Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche

In the early days of blogging you could go to the Technorati Blog Index, enter some identifying terms for a particular niche topic and discover what the top blogs were in the field.

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.

Unfortunately, Technorati's not what it used to be anymore. While we here at RWW are very proud to have climbed to the #14 spot in the Top 100 most linked-to blogs overall in the Technorati Index (look our Perez Hilton, you're next in line) the fact of the matter is that for every day use Technorati doesn't feel very reliable any more.

How then can you identify the top blogs in a particular niche field? There are paid services you can use to identify influencers online but they are expensive and not appropriate for quick hits in a new topic. I'm all for paid services but in this case, let's talk about options that are fast and free. Given the need to classify a lot of content with minimal human intervention, this could be a great place for Semantic Web technology to come in.

Here's a comparison of the pros and cons of six different services you can use to do so. None are as solid a solution as the blogosphere deserves. This is a huge opportunity for indexes, but one that will be hard to fill since an index has to be wide and deep to be truly useful for this purpose.

Technorati

Pros:

The Technorati Blog Finder. was set up for just this purpose and in earlier days claiming and tagging your blog on Technorati was considered an essential step in getting started with a blog. I'm not so sure that's the case anymore.

Technorati offers a clear standard of authority and you can download the OPML file of the top 10 blogs in any category. Why only 10? I have no idea.

Cons:

After years of spotty service, seemingly random redesigns that made the site even worse than it was before, a crazy idea to get bloggers every to point all their rel=tag links to Technorati (!) and the entry of bigger players into blog search - Technorati doesn't feel as active today as it once did. There are probably a lot of top blogs in any niche that haven't added themselves to the directory.

The directory is also organized according to the tags applied to a blog by its own author, typically when the blog just gets started.

The user experience is not good at Technorati but it's good enough to still warrant a look in hunting for top niche blogs.

Del.icio.us

Pros:

We wrote about how to find top niche blogs using Del.icio.us in a post last month. At the simplest level, go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

There's huge amounts of data on Del.icio.us and it's a very dynamic community. There's also RSS feeds, user comments, information about the people (users) who have done the classifying and a lot of other helpful features. I've been using Del.icio.us to find top niche blogs a lot lately and it's served me fairly well, even if I have to eyeball the last few yards to an answer.

Cons:

Del.ico.us hasn't been evolving very quickly, at least the publicly available version of the service. There are a lot of obnoxious qualities to it, like the fact that you can't search for most popular items with multiple tags - there's no such page as http://del.icio.us/popular/topic+blog.

Search results pages are funky and tag/topic+blog just means that a URL has been saved at least once with both of those terms, not that any number of people used both terms at once. It's not intuitive to look up the tags given a URl much less an entire domain. Finally, at least in the tech sector a lot of hip cats are using Ma.gnolia now instead of Del.icio.us. It's a recommendation engine waiting, forever, to happen and I'm still heart broken that it was acquired by Yahoo! instead of the Library of Congress.

StumbleUpon

Pros:

StumbleUpon has huge user numbers, very targeted interests and classifications, algorithm combined with human editorial judgment about the blogs in question.

Cons:

It's more "fun" than it is business, unless you're into SEO. There's no clear way to look at top sites in any category, the search results page is really random looking. Good for stopping by and doing some searches just to see if you've missed anything, but nothing you'd do as part of a structured search.

Google Reader Recommendations

Pros:

Google Reader's new recommendations are very high quality, in tech at least, because they have a large number of web savvy users. I'm hoping that starting a dedicated Google Reader account filled just with some known feeds in a niche, I can have other top sources in that same niche recommended to me.

Cons:

Recommendations don't come right away, you have to wait for awhile. There's also a limit to the number of recommendations you can receive at one time. It is a tech focused community, disproportionately to the blogosphere in general. Finally, this is a pretty silly little hack at things and you find yourself getting tied up with trying to run multiple Google accounts, etc.

AideRSS

Pros:

I love AideRSS because the criteria for hotness is relatively clear and I find the service really useful in lots of contexts. In theory you can plug almost any RSS feed, including search feeds, into AideRSS and it will score items in that feed for popularity based on number of comments, diggs, del.icio.us saves and inbound links. You could put feeds from a blog search for niche specific language into RSS and find some niche hotness. Once you identify top niche blogs you can also run their feeds through AideRSS to quickly discover what their communities of readers find most engaging. It's magic, almost.

Cons:

The service only works most of the time and long URLs choke it up. It's also limited to feeds, which take some creative thinking in order to bend to our particular purpose of finding top blogs.

Ask.com Blogsearch

Pros:

Ask has the best blogsearch on the web, it uses Bloglines subscription numbers as a big weight in spam control. There's very little spam. You can search for niche specific language or a key niche link and sort by popularity of source.

Cons:

Ask does get overloaded some times and the above method is hardly systematic anyway. I wouldn't reley on it alone. Ask blogsearch does index a lot of funky feeds that clutter search results even if they aren't spam. Try it out and you'll see what I mean.

Conclusion

See what I mean? Nobody quite does what we need. Used in concert and with a little work, these tools together can build you a pretty good reading list of top blogs in any niche. There's big room for improvement in this toolset though.


Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/identify_top_blogs.php

Multi-National Search Marketing: Effective Strategies for Global Marketers

Yesterday, Chris Sherman from Search Marketing Now presented another webinar jammed packed with useful information. This session entitled ‘Multi-National Search Marketing: Effective Strategies for Global Marketers‘ was sponsored by iProspect and moderated by Claire Schoen.

Chris was a perfect speaker due to his experience covering search and search engines since 1994. He is the author of several books, including ‘Google Power’.

