Archive for the ‘Search engines’ Category

Google+ – Google’s combination of search and social

January 19th, 2012

Google’s announcement of the uplifting of Google+ (or G+) pages within search results has been eliciting reactions from a number of people in the search industry. Everyone seems to have an opinion about how they feel Google’s new preferences will affect search results, but in the furore that this has raised, businesses have to ask “How will the average searcher react?”

I think there are a number of ways in which this could play out for Google and, in turn, the businesses that get traffic from their search results. First I think it’s best to examine exactly how Google came to make this change. The rise of social media has put “the big G” into competition with “the big F”, even though they are in similar, but not the same, markets. For a large part, this decision seems somewhat ego-driven, because Google has confronted Facebook with their foray into Social through G+. So far G+ just hasn’t captured audience share from Facebook that Google hoped it would. So, to keep G+ front of mind, Google wants to increase its importance to searchers, in the hope that companies will flock to G+, bringing their fans with them.

Now those motives are not necessarily pure, it leaves search engine aware businesses with the realisation that Google’s results are no longer pure and neutral. However, for the average searcher, with little to no knowledge of how search engines actually work, will this make a difference? They will see these new details (like the result below), but their reactions are hard to predict.

Searchers seeing G+ or affiliated results, which their circles share, may believe that those pages are more trustworthy because Google and their friends endorse them. They are therefore more inclined to click on them as their level of trust in Google is high, which means that businesses could start to see G+ pages visited instead of their pages when people are searching for generic terms. This could draw greater numbers of businesses to create G+ pages as they believe their competitors’ G+ pages are gaining greater prominence in key search result pages.

Another alternative is that people start to distrust the entirety of Google’s search results because they no longer see them as neutral and unbiased. This is heightened by the fact that it is only G+ elements that are being integrated, not Facebook or any of G+’s other competitors. With this lack of trust, it could mean searchers have to find another trustworthy way to find new sites. This could mean a gap for a new search platform, becoming to Google what it was to Yahoo, or it could mean that Bing has an opportunity to seize market share. However, a new search platform would mean and entirely new problem for businesses to solve, as predicting where people will go is something that no one has completely nailed down yet.

At the end of the day, word of mouth is great when people are searching for a great place to have supper, or the new cool place to buy clothes, but friends and circles don’t know everything. We know that our closest friends don’t all have the same likes and dislikes as us, and that’s not taking into account the drive to acquire as many friends as possible. It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen in Facebook, where people collect friends to try and compete for the biggest number of friends. If people start to do that on G+, then all of those people will impact what search results they see, even if it’s a second cousin twice removed that you emailed out of family duty.

As a business, you obviously won’t know who your potential visitors are connected to, and how populated their search results will be by G+ results. This can cause businesses to potentially overestimate the impact of the new integration on their potential customers and panic. However, what they needed to bear in mind is that Google has been integrating social elements into their search results for a while, but never so overtly. Therefore without downplaying the effect that the change may have, it serves little purpose for businesses to panic that they’ll lose masses of searches overnight. For the moment, businesses need to ensure that their sites are well setup, and that they have a G+ page as well as one on Facebook.

[A potential side effect could be for those businesses with extremely poor customer service or some PR disasters in their cupboard. People are more likely to share information about bad experiences with their circles. This means that even if someone didn’t see a piece that was shared in their circle, future searches for the brand concerned could highlight the negative press. An example of this would be an article about Easyjet discriminating against a disabled businessman, which is likely to be shared in a G+ circle, so that could appear prominently when someone is considering booking a flight with Easyjet. This would make online reputation management even more important, as measuring this would be very difficult]

Blog post by Juliette van Rooyen, Search Consultant at Reform

Google SSL update and its impact on SEO, SEM and more.

November 8th, 2011

At Reform lively debate and conversation is encouraged as we develop our take on the latest developments in the ever-changing world of digital. Digital marketing is far from black or white (no search-related hat pun intended!), and through these debates we believe that we can better relay our thoughts on both sides of the fence to our clients and colleagues.

This week we’ve been discussing the latest Google SSL update, how Google Analytics now reports some SEO traffic as ‘(not provided)’ and the potential user / privacy issues driving the change.

Here are different takes on this development from two members of our team – one positive, about what Google can do as the innovative leader in this field, the other perhaps more pessimistic about what Google has become.

