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#social#networking #social#media #social#media#marketing #LinkedIn #Bing

Today’s the last day of the battle between search and social.  So far search leads the way with more Internet users relying on search than on social.  Social won round three yesterday, so the counts 2-1.  Today, search could land the final blow, or social could force a tie.  First, I need to make a correction in this first category.  Even though I looked at sites as they’re ranked in the U.S. according to Alexa, Alexa ranks this first category according to all Internet users.  My apologies.

Now, let’s bring out our last two contenders and see if search can deal a knock-out blow to social.  Introducing, on the search side, Bing.  And on the social side, LinkedIn.

Bing

Only 3.65% of all Internet users use MSN

LinkedIn

Only 2.85% of all Internet users use LinkedIn

Bing

About 7.5% of their traffic comes from search engines

LinkedIn

About 16% of their traffic comes from search engines, which means their traffic would decrease by less than 1% without search engines.

Bing

Immediately before visiting Bing, 5.97% visit Google, 5.44% of their user visited Yahoo!, 4.61% visited Facebook, 4.08% visited Live, and 1.67% visited Youtube.  After leaving Bing, 6.15% visit Google, 5.82% visit Facebook, 5.23% visit Yahoo!, 3.28% visit Live, and 2.48% visit YouTube.  MSN is in there also.

LinkedIn

Immediately before going to LinkedIn, 23.77% of their users visited Google, 11.65% visited Facebook, 4.35% visited Yahoo!, 4.1% visited Twitter, 1.71% visited Live, and 1.07% visited YouTube.  Immediately after leaving LinkedIn, 22.63% of their users go to Google, 12.31% go to Facebook, 4.55% go to Twitter, 3.92% go to Yahoo!, 1.19% go to Live, and 1.1% go to Youtube.

So, what’s the verdict? Search and social need one another. I’m going to call it a tie.  What’s my point in all this?  Make sure you use both to bring people to your website. If someones telling you search is dead, their probably not a good person to hire or work with.

Come back tomorrow for the latest news about social media.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Related articles

• Bing’s New Social Search a First Tiny Step Toward a Giant Future (blogs.forrester.com)
• Bing Deal Could Extend Reach for Businesses on Facebook (clickz.com)
• Bing And Facebook Merge Search And Social (ghacks.net)
• Social Search: Links are Dead, Social is the New Pagerank (webpronews.com)
• Bing makes friends with Facebook (telegraph.co.uk)
• Welcome to the social: Bing uses Facebook friends to power search (arstechnica.com)
• Yahoo Loses Market Share, Bing Is #2 (wpromote.com)
• Bing Gets Something Google Can’t Get, Facebook Data (seroundtable.com)

Let’s continue comparing search and social. Facebook has a long way to go before it catches up to Google, but YouTube and Yahoo! are a little more even. Youtube had a few good days in September and are currently having some good days that have allowed them to rank higher than Yahoo!. And Yahoo! did not start out as a search engine, and YouTube recently started getting more social. Remember, this is all according to Alexa within the U.S.

Yahoo!

In the last three months, 26.49% of all Internet users in the U.S. have used Yahoo!.

YouTube

In the last three months, 24.36% of all Internet users in the U.S. have used YouTube.

Yahoo!

About 7.1% of their traffic comes from search engines.

YouTube

About 15.5% of their traffic comes from search engines, which means their traffic would decrease by 3.77% without search engines.

Yahoo!

Immediately before visiting Yahoo!, 2.1% of  their users visited YouTube, 7.77% visited Facebook, and 8.14% visited Google. Immediately after visiting Yahoo!, 2.28% of their users visit YouTube, 7.62% visit Google, and 8.44% visit Facebook.

YouTube

Immediately before visiting YouTube, 3.13% of visitors visited Yahoo!, 9.61% visited Google, and 12.47% visited Facebook. Immediately after leaving YouTube, 3.02% go to Yahoo!, 9.98% go to Google, and 13.52% go to Facebook.

