This is great for anyone wanting to track said search engines but even better as it goes towards fixing a long standing bug within Google Analytics, as all data that contained the word “search” and contained the parameter “q” would be defaulted into coming from “search.com” this of course lead to inaccurate reports with traffic from search.com being wildly inflated.

The search engines that have been added to the default list are as follows:

• http://rakuten.co.jp

• http://biglobe.ne.jp

• http://goo.ne.jp

• http://www.startsiden.no/sok

So what does this mean for your data?

These changes help to clarify that the smaller site-links are indeed a part of the site above. Previously users reported being confused as to whether the single line site-links would direct them to a new search or to a sub-page of the link above.

This is just a minor change that will have no impact on search engine rankings. It simply demonstrates how Google is trying to make its search engine more user friendly.

The adoption of technology is often limited by the skills required to operate it. As these become less and less, more and more people can begin feeling its benefits. Therefore the primary consideration of my predictions isn’t technical or business developments, but rather what will continue to aid the internet’s ever growing ubiquity, main stream crossover and human experience.

Even More Frictionless Sharing
The majority of the developed world consumes content via the internet. A small majority chooses to share this. How do you close this canyon between consumption and sharing? Make the experience as frictionless as possible.

Introduced at their F8 Conference in September, Facebook announced that users who browsed content within their platform would automatically have this information posted to their new ‘Ticker’ feature. Although met with uproar from the privacy brigade, like many of their other new features, the initial cries fizzled out when people discovered it’s not actually all that bad.

Twitter has also begun making steps into broadcasting your social activity to your followers. Their aptly named ‘Activity’ tab now includes a lot more than tweets, but now when someone you follow has favourited a tweet, followed someone or retweeted something.

But where this trend will really find it’s feet is location. Imagine not having to pull out your phone to check-in to your favourite store, but still receive a discount because you’ve been highlighted on their in-store social CRM system as an influencer? They’ll head over to the checkout, swipe their phone and ‘Hello Mr Smith, for the good words you’ve said about us on Twitter have a lager on the house’. The business potential this offers will mean there’s a vast deal of thought and resource put into making this dream a reality.

Besides social media, businesses will realise that metrics such as time on site are no longer important as people revolt against wasting their time on inefficient retail experiences. People don’t want to waste their time on a website or in a shop when they could be out with their friends, sharing experiences with their family or consuming meaningful content. The more frictionless the commerce experience, the better the brand perception. Ever wonder why Apple now lets you walk in and out of their stores with a product without even talking to any of their staff?

Facebook Ticker

Twitter Activities

Geoloqi App

Apple Store App

Connected Things

Creating, sharing and amplifying real life experiences. Driven by the adoption of engineering platforms like Ardunio, the process of connecting appliances to internet APIs will become effortless and widespread.
Different to the quantified self in that the things aren’t particularly interacting with yourself but rather with each other, connected things offer the opportunity to bring the benefits of digital to the real world.

Poke, the London based agency set up by the now W+K director Iain Tait, recognised that whilst the real-time nature of Twitter would be the perfect place to announce fresh-out-of-the-oven bread, the dough riddled hands of a baker wouldn’t fair too well with a keyboard. Connected appliances offer the chance for interactions with the internet that wouldn’t have been possible before, but not only with the internet, but with each other too. Check out this infographic by Cisco that does a brilliant job explaining its potential.

Poke’s Baker Tweet

Hyper Naked’s Nokia Push

Breakfast’s Instaprint

Mint Digital’s Olly

The Conveniently Quantified Self

To me, the idea of gamification never really resonated. I can see how playing a branded game increases the exposure of your brand but 99% of the time, much like TV advertising, they fall short of their non-commercial counterpart. Ultimately, this leaves you with an experience that hasn’t quite fulfilled your appetite. I do, however, see the desire humans have to track their conquests and the potential digital applications have to supplement this. Ranging from finance tracking applications to a retailers barcode scanning app that tracks the amount of money saved by shopping with them, to more complex applications like Jawbone’s Up. Saying you’re a retailer that saves someone money is one thing, but being able to display this dynamically would hold much more weight in the mind of the customer. And this, my friends, is how advertising must adapt. With increasing customer savviness, messaging is no longer enough to get someone to buy into your brand.