Niall Madden, Director at Reform says…

The big story here is that when a user logged into Google (Gmail for example) does a search, they are being taken through an encrypted query on Google’s https website, stripping out all the tracking parameters in the process, resulting in that traffic showing in Google Analytics as ‘(not provided)’.

This means that Google, and ONLY Google, know not only what keyword was used, but where the listing ranked in the SERPS (the “cd=” parameter correlates with the SEO rank in all occasions).  Why I hear you ask? Apparently this is due to a concern about protecting the privacy of Google users.

Since the change, if you’re logged in and in the US, you can’t even enter a search query with JavaScript turned off any more (UPDATE – NOV 18 – This is no longer the case, as now we can search with JS off, even when logged in, though some interesting features include one where the sub-links are shrunken into the older link only versions). Combine this with the recent announcement about the algorithm tweak emphasising content freshness (affecting around 35% of results) and there’s a lot of buzz within the SEO industry.

But the big issue is Google Analytics, a free service that’s been great for SEO practitioners over the past few years. Many users started seeing a few SEO visits listed as ‘(not provided)’ in the keyword list, and even a few days ago shrugged it off as overhyped news – since they only saw it affect 1-2% of traffic, people weren’t concerned, life went on.

Then, by last Friday, that 1-2% hit as much as10% on a couple of sites, and people started getting concerned.

There is potentially another layer to this story.

Google recently launched Google Analytics Premier, which it is aggressively pushing to larger scale clients. The introductory price of $150,000 per year provides a service which, according to the brochure will enable you to ‘track more than ever’, ‘own your customer data’ and ‘analyse ALL of your data’.

To me this sounds like music to the ears of clients worried about losing keyword data for 10-20% of SEO traffic to their site, and it has caused many to think that Google might be using this data exclusively like many third party ad providers do theirs.

However, this statement has not been accepted by Google, and their reps and other parties have informed us that this is not currently the case, (so conspiracy theorists can rest, for now). Still, it seems like the logical next step if Google is going to be selling their product, and many people have said that the answers they receive from Google on this subject are vague at best.

Face it, Google has changed. The data is valuable, and they need to generate revenue beyond AdWords. Hey, call me a cynic, but it just seems like the path that Google is taking, regardless of what Google tells me. I mean, really, who’s going to pay $150k when 10-20% of the keyword data is missing!?

And as for user privacy, consumers tend to complain more about targeted advertising, like remarketing perhaps, not SEO results. Ironically for PPC – “If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.”

So where’s that valued privacy now?

Richard Fergie, Consultant at Reform says…

Yes, you are a cynic. As far as I know, it’s all speculation and conspiracy theory at best.

Firstly, I think it is important to be clear that Google *could* do everything that Niall is talking about; there is no technical barrier to them operating an exclusive web analytics service in this way. My argument is not that Google can’t, but that Google won’t.

What will Google gain from this? If this change increases uptake of their premium analytics product so that it grows to twice the size of Omniture it will increase Google’s revenues by only 2% (based on 2010 figures).

Not the type of return shareholders are looking for.

2% at Google’s scale is still a lot of money but I think this reward is not worth the anti-trust risk for Google. Google are already walking a fine line in the anti-trust courts; I say that using their dominance in search to help them dominate the premium web analytics space will put them so far on the wrong side of the line that the US Government will have to take action.

So what is the real reason why Google have made this change? I genuinely believe that they are doing it to protect user data. Not because they care about user privacy but because user data is being used to compete with Google in the online advertising space.

Google Remarketing is an excellent retargeting solution but it is nowhere near being the best in the space. Giving these ad networks additional data in the form of the user’s search query makes their targeting even more efficient and harder to compete with. Google can reduce the effectiveness of their competition and gain brownie points with organisations who care about user privacy – win/win.

So who is right?

Only time will tell (though at this moment Google have claimed that the data will currently NOT be added to Google Analytics Premium). In the mean time, this surely provides an opportunity for innovation and development within the SEO industry.

Every business in every industry suffers setbacks at some point, and from an SEO practitioner point of view, this certainly feels like a step backwards for SEOs that analyse keyword data as a key sign of the overall project’s value.

However, workarounds will be developed, new KPIs will emerge, and the industry will continue to grow. This isn’t the first time data has been closed off, and presumably it won’t be the last.

