However, according to a study by a Pew Internet survey conducted in May 2011 and results released this week, the proportion of people in the USA using social networking services is 65%, whereas 92% of internet users send email and use search engines. These figures remind us that even though social media is important, we shouldn’t let social become too much of a distraction.

Compared to less than 5 years ago, when only around 20% of adult internet users in the USA were tweeting and liking, 65% is actually a good figure and a tremendous growth, which undoubtedly cannot be ignored. However, when it comes to established, continued usage, social media is still not yet up to the same level as email and search.

Usage of search and email is also astonishingly consistent across demographic categories. For example –
96% of those aged between 18-29 use search engines and 87% of those who are 65 and older use search engines too. 94% of internet users in the 18-29 category use email while 87% of those in the 65+ group also use email.

Usage is also consistent through socioeconomic categories as 90% of those earning $30,000 per annum use search engines and 98% of those earning $75,000+ per year also use search engines, which isn’t significantly higher.

Some people may think that email is dying, however we can see from the survey results this is not true. Many organisations are still undecided about social media and can see emails as a vital part of their business as they use it every day.

Even though there’s a buzz around social networking sites, mainly because they are seen as “the new kid on the block”, search and email should not be forgotten. At the moment search and email can be seen as currently the two most reliable digital marketing channels. Saying this, all three channels have unique attributes and if they are all integrated in a marketing campaign, this can lead to a successful campaign.

In the past, Google used Twitter for faster indexation of content, to power real time results and also for use in their ranking algorithm. It has been reported that Google removed real time results from Twitter and other websites such as their News and Facebook. However, Google plans to reinstate real time results using Google+.

Even though Google+ is different from Google+1, with each having their own unique functions – they do connect with each other. Users who have a Google+ account or a normal Google account will be able to click on the Google+1 button, which will essentially allow users to vote for their search results and see which websites other connections or friends have “+1ed”. Therefore, the result’s rankings will not only affect you, but also people that you are connected with through Google.

Some of Google+’s features

The main feature of Google+ is the Circles feature, which is similar to Facebook and Twitter Lists. Circles allow you to allocate contacts to Circles e.g. Family, Friends, Snowboarding Group, Acquaintances and whoever else you want in the Circle. You can then publish content to specific Circles or specific individuals, because as Google states, “not all relationships are created equal”.

At the moment, there seems to be more control over privacy on Google+ compared to Facebook. You can share photos with your family in one post, and then publish something publicly in the next post.

Hangout is another feature of Google+. It’s a group video chat feature where you can invite members of a certain group by sending them a notification. An additional feature of the new social networking site is Huddle, which is a mobile group chat service which could also become available from your mobile phone in the near future.

Sparks is an online sharing engine where you can create a topic of interest and share links with group friends who also have the same interests. E.g. you could share results of Snowboarding in France with your “powder chasing” friends.

Why Google+?

Some people may wonder why Google has bothered launching Google+. The reasons are because nowadays, search is about real-time information, people and the relevance of information to them, not just about pages.

Google has been an advocate for real time and social media for a while now, with Google Buzz, Google Places, Google Wave and not to mention the list of its acquisitions of social sites e.g. YouTube and Blogger.com.

The senior vice president who oversees Google’s social product, Vic Gundotra, said “It’s ‘project’ rather than a product because it’s an ongoing set of products and ‘Plus’ because it takes products from Google and makes them better”.

Google doesn’t see itself as a competitor to Facebook or Twitter, as they say that the way people connect online is limited – it’s just a new way to connect online with the people that matter to you.

What’s next?

For now, businesses and organisations have been warned to stay away from Google+. Christian Oestlien, advertising lead on the team behind Google+ explains that the social media site was designed for individuals in mind, “We’re working on building a optimised business experience for Google+ which will hopefully be rolled out later on this year. It will include the ability to connect to other parts of Google such as AdWords and other rich analytics”. However, their main focus at the moment is optimising the consumer experience for Google+.

In terms of SEO, social media won’t replace traditional SEO however, it will indeed help it. SEO practices including link building, content creation, keyword research and targeting will be the foundation for ranking success. Even though social media is gaining more importance and interest, using a combination of both technical SEO techniques and social media are the best steps towards success.

Sadly, we weren’t lucky enough to get our hands on an invite the first time round, but we are looking forward to when we are able to get onboard with the project.

However, even with all these additions, Google is still trying to make search results more personalised and so this week has introduced a new blocking feature on Google.com which will allow individual users to block whole domains from their search results.

Basically the new process will work like this; when you search for something, i.e. “how to fix a TV”, your usual search results will come up and there will be nothing different about the results. However, if you click on a site and then go straight back to your search results (because the site wasn’t what you were after) you will then see an option to block the website from your search results, located next to the “Cached” button.

