing on “spill response plan” allows them to reach an audience and craft the message they want to share.  This also leads to an unfortunately ironic sponsored result for “spill proof gas can.”

This is not BP’s first time advertising on search engines.  BP has long advertised on industry keywords like “alternate energies” and “natural gas supplier.”  Those keywords, though, have been dumped from their campaign.

BP halted advertising on more than 1500 relevant keywords and updated the ad on 100 of those it kept, shifting all search advertising attention to damage control.

Nearly every search result where BP appears ends with the same call to action.  “Learn more about how BP is helping.”

The closest estimate to BP’s Adwords campaign results are that they are spending USD $60,000 per month and somewhere around 26,000 visitors.

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