Advance Search & Social

Google News Gets Real-Time Coverage Update and Visual Facelift

By: Ryan Miller

Today, Google begins rolling out some updates to the U.S. Edition of Google News including scrolling real-time news updates, larger image sizes for accompanying thumbnails and additional integration of Google+ posts and comments for logged in G+ users.

Visually, the most striking and eye-catching update is the redesign of the Google News homepage and the Top Stories pages.

The most current top news story is now receiving a much larger piece of the above-the-fold Google News real estate including a larger photo thumbnail and a slightly bigger headline font size than all the other headlines on the page. This one-two combination now gives this story much more prominence over all other coverage on the front page.

Additionally, a new scrolling photo section has been added to the cluster for related stories.  Rolling your mouse over each individual photo will give you a small flyout of the photo and provide the full headline of the accompanying story.

While it has always been important to select striking photos to accompany your content submissions to Google News, should make news-focused websites be even more selective with their photo selection.  Whenever possible, choose photos that are unique to your website or at least find photos that are not Associated Press or other commonly used photos.

Next up is the real-time news coverage update. While this is a welcome addition to Google News since Google lost access to the Twitter “firehose”, this should not be seen as a replacement for instant real-time updates.

These updates are published as Google discovers, indexes and categorizes the news content being submitted to Google News.  As you can see, the updates are given a time stamp as to when that content was originally published on the website.  As new content is discovered, the Google News page is automatically updates with the newest headline.

News publishers have generally been recommended to publish new news articles for larger event news coverage rather than updating older content.  With the launch of real-time coverage, this recommendation, along with tried-and-true inclusion of the trending top news story topic in your headline, becomes much more important.   Remember, if the news update is important enough to make a considerable update to an older story, it’s probably important enough to give that update its own story. 

Lastly is the further integration of Google+, with Top Comments that can accommodate the Top Stories’ the real-time coverage page if you are logged into your Google+ account. 

Per Google’s blog post on this update, the content published here comes from “your circles, journalists covering the story and notables like politicians or others who are the subjects of stories have to say about breaking news”.

Google has commented again and again how they intend to add a Google+ layer to everything Google related eventually, and here is one more example of that promise being made good on.  This is a great opportunity for news sites to get potential exposure for news stories.  If you are news reporter and publishers cover ongoing Top Stories, be sure to add a comment or two to your Google+ account.  This could be done via your Google+ profile, or directly via Google News who invite Google+ users to share their thoughts on the news story.

Currently these updates are only available in the U.S. Edition of Google News, and should be rolling out over the next week.  If you don’t see them just yet, you should be soon.

Ryan Miller is the SEO Manager for Advance Digital, and provides best practice techniques for improving your search and social visibility including breaking news optimization. You can follow him on Twitter @cromiller and add him to your circles on Google+.        

Social media study: Companies should court moms

By: Sylvie Dale

Mothers are 75% more likely than other women to rely on company information on social sites like Facebook and Google+, and they are 45% more likely to make a purchase based on comments and shares of other mothers online, a recent study from Performics concluded.

The April 12 findings from “S-Net: A Study on Social Media Usage & Behavior,” point to the unique online networking skills and preferences of a group of Americans which also inspired the term “mom bloggers” or “parenting bloggers”. The study looked at the behavior of almost 3,000 active users of online social sites.

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ILM East Conference: Advance’s John Denny Talks SEO

Advance’s John Denny was invited to speak at the Kelsey Interactive Local Media Conference in Boston last week as part of the session “SEO for CEO’s”. Joining John were two leaders in the search industry- Andrew Shotland and Will Scott. John’s main topic was building an in-house SEO department, including all the strategic considerations an organization needs to go through before creating an SEO organization. He also talked at a high level about some of the shifts taking place associated with marketing and advertising spend in the digital world.  One of which is the move from Marketers spending the bulk of their money on ”Advertising”, to transitioning a significant portion of their budgets to “Services” (content marketing, blogs, search engine optimization and social media marketing). John wrote a detailed blog post on the topic here, and you can also find a recap of John’s ILM session on the Kelsey blog.