So say there is a particular How To or Content site you always see in your results but don’t like, you will be able to block the domain and stop any of their pages from ever appearing in any of your search results.

This new option is linked to Google Accounts and so to keep the block permanent you will need to do it whilst logged in. And don’t worry if you change your mind later there will be an option to undo all of your blocks.

Ramifications for SEO

On the service this is simply a new tool to make search more personalised for individual users and in that sense has very little impact for SEO. However, although they are not doing so yet, Google have mentioned the possibility of using this new feature as a signal in ranking, stating that “we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future”.

In a very simple sense, the way this would work is, the more times a site has been blocked the more damaging to its rankings. So if a sites blocked by 100,000 people it will likely move lower than a similar site blocked by just 100 people.

If this idea were to be used as a new ranking criteria in Google there could be huge ramifications for SEO. With the addition of a block button, businesses could target rivals with negative SEO, setting up hundreds of fake Google accounts through Mechanical Turk and blocking a competitor site over and over.

So how can Google prevent this negative SEO? Well if they were to use this as criteria for rankings they would surely have to use just a select group of user’s activity to determine rankings. Basically, they would have to just look at users who have been around for a long time, have a well built up profile and are blocking domains very selectively.

Is this likely to affect rankings?

In theory this sounds like a great new way for Google to evaluate rankings, but with the huge possibility for negative SEO and the labour in finding a very select group of users doing it properly, it seems unlikely that it will come into practice anytime soon as the logistics are just too large.

However, although we may not see this impacting SEO anytime soon, the new blocking option is another step towards the ultimate personalised results that Google so desire! The new feature has gone live on Google.com this week and will be making its way to Google.co.uk very soon, so look out for it and start thinking of some sites you are sick of seeing in your results.

The impacts of the many interface changes in 2010 changes in 2010 were all very modest though, as far as SEO goes (not even the eventual rollout of the infrastructure related ‘caffiene’ update made a huge impact). What is easy to miss is how little these changes affect consumer behaviour – people still use a search engine to find websites and click on one of the top ones, just as they did a year ago. The only difference then, is that new distractions exist – given many distractions (think vertical search) already existed; the impact on traditional search has proved to absolutely minimal. There were some bigger changes to SEO – the heavy places integration in q4 of last year is bound to have a huge impact, but only if you’re competing for ‘local’ type searches.

Despite the hype, the caffiene update didn't provide a rush of traffic for many SEO's

Nevertheless, when these changes happened, they all provoked huge debate ranging from the usual “SEO is dead”, to predictions of more specific impacts on things like click through rates. The blogs were busy, Twitter was trending, and there were doubtlessly thousands of emails received by clients and managers about how these changes would fundamentally change search and how a new strategy was needed ASAP. And yet, if we’re honest, we’re probably entering 2011 largely unchanged.

But rather like the boy who cried wolf, I do think there could be more changes in 2011, from Google in particular. Google could have a huge impact and has the potential to catch many off guard, as we remember all the changes which didn’t change much in 2010. With Google’s algorithm still being hugely dependent on links, despite viable alternative now existing and being used in a limited capacity , Google have the potential to make a change to what really matter to marketers and (particularly) SEO’s – the way websites are ranked.

If any of the below occur to a moderate degree, 2011 would create the biggest challenge to SEO’s in many years:

• Tweets/Likes used heavily in to determine popularity (as opposed to , as I suspect currently , regency)
• User behaviour, such as bounces, folded into main algorithm
• A change to the ‘reasonable surfer’ model to how links are weighted
• A complete , or near complete disregard for Anchor text in the same way as happened with meta tags
• Prevention of duplicate “mill” content from being indexed and passing page rank

For what it’s worth, I’m expecting a least a couple of these things to happen. If they do, it’ll be the year that SEO really does change.

“So what’s the secret with PPC?”

The question is usually something along those lines. I feel a bit like scrooge cancelling christmas writing this post (especially if you’ve found this post searching for the PPC silver bullet) because, quite frankly , there simply isn’t any silver bullet with PPC.

This is not to say that paid search can’t be complex (it often is) , or that there aren’t really any ways to make a difference to a campaign – just that there’s no 1 overpowering method to suddenly reduce your CPA or increase your clicks. You’ll need to do better than that.

There’s now more settings and options with adwords than there have been. Whether you want to add videos , text links or phone numbers to your ads, you can now do it. There’s new keyword match types, mobile device targetting, new ad formats and the ability to ‘remarket’ to people who’ve previously visited your website.

