INSIGHT blog

Posts Tagged ‘Andrew Bates’

Psyched for SXSW Interactive

11
March
2010

SXSW® Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer

Andrew Bates

Client Services Manager

I could honestly not be more excited than I am for SXSW Interactive this week / weekend in Austin, TX.  I get to spend 5 days with the best and brightest of the web and digital industries, seeing the latest in internet, interactive, mobile, video games, and much more.

What am I most excited for at SXSWi this year? Tons…

How about the keynote interview with twitter’s CEO Evan Williams?  Can’t wait to hear his perspective on social networking and the impact twitter has on communications and business.  A revenue model?  Profitability?  We may hear something interesting

I also want to check out the Microsoft Silverlight Interactive lounge that may feature our friends from Cynergy Systems.  Really impressed with the quality of RIA work and demos these guys have been showcasing.

I also can’t wait to hang out with industry experts at ScreenBurn at SXSW Arcade Fri-Sun.  This is a place for people, swag, and learning what’s new.

When I get back, I’ll post again to let you all know what I saw and learned at SXSW Interactive.

@AndrewBates

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Google sneaks in more Social Search and signs of Caffeine

17
February
2010

Google sneaks in more Social Search and signs of Caffeine. It looks as if the major aspects of Google Caffeine may be live today.

Andrew Bates (@AndrewBates)

Client Services Manager

As we’ve heard for months and months, Google has been developing their next generation of search algorithm Caffeine.  Last fall Google’s Matt Cutts told us of the impending launch of Google Caffeine, but so far we have seen mostly a slow roll out of features including real-time search in January.

Most recently we’ve heard a great deal about the growing value of social networks for breaking news and for search engine marketing, but Caffeine has stayed below the radar.  Much attention has been given to Buzz, the new toy from Google that is meant to be tool to engage and follow other social networks in gmail.  Some search experts like Tad Miller of Search-Mojo see Google Buzz as another method Google is using to introduce social search.

There is now evidence of more social search features live in Google now.  In the search results below, you will see results with Peter Corbett coming into the results because of my social circle.

It looks as if the major aspects of Google Caffeine may be live today.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Hey Google, where is our Caffeine?

26
January
2010

In Aug of 2009 Google announced its next generation of search called Google Caffeine. Half a year later and Caffeine is still not live, or is it?

Andrew Bates

Client Services Manager

Last September I reported on a hot topic in the search and web world called Google Caffeine.  In this post I covered details about what Google Caffeine is (or will be), and how it is likely to dramatically impact search.  This next iteration of Google’s search is focused on improving the search site in these core areas: Speed, Accuracy, Temporal Relevance, and Index Size.  Most important is the weight or importance on social networking posts in an effort to increase “temporal relevance” and the validity of near real-time information.  Bing and Google worked to add real time search to their indexes and results via licensing agreements with Facebook, Twitter, and others.

From all initial reports and tests, Caffeine does exactly what Google intended.  Mashable, SEOBOOK, and many others reviewed the new site via a test sandbox environment, but Google closed down this test version of the Caffeine last fall.  It’s fast with a deeper index and obvious incorporation of social posts.  So where is it?

Well we now see some elements of real time search in current Google SERPs, so we know that at least a partial launch of Caffeine has been completed.  In the last couple weeks some reputable sources have even made the argument that “Google Caffeine is Here And Has Been For Weeks!” Most believe and see evidence that Google has slowly been rolling out features of Caffeine behind the scenes with only occasional posts highlighting specifically those new features as Google Guru Matt Cutts did yesterday in his post “keep an eye on changing pages.”

When will we get to use Google Caffeine?  You probably already are now every time you search on Google.  While searching for my firm EyeTraffic Media I see our website, blog, Linkedin, and twitter pages in the results, but I also see nearly real time posts from our twitter account:

EyeTraffic Media real time search results in Google

EyeTraffic Media real time search results in Google

The last couple months have shown that Google is already incorporating the most valuable aspects of Caffeine in current SERPs.  No need to hold your breath.  Google Caffeine is already old news.  The current challenge for SEO experts and online marketers is learning how real time search affects a website’s organic rankings.  Do you agree?  Let me know your thoughts.

@AndrewBates

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Another Social Media List for 2009

30
December
2009

Yet another social media review for 2009. Some of the year’s best social networking posts.

