Pod1 Blog

Re-targeting or remarketing is fast becoming a mainstream tool, but for good reason.

By Re-targeting you are able to serve up highly targeted advertising to users who have already engaged with you brand to some extent. This means that they already know your brand which allows more offer driven advertising to follow them around. It also is really effective at keeping awareness being served to people who fail to finish going through the purchasing funnel. For example if they drop out when they are meant to insert their credit card details because the phone rings, there will be some users who forget about finishing their transaction altogether. But through retargeting you are able to maintain a level of awareness for your brand as they browse the internet and hopefully re-capture them to finish off the purchasing cycle.

Really?

Awful…..

Thoughts?

Great Britain has 37 million social network users

73% of British Internet users use social network sites. In total this is about 37 million people.
Facebook is the most popular site with 64%. 24% of British Internet users use Twitter. LinkedIn
comes 3rd with 21% penetration amongst British Internet users.

Twiitter, the exception

87% of all Brits know Twitter, but only 24% uses it. The intention of shortly starting to use Twitter is large:
18% of non-users are planning to start using it soon.

42% of British social network users follow a brand

4 Brits out of 10 who have a social network site profile follow at least one brand. Four sectors are very popular: media, fashion, food and retail chains. Survey shows that people become a fan of a product after having used it. 56% of fans expect extra promotions of the brand on social media, 55% want to receive invites to events and 50% are looking forward to reading more product information.

Consumers wish to be a part of a company’s management

Some consumers are keen to be involved in their favourite brand’s management. 49% of all British social network users would love to share ideas with a company; 27% would love nothing more than to co-create new products and services with a fun brand.

About the study
• More than 9,000 respondents
• 35 countries (Europe, South & North America, Asia and Oceania)
• Sample representative for the Internet population of the participating countries
• Research realised by InSites Consulting

Google.com has introduced adverts for daily deals to its searchers. The service is called “Google Offers“. Same as we do on Groupon , we can subscribe to receive daily alerts about the available deals at the places of our choice .

After months of waiting and years of guesswork , the transition from Yahoo’s organic search to Microsoft’s Bing is finally over. Yahoo has announced that it is ready to transition its European organic search results to Microsoft as a part of the Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance.

Yahoo said that the transition does not involve paid search results but websites which rely on organic searches for visitors should take some precautions.

Here is the email announcing that the UK organic results will be powered by Bing from 3rd August.

An interesting info-graphic from Ignite showing which social networks are popular with which demographics, which ones are on the up and which are looking decidedly downwards.

Social Media links are gaining ground over directories and farms

2011 has been the year when Google declared war on ‘low quality websites’.  Google big Panda update which changed the SEO playfield was “designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites”. It was mainly the “farmers” who suffered from these changes, but internet directories and themed guides also lost in value, traffic and revenue.

“a real person finds this URL interesting”
As the message was clear, our link-building strategy started focusing more towards websites which are maintaining active online communities. Instead of merely checking the page rank, we looked for websites with high numbers of re-tweets, re-blogs, likes, digs, stumbles and other strange verbs which mean “a real person finds this URL interesting”.

” a real person you know finds this URL interesting”
Soon after, Google also started caring about what people say and Google’s +1 button is now live…. With it, Google hopes to improve its personalised search services!

“a real person votes this URL ‘is all about Social Media Optimisation’”
Already a significant part of SEO labour goes towards link-building, a standard SEO procedure where you are gathering “votes” towards your website. Each anchor link is a vote and the anchor text is what we “vote” for!

Social Media is all about voting, suggesting and experience sharing.
Still though… Right after I will tweet my blog post, my tweet this will not count as a  “vote” saying: “a real person votes this URL ‘is all about ‘Social Media and SEO’”?

What about links from Social Media ?

• Does Google count them in their secret ranking algorithm?
• Are they ‘real’ links?
• Can I go and spam twitter looking for back-links?

Le’ts ask yahoo, it has never failed me before!

I like yahoo’s answer ! “Twitter links are useless for link building” due to the nofollow attribute. Here is a screenshot of the twitter.com interface where we can see the usage of “nofollow”.

twitter links are using the nofollow attribute

But tweets get republished on a number of different websites….
So I added in the yahoo answer…  “Twitter links are useless for link building when they are published through twitter’s  twitter.com interface”

The above becomes obvious when we explore the anchor links on tweetmeme.com, where there is no usage of the “nofollow” attribute. The same happens in dozens of other websites. My personal favourite is paper.li and this first article on Social Media Optimisation for SEO is going to be about their platform!

“paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format. A great way to discover content that matters to you – even if you are not connected 24/7!” [Taken from Paper.li website]

Originally introduced to me when a friend published his newspaper. Since I was mentioned as one of the contributors, I clicked and entered the website and started the reverse engineering!

Paper.li displays what your community “votes” for
Paper.li will either parse every item on your twitter news-stream or the one generated by your twitter lists and it will automatically generate a newspaper every 12h, 24h or week. Note that once the newspaper is generated there is no space for further editing, removal or addition of posts.  Assuming your social media strategy is working alright and your influence levels towards your network of contacts are high this should not be a problem, as the tweet stream of your brand, interest, reason etc should all be relevant to you.

Once your paper is published, you get a paper.li URL, which does get indexed by search engines and you can start sculpturing its Page Rank and improve the SEO value it carries, while it is link-building for you.

Summing up, I love paper.li as it:

• Is optimized for SEO and links to all the sources it used. It also allows a custom page title
• Supports user engagement and participation in ways which will satisfy even the most demanding PRs
• Offers a real picture of our network/community
• Brings a smile on my face when I see myself mentioned on one
• Transforms my tweet into -> a real persons vote that this blog post  ‘is all about Social Media OptimisationAllows my tweets to vote “”

You can read our Pod1 paper.li here

Hope you enjoyed this blog post, see you soon with  Part 2 “Title TBA”

According to the Official Google blog this looks like it could very much be the case.

Let me explain, it all started with a misspelled search on Google for the term ‘tarsorrhaphy’ (FYI a surgical procedure on eyelids). The user had mistakenly typed ‘torsorophy’ (Doh!) but google suggested the correct spelling and accordingly displayed the top 2 results. Nothing strange here so far, until someone at Google checked the same query on Bing which showed the same 2 results without the corrected spelling!

Coincidence? Google didn’t think so and so to ‘test’ this hunch Google decided to insert ’synthetic queries’ (for synthetic read fake) into the results with real webpages that had nothing to do with the query as the first result.

They then took 20 Google engineers gave them clean laptops running Internet Explorer 8 and opted in to the suggested sites feature and the default options on the Bing Toolbar.

They then asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, within a couple of weeks Bing started to display the same unrelated results for the ’synthetic search terms’, (you sly dog you Google;).

The screen shots below from Google’s own blog make for pretty compelling evidence, but I’ll let you make up your own mind.

Could it be that when Bing doesn’t know the answer to something they, like everyone else, now just Google it?

When asked for his views on what has become know as ‘The Bing Sting’ Harry Shum, vice president of Bing, said: “We do not copy Google’s search results. We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results,”

He added, “Opt-in programs like the toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites,”

Read the full article here or go to Bing and Google it!

UPDATE

The site has now launched and the official description is below;

Boutiques.com is a personalized shopping experience, brought to you by Google, that lets you find and discover fashion goods through a collection of boutiques curated by taste-makers — celebrities, stylists, designers, and fashion bloggers. Boutiques uses visual technology to help fashionistas discover and shop their look and creates the opportunity for designers to showcase their collections and latest inspirations online.

It is only currently available in the US but there are plans to roll it out to other countries. Have a play and let us know what you think.