A ruling by the Australian Advertising Standards Board, which has declared Facebook an advertising medium as well as a communication medium, means that brands like Smirnoff are now responsible for closely monitoring all content that appears on their brand pages. With Facebook already facing some difficulties in better monetising the massive user base they have, the ruling could mean further problems especially if other countries follow suit.

Facebook Stock Price Decline

Facebook launched its IPO in May 2012 and disappointed the market. Despite launching at $38, valuing the website at $106bn, it finished the first week of trading down 16.5% at $31.91. Now with a price of less than $22, this represents a drop of more than 40% in around three months. Share prices certainly weren’t helped by the company’s financial report which was published on 26th July and showed slowing revenue growth and a reduced operating margin.

The Monetisation Challenge

One of the biggest challenges for Facebook, which boasts a user base of nearly 1 billion people, or approximately 1/8th of the world’s population, has been how best to monetise these numbers. Advertising revenues have proven hard to come by and the company is struggling to make money from mobile advertising revenue too. Mobile Facebook is seen as being the greatest growth area for the company and they continue to struggle to profit from the growth of mobile users.

Attracting The Big Names

Attracting big names to the site has proven reasonably successful in recent years. Many businesses now have brand pages, but these are effectively free. The ruling by the ASB, reported by ClickThrough-Marketing.com means that all brands, in Australia at least, are now responsible not only for the content they publish themselves but for the content published by their users and page visitors. This means that comments must be vetted to remove racist, sexist, and inaccurate content; a ruling which could lead many big brands to limit their Facebook use.

Implications Of The New Ruling

While this initial ruling is limited to Australian brands, advertising boards across the world could adopt similar stances and this would mean another obstacle for Facebook to overcome. It would also mean greater attention and greater resources would be required to manage a Facebook brand page for those that still wished to be use the site as an advertising channel.

There is a lot of information on the Internet regarding SEO and Internet marketing in general. Unfortunately, while there is some priceless information that will help you formulate an effective search optimisation strategy there is also a lot of less than useful information, some of which could end up costing you a lot of money and providing you with no benefit. In some cases you may suffer as a result of the misinformation that can be found.

Multiple Domains

Buying multiple domains is really only beneficial if you have a number of brands or you have a genuine need for multiple websites. Redirecting domains will not yield any great SEO gain while creating 5, 10, 20, or 100 entirely unique websites will not only prove time consuming but will usually mean that you will not be able to manage any of them as effectively as if you had concentrated on just one website.

Buy Up Top Level Domains

By all means, buy up your domain name under the various top level domains (eg .co.uk, .com, .net, etc…) and redirect the domains to a single website. If you offer services or products that are very different to one another then set up 2 websites, but don’t expect multiple domains in the same category to prove beneficial for your SEO campaign.

SEO has never been an exact science and this is at least partially because of the tendency of search engines like Google to update and dramatically change the ranking factors that they use to create their search ranking pages.

Where keyword stuffed content and Meta tags were once the stairway to search engine heaven, they now represent an escalator ride to the bottom of the pile. Similarly, websites that relied on reciprocal links and eventually those that were caught buying links also suffered a similar demise to pages littered with irrelevant keywords.

Meta Search

Before the days of advanced algorithms, search engines essentially relied on information provided entirely by the webmaster owner or publisher. They used keyword and description Meta tags, the title tag for a page, and the content on that page to determine which search phrases a page should rank highly for.

The Introduction Of Spam

However, the willingness of spammers to use irrelevant keywords and to overload pages with keywords to the detriment of site content quality meant that the search engines took action. And so, Google PageRank was born. This measured the number of inbound links a page received and Google thought that all was good. However, it soon became obvious that spammers had caught up with this particular ranking factor too and were acquiring links in many underhanded ways.

