There are set to be massive changes in the world of online marketing in 2011, with many ‘game changers’ all on the horizon. Brands are going to have to pay attention to these changes if they want to retain the level of online visibility and conversion generation they currently hold.

So without further ado, let’s get out the crystal ball and delve into digital marketing in 2011.

Mobile Web & Device Diversification

Google has estimated that by 2011 mobile searches will be equal to the amount of desktop searches in 2007. That statistic might be a little optimistic for the UK alone, but there is no denying the fact that mobile web usage will continue to grow strongly during 2011. Next year will be when everyone has to take the mobile web and mobile search seriously if they want to (at least) maintain their current level of online exposure and conversions.

Increased mobile usage will change how users search through text, voice, and images; what they search (shorter searches, mobile/location-related searches), and how they view the content when they find it (limited screen real estate). Mobile websites, mobile SEO and mobile conversation rate optimisation will be essential for those wishing to prosper in this ‘new’ environment. Of course we’re not just talking smartphones here. The growth of tablets opens another whole new area of optimisation possibilities:

• Have you got mobile strategy?
• Have you got device strategy?

‘Appification’

The advantages that software-based Apps offer, both publishers and users, in terms of delivering and consuming content, and functionality, in an ever increasingly diverse device market, will ensure their strong growth during 2011.

In addition, the continued growth of cloud computing (websites as applications) means that for many, the line between what a website is and what a software application is will blur. Eventually many users may not know (or care!) the difference between the two.

It is my own personal belief that the continued growth of Apps will eventually lead to them being considered as a direct competitor to traditional websites.

Apps are already a Universal search option within Google Mobile Search, and this functionality will eventually make its way into the traditional desktop search results.  Have you got App Strategy?

Internet TV

Next year might not quite be when TV search explodes, but Google will look to grow this channel strongly during 2011. Early adopters here in TV SEO might gain themselves a march on their competitors.

Will we eventually see blended TV results in Google like we do with Google Mobile? How about blended tablet results? If Google is committed to delivering users the most relevant content for the device, then this would seem like a logical route to take.

Social Media Marketing

In 2010, both Google and Bing confirmed that Tweets and (possibly) other social media factors directly influence the traditional search engine ranking positions.

This comes as no real surprise. Search engines in many ways are a mirror of the environment in which they find themselves. Why would they not use this data to deliver ‘better’ results?

If your company is not present on Facebook and Twitter, and is having its content and URLs passed around on these and other networks, then your brand is in decline in the eyes of Google. These kind of social signals (and user ‘sentiments’) are going to become increasingly more important to search engines in assessing what is an authority website in any niche.

A well thought out social media strategy can lead to a number of pre-defined outcomes: the creation of brand champions, the generation of incoming links (traditional & social) to your website, and good reviews (for Google Places optimisation). Social Media Marketing, or Social Media Optimisation (SMO), increasingly becomes an integral part of everyone’s overall marketing strategy, as the lines between disciplines blur. During 2011 we are going to see much more campaign integration, not just with SEO and social media, but through utilising traditional off-line marketing to help drive both SEO and social media campaigns….. Have you got a Social Media Strategy?

Personalisation

Personalised results in search engines will continue to grow and become an important part of the listings, forcing organisations to think more intelligently about how to gain exposure. Local optimisation could play a big part for organisations in addressing this issue.

Personalisation won’t just be limited to the search engines though. Expect to see personalisation across more and more websites as universal logins (ie Facebook Connect) continue to proliferate. Users will get used to this and come to expect it. If you’re not making product suggestions based on your user’s social graph, expect your competitors to steal a march on you.

Personalisation in display advertising will also continue to grow strongly. After proving itself in 2010, this method of banner advertising will go truly main stream in 2011.

Web Analytics & Conversion Rate Optimisation

It’s been important to us as a specialist search agency, for Conversion Rate Optimisation to continue to grow strongly across the sector in 2011. As mentioned, this becomes even more important in an ever growing divergent device market. Expect new screen sizes, new interfaces, and new user needs.

I expect Facebook to ramp up their web analytics offerings, possibly even buying out a current supplier to quickly improve their offerings. No doubt Google will have some interesting things up their sleeve over the coming year, watch this space…. Have you got CRO?

Local, Location, & Places

If you are reading this post, no doubt you are probably aware of Google Places and the impact it’s had on the search results screen real estate.

Local search optimisation in Google Places, traditional SERPs and mobile search may well become crucial for many organisations during 2011…. Have you got local?

Semantic Data & the Rise of the Aggregator

The inclusion of semantic data on your own website will become increasingly important for websites wanting to send the right kind of signals to the search engines, in terms of their locality and topic niche. Specifically, all brands should look to include Micro formats and implement Facebook’s Open ID during 2011 (if they haven’t already). Appearing on other sites that also publish semantic data that Google utilises will also be important for many brands.

The Semantic Web and Web 3.0 are just around the corner. To stay visible in this new environment/‘platform’, brands need to start publishing semantic data today.

Those that adopt the use of semantic data across the board today may very well end up enjoying a significant advantage over their competitors, in terms of search engine visibility in the future.

The availability of all this new data and personalisation (from social graphs such as Facebook) will see a plethora of aggregator websites popping up. Some focused on specific niches (shoes perhaps) with others delivering completely unique content to each and every visitor that views the site.

Many predict user’s behaviour will change and switch away from the search engine to more targeted semantic aggregators. Think Amazon and its listing of others products, but on a much bigger scale across the web.

Visibility in the major engines alone may no longer be enough…. Have you got semantic data?

Battle of the Giants (to the death, with laser beams)

Google vs. Facebook, Google vs. Apple, Google vs. Microsoft, Google and Twitter vs. Facebook and Bing/Yahoo.

Whichever way you look at it, the battle to become the dominant player in the consumer computing industry, never mind just the web or just the most popular website/search engine, will intensify. This is a fight that crosses over devices, operating websites, search engines, and third party websites.

The ultimate prize here is us and our eyeballs, and the advertising dollars those eyeballs bring. This topic is huge and spans every aspect of the online world and consumers computing industry. There is however, a few key things we should look out for in 2011.

In the US, a combination of Bing & Yahoo could finally deliver a real challenge to the Google behemoth, clearing and increasing the importance of those engine(s) in terms of visibility.

If Facebook is (even partially) successful in ‘replacing the web,’ as it is currently attempting to do, we could expect to see search behaviours change significantly. Facebook already has Bing there ready and waiting to deliver search results…

Online Marketing takes a bigger bite of the budget
One thing every organisation can expect to do in 2011 is switch more of their marketing budget into digital marketing. The new opportunities, the conversions, the consumers, and more importantly the better ROI, are all there. Digital marketing will undoubtedly continue to grow.

If you’ve got this far into the post, I would love to hear your thoughts on what you think is going to be big in digital marketing in 2011. Fill out the little form below!!

There are numerous Internet TV options currently rearing their head, such as Apple TV, Boxee and ‘official’ platforms, such as the UKs YouView. In this article though I am going to focus more specifically on the imminent Google TV (GTV), its potential for market penetration and what that could mean for both digital marketing, and marketing in general.

You can find out more about Google TV by watching the following video.

If you build it, they will come (?)

A large number of us already use media in the way Google TV is suggesting, be it selective DVD box sets, the BBC iPlayer on a laptop, a Media PC hooked up to the TV,  illegal torrents through a DIY home media setup or a closed garden platform such as Virgin and Sky.

It’s a natural progression for TV and the Internet (& the PC for that matter) to converge. This has been a long held assumption by many ‘futurists’.’

• Television is increasingly becoming more interactive and digitised; phone voting, the red button, web tie ins et al.
• The Internet has increasingly become the place we go for video content; YouTube dancing cats, catch-up services, content purchases, illegal torrents.

The market is crying out for a simple, functional, off-the-shelf, affordable device that ties all these uses together in one place. Oh, and it needs a remote.

The consumer market for the right product already exists, Google doesn’t need to invent the market, it just needs to deliver the right product to it.

Television Vs Mobile Phone

The move into the mobile market for Google, both to create advertising space and to sell units (handsets), also makes sense for Television as well, if not more so.

As Google highlighted at GTVs announcement, the current Worldwide TV audience is 4 billion. Personally I’m still waiting for the widespread Mobile Ad revolution, and widespread consumer adoption of Internet TV may also be slow at first, but the potential is certainly there – and it’s huge.

• Which Internet enabled device would you place your money on for ‘universal’ consumer penetration first, your mobile, or your TV?
• Which do you think will end up with the largest consumer market?

The answer maybe mobile for both, but I think these questions raise some interesting and important thoughts. Whilst the attention and hype of many digital marketing agencies is focused on the mobile phone IMHO the sector is overlooking the huge impact Internet TV could have on all of us.

One distinct, and interesting, advantage that TV does have over the mobile is screen eyeball time. The average American spends 5 hours a day watching TV. The Mobile Web can’t get anywhere to close to TVs current consumer market or eyeball time.

Smart PC TVs

Comparisons with the mobile market also remind us that Internet TV, or specifically Google TV, isn’t just a single purpose device. Whilst offering video content, GTV will be based on the Android OS allowing the use of a Web Browser and the installation of Apps.

Welcome to the world of Smart TVs.

Based on the blurb from Google so far, the GTV devices will in essence be ‘mini’ media PCs. The added functionality this offers means your average user could abandon the traditional PC desktop for their Internet and home computing needs entirely. After making do with poor quality devices, or hobbyist Internet TV devices (XBMC) for the past few years the geeks are crying out for a decent TV device with the capabilities of a modern PC, if only to more easily watch all that illegal content they’ve downloaded on a standard TV.

Whilst Google’s deal with Sony may ensure that GTV makes its way into many living rooms ‘by default’,’ Google are going to have to battle hard and release a good quality product to ensure mass consumer adoption.

The user interface

The user interface here is key, if Google can get this right and offer the functionality of a PC, with on demand video content, tied into a universal TV guide, in an easily usable and unified interface, then they are onto a winner. The winning Internet TV device will appeal to both normal & geek users alike. It needs to be cool, sexy and convenient.

Google though doesn’t exactly have a great track record in this area; it took HTC to make a decent interface for Android. If GTV is to become a mainstream success, Google needs to get this right. In fact, this thought makes Apples still half hearted stab at the whole Internet TV thing even more perplexing; Apple TV still offers no App support and other advance functionality.

Internet Television though will kill the iPad, dead. Forever.

Okay, okay so I’m exaggerating for effect and to get the attention of the Apple Fanboys out there (including my company directors!) but I just don’t see consumers watching video at home on an iPad when there’s a big screen TV with Internet in the corner. More interestingly, I also don’t see people getting off their bums and walking over to the PC when they can search right there from their sofa.

A New Advertising Platform

The potential for Internet TV and specifically Google TV is there, and so is the potential to make a lot of money, be it through paid search advertising revenue or the selling of video content.

The consumer market is there, consumers are used to the technology, and the opportunity to possibly make a lot of money is also present. So what could possibly get in the way?

Content is always king

So far I’ve waxed lyrically about the need for, and potential, of Internet TV. There is of course one massive hurdle to all of this, and that is content.

Google’s (and my) worst fears in regards came true recently with multiple US broadcasters stating they will block their traditional broadcasts, and its content, from Google TV. This isn’t surprising, if Google TV became the one of the defacto ways to access TV they could (eventually) capture the entire TV advertising revenue market. TV companies could become merely content producers rather than advertising space sellers.