These changes , combined with future improvments, make PPC one of the most exciting areas of digital marketing to be involved in – it means that , increasingly , every paid search account is different not only just in the keywords and campaigns , but in a whole range of ways.It also means that we need to take even more time to understand not just all of the options available to us, but how we can apply these to the client account in question.

The impact on PPC is subtle, yet important. Any marketeers approaching PPC with a fixed methodology are likely to find their work increasingly ineffective. To give an example, I’ve seen checklists and process plans for PPC management – while best practises can be beneficial, a checklist applied to every client is a classic way to get things the wrong way round.

As with traditional marketing, the best way to approach a PPC is to start with the objectives of the  business in question – for us, it means understanding our client. It may sound banal to point out that understanding a client means understanding how best to make the campaign work, but it’s nevertheless the case. The most important part of the planning phase for a new PPC client is in being able to map activities according to the level of impact they will have on the client – how much difference optimising them will actually make. When you’ve done this, you know what you need to spend time on, and what you really need to get right.

For cleints, rotating ad-copy can make all the difference , while for others it’s all about conversion rate optimisation. If rotating ads frequently doesn’t make the difference, don’t feel compelled to do it every week. Equally, If reducing the dropout of a form doubles your return on the entire campaign, do feel compelled to spend every last hour trying to achieve it.

If anything, the ’silver bullet’ of PPC could be as simple as understanding the impact of your work, before you start.

Make Mine Instant!

So Google announced yesterday the launch of a service they are dubbing “search faster than the speed of type”! Calling itself Google Instant, it has had Twitter and the blogosphere flooded with people from the search industry fretting about how this innovation could affect their campaigns.

If you haven’t tried it yet, Google Instant automatically populates the results page (known in the industry as SERPs) whilst you type. No longer do you have to press the Enter key on your keyboard, or the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button to see the results of what you’re searching for. Google themselves estimate that Instant will save users anything up to 5 seconds per search. This may not sound like a lot, but these seconds all add up when you consider how many searches we conduct through the search engine each day.

But let’s face it; Google has done this for several reasons. Firstly, it’s innovative, and part of Google’s brand is based on their innovative and intuitive products. Automatic search suggestion as you type has long been with the three main search engines, but none of them have hitherto showed a full search result based on the first letter typed into the search box!

Secondly, it’s a time saving tool which will lure users back to the Google home page. Google search has been increasingly appearing on different corners of the web for a while (perhaps more prominently, in the right hand corner of our web browsers), and these handy shortcuts have steered people away from using the Google homepage as their search starting point.

This tool is highly dynamic and potentially game changing for those who work in search or even advertise on Google. It means that some Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts may only appear for a split second on the results page, as Google changes the visible results according to what the user is typing. This could affect PPC and SEO campaigns in three main ways. Firstly, it could mean lower Click Through Rates (CTR) on Google Adwords. For SEO, It could also mean increase the importance to rank high on short tail organic keywords. Finally, it could also further decline the importance of misspellings as Instant automatically corrects

At present, Instant is only available to users logged into a Google Account, who are located in certain countries, and who are searching from the Google home page. And because of its current level of restricted access it is hard to see Instant changing anything from an SEO and PPC perspective in the immediate future. But as with all things that Google does, the proof is in the pudding. Time will tell as to how this ground breaking change to Google’s core product will affect those who advertise with it, and wish to rank high in its search results.

Question based search is exactly what it says on the tin – a situation where a user types a question into Google, rather than the name of a product or service. The type of search often indicates the user is in the research phase rather than ready to buy/sign up, but this isn’t always the case (for instance, many users will search for something like “where can I find a ….”). Either way, if you are thinking long-term, you’ll gladly take the extra traffic (and potential leads) that ranking well for these particular terms can yield.

In order to succeed with a question search strategy, you need to break the process down into 4 steps :

1. Identify your customers questions
2. Decide which questions you’d like to answer
3. Answer the questions
4. ‘Convert’ the searcher into a lead

Identifying Questions

There are many places where you can look for questions that have already been asked – although you’ll be competing with other websites, you’ll have the benefit of knowing that those questions are definitely of interest to people. Some ideas for finding questions would be as follows :

1. Look at your analytics search phrases ; the chances are, you’re receiving the occasional visitor on question searches already. Another way to use your existing site data is to use your internal search data – which you can also track through many analytics packages.
2. Do a google search for a broad term, and then select ‘discussions’ from the options menu on the left
3. Search websites such as Yahoo Answers, as well as any industry specific forums individually

I did a search on Google for the word ‘accountant’, and clicked discussions – an encouraging 700,000+ results. Yahoo Answers alone had over 4,000 results.

