Simply Zesty » Search – Simply Zesty

Developing a social search strategy – content reigns supreme

Lauren Fisher — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:29:24 +0000

Social search is gaining in popularity as a marketing term and practice as more brands recognise the benefit in developing a combined strategy and the need to react to changing consumer behaviour. A search engine results page is no longer just a mass of static links, but combines photo, video and realtime content to present the user with an increasingly changing web of gateways to content online. The focus for a long time has been on the strategy on external social networks – increasing your profiles to reach new users but also improve your search engine rankings to control the front page for your results. The website has taken somewhat of a backfoot when it comes to a social search strategy, but you risk ignoring it at your peril.

Content is still king

I have a bit of a problem with this hypothesis, as it started doing the rounds a few years ago but I felt it ignored key factors. Many companies reacted and went on a content-creating drive, without looking at the distribution strategy behind it. A recent survey by Marketing Sherpa – The 2012 Search Marketing Benchmarking Report – shows us that content is one of the most effective methods of SEO, but it is also the most difficult, as the graphic below shows :

This is an invaluable chart for brands and marketers as it shows that while content is the most effective SEO/social search strategy, the results aren’t going to come as easily as you think. Built into your content strategy has to be a full plan of distribution, both to other sites, as well as creating methods to allow people to find your own content. SEO goes a long way towards this, but shouldn’t be the complete content distribution strategy on its own.

Making the most of social search

Content is the number one currency online. Whether it’s text, photo, or video, it’s what people trade in. Good content provides you with entertainment, it gets you noticed by your followers and will probably get you new followers. Brands can benefit from this by providing people with the ‘stock’ that they want to trade in. What you need to recognise however, is that you need to make this content available in increasingly changing and developing formats. Now that Twitter has embedded images and videos in its search results for example, it’s important to include more of this type of content in your Twitter feed, to increase the likelihood of you getting found. A good social search strategy needs to look at how Google works, as well as the social networks themselves. Both are indicators of – and pointers to – good content.

By developing a clear content strategy, you can start to commercialise your social media activity. The report concludes that social media content, executed effectively, can drive lead generation by 30% and revenue by 114% – certainly good news for marketers. This shows the ability for content to instigate the ‘natural’ part of the consumer journey, with the onus then being on the brand to use this to drive the consumer purchase or conversion.

Let’s hear it for the website

Intrinsic in a good social search strategy, is a clear strategy of the role of your site. Though social commerce is growing rapidly, the majority of your sales/conversions will still be through your site. An increasing amount of advertising is pointing people to social sites, but this should exist alongside the strategy for using your website. It is by no means a dark corner of the web, and the findings by Marketing Sherpa show the benefits of focusing on good content for your site, alongside a clear SEO strategy. The fact is that while you can exercise social SEO best practice, the extent to which you can control this on an external site is limited. Social search is by no means just about social media, but integrating and implementing social technologies into your website, where you are more likely to drive the conversion.

This may not be the way things are done in a few years time, and the role of the website in the long-term is certainly in question. But for now, don’t forget the basics. You can have all the widgets and gadgets that you like, but content wins out overall.

10 Simple Ways To Improve Your Twitter Search Experience

Niall Harbison — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:25:06 +0000

Ever since the early days of Twitter when Summize popped up and was bought by Twitter and turned in to search.twitter.com everybody realized the power of real time search on Twitter. It’s one of the main reasons that thee service is what it is today and it allows people to tap in to what people are thinking around the world at any given moment. Most people use the service at it’s very simplest form and type in the word of hash tag that they are looking for and it returns the results you need but just like other search engines there are a lot of additional ways in which you can use Twitter search and we wanted to explore them and give you the complete guide. If Twitter search is something that you are using on a daily basis and you use it to monitor what people say about your brand or to engage in customer service with your brand then it is essential that you take an hour out of your day and learn some of these great ways of vastly improving your Twitter search experience…

Search By Pictures only

“Haiti” twitpic OR yfrog OR post.ly filter:links
One of the things that I like looking at most on Twitter are pictures as I find that with some events (especially sports) they can really give you a different perspective on the story. In the example above the search is running so as you only see a constant stream of pictures coming out of the Haiti disaster. A highly effective way of painting a picture in your head and as you say a picture paints a thousand words.