There are similarities here to both the music & movie industry. Both have tried to hold on to their traditional business models and been reluctant to switch to new digital business models, to their detriment. Eventually though I don’t think the networks will have any choice, Google TV will become so popular that they will have to unlock their traditional channels to the platform for fear of losing even more advertising revenue.

Search Engine Optimisation for Television

Beyond searching for video content, will we see a specific Google for Television users in the same way we have seen a Google Mobile Search? It would make sense for video content, or websites containing video content, to rank highly on such a platform. Clearly the value of viral video expands significantly if there exists a broad user base of people interacting with the web through their televisions. Internet TV though, could, see a fall in the amount of people performing traditional searches from within Google, due to Appification, an increase in users switching from the web for solutions to Apps. That though is an argument for an entirely different blog post.

Clearly,  to perform well in future GTV user keyword searches is to increase video content and optimise it to perform well both in YouTube searches and within Google Universal search, be it hosted on YouTube or your own website, or both.

GTV & Google Adwords

A new facet to their search service gives Google the opportunity to further spread its primary revenue generator, Google Adwords. The conventional text based ads, and their associated web-pages, will still work in GTV due to the built-in Google Chrome web browser.

IMHO as an SEO-er, Google Video Ads haven’t been a huge success for Google to date, could be the widespread adoption of GTV be the thing that finally changes that for good?

The re-invention of TV advertising/ Demographically Targeted TV ads

I’m no Harry Crane (from Mad Men), but as I understand it, TV ads are often placed with specific TV shows in order to reach a certain demographic. Or rather TV shows are often designed to attract a certain demographic in order to show targeted ads.

With access to a user’s account, and its details and history, GTV could give advertisers the potential opportunity to directly access an individual users demographic, rather than a sweeping statement based on the type of TV show they are watching.

• Why do we all need to see the same adverts when we watch TV?
• Would the implementation of the model above actually result in better TV shows?

Is this not the holy grail of advertising, the most effective media with perfectly targeted demographics?
Of course, this simplistic example assumes that the provider has both a users graph and content to deliver around the ads, but it’s a tantalising prospect.

A new type of advertising & a new type of television

Clearly the built-in web browser and ability to install Apps offers the chance for more viewer & advertiser interaction. Arguably the effectiveness of this is yet unproven, but it opens up a huge area for possible innovation both in television and advertising.

How exactly do companies and their agencies currently track the effectiveness and the direct ROI for TVs currently? Ultimately, I imagine, this comes down to sales figures and brand awareness ‘tests’ but like most forms of traditional advertising it’s probably all a little fuzzy and crude in nature.

Internet TV could change the paradigm of TV advertising forever.

Why can’t a TV ad drop the equivalent of a cookie, either attaching to the TV  itself or more interestingly to an individual user account?

With Internet TV, the potential to give clients tangible and direct ROI figures on their TV Ads becomes a possibility.

TV ads could also now have direct calls to action embedded within them, taking the user to the client’s website, or to install a related App. If advertisers can figure out the right incentives for consumers to interact with their TV ads then this data could become extremely useful.

Could we begin to see the process of TV Ad optimisation in the same way we currently do with Google Adwords? With computer generated graphics, could changing a TV Ad become as simple as changing the text on a PPC advert? Why not?

The very nature of TV Ads themselves can also change with Internet (or rather PC) TV. TV advertisers can finally go beyond the static video ad and become more creative and innovative with their ideas.

I can see the possibility of sponsored social games, based on the theme of the TV show, being available during ad breaks for mass audience participation, as just one example.

Internet kills TV ad revenue, Internet re-invents TV advertising

The Web has been cited by many as responsible for dwindling TV ad revenue. This is primarily due to the ROI figures Web Advertising offers and the relative cheap nature of it as a marketing model. The Internet has also been blamed for drawing users from their TV screen. The multitude of channels and dwindling mass audience figures is also cited.

If television adopts the tangible ROI approach the Web has, through Internet TV, this could save the format of TV from further dwindling advertising revenue. Advertisers may no longer have to book their advert for a particular program but simply state they want a specific demographic regardless of the TV show being watched. If users are leaving the sofa to ‘surf the web’ then put the Web in front of them on their TV, and keep them watching those Ads whilst interacting on Facebook at the same time.

Of course if a vision similar to this comes to light it will be Google, not the TV companies, who will gain the majority of this revenue.

Your Thoughts

A lot of what I talk about in this article, at the moment at least, is potential. The innovations I allude to are based on the assumption that the TV content is being fed over the Internet, rather than traditional broadcast methods, so the ads aren’t ‘static’ in nature and can change in line with the user. Even without this though, Internet TV could have a huge impact on us all. If Google TV, or one of its competitors, is a mainstream success it will change how we watch TV, how we advertise on TV and how we use the Web forever.

If you’ve got to the end of this article I would love to hear your opinion on Internet Television and Google TV specifically. Are we witnessing the birth of an advertising and television revolution? Or will ‘open’ Internet TV pass by as a limited user base fad, with most users sticking to closed garden broadcasters such as Sky and Virgin? Add your thoughts in the comments box below!

So exactly what is likely to be a big area of growth this year on the web? What are our forecasts for the ‘next big thing(s)’ in online marketing? See below for our predictions on what to look out for in 2010…

Social Gaming

FarmVille, a Facebook game in which you grow and tend to your own Farm, currently has 70 million active monthly users. By comparison, Twitter currently has approximately 12 million users. Clearly Social Gaming is already popular, and will continue to grow strongly during 2010. I’d also wager that FarmVille has much more of a ‘middle America’ demographic than Twitter…

Brands looking for new & innovative online opportunities for exposure need look no further; create a killer Social Game on Facebook. These types of games could even be tied into product promotions; with codes to unlock various aspects of the game available on the back of packaging for example, as well as forming part of a link generation campaign.

Social Games are going to become the Flash Games of 2010 for big brands.

Payment Platforms

Those that just make the games will look to ‘internal game economies’ and user purchases for monetisation. Micropayments can already be made on Facebook for charitable donations and gifts, so this functionality lends itself well to this purpose.

With the seemingly never ending proliferation of Facebook Connect (allowing you to log into other websites using your Facebook ID), will 2010 be the year we see Facebook emerge as a general e-commerce payment platform? Probably not (just yet), but for micropayments (to access premium content for example), Facebook is in prime position. Expect to be using Facebook, or similar, to make micropayments to access individual articles on pay newspaper sites (owned by Rupert Murdoch).

The Amazon Flexible Payments Service is likely to be the early leader as a full blown payment platform, allowing consumers to purchase goods from third party websites through simply using a passphrase and a pin number. Clearly this adds convenience to a consumer’s journey through a website as they don’t have to enter details more than once. It also addresses any issues of trust a consumer could have with a small e-commerce website, no payment details are passed to the third party as Amazon processes the payment: http://aws.amazon.com/fps/. Online retailers unable, or unwilling, to obtain a merchant account of their own may also see this as a viable option.

Expect this to be a big area of growth in 2010 which the web’s big boys will fight over to control.

IPTV & Internet TV

I’ve been banging on about internet TV for years now and have been waiting with baited breath for the platform to come to full fruition. Will 2010 be the year more people watch TV via the Internet than traditional methods (digital or analogue)? Probably not, but 2010 will be a huge year for true Internet TV and could open up new online marketing channels.

IPTV

Whilst interesting in itself, IPTV doesn’t open up any new (& immediately accessible) marketing channels, as IPTV offerings are largely walled gardens such Virgin TV, for that you need the real raw internet. It will however, get consumers en-masse more used to the idea of Internet based Television.

You can already get YouTube and iPlayer on your telly via a wide variety of methods, we’ll see this and similar functionality make its way from the geeks living room into your grandmas living room during 2010 via the inclusion of Freeview boxes and standalone TVs with Ethernet or Wi-Fi connections.

YouTube

No wonder so many UK TV channels have signed on the dotted line with Google’s YouTube.

This makes it even more important to rank highly for brand related terms (for exposure and protection purposes), or your viral TV ad, as more and more people use YouTube via their normal TV.

Internet TV & Set Top Boxes

We will also see an excess of new set top boxes and software solutions offering to bring together the many current web TV services and other websites all in one place. As a long time fan of XBMC (Xbox Media Center), I await the launch of Boxee’s (XBMC predecessor) set top box with baited breath. For more information on Boxee check out my blog post from November of last year (link to blog).

Online Marketing

These new TV distribution channels will give online marketers an additional channel to work with; you’re probably already creating a large amount of video for your website or YouTube (or are about to), why not wrap it in a new little branded package and create a mini TV Channel based solely on your brand and push it onto Boxee or similar?

Widgets & Apps

Yahoo TV Widgets have been around on Samsung TVs for a little while now, though no one paid them any attention. The concept of TV widgets was re-launched at the recent CES show in the US, with Samsung announcing a new set of widgets supporting TVs and, importantly, a new iPlayer widget.

Whilst your digital marketing agency may discuss Facebook applications with you today, expect them to begin talking about making a TV widget or something similar by the end of the year.

Augmented Reality

The web will begin to bleed into the real world during 2010. Augmented Reality ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’, it takes reality (the physical real-world environment) and adds something additional in the form of computer generated imagery, in real time. This has a myriad of applications in the world of e-commerce, mobile marketing and paid search and will break through into more mainstream use during 2010. Find out more here.

Mobile Web

So iPhones and Smart Phones are generally pretty popular, right? Of course they are, but 2010 will be the year this area truly takes off with an abundance of new, more advance and most importantly, more affordable Smart Phones hitting the market. 2010 will be the year this platform becomes completely mainstream and we begin to see much higher percentage of users accessing the web via their mobile.

How people are viewing and using the web is changing. Websites that are serious about maximising their online exposure will need to pay closer attention to how their website operates in a mobile environment during 2010 and what additional services and applications they can offer to maximise the potential of this literally mobile audience.

Mobile Payments

Mobile Payments, the ability to pay for goods via the direct use of your mobile phone, rather than cash or credit cards is already popular in many parts of the world, will take off in 2010 in the UK.

Wave and Pay within Debit Cards may triumph in the UK in terms of purchasing goods in the physical world, but mobile payments are so convenient to make purchases with when you’re browsing a shop via your mobile phone that their increasing popularity seems certain.

The Web as a Platform

Always a long term goal of ‘web 2.0’, cloud computing will truly kick into gear in 2010 as businesses and individuals alike begin to see the Web as a platform itself, in the same way Windows currently is, as both Google and Microsoft strongly push their offerings.

As web users get more accustomed to the functionality in their every day websites, or applications, e-commerce sites will begin to feel the need to offer more advanced functionality in their own offerings.

Oh, and if you haven’t rolled out Facebook connect, OpenID or other such services into your website login procedure already, you almost certainly will during 2010.  The use of Social Media APIs will also become increasingly popular and important.

The long term battle of the web lies not between the search engines, but the platforms…

Google in 2010

Google Wave (Real Time Collaboration)

Whilst Google Wave on the surface appears to be an over elaborate replacement for GTalk, when you think about the encroaching cloud computing and regularly using Google’s Chrome OS, this software takes on a more useful and substantial roll as a real time collaboration tool and its use will grow relatively strong during 2010. Welcome to NetMeeting, 2010 style.

When we think about ‘Crowd Sourcing’, and using it as a marketing tool, there is a strong chance that Google Wave will emerge as a platform on which we see companies and consumers collaborate. I have no doubt that someone, at some point, will attempt this in 2010.