There’s a correlation in the those who browse the four sites I’ve looked at today and yesterday. Are you starting to see how search and social need one another other? No. Without search engines YouTube would lose 18.02% of their traffic and Facebook would lose 18.72% of their traffic. Without Social networking sites, Yahoo! would lose 9.87% of their traffic and Google would lose 7.63% of their visitors. So, what can we learn from all of this? Search and Social need one another. The numbers continue to show that social needs search more than search needs social, but the battle’s not over! We’ll go two more rounds with two new sites tomorrow.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Related articles

• Driving real results with YouTube: Questions for aimClear’s Marty Weintraub (smartblogs.com)
• Using YouTube as a Keyword Research Tool for SEO (seomoz.org)
• Alexa: YouTube surpasses Yahoo! as the Internet’s 3rd most visited site (thenextweb.com)
• YouTube OverTakes Yahoo For 3rd Most Visited Site On The Web (reelseo.com)
• Optimizing Your YouTube Videos for Search Engines (compukol.com)

#Facebook #Google #social#networking

You’ve probably heard at least one person say search is dead, or maybe you are that one person.  Let’s look at the argument in perspective, using Alexa to compare Google and Facebook—the two most trafficked sites in the U.S. and the world.

Facebook

In the last three months, 35.66% of all Internet users in the U.S. have used Facebook.

Google

In the last three months, 43.22% of all Internet users in the U.S. have used Google.

Facebook

6.7.% of all traffic to Facebook comes from search engines, which means their traffic would decrease by 2.35% without search engines.

Google

3% of all traffic to Google comes through Google.  In other words people searching for Google Analytics, type in “Google Analytics” into their search engine.

Facebook

7.37% of all people who visited Facebook visited Google immediately going to Facebook, and 7.86% of all Facebook users go to Google immediately after leaving Facebook.

Google

4.61% of all people who visit Google visited Facebook immediately before visiting Google, and 4.15% of all people who use Google go to Facebook immediately after they leave.

We can take these numbers and draw any number of conclusions, but it seems these numbers suggest that search engines and social networking sites need one another.  Neither is dead, rather they have become so integrated that they cannot be separated without negatively impacting the other.  I invite anyone to chime in, but I would especially welcome the rebuttal of anyone who believes search is dead.  The numbers simply do not suggest that.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Related articles

• Google versus Facebook is about ‘fast’ versus ‘sticky’ – which is the best strategy? (zdnet.com)
• Facebook taking on Google on new fronts! Will they succeed? (trak.in)
• Facebook Shuns Google, Not too Social (arnoldit.com)

SEO content is like a martial arts duel.

Here’s some rules martial artists fight by:

1.     Be aware of your surroundings

2.     Adapt to changes within those surroundings

3.     Use what is available to you in those surroundings

4.     Recognize your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses

5.     Use your strengths to exploit your opponent’s weaknesses

There are more rules, but those five apply best to writing Web content.  How?  Let’s review the rules again and apply them to your efforts to rank well in the search engines.

1.     Be aware of your surroundings.

Search Engine Application: Check your rankings in the search engine’s

2.     Adapt to changes within those surroundings

Search Engine Application: When search engines introduce a new innovation like Google Instant, adapt your SEO strategy to those changes.

3.     Use what is available to you in those surroundings

Search Engine Application: This is where you need to go viral by blogging, using social media, and learning what does and does not work.

4.     Recognize your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses

Search Engine Application: Know who your opponent is, watch them in the search engines, watch them on the social Web, and adjust your strategy if need be.

5.     Use your strengths to exploit your opponent’s weaknesses

Search Engine Application: If your opponent doesn’t have a Facebook profile, make sure you launch one.  If your opponent only Tweets twice a day, Tweet five times a day.

Check out this fight between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris.  Notice how Bruce Lee changes his fighting style to use these rules.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

So, let’s get a little deeper into this conversation about what kinds of words you should optimize your site for.  It’s great that you want to optimize your site for the word ‘burger,’ but you will have to compete with 38,300,000 other pages (according to Google at the time of this post).  You could try ‘hamburger,’ but you’d still have to compete with  16,900,000 people.

If your site is about hamburgers, your audience wants to know what you want to say about hamburgers.  Do you want to tell them about hamburger recipes?  Tell them about those, and you’ll only need to compete with 1,730,000 sites.

Remember the old saying, ‘There’s more than one way to grill a hamburger’?  Okay, so the saying’s actually about cats.  Let’s say you want to tell people about great ‘hamburger recipes for the grill,’ then tell them about those.  And while doing so, you’ll only have 602,000 Web pages to compete with.

A word like ‘hamburger’ is a short-tail keyword, and a term like ‘hamburger recipes for the grill’ is a long-tail keyword.  More websites and Web pages will always compete for short-tail keywords, so start off by optimizing for long-tail keywords.  You won’t have to compete as many Web pages to get to the top.