Also, don’t forget about the questions that may never have been asked – you could raid documents, textbooks and even exam papers here – an accountant, for instance, might find that many of the questions in their tax textbook would be of great interest to small businesses.

Filtering questions
Given that finding enough questions to answer won’t be a problem for many businesses, selecting the best questions to try and answer is probably the key challenge. You’ll want to consider several factors in this,  but some of the more important questions you should ask yourself are as follows:

1. Can I actually answer the question? (be honest with yourself!)
2. How long will it take to provide a good answer? (again, be realistic)
3. Is there likely to be any value in attracting this type of visitor?
4. What competition am I up against?
5. How often do I think this question may be asked?

By filtering with the above 5 criteria, you should get a large number of questions that will be likely to offer a reasonable reward in respect to the effort expended in answering. You can then pass the list to your staff / content writers or perhaps even work down them yourself in an effort to create some genuinely useful content.

Answering the questions

Now, depending on available resources, this part could be the easiest or most difficult. Factual based questions are likely to be among the quickest to answer, while complex questions may need a good writer to explain. Either way, you’re going to need a section of your website where you can actually put these answers. Some of the places you could put this content are as follows:

1. FAQs section
2. A knowledge base system
3. Your blog
4. A traditional ‘articles’ section

If the system you choose has the flexibility to allow users to ask their own questions, you should try and take advantage of this, since you’ll be getting content ideas  for free via this route.

Getting a conversion

Probably most important of all – you’ll need to get these visitors to convert. Often providing different ways of converting will be your best bet here.

If you think you can convert your customers straight into leads, then by all means push a ‘get a free quote’ or similar message at the customer, but if this isn’t the case then you might want to consider pushing a softer conversion type. Newsletters, mailing lists, white paper downloads etc might not make you any money right now, but they all provide you with a means of building your customer database, and hopefully an opportunity to sell your services to these visitors in the future.

Bear in mind that Google doesn’t need to be too concerned about making mistakes when doing such a classification – as long as they penalise link sellers (by stopping them from passing value) they don’t risk excluding sites unfairly.

make sure your links don't look like this

Here’s just a few of the many signals we look at to determine if a site is selling links:

Look out for Blocks of Links

Some websites are less savvy about Google’s terms than others. Whilst it may be against Google T&C’s to sell links (unless using nofollow) many webmasters are unaware of this and don’t go to a great deal of effort to disguise the fact that they are selling links. They will therefore mark up the section ‘Sponsored Links’ or something equally blatant. This is extremely easy for either a manual reviewer or an algorithm to spot. If you are familiar with HTML, you can also check the source of any link blocks to look for clues in the markup if you see something like ‘div id=’ads”, then you have another clue

Another obvious signal is where you find a block of links, often in a dubious place on the website (e.g the footer), that all link to a set of seemingly unconnected but commercial websites. A key thing to differentiate here is a ‘Blogroll’ from a block of ad-links – a Blogroll will usually link out to useful resources which tend to be a mix of other blogs, commercial and non commercial links – a block of ads will link purely to commercial websites.

Check the Anchor Text

Another obvious signal is in the anchor text of links – i.e. the text you see on the screen for the link. If all the links say things like ‘Credit Cards’, ‘Car Insurance’ etc, then there’s a str0ng possibility somebody paid for the website to link with favourable text – this is especially likely to be the case if:

a) the site being linked to isn’t called ‘Credit Cards’ (i.e. doesn’t have the url www.creditcards.com)

b) the site being linked is obviously targeting ‘Credit Cards’ as a keyword

Who are they linking to?

Possibly my favourite test of all when looking at a website’s outbound links is to see exactly who they are linking to. Generally, you can identify the major link buyers in any industry – the types that have chunky five figure link building budgets that buy rich links from anywhere and everywhere. If the website you are looking at links out to these (especially with rich anchor text in a sidebar) then it’s almost certain they are in the business of selling links – Google knows who the major offenders of link buying are, and therefore by association has a good idea of who the sellers are too – don’t get yourself involved with this crowd because you’ll probably be wasting your time/money… or worse, you may see a your site penalised.

Who owns the website?

Although this might lead to an occasional false negative, the owner of the website can give you a good clue as to their intentions. There are two interesting things to look out for here:

1) Is the website owned by a publishing company? If so, you can almost certainly buy a link. Generally speaking links tends to be nofollowed and go through some sort of tracking url. However, some publishing companies have wised up to the potential income from followed links…

2) Is there a disconnect between the websites owner details and their audience? For example is the website targeting a UK audience but owned by an individual outside the UK who also owns 572 other domains. Why should this concern you? Because there are literally thousands if not millions of websites created every day,  purely to sell links to other countries. Although there will sometimes be a perfectly legitimate reason why the domain owner is overseas,  it’s just another indicator that the website was created with the intention of selling links which can be balanced against other signs and signals.