Google Search as an Application?

If we begin to think and use Google as an operating system, this could potentially result in Google Search just becoming another application. Will this change how people use Google, and more importantly what search results they click on? Google Search being viewed ‘just’ as application, a widget, or an applet may be quiet a way off yet. The way people view and use Google, and thus what results people are drawn to however, will change during 2010.

The New Google User Interface

Rumoured for a while, and discovered live on the web by a clever person over at Gizmodo, there is a new Google interface on the way for 2010. Being referred to as the three panel layout, this change means it will become increasingly important to rank highly in image, video et al search results, as Google gives more prominence to these sections within its interface. Try it out yourself.

Real Time Search for the masses

Originally this article was to include a section on how Real Time search will break out of Twitter (and off Bing) and into the mainstream. The speed at which Google is releasing new features at the moment has made this prediction for 2010 out of date already. Announced at the end of 2009, Real Time search results from Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and other news sources will be integrated directly within the natural search results.

This change has huge implications in terms of brand protection, what results people will click, as well as creating new opportunities to rank highly in the search engines. Check out my and others Expert opinion on this topic over at Econsultancy.

Personalised Results

Google also announced earlier this month that search results are now being personalised (to an extent) based on your previous search behaviour, regardless of whether you’re logged in or not.  Are the days of the ranking report now truly numbered?!

Find Out More here.

Google Caffeine

Google Caffine, Google’s latest update to its core search offering, is set for release early on in 2010.

“At this stage, Caffeine is not a full-blown algorithm update although there has been a lot of speculation regarding things that may have changed. Caffeine is in fact, documented as a complete overhaul of the infrastructure that sits under the hood of Google’s search engine.”

Find out more from our Head of Search, Malcolm Slade.

Google’s Pace of Change

2 years ago, would we have seen Personalised Results and Real Time Search released in Google Labs first, before hitting the ‘big-time’? Most likely so, at least in the case of Personalised Results, so what has changed? Why has the pace at which Google is releasing new features increased so dramatically over the past year?

In a word – Bing. Increased competition from Microsoft’s search engine has resulted in Google upping its game, and we should expect the two engines to continue this pattern in 2010 as one looks to increase its market share and the other protect it.

Of course the web, and thus search itself has changed. Nowadays Google welds enough power to try and manipulate the environment in which it operates but for me, Google at its core is a mirror of the (web) environment in which it finds itself. As the web and how people use it changes, so will Google…

To stay ahead of the curve, and the competition, websites in 2010 will need to pay close attention to search engine innovation in order to maintain their current levels of traffic and capitalise on the new opportunities that will present themselves. Companies simply must connect with their users in order to keep them engaged and ensure they maintain the highest possible positions in the search engine results.

The new search results layout is being referred to as the 3 panel layout with,

• the paid results on the right
• the natural results in the centre
• and a new control panel on the left

The horizontal tabs within the left panel duplicate many of the links currently listed on the top, such as images. Note though that these tabs are dynamic in nature, if theres ‘enough’ relevant image results than the image tab is shown, if theres enough news results then.. you get the idea.

Immediate thoughts are that is has once again become even more important to rank highly in these verticals if you’re looking to maximise natural exposure, simply because users are more likely to click these results, especially if you believe in the F-pattern of usability.

Take a look at the options below these tabs, which when clicked change the search results. Note how that these options dependent on the tab your viewing.

Clearly these changes are important to us, it changes how people use google, what results they see, what results they may click on.

The best way to get a feel for this is to try it out for yourself, follow the instructions here (don’t worry it’s easy to do) and you’ll be well away with the new Google in no time.

So what actually is Augmented Reality?

Augmented Reality ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’, it takes reality (the physical real-world environment) and augments it, it adds something additional to the real world in the form of computer generated imagery, in real time.

Imagine,

• Directions to the nearest tube station/ bus stops, special offers and discounts in shops, information about landmarks, your friends locations, are all displayed in front of you as you specify as you walk around where you live.
• Sat Nav directions, fuel & speed indicators, the outline of other vehicles at night, collison detection, braking distances, speed cameras and any and all combination of the forementioned all laid out on the road ahead as you drive.
• Being able to ‘try on’ a new coat, shirt or skirt in the comfort of your own home before you buy, and instantly switch to something new at a click of the mouse/remote.
• Seeing what your kitchen would look like with a particular new appliance or new colour scheme, as you physically walk around the kitchen itself.

To actually view this Augmented reality you need to view the real world through something else, be it a camera, a computer monitor, TV set, a set of special glasses, or ultimately through an implant in your eye.

Before we all get to carried away lets take a look at the current uses of Augmented reality today, and in particular its use as  a marketing tool.

Current real world examples of Augemented Reality

Welcome to WikiTude

Wikitude is an iPhone and (Google) Android application that mixes in information from Wikipedia with your current real world environment via the use of the devices built-in camera. Turn on the WikiTude app and hold your iPhones camera at your surroundings and Wikitude pulls in information from Wikipedia based on your surroundings. If you thought people walking around texting, emailing, and listening to MP3 players was annoying imagine them all viewing their world through there iPhone…

Doritos’ Late Night Augmented Reality

By holding the back of these special packs of Doritos to your webcam and visiting doritoslatenight.com you get to see either Blink 182 or Big Boi perform for you right there in the palm of your hand (via the PC screen). The artists performances can then be further manipulated by moving and shaking the Doritos packaging. After the first song the band will return more quickly for their encore depending on the amount of noise the user makes. It’s this type of marketing in which Augmented reality has seen the most use so far, adding a ‘viral’ element to packaging to encourage sales.

Along a similar theme TOPPS 2009 baseball cards feature 3d Augmented Reality players, which the user can interact with and play games. Check out the following video to get an idea of what this is like.

Hardware is the issue why Augmented reality can’t really flourish just yet

The only commercial and successful use of Augmented Reality in e-commerce so fair has only been concerned with spectacles, Glasses Direct offer visitors the ability to ‘try on’ glasses before buying them. If you have a webcam you can try this out right now after downloading some additional software.

Given the obvious possiblities for ‘see/try before you buy’ applications this does beg the question why the use of this technology isn’t more widespread in the world of e-commerce.

The spectacles application works because the hardware supports it.

To try on clothes in this manner you would need to stand up and move away from your computer screen for the camera to capture your full body. The majority of webcams simply aren’t of a good enough quality at the moment to capture a image good enough to work effectively with Augmented Reality from this distance (in this case).

Then of course there is the issue of actually  seeing what you look like in those 70s flares from where your standing, having to squint at a relatively tiny laptop monitor to see what you actually look like defeats the purpose of the application in the first place.

It just may take take some time

Its worth remembering that many technologies we take for granted today were all tried for many years before their widespread adoption and were deemed to be a failure and ‘dead’,

• VOIP
• Web Video
• On demand television (BT trialled this in the late 90s)

All of these technologies (and probably many more I can’t think of right now) made a comeback years later as soon as the widespread (or at least viable) adoption of the required technology and hardware was available.

Augmented Reality is already with us, and as hardware improves only looks to expand further into our everyday lifes. It may not be your immediate priority, but soon the use of Augmented Reality will become an integral part of many organisations digital marketing plans and  is something everyone needs to begin thinking about how they can apply to their brand and products today.

Up until this point, TLDs (top level domains) have had to be written in the western Latin alphabet, resulting in the .com .org .net and .co.uk web addresses we are all familiar with. Whilst Korean websites, for example, have been able to use their own alphabet within the start of a domain, the end of the address has had to end in the .kr suffice (i.e. Latin script) for the addresses to resolve to websites IP address (the destinations true ‘internet address’).

This change could potentially mean new TLDs could appear in as diverse characters as Hindi, Korean, Arabic, Japanese, Greek, Mandarin and Russian Cyrillic.

“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalisation of the Internet. The first countries that participate will not only be providing valuable information of the operation of IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names) in the domain name system, they are also going to help to bring the first of billions more people online – people who never use Roman characters in their daily lives.”

[Source: Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's President and CEO, 30/10/09]

Applications are being taken from November 16th this year and the first IDNs are expected to be in operation around mid-2010, with the mostly likely up takers being Chinese, Arabic and Russian users.

The release of IDNs follows the recent moves from ICANN to regress from its strong ties to the US government and become a true international organisation and regulator.

Geocities had been around since around 1995 and offered its users a free place to host their website. At its height, Geocities was the MySpace/Blogger.com/Wordpress.com of its day, leading to Yahoo purchasing the site for $3.57 billion in stock (yes that’s $3.75 billion!) back in January 1999.

Due to the age of the hosted websites themselves, and the large amount of (aged) links pointing at those sites, Geocities contained some of the most powerful webpage’s on the web in terms of SEO.

• Before the big switch off Google UK returned 30 million results for the Geocities domain.
• Many of these hosted sites ranked for many high traffic and competitive terms in Google.

Can you imagine how many links were pointed at those 30 million pages?  Can you imagine the amount of traffic Geocities attracted on a daily basis? Personally, I don’t like to think about it…

I’m not saying that Yahoo didn’t need to do something with Geocities, they did, it hadn’t turned a profit for a while (if ever), and it had lost its meaning in a Web 2.0 world. But if there was ever a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water, then this was it.

If you were to visit a Geocities hosted webpage today you would be greeted with a bland 404 page, as the original content has been removed. This is pretty bad from a user perspective but what really upsets me is all the link equity that that page held (and 30 million+ just like it) has been lost. Gone, destroyed, wasted. Forever.

As every good SEO professional knows if you have a page that ranks for a particular keyword, or even if you remove (or even delete) a webpage you should 301 redirect the old URL (address) into a new location to carry across the age and incoming link equity that page holds.

Now, I’ve never 301 redirected 30 million pages and transferred the link equity those 30 million pages held into one new location, but boy I would like to try!

Yahoo could have also been more intelligent about this and redirected various URLs into appropriate places in their own portfolio. I can also think of various ways in which Yahoo could have used the power of the Geocities domain to embarrass Google significantly in terms of manipulating rankings. Can you imagine the uproar Yahoo could have caused if they’d starting selling links on Geocities? 

If you’re thinking of closing down a section of your website, or even removing a few old pages, please don’t do what Yahoo did and waste the power of those old URLs, consult an SEO professional and make sure you keep your rankings and your link equity!

SEO and Social Media have now become intrinsically linked. If you want to achieve maximum success in one, you can’t do it without the other, as the lines between Social Media and SEO are becoming increasingly blurred. Let me explain…

SEO Relevance and Authority

At its core, SEO is primarily concerned with relevance and authority. If you want success in the most competitive SEO niches, your website needs both authority and relevance in the eyes of the search engines to achieve the rankings your company wants. In today’s often confusing digital marketing mix Social Media has become integral to generating both of these aspects for your website.

Link Generation through Social Media

When we refer to having authority in search engines, in essence we are talking about links.

• How many incoming links does your website have?
• What types of links are pointing at it?
• What links does the webpage linking to you have pointing at it?

Social media has become a crucial aspect of generating ‘natural’ links for your SEO campaign. Let’s take a quick look at some practical examples of how social media can generate one of the crucial aspects of success for today’s search engines, links.

Social Media Directory Link Building

At its simplest level, submitting your website to all the available social media websites will generate a relatively small amount of incoming links to your site, in the same way that submitting to a range of low quality free directories would. A worthwhile base link building technique, good for your link profile mix, but there’s nothing earth shattering here, this practice in many ways is similar to free directory submissions (DMOZ, Best of the Web et al).