Poor Quality Sites Littered With Irrelevant Keyword Lists Be Gone

Google and its users witnessed web pages that were littered with poor quality content that had risen to the top. Website owners were taking links from any website that would offer them even if it meant selling their integrity and their soul to the highest bidder. So, Google saw that changes were required once again. A similar story also came about that saw the end of paid for links as a means of rising to the top.

The Modern SEO Role

The modern SEO not only has to concentrate on effective keyword planning but they need to create high quality content (for the benefit of human visitors) and developing a means of encouraging links from other sites. They need to be able to tap into the now fully fledged social media and social networking markets in order to hit every ranking factor the search engines have.

Have You Evolved Too?

There’s no doubting that the search engines have evolved – the question is, has your digital marketing agency evolved to keep pace with them?

Brightedge has become one of the leading providers of Enterprise SEO services and products.

They provide an advanced reporting and analytics platform that enables businesses of all sizes to measure, track, and improve their SEO performance. In a bid to further enhance the quality of the service they offer, Brightedge have now integrated Majestic SEO’s massive link intelligence database into that platform.

Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is vital in many aspects of business. Knowing what the competition are doing enables the astute business owner to do better. It can provide a means of offering competitive pricing, advanced features, and more extensive solutions to potential customers which, in turn, means that it can provide actionable data to the business owner. Such competitor analysis can also prove vital in a marketing campaign, especially in an SEO project where the aim is to outperform the competition.

The Brightedge Platform

SEO competitor analysis can be done manually but it requires a lot of extensive legwork. Brightedge offers a much less labour intensive alternative that has proven to provide excellent results for its users. One of the key features of the Brightedge platform is that it allows businesses to track intelligence regarding their own sites as well as their competitors and by integrating data from Majestic SEO they have further increased the size, scope, and benefit of the data that they offer.

The Majestic SEO Link Database

Majestic SEO has developed the largest commercial link database in the world and they query a billion pages every single day. This means that the data provided in the Majestic database is not only extensive but timely and accurate too. It can be used for competitor analysis or it can be used for news monitoring, developing marketing strategies, and benchmarking results for many aspects of an online business.

Improved Results For Businesses

The combination of Brightedge’s platform and Majestic’s network means the creation of an extremely powerful and highly advanced link analysis and SEO analysis platform. This platform is backed by data from many sources, but in Majestic SEO businesses will really benefit from large sets of relevant and beneficial data.

The introduction of Google Plus has seen a number of high profile changes in the Google stable and one of the most recent is the announcement that Google Places has become Google Plus Local. The change is actually more than a bid to move everybody over to using Google Plus as the new service will also incorporate Zagat, the restaurant rating service which Google purchased for $151m last year, and will make social search more beneficial, at least according to Google.

Google Plus

Google Plus has been dubbed as the search giant’s answer to the continuing success of Facebook. While the two sites initially operated in different areas of the web, their interests have collided more and more in recent years. With tension mounting between the two parties over the use of one another’s data, Google released its Google Plus social networking service.

Facebook Comparisons

Google Plus does not, as yet, enjoy the same user base as Facebook. Plus has around 100 million users while Facebook has nearly ten times this at approaching 1 billion users. There have also been worrying statistics released regarding the level of user engagement enjoyed by Google Plus page owners. However, Google continues to develop and improve the service while integrating it into more of their other services; moves that are likely to see its use continue to increase.

Google Places

Google Places enables people to search for local businesses and shops. It can be used to find takeaways that are within a certain distance and it, too, has undergone a number of revamps. It is now possible to search using keywords so instead of being shown every single restaurant within a 20 mile radius you can enter a keyword to be shown just the type of restaurant that interests you most.

Zagat Integration

The integration of Google Places into Google Plus Local means that users will be given instant access to Zagat reviews too. Marissa Mayer, VP of local search and maps for Google says that this integration means that users will be able to access “great reviews” when they search for a local business.

