Aysegul talks about Facebook Graph Search

Facebook Graph Search has been recently rolled out to everyone using Facebook in US English.

The tool lets users find specific information including their friends’ favourite hotels, restaurants, films and more, using filters such as location, gender, specific personal interests etc...

In some ways, Graph Search is a natural extension to the News Feed. However, rather than reviewing friend’s news feeds, now you can ask questions to Facebook about your friends and quickly find out the results. For example; searching 'Friends that have gone to Barcelona on holiday' would bring up a list of all the friends in your network who have either listed Barcelona as somewhere they have visited on their timeline or have checked in to a location in that city. You can then message your friend to learn more about it.

With its features, Facebook Graph Search is believed to be really big for marketing from creating awareness to purchase decision making process, as most of the people searching for pubs or restaurants etc... that their friends ‘Like’ when they’re figuring out where to go and in general friends’ recommendations are important decision making triggers.

Via this tool, people will be exposed to a huge range of new results.

Let’s try a research for hotels:

You can narrow it down by making it more descriptive:

What does Facebook Graph Search mean for brands and businesses? 

From a business perspective, whether you’re a small or a large business, you would really want to get your data into Facebook so that you’re showing up on the results pages.

Not all the businesses probably have physical locations on Facebook, so that they will need to think of clever ways to get themselves found in Facebook.

In terms of marketing, this change also support the need for an Integrated Social Search approach as this development is additional proof that the search and the social teams can’t be separated anymore. Brands and companies would want the SEO efforts to be taking into account what is happening in the search as well as in social media and in this case Facebook.

Below we have listed a couple of points about how your Facebook pages can best take advantage of the opportunities presented by Facebook Graph Search.

1)      Make sure your Facebook listings include the right information and are optimised.

This can be ensured by checking if the right category has been chosen and the added business address is correct. To fully optimise your page, suggest completing your profile including important keywords, posting and correctly tagging photos and videos, and encouraging your fans to add recommendations to your profile as the reviews will show up in Graph Search results.

2)      Encourage Check-ins

For local optimisation, encourage your fans to check in to your business page whenever they visit. It is one of the most important features as people mainly tend to search by location.

3)      Learn more about your fans to provide more value

This tool lets you learn about your fans’ interests and likes by sorting them into behavioural (hobbies, recent activities) and demographic segments (age, gender, location).

Fans interests can be used for Custom targeted campaigns, contests; and by identifying the other pages your fans like you can learn what content to share will be liked by your fans.

This may help you to provide more value to your fans and to increase brand loyalty.

For more tips and the possible search combinations you could use to help you conduct your research, suggest viewing the article 17 Ways Marketers Can Leverage Facebook Graph Search from Social Media Examiner.

If you have any queries on how social media can benefit your business, please do get in touch with our Sales team.

Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi

Did you Google or did you DuckDuckGo?

Search Engine Land reported on Tuesday last week that the upstart search engine 'DuckDuckGo', which has the USP (Unique Selling Point) of protecting its users’ privacy, hit a new milestone on Monday as searches for the website hit 2 million direct searches. 

Pretty impressive statistics, right!!

A huge growth spurred by New Media advertising and most probably because of the recent PRISIM scandal which questions how Google, Bing and Yahoo etc are sharing their data with Government agencies.

DuckDuckGo’s meta description states:

“Search anonymously. Find instantly. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that does not track you and, has more instant answers and less spam/clutter”.

 

Could DuckDuckGo be a threat to the three main search engines, well given an appropriate marketing budget, we certainly think it has potential from a ‘search experience’ point of view (less clutter).

Search Engine Land conducted a review of keyphrase placement here: and it appears to be doing a good job. Read the comments on the review, have a go with the search engine and decide for yourself. 

Will you make the jump to DuckDuckGo or will you find it hard to break the ‘To Google’ habit?

Don’t forget if your website, product, brand, service needs help being found in search engines please do get in touch with our Sales team, to discuss your Search Engine Marketing requirements further. 

We would love to hear from you.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Picasa, Blogger, image optimisation and SEO

Rocktime has talked previously about Picasa as a photo sharing platform ‘Photosharing: Flickr versus Picasa’, in extension to that post, we would like to contribute some knowledge with regards to how Picasa integrates with your blogger account. Reason being, when using Blogger as your blogging platform, as we do here at Rocktime, you may not realise it but every image you upload through blogger goes onto your Picasa Web account.