Link Bait, the Old Fashioned Way

Link bait – the creation of content to appeal to a specific audience to order to generate incoming links, was all the rage when Digg, Reddit, Newsvine etc all burst onto the scene as new social networks. Achieving a front page position on Digg, as well as driving large amounts of (possibly irrelevant) traffic, would also generate a large amount of incoming links to your website. If your content is great, and targeted at the right audience, they will link to it.

Networking and Public Relations to generate links

Through the use of the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn it’s now possible to use information sharing and networking techniques to build high quality incoming links to your website. If done correctly, these emerging Public Relations processes can yield huge returns in terms of incoming links from high quality and/or relevant websites.

Generating ‘free’ content and gaining customer insights through Social Media

Relevancy comes from text, be it on page or off page. If you want your website to be relevant to your niche then you’re going to need content (text) on your website!

Quite simply the more content your website has, the bigger chance you have for your website to appear in search engine results for a wide variety of long tail terms. Spread that content out across many SEO friendly pages and you’re onto a winner in the Google search results (and your bottom line).

Of course generating content takes time and resource, and this is where Social Media can come into play. Putting the effort into initially building a following or community around your site can wield massive long term gains in terms of generating free content, increased SEO traffic and more conversions.

Blog comment forms, ‘Ask The Expert’ platforms, forum discussion boards, story submissions, and social platforms are all great ways for your visitors to generate this keyword rich content for you, and for you to get a unique insight into what customers think about your brand and products.

Fail to participate and offer your visitors the ability to interact with your website and your brand means you’re failing to maximise the potential of your websites traffic, your brands exposure and your bottom line.

Social Media signals as a ranking factor

For a long time links have been the most important ranking factor for search engines, and they still are today. However there is a widely held belief in the SEO community that social media signals will become an important part of how Google ranks websites.

This train of thought is logical, search marketers understand how the current link algorithm works, and they know how to game it. One way the search engines can combat this threat is by introducing social media as a ranking factor, to maintain the quality of their search engine results.

Why not use the indicators of a good website left by the web as a whole participating on social networks rather than just those (relative) few who own and run websites?

If you want to future proof your website against these likely future changes, then the time to engage in Social Media is today. Be proactive rather than reactive, otherwise in a few years you may find the top rankings you hold today have disappeared and you’ll be left playing catch-up with your competitors.

Personally, I view Google as a mirror of the environment in which it operates. It uses the variables available in that environment to produce the best search results for its customers. This environment, the landscape of the web, has changed dramatically since the inception of the search engine. At its core, the Google algorithm is still very much a Web 1.0 search engine, operating in a Web 2.0 environment.

I would also argue that in many ways Google always was a social search engine. What are links if not a machine readable indication of the relationship between two human parties? For me this ‘social measure’ playing a part in ranking websites will only continue to grow.

Raising brand awareness through Social Media

Achieving a front a page Digg story, having a popular Facebook app, spreading your widget across the web, driving traffic via Stumble upon, appearing in many Google search results across many terms are all going to push your brand out, increase the amount of people searching for your company online (and hopefully your products offline too) and visiting your site from a link on a Social Media site. Ultimately this increase in traffic and exposure will affect your bottom line.

Social Media can’t work without SEO

How do people find your blog? How do people find the comments left on your blog? How will people discover all that fantastic content created in your forum? Through the search engines of course! Without a search engine friendly website you’re not maximising the potential of the content being created on your domain through your Social Media platform.

If you’re spreading your brands name fair and wide via Social Media it is crucial that you have a SEO campaign to back it up when people remember aspects of that campaign and subsequently search for them in Google.

Having multiple Social Media accounts is also a fantastic way to help with brand protection, fill up that first page of Google SEO search results with profiles you’ve created and control; and push that negative publicity out of the spot light.

SEO and Social Media – bed fellows for life

SEO needs Social Media, and Social Media needs SEO. In today’s digital marketing environment one cannot operate successfully, to its full extent, without the other.

So if you haven’t begun to think about it before, now is the time to integrate both your SEO and Social Media strategies to ensure you’re maximising the potential of your website and your sales, future proofing yourself today.

What makes this Doodle different from the usual Google Doodle is the fact it is (seemingly) not linked into any specific event, anniversary or person like practically every other Doodle is; for example on the 4^th of July an American flag was present as the Google logo.

The mystery deepens even further with Google tweeting a set of co-ordinates in the early hours of this morning (GMT).

So what exactly is this is all about? Has Google been taken over by aliens? Are we about to be invaded by men from mars? Why the crop circles? Why today? Mulder and Scully unfortunately aren’t available, so I guess our investigative team will have to do as we try and solve this perplexing mystery.

The Science Fiction connection

Popping those co-ordinates into Google maps leads us to Horsell near Woking in Surrey (England).

The science fiction geeks out there (i.e. me) will recognise Horsell Common as the location of the first invading Martian landing party in H.G Wells seminal science fiction novel War of the Worlds. So this is something to do with H.G Wells then? Well that would seem pretty clear, but there’s no direct date tie in for September 15th.

21st September looks more promising as Wells 143rd birthday (if he were still alive), but that is six days away. So this is just all an elaborate lead up to this anniversary? Google has never done anything like this before, but given Google’s penchant for aliens and all things geeky they may be making a special exception for the man considered, along with Jules Verne, ‘The Father of Science Fiction’.

The alien spacecraft sighting

18 miles away from Horsell lies Bagshot Heath, where on September 15th 1985 a Surrey family claim to have seen an alien spacecraft.

So this ties in nicely with todays date, so whilst the main thrust of this would appear to be Well’s this could well explain why todays date has been chosen.

Are Google about to launch a new product?

Some have spectulated that this Google Doodle in conjunction with the one released on September 5th is all part of a lead up to a new Google product launch, due for release on Wells’ birthday.  I’m not convinced about the new product launch, but its no coincidence that theres been two alien related images released so close together. The more I delve into the murky waters of Google’s alien obsession the more I think its just all about Wells’ and a celebration of his work (though I’d love to be proven wrong).

This X-File remains open, for now.

Keeping watching the skies, keeping watching the Google logo, and enjoy the ‘viral’ marketing , I reckon there’s still (one) more mysterious Google Doodle to come….

So what exactly is Boxee?

“Boxee is a free, open-source software platform that integrates personal media with Internet media along with social networking…Boxee’s free software lets you navigate all your personal movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites”

From Boxee.tv.

Imagine using your normal TV set to access:

• all of your own local media (MP3s, TV shows, films)
• all of your favourite Web 2.0 websites (Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr)
• all of your favourite online Video streams (BBC iPlayer, CNN, Hulu)

all at the touch of a button on your remote control, and completely for free.

Add into that the ability to ‘follow’ other Boxee users, recommend content to your friends, rate the media you’ve just watched, and you’ve got Boxee, the Social Media Center.

However, this list doesn’t really do justice to the wealth of features Boxee offers – let’s dig a little deeper to understand just how fantastic this software really is.

Boxee Internet Media

Boxee BBC iPlayer

Joost on Boxee

There is already a wealth of content streaming services and Web 2.0 sites available directly from the interface in Boxee, as well as the ability to add your own media feeds, and this is growing by the day. Here’s just a taster of what’s currently available:

Video and Television: The BBC iPlayer, The Open University, BBC Live, CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, Joost, Netflix, The Warner Brothers Network, Revision3, MySpace Video, Digg Video, MTV Music, CNET,  Apple.com.

Audio and Radio: Last.fm, BBC, Jamendo, National Public Radio, Pandora, SHOUTCast, We are Hunted.

Digg Video via Boxee

Browsing Flickr on Boxee

Photos & Pictures: Flickr, PIcasaWeb, Facebook Photos.

As well as the many services already mentioned you can also add your own feeds to Boxee; video, pictures, audio (podcasts) and even good old text feeds can all be easily added and subsequently accessed from within Boxee.

The Open Platform

Boxee makes extensive use of python and XUL (the same XML platform Firefox uses) and has recently opened up a public API.

Put simply, this means you can expect the services and software available on Boxee to continue growing exponentially, as amateur and professional developers alike have the tools to easily create new stuff; The Open University in the UK and Major League Baseball in America are two very recent additions to the Boxee platform.

Regional access restrictions

As a UK user you may find attempting to access many of these services a little frustrating at the moment due to regional access rights, but don’t despair, it’s only a matter of time before these US services open themselves up to international markets. Just be content with the fact that you’ve got BBC iPlayer and they haven’t .

The Social Aspects of Boxee

Invite your friends to use Boxee

Your Friends Boxee Actvity

Boxee usage requires you have a registered user account, which means that a social network of fellow Boxee users is added too with every new user that signs up. Once registered Boxee will then auto generate an activity feed of the media you’ve just consumed. You can then find, invite and follow as many friends as you want via the Boxee website.

Once you’ve decide to follow someone, their Boxee activity feed shows up as part of your friends feed, accessible from within the Boxee interface. Does this sound familiar to anyone (tweet tweet)? You can also rate and recommend any content that you consume, and easily view recommendations made by your friends. If that media is available online you can watch it instantly, right there and then.  If it’s not available Boxee will try and find an appropriate trailer to show you.

Boxee will also spit out your activity feed into your Twitter account (or Tumblr), so you can tell the whole world what you’re viewing as you watch it! The more adventurous amongst you can then pull these feeds into your other social media accounts, such as Facebook.

The Boxee Media Center

Metropolis Film Synopsis

Another great feature of Boxee is the Media Library.  Once you’ve pointed the software at the location of your files it will automatically scan them and pull down a plefora of information about the files from the internet, including movie & TV reviews and ratings from IMDB, and screenshots, wallpaper and fan art from the TheTVDB; all viewable via the Boxee interface. Once Boxee has this info you can then browse through all your content by genre, title, year, actors, director, title etc.

Will Boxee play X or Y?

Out of the box Boxee will play 99% of all the media types (both audio and video) that you throw at it. Boxee has been based on the open source software XBMC; a stable and long lasting platform that has many thousands of developer hours put into it. The only other media player I’ve used that has ever come close to the level of support for different file types that XMBC does is the infamously good VLC. XBMC/Boxee will even play video files that are incomplete; I’d like to see Microsoft Media Player do that! Boxee supported file types from Wikipedia

The Boxee Box

Boxee set top box mock-up

Currently, if you wanted to use Boxee, you’d have to watch your media on your PC or hook up your laptop or computer to your TV and set up a remote. The other alternative is shoe horn it onto an Apple TV. Not too much of a challenge for the technically inclined, but a big barrier to entry for the rest of the population.

Eventually, Boxee intend to release their own hardware, as well as licence the platform out to as many different platforms they can (think satellite receives, consoles etc) so Boxee will be available in a neat little box to put under your TV in the not so distant future.

Is Boxee the future of social media/television/the internet?

Social Media

People love to think that everyone else is interested in their taste of music, films, and TV shows, and love to tell people about it. Right now, there is no better way to share this information with the world, and make specific recommendations to friends. Spotify has already shown how people love to share their music playlists, Last.FM has demonstrated how people like to make and receive recommendations. For me, it’s an absolute no brainer that technologically inclined users (and many others besides that) will love sharing what TV shows they watched last night, especially if it can be seamlessly slipped into their current social media platform of choice. Boxee isn’t going to change social media wholesale but it’s certainly going to add an important extra dimension to it.

Boxee is also lauded for how it centralises all of your favourite websites and web services into one place that can be easily navigated around – a significant feature that could change how people digest social media, if not social media itself.

Television

If it’s not Boxee, it will be something very similar. Television is changing, be it in the delivery method (on demand & internet streams, as opposed to static over the air broadcasts) or the consumption method (more social/active, or at least the option of activity, rather than passive); television is merging into internet television. Boxee is meeting both these emerging market demands, and in abundance. Boxee is placing itself as a prime candidate to become the internet television and Social TV platform of choice.

The Internet

Clearly Boxee isn’t going to take over the internet but how the internet is being used is certainly transforming and will continue to change over the coming years. For video, at first we had YouTube (and numerous imitators), then we’ve dedicated TV streaming services such as hulu.com (in the US) and the BBC iPlayer here in the UK. Whilst most geeks will happily watch TV shows on a PC, getting your mum to sit in front of the computer and watch a movie is a challenge. And this is how Boxee, and many similar offerings will change the internet. How we view and access web based content is going to change – from the desk chair to the sofa.

Internet Television as a future marketing channel

If you’ve got this far into this article you may have wondered what exactly has all this got to do with digital marketing?! Well ‘internet television’ will become another marketing channel which businesses are going to have to consider as part of an all encompassing digital marketing strategy. We’re not talking about ads in TV shows here (necessarily) but rather, developing applications that let users access your companies’ online content via their chosen method, their TV set!

If I were a company with a wide variety of videos on my current web site, I would, right now, be asking my developers to create an application for the Boxee platform. Sure it’s not going to get huge amounts of eyeballs, but it will mostly certainly gain your company a hell of a lot of kudos and generate buzz around your brand. Remember that the people who adopt social media networks first are the webs big boys, they are the linkerati, the movers and shakers of the web, wow them today and gain the incoming links for your SEO campaign tomorrow; whilst future proofing yourself in an upcoming marketing channel.

Sound interesting? Sign up and download Boxee here. Once signed up don’t forget to follow me, David Wilding, username tinfish. 

So if these large companies don’t provide their customers with an e-commerce solution then why should you? There are some very clear and convincing reasons why you should be considering an e-commerce website for your retail business, if only to capitalise on the fact these big players aren’t participating…

Cut down on customer queries and related costs

Sick of answering the phone all day (or paying someone else to do it), only to field the same questions again and again?

A well constructed and thought out customer service section of your website can save you a fortune in dealing with these types of FAQs. An intelligent strategy in this area can also have both a positive effect for your sites SEO and provide insight to your customers thinking and needs.

Become a 24/7 business, without the associated costs

Don’t you wish you could be taking orders and making money whilst you slept?

Of course you do but the thought of taking the chance of opening up such a store in your local area probably seems unrealistic, or if not, prohibitively expensive. An e-commerce solution solves both these issues and opens the doors to your business around the clock.

By selling online you are also exposing your business to markets who could never have reached before, such as consumers who are at work from nine until five and those who choose to shop at home after work.

Increase your brand exposure and improve offline sales

The introduction of an e-commerce website can also have a positive effect on offline sales.

Savvy (and increasingly not-so-savvy) consumers are using Google as a research tool to find the goods and retailer for the product or service that they desire, regardless of where they end up making their purchase. Without an e-commerce website you’re not even in the running to seen by those people and gain the extra brand exposure.

Escape the high street

Clearly the number of retail outlets you have puts a cap on the number of consumers you can reach and sell to. Moving online opens your business to a much wider potential audience allowing you to sell your products nationwide, or even internationally, without the associated cost of opening a new retail outlet.

Your exocentric niche product could sell millions online

Exploit the long tail! Whilst there may not be many individuals interested in ornamental china chopsticks in your local area, worldwide there’s probably a sizeable audience out there desperate to purchase just that.

E-commerce is still growing

The amount of people turning online to shop continues to grow and this trend is only being re-enforced by the recession, as consumers increasingly turn online to find the best prices. It’s not too late to get involved with selling online as the market continues to expand.

An affordable option for all

E-commerce websites are affordable for all. No matter the size or scale of your business you can find an e-commerce solution that will suit both your needs and your budget. Be it an SEO ready e-commerce platform design to achieve maximum market penetration and best conversion rates, or a simple e-bay store, there is something out there for everyone.

The bottom line: increase your sales

As many retailers experience a downturn in sales on the high street turning to the web can be a great way to offset these losses and even increase the number of overall sales as you expose your products to a wider audience, and all at a relatively low cost and risk to the business.

Perhaps the real question we need to ask here is why wouldn’t you launch an e-commerce website?

And that’s one of the reasons Google introduced Universal Search relatively recently, to provide visitors with all the ‘types’ of information they want in one place. The idea was simple; lets mix in other media (such as images, news items and videos) in the main Google results, hence providing better & more useful mixed media search results to their visitors. Let’s give visitors a choice. Remember with Google it’s all about the quality of the results that makes them so great, right?

Well I’m here to tell you that Google has failed; it’s still failing, and will continue to fail its UK visitors, at least for music related searches, until it fixes Universal Search here in the UK and removes the irrelevant YouTube results. Most sad of all is its probably failed Michael Jackson too.

Earlier this year YouTube lost the rights to broadcast a whole host of music and music videos here in the UK. They were (in my opinion) deliberately priced out of the market by the record companies, as they look to established their own new online music business models.

When you try to access any of the restricted songs in the UK you are met with the YouTube ‘red bar of death’; ‘This video is not available in your country due to copyright restrictions.’ is duely displayed. There’s something about that red bar that makes me feel like I’ve done something very very wrong even when I haven’t…

When this happened many in our office predicted the ‘death’ of YouTube. Beyond the odd funny personal video and network TV copyright violation YouTube had really turned into an on demand MTV for many.

The loss of these music rights was actually almost scary; where am I going to get my on demand music fixes now (Okay there was last.fm back then it was pretty limited IMHO)? To be honest the impact of the loss of music on demand from YouTube has been offset by the launch of Spotify in the UK (smart move there guys…), so all was well for music lovers.

So whilst consumers at large have found a (better?) alternative for their musical needs what have Google been doing? Well not very much it seems. Many months on and Goolge UK results are still littered with irrelevant, out of date, and dead YouTube links. On this evidence alone universal search has failed, it’s not delivering a better user experience, its delivering a highly annoying frustrating experience. Seriously though, if you can’t view those videos from your location then why the hell are Google including them in their search results?

The UK Top 10, a test case

I like music, you probably do too, and my usual course of action is to Google an artist when I first hear about them to try and learn more; well at least that’s what I used to do. You probably do the same (?), so as an example let’s go the UKs top 10 single artists this week and see what videos are available through universal search.

In choosing to take a straw poll of the artists currently appearing in the top 10 UK singles I decided to be nice to Google. These artists are currently promoting their work so, in my experience and opinion, are more likely to be openly sharing their music videos in order to promote their single. I wonder what percentage of failure you would get, if say you Google’d a set of more established all time great artists? I don’t know, say someone like Michael Jackson for example…

Helping heal those Michael Jackson wounds

Now unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 24 hours you will have heard that Michael Jackson passed away yesterday. Many (if not millions) in the UK would have awoke to this news and eagerly ran to their computers and Google’d the singers name in the hope of reliving their favourite Jackson music videos of the past.

Clicking on both these videos results in the YouTube ‘red bar of death’. Okay, there is the link for Video Results which gives you more options from Google Video but how many people click on that in comparison to the shiny videos links? Not many, and if they do there going to be mightily annoyed by that point after clicking through two irrelevant results.

Does Google have a conflict of interest?

So why are Google doing this? I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice this today but this has been bugging me for a while. Surely Google with all their algorithmic might would be able to easily weed out the copyright restricted results and replace them with something more relevant? Well you’d think so, though you never know with the Big G (perhaps they’re not that interested in the UK market after all), but let’s assume the answer the yes.

That gets me thinking about how and why I first started using YouTube. Never a big fan of homemade videos, besides the odd copyright infringing Family Guy clip and Star Trek fan montage, I only ever really used YouTube for music videos. And I was drawn in by the embedded Universal search results. The reason Google bought YouTube was due to the sites tremendous success and the amount of eye balls it had. Google mantra is to do no evil and deliver the best quality most relevant search results it can. Conflict of interest anyone?

Are Google afraid that UK users will just ‘forget’ about YouTube if it doesn’t appear in their search results, especially for the thing YouTube became synonymous with, music videos. It’s either that or, and possibly more likely, Google Universal search delivers poor quality irrelevant music related results to its users in the UK.

So beyond the standard Visa and other credit and debit cards, what other payment options can e-commerce stores offer to maximise their sales?

PayPal and Google Checkout

The most obvious choice here is PayPal and Google Checkout. Whilst many smaller retailers offer PayPal (and it’s something consumers have grown to expect), practically none of the larger retailers offer this to their customers. Those utilising Google Checkout have an extra button on their Adword ads asserting this, which, according to Google, increases the amount of clicks these ads receive by 10%. This is a great option to address those dubious about submitting their credit card details to an unknown entity.

In a sporadic move Kiddicare have made it possible for their customers to pay for goods with cash by buying a voucher and entering the voucher code during the check out process. The vouchers are available from over 21,000 pay points throughout the UK, including many petrol stations and local newsagents. The reason for this new mode of payment is customer demand, as explained by Scott Weavers-Wright, partner at Kiddicare, via silicon.com.

• We get about 400 or 500 calls a day and 300 or 400 emails a day, (and) we do get questions on ‘is there an alternative payment?’ and it’s definitely increasing.

Taking cash over the web

Clearly the recession plays a role here, with more individuals being unable to access credit cards that they can use online. That said the ability to pay by cash addresses the fact that a sizeable group of people are still fearful of ordering online due to crime and fraud.

“It’s very apt that we should be able to offer the ability for customers to pay with cash in the current climate. If (customers) don’t want a credit card they shouldn’t be penalised and they should have the option for another payment…

Telephone Orders

According to a Get Safe Online survey 14% of people in the UK are still deterred from using the internet due to fear of online crime. The provision of a telephone number on the site through which orders and customer service issues can be resolved could be used to address this, offering those alarmed a traditional payment choice.

Businesses, and rightly so, may be reluctant to offer such a number on their site because the attraction of operating an online store is the low running costs and overheads, such as operating a call centre.

PetFoodDirect.com have taken an intelligent approach to this problem allowing consumers to fill in their order details online, minus card details, and request a call back to make payment. This significantly reduces the amount of time each consumer spends on the phone and ergo the associated cost to the business.

Signs of Trust

Often the reason consumers are looking for alternative payment methods to the standard Visa card is the lack of trust they sense towards a website. Consumers should be reassured whilst visiting a site in regards to security and privacy, particularly through the checkout process and product pages; so the inclusion of a genuine VeriSign logo confirming this is essential. Displaying company contact details (ideally physical address, email address and telephone number) also significantly helps, assuring people there’s somewhere to turn if anything should go wrong.

Whilst the fear of online crime and fraud maybe more prevalent than the actual realities, online retailers need to offer customers the ability to pay for their purchase through their preferred payment method, if they want to maximise their sales and profit.

As the web’s entire link profile has been changed (and manipulated) by search marketers certain ‘natural links’ have gained more importance in the eyes of Google; links embedded deep within the belly of a blog post, for example, carry more weight that those placed in a blog roll.

Whether you’re looking to grow your website ‘organically’ or simply improve your current linking profile, you need to understand how you can attract more natural links. As time goes by, attracting natural links will become increasingly important as Google continues to weed out as many ‘un-natural’ links as it can.

When we say ‘we wish to attract natural links’ what we are really attempting to attract are the people who create these links. The hardcore geeky nucleus of the web who create the vast majority of worthy content, actively use social media and, most importantly, create outbound links – the ‘Linkerati’.

So the concept is simple – create content that these ‘web influencers’ want to link to. Actually tying down what it is you can do to manipulate these influencers and get them to link to your webpage is a little more difficult to explain.

Looking Non-commercial
The ‘Linkerati’ love content that appears to be non-commercial in nature. These people love the web and don’t view it as a commercial platform upon which companies make contacts with consumers. To them the web is, in many ways, still the altruistic project based on the sharing of information for ‘the good of all’. It was their baby and they want to keep it as ‘clean’ as possible. Google themselves were originally very much members of this group.

This is one of the reasons why Wikipedia has become the defacto reference site to link to; why would you choose to refer someone to a blog post, complete with ads, if this was your outlook?!

Once you’ve made this realisation you can take steps to attempt to appear as ‘non-commercial’ as possible to this crowd. Domain name choice (.org is always respectable), graphic design and advertisement placement can all be manipulated to best serve this group of people in terms of the key signals they want to see (or don’t want to see) before they’ll link to your webpage.

Showing your ‘good’ intentions
As awareness of SEO grows amongst web users and web developers alike so does the amount of attention people pay to micro sites, viral campaigns and link bait. The scrutiny these types of creations have to pass before web users will ratify them as ‘legit’ increases by the day. The Linkerati have, in the past, been wholesale manipulated to best serve the needs of Search Marketers and generate links – and they’ve had enough of it!

If you have an image you want to communicate, don’t post on it on a key word stuffed, over optimised HTML page complete with garish ‘link to this’ buttons, and copy and paste keyword stuffed HTML link code – it’s just not going to pass muster with the elite of the Linkerati. Use credible and ‘cool’ sites like Flickr to share your image and watch the link-love and social media traffic flow.

Using design to your SEO advantage
A huge part of expressing your non-commercial credentials and good intentions is down to your design; this is where the psychology of so called ‘bad’ or ‘dated’ web design comes into play and can be used to your advantage to portray your desired impression.

On the other side of the coin stunning, modern, clean web design will also always help attract links simply through looking more professional and credible.

Make yourself easily linkable
So, if you’ve put the effort in to make your content as link worthy as you can, then it makes sense to make it easy for people to link and reference that content. Let’s face it, people are lazy and we all lead busy lives. Include short URLs for your articles, provide HTML non-technical users can copy and paste, include social media buttons (and target them to your niche). Make it as easy as possible for people to share and spread the word about your content.

The BBC website is a prime example of this. Before the BBC introduced its social media buttons to BBC news articles it’s stories were quickly being re-spun and spat out on various other websites and getting voted up to the top of Digg and other social media websites. Why? Because those sites made themselves easily linked and shared whilst the BBC did not.

Using emotion to trigger a response
Why do people choose to link to a news story on one website over another? They both, in essence, carry the same information and facts, but something from the first story means that people choose to link and discuss it and not the second. That something is an emotional response.

In many ways this touches on traditional journalist tactics, evoking a response in the reader through the manner in which the content is constructed; anger, excitement, envy, confusion, disappointment, shame, pride are all emotions that can be used to entice someone to link to and discuss your content.

Many could argue that whilst attempting to evoke emotions, one must be careful not to leave potential customers alienated. However, in a world made up of sterile web servers and pixels on a screen emotion, passion and personality can be a huge driving force.

Finding a non-competitive market within your niche
Imagine you’re an estate agent and you write fantastic content about properties available in your city. Surely every other estate agent in the area would want to share that content with their visitors? Of course not, they’re not about to link to a direct competitor and help your rankings. Once you’ve made this realisation you can start targeting your content towards individuals and groups that won’t feel threatened to link to your work – identify your own local ‘linkerati’.

Is your estate agent based in a student city? Great, create a guide to student living in the various areas and tell all the student websites about it!

Are there local charity and government organisations concerned with housing issues? There is, great! Create a genuinely useful and helpful resource based around local housing issues and tell them about it!

Creating Credibility
Data, resources, white papers and even pure opinions that originate from a trustworthy, reliable source which are well researched are much more likely to be linked to than other content.

Most UK users for example generally feel perfectly safe to link to or cite a webpage from the BBC, knowing that, in all likeliness, the information will be correct; these academic Linkerati types are a stickler for accurateness.

Whilst it may be virtually impossible to gain the same amount of credibility the BBC possess, the same kind of trust can be established relatively easily within your own niche… with a little work.

On the surface many of these ideas may seem obvious or even simplistic, but when implemented and promoted correctly can have a huge positive effect on incoming links and ergo rankings, especially over the long term.

Quite simply, if your competitors are undergoing an active SEO campaign with a good agency (like you are) how are you going to differentiate yourself:

•    What’s your competitive advantage?
•    Is your incoming link profile diverse enough to be deemed risk adverse?
•    Have you got a strategy in place to attract more natural links over time than they do to ensure long term success (even after you’ve finished working with an agency)?

If you’re struggling to answer any of these questions with confidence, then perhaps it’s time you too paid attention to the Linkerati and how you can leverage them for your own commercial benefit.

The introduction of Kenshoo Search, a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign management tool, will allow Epiphany to manage much larger PPC campaigns for more clients, while streamlining internal processes for its staff.

Epiphany’s PPC division has seen strong growth in the last 12 months, with sales increasing by 150 per cent and staffing more than doubled.

Significantly, just last month it announced the appointment of Managing Director Rob Shaw, the former Chief Technology Officer from rival Latitude.

He will be responsible for ensuring the company continues to deliver operational excellence during this period of rapid growth.

Commenting on the introduction of the platform Shaw said:

“We’re really excited about selecting Kenshoo Search as our preferred PPC management platform. As we continue to grow and secure further paid search contracts it’s essential we have tools that enable our talented staff, rather than hinder them.

“Having reviewed the leading paid search platforms for many months, we finally selected Kenshoo Search as our platform for larger paid search contracts because it has been developed by people who understand the industry. Their unique approach called Quality Management delivers a complete end-to-end solution through intelligent automation resulting in optimization of all elements of PPC campaign creation and management. They believe, as we do, that the best PPC campaigns are those delivered with a combination of highly skilled staff using the right tools.

“We have expanded our PPC capacity considerably in recent months and the team have been actively involved in the selection process. They all feel that Kenshoo Search will deliver tangible benefits in the delivery of paid search to our clients.”

Speaking about the selection, Mike Chowney, Managing Director of Kenshoo Inc. UK, said:

“We are delighted by the news that Epiphany have chosen Kenshoo Search. They have years of experience running PPC campaigns and we believe it’s a reflection of the quality and flexibility of our product that an agency like Epiphany would select us over some of the biggest names in the search industry. We look forward to working with them.”

Brand & Reputation Management
A useful session with plenty of guidance on how you can implement brand and reputation management for any organisation. Due to the nature of the beast this session blended into the topic of Social Media, so forgive me as I venture down the SMO alley.

Dave Snyder, Co-Founder of Search & Social, kicked things off in the world of ORM (Online Reputation Management). Dave started his talk with, Social Media, the best link building technique and took us through both the light and dark side (his words) of ORM. Dave informed us that when trying to promote content on Digg (for ORM or general SEO) don’t get obsessed with making the front page of said website. The point of promoting here (in this instance) isn’t the traffic you will attract; it’s the incoming links this exposure will generate. The goal here is to get others to blog about your content, and ergo supply incoming (and possibly keyword rich) links. If you’re selling something 99% of the time the bulk of traffic that Digg can generate is worthless, these people aren’t looking to convert, there just looking for quick entertainment.

Dave Naylor was next and outlined the things he tracks in the SERPs when undertaking ORM; brand terms, company name, key employees and product names. Reputation scoring was another technique Dave explained. Simply this is looking through the SERP and assigning a score to the SERP content based on how positive or negative the comment was. Undertaking this at regular interviews allows you to assess the current online reputation of your clients for key terms.

Social Media Optimization
In what was most definitely the prettiest session of the entire of SES London, this all female panel gave some fantastic explanations and insights into SMO, and how to form your own all encompassing Social Media Strategy.

All of the talks here were great, but I thought Jennifer Laycock in particular made some good points. For her it’s not about optimisation but conversations; Social Media Conversations. For example, in this time of recession SMCs are a great way to interact with your customers and find out what they think about you product and its price point as wallet sizes diminish. It’s the ultimate focus group. Remember also that Social Media is on the bleeding edge of search marketing, and it can hurt. It’s important to take a look at adoption rates of these sites before trying to promote your client sites in them.

Lisa Ditlefesen informed us that the actual practical implementation of SMO is easy, and I agree with her. What is hard here, and is the true driving force behind many SMO successes, is creativity. You need to be creative and innovative with your submissions.

Were heading back into ORM here, but another important point of SMO is too alter the SERPs. The success of positive social content can take another position on the front page of Google for your companies name and help to protect your brand image. I intend to go into more detail on SMO here on the Epiphany blog shortly, so look out for that and more

Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Mentions Online
Going beyond the clich that is the term link bait is many ways is very much a use of old school marketing tactics. You need to make contact with important and prominent journalists and bloggers in your particular niche and bait them, supply them with a News Hook; a term that anyone who’s had anything to do journalism will be familiar with. It’s simply really, you need to give them a news story, journalists love fact and figures, supply them with a targeted press release with a great story complete with facts and you will generate incoming links from authoritative sources. You clearly need good contacts to be most successful here, and the panel suggested creating your own database of journalists to help with this and gave plenty of great advice on how to put this together.

Dixon Jones, the managing director of Receptional Ltd, rose a point that may surprise, or even worry many. 301 redirects may decrease in relevancy for Google in the not to distance future. Dixon was careful avoid putting too much emphasis on this controversial point and kept his analysis deliberate vague. He cited the recent introduction of the canonicalisation Meta tag by Google as evidence of this possible change. Dixon went on to outline how to analyse the quality of links pointing at a website and as well as covering the issue of the use of short URL services such as TinyURL. Simply, don’t use them, create your own script and gain control over those links. Mr Jones also suggested that rather than building new links you should also look at getting current links changed to suit your purpose, i.e. improved anchor text.

So all in all would I go back to SES London? Yes, most definitely. As a day to day SEO professional alot of what was covered wasn’t new to me, but the regularly ‘golden nuggets’ that were provided made it all worth while.

Orion Panel: SEO Where to Next?
Billed as a SES first and an ‘explosive’ session this panel discussion almost lived up to the hype. It’s hard to sum up in a few sentences the in-depth discussion that went on here with moderator Mike Grehan and panellists Kevin Ryan, Rand Fishkin, Brett Tabke, Chris Sherman and Jill Whalen, and still do it justice. One thing amongst many that stood out was the somewhat heated discussion between Rand and Jill. This boiled down to ‘link acquisition’ strategies (or lack of); Jills ‘natural website’ ethos, and Rands more ‘forced’ approach. Personally, I think to achieve a truly successful long term SEO strategy, and timely meet the commercial goals, you have to do both.

Edit: You can check to see just how fair off my description of the session was with this transcript from Search Marketing Gurus.

SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
Yorkshires own Dave Naylor formed part of the panel for this session. For those not yet regularly blogging or familiar with how to SEO their blog from a technical perspective, this would have been a great session. Dave and the other blogging expert on the panel, Sante Achille, gave some great advice on implementing WordPress for most SEO impact. I was a very early WordPress adopter and considered myself clued up on its best implementation for maximum SEO impact, so it was good to hear the SEO rock stars of the industry confirm the methodology I had developed for myself. WordPress usage has taught me that fresh new content (i.e. blogs) ranks very well and very quickly in Google for many medium to long tail phrases in many circumstances, as Dave pointed out for Google (a) “Query Deserves Freshness”. I was brave enough to ask a question during this session in regards to BBPress and the possible future uptake in its adoption, a little off topic I know. Either they didn’t hear my question fully, didn’t think it deserved an answer, or didn’t have an answer, but I received a very small short negative reply from Dave. For the record, he doesn’t rate BBPress at all. This was quite a daunting thing to do with a room packed full of SEO professionals and the such like, but this is one thing that makes SES so great; the ability to quiz and question the SEO rock stars of this world.

Searcher Behaviour Research Update
Are the people searching for your target term, navigation, information or transaction searchers? Do you know that Google alters it SERPs dependent on the type of searcher it thinks is using the engine at the time? That is, if Google thinks your term is an information seeking term it will promote information type websites (pages) to the top of the rankings for that term. Well, I’ve read about and seemingly experienced something similar, but this session proved beyond doubt with statistical information that this is the case.

Video & Podcast SEO
So how actually do you SEO a non-text based media such as video or podcasts? It’s a good question and is increasing important for those wanting to dominate the SERPs in a time of blended and integrated engines, as well as mine this potential traffic source. This session was about how this was possible, and to be honest (and unsurprisingly) it was mainly just standard SEO best practice.

There were though a number of nice titbits in this session. This had occurred to me before, but is perhaps a new one for many. MP3s have what is known as ID3 tags, information about the MP3 contained within (attached too) the MP3 file. These tags are machine readable; itunes for example reads these tags when it displays artist and song details. Google is a machine, it can read ID3 tags. For those of you that remember the days of effective Meta Data keyword stuffing, this is one area in which an equivalent of this is to some extent still alive and well..

Pay-for-performance: Winning Strategies for Advertisers & Agencies
Though a little dry, this session was pack full of useful business models, real world case studies, and discussion on how agencies and clients together can work to produce Pay-for-performance models that work well for them both. Some really insightful proposals were put across here and I imagine was of great use to prospective clients and agencies alike.

And on a final note for the organisers, the lunch available today was much nicer than the one yesterday. Lemonee salad, yum!

The Pirates Dilemma
Perhaps the best presented and most entertaining talk of the day, SES London kicked off with a talk on ‘how youth culture reinvented capitalism’ in the guise of The Pirate Dilemma, hosted by Matt Mason. I won’t dwell on this one to long as it has little relevance for most people involved in a day to day search marketing campaign, but it was certainly an insightful lecture. In essence the talk outlined how privacy has influenced & changed business models & practices, and how to best deal with privacy (to your advantage) if you should ever become a victim of it. You can download the book for free from Matt’s website – http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-book.

Universal & Blended Search
Over the past two years Google has significantly changed how it displays search results with the introduction of Universal and Blended search. For those not familiar with these terms I’m referring to the image, video, news & local results Google inserts into the natural listings, as well as the targeted search tabs that run along the top of Google.

As search marketers were all familiar with the CTR stats of the top 5 results in Google gleamed from the leaked AOL data a few years ago. What may shock may people to learn is that when a video is present within the natural listings this ‘steals’ away 30% of ALL the traffic the top five sites normally receive. Its this kind of insight and statistical data which makes me really warm to SES, you just can’t seem to find trustable data and statistics on things like this very easily, if at all, anywhere else. There was a lot more to this presentation which I hope to share with you all in the coming days, but simply if you want to dominate the SERPs that you need to understand Universal Search and “Digital Asset Optimisation”.

IAB: Search Marketing Best Practice
This would have been a great presentation for marketing managers looking to hire an search marketing agency, concluding with a fantastic checklist of what to look for and ask when hiring. After asking these questions about Epiphany Solutions I’m happy to say we I think we would fair very well against these ‘standardised’ benchmarks of quality.

Orion Panel: Measuring Success in a 2.0 World
One point that may surprise many that don’t work day to day in the world of SEO is the view of Google Analytics that came across in this question and answer session.

“Jack of all trades”
“One size fits all solution”
“If you only have a hammer then all you see is nails”

Were just a few of the clichés used to describe Google Analytics by the panel, and I think they have a point. If you have a specific KPI for your business than you should chose the metrics package that will best report on that KPI for you, and not just blindly adhere to the Google mantra. I think this is an important point and for me, the same is also true of Google Website Optimizer. It’s a great product, and its free, but don’t just assume that it’s made by Google that it’s the right solution for you and your particular business objective.

Analytics: Data into Action
Heavily relying on a Star Trek (The Original Series) analogy throughout, this presentation was insightful, to the point and packed full of useful information, as well as entertaining. The message to this talk though was fairly simple; don’t get locked into just producing reports with meaningless numbers. If you are to provide useful advice to your clients then you need to give insight, you need to look at the experience a website visitors receives, you need to segment your data and not just aggregate it all in together to gain a true understanding of what your visitors are really doing, and whos really converting. Otherwise your reports are just meaningless lumps of numbers and data.

Come back tomorrow to read my review of the second day of events at SES London 2009.

The deal is pretty simple, each student team will get $200 to spend on a Adwords campaign for a local business of their choosing. The students will then have to outline a strategy, run the campaign, assess the results, and then provide the business with recommendations for further development. Teams will then submit a report to Google of their Adwords escapades and they will be judged by a panel of independent academics from all over the globe. The winners will get flown out to Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California, and get to meet the team that created AdWords.

Check out the press release or visit the main site for more information.

It’s important to remember that the web is still relatively young as an industry. Whilst I think we’re beyond the automobiles industry benchmark of the the Ford Model T, we’re nowhere near the deterioration of Detroit! The longevity of Search Engine Optimisation is less clear, but you can be guaranteed that as the web moves out of pubescence / young adulthood its evolution will have an effect on the way Search Marketing operates. Social Media Optimisation could be only the first of many examples.

So what is Social Media Optimisation?

The term Social Media Optimisation has been credited to Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations, he defines SMO as the following.

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

When looking at SMO for his own clients Rohit breaks SMO down into 5 rules to help his thinking,

• Increase your linkability
• Make tagging and bookmarking easy
• Reward inbound links
• Help your content travel
• Encourage the mashup

To get a strategic overview of these points check out Rohits original post 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO). Rohits post is most definitely worth a look, but based upon my own experience and others I intend to delve into these points a little deeper and hopefully explain how they translate into real world (well, web world) actions.

1. Increase your linkability

For the uninitiated linkability is the measure by which your website is worth linking to. For most business sites out there this is usually pretty low; they offer generic shop fronts or dry corporate sites that are not regularly updated, both remain ‘static’.

You need to give people a reason to link to your content, a standard pretty brochure based site simply isn’t enough. You need to offer something unique, interesting, original, useful, innovative, comprehensive, controversial, argumentative, informative, witty, -insert your own adjective here -. What’s your differentiator?

The most common and easiest way to achieve this for most organisations large and small is to introduce a corporate blog. This gives them a platform via which they can offer regularly updated insightful information about their organisation in an informal way, and it might just turn out to be something worth linking to or voting for.

The options here though are almost endless, from academic white papers, through to a themed Flash Game, back to a Firefox extension. An extremely old school example of this would be an office web cam, nowadays on its own this won’t be enough, but point it at your custom built office water cooler piranha aquarium and you’ve got a guaranteed hit.

The best example I can give is a site I recently created, Google Adwords – The Ultimate Guide, by PPC agency expert Steve Baker. This site is a comprehensive guide to using Google Adwords and contains a level of depth and insight not previously available on the web; its a unique and comprehensive guide on a topic that plenty of people blog about, and importantly a topic we as a business can easily generate content (or a resource or a tool) around. Making something that has linkability isn’t as hard as it may sound, just think about what you already know and how you can put that across in a unique and interesting fashion to others.

2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy

In the early days of Digg those ever so enthusiastic early adopters would happily manually submit your amazing content for you, just for the kudos of being first to do so; plenty of users would then follow on and Digg you up. Sure that still happens, but in order to maximise your potential number of votes and ‘make the front page’ of social media sites you need make it easy for users of these social sites to vote for your content.

Think about it, how many sites do Digg users visit in one session? Unless your content is the best of the best they’re not going to go out of their way to submit your site when there’s a funny video of Britney Spears exposing herself in the next tab waiting for their attention. Users of these sites want to reward content they enjoy (on whatever level), its part of the experience for them, you’ve just got to make it easy for them to do so.

Social Share Buttons

I like to call the answer to this, Social Share Buttons (SSBs), those little icons and text links you increasingly see on the bottom of every web page. Please feel free to propagate usage of this phrase via your own weblog .

Technically SSBs are easy enough to implement, it’s just a matter a adding a few images, correctly linking them through to the social site and perhaps throwing in a few database controlled elements in, such as titles, descriptions and relevant tags. Most of the Social Media sites offer guidance on how to properly link to their service for user submissions and there are plenty of WordPress plug-ins available to automate the installation of SSBs to help along the unsure.

SSBs (Social Share Buttons) from The BBC

Social Share Buttons enter the Mainstream

Over the past 6-12 months the practice of including SSBs has become practically mainstream. It all started in the Blogosphere, but SSBs can now be found on almost all national UK newspaper websites, weblogs, and local rag sites alike. Even the lamest of websites now include them, in fact the point of saturation is so that SSBs have become almost uncool, practically passe for the ultra web hip. It is perhaps the ultimate endorsement of your content or creditability when you are successful on social media sites like Digg without using them, I’m so big I don’t need to advertise kinda thing.

Participation is compulsory to protect your interests

The most recent high profile example of adoption of SSBs is the BBC. Whilst the Beeb was quick to pick up on and promote RSS feeds it has been slow to jump on the SMO and SSB bandwagon having only introduced its icons in the past few months. I would suggest that in part, the decision by the BBC to adopt SSBs was based upon the fact that many bloggers were recycling BBC news stories into their own blog posts and garnering the social media attention for themselves. Since the BBC has introduced the buttons the original stories (i.e. the BBC) are now receiving the social media attention rather than the copycat bloggers. This doesn’t just apply to large well known sites like the BBC. Imagine you were an obesity surgery business that introduced an innovative new type of surgery that was newsworthy. Introducing SSBs to the official press release would mean you would stand a chance of being noticed amongst the numerous blogs that will attempt to make grass on the back of your story. A more targeted SMO campaign could ensure that it is your copy and message that gains the most social media attention rather than some amateur blogger looking for cheap gains at your expense. Protect your brand and gain potential new customers all in one go.

The Facebook Phenomeom

You’ll notice that the Beebs SSBs also include Facebook. Facebook truly hit the big time in the UK over the summer, regularly making the headlines in print and on TV alike. We are regular informed that time spent on Facebook during work hours is costing the UK economy millions (if not billions) in wasted man hours. The speed at which Facebook SSBs appeared was remarkable, it has taken years for the phenomenon that is Stumbleupon to appear on mainstream websites, the adoption of Facebook SSBs was practically overnight. This is perhaps even more remarkable when you consider the fact that Facebook is largely a closed garden. Web developers and web marketers alike, whether they realise it or not, are embracing SMO tactics wholeheartedly.

3. Reward inbound links

If you’ve got this far into the article your probably already aware that links to your site play a crucial role in your success in Google rankings. Quite simply, the more inbound links you have the better.

A lot of ‘amateur’ bloggers will link to your content just to have something to blog about (assuming you have the right type of link bait of course) but to maximise your incoming linking potential you need to offer linkers a reward. The only truly valued reward you can give here is a link back.

Most blogging software offers track backs, allowing people to ping your blog when they link to it and receive an excerpt and link back to their original post in your comments area. It’s a simple, effective and established method of encouraging people to link and discuss your weblog posts.

More recently a number of webpage widgets have emerged that show related weblog posts to the page you are reading, this relationship is usually established via incoming links. Personally I’m not a fan of these as I feel they add more of a hindrance to a users site experience than adding to it, but I can appreciate how perhaps they are more appropriate than ‘techie’ trackbacks on some sites.

The ultimate aim of any search marketer is to generate one-way incoming links, and this is still possible using the above methods as, at least in the eyes of Google, these links are discounted if they have rel=”nofollow” insert on the link back. Most modern blogging software does this automatically nowadays. Also, most of the widgets that are available render their links in Javascript, meaning they are invisible to Google and other engines.

You should also make it as easy as possible for people to link to your site, simply by having human friendly URLs, eg http://www.example.com/news rather than www.example.com/index.aspx?5847. For the less technically minded (Bebo, Myspace et al users) it might also be an idea to introduce code which they can copy and paste to embed a link and a banner to your website.

4. Help your content travel

Making your content travel is about creating content that can be portable, content that can submitted and appear on other sites or elsewhere in the ‘real world’. We’re talking MP3s, videos and PDFs here. Ultimately, Rohit argues, this will result in more backlinks to your site, I assume as simply your URL and content is in-front of more eyeballs. Whether creating portable media like this generates a significant amount of backlinks is too hard to assertain but submitting your creative video to YouTube will certainly increase your exposure.

5. Encourage the Mashup

A mashup is the idea of taking data sources from several different websites and mashing them together to form a new web application. Most mashups are altruistic affairs due to the nature of content licensing; common examples include such things as taking traffic reports from the BBC website and placing them onto top of Google Maps interface in real time.

As Rohit points out the best example of commercial success in offering content for syndication is You Tube via their video embedding, the promotion of their brand and service on every site that featured their videos weighed heavily in quickly raising their profile early on.

The easiest way for most websites to fulfil this point of SMO is to offer an RSS feed of their latest news stories. Doing this allows your content to be syndicated out to the rest of the web; your headlines and news excerpts can appear on other peoples websites, creating one-way back links and driving traffic. There are hundreds of RSS aggregators and search engines (and geeky developers) waiting to devour your content and promote it to a new audience.

Many worry about issues of copyright and duplicate content in making there content available in such an accessible manner, but they shouldn’t. RSS feeds can be set to only include a snippet from the news story meaning duplicate content penalties from Google should be avoided and anyone wishing to read the entire story will have to visit your site.

The truth is though, the chances are unless your what your feed offers is particularly unique or press worthy you are unlikely to feature in anything more prestigious than an RSS aggregator or directory. Whilst not reliant on RSS perhaps the ultimate ‘mash up’ (more accurately aggregator) most sites can hope to feature in is Google News. This endeavour though is still worthwhile, just for the backlinks it can generate alone (and we haven’t even touched upon the user experience enhancements it makes possible).

My own personal favourite mash up related tip is geourl.org. Add some ibcm geographical co-ordinates into the head of your document, submit and your listed. This instantly generates over 100 potential backlinks from geourl. What really interests me here though is where this data may eventually end up being used…..

On a very low level many blogs already feature GeoURL links in their sidebar. As there are few automatic services for embedding this data available these blogs tend to be of fairly high value as they have been created by web professionals, a free geographical on-topic backlink from a decent blog.

Its Still About the Links, Baby

As Google seemingly continues to shout clamp down on paid links the importance of being able to attractive and generate real natural links will become increasingly important. They’re not quite there yet, but eventually Google will manage to get its act together and weed out many paid for links (though probably not all). This could be years away, but as part of a long, long term strategy every site should be looking to build as many natural and real links as possible.

For me, working day to day as an SEO analyst this is the real attraction of SMO, the potential incoming one-way links it can generate, be it from the social media sties themselves or the proceeding blog posts. Sure, huge traffic surges can be nice but the traffic is often of a low quality or off-topic and offers me little or no real value as a search marketer of commercial sites looking to sell specific products.

If an article or ‘social media bait’ of yours makes the front page of Digg you can be guaranteed that you’ll pick up a whole host of links from others sites, as others look for interesting content to blog about, recommend or link to.

Beyond the Social Media Optimisation 5 step plan

SMO though doesn’t just stop there, though I’m going to. A number of marketing professionals have picked up on Rohits post and run with it, creating several more SMO check points of there own.

6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7. Reward helpful and valuable users
From Jeremiah Owyang

8. Participate
9. Know how to target your audience
10. Create content
11. Be real
From Cameron Olthuis

12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
From Loren Baker

14. Develop a SMO strategy
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices
From Lee Odden

Social Media Optimisation is an emerging art and changing daily as new social media players emerge and the established sites update themselves. Your thoughts on this article, or on how this emerging industry will evolve are welcome.

Let me explain. Roughly 80% of all UK search traffic originates from Google. In the majority of cases, your long term website traffic (& conversions) will originate from a search engine (insert your own social media caveat here). Before this online behemoth and others can begin sending you those potential customers it has to visit, ‘read’ and ‘understand’ your website, not just once, but hopefully time and time again. How else can Google decide on which pages to recommend to its users? ‘The machine’ (or rather several thousand servers) that does this is know as the Google Bot.

Meet Mr Google

Here’s a rather loose analogy. Imagine that in your town, the only way the vast majority of people learnt about a new shop was through recommendations. Not recommendations from friends or family, but recommendations from one man, and one man alone. Mr Google. If this was the case in the real world, you can bet your mortgage that you’d make sure Mr Google can find your shop, can get inside, enjoys his time there and can most easily understand what you sell. You’re relying on this one man to drive the vast majority of your customers to you. Think of Mr Google as kinda like a restaurant critic on steroids.

The simply conclusion? The most important visitor that your website will ever receive is the Google Bot, and the chances are that your competitor is, to some extent, ignoring it.

If you owned a high street shop, you may be tempted to get the banners (rollover effects) and bunting (flash animations) out right about now to tempt in this ever so influential Mr Google. Just slow down there, cowboy.

The Blind (Google) Bot

You see though, the thing is, when the Google Bot visits your website, it doesn’t notice your new shiny navigation, it can’t read the ‘text’ embedded deep within your graphic rollovers, your amazing(ly) (expensive) photography leaves it cold and that sexy Flash animation is most definitely not a turn on.

The Google Bot is a lean, mean, text eating (image hating) machine. It’s interested in what you have to say and how you say it, not what you look like. He’d probably date the cute intelligent girl who studied maths at university (and liked dogs).

Mr L. Google is as ‘blind as a bat’. Never mind the barn door, the Google Bot would miss the adjacent field. After all, it is only a machine.

And here in lies the problem: web developers/ designers are only (mostly) human (well, at least 90% are). Traditionally, they have designed & created web pages for visual effect. They often don’t consider how messy their code may be, if the page is usable in any browser, on any platform within any device, or if it can be ‘best read’ by a blind user, aka Mr Google.

Boat number 97 please come in your time is up

There are very good and completely understandable historic reasons why this ‘incorrect’ method of creating web pages has been so prevalent in the industry. But, without boring us all with the history of web development and browser development (or lack of Mr Gates!), there is simply no longer any excuse for this.

Since November 2001 (the release date of Internet Explorer 6), we have had a set of browsers that understand modern web technologies, enabling all web developers to develop accessible standardised sites that can be viewed and understood by all, including Mr Google.

Though things have improved immeasurably since the dark days of 1997, primarily driven by the advent of blogs and many ‘Web 2.0’ sites, many (and I mean many) corporate/commercial sites still bask in the table tags, messy code, and inaccessible methods of the late nineties.

I have yet to see a single client’s site that comes anywhere close to fully implementing and understanding the standardised and accessible method of creating websites.

The sites that do attempt this (most probably unwittingly so) more often than not also get it horribly wrong. It seems that many web developers have simply switched from nested tables to div soup. They place Header 4’s before Header 1’s within a page. They leave unclosed tags. Quite bluntly, they don’t understand (X)HTML, the basic building blocks of any website.

But I like my pretty website! Or, my pretty website cost me a lot of money!

As a business owner, at this point you may be beginning to worry, you’re interested in sales, not some altruistic method of website development that gives access to all. Sure, you’ll want to meet your legal requirements but let’s face it, you want to know about the bottom line.

Don’t worry, when we SEO your on-page content were not going to build virtual wheelchair ramps or install text-phones. Your website can remain just as beautiful to the human eye as it is right now, and after our on-page optimisation it will also be beautiful in the text hungry eyes of Google as well.

Accessibility alone is never the answer.

In essence, what we’re talking about here is page mark-up; how the page is constructed, the order of your content, the semantics of your document. A standarised and professional approach to creating web documents.

If you’ve read this far you probably already know that on-page factors alone will never result in a success SEO campaign. Simply creating a website that addresses to WAI guidelines is not going to result in high rankings for Britney Spears. There are many more factors at play here.

What is important here is understanding. If you can understand how your webpage is read, viewed and interpreted by every user from your granny on Windows 98 through to your nephew on his new PSP, you can then truly say you fully understand how Google (a machine) can read and understand your webpage, and can maximised this potential to its fullest.

So there you have it – Web Accessibility, the basis of any solid SEO campaign.

Hey! Hold on a minute, who’s Larry?

Larry Page is the co-founder of Google along with Sergey Brin. Neither is know to suffer from any visual impairment.

With the CAPTCHA system, blind users were not able to access many Google services, such as GMail, Blogger, Google Groups, or a Google account, as the visual challenge kept them from participating.

Dr. Raman comes from a background of advocating standards-based programming and structured data on the web, and highlighted three key phrases: ‘clean,’ ‘well-structured’ and ‘semantic’ when looking at search engines. He believes that Web
sites creating clean, well-formed XHTML content will, over time, find it significantly easier to serve all their users better—simply because their content will be easier to manage and evolve.

Google’s accessible search was received positively by the blind community, yet many low-vision users took issue with the tagline of “search for the visually impaired.” Why? It turns out that many sites are accessible for blind users, yet the same amount of accessibility is not available to low-vision users, who require different methods in order to access the content.

The main obstacle to creating accessible web sites is that needs vary widely—there is no single “fix” that will make a site accessible to all users. Because of the varied nature of access, the multiple types of assistive technology, and multiple user needs, sites must cater to a host of diverse combinations.

One blind user of Google said:

“What is ‘usable’ to people with varying levels of vision impairment has hardly been studied and those of us interested in doing so are few and far between. So, in my opinion, moving from ‘accessible’ to ‘usable’ will
take another decade.”

Google continues to enhance its accessible search tool. It has recently been improved to give blind users access to the same advanced search features that are available in the regular Google search.

Dr, Raman feels that the impact of the accessible search will go beyond a simple service and one that will affect the development of the web. “I hope that as we continue to improve accessible search, we’ll have a long-term positive impact on increasing awareness of the need to create clean, accessible web content,” he says.
[Via Search Engine Watch]