Google has applied for a patent on a new technology which ranks the most influential Social Media users. Although the details are still under wraps, it is likely that the new system will show great resemblance to Google Pagerank.

How does it work? The new technology will take several factors into account to determine your influence within social networks: your number of connections; the number of times that others post something on your profile pages and vice versa; the popularity of the video you posted … . Let’s not forget: Google ranks web pages based on their influence (i.c. the number of incoming and outgoing links). Why wouldn’t they extend this logic to social networks and the growing number of people who are active users?

What does this mean for online advertising and the profitablilty of social network? Let’s take a look at the following example from Business Week.

Say there’s a group of basketball fans who spend a lot of time checking out each other’s pages. Their profiles probably indicate that they enjoy the sport. In addition, some might sign up for a Kobe Bryant fan group or leave remarks on each others’ pages about recent games they played or watched. Using today’s standard advertising methods, a company such as Nike would pay Google to place a display ad on a fan’s page or show a “sponsored link” when somebody searches for basketball-related news. With influence-tracking, Google could follow this group of fans’ shared interests more closely, see which other fan communities they interact with, and—most important—learn which members get the most attention when they update profiles or post pictures.The added information would let Nike both sharpen and expand its targeting while allowing Google to charge a premium for its ad services. If Nike wanted to advertise a new basketball shoe, for example, it could work with Google to plop an interactive free-throw game only on the profile pages of the community influencers, knowing the game would be likely to draw the most attention in these locations. And because the new technique ranks links among groups, Google could also target the ads to broader communities.

Talk to an experienced social media consultant if you would like to know how to rank higher on the social media networks and what this means for your bottom-line.

Source: DutchCowboys

A couple of months ago we posted that Facebook has reached over 100 million users worldwide. A recent study shows that over 1% of all Facebook users are Belgian. 1 million Facebook users in small country like ours that only has a population of 10 million, that’s truly remarkable. Especially when you take into account that at the end of 2007, the Belgian Facebook userbase had less than 200.000 members. Given this enormous 400% growth, there’s even less reason to be hesitant on contacting professional social media consultants who have proven experience in social media optimization and social media advertising.

As you probably already know the current poll results favour Obama. But what interests me the most: how are they doing online?

In October 2007 Hubspot released a report on presidential campaign websites. With only two candidates in the running, I thought it was fun to give a quick status report:

• How good is the SEO of their official campaign websites?
• Do they rank in search engines on relevant keywords?
• Do they make use of online social media?

How popular are their official websites?

• Although Obama’s website has more incoming links, both campaign websites get a Google PageRank of 8/10, indicating that both websites are equally important.
• I used the Alexa Rank to find out how Obama’s site traffic stacks up against McCain’s. The lower the Alexa ranking number the more heavily visited the site.
• With about 30.000 web pages McCain’s team is more actively publishing content than Obama’s crew. However, having many pages indexed by Google doesn’t mean that you instantly gain visibility. So let’s get over to the next question.

How do their web pages rank on campaign issues (on Google.com)?

• Although the Iraq war is a campaign issue for both candidates, Barack is clearly in pole position with a 1st place (Yahoo!) and a second place (Google).
• One of Barack Obama’s web pages ranks on the third place for the query “US president 2008″, while McCain stays below the fold of the search engine results first page (8). Is this a sign?
• On other campaign issues their visibility in search engine isn’t great. Maybe they’re betting on other forms of online marketing to get their message across?
• Chances are that both candidates are actively using search engine advertising campaigns to compensate their low search engine rankings. Due to geotargeting issues I’m unable to check it, but here’s an article concerning the subject.

Hot topic: Social Media

• You don’t need a calculator to see that Barack Obama throws a 180 on the social web.
• His YouTube channel is far more popular than McCain’s channel.
• And what about their respective friends, followers and supporters on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter?
• Unfortunately we don’t have Technorati Rankings of their blogs.