Despite the Quantified Self movement having been around for some time, like most things, it won’t see widespread adoption until practicality issues are resolved. Smartphones have done much resolve this, but you’re still required to pull out your phone and input some data every time you do something that may seem trivial, yet it’s vital towards providing the data applications need to offer life-improving solutions.

Expect to see a host of periphery products entering the market designed to pair up with your mobile phone and optimise your life.

Jawbone’s Up
Nike’s Plus

The Re-emergence of Broadcast Media

One way broadcast media is social in a way demand media isn’t in that it provides a simultaneous experience. Twitter becomes a hot bed of activity when shows such as The X-Factor and The Apprentice are showing on TV, and whilst people may be isolated in their living room, they can be sharing their predictions with friends across the world. After all, where’s the fun in wanting to speak about something no one else has any opinion on or the interest has already been and gone?

Facebook has unsurprisingly been one of the first social networks to try and harness this trend but their implementation is still someway off. The simplicity of watching TV whilst tweeting from your iPad is an experience hard to beat. Whilst TV will remain, devices like AppleTV are going to bring it even closer to the internet and I’ll eat my hat if social isn’t baked in at the very core. Eventually, I’d expect communities to schedule, watch and comment on media simultaneously, providing the benefits of both broadcast and on-demand. Imagine inviting your brother in Australia to watch the next episode of The Apprentice at a time that suits both of you.

AppleTV

GetGlue

Copyright Abrinski – Flickr

The opportunity in mining social data to better inform business decisions is met equally with the challenges of converting something so vast and varied into meaningful insight.

In my opinion, it’s important to provide some differentiation between the functions Social Media and Social Analysis provide. In the context of business practice, social media is the promotion of a business through earned, owned and paid for media on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

Alterian’s Susan Etlinger describes Social Analysis as a measure to ‘focus attention, drive insight, and learn from experience.’ But while this approach fosters organisational learning, she goes on to explain how its most fundamental role is to provide strategists from all disciplines the ability to be able to ‘articulate, quickly and with confidence, the strategic business value of social media.’

Despite the swaths of information available, to be able to structure, organise and analyse social alongside other commercial data within an effective time-frame is presenting something of a stumbling block for marketers. Although movements such as linked data offer hope in this quest, to implement such a system in its relatively unproven state is a financial burden which may be hard to justify to executives.

As well as this, there is a general consensus that social data is far from revolutionising marketing. Colin Grieves, Director of propositions and strategy at Experian says ‘The volume and variety of data is something advertisers and network-owners have not yet managed to translate and fully exploit to prove the value of the channel. It will happen, but, as with anything this new and immense, it needs to mature and evolve.’

However, it isn’t without its high profile advocates. Both Marketing Magazine’s Melanie May and Edelman’s David Armano have recently published articles promoting the use of real-time data to influence program planning and uncovering trends and insight at a segment level. Whilst Armano skips around some of the problems, the provision of a strategic process to turn passive monitoring into valued insight which can then be spread across numerous business departments, does much to prove its value beyond communications.

So the question begs, where does a brand start with social analysis? Like all good decisions it should be shaped by your overall strategy. First of all, consider the objectives at the very core of your business, what are your corporate or unit priorities? Identify how social analysis can help satisfy these. If you’re still stuck, Alterian’s Social Media Measurement compass can help identify where the strengths of social analysis can align with your goals:

Second, define how you will measure success. Again, this should start with commercial objectives such as revenue generation, brand awareness and competitive insights. Then align these with social media metrics such as: leads generated through social media, positive brand mentions and share of voice.

Third, create and employ the tools needed to effectively measure this information.

Finally, and most importantly, turn this information into insight that can be shared across business departments. Although still in its infancy, being one of the first to uptake this type of analysis will no doubt provide a competitive advantage above anyone else, not least because once it’s matured into the potential it offers, you’ll have the experience and expertise of having been involved from the start. Product planning, CRM, strategic planning and human resources are all functions outlined by David Armano that will find this sort of information useful.