Find People On Twitter (not technically Twitter search but still useful)

One thing that can be hard to do on Twitter is find the people that you are looking for. You can use Twitter search for a ton of different things but finding people based on their interests is not an easy thing to do. There are a couple of Twitter directories like WeFollow that might help but Tweepsearch is an invaluable tool as it searches through people’s bios and it is amazing how many good contacts and relevant people you can find through this tool.

Search your multiple profiles

to:niallharbison OR to:laurenfisher
It is getting to the stage where a lot of people have multiple twitter accounts (work, business, pleasure etc) and you want to be able to search them all in one go and respond to people without having to do individual searches for each one. In the example above the search will send back any replies mentioning either myself or Lauren so as we never miss anything. You could do this with your brand or people associated with your brand.

Monitoring You Competitors Conversations

from:dellOutlet OR to:dellOutlet
It is easy enough to see what your competitor is saying by running a simple search but you will also want to see what people are replying to them and paint a better picture of how they are actually interacting with their customers. Use the example above and replace the names with the competitor of your choice. (In the example above I have used Dell computers).

Find The Best People + Their Best Links

from:kevinrose filter:links
Some people share great links right? Those same people also share a load of pointless chatter that I have no interest in listening to so this is one of the best ways to just get the quality information. I like the links that Kevin Rose share this simple search lets me scroll through every single link that he shares and thus have an amazing bank of content to read. Again this works with multiple user names so pop 10 great link sharers in there and you’ll have your very own awesome personal feed of great unique content to read.

Have Your Questions Answered

â€œgmail downâ€ ?
Wouldn’t it be great if all the answers to your questions were out there before you even thought of the question? In the example above I would be able to see if there was a widespread problem with Gmail or if I was just seeing problems myself. The fact that there are only a couple of people asking if Gmail is down in the last couple of hours tells me there is probably no widespread problem. Use the question function to get as create as you like.

Using Hashtags

#hashtags
You’ll often find that conversations around things like breaking news stories, sports events and conferences are assigned a # (this symbol is called a hashtag) and a word that mentions the event. The main reason that this is done is so as you can easily follow a stream of conversation around the event that you are watching. Using the hashtag rather than random words brings lots of people together and ensures that you don’t miss any tweets.

Cut Out The Duplicate Content

“Haiti” -rt -via
You’ll often find that when new stories break on Twitter that you are seeing all the same content over and over again as people Re tweet it and pass it on to each other. Use the example above to take out all the RT’s and Via’s to ensure that you get mostly the new and original content that is breaking on a particular story. You may still get some duplicate content but the chances are you will find lots more new and fresh links this way.

Save Yourself Time In Future

You may find some great searches that you want to keep running for the future and most of the third party apps like Tweetdeck will let you do just that by adding a new column where the search will run continuously. If you are using the Twitter web interface you can simply add the search to your saved searches so as you can access all your searches in the future with one simple click…

Twitter’s Guide

Here is the official list that is provided by Twitter themselves. They also provide advanced search with some simple categories to choose from in a more basic format here.

The Battle Between SEO And Social Search : A Debate

Niall Harbison — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:50:34 +0000

We all heard for years how SEO was the best way to get your site to the top of the rankings on Google and it is to this day a massive business. Social media is bringing about a change in the way we all consume content and spend money online but has it made SEO totally redundant or can the 2 practices live side by side? What should you be spending time on for your website or business? Budgets are tight at the moment so you want to make sure you are getting the best bang for your buck so we invited two leaders in their field one from each side of the fence to debate where we are headed. I want to try and open this up as much as possible in the comments so as we can get as wide a range of opinions as possible so feel free to get involved and leave your opinions. So where are we headed? Here are the 2 opinions…

Social Search

Erik Qualman is the author of socialnomics and the Global Vice President of Online Marketing for EF Education, headquartered in Lucerne, Switzerland.