How do the rules for optimising an ecommerce website for SEO differ from the equivalent rules for more basic websites? Well, they differ in one major aspect: the SEO campaign for an ecommerce website typically requires much more work and attention. However, the basic principles of SEO do not differ for ecommerce websites, and the much greater amount of work and attention required in optimising an ecommerce website is certainly worthwhile given the subsequent benefits.

Make plentiful and pleasant content

Crafting content that is plentiful, detailed, informative and pleasant to read is typically the best manner of optimising any website for SEO, and so it remains the case with ecommerce websites. Crafting such content for ecommerce websites usually means writing detailed, accurate but not too lengthy descriptions for the products on sale through the website. This has a multitude of benefits for SEO purposes.

For a start, detailed product descriptions will naturally use more keywords, both head and longtail, than less detailed product descriptions. This will lead more people to click through to your website following a web search. Secondly, pages on your website with pleasant content will be the type that other websites will be keen to link to, which will in turn enhance the link building part of your SEO campaign. And, finally, allowing for user-generated reviews will further enhance your website’s standing with the search engines.

Show a bit of creativity

However, if you really want to give your ecommerce website that additional boost over competing websites, then you will have to draw on other, more creative methods of SEO that account for aspects of your website beyond its content.

You can, for example, take advantage of the popularity of social networking websites through showing social media badges on your website and permitting your website viewers to “share” information about your products on social networking websites. Meanwhile, using Google products like AdWords for your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and YouTube for videos on your website makes it easier for your website to rank highly with the most popular search engine, Google.

The official word from Google, and the short answer to this question, is that it does… well, kind of. The search giant announced some time ago that page speed was now a ranking factor, which indicates that the company will use usability metrics to determine your site’s rankings.

But how important is server speed, really? Does it, for example, have a dramatic effect on the top 10 search queries, even when such factors as content optimisation and link profile are considered?

Why server speed does have an effect

Of course, Google’s complicated algorithms mean that there are many factors to consider prior to server speed when you are creating, designing or updating a website.

Nonetheless, we don’t need to apply much of the mathematics to realise why the speed at which your web pages load matters to both Google and your visitors – after all, the needs of these two groups are really one and the same.

Anyone who is in charge of site design and search engine optimisation (SEO) will be aware of the importance of accessibility. A site that takes too long to load is not going to win much favour with impatient online browsers, so if this is the situation for your own site, your conversions can be adversely affected.

The Google approach to server speed

Reading the official blog post by Google that announced site speed as a factor, however, one gets a rather more ambiguous impression of its true impact on site ranking. The blog stated that while site speed was a new signal, it didn’t carry as much weight as a page’s relevance, adding that “fewer of 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal.”

What this appears to mean is that server speed will only become a real influence in circumstances where all other ranking signals of competing websites are very close, or when there is a very poor load time. Page speed may become a factor, then, if sites have both high relevancy scores and close link metrics, although this doesn’t seem too likely.

Nonetheless, as a website owner, server speed remains important to the user experience and the revenue that you generate online – whether it does, or doesn’t, also give you a modest SEO boost.

Penguin is the highly anticipated over optimisation penalty and anti-spam update that has been released by Google. Its aim was to bring down poor quality websites and to thwart those sites that rely on poor quality links. Not only have a great many links been devalued, offering little or no benefit to an SEO campaign, but there are a lot of webmasters receiving penalty warnings from Google. A drop in rankings and, therefore, a drop in traffic levels is possible unless you heed the warnings and adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.

Penguin Targets

The Penguin update was primarily aimed at those websites that used linking techniques deemed unfair by Google. Blog network and site network links were heavily penalised while the use of paid links could lead to a site wide index. The Panda update is a site-wide update and this means that if one of your pages suffers a penalty then so, too, do the rest. By the same token, though, if you adjust your SEO campaign and perform well as a result, you will enjoy good results across the site.

Webmaster Tools Warning Emails

Google has been sending warning emails to Webmasters for some time now and you should check your Webmaster Tools account. If you don’t have one, get one, and use the information that is provided to hunt down low quality links that could lead to a penalty. Have them removed or, at the very least, ensure that you have a high ratio of high quality links to poor quality links.