The Facebook Timeline…What Features You Will Benefit From

Starting today March 30^th all fan pages will be switched over to the new timeline format Facebook has implemented.

 The format has brought along several new features that will help improve engagement as well as customer satisfaction. Below are tips and recommendations on how to utilize your timeline to get the most of your Facebook page.

Cover Photo- So let’s start with the top of the fan page. The most noticeable part of your page will be the cover photo.

The dimensions of the cover photo are 850px wide and 315px high. The photo should be relevant to market and industry.

Make sure the cover photo compliments the profile picture, if the colors are too similar it might be hard to see.

Photos of landmarks, athletes, or logos are great to display as your cover photo.  Below are examples of cover photos that grab your attention and compliment the profile picture.

The space is not meant for banner ads or other promotions, strictly pictures. Before adding your cover photo Facebook will give you a warning.

Fans can now message pages- Being able to receive messages will greatly help companies organize customer questions and concerns as well help the brand image be portrayed as a business that is ready to listen and stay in touch with its customer base. This is will be helpful because it creates a new customer service channel. Make sure to consistently check your messages so it doesn’t seem like you’re ignoring your fan base. It’s important to let your fans know there is a message feature now, every once in a while try letting your fan base know that they are free to message you about any concerns or private questions.

To access your messages with the Timeline format click “Admin Panel” at the top right, after clicking there will be a drop down menu

Notifications, news likes and Facebook insights- Along with the admin panel you are now able to see your most recent notifications, new users who have liked your page, and a mini preview of Facebook insights.

Add milestone to your company pages- Adding important dates to your page can help fans learn about the history of your company and gives the fans an idea of events and important moments that happened.

Pinning- Normally when updating your page the posts move in chronological order. If you want a particular story to stand out on your timeline you can pin it. Pinning the post will place the article at the top of the page to gain the most exposure. After pinning a story on your page an orange ribbon will appear at the top right of the post. Pinning should be used to promotions that will be relevant for several weeks.

Highlight- Highlighting a story is similar to pinning something, the major difference is that when you highlight something it extends over both columns to feature that post. Highlighting a post does not bring it the very top of your page; it only makes it more visible to your fans. Posts that should be highlighted are  time sensitive news story, customer or employees or the month, customer testimonials, or even a video clip of your latest commercial. Below is an example of a highlighted story.

With these new features, sites are seeing an improvement in engagement.  By taking advantage of these, we put ourselves in a position to do the same. According to a new study from ClickZ the new Timeline format has lifted engagement with many brands by 46%.

David Aziz is the Social Media Analyst for Advance Digital. You can follow him on Twitter@DaveAzizand see what he’s sharing using the +1 Button by adding him to your circles on Google+. 

Upcoming Google Algorithm Change Will Target Overoptimized Websites

By: Ryan Miller

Please note that this is an upcoming algorithm update. The views below are speculation based on previous algorithm updates and where search is heading.

Google’s Next Algorithm Update Will Target Overly SEOd Websites to “Level the Playing Field”

During a panel discussion at SXSW Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team at Google, made an announcement that an upcoming algorithm update will seek to level the search playing field by targeting websites that have been overly optimized.  The following is a transcription of how Matt described the coming change:

What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO? We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO - versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.

While this has not specifically been called out as part of the ongoing Panda algorithm updates, it certainly bears a lot of similarity to the quality-focused changes that Panda has brought to organic search.  Per Matt’s description, this update appears to be targeted toward websites that have an unnatural slant toward the more common SEO elements such as content that has been overly keyword stuffed, content written more for searchbots rather than humans or a link portfolio that appears out of the ordinary in correlation to that content. 

Although this update is still several weeks to months away from launching, and could shift in focus between now and then, at the moment this update should not affect higher quality sites that are implementing correct SEO best practices or may not have a fully realized SEO strategy. Matt Cutts does go on to say in the conversation (the entire hour long audio is available at http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP11742) that Google does like SEO, and that when implemented correctly does provide Google a benefit as it make their job easier to connect search queries to relevant content.