There will be a blending of search and social. We are already seeing this with Twitter being incorporated into the Google organic results. Consumers we will be privy to a) sponsored listings b) organic listings c) social graph listings. During a purchase decision we will utilize all three of these data points – however I would strongly argue that item c – what our friends and peers think – will be “weighted” the most. We are seeing “word of mouth” transforming into “world of mouth.” If I have my first baby and need to purchase a child seat for the car and I can see via social/search tools that 30 of my friends have purchased a child seat in the past 18 months. And, of those 30, 23 have purchased the exact same model and all have had a great experience, well then I’m going to be fairly confident in that purchase decision and I may not even look at the sponsored or organic listings. SEO is still a vital part of any product/companies health (especially in the here and now), but as we look down the road, the simple fact is that I trust more what my friends and peers think than an algorithm. So good companies are starting to listen to what is being said in the â€œsocial sphereâ€ and adjusting their products/services accordingly.
Erik is the guy behind lots of great videos including this one…

SEO

Alastair McDermott Website Doctor

Alastair McDermott runs SEO company Website Doctor and can be found on Twitter here

My brief here is to talk about the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) vs social media, and where I see the industry going over the next year. SEO here meaning “organic search”, or more simply: the results you get when you search Google, etc.

SEO and organic search is very important in 2010 – as is social media. Most organisations are significantly increasing their social media spend compared with last year – mainly because it was so far behind other marketing spend. SEO spend continues to increase, though at a smaller pace since larger organisations realized the importance of SEO in 2007-2009 and started to invest heavily then.

SEO itself has undergone huge changes in 2009, mainly focused on the areas of real-time (e.g. incorporation of Twitter results and news), personalisation (based on your browsing history), and the related local results (geographical based). This trend will continue as Google drives to improve in particular their real-time results which are still at an early stage currently. There is a general shift of consumers moving from their reliance on search to peers for news, recommendations and answers – Twitter and Facebook are capitalising on that, and Google are working hard to combat it by the partnership with Twitter, amongst other strategies.

The first port of call for most people looking to answer a question online is still Google search. Why? This is Google’s stated goal in search:

“Our goal is very simple: We want to return to the user the answer that they need. It’s about getting people what they need, and about getting the results to be as accurate and fast as possible. We’re innovating, and concentrating just on the relevancy of results. Last year we made over 450 improvements to the algorithm.”

Google Search Guru Udi Manber, April 2008.

Even in 2010, SEO basics are still the same as before: if you focus on creating good, relevant, link-worthy content then your authority and relevancy will build and you will rank highly in results. Unfortunately there is no quick fix or silver bullet for SEO, and as your competition invests in creating content so the bar rises.

If Google made 450 changes to their search algorithm (the formula which they use to rank results) in 2007, how many tweaks and changes do you think they made in 2008 and 2009? Google are continuously tweaking their algorithm on a daily basis – so instead of trying to cheat on this exam, it’s time to knuckle down and put in the effort!

What’s to come in 2010? More real-time stuff: more focus on Twitter, news headlines and maybe even Facebook integration in either Google or Bing. Social media will continue to grow, though not at the breakneck pace of 2009. My advice – sign up for whatever social media you prefer, e.g. Twitter & YouTube, and start blogging: high quality posts infrequently are more useful than poor quality posts frequently!

Back to the original question of the importance of SEO vs social media – ultimately choosing the right tool for the job is as important as ever. SEO, social media, and all of the other facets of online marketing (don’t forget email marketing) will continue to be relevant for some time to come.

Where Do You Stand?

This subject is a hotly debated one and one that we wanted to gather as much feedback as possible from so feel free to get involved in the comments and leave your opinion. Where do you see search going? Is it becoming more social? Is SEO as crucial as it once was? Will the two professions merge further together in the coming year? We look forward to hearing your thoughts…

The future of Bing is not in search.

Lauren Fisher — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:28:46 +0000

Bing has been grabbing a few headlines lately and it has certainly stormed onto the search market this year, making a big impact. I think there could be a potential for Bing, but I don’t think it’s future lies in search. At least, not as we know it. The simple thing is, I don’t really think anyone can challenge Google’s search product now. It’s been around too long, the results are just too good and I don’t think users really feel compelled to change.Â Google has a monopoly for a reason, it’s not like other search engines haven’t tried to challenge them and failed. Bing can still make a play for Google’s traffic though and I think there is a big future for the site in areas other than direct search.