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

Real time serendipity and a frictionless Facebook experience

October 14th, 2011

Mark Zuckerberg used the words ‘real time serendipity’ and ‘frictionless engagement’ throughout the F8 conference last month.  A rough translation reads, ‘more engagement and less spam’.

Much of the conference focused on the new “this is your life” time-lines and the new class of open graph apps, which no longer require authorisation for every story published.

Facebook wants us to think of our interactions with apps as ‘self expression’, reading, listening, watching and importantly making serendipitous discoveries about our friends, their interests and activities.  ‘Graph Rank’ has been introduced to keep app developers in check.  It is an artificial intelligence that manages discovery based on feedback to cut out spam.

Have the recent changes to Facebook impacted strategies for building fans and optimising fan page engagement?

The abiding principles of managing a successful Facebook page remain the same. It’s vital that page managers have a thorough understanding of Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm when planning strategies. Publishing timely, relevant updates tailored to the fan base and target audience, with the goal of optimising engagement and as a result, increasing reach.

The introduction of the hybrid news feed, featuring ‘top stories’ above ‘recent stories’, reinforces the value of knowing as much as possible about what makes your existing fans and your target market ‘tick’.

The ticker, a sidebar news stream where every story created now passes through in real-time is designed to create this ‘frictionless’ experience. The idea is to keep stories that are lightweight away from the main news stream so we never feel annoyed by a friend’s online activity. No more having to hide friends due to their obsession with Cityville.

As data comes in it will be interesting to see how this shift in lightweight stories over to the ticker impacts secondary reach for page posts.

Have you had any ‘serendipitous discoveries’ through the ticker yet or did you minimise it as soon as you found out how!?

The only change rolled out so far for Facebook pages, since this year’s F8, are improved page insights.  Facebook has made it easier for a fan page to measure how well they are faring against the competition as well as giving page owners a better understanding of ROI by introducing a few new juicy metrics.

We are now able to measure each post to a Facebook page in terms of reach (unique impressions), engaged users (Clicks), talking about this (stories) and virality (previously feedback).  The reach metric is also broken down to show organic, paid and viral reach.  We can now begin to measure the impact that sponsored stories have on viral reach and organic reach. Great news if you are managing a Facebook ad budget!

I’m particularly excited about the ‘people talking about this’ figure.   Every story or interaction created about a page, including Page likes, likes, comments, event RSVP and answers to polls are transformed into one account-able figure. This figure is not only available to track in insights but displayed publicly on your page.

Simply divide fans by ‘people talking about this’ and you get a figure you can use to measure the engagement of your page over time or the engagement of one page against another.

This public display of engagement is an excellent method to quickly monitor the health of a page and more importantly the brand that owns the page.

Guest blogger Hilary Pullen, Freelance Digital Marketing and Blogger

Gamification strategies are now a key part of UX and customer engagement – ignore this and your brand will suffer

September 30th, 2011

Social media is a game. Some people (like me) don’t get that at first. Or maybe in the early days social platforms relied very much on early adopters who were happy just making friends (and maybe making out with them) via social. In the last twelve months however, engagement, challenges, rewards badges you can virtually gift etc, have tuned me into the fun. I find myself immersed in a world of fans, followers, circles, news feeds and apps, and all that alongside my Klout perks, beta test invitations and the micro affiliate cash I can get for simply recommending a product or service to my followers. The power that rewards can leverage to an online brand strategy is awesome. See the overnight success of Badgeville, and the adoption of behaviour analytics as a basket of key metrics in the measurement of a brand’s power to engage customer loyalty meaningfully.

Simply organising your social media life, identifying and connecting with the people that matter to you emotionally brings immeasurable pleasure. As does listening and advocating those that you find thought-provoking and that you can learn stuff from, dipping into the musings of others you know it’s good to keep tabs on, and finding those people you perhaps knew long time ago when you had a different set of priorities that now keep you connected to a shared past. This emotional payback through connectivity is an intrinsic motivational driver to the key engagement piece, and is why I argue that, although I can see a world when Facebook is the suburbs with new and innovative social urban conurbations emerging, social experience utilising technologies is here to stay.

Games for Brands, a conference on gamification, is being held in London on the 27th of October and will be the first mover in what is set to become the new social media. A quick skim read of the list of keynote speakers sees representatives of the UK’s major broadcasters, agencies, and games developer communities, as well as the academics and social entrepreneurs. Harnessing the power of gamification and utilising it is going to be exciting and will be another step-changing crossroads in the incredible journey that digital is affording the marcomms sector. Bring it on!