‘Our customers spend most of their time online, which requires us to adapt to their reality,’ says Xavier Vallee, direct of ecommerce, EMEA, at Avis. ‘As a result, we are transforming our marketing. The data we get from social media helps us participate in conversations with our customers as well as several objectives, in terms of brand positioning, product development, customer sales and insight, and it does influence revenue.’ – How to Join the Social Club, Melanie May, Marketing Magazine.

Despite its detractors, the fact remains that many businesses have already implemented and benefitted from this activity. The value of media in providing promotional value to a business is quickly diminishing due to the lowered barriers to entry of publishing. So the question begs: why not reframe media as an environment from where brands don’t only talk about themselves, but to where brands also listen to customers?

Reporting to: Head of Natural Search / Account Director

Scope

We have a very exciting opportunity available for a candidate who is looking to develop their organic search skills, working on some of the UK’s most exciting brands. Experience is preferred but we will consider recent graduates with relevant or transferable skills.

Reporting to the Head of Natural Search and Account Director and working as a part of a very knowledgeable and passionate team, you will be responsible for the day to day analysis, research, reporting and implementation of SEO programs for a varied range of clients. You will also be exposed to all other relevant channels (PPC, affiliate marketing, shopping comparison, display advertising, social media etc.) and the integration between channels.

We offer the potential to develop your career with one of the top full service marketing agencies in the North of England.

Please note, this is a permanent role and you will be based in our office in Leeds, England.

Responsibilities:

• Day to day management of client SEO programs
• Carrying out technical SEO reviews of client websites
• Keyword research
• Copywriting and content recommendations
• Planning and implementation of link building campaigns
• Producing monthly / weekly / ad hoc ranking reports
• Tracking, monitoring and reporting using Google Analytics and other tools
• Competitor and market analysis
• Staying up to date with industry developments
• Direct client responsibilities

Person Specification

• University education preferred
• Some recent SEO experience preferred
• Up to date knowledge of SEO techniques and strategies
• Excellent communication skills
• Excellent analytical skills
• Able to work on own initiative and as a part of a team
• Personable
• Attention to detail
• Sound knowledge of the Microsoft Office suite of programmes, especially Excel
• Good organisational skills
• Experience in building websites using HTML, CSS and server-side scripting is beneficial
• Experience in blogging and social media is beneficial

Salary negotiable dependent on experience.

Please forward CV and cover letter to cab@fusionunlimited.co.uk.

In it’s place is the following:

With the completion of algorithmic transition to Bing, Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo!.

Yahoo announced this was going to happen a few months ago, so it hasn’t come as a shock.

With plenty of alternative, better tools available, such as Majestic and Open Site explorer, this really isn’t a big deal for SEOs.

Nevertheless, many will see it as an end of an era and the final nail in the coffin for Yahoo search.

As online becomes the fastest growth area for sales, using the power of cloud to cope with the spikes during Christmas trading periods will combat help combat site crashes that weren’t geared up for the sudden surge in traffic.

Damian Saunders of Citrix System recommends retailers access cloud services to scale to unlimited resource as soon as it’s required and drop back once traffic slows down afterwards. This flexible pay-as-you-go model is the best solution for sudden spikes of demand rather than to build the short term infrastructure in-house. And consider alternative short term hosting solutions to cope with higher levels of security for online transactions.

Here we offer up our top tips for keeping your website up and running this Christmas – and recommend acting now. If you want more advice on this please contact us direct on: jp@fusionunlimited.co.uk

An example Google used to explain how this change will affect users, was that if you were searching for a recipe, it wouldn’t matter whether the recipe was days or years old. But if you were searching for the results of a football match, it’s the most recent results you want. Which means when it comes to certain subjects, newer results will have priority over older results.

Upon first announcing the update Google stated that the change would affect roughly 35% of searches, dwarfing Panda’s 12% impact. But just yesterday (07/11/2011), Google clarified with the following statement:

To clarify, when we say this algorithm impacted 35% of searches, we mean at least one result on the page was affected, as opposed to when we’ve said noticeably impacted in the past, which means changes that are significant enough that an average user would notice. Using that same scale, this change noticeably impacts 6 – 10% of searches, depending on the language and domain you’re searching on.