This does bring up an important reminder though for webmasters, content developers and website marketers – if you have not yet readjusted your strategy in the wake of Panda, now is the perfect time to do so. Reexamine your current websites and strategies and create a roadmap accordingly to reinvest in creating quality, sharable and unique content with a 1-3 keyword focus that will naturally draw traffic and backlinks.

Whether this makes as big an impact as Panda will of course remain to be seen upon launch, but it’s rare that we are given the opportunity to anticipate and prepare for an algorithm shift.  What may be the most interesting outcome of this will be seeing how Google intends to find and bubble up great content and sites for search queries that are not directly optimized for that query but is still relevant. 

Stay tuned for additional updates on this pending algorithm change.

Ryan Miller is the SEO Manager for Advance Digital, and provides best practice techniques for improving your search and social visibility. You can follow him on Twitter @cromiller and add him to your circles on Google+.        

Why Use Pinterest? A Rationale

by Jessica Thompson

What Is Pinterest?

Pinterest is “virtual pinboard”—a social image sharing site that allows users to collect and share pictures they find across the web. Users organize pictures, or “Pins,” by placing them on various thematic “Boards” they have created. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see HGTV’s Pinterest account currently has 16 Boards (Daily Delights, Design Happens Blog, HGTV Dream Home, etc.) containing 595 Pins from various HGTV properties.

Members are able to follow other members on Pinterest, with the option to follow an entire account or just specific Boards within an account. As with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter, logging into Pinterest will bring up a stream/feed of all the pictures pinned by the users and boards you are currently following.

Users have the ability to Like Pins, Comment on Pins, and/or “Repin” Pins. Similar to retweeting on Twitter, “Repinning” allows a user to share a pin they like with their own followers. When a user Repins a picture, it appears in their followers’ streams as if they had pinned it themselves. Each pin contains a link back to the source, which means that each pin has the potential to drive traffic to the website from which it originated.

Currently, there are 5 ways for logged-in users to add a Pin to one of their Boards when they come across content they like:

1. Go to pinterest.com and click the “Add + ” button in the upper right-hand corner. From here, users can either upload a picture or specify the URL where a picture is located.
2. Download the Pinterest bookmarklet, which allows users to add pictures to their Pinterest account directly from a web page, without leaving the site they are on.
3. If a site has added “Pin It” buttons next to photos/images, users can click these buttons to add pictures to their Pinterest account.
4. Repin pictures pinned by other users (by far the most common method for sharing content on Pinterest).
5. Use the Pinterest mobile app, currently only available for iPhone

Users who wish to share their own image content can influence #3 and #4 above to some extent. By making the “Pin It” button available next to compelling images on your site, it becomes easier for people to add your pictures to Pinterest and share them with followers. And, by creating branded Pinterest accounts, updating them regularly, and interacting with users who have similar interests, individuals and businesses have the opportunity to acquire and share pictures with fans (who may, in turn, share them via Repin with their own friends and followers). In both cases, users increase the chance that images on their site will get links and traffic from Pinterest.

How Popular Is Pinterest?

The reason many social media experts are now suddenly noticing Pinterest is because the site’s popularity has grown rapidly in the past several months, increasing exponentially since its launch in March 2010.

In late January, Mashable reported that Pinterest had become a top traffic driver for retailers, noting that the site’s traffic had increased 429% from September 2011 to December 2011 based on data from Compete.com. A TechCrunch article published in early February featured comScore data for Pinterest, indicating that the site had reached an estimated 11.7 million unique visitors in January 2012—up from 7.51 million in December 2011. And on January 23rd, Experian Hitwise tweeted that Pinterest was the #60 most visited site in the US for the week of January 15th.

Reflecting its growing popularity, Pinterest has increasingly been featured on high-profile, mainstream online publications. In addition to being named one of Time magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2011, Pinterest has also been featured (in some cases, numerous times) in The New York Times, CNN, NPR, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

Additionally, it should be noted that among social media portals, Pinterest has overtaken Google+ significantly as a source of referral traffic.

Pinterest: Just a Fad or Here to Stay?