Bing really started to get my attention a few months back when I spotted that they were integrating results within Facebook search :

This was a great move both for Bing and Facebook and it’s refreshing to see a new product on the market that could be a real challenge to Google’s custom search platform. I’m still not convinced of the quality of Bing’s search product itself, which explains the title of this post, but this is undoubtedly a powerful tool and is certainly the most likely reason I would now click on a Bing search result. Social is clearly of importance to Microsoft’s Bing, as their recent homepage changes incorporated access to Facebook, Twitter and Wolfram Alpha. This is certainly more prominent on the site than Google’s recent inclusion of social network updates in search results (sitting at the bottom of the page) which shows that Bing seriously understand the importance of search to the whole social user experience. If they continue to explore new ways of integrating search and social networking – the two biggest activities online – they could well have Google shaking in their boots.

Of course, the other important product for Bing comes with news that they may be launching a competitor service to Google News. Techcrunch broke the news yesterday that Microsoft had a secret meeting with top European publishers on Tuesday this week. Nice timing for Microsoft with Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that he would be ready to withdraw Google’s access to his sites within months. And, as Techcrunch notes, Microsoft are certainly going the right way about it, cosying up to publishers by pledging to invest in ACAP. The Automated Content Access Protocol was set up by major publishing organisations to revolutionise the protection of copyrighted content online, including how sites were crawled by spiders.

Google News is still a new enough product for Microsoft to take on, as it is not as engrained in people’s search experience as Google search itself. If Bing can do with news results what they’re starting to do with their own search product, streamlining it with other online activity then they could develop a superior service. As I said at the start of this post, I don’t think Bing can challenge Google when it comes to straightforward, direct searching. But the downside of Google’s monopoly (for them) is that they’ve enjoyed a comfortable position in the market without having to do to much so they might not be ready for a challenge. Bing has the upper hand here because they have to fight to steal a share of the search market. If Bing start to develop the quality products we’re starting to see the roots of, they could sneak up on Google when they’re not really looking.

5 Ways To Own Your Business Search Results On Google

Niall Harbison — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:18:38 +0000

We all know just how important it is for businesses to protect their identity online and one of the most effective ways of doing that is controlling what people find when they search for your company or even for you as a person. You may not always be able to control it 100%Â and there are some companies who return very negative results but there are some good practices that you can put in place so as people get a good first impression when they search for you on Google. Here are our 5 tips for controlling your image online…

1.Link to a friendly post

Chances are that somebody has written about you or your business in a favourable way at some stage so you want to make sure that people find this credible review of your business when people search for you. Build links to this page and promote it as you would one of your own. Link to it from your media section and your own blog to help it’s authority as a page that will help it to climb the search engines. This is much better than tooting your own horn and will make people think that you are even bigger than you actually are. If you are lucky enough to have multiple articles about your company repeat the process accordingly.

2.Buy your own name with Google Adwords

This may seem like a waste of time as the logic is that if people are searching for your name or business they will find it but you have to remember that most people click on one of the first couple of results on Google. The paid for search term will stand out and mean they don’t see any of the other negative stuff further down the search page.

3.Get a blog

Blogs rank incredibly well for SEO as they are updated daily and are search engine friendly. Write an authoritative blog on your area of expertise and it will almost certainly attain the first or second ranking on Google. Make sure to keep the content fresh and relevant though as there is nothing worse than somebody finding your company blog only to see that you haven’t updated it in a year.

4.Get a Facebook page

Facebook ranks really well with Google and you will usually see a businesses page in the first handful of results if it has been updated on a regular basis. A Facebook page allows you to add a fun, friendly and warm side to your business although you should keep it professional with all the relevant contact details so as your potential customers don’t have to go any further in search of your contact details.

5.Use YouTube video

You’ll often see Youtube video indexing very well with Google and the good news is that they are putting a huge amount of resources in to making their ability to search even better. You don’t need to have a massively produced corporate video if you don’t have the budget as all you will need is a simple interview with your founder or CEO talking about the company and tag and describe it correctly on Google.. This could be just the engagement that your potential customer needs to form a connection with you that could lead to a sale or partnership further down the line.

Is the honeymoon period over for Bing?

Lauren Fisher — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:30:26 +0000

Statcounter have recently released results that show search engine Bing has recorded the first decline in traffic since launch.The rival search engine to Google was beginning to take a healthy percentage of the search market.

