Last week, Facebook announced the launch of its latest location product called Places. Similar to other location based social networking platforms such as Foursquare, Facebook Places allows people to “check-in” to an existing location or to add new locations to the platform through their smart phones.

When someone checks in at a place, for example a café or cinema, this shows up in that user’s news feed for their friends to see. Another feature is that it allows subsequent people who later visit the same location to see what their friends thought about the place or what they were doing at the time. Facebook Places goes a step further in social integration by helping to spot friends close by to your location. This gives people the opportunity to engage in spontaneous face to face meetings, and may have wider implications for local business marketing and privacy concerns.

The following video explains what Facebook Places is and what it can be used for:

How to access Facebook Places

Facebook Places is currently available in the United States on the Facebook App for iPhone.

You can also update Places through touch.facebook.com for all other smart phones that support W3 geo-location. There has yet to be news as to when it will become available in Australia.

However it has been announced that Foursquare, Yelp, Gowala and Booyah will be integrated with the Facebook Places API, which can pull information and pictures of the location where a user checks in.

Facebook Places and User Privacy

There has been mention about potential privacy issues associated with Facebook Places.  Once a user checks in to a location, the update shows up on that person’s wall and news feed by default. The bigger concern is that it also shows up in the activity stream of the checked in place.

Places give users the ability to tag friends who are with them when checking in to a location, another point of concern for privacy. However, privacy settings for Places can be customised to preference, as with other Facebook features. Allfacebook.com has come up with a four step guide on how to edit your privacy settings for Places.

Using Places for Local Businesses

The launch of Places presents another opportunity for local cafes, restaurants and brick and mortar shops to connect with customers and reward them for checking in to that location. If used and promoted well, Places can be a great marketing tool to help customer retention and repeat visits.

Local businesses can claim their location in Places through a verification process to ensure authenticity. This is done by claiming an existing Place or by creating one to allow others to check-in. Places within Facebook can be merged with a businesses’ Facebook Page to centralise the management of both entities. The advantage is also that the merged Page will be updated to include Place information such as maps and check-ins, as seen below:

Download the Facebook Places Guide for Businesses to find out more.

What do you think about Facebook Places? What other applications can you see Facebook Places used for?

Couldn’t resist snatching a look at what the two major parties are doing in the digital realm for this election. This election was supposed to be the big digital one taking cues from Obamas election in ‘08 but so far both parties are doing just ‘enough’ with the Libs marginally ahead. A classic example was the morning after the PM’s solo appearance on ABC’s Q&A show when Google searches for the Labor party and the PM were expected to spike. On this day however, the ruling party was conspicuous by its absence allowing its competitor to easily capture all those searches of Labor followers or potential fence-sitters.  Searches conducted on Tuesday for  ‘labor party’ and ‘julia gillard’ brought up paid ads instead by the Liberal Party attacking Labor failures. The Liberal party has obviously cleverly included in its list, Labor party brand terms and the names of Labors leaders ensuring users typing those terms see a Liberal Party paid ad instead. The ads also use the recently launched Sitelinks format which offers users multiple links to click on to enable voters to explore different facets of the Liberal Party’s campaign.

Paid search (PPC) can be effectively used in an election as messages can be updated and put live within hours in response to trending election themes or breaking news. PPC formats allow Election Campaign managers a low cost environment to test and run multiple messages which can serve as a far more credible means of testing concepts than traditional focus groups. Enhanced formats like Sitelinks allow Campaign Managers to integrate their offline and social media components into the Search strategy. Tailored messages can also be used focusing on the most relevant issues for different geographies eg states and cities in contrast to traditional advertising’s one message must fit all. With only a handful of major parties buying search terms in Australia, the costs of setting up running an effective search campaign would be far less expensive than buying primetime radio or television spots.

Google has set up its own page covering the Australian Federal Election which tracks election search trends on the major parties, leaders and issues along with links to a Google Map mashup to find polling booths and Electoral bases in your surburb.

Google announced today their trademark protection policy in many countries will be updated to be in line with the policy in place in the US and UK.  In this instance, Google will only investigate trademark protection if a company feels a competitor is being misleading.  So in practice competitors are able to bid on one another’s brand names, but can not include competitive brand names in their ads, or try to ‘trick’ consumers into clicking on their ad instead.

Advertisers have until the 14^th September 2010 to lodge their complaints under the existing policy, after which time the new policy will apply.

Australia, New Zealand and most Asian countries are not affected, although each country can have a unique policy.  Click here for a full list of affected countries.

We continue to urge all advertisers to ensure they have applied for proactive trademark protection in their relevant country.

Recent discussions around the local café espresso machine have centered on the SEO value of a microsite.  It appears to be a divisive issue amongst SEOers and online strategists, even more so than the füßball table and the perennial argument of who lives in the Real World (SEOers) vs. who lives in the clouds (online strategists). So, let’s consider some of the reasons why one may venture down this thorny path and what the SEO implications may be… 

Firstly Wikipedia describes Microsites as “a web design term referring to an individual web page or cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. The microsite’s main landing page most likely has its own domain name or subdomain. This is also known as niche marketing.”

The main considerations with setting up a keyword rich mini-site, landing page or weblet as a microsite vs. building out your existing website are: 

1)                  When is a microsite a good commercial decision?

2)                  What are the SEO implications?

Microsites – a good commercial decision
Besides the obvious, “it depends”, in certain circumstances there are some quite compelling reasons to use a microsite strategy.

Here are 8 reasons why you might do so:

1.       It is easier to sell a product or a separate brand when they are hosted on their own domains.  SEO Benefit: Interlinking of microsites may help build link equity.

2.       Brand conflict issue; When the new product/service should be distanced from the main brand site.  Sometimes there are good commercial reasons to keep new online products or services separate from the main site where aligning your products may be detrimental to the main domain. SEO Benefit: Zero.

3.       It may be easier (and quicker) to bypass the legal and PR departments to build a small promotional site.  This is relevant when time based events dictate the immediacy and duration of opportunity, and where it is quicker to set up a new domain rather than receive formal approval from legal and PR departments. SEO Benefit: Creates opportunities to link to your main site.

4.       Content may be active or live for only a short duration ie for the life of the campaign or event. It may be easier (and quicker) to set up a microsite for specific campaigns, then redirect traffic back  to the main domain once the event is over. SEO Benefit: Keyword-rich, restricted content (niche sites) may drive traffic back to the main site.

5.       Where it is used as editorial support for a specific product. Sometimes it is not physically possible to add detailed information on the main domain. Useful for technical or in-depth descriptions of product or processes where more information may be useful for online research. SEO Benefit: Long tail keywords drive traffic back to the main site.

6.       Webmasters or bloggers may prefer to look at independent or informal sources for information gathering rather than corporate branded sites. SEO Benefit: Broader target audience with linking opportunities to send traffic to the main site.

7.       Viral sites can attract different visitors than the main branded websites. Messages will resonate with different audiences based on how they are received. SEO Benefit: Linking opportunities from different sources.

8.       They can lower your PPC cost because of the specific keyword focus which can improve the quality score and lower the CPC. SEO Benefit: Relevant keyword rich restricted content. “Owning the digital shelf” can help with organic click through rates.

However, the most obvious downfall of a microsite strategy is the increase in time and other resources it takes to manage each individual site.  This can lead to an exponential use of limited resources as the number of microsites grows.

Microsites may be frequently set up for the wrong reasons
Here are a few examples:

1.       Improved visibility or crowding out competitors on SERPs.  If there is no obvious benefit for the end-user, this tactic may be viewed as spam.

2.       When the sole or over-riding purpose is to generate self-given links back to a main site from microsites, then this practice may be viewed as spam.

3.       Creating keyword rich, limited content microsites in order to compete with broader content sites may provide a poor user experience and potentially result in a company’s web presence and branding collateral being diluted.

4.       A commonly held webmaster belief is that multiple niche sites linked together perform better than one broader content site.  This practice is not definitively true, as link equity is then spread across the microsites on multiple domains rather than passed directly to the main domain.

Ultimately, as Shakespeare might have said, if he were an SEO, implementing a microsite strategy may result in “suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, which is a good thing, or, if poorly executed, may result in “a sea of troubles”, which is a bad thing.  Weigh the pros and cons and tread carefully.

What do you think? 

We would love to hear your comments.

We’ve been keeping tabs on infographics ever since the linkbuilding tactic came about in 2008, blogged on it a few times and its something we encourage clients to do.

So, after reading David Scoville’s post on SEO.com I decided it was time to share my research on infographics. Over the last few months I’ve compiled over 60 infographics, categorised them by topic, recorded the amount of external links they’ve earned and noted how many times it got retweeted. Is it a fad? I think not. Does it work? It can be an exceptionally good linkbuilding tactic … as you will see in the data we’ve put together.

Check out the free data sheet shared on Google Docs which might help you figure out if this is worth doing in your niche:

And here’s some top tips for publishing an infographic

• Create some textual commentary around the infographic to give it some context.
• Keep the publication of infographic hosted on one place for maximum seo benefit because you want people to link to your site. So, never use Tinypic, Imgur or Flickr to host the JPG because people will link to it there instead of your website.
• Host the infographic on a webpage or within a blog post. Give the infographic some context on the blog post and link to the full size image. Here’s a good example from Focus FYI: blog post to do give the context and the full size image for display purposes.
• Give people share + bookmark functions to easily Retweet, Buzz and stumble it.
• Encourage people to embed it on their blogs by having the code on the page so that it can earn as many links as possible.
• If you have a really long vertical infographic (like this one) then you can try to fit the blog post width format.
• Display the sources on the infographic to show where the data came from.
• Encourage engagement on your blog by prompting people for their comments.

What is the best infographic you’ve ever seen? Do you think this medium is a fad?

Last month Google made the announcement that in addition to its regular search choice they would start offering a new “secure” alternative.  The new offering can be found at https://www.google.com and the idea behind the new service is rather simple. By using SSL technology you are able to create a secure and encrypted connection between your browser and Google, ensuring that no third parties on your network will be able to intercept your search results.

However, this new enhanced privacy potentially comes at a cost for those of us out there who rely on analytical software to gain valuable insights into how users come to discover our site. Let’s say for example you owned a website that sold home theatre systems, traditionally when a user searched for the phrase “buy home theatre” in Google they would be taken to the address http://www.google.com/search?q=buy+home+theatre. Then when a user clicked your listing in the search results and was taken to your website, using analytical software you could then see what page the user came from, and in turn, discover what search phrases they used to discover your site.

Conversely though, due to the way modern browsers handle the transition from a secure SSL connection to a regular webpage all information that would regularly be sent in the browsers referrers string is lost, leaving website owners seemingly with no way to determine what phrases are used to discover their site in Google. Some in the industry have been screaming that this is the death of analytics; however this is simply not the case.

It would be worthwhile noting that Google’s new SSL anonymous search alternative is in no way the default option and while it is too early to determine any meaningful data in terms of usage and adoption rates among regular web users, the general consensus so far seems to be that this is not going to be the next “big thing”.

Furthermore, something that seems to have been lost thus far in the panic is that for years now the millions of users running one of the many Internet security programs from vendors such as McAffe, Norton and Symantec tend to strip the referral string by default, albeit to zero fuss.

While it does seem at this stage rather unlikely that this new offering from Google will have any major effect for most website owners at this stage, for those who wish to err on the side of caution, a solution exists.

As previously mentioned the information contained within the browsers referrer string is only lost when the user’s browser makes the transition from a secure SSL connection to a regular unencrypted connection. Simply by offering users a secure connection when visiting your site you will be able to continue to capture the valuable analytical insights contained within the referrer string.

In the end it remains to be seen exactly what, if anything, this means for analytics. In the mean time, it’s nice to know that a solution exists.