So, it is worth it for brands and businesses to start using Pinterest? Will it be a good long-term investment, or is this just another online fad? While no one can say for certain, the site has a lot going for it at the moment. With its clean, easy-to-use and heavily visual interface, Pinterest offers a unique experience for people of all levels of technical savvy—an experience that is not currently fulfilled by other social networking or photo sharing sites.

Though it’s tempting to compare Pinterest to other social networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter or Google+), the fact is that it is not entirely accurate to consider it a direct competitor to those sites. If anything, Pinterest is probably more akin to something like YouTube; while YouTube does technically compete with other social media sites for attention (in the form of visitors, pageviews, and time spent on site), it also integrates well with most social media platforms. It is a mutually beneficial relationship: YouTube enhances a site like Facebook by allowing users to easily share videos with their friends without leaving the site, and Facebook gives YouTube a larger audience—and thus more ad revenue—than they otherwise would have had. Similarly, Pinterest enhances Facebook with its seamless integration into the Facebook timeline, and benefits from increased exposure and (as a result, presumably) wider user adoption. In this sense, Pinterest is not a direct competitor to Facebook in the same way Twitter is, and vice versa.

And, if the data above isn’t enough to convince you that Pinterest is positioned to stick around for quite some time, consider the following facts:

• Currently, the site is averaging of 1.36 million visitors a day and growing. [modea]
• The average Pinterest user spends more time on Pinterest than the average Facebook user—and user adoption is continuing to expand. [modea]
• According to comScore, Pinterest hit 10 million monthly unique visitors faster than any site in the U.S. [TechCrunch]

Pinterest certainly has some challenges ahead if it wants to be able to stay on top. The company will need to expand quickly to keep up with increased demand, and eventually figure out a way to monetize the site to make it profitable. But considering its incredible growth over the past year (and especially the several months), it’s likely that Pinterest isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Facebook Timeline for Brands: Why Messaging Will Be Important

By: David Aziz

Facebook has finally announced that they will be releasing their Timeline format to all branded pages. Although I see Facebook rolling out new features as this format progresses, one feature that can be extremely helpful to small businesses is the new message feature. Being able to receive messages will greatly help companies organize customer questions and concerns as well help the brand image be portrayed as a business that is ready to listen and stay in touch with its customer base. This is will be helpful because it creates a new customer service channel. Make sure to consistently check your messages so it doesn’t seem like you’re ignoring your fan base. It’s important to let your fans know there is a message feature now, every once in a while try letting your fan base know that they are free to message you about any concerns or private questions.

To access your messages with the Timeline format click “Admin Panel” at the top right, after clicking there will be a drop down menu where there are also a number of other features such as a notification center, new likes, and a mini preview of Facebook insights (which will be launching real time information in a few weeks).

David Aziz is the Social Media Analyst for Advance Digital. You can follow him on Twitter@DaveAzizand see what he’s sharing using the +1 Button by adding him to your circles on Google+. 

Google Search Plus Your World (If You Live on Planet Google)

By: Ryan Miller

Google has once again unleashed a massive change to the way their Universal search results pages display information and the auto-fill recommendations in Google Suggest for users that are logged into the search engine behemoth. 

Earlier this year these updates, dubbed Google Search Plus Your World, began rolling out for all Google users.  We discussed part of this update in a previous post about Google+ showing prominently in Google search.  The biggest and most immediate change that Google users will notice, and will verify that Search Plus Your World is now working, is that when you type in your search term, you will be notified of the number of personal results for your search query along with total results, and a new switch box to turn your personal results on and off: 

As with the previous incarnation of search results, you’ll see in your universal search results personalized search returns based on your location, your search history, and websites that those in your Google+ circles have shared.    Now in your results, you’ll also be shown within the image results photos that have been uploaded by yourself and others within your circles in addition to standard photos returned from http://images.google.com. Additionally, Google will also suggest people who have authority within the realm of your search term that you may want to add to your circles.  For instance, a search for “SEO” suggests Rand Fishkin and Barry Schwartz:

Note that while Google does tease “Learn how you could appear here too” the reality is that there is no way to submit your profile to a specific search query, you earn the space by discussing a specific topic on Google+ and becoming an authority figure on the subject.