Bing’s share of the US market fell from 9.64% to 8.51%. Consequently, Google’s share increased from 77.83% in August, to 80.08% in September. This trend is hardly surprising, as it’s likely many users tried out Bing for the attraction of a new search provider, before returning to the trusted Google.

The declining share of the market for Bing also comes at the same time that their search results have been integrated with Facebook, which shows that the experiment has had negligible effect. It also coincides with Google adding increased functionality to their search results, which will inevitably steal traffic from rivals Yahoo and Bing.

It’s still early days for Bing and the decline in traffic is no reason to write it off yet. The best opportunity for Bing is to try and be a whole new search experience, not just the new Google. Steps such as adding their results to Facebook are the right way to go about doing this, but it may just take more time to settle in. It would also be interesting to see the average age of the user on Google, compared to Bing. It may be the case that Bing will become the choice of search for the younger generation as they seek a ‘cool’ new brand.

The Ultimate Guide To Delicious

Niall Harbison — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 23:48:40 +0000

The chances are that you will have spotted the logo on the left many times on your travels and you have probably also heard about Delicious but you might not be familiar with what it is and what it does but I am urging you now that you should sit up and start using it. At it’s most basic level Delicious is an incredibly simple way of storing your bookmarks online which can then be accessed from any computer once you log in. With most of our working lives revolving around online content Delicious is a ridiculously useful tool but the benefits far exceed simply organizing your own content and we try to explain them here and give you as many resources as possible for you to understand it and start using it yourself.

As always with these sorts of services that people have trouble understanding I think it is always best to start with a video that explains the service and the guys from Common Craft do a great job of explaining Delicious in simple English…

Some of the delicious basics

1.Searching on Delicious

2.The popular stories on Delicious, this is where you want to be

3.Delicious explained on Wikipedia

4.How to use delicious like a pro

5.Some simple ways to get the most out of delicious

Resources for using delicious on your website or blog

1Add Delicious and other social sharing buttons to your site.

2.Add link rolls to your website to show off content that you think is valuable to your readers

3.Get a nifty little delicious widget

4.WordPress plugin for customizing Delicious on your blog

5.Purpose built delicious pages

Spread the word about great content using Delicious

1.Share links using Twitter and Email

2.5 Tips to get traffic using Delicious

3.Add delicious to Facebook

4.Tips on creating bookmarkable content

5.A Marketers Guide to Delicious

6.2 Part video series on how to get targeted traffic to your site

7.Some easy ways to get listed on Delicious homepage

8.See when users bookmark your site with delicious

9.The several habits of a wildly successful delicious user

10.Become a Delicious power user

Some Delicious Extras

1.Stories with over 50 saves to delicious

2.How to Use Delicious, a simple guide

3.10 great people you should be following on delicious

4.8 Tips for better bookmarking on Delicious

5.How to get more bookmarks and better links

6.3rd Party tools for delicious

7.A selection of great hacks for Delicious

8.Convert Twitter links to Delicious bookmarks automatically

9.Using delicious on your iPhone

10.Be careful what you save!

All in all I think you can see that Delicious is a great tool to use and although it will take a bit of time to get used to it and to get the best out of it you can clearly see that there are some great tips and tricks in this list. Be sure to add any other tips that you have in the comments and get bookmarking today!

Did Facebook Just Wipe Out Twitter By Adding A Simple @ Symbol?

Niall & Lauren — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:26:20 +0000

Facebook just announced something that is going to shake through the whole social media scene and could just wipe Twitter off the map….they have added the ability to @reply your friends. Facebook (who recently got to fairly late stage discussions about acquiring Twitter) are very keen to get into the “real time” space and have made tentative steps but nobody at all had predicted they would roll this out especially so soon after acquiring Friendfeed. There is more on how the system will actually work below but here are some of the incredible advantages that this will bring…..

Large Reach

While it is embraced by those avid users, Twitters reach is still unarguably small, compared to Facebook. Facebook currently has over 250 million active users, compared to 50 million on Twitter. If you want to have a conversation with someone you know, the chances are they’re on Facebook. On Twitter, you’re restricted to those that you ‘know’ on that platform.