Since the update went live, as usual, some reports have been released on who’s won and who’s lost. As expected, plenty of news sites have seen increases in traffic. However, it’s worth pointing out that these reports are not based on actual figures and are simply estimates based on lists of millions of keywords.

Google+ Direct Connect

Though a fair effort at adding value to Google+ for brands, which before this launch were kicked off with the promise something was coming soon, there are a number of features Google have yet to implement. Most importantly, there’s no analytics to allow the optimisation and reporting of page performance. However, they do launch better targeting options and the opportunity to rank Plus Pages favourably in search, as they do some of their other products, gives them some advantages over Facebook. There are also benefits to be drawn from features Google+ had from the start, such as Circles and Hangouts, which are yet to be realised on Facebook Pages.

Google+ Hangouts for Businesses

Although it’s easy to compare Google+ to Facebook Pages, it’s clear they both follow unique strategies to draw in content. As Google looks to bake in a number of their own products, Facebook relies on apps and their ‘Like’ button which is spread across the internet. Whilst the user base of Google Plus is only around 5% of Facebook’s, it’s still very much recommended to get in there, have a look around and register relevant IP as your own.

Check out some of the current brands taking part:

Toyota
Barcelona
Coldplay
New York Times

]]> http://www.fusionunlimited.co.uk/blog/business-pages-launch-on-google/feed/ 0 http://www.fusionunlimited.co.uk/blog/october-2011-seo-news-summary/ http://www.fusionunlimited.co.uk/blog/october-2011-seo-news-summary/#comments Mon, 07 Nov 2011 17:01:12 +0000 Rick Gaskell http://www.fusionunlimited.co.uk/?p=2141

3^rd November 2011

Google Algorithm change expected to impact 35% of results

Google announced they are rolling out a new search algorithm change that helps make the search results “fresher.” The big news here is that besides for the results being fresher, the results will change for about 35% of all searches. That is larger than the Panda update which impacted 12% of the searches conducted.

30^th October 2011

Google now index Facebook comments

Search behemoth Google has finally upgraded the abilities of its search bots to index AJAX and JavaScript, meaning the comments you post on any website that features Facebook or DISQUS commenting (and others) systems will be now be visible.

28^th October 2011

Google Incorporates Google+ into Rel=Author display

• Circle counts — you can see how many people have the author in Google+ circles.
• Add to circles — in the case above, the Author is in a circle called “Search Engine Land.” If he wasn’t in any of the circles, there’d be a gray “Add to circles” button there.
• Comments — at the bottom, you can see how many comments there are on the Google+ post (not the original Search Engine Land article) when the author shared this “Bing Promotes Firefox” story. There’s also a link there to drive traffic to the Google+ post.

19^th October 2011

Visualising visitor flow in Analytics

The Visitors Flow view provides a graphical representation of visitors’ flow through the site by traffic source (or any other dimensions) so you can see their journey, as well as where they dropped off. You’ll find this visualizer on the left hand navigation menu, where you’ll see a new “Visitors Flow” link under the Visitors section.

Nodes are automatically clustered according to an intelligence algorithm that groups together the most likely visitor flow through a site.

18^th October 2011

Google encrypts personalised search queries

Many users will find yourselves redirected to https://www.google.com (note the extra “s”) when you’re signed in to your Google Account. This change encrypts your search queries and Google’s results page. This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe. You can also navigate to https://www.google.com directly if you’re signed out or if you don’t have a Google Account.

5^th October 2011

Webmaster tools in Google Analytics for everyone

The Webmaster Tools section contains three reports based on the Webmaster Tools data that Google hope will give a better sense of how your site performs in search results. We’ve created a new section for these reports called Search Engine Optimization that will live under the Traffic Sources section. The reports you’ll find there are:

• Queries: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries
• Landing Pages: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages
• Geographical Summary: impressions, clicks, and CTR by country

3^rd October 2011

Google Launches Trusted Stores

Google is launching an e-commerce certification program this morning called “Trusted Stores.” The company says that it’s trying to give consumers greater confidence to buy products online. In very limited beta right now, qualifying e-commerce stores will be able to display a “Google Trusted Store” badge. What’s more interesting is that Google is backing its program with $1,000 in consumer purchase protection.