Now, there is a downside to using long-tail keywords.  The longer the keyword, the less chance someone will enter it into a search engine.  Though, don’t fret.  This is for those of you who are just getting started with SEO content.  Start off by optimizing your site for long-tail keywords and then worry about short-tail keywords.

Think of writing Web content as exercise.  Using long tail keywords is the warm up that gets you ready for the heavy lifting.  If you try to use the weights without stretching, you could injure yourself.  And if you try to optimize your site for short-tail keywords without spending time learning the art of SEO with long-tail keywords, you could injure your chances of optimizing for those short-tail keywords.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

After you choose three to five main keywords for your site and use a tool like Google Keyword finder to find related keywords and then decide which pages on your site those keywords fit best on, you’re SEO content woes are over.  Right?  Wrong.  You need to monitor your keywords and your position within the search engines.

It’s important to stay as close to the top of the rankings as you can.  Think of your search through search engines as looking across the ocean.  Those sites in the search engine results pages (SERPs) are what you see as you look out toward the horizon.  The closer to page one of the SERPs your site is, the higher the probability is that a potential customer will see your site.

There is no one rule, but we consider the horizon page ten of the SERPs.  The further your site is from that very first position the less of a chance there is that your potential customer will go to your site.  If your site is on page ten of the SERPs, that is like a ship floating along the horizon.  There is almost no chance that a potential customer will go back to page ten of the SERPs.  Even if a potential customer does go all the way to page ten, there is less of a chance that person will go to your site.  I know the analogy falls apart, but all analogies fall apart at some level.  So, I hope you understand the spirit in which I intend it.

At SEO Bridges, we know it’s tiring to monitor your positions in the search engines, especially when you’re monitoring for several keywords.  We can monitor your keywords in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the cost you can.  Trust me, the ROI of allowing us to monitor your position in the search engines will payoff.  If you don’t believe me, send us a note with a list of ten to 15 keywords you want to optimize your site for.  For only $50.00, as long as they’re within the first ten pages, we’ll tell you where your site’s positioned using those keywords.  If we’re wrong, we’ll refund your money no questions asked.  And the great part is you can check our work right from your computer.  You have nothing to lose.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Let’s examine the four types of Web traffic: Direct traffic, Referring sites, search engines, and other.

Direct traffic doesn’t just refer to traffic from people who bookmarked your site or know the URL by memory.  Direct traffic also refers to people who came to your site because of a television or print ad or through e-mail campaigns or other untraditional Web sources.  Recently, GA has categorized some traffic coming through Google Adwords as direct traffic.  That could be because of improperly tagged or untagged destination URLs in people’s ads (Read more here and here).

Referring site refers to sites linking to your site, which can be those sites you’ve developed link partnerships with, social bookmarking sites, microblogging sites, or other social networking sites.  Google does not recommend trading links with other webmasters as the best method of obtaining links to your site.  We don’t recommend it either as it is time consuming and often shows very little ROI.  It is against Google’s TOS to buy or sell links that pass pagerank.  Google recommends creating useful content as the best way to get people to link to your site and get referral traffic.

Search engine traffic is any traffic that comes from any search engines.  This is where it’s important to make sure your website contains good Web content. Make sure to follow the rules, so you don’t find yourself in the sandbox or banned.  According to one Google contributor, there is no more sandbox, but just play by the rules and you won’t get TOSed.  And “other traffic” refers to any traffic that cannot be categorized in one of the first three categories, such as users who come from banner ads or e-mail newsletters.

So, what are the X and Y factors of SEO content?  Think of a pie chart, which your analytics program probably uses to show the distribution of the traffic.  The X factor refers to those times when you have had an equal amount of traffic from all four of those types of sources.  This is highly likely, and not always the most desirable, so there’s also the Y factor.  This refers to those times when a site receives an equitable amount of direct traffic, referring sites, and search engines.  How do you achieve the X and Y factors?  Peruse your analytics account, review what is and is not working, make changes where appropriate to drive traffic from all sources, and don’t rely too much or too little on traffic coming from one type of source.  This means writing good Web content for website and using social media to promote that content and your site.

Here’re some other important blogs and articles to read:

Important Exception to Google Last Click Attribution

Excellent Analytics tip #18 (By Avinash Kaushik)

3 Creative ways to Drive More Traffic to Old Blog Posts

An Introduction to Link-Building: A Crucial Aspect of SEO

Stay social my friends,

Erick