Business Friendly

Facebook will increasingly become ever more appealing to businesses. The introduction of the @reply combined with the recent functionality to search through people’s public updates makes for an appealing option to those looking to engage with people based on certain interests. The fact that businesses on Facebook show off content on their fan pages rather than trying to “target” consumers directly on twitter makes it a more business friendly option

No 140

No character limit. While the 140 character limit is admittedly a big part of Twitter’s charm, it is ultimately restricting. In Facebook, your message can be as long, or as short, as you want.

Rich media inline

The beauty of the @reply with Facebook, is that it’s easily integrated with the other functionality on the site, including photo and video. If you want to share a picture on Twitter, you have to use a third party app such as Tweetdeck or YFrog . In Facebook, this is all done under one platform. You could upload a video for example, post it through your status update and include names of particular friends you want to share it with.

Goodbye to spam

Within Facebook’s new @reply you are still restricted to those that you are already friends with, unlike Twitter. The reply works by presenting a drop-down list of friends’ names. While some may see this as restrictive, it presents an attractive option to those that are tired of ‘spambots’ on Twitter, which seem to be increasingly plaguing the microblogging site.

How does it work

Well according to the Facebook blog…

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.

RIP Twitter?

Anecdotal evidence was already starting to suggest that twitter users had been using the service in a different way recently anyway with a huge influx of brands targeting potential customers and most people using the service to find good content and quality links and indeed we were just about to write a post when this broke about how users are getting fatigue of the service and struggling to find new followers due to the sheer noise. Just look at the response when I asked this morning if users were still following new people, hardly enthusiastic…

All in all Twitter is still a great service but the rich media elements of Facebook, steady infrastructure and huge numbers of securely connected people will make Facebook the overall winner and make the guys over at Twitter wish they had cashed out around about the time that Oprah made her brief appearance on the service!

How Much Traffic Can Stumbleupon Send You?

Lauren Fisher — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 13:52:05 +0000

If you have a website or blog online and one of your main goals is to get as much traffic as possible (lets face it that is what a large proportion of people on the web are up to) then you will probably have read somewhere that you need to focus a little bit of your time on Stumbleupon. For those of you not familiar with stumbleupon it is a toolbar that you can install and it helps you to find random sites that are within your field of interest. It is great from a users perspective but I wanted to share with you what it can do from a publisher’s perspective…

I am using the example of Foodandfizz which is a site we run over at Lookandtaste. I started promoting Foodandfizz 3 months ago and built it up to 20,000 unique visitors in the first couple of months and on the odd occasion we would get a bonus of about 500 uniques per day from stumbleupon but these would only happen about once a week. We then had a little re-design of the logo and tightened up the design in general and I started working on promoting it on sites like Stumbleupon and the results and takeoff have been incredible. Here is a section of stats spanning 10 days…

Now some of the key things that you will see form these stats…

Quarter of a million visitors over the span of a full month
Very high bounce rate
Very low amount of pageviews
Large amount of new visits

When you take into account that people would normally view about 3 pages per visit on the site this is certainly very poor quality traffic but there is also no doubt that the site is being opened up to a much bigger audience than you would normally expect. There was a certain amount of work that went into building a presence on Stumbleupon (probably about 3 full days of my time spread over a month) but as you can see once they do turn on the traffic tap to your site it can certainly be worth it. With that in mind I thought I would share some of my tips for getting you some Stumble action!!

Get Stumbled Tips

1.Only submit highly visual pages from your site. Users will be on your site for a fraction of a second and you need to get their attention real fast.

2.Build a couple of accounts on SU and start surfing around and adding some content yourself. Once you have built up a bit of trust submit a few of your own pages.

3.Ask a few friends to install SU and give a few of your pages the thumbs up.

4.Twitter out some of the links that you want stumbled as people on Twitter will be more likely to have a stumble bar installed.

5.Add a stumble button to the relevant pages so as users can quickly stumble it.

All in all stumbleupon is well worth using if you are playing the traffic game and although many people will leave instantly there are plenty who will find your site for the first time and come back time after time.

The Importance Of Favicons In Tabbed Browsing

Niall Harbison — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:27:03 +0000

There is a very good chance that you have more than one tab open in your browser right now and are taking part in what is known as tabbed browsing. I am a maximum of three tabs open man myself but as the poll below will show there are a large proportion of people who have tons of tabs open and whizz back and forward completing the various tasks they are working on.