With any free photo sharing web account, like Picasa, it is worth making sure about storage capacity. Picasa Web Albums offer a 1GB size limit, however, the additional charges for Google storage are fairly minimal. Not every single image you upload contributes to the total storage; images under a certain size will not count towards your 1GB limit. Furthermore, having a Google+ account will actually increase what you can upload for free, without taking it out of your 1GB limit. Google+ offers unlimited storage for photos uploaded in Google+, which are automatically resized to 2048 pixels. Videos up to 15 minutes in length are also free. G+ is almost turning into an image archiving facility.

An alternative is to use your own image hosting, uploading images to your domain, or using another online image hosting service, and then direct linking to the image through your blog post.

If you want to conserve space on your Picasa Web Albums account, another thing to look out for  is to manage duplicate images, which is an issue that sometimes crops up when uploading images to Picasa from your PC.

This is due to the way Picasa scans your computer for images; if you have the same image stored in a different file, Picasa might choose to treat it as two separate images. If you’re making use of the Import button to bring photos from your computer into Picasa, check the ‘Exclude Duplicates’ option at the bottom of the page. This will force Picasa to check for duplicate entries by comparing factors such as size and names etc, and hopefully remove the likelihood of any copies of images being uploaded.

Last year Google wrote some recommendations for improvement with the Google Picasa and Blogger integration which links to the Google Picasa Help Forum if more assistance is needed.

There are many other features from Picasa that help to keep a blog engaging, such as fast Picasa Web photo viewer, manager and uploader for Android devices - called Picasa Mobile -, which was designed to facilitate viewing and managing your online Picasa albums and photos.

Google Picasa Web Albums recently added a range of new image editing effects like Boarders, Vignette, Duo-tone, and more effects similar to editing in Adobe Photoshop, Irfan view and PaintNet photo editing software, which helps to make the photos look more professional.

There are numerous SEO advantages of optimising images in Picasa, like the ability to geo tag images, which adds geo-location details to help your local search engine rankings, high-quality backlinks pointing to your website, better page load time from reduced bandwidth and storage reduction, good search engine presence for your images, a library of images that can be shared socially, and you can even embed Slideshows in blog post from Picasa.

One feature that should never be overlooked with any images is the actual image optimisation process. We will write a more detailed brief on this in the coming weeks. Generally though, the rule of thumb is to make sure that the image is named accurately, that the image contains some of the keywords relevant to the blog or content of the article and that Google is given all the contextual and any localisation details about the image. This way, the chance of the image being found on Google Images is greatly improved. Every image on Google Images is a possible link back to a website and helpful to users. All good for user journey, mobile viewing, relevant content, sharing opportunities and SEO.  This can all be done in Picasa before uploading the image. Picasa allows that image to be shared in a number of ways, which is great for running marketing campaigns.

Once the images are uploaded to the blogger blog, it takes just a few moments to go into the HTML or right click the image in 'compose' mode and add the alt text for the image. Alt text, or alternative text of an image, tells the user about the image depending on the context in which the image is used.  Alt is not a tag, or a place to stuff keywords, it is an 'attribute'. Basically, search engines cannot crawl images, they index the text part attached with it, so the alt text is an alternative for non-visual browsers.
Images play a massive role in mobile, directories, user reviews, blogger engagement, social networks, websites, press coverage and organic inbound marketing link building campaigns.

If you’re interested in learning more about Google updates, services or how Rocktime helps businesses to use image optimisation as part of good practice for SEO, Accessibility and an Integrated Digital Marketing Strategy, then please ask one of our Flashlight Search Marketing Team  about publishing your content to a larger audience, it is something we are passionate about and have been talking to our clients about for the last 2 or 3 years. Check out the blog we wrote back in 2010 about Good practice on adding images to Blogs.

Please get in touch with Rocktime Sales Team to arrange a meeting or leave us a comment below about how image optimisation can make a difference.


Author: Fiona Anderson

Why Sarah is not happy with latest Google Update

Google announced last week that they are going to begin to encrypt searches made by logged in users, to make search more secure. Even though you can still obtain results on keywords (logged in or not) from paid search!

What this means to users is nothing (apart from security on keeping keyword searches secret), what this meant to website owners with analytics, is that they will no longer receive referral data from these (logged in) searchers. Generally we are fans of Google Updates as they are useful in their quest to make search a more pleasant experience. Alas, we are not fans of this change.

Monitoring the number of keywords that drive traffic to our clients websites is one of our favourite analytic reports. Our Search Marketing Executives get a real kick out of telling our clients (with search marketing contracts) that the number of keywords driving traffic to their website has increased by XXX %.

We will still be able to get the reports as this update will only relate to those logged in searchers. However, it won’t be the full picture, which makes us - Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Web site usability fanatics - sad.