If you would like to discuss your social strategy and the implications and opportunities that gamification represents, please contact Reform.

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, non-executive director at Reform.

Yandex – Yet ANother inDEX?

September 26th, 2011

There are parts of the world where Google is not dominant. In Russia the search engine Yandex is the market leader with a market share of over 60%. Helped by rapidly growing internet usage in Russia, the search engine doubled the number of searches it handles between 2008 and 2009. For online businesses operating in Russia there is no question about the importance of Yandex (for more about search engine marketing in Russia read our Internation Search Review post) but since the launch of an English language search engine in 2010 should the rest of the world be thinking about Yandex?

There are two aspects to this question:
1. Will Yandex gain a large worldwide market share?

2. Are there other reasons to observe what Yandex is doing?

Will Yandex gain a large worldwide market share?
In my opinion, no. Right now people have no reason to use Yandex. It is not integrated with any of the online services commonly used in the West, nor is it the default search engine on any of the main browsers. The only ways Yandex can increase market share are either by spending a lot of money on advertising (this is working, but very slowly, for Bing) or by being better at search than Google. Unfortunately for Yandex, they can’t just be a little bit better they need to be a lot better; studies (by Microsoft) show that people say the quality of results from Bing are equal to those of Google, but only when the Bing results are wrapped in Google branding. Any new search engine that wants to dominate the market needs to be an order of magnitude better, just as Google was in 1998.

The search technology behind Yandex
Google beat the competition with their PageRank algorithm. Page and Brin realised that strong webpages were more likely to be linked to from other strong webpages. In other words, they picked a feature that they thought good webpages should have and then built their search engine to rank pages with this feature.

Yandex’s MatrixNet algorithm is very different; given a list of good pages for a queryspace, MatrixNet uses machine learning to decide which features distinguish them from the average. Then they rank pages with similar features in that queryspace. This method is a great defence against spammers because any feature that becomes common is no longer a powerful ranking signal. For example, if everyone has an optimised title tag then having an optimised title tag is not a signal of quality.

The main weakness with the MatrixNet approach is getting the list of good pages to begin with. The internet is too large for this to be manually curated so there has to be another algorithm to generate the list of quality sites. This algorithm must be very conservative in the sites it selects, otherwise results quality will suffer a lot; imagine if having a large number of AdSense ads became a positive ranking factor!

Google’s recent Panda updates use a similar approach. Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) has said that they “came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side”. However, this algorithm update can only reduce rankings, not increase them so Google do not need to be as conservative with how it is applied (some site owners say they should have been a lot more careful).

As evidenced by their Panda update (and many other projects), Google has the technical ability to do machine learning at web scale. Should Yandex’s approach begin producing SERPs of amazing quality then Google can copy their approach before Yandex’s market share reaches critical mass. This is why Yandex need an order of magnitude improvement over Google; they need to capture a large amount of market share before Google improve their algorithm to match.

Why you should pay attention to Yandex
Like Yandex, the browser Opera also has a large market share in Russia without being a big player in the West. Opera introduced features like tabbed browsing and “speed dial” that have since been imitated by Firefox, Chrome and others. Web designers watch how Opera are innovating because some new features will cross over into the mainstream.

Similarly, you should keep an eye on what Yandex are doing because they take a different approach to search and successful features from their algorithm are likely to appear in other places.

Blog post by Richard Fergie, Consultant at Reform

Search engine marketing in Malaysia – International search review issue number 7

August 1st, 2011

Reform has this week published the latest paper in its international search review series. Continuing the focus on markets in Southeast Asia, this instalment looks at the internet and search market of Malaysia.

With internet penetration increasing from 15% in 2000 to 59% in 2009, it’s clear that there has been significant change in this country’s technological outlook over the last decade.

This is another market where Google has consolidated its dominance of the search engine arena, growing its share from 51% in 2008 to 85% in 2011.

The increase in internet penetration (16,902,600 internet users as of June 2009) has occurred in spite of the fact that the quality of the broadband in Malaysia is still rated as ‘poor’. This, combined with a growing number of increasingly sophisticated mobile devices, has led analysts to believe that mobile search will become ever more important in this market.

Advances in mobile technologies can also be looked to as the facilitators for the phenomenal popularity of social media sites in Malaysia. This is a country that has Facebook penetration of 88.4%, and which accounts for .47% of Twitter’s world voice.