Check Your Content

It isn’t just links that have been targeted by the Penguin update, though, and you should ensure that your content meets Google guidelines. Primarily, this means targeting your content to your readers rather than the search engines although you can still consider the use of one or two keywords in your writing to be good practice. It highlights a topic to readers and does offer Google guidance for choosing relevant topics and searches.

Varied Links

Your link profile needs to appear as natural as possible and this means diversity. Links should point at all pages on a website and they should use a variety of anchor text keywords and phrases. This includes a number of links that use your website address as anchor text and your company name.

Social Influence

Social indicators are being picked up and used with increasing frequency by the likes of Google. Microsoft’s Bing is also known to favour factors such as the number of likes, +1s, and shares that your content receives. This will give you domain authority and it will give you, as an author, authority too.

Microsoft is attempting to win over Google users by further integrating Facebook results and features into its search results. The search engine will include a new sidebar on the right of search results and this will suggest to users which of their friends, from various networks including both Facebook and Google+, may be able to give them the answer they are looking for. Social indicators will include liked pages, photo content, and status updates and will help to identify those social experts that could give the answer to a particular question.

Social Search

The move to social search has been quite a protracted one. Google initially tried showing results from the likes of Twitter in their own results but this partnership was short lived. The search giant introduced its own social network in the shape of Google+ which they hope will help them to provide more social results to users.

Microsoft Stake In Facebook

While Microsoft doesn’t have its own social network, it is actually a 1.6% stakeholder in Facebook, having paid $240m for the shares in 2007. With Facebook about to launch their IPO potentially valuing the company at nearly $100bn, this would put Microsoft’s stake at well over $1bn and make it an astute piece of business. However, Bing isn’t putting all of its eggs in the very busy Facebook basket.

Friends In The Know

The social results section will offer a list of users’ friends that look the most likely to be able to provide an answer to their search query. For example, if you were to search for information on the best place to grab a coffee in New York, then friends that like Coffee, are based in New York, and are highlighted as relevant in other ways will be flagged. Searchers can then ask questions of their friends directly from the sidebar.

The New Bing Sidebar

The sidebar will use information from Facebook, from rival Google+, and from Twitter, FourSquare, Quora, and LinkedIn and the search engine has said that they are making the move based on the fact that the majority of people listen to personal recommendations from those that they trust and that are close to them.

In its constant quest to improve upon search results, Google has been testing a Sources area that appears in the right hand column of the search results pages where ads would normally be displayed. The Sources information, which contains information about actors, shows, and other credits for various forms of media, is currently only available to a limited number of people but it looks likely that it will be rolled out to the general public soon.

Search Engine Use

People search for many different things on search engines and while a lot of use the power of Google’s index to find information on products we want to buy or services we wish to use, there are those occasions when we look for information on TV shows, films, and actors and actresses as well as bands and other forms of media and artist. This Sources area will display in-depth information pertaining to these forms of media.

Sources Information

In the right column, if you were to search for a TV show, and you were lucky enough to be one of the testers, you would receive a brief snippet of information usually taken from Wikipedia. You would also see a list of cast members, and even a related search area that shows similar TV programmes. For actors and actresses you would see a list of their credits as well as related actors.

Google Updates

Google has recently launched a number of updates not only to its search results in the hope of further improving results but to various other websites and pieces of online real estate that they own. YouTube is undergoing some changes hand in hand with Google+, the search engine’s foray into the social networking world.

Direct Answers

Another change that you may have already noticed but that slipped under the radar for a lot of people is the expansion of the Direct Answers feature. This means that when you type in a particular query or question, Google will effectively provide you with the answer before it provides you with the usual list of search results. There is also a link to View More from where you can see the sources of this information.

Photo Courtesy of Cyrus Sheppard