Andrew Bates
Client Services Manager

With the holidays and year’s end we are inundated with “best of” and “top 10” lists of everything from The Top 10 Most Important Tweets of 2009 to Time’s The Top 10 Everything of 2009. To keep you from having to read all of the social media reviews for this passing year, I’ve taken it upon myself to do so for all of us. Here are some of the better collections I’ve seen recently:

Open Web Awards Winners List 2009 – This is Mashable.com’s 50 winners of their 3rd annual Open Web Awards: Social Media Edition. Here you can find some great follows and resources with a brilliant mention and win for one of my favorites – “Best Social Media Maven to Follow: @BuzzEdition.”

Ten PR People to Follow on Twitter – From socialmediatoday.com, this directory has a few that I already follow and gave me insight on some I had not heard of yet. I’ll be watching what these people have to say about online marketing and social networking in 2010.

10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs – so nice, I mention @mashable twice. This list is from October, but has some excellent resources for social media professionals. This post includes great points as well as some good tips on how to get the most out of Linkedin.

Top 10 moments in social media in 2009 – In this LA Times article from yesterday, Mark Milian (@markmilian) mentions the overwhelming change in tradition marketing brought about with the rise of social networking. He also touches on the obvious stories like TMZ breaking the Michael Jackson death via twitter while not ignoring the political issues like the Iran protests.

Top 5 Social Media Articles from 2009 – another fresh post, but from one of the best new blogs of 2009. This article is a collection of some very interesting posts filled with wisdom and valuable statistics (mmmm stats….). socialmediaexaminer.com is one to subscribe to and read consistently.

What will 2010 bring for social media? Well luckily there are plenty “best of” and “top 10” lists for this as well, but I won’t get into predictions now. Instead I wish everyone a happy new year whether you made it onto someone’s ’09 list or not.

Cheers,

@AndrewBates

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Got a blog? Now what?

3
December
2009

Adding social networking sharing, bookmarking, and voting features helps get content to the right audience

Andrew Bates

Client Services Manager

Remember 10+ years ago when everyone rushed to get a website?  At some point all those businesses, organizations, and people decided after years of prodding that they needed to hop on the web bandwagon.  People that called the web a “fad” previously were now dumping $1000s or possible tens of $1000s into getting a web presence that they didn’t fully understand.

This is where we are today with blogs.  Yes, early adopters and “those in the know” started blogs many years ago and lots of organizations have adopted a blog since then, but many are rushing to the table now.   We know that today there are over 200 million blogs on the web (Erik Qualman – http://socialnomics.net/2009/08/11/statistics-show-social-media-is-bigger-than-you-think/). 

With this growth in adoption, we are left in a similar place as we were with websites years ago.  Organizations deploy blogs with no real strategy, goals, or a way to get their content found by others.  I try to stress that a major part of any blog strategy should be getting that information and content in front of the desired audience.   

So how do you build an audience or community around your blog, and how do you get it out there?

Sharing your posts

Now that you’ve finally gotten your team to write some great content, make it easy for them to share.  Make sure your blog has an auto tweet feature.  Most blogging platforms have this widget or plugin available.  One of the most popular thanks to Guy Kawasaki and others is the TweetMeme button.

Where to share

It may go without saying, but I do frequently check and see that many groups and even social media experts do not share their posts in the core social networks.  Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin are just a few of the key networks to syndicate your content.  Some will link a new post to all of their social networks immediately, while others may choose to distribute over time.  Hootsuite is an example of a twitter resource that allows posts to be scheduled at specific times allowing that group to consistently push out new and valuable information.

Let your audience help

Making it easy for your readers to repost your article and share that content in their social networks is part of the process, but allowing them to vote, bookmark, and comment is truly invaluable.  While adding the sharing feature to your site, use a plugin or tool that allows for the reader to vote or bookmark that content.  Digg, Delicious, and Stumbleupon are just a few of the sites that empower your audience help bring new readers to your content.  Many social bookmarking sites can also positively affect your SEO efforts when executed properly.

It is simply not enough to have lots of excellent content, and its only really “sharing” when the relationship is reciprocal.  Blogs readership grows from great content and an enthusiastic audience that is capable of spreading the word.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

What is Google Caffeine and how does it impact SEO & Social Media?