Use your common sense!

It might be difficult to see every link on a page, but given you can pretty much ignore internal links for this purpose, scan your mouse over all the main link blocks and pay attention to the external links – a simple sense check can often tell you whether or not the link deserves to be there. Put yourself in the users shoes – if there’s no logical reason you’d want to click on the outbound links, then chances are, the site’s selling links.

Image credit Tim Parkinson

In every industry there are cowboys. Search is no different.

Sadly, many businesses are scammed because they get drawn in. They leave their common sense at the door.

So what is the truth about SEO?

1. You cannot buy an organic ranking on a search engine.

Even if you could, (which you can’t) you probably couldn’t afford it anyway. However, you can pay to advertise on search engines – this is called PPC or Paid Search. That’s what many of the $50 per month guys are actually offering. Alternatively, they may be offering you the opportunity to rank 1st organically for your brand name. You’ll probably find you already rank 1st for that anyway.

2. There’s no such thing as a Google / Yahoo / MSN Approved SEO

None of the major search engines offer training or qualifications in SEO. Anyone who claims to be Google / Yahoo / MSN approved or qualified is misleading you.

Somewhat confusingly, the major search engines do offer training in PPC or Paid Search, and, if you want to undertake PPC or Paid Search then by all means pick a qualified company or individual to run your campaign for you. Just be aware, that those qualifications they’re parading around have no bearing whatsoever on their SEO ability.

3. There are no guarantees

This is perhaps the most important point. Be extremely wary of anyone offering you guaranteed first page or first position rankings. Why?

Because there’s not an SEO on the planet who can control the search engine’s algorithms. And frankly, if you can’t control the algorithm, you can’t guarantee a ranking.

Search engines are understandably precious about the algorithms which they use to rank web pages. They have to be. They don’t share them. They make constant tweaks and refinements to try to return the most relevant results for users search queries. 

Many who offer guarantees are again actually just offering you the first place in the PPC or Paid Search listings - not the same thing at all.

 4. It makes no odds who you know at Google

Seriously. The notion that various Google employees sit around manipulating search results for their mates is nothing but a nonsense.

No one has a ’special relationship’ with anyone at Google. Well, actually – I’m sure they do – the guys and gals at Google have wives / girlfriends / husbands / boyfriends and so on, but that a different kind of  ’special relationship’, right?

It can be difficult to know who to trust and who to believe. Our advice? Read around the subject. Take the time to educate yourself and keep your wits about you. Oh, and if it sounds too good to be true -  it probably is.

Image credit Peter Blanchard

Welcome to our new feature. Each week we’ll be bringing you a round up of some of the best blog posts/articles we’ve read relating to Search Marketing – so here goes!

SEO

Stephan Spencer (via Search Engine Land) rants about a site which despite being ‘unfriendly’ to search engines, still ranks well.

Small Business SEO

Sugarrae (Rae Hoffman) wrote an excellent post on how small businesses might increase their online presence. She’s used lawn care to illustrate her example, but the ideas can easily be applied to any business.

Search Engines

Google Searchology 2009, saw the launch of some new developments – Google Search Options, Wonder Wheel, Google Squared and Rich Snippets - see Matt Cutts’ thoughts and Danny Sullivan’s Live Blogging coverage.

Blogging

Preparing to launch your blog? Or maybe just considering your options? Don’t miss Lucy Langdon’s fantastic blog launch checklist on SEOmoz.

Social Media

There’s been a whole lot of noise about Twitter, but I couldn’t agree more with Dr Pete’s post about the real power of Twitter on SEOmoz.

Jennifer Horowitz talks us through the seven deadly sins of social media - check yourselves boys and girls :)

Web Design & Usability

OK, so this post wasn’t written this week, but I think it’s fantastic. Dr Pete’s created a really rather marvellous cheat sheet to designing a usable website. The man’s a genius.

PPC

Joe of PPC Hero wrote a great post about broadening exposure on the Google Content Network - now many advertisers elect not to run on the content network, but for some clients we’ve seen some really good results – if you’re thinking about trying it yourself, it’s a must read.

Aaaannnnd Finally, Friday’s Funny

Well there;’s not much point in doing this if we can’t make you smile. 1000 Awesome Things is a blog – where in, as the name suggests they count down 1000 awesome things. Kinda like a daily reason to be cheerful – enjoy and have a lovely weekend.

Is there something I’ve missed? Hit up the comments