There is a poll being run over at SEOptimise and based on the results so far, say that this is relating to more companies using PPC ads:
Visit the poll here http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2011/10/google-dropping-analytics-keyword-data-what-does-this-mean.html

There is plenty of upset on this news, one we particular like is from Ian Lurie over at Search News Central and this statement in his article Dear Google, This is war:

“Don't get me wrong - I've not opposed e-mail ads, or Street View. But you can't shut down search query data and then protest privacy. That's like leaving one bite of steak on your plate and saying you're a vegetarian.” Ian Lurie, Oct 18th

Having had time to digest the news, I can now say that personally I am livid with the move, understanding what terms people are using to find your website allows you to create a site which suits the searcher and allows you to optimise on pages that they may not like at first glance. We (Search Marketing Flashlight team) are all about creating websites that benefit user and in turn increase client revenue. Google are making themselves out to be the good guys here, with regards to respecting privacy, but what will happen in turn is that people like us (Search Marketing and Web usability Ambassadors) will not be able to do our job to full effect.

We will still be able to determine keywords used from paid search adverts, however this will cost our clients additional money. For years now we have given all our focus to ramping up natural positions and diminishing PPC ads. Are people really that bothered that Google are keeping their keyword searches and using them to benefit their overall online experience!! Really!!

When people have complained to me in the past that they hate how Google use the details in their emails to show related adverts, I can understand their concern, however my response is generally as follows; Google is a free service, if you needed to pay for it, you probably would. Google make money from the advertising, this is how they are able to offer you search results that keep getting quicker and quicker.

Why Google have thrown in the 'we care about your privacy' card now, beats me. Totally stumped and off to complete the SEOptimise poll to tick the reason why Google have made this change as: to encourage more companies to use PPC Ads.

Graham Charlton over at E-Consultancy has invited some of the E-consultancy guest bloggers and a number of search and e-commerce experts what they think of this move. Please do go and visit this page to receive a more balanced view, you will soon come to note though that several in the Search Marketing community are not happy at all, Google SSL Encryption for search queries: the experts’ view.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Top SEO / SEM New Year Resolutions

The Flashlight Search Marketing Team at Rocktime would like to share with you their top ten search engine optimisation resolutions for the New Year. Need any help setting up yours?

Then feel free to get in touch with Rocktime Sales to arrange a meeting

Rocktime's top ten SEO / SEM resolutions

1. Review keyword density on our product pages
2. Reoptimise our page titles and descriptions
   
3. Consider what we are not talking about on our website in line with 2011 trends
   
4. Continue to explore new ways to connect with our prospects online
   
5. Revisit our internal linking strategies on our website
   
6. Shout more about out blog posts on social networks
   
7. Establish Local SEO targets & give focus to geo location targeting
   
8. Create compelling content people will want to share
   
9. Create new accounts in line with Social Media Strategy
   
10. Set some big goals and analyse the metrics to increase sales & leads

Why not head over to Mashable to take part in their pole to find out 'how others plan to change their life this year in the world of gadgetry and technology': Tech-Related Resolutions Poll at Mashable.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

SEM New Year Resolutions for 2011

This week the Flashlight Team will be sharing with you their Search Marketing (SEM) New Year's Resolutions for 2011, focused on SEO, PPC, Social Media and Mobile Marketing.

Sarah (@sarahgriffiths), 'Head of Search' at Rocktime says:

"We are very excited about our 2011 plans and throughout January will be setting some large ROI targets to grow the Flashlight division further, a large focus for our team this year is Local SEO/SEM and Mobile Marketing strategies".

The Flashlight Team hope you can steal some ideas from their 'Search Marketing New Year Resolutions' and would like to mention: where you don't have the resource in house, why not contact them to see how their online marketing expertise can fit in with your business.

New Year Resolution blog posts focused on Search Marketing, Social Media and Mobile Marketing will be delivered to you Wednesday to Friday this week.

In the meantime the Flashlight team would like to recommend that you visit this article over at Mashable, where they have listed 10 websites to watch in 2011, worth a look to gleam some inspiration for your own website development plans.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our blog readers a prosperous New Year.


Author: Alice Cheetham

The Future of Search: "Mobile will be big"

Thought to share with you this video from this time last year, when Matt Cutts (Google's Head of Webspam team) answered questions about the future of search in the next few years.

He ends the video with a few words about mobile search, saying that he sees a lot of potential growth in that area of search. "You're going to see all kind of changes, but mobile going to be a big part of it".

We are currently building sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools to assist our clients ranking in the Google Mobile Index. Videos seem to appear quite often, wondering (as early days) if we should create a YouTube video to link to our own mobile site..,Hmm now that's a thought.

We have heard from our friends in search that the Google Mobile spiders takes about 2 weeks to find your site (after submission of sitemap) we will be keeping an eye on him and will feed back our learnings.

During Google Searchmasters Conference 2009 one of the presentations we saved: was 'Building mobile friendly websites' you can view this here on Google Docs and then save as PDF.

If you want to talk further about the future of mobile for your business, feel free to give our sales team a call. We are going slightly mobile crazy here at Rocktime right now, so we will share new mobile web statistics shortly.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Google May Day Update increases long tail traffic

Over the Bank Holiday we are sure that the majority of you were out in the garden; clearing out the wardrobe; or planning your Euro-Vision party: Rocktime’s Head of Search was busy finding out about what has been named the Google’s ‘May Day Update’. She shares with us her insights below:

May Day Update Undercover Reporting

There were several blog posts & forum chats to sift through which stated that the update had dramatically increased or decreased traffic to sites, so this change was one worth investigating. After sifting through the techie rumours, I identified that the update really is pretty straightforward and impacts “the long tail traffic”, which are generally from longer tail queries that fewer people search for individually. No drama. We have been focused on the long tail for some time now.

The new algorithm update gives continued emphasis on page quality, to give smaller sites more of a chance in ranking highly. It appears (from forums and blogs) that the larger sites, with weak content but a lot of trust (links) are moving down positions in natural search. To help explain this, we envisage that the E-commerce sites will be most affected, especially those with individual product pages, found deep in the navigation path, which have the product content pulled in from the manufacturers database. The content is likely not to be unique and hold little substance with regards to page quality. In summary, a large site with lots of pages, which generally fared well in search results before, could now find itself dropping position, if they haven’t got a unique angle on their content and on the information they provide to their customers. Amazon should remain OK as they have unique product descriptions and user reviews.

A few search marketing managers & web masters are citing that Google has changed their Algorithm to purely push those larger sites down and obtain more advertising revenue from them (Adwords), we (amongst others) disagree, this is purely a quality change, giving Google users the most relevant site for their query.

Matt Cutts (Google) posted a video on the update; see above. The news on the change is very brief, so you may want to read a deeper and well explained review over at ‘search engine land’ – Google Confirms “Mayday” update and the impacts on long tail traffic, by Vanessa Fox.

The fact that the algorithm change was rolled out between April 28th and May 3rd means that you could go into your analytic package and see if you notice a drop, or an increase, to then determine whether you have been affected by this change. It would be a positive move to review whether the change has been effected by a number of referrals, or the number of pages that are receiving traffic. Look closely at the number of keyword (from organic search) driving visitors to your website, look at your key-phrase positioning reports to note if any phrases have dropped position. Then strategise on how these can be improved or enhanced.

Most of the reviews out there are rightly saying “Don’t Panic”, which is very good advice indeed. If you are constantly practising high quality SEO, building relevant pages, making content compelling enough that people will want to share and generally improving on page and in content navigation, then we are sure you will be fine. Do keep reviewing who is ranking above you and consider why Google are deeming them to have a higher quality than your site, could it be that they have ‘user comments’ on their sites, regularly update their site or encourage page sharing (badges, widgets, bookmark icons).

Google made more than 500 changes to their algorithm last year alone and 99% of the time none of us even notice. All you need to remember is, it is Google’s mission to display the most relevant and useful page to their customers on search. We do harp on to our clients quite alot about relevancy and page quality, apologies for that, but as you can see from the above update, it has been worth it.

Should you require any assistance with your SEO strategy you can of course contact the Rocktime Flashlight team who are practicing high quality SEO on a number of websites right now.

Author: Sarah Griffiths @sarahgriffiths

Twitter Simplifies it's Business Model - #not

Twitter ranks as one of the most popular sites on the Internet. So we all have waited with baited breath of news on when they were going to start putting together a business model. The news broke yesterday.

They have launched what they call a simple service titled “Promoted tweets” and this morning I have been trying to get my head round what this means to the Twitter Eco System and how our clients will benefit from this service.

Twitter are classing this as the first stage and already have a number of advertising partners onboard to trial the service which include: Starbucks, Virgin America (not surprised), Red Bull, Best Buy and Sony Pictures. The premise being is that promoted tweets are just like ordinary tweets that brands may wish to use should they want to highlight their Tweet to a wider community.

We are going to begin to see promoted tweets appear at the top of some of Twitter Search result pages (see image above). Twitter will be measuring whether people like the tweets via their interaction with the message ie: marking as favourite, Re-tweeting or @replying. If no body/tweeter appears to like the promoted Tweet then it will disappear. I believe there will be a connection to the Twitter user and the promoted tweet, a little bit like “You may be interested in feature” on Amazon, ie: the more you RT tweet a tweet from a sports brand the more promoted tweets from sport brands you will see.

Also as the Tweet is promoted and Twitter seek to make money then the promoted tweets will be purchased on a CPM model and quite excitedly (for Flashlight) it will be a mix of earned versus paid media – as you need to make your Tweets work.

Having a combination or organic and paid ads will suit Rocktime’s Flashlight Team well as we have the mix of SEO expertise, Paid search expertise and Social Media Savvyness.

I am sure there is more in this development, so I went and visited Web Strategist Blog by Jeremiah Owyang to see what he has to say, quite alot as it happens.

Jeremiah has provided a summary of the promoted, explaining as I have above on how it will work, he has also developed a matrix on what Twitter’s promoted tweets business model will mean to the Eco-system. Go and view his blog post here and follow him (blog & twitter) as he regularly talks a lot of sense:

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/04/13/quicktake-analysis-what-twitters-resonation-means/

Twitter’s founder Biz Stone has let us all know that there will be more announcements soon as the project matures, they are currently finding their feet too in understanding how to measure Twitter user interaction on the Tweets. Once they have a footing this will be rolled out to other advertisers. So watch this space, as I am sure we have some very interesting times ahead.

Reputation and respect has never been more key. Power to the people ! and good luck to the brands in finding the 140 characters that resonate with their audiences.


Author: Sarah Griffiths

Google prefer sites that load quickly

Following on from the above video on June 2009 (note: final line - about their quest to "raise the quality of life"), last Friday, April the 9th 2010 Google officially announced its plan to promote faster loading sites.

This new rule reviews the speed in which the pages show up when a user clicks on an address, the objective being to show their customer (Google users) with sites with advanced usability.

Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts explained over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog

“Faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduce operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites”

Read the full blog post here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

Those familiar with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) know that Google’s ranking of results has mainly been based on the relevance of the website content to search query and providing points to those who have many other sites refer to it as a good source of information.

There are over 200 ranking factors in Google’s rule book, the good news, especially for smaller sites who can’t afford to maintain fast servers, is that they have stated that the most important criteria for ranking results would remain the relevance for a particular query and that the speed rule is only expected to play a minor role. It is believed that only 1% of search queries will be affected by the change to include load speed, as it will mainly involve penalising pages with excessive loading times of around 20 seconds or longer.

Google have helpfully provided a list of some free tools you can use to evaluate the speed of your site, please view these below. If you need any further guidance on site speed or SEO feel free to get in touch. We have used the Google's Site Performance feature found Google Webmaster Tools for some time now, Google blogged about their Site Performance feature back in Dec 09 here.

Handy Tools to evaluate the speed of your website

Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
In Google Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world

There are also many other tools at code.google.com/speed.

We encourage our clients and our readers without an SEO contract with us to start looking at your site speed using the above tools, and as Google say this is to “not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone's experience on the Internet”

Maybe they really are good guys after all !

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Don't bore the search engines with duplicates

Google use canonicalization to pick the best URL when there are several choices, for example the home page may present:

mysite.co.uk
www.mysite.co.uk
www.mysite.co.uk/index.aspx

Most people would consider these as the same URL, but technically they are different. Google will canonicalise a URL which means over time they will pick the one they think is the best.

You can make sure that Google picks the URL that you want them to pick, your preferred URL by using 301 redirects to tell the search engine the page has permanently moved (a 302 is a temporary move) you can also assist search engines by making sure all your onsite internal links point to the correct page.

If there are pages on your website that show identical content but different URLS due to tracking parameters, category navigation and comment parameters, then there is a way to tell the Search Engines which url you would rather them store. Within the code (behind the website) you can add a tag to specify your preferred version.

This standard can be adopted by all search engines crawling the site and URL properties such as page rank and related signals are transferred.

How this is displayed is outlined below:

link rel = " canonica l" href = " http://www.mysite.co.uk/products/Blue-Pig.aspx "
inside the section of the duplicate content URL/s:

http://www.mysite.co.uk/products/Blue-Pig.aspx?show=reviews

and Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL:
http://www.mysite.co.uk/products/Blue-Pig.aspx

(NB: You can also use a relative path to specify the canonical, also if you include a link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL)


The hypothetical work involved

1. You could change internal linking on logo (for example) to go to one address ie: http://www.mysite.co.uk
2. Add appropriate 301 redirects example: on the http://www.mysite.co.uk/index.aspx to the default URL http://www.mysite.co.uk
3. Update links to point to a single canonical page to ensure optimal canonicalization results


Speak to Rocktime if you need any further help with this.


Author:Sarah Griffiths