15
September
2009

Google’s next gen search engine Caffeine became availabe in Aug 2009

Andrew Bates

Client Services Manager

In Aug ’09 Google unveiled its next generation search engine called Caffeine.  Likely in direct response to Microsoft’s Bing search platform, Google Caffeine is focused on faster, more relevant search that takes into account social and viral media sites.  With improved “temporal relevance,” Caffeine is said to have better results than the old Google when returning breaking information.

SEO and social media thought leaders have been putting the new Google through its paces at the publicly available Google Caffeine test sandbox.  For comparison, initial tests focus on: Speed, Accuracy, Temporal Relevance, and Index Size. 

What are the differences between Google Caffeine, old school Google, and competitors like Bing? 

Well the speed is definitely noticable.  Search comparisons show that Caffeine is easily two times faster than the old Google. 

Old Google search for “Dog” yields results in .25 seconds:

Google Caffeine search for “Dog” yields results in .12 seconds:

What about the accuracy?  Although all blended search options do not seem to be live in the new Google, there does seem to be an increase focus on keywords.  Time will tell, but so far Google Caffeine is incredibly accurate.

How is Caffeine on Temporal Relevance and finding breaking news?  The jury is still out.  Google Caffeine frequently returns the exact same results as the previous Google or Bing.

Where is the most noticeable improvement next to the speed?  The new Google Caffeine index appears to be many times larger than that of the original Google, but Bing still seems to return the greatest number of indexed results on a consistent basis.

Mashable’s SEO expert Ben Parr gives a great overview in his recent post “Google Caffeine: A Detailed Test of the New Google” with some excellent examples of searches he performed in all 3 environments.

 So how will Google’s Caffeine search platform influence SEO and social media? 

First Google Caffeine impressions:

-       It is fast, with a deeper index

-       There is an increased focus or weight on keywords

-       There may be an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages) with potentially slightly more weight on exact match domain names

-       Caffeine likely has an improved comprehension of related words and synonyms

-       Google’s new search may have increased the relevance associated with video and image results while decreasing the volume of multi-media returnWhat do you think?  Try Google Caffeine against your favorite search site at Google Caffeine test sandbox and let me know what results you see.

- @AndrewBates

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

How does Social Media benefit SEO?

28
August
2009

Social Media sites and links have strong SEO and organic rank value

Andrew Bates

Client Services Manager

Over the last couple years of both pitching and listening to pitches about corporate social media, I’m often surprised by how organizations focus on the “buzz” or brand benefits around social media without noting the obvious technical benefits for that organization’s search engine optimization.

We know that keyword phrases, site architecture, relevant content, and links make up for much of a website’s rankings (http://www.sherpastore.com/Benchmarks-Metrics.html and 1000s of other sources).  Out of traditional SEO, we see that both on-page elements of a website like keywords and content factor as well as off-page elements like inbound links.  Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing value inbound links from other websites as “votes of confidence” for the website they are linking too (http://www.seocrunch.com/factors-in-seo-link-value/).  Time and consistent results have shown that inbound links make up a majority of a site’s page rank value, and that each type of inbound link has different merit or weight for the referenced site:

Overall Ranking Algorithm

Overall Ranking Algorithm

  • 24% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain

  • 22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page

  • 20% Anchor Text of External Links

  • 15% On-Page Keyword Usage

  • 7% Traffic and Click-Through Data

  • 6% Social Graph Metrics

  • 5% Registration and Hosting Data

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors/

So what is the bulk of social media engineering? (besides the important, high-level concepts like awareness, community, resources, reputation management and the rest…)  Well?  Social ends up being a lot of properly research keyword phrases imbedded in optimized content on open, crawlable sites with tons and tons of contextual, relevant links from powerful domains.  Social media is an ever increasingly important component of holistic, natural search.  One of the best things an organization, association, group, or business can do to improve their web presence is to introduce a social media strategy that keeps SEO in mind during the strategy, execution, and analysis phases.

Search engines and search sites today are putting ever increasing value on authoritative social and multi-media based sites.  Links from video sites like youtube.com and posts on sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, or Delicious are beginning to become incredibly important for any organization competing for their own space on the web (http://www.bestrank.com/blog/how-social-media-can-help-improve-organic-search-rankings/).

So remember when you are articulating your new social outreach program to your client or internal management team, you can remind those decision makers that your social and new media strategy will help measure and monitor the brand, it will help you communicate, understand and grow your audience base, AND… when executive properly it will improve and solidify the SEO value of that website.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »