Social Media has exploded over the last three years, with more people now communicating everyday by various social networks and media which they create and produce. Google has been indexing this data for a while and has added it into its overall assessment algorithms, as shown by both Google Shopping Review score and now with the new Google Social Search.
Always at the front of these developments, Sitelynx is now offering a market leading monitoring and sentiment assessment tool, which reviews over 30 million news and social websites to see how what people are saying about your company, senior management, brand or website. The aim is to give our clients an view into what the Social world is saying about their brand or site and measure the change in opinion.
However, Social Buzz monitoring doesn’t just do Search - it measures the overall “chatter” about a brand or marketing campaign that is happening online. Social Buzz can help you to discover what people are saying about your brand online, discovering the sentiment of those comments about your brand (positive, negative or neutral) and find out what your competitors are doing online. In addition, you can set up alerts to be the first to know if there are any negative mentions of your brand or company on the internet.
To find out more about Social Buzz and how your company can benefit, fill in our contact form and let us help you to be in control of your online reputation.
In a move said to be “the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created”, Internet regulator ICANN has approved a new Internationalised Domain Name Fast Track Process, allowing the use of non-Latin characters from languages like Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi and Korean in internet domain names (IDNs).
The move, which will see around 100,000 new characters available for use in IDNs, spells out an interesting development for Search Engine Marketing. “The more domains are recognised in any language the more navigation search in that language will increase”, said Graham Hansell, Founder and Director of Sitelynx. “Opening up of the domain name space to non-Latin based languages will increase searching as up to 30% is navigational, looking for websites people know of.”
ICANN’s decision means that by mid-2010 web addresses using characters from different languages will be available, including top-level domains such as “.com”. ICANN’s Fast Track Process launches on 16 November 2009, allowing nations and territories to apply for Internet extensions reflecting their name – and made up of characters from their national language.
More than half of the world’s internet users do not have English or another Latin-based language as their first language. According to Internet World Stats, Asian countries already account for the largest share of the world’s Internet population (over 700 million users or 42.2% of the total Internet population), more than Europe and the United States combined (Europe: over 400 million users, 24.2%, US: 252 million users, 15.1%).
In the last post we were talking about the changing search result pages (personalization, geo-location, universal search) which will not make SEO’s life easier. The recent launch of Google Suggest (a pop-up menu that suggests alternative queries while the user types) as the default on Google.com may have some more influence on SERPs and search in general.
The implications of Google Suggest on search marketing:
- Being number one for strong generics will not necessarily mean that you will receive tons of traffic. Users who initially intended to type in ‘laptops’ may choose to see results for ‘laptops for sale’ or ‘laptops for students’ as per the Google Suggestions. In this case we might expect that a number of users will bypass ‘laptops’ on the search result page. In other words, users are presented with a choice before they even land on SERPs.
Read “Google Suggest”: Its impact on search
Search engine optimisation changes quickly… we all know that. Search engine algorithms are constantly tweaked by engineers, who strive to provide the highest quality of search result pages. On the other hand SEOs are adapting to these changes and are expected to achieve the highest possible rankings. One would think that the ultimate measurement for determining the success of optimisation would be typing in the keyword and checking it rankings. However, there is a slight problem with this approach, actually a few problems. First let’s start with the so called ‘automated rank checking software/tools’. Last week the discussion about rank checking software resurfaced in the webmaster world. Google had stated a long time ago in their Quality Guidelines that:
‘Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service’
Read Measuring Your Search Engine Optimisation Efforts
The latest search engine news from 21st July to 28th July:
- Launch of Knol
- Google walks away from deal with Digg
- Microsoft’s BrowseRank
- PageRank Update
- Google Index Insights
- Cuil, new search engine
Read Search News from 21/07 to 28/07
Over the past few months there’s been hot discussion among the online marketing community. It has to do with link baiting, the process of creating online content with the purpose of amassing inbound links.
Read about Linkbait Controversy
This month we feature interview with Kim Pham, who is the Head of Paid Search in Sitelynx Ltd.
Beginning on May 5, 2008, the AdWords trademark policy for the UK and Ireland will change. Adwords clients will be able to bid on trademarked terms. What’s your take on this?
Kim: My initial take on this is that it doesn’t change a great deal on the PPC landscape - on one side, advertisers may have to pay a little more to reinforce visibility under their own brand, if their natural visibility is poor. On the other side this may urge non-advertising companies to begin advertising on PPC when competitors are appearing in the sponsored listings under their brand name.
Read Full Interview with SEM Expert