Some final thoughts

• If you compare the visibility in the classic search engines to their activities in social media, you can clearly see where the focus lies on.
• Nowadays people and voters are certainly search centric. But that doesn’t mean that they will use a search engine to get the information they’re seeking. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace,… contain plenty of information waiting to be found. Both McCain and Obama know this. Obama just seems to be more succesful in disclosing his messages.
• Do the figures above mean that Obama is targeting younger voters (and earlier adopters of social media)? He recently started with ingame advertsing. It’s highly unlikely that my father will start to play Burnout Paradise. Also note that for Obama video games are for underachievers.
• Games and presidential elections? Be sure to check Palin in the White House on www.palinaspresident.us. Take your time to click around. US elections really are fun.

More about these recent chances can be read on Inside AdWords.

Googles organic search ranking factors are also frequently updated. How often? And when? Hard to tell. Google does not send press releases regarding this matter. Honestly, SEOs have a hard time to predict important algorithm shifts. Most of the time we try to anticipate on changes that are highly probable, that’s what makes our job so exciting. Although we keep a close eye on possible changes, sometimes we are obliged to act post factum.

Is Google shifting gears?

What are the factors that are starting to change search results? Most of them come down to user experience.

1. Uptime of your website. Fast load times go hand in hand with good search engine optimization. Most of your prospects or customers have broadband connections. Others use sometimes slow WiFi or mobile phones. These users will likely experience slower site load time. Google will take this into account.

2. Google is starting to use bounce rate as an important signal in organic rankings. Search engines all have the ability to collect bounce rate data. For instance Google knows the bounce rate of your pages via the Google toolbar or Google Analytics data. And they certainly can tell if you did a query, clicked on a result and you were back at the search engine results doing a query again 30 seconds later.

If your bounce rate is to high (i.e. over 60%), it’s highly likely that your rankings will drop. Try to work towards a bounce rate of 20 % or less. Bounce rate is also known to affect your paid search as well.

3. Links have always been important to SEO. But the diversity of inbound links becomes even more important. Aim for inbound links on different blogs, social bookmarking sites (like Delicious) and social networking sites (Facebook will be crawlable).

4. Google is also tracking the number of your RSS subscribers and will be ranking articles higher if the blog has more subscribers. Just take a look at your subscriber stats in Google Webmaster Tools.

What’s the point?

As a matter of fact there are many. SEO is still about technical requirements, inbound links and valuable content. But more than ever about a good mixture of al of these ingredients.

That’s were a solid SEM approach comes into play. Create a crawlable website with good content and great usability to lower your bounce rate and get good search engine rankings.

Create even more good content and make it easy for people to link to your site in order to obtain inbound links. It’s highly likely that you will launch a snowball effect.

And of course, we’ll be glad to help you with your e-snowball.

]]> http://www.across-the-web.com/sea/you%e2%80%99d-better-watch-your-website%e2%80%99s-bounce-rate-google-does/feed/ http://www.across-the-web.com/general/did-google-find-your-company-in-2001/ http://www.across-the-web.com/general/did-google-find-your-company-in-2001/#comments Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:02:57 +0000 Kenneth Peeters http://www.across-the-web.com/?p=174

The world’s biggest search engine is slowly but surely hitting puberty. These days Google is allready celebrating it’s 10th birthday. Check out the interactive time line if you would like to know more. The celebrations have generated a lot of buzz and new initiatives. One of them is a detailed look at Google in January 2001, the oldest available index. Just type in your (company) name and see if you were found back in 2001. You’d be surprised how few of us actually generated relevant results in a time when SEO, SEA and SEM sounded like exotic diseases to the majority of marketeers. Thank god those days are over!