As you will see on this tab we just launched our own Favicon (the small icon on the tab) today and it is becoming one of the most important branding tools when designing a website. Favicons appear in many places, including browser toolbars, bookmarks, tabs, and address bars and are crucial in establishing your brand online. If you think that favicons are just a nice little add on you better think again and if want more evidence as to how important they are bear in mind that when internet giant Google was looking for a new Favicon they trialed over 300 different designs and the process took over 6 months, here are just a small selection of the designs that didn’t make the cut…

Simplicity is the key when designing your favicon as it needs to catch the eye and be memorable instantly without being distracting or overbearing. Why not go and establish your online brand a little more and get yourself a favicon and let us know what you think of our new one?

Search is getting social (really this time)

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:44:57 +0000

I was messing about late last night, looking at stats for Twitter on compete.com (I know, I really know how to have fun on a Sunday) when I noticed something that got my attention.

According to Compete, the top referrer for Twitter is Facebook, with 11.4% referral share, compared to Google, which came in second with 9.94 %

The same trend can also be seen for myspace, with 11.4% referral share coming from Facebook, compared to Yahoo which came in at second place with 9.69%

Social search is a term that’s been bandied around for quite a while, but no-one seems to have quite cracked it yet. What these figures show us however, is that people are beginning to use Facebook, at least, in ways that are more akin to search engines. Whether this is down to people sharing links, or apps/widgets that are linking through to other sites (auto-updating Facebook status from Twitter for example), it’s clear that social networks are beginning to grab some of the major search engine’s traffic, which has implications for how you run your social media presence.

The referral aspect of social networks, demonstrates the need for brands to have a consistent presence among various social networks. Where once the emphasis was strongly on SEO, this is now shifting towards Social Media Optimisation. Users are increasingly bypassing Google completely, so you need to ensure your brand is easily discoverable on social networks as well. The importance of reputation management is also key here. It’s no longer just about controlling your Google SERP for your brand terms.

Of course, Facebook is getting more search-centric with increased functionality and Â the recent addition of bing results into their search page.

(search for 'holiday ireland' in Facebook

Given that Facebook is already encroaching into the search space, this may be the biggest threat to Google yet. Users are growing increasingly sophisticated online – we look for all of our information in one place and Facebook is making big inroads here.

Why we will always Google

Lauren Fisher — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:13:36 +0000

It seems like every week a new search engine launches and another one dies. Some go quietly – remember Cuil, anyone? There was a huge buzz around the time of launch, but that soon dropped off, as the traffic figures for the past 12 months show, below.

Bing made headlines last month when it overtook Yahoo as the number 2 search engine in the U.S. Wolfram Alpha also made a big splash recently similar headlines, but again the traffic has died down from the original buzz at the time of launch.

While Bing’s growth is impressive, the traffic is still a drop in the ocean when compared to Google’s stranglehold in the search market, at over 70%

Each one is billed to be the next Google. I was looking to Bing to be the next big thing. I used it as my default browser search for a week and I don’t think there was one time when I didn’t then go to Google to perform the same search. I’m sure Bing’s results were adequate, but I knew they weren’t quite what I was looking for. I know this because I search all day every day and I’m used to the results I get. I want what Google gives me.

The reason we (I) will always Google, is because it is the one site I can trust to make sense of the ever-sprawling mess that is the internet. You can be pretty sure when something has passed over into a verb, it’s there to stay. ‘To search’ is really ‘to Google’. Whether we like it or not, we trust Google. The internet is constantly changing – every day a new site launches that we might check out, bookmark, dismiss, add to our feeds. But it’s Google I come back to again and again. I can’t shift my reliance on it now.

The beauty is clearly in the simplicity of the interface. Very little has changed over the years – we are still faced with one simple search box. While Google have clearly branched out in the products that they offer – this holy grail of the internet has remained a constant. Uncluttered and simple. I can say without a shred of doubt that I trust Google. I might not like what it does with the information it has on me, but I trust it to follow my command, scour the big wide web for me, and give me what I’m looking for. It’s too late for this to change now. Google has earned our trust – this is no small thing, and I for one am pretty happy to keep it.