Since 2009 the number of Malaysian web users using social media to keep in touch with family has increased to 71%.

To find out more about the search market landscape in Malaysia, download a copy of the review – and let us know any comments or feedback that you might have. You can also download past issues of the International Search Review to see what we discovered about Chinese internet development and the Russian search behaviour evolution amongst other things.

Contact us and we’ll send you the next issue of our International Search Review before anyone else.

Blog post by Juliette van Rooyen, Consultant at Reform.

Is It Good To Be Bad In SEO?

December 2nd, 2010

There’s an old saying that all publicity, even bad publicity, is good publicity. In a recent article from The New York Times, Search Engine Optimization through search juggernaut Google proves that the old saying may be the current truth in ecommerce.

The story details a consumer who purchased a pair of Lafont sunglasses from DecorMyEyes.com, a website ranked at the top of Google’s search results. While she believed that the high Google ranking and the look of the site brought assurances, she had no idea of the nightmare to follow.

Within a few weeks, she received the glasses in the mail, but, a loyal follower to the brand, she immediately spotted them as counterfeit. In investigating the purchase, she discovered that she was also overcharged by 125 dollars. When she called the website support to inquire about the purchase and ask for a refund, she was berated by the owner of the site, who called her a bitch and threatened her with graphic sexual violence. He also told her he knew where she lived and sent her a picture of her front door.

The consumer immediately called her credit card company but unfortunately, they also gave her trouble in investigating the matter and getting a refund.  Her requests for refunds landed her more harassment from the owner of the site, including calls at three in the morning and e-mail threats against her.

How then did this website get such high status from Google? The answer, according to the article, is simple. Many times consumers expect a smooth transaction and when they receive it, they don’t leave feedback. But when they get a horrible transaction, they need a place to vent their frustrations and the jilted consumer will go a review based website to describe their experience, throw caution to other consumers and link to the website to show where to consumers must avoid. The problem: This actually helps them.

DecorMyEyes saw that while consumers left feedback and provided links to their site on reputable sites on Google’s augustness scale, their Google ranking would increase… and so their sales would follow. They realized that bad publicity is not only good publicity, it’s also free publicity.

Since the Google algorithm may not be able to discern sentimentality, the search engine looks at the added content on a reputable as a benefit and gives DecorMyEyes a greater ranking. The website, seeing the potential, has taken the SEO philosophy and run with it, spurring on more comments by frustrating reviewers on websites into even more action. According to the article, their goal is “NEGATIVE advertisement” and that goal is garnering SEO great dividends.

A Google ranking leading to productivity of the site, even with bad reviews and now a scathing New York Times article about it, reaffirms the great power that SEO has on ecommerce business. Getting a high Google ranking, DecorMyEyes has built an ecommerce site that the owner claims to be “fantastically profitable.” Yet his completely unethical and terrifying business practices show that, in the wrong hands, SEO could be a powerful tool for unlawful sites intending on trapping consumers.

As of Tuesday night, Google was yet to comment on the article but many replies commented on how the search engine algorithm should be altered to punish sites receiving bad reviews, protecting consumers from sites that use SEO to prey on them. Google have now responded on their official blog, announcing that they have developed an algorithmic solution in an initial response to this problem, but they can’t guarantee that people won’t find further loopholes in the algorithm.

The outcry over the site has spread significantly throughout the week and one may wonder if the owner of DecorMyEyes is already relishing the profits of getting his website in the very prominent online version of The New York Times.

Read the full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html

Google Instant: the PR coup of the year?

September 9th, 2010

The Search industry waited with baited breath as to what Google’s big announcement would be this week.

Matt Cutts, Google’s search community ‘idol’ was excitedly tweeting, galvanising the search geeks across the globe.

And then the announcement came: the launch of Google Instant (to continue with the coffee theme, following Caffeine?)

Well! All I can say is that Google’s PR team are really good at creating an almighty hype over something very minor: the auto-completion of your search query.

Google reckons Google Instant will give us all 5 seconds of our lives back – per search. So that’s something, I guess!

So that’s it really. After all the hype prior to the big launch, it’s just a functional / usability improvement. Nothing particularly strategic or impactful on Google’s index.

Google Instant is potentially controversial in that this is perhaps another example of Google trying to second guess or pre-empt what users may – or may not – be searching for. One step too far in terms of Google’s sphere of influence? Those trusting souls paying little attention to their typing may find that they end up with a completely different set of unrelated results.  It will be interesting to read the subsequent industry opinions on this subject in the coming weeks.

But for now, I think this article on Telegraph.co.uk best sums up Google’s announcement this week…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7991057/Google-Instant-the-technology-anti-climax-of-the-decade.html

“Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly,” said the boffins from Mountain View in their blog post announcing Google Instant”

- if this is the kind of insight that Google’s boffins are paid to come up with, I’m definitely in the wrong job!

Blog post by Amanda Davie, Managing Director of Reform

Google’s Search Market Share Fallen Behind in Asia? Not Exactly

July 30th, 2010

Don’t call it a comeback, but Google might actually be gaining a lot of ground in the Asian market very soon. Yes, the make up of search engine usage in the Far East (the focus of Reform’s International Search Review series so far) – where only a few months ago Google left China, Yahoo! dominated in Japan and few people in Korea even used Google at any point – has changed drastically.

Yahoo! Japan has about a 57% share of the market there, while Google’s share is just over 35%; Microsoft has a share of about 3%. Yahoo! and Bing are merging results elsewhere, but Yahoo! Japan, being to some extent independently owned (unlike in other markets, the Yahoo! Japan branch is actually majority owned by Softbank) has opted to go with Google instead of Bing for its results on both the SEO and PPC side. Microsoft quickly protested, citing that Google will suddenly have close to a 95% share of the 3rd largest search market after the US & China, thus monopolising it in a similar way to Microsoft’s dominance in the PC market over the years.

As for China, Google is back to work in the market that they shocked many people by threatening to leave earlier this year. Only a couple months ago, Baidu was pulling away with a clear lead in one of the fastest growing markets (and potentially largest) in the world.

But earlier this month, Google managed to work out a deal where operations in China could resume through 2012, and the google.cn domain no longer redirected to Hong Kong. But the relationship has been short lived, as while http://www.google.cn/ is back, trying a query as of July 30th takes you to Hong Kong once more. So, the comeback is still a work in progress there. In fact, you can take a quick look at day to day status via http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en

Google has also cut ties with two of the twenty five “authorized advertising agents” in China, which account for most of the paid search spend within China.

Moving over to Korea, where Google’s market share is even lower (under 5%), they’ve worked on a new strategy – going away from search and moving towards mobile and even TV. Working on partnerships with local companies, Google has shown progress in the mobile market there (which rivals such as Naver were late to enter) and are working with companies such as LG and Samsung on integrating search with other forms of media, such as TV, where Samsung is potentially working on launching a Google TV that would run on Google’s Android Operating System.

Still, contrary to what some people felt a few months ago, Google hasn’t given up on Asia yet, and the search market in countries like China, Japan and Korea is still ready for new competition. Find out more about these markets and more via our market research pieces:

Search Marketing in China

Search Marketing in Korea

Search Marketing in Russia

Search Marketing in India – Coming Soon.

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

The SEO community starts to test social media search optimisation strategies

July 2nd, 2010

When we think of search we think of external search i.e. search engines like Google that act as windows onto the web. From these windows we can find and access news, videos, social media forums, maps – as well as a wealth of branded content and information about businesses, products & services.

But of course people search elsewhere on the web. After email communication search is the primary web behaviour. And there is another kind of search engine: internal or enterprise search. In the US in March of 2010 Facebook’s internal search engine, for example, saw its usage soar by 48% to total 2.7% of all US searches carried out on the Web in that month. OK, so compared to Google’s 64% share of the US search market that might not seem to impressive. Still, that’s a whole lotta searching going on – and mostly for people’s names.

As brands and businesses start to saturate social media properties like Facebook, SEOs are already trying to fathom what the ranking factors are, so that they can lend their services to help brands become more visible in social media search. This article by Marty Weintraub entitled “Facebook SEO Ranking Factors, 2010 Study Results” suggests that criteria such as the Facebook Suggest Box, inserting generic keywords into name fields, population of the Interests field, encouraging as many Fans and “Likes”, might become the focus of SEO test strategies.

However, as Weintraub points out it’s early days in terms of cracking the social media search algorithms. But that won’t stop the more innovative and curious SEOs from having a go!

Blog post by Amanda Davie, Managing Director of Reform

« Older Entries