Why should companies ever want to outsource their Pay-Per-Click campaigns? It’s a valid question. After all, isn’t Search Engine Advertising a simple question of buying a few keywords on Google, setting a high enough bid and waiting for the hordes of paid visitors and resulting revenue to come to you? Any search marketeer will tell you the truth is far less simple than this. Based on our own experiences and an fairly old but interesting article on SearchEngineLand, we have gathered 10 viable reasons on why it’s usually better and more cost-efficient to outsource your PPC campaigns to SEM professionals instead of trying to do it yourself.

1 Campaign follow-up

Professional campaign management is definitely king when it’s comes to making your search advertising efforts a success. Unless you are running very small campaigns with only a couple of keywords and one or two ads, it is absolutely vital to check your campaigns on a continuous (minimal weekly) basis. Both keywords and bids have to be adjusted regularly in order to achieve great results.

2 Keyword competition

If you are the only bidder on a limited set of very niche-keywords, you might try to do it yourself. In most cases however, competition is continuously growing stronger. Professional bid management is needed to ensure your ads stay visible and on your desired positions.

3 Quality Score

Most PPC platforms, such as Google AdWords, use a type of ‘quality score’ to determine the actual cost-per-click and the position of the ads. Irrelevant landingspages, or very generic keywords, can increase you minimum bid to 4€ or higher. Only a structured campaign made by an experienced search marketeer can avoid these insane minimum bids.

4 Conversion tracking

Unless you are only interested in branding, an enormous increase in web traffic isn’t enough to determine the successrate of a campaign. Conversion tracking is a conditio sine qua non to actually measure the quality of the paid visitors and the ROI of search engine advertising. SEA professionals make sure they track which keywords actually ‘convert’ (’make a purchase’, ‘fill in a contact form’, ‘register’, ‘visit a key page’ … ). You’d be surprised how many times the least likely keywords are actually the most profitable ones.

5 Different search engines

When someone says ’search engines’, most people will automatically associate it with Google. Especially in European countries where Google has a market share up to 95%. However, it might be worth your while to try your luck with other PPC platforms such as Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter. In many cases the cost-per-click will be considerably lower than on Google AdWords, thus increasing your overall ROI. Make sure you work with SEM providers who have experience with more than one PPC platform.

6 New features

The search engine marketing world is always evolving. The list of tools, features and options grows literally every day. Only professionel search marketeers know all the latest tips and tricks to ensure you get the most out of your campaign (budgets).

7 Problem solving

Setting up a new PPC campaign will inevetably bring it’s own set of very specific problems. Small-time advertisers usually don’t score that high on the priority list of the Google’s and Yahoo’s in this world. Only experienced SEA professionals have the necessary contacts to cope with these start up problems in an swift manner.

8 New advertising formats

Gone are the days when search ads were only text based. Image-, video- and mobile-ads are growing in popularity as we speak. Speak to professionals for more insight into these new and exciting ad formats.

9 Click fraude & trademark violatons

The internet is filled with deceit. In search engine advertising this usually comes in the form of click fraud and trademark violations. Only professional search marketeers have the necessary skills, experience and contacts to deal effectively with these heinous acts.

10 Time management

As a marketing/product/e-business manager, you should focus on your key task: think about new ways to promote your products or services and create overall marketing strategies. Leave the actual PPC campaign management to search marketing professionals. I guarantee, you will save time and money!

Feel free to contact us, if would like to know more about our various SEM services.

Source: MarketingFacts

The results show a greater focus on the top 3, maybe 4, results.

In a 2005 study we found that people looked through many of the search results before clicking on one. The distribution of attention using Google can be seen in the heatmap below.

In our most recent study, we had 30 participants search for the broad term, Oasis. PEEP methodology was employed; participants were eyetracked while completing the task and later asked about their usual behaviour.

The study concludes that we are expecting our results to show up in the top 5 results more than ever. If a user can’t find what he is looking for in the first few restults, he simple modifies his query and searches again. Second pages aren’t even look at anymore.

More on Think Eyetracker

If you want to learn more on how to increase your overall rank in search engines, do contact our SEO team.

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