Speaking of getting suggestions for names to add to your circles, Google Suggest will now auto-fill Google+ URLs for high profile names that you are searching for if they have a Google+ profile. For instance, starting a search for Google’s CEO Larry Page, I am suggested his Google+ profile:

Let’s take a look and what the new personal results page look like. It is widely cited that the strength of social sharing comes from the fact that users will give greater credence to content and websites that their friends and connections have shared over content that is not.  To that end, doing searches within your “personal results” will turn google.com into a search engine for all things connected to you via Google+.

Here you’ll see search results laid out much like you would on the Universal SERPs, except here all results some definitive tie-back to a person or page you are connected to within Google+.

As mentioned before Google Search Plus Your World can be turned off, and with that something that Google has not provided for some time – non-personalized search results.  The setting of your location will still provide local-based results if the search query is relevant, but your results are no longer further personalized based on search history, sites visited and your social sphere.  For webmasters and marketers, turning off Google SPYW can give a more objective view as to where their website is ranking when social influence is not a factor.

For those looking at how Google+ can continue improving their personal profile, website and brand visibility this is a clear indicator that the more time spent in Google+ publishing, sharing and talking about the topics more relevant to you, the more potential return you will see. Getting circled now takes you and your brand out of just the stream and drops you directly into the search results of those who have you circled.  This is just one more reason to accept that Google+ is not an option; even if you are publishing duplicate links and comments to multiple social accounts which in turn have many duplicate social connections, it is how that content will be found by those connections that is becoming more and more unique.      

Ryan Miller is the SEO Manager for Advance Digital, and provides best practice techniques for improving your search visibility. You can follow him on Twitter @cromiller and add him to your circles on Google+.   

A Primer On Content Marketing

Advance’s John Denny has a new post all about the shifts happening in marketing and advertising and how Content Marketing is emerging as a new force. As he points out, the days of relying solely on paid media to market are done.  Today’s marketer’s needs to be a master of “earned” media (visibility in search and social spaces, word of mouth, PR) and “owned” media (your website, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube presences).

Google+ posts featured prominently in search results

By: Sylvie Dale

SEOMoz’ Rand Fishkin on Friday posted a nicely simplified explanation of how Google is changing SEO rules yet again, this time by prominently displaying its top-shared Google+ posts in search results in ways that we’ve never seen before. Connecting the dots, this means that web pages that don’t interact in social networks could soon begin to be seen as low-quality search results.

Google is so powerful, so frequently used, that there is now a verb in the English language called “Googling”. Although its approximately # million users still are fewer than Facebook’s (about 800 million users), adding Google+ results into regular search exposes these accounts and posts to billions of searchers per day. 

Of course, there are rules for when and how Google shows searchers Google+ posts, and these have to do with which Google+ accounts are in the searcher’s circles. If the searcher is not logged in, these posts don’t show, but a “People and Pages on Google+” box will still recommend related profiles. 

Here is an example of a search I did with “personal results” turned on in Google:

Fishkin commented in his Whiteboard+ video that relevant posts from Google’s new social network are showing up in search results in a couple of powerful ways:

• If you have a Google account and you are logged in when doing a search in Google, you’ll see some Google+ results very high on the page - personal recommendations for you, showing you who else in your circles has shared or +1d the information. 
• If you are not logged in, a box on the right side of the page shows a few recommended Google+ accounts that you should add to your circles, based on what you just searched on. 

Increasingly, the search results you see are going to be enhanced by the social signals (sharing, +1ing) that happen within Google+. 

That also means that companies which are not in social spaces interacting with others in their areas of expertise could be labeled as low-quality or spam by Google’s search algorithm, making it even harder for them to rank.  

Conclusion: If you want people to find you on the web, not only do you need keyword-optimized pages with a healthy number of links pointing back to them, but you will also need a good level of interaction in the major social networks such as Google+. 

Watch Fishkin’s video on Google+.