What do social media and tattoos have in common? They’re both things you might live to regret!

At the end of 2009 the major search engines brokered deals with the larger social media players (i.e. Twitter), allowing them to index real time content and thus further embedding social information within search results.

Will consumers and businesses start trawling for information via the likes of Google and what will they come up with?

As we continue to live in the now, we tend to forget about the potential long term implications associated with Social Media. For example, a recent security flaw on Facebook highlighted that there is the potential to compromise private conversations.

Should consumer privacy concerns continue to mount; what are the implications to businesses? Will consumers tend to shy away from engaging with brands within Social Media platforms? How will consumer behaviour change?

An article published recently in the New York Times discussed how the concerned “Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline” are increasingly “self censoring” digital assets they post on social media networks. Concerns regarding potential career prospects were covered in the article; where photos of not so flattering or derogative comments may come back to haunt you one day. Will prospective employers use these forums to conduct character references? Other concerns related to identity theft and other privacy related matters are also discussed.

Research findings published in the New York Times article showed “In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Centre for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.”

Given this insight how will social media play out? Will it be the role of government to facilitate stringent privacy legislation or will it be left in the hands of the consumer?

What are your thoughts? Will this slow down uptake?

Google announced this week that they had released a new open beta in the UK and Canadian markets for ‘modified broad’ match.  To me this is good news.  The launch of expanded broad match almost two years ago brought some definite problems for well built conversion-focused campaigns.  Yes, expanded broad match allows Google to capture terms you haven’t considered, but it also had some interesting matches.  We had one example where a brand term in one of our accounts was matching to a very generic head term – blowing out the brand reporting & CPC, & more importantly having our ads show on something we definitely didn’t want to target.

We resolved that by lowering our max CPC significantly, running multiple match types and reviewing negatives, but it does need ongoing careful consideration.

Broad match is fantastic for:

• A new account launch where it enables you to capture terms you may not have considered in your research (as much as we’d all like our research to be all-encompassing, there will always be new ideas in search query reports)
• When running multiple match types to cast a ‘wider net’ on an ongoing basis, as long as search query reports are routinely checked, useful terms included in the account and irrelevant terms added as negatives
• People are typing in longer and longer search terms and it can be next to impossible to include every single combination in your account

The new modified broad match proposes to allow you ‘greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match’ according to Google’s blog on Tuesday.   Their handy diagram explains…

Source: Google Adwords Blog:  New keyword targeting feature for advertisers in the UK and Canada

Whilst our colleagues in Canada and the UK will have the first chance to play with this, it should offer a slightly more controlled broad match experience and we look forward to testing it here.

In previous posts I wrote about some potential changes for Google’s infrastructure which Matt Cutts called Caffeine. Now, Matt did say (I guess we are on a first name basis) that they were going to hold off on this update until after Christmas 2009. This was done because last time a big update occurred it was right before Christmas and it negatively affected online retail sales. So, a bit of love – just in case Caffeine would have a significant affect in the SERP’s.

Then there was a ranking change which introduced the idea of how web page speed is being factored into the ranking criteria. I will reiterate here – relevancy is still the key metric.

But, something significant happened in Q1-Q2 2010 and Webmasterworld, as has always been done in the past, called a new, noticed algorithm changed “Mayday”.

This appears to have affected a large number of webmasters with reported traffic drops ranging from a 10% to 90% loss with a very apparent change on how Google is handling long-tail phrases and how far more spammy sites seem to be appearing in some results. This thread on Webmasterworld is long with a lot of analysis and speculation resulting in 13 pages of posts, so I’d suggest going straight to page 13.

This has had a much more noticeable affect and is apparently not finished yet. As Google isn’t too forthcoming Mayday could be a part of Caffeine; however, this shouldn’t necessarily be so because Google stated that Caffeine would be purely an infrastructure change that most users would probably not notice.

One poster, dusky, summarises on May 12th:

“There are too many legitimate white hat sites being whacked to believe it’s a penalty. Many well established gov and edu sites, large commercial and corporate sites, well known news and media sites that seen a change for the worst so far for the last three months at least and starting MayDay in particular. G* sites themselves are affected as noted above and somewhere else, how many more days or weeks this is going to take is probably everyone’s question, at least the people who join my “total re-index” camp anyway, or shall I call it total-recall. We used to think they lost some or most of the data when this happened, and that’s why the crawl rate and the re-indexing, but it turned out it was due to infrastructure and algo updates, Florida and BigDaddy are best examples.”

We have a theory based on TF-IDF. Ian Lavelle, my colleague here at Outrider, took the time to show us how this algorithm change (and apparent surge in spam pages showing in search results) could affect the long-tail. You can read Ian’s post here.

UPDATE

I thought I’d update this post based on the fact that SearchEngineLand has posted a confirmation of the Mayday algorithm change on May 27, 2010 (see excerpt below):

“Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks……

……However, sometimes a Google algorithm change is substantial enough that even those who don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the algorithms notice it. That seems to be the case with what those discussing it at Webmaster World have named “Mayday”. Last week at Google I/O, I was on a panel with Googler Matt Cutts who said, when asked during Q&A,  ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.””

As my esteemed colleague Amye Saunders covers in her blog post Mayday, Mayday!, the search engines have been rolling out some changes that look to have affected webmasters across verticals. I had an idea for a blog post on the topic of “keyword density”, and thought this an opportune time to tie it back to some real-world events… (Disclaimer: this is just my theory, and thus by no means gospel!)

Oftentimes clients will ask us about how many times they should use their keywords in their page copy, or “what is the optimal keyword density?” The answer is that there is no magic number, and the optimal keyword density changes for every search term, and I’ll explain why.

Search engines are more concerned with a value known as TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency), than just the percentage of your page content made up of your target keywords. I won’t go into the intricacies of the TF-IDF formula right now, but if you wish to delve a bit more into it, see good old Wikipedia.

Keyword density says nothing about your page’s relevance to a search query, in relation to the rest of the web. For this reason, we need to consider how many pages across the internet contain your search term, and also the total number of documents in the search engines index.

Let’s consider an example web page about ‘car insurance’ with 100 words, where the word ‘insurance’ appears 9 times. The term frequency (tf) in this case is 9/100 or 0.09. Now let’s make another assumption that the internet is made up of just 1000 web pages in total, and the word ‘insurance’ appears in 80 of these web pages. In this instance, the IDF value (inverse document frequency) is as follows: ln(1000/80) = 2.53. The TF-IDF score in this case is the product of these 2 numbers ie. 0.09*2.53=0.2277.

Let’s now consider the same example, except the search term we will focus on is more long-tail, let’s take ‘comprehensive car insurance’, which, I’ll assume, only appears twice on my example web page. Term frequency, tf, is 2/100 or 0.02. Across the entire collection of 1000 web pages, ‘comprehensive car insurance’ appears in, let’s say, 15 of them. In this long-tail case, the IDF value is: ln(1000/15)=4.2. The TF-IDF score in this case is 0.084 (less than the 0.2277 for ‘insurance’ in the above example). A higher TF-IDF score tells us that the word ‘insurance’ is more important to this imaginary internet overall than ‘comprehensive car insurance’.

Now let’s take a final example, with an expanded internet which now contains 1500 web pages, one and a half times the size of our initial index. In the above illustration, ‘comprehensive car insurance’ appeared in 1.5% of all web pages (15 out of 1000). Assuming that these new pages are just as likely to contain mention of ‘comprehensive car insurance’ (i.e. a 1.5% chance), we now have 23 pages containing our term overall. Now, our TF-IDF score works out to be 0.0836 (0.02*4.18). So from this, we can see that an increase in the size of the search engine index leads to a lower TF-IDF score for us on the term ‘comprehensive car insurance’. A high TF-IDF score means that your page is likely to be highly relevant, so your chances of ranking will improve in relation to your TF-IDF score. And as illustrated above, this score can drop if the internet expands, even though you haven’t changed anything on your site!