Chris started out the presentation by outlining that he’ll cover why we might want to go global, what types of campaigns work best and how to do it.

The first slide discussed the fact that a lot of people perceive that Google has taken over the earth. Yes, Google is dominant and if you are running a search marketing campaign, you understand that Google’s reach can give you that global coverage. Chris said we may ask ourselves why should we should bother going multinational since Google has a global reach. But, Chris believes there are other opportunities out there.

The market share and what the reality really is.....

comScore does a monthly report on worldwide search share. Google does have the dominant share - about 63% - that’s just under 2/3 of all the market share worldwide. Despite the all the media about the Yahoo/Microsoft merge, the reality is that Yahoo worldwide, they are number one in terms of the number of people who visit them. In terms of search - they are number 2. If you aren’t using Yahoo, you could be missing out on certain benefits - particularly worldwide.

The number 3 player is Baidu.com - they are the dominant player in China. Over time as the Internet expands in China, Chris believes those numbers for Baidu will go in the double digits very quickly.

There is a tie for number 4 - Microsoft sites and NHN Corp. Finally, the other 90+ search engines have a 13% market share. If you actually start drilling down you’ll find some of these players are dominant in certain regions.

Key Players (source comScore)

• Google totally dominates North America and most of Europe.
• Yahoo is dominant in Asia, except for:
  • China (Baidu 61%, Google 20%)
  • South Korea (Naver 74%, Google 4%)
  • Russia (RIndex 57%, Google 23%)

Why Go Global

Almost 1/6 of the population is out there searching and doing about 61 billion searches per month. If you drill down, 75% of all searches are outside North America. To Chris, that is the most compelling reason you want to consider doing a multinational search marketing campaign.

To Translate or Not

Chris posed the big question…‘do we have to go through the details of translating?’

• Depends on your goals. You can have a strictly English campaign and it will work best for global brands and products with the same name in all cultures.
• An alternative is to mix campaigns that mix and match English and target market language (keywords, ads, creative landing pages, etc). Takes a bit of experimenting to discover what works best with this mixed approach.

Key: Search Behavior

• Varies from country to country.
• Chris discussed how people use different search terms, have different eye tracking, and result scanning patterns, different click through styles. Studies have proven the differences between North American searchers and others - like those from China.
• This means you will likely need to do translation, search optimization and cultural optimization. You need to make your content appealing to the search engines and the searchers through their various needs that they are expressing through their search behaviour.

PPC or SEO or Both

• Chris counseled us that if we are going multinational, we will have to commit a reasonable amount of resources to ensure the campaign is successful. Even before we being, we should consider whether a paid search or natural search campaign is more likely to be effective in a given market.
• Sherman feels that in larger markets - you are probably o.k. to do either - or both if you have the resources.
• However, for smaller markets, you should consider each individually. (In smaller countries where you could be targeting the millions or hundreds of thousand of people - you need to carefully consider who is the market leader in those countries).

Targeting Your Markets

• Use your marketing department to carefully weigh the probability of ranking with both country size and internet reach. Remember that Internet reach varies greatly (example, China is under 20% while other countries have much greater Internet reach - but with a smaller population).
• Do you have sales and logistics resources in a market? May not need them and may be able to successfully do it all online, but if you can’t you need to have the resources in place.
• Are we able to handle shipping, different currencies, duties and taxes?
• What about support? Do our support people speak the language? People may want to call or send an email. Do we have the people in place to handle this?

All of these things will impact whether the search marketing campaign can be successful.

Process

• First thing is to find good translators
  • Must know local idioms (need to understand the local dialect, terms etc).
  • Must be able to translate unique or technical terms for your product, service or brand
• Translate text, images and navigation. A lot of people overlook translating images and navigation - you need to make the user experience rock solid.
• Crucial - Make sure SEO is involved from the beginning. Don’t want to do SEO as an afterthought - get them involved right from beginning so that you’ll end up with a more effective website and the SEO specialists can help you avoid potentially costly mistakes.

Optimized Translated Content

• Chris warned us that English content that’s optimized does not automatically become search friendly when translated. Translation is an art and may alter the content in such as way that it doesn’t rank well at all in your target market.
• Similarly, you can’t simply translate English PPC ads and landing pages.
• Tip: Translate your keyword list first, before any other content. Get a good sense of those critical keywords that you are hoping to capture with the searchers.

The Long Tail Varies

• The long tail means targeting less common keywords or phrases - that long tail exists in all other languages but it is not the same in all other languages.
• Romance language searches tend to use fewer, more common words.
• English & Dutch/German searchers tend to use more terms and less common terms. Right now, long tail will probably be more effective in those languages.
• Paradox? In the UK - nine keywords account for 5% of all searches.

What About Duplicate Content

• Chris said he is often questioned about duplicate content in multinational campaigns. If you have the same language content on multiple servers in different countries, you may be subject to duplicate content penalties. Be aware, but don’t necessarily be alarmed. They may only be trying to find the main source of your content, regardless of where you are located in the world. However, if you are finding that search engines are getting confused, you may need to do some work changing content, or putting it into other formats etc. Really boils down to your individual situation.
• Content translated into different languages and hosted in different countries is not duplicate content to search engines (at least today…) May change but today isn’t a concern.

The Right Domain

What should the right domain be - a dot.com or a country specific domain?

• Boils down to your intent. If possible, go for both - especially for companies trying to target regions with regional pride, you will want to go for country specific domain.
• For example, IBM has one global website, with subdomains for individual countries.
• Sony, by contrast has local domains in all countries.
• Be careful of those ‘choose your country’ top level pages! If you have a dot.com and are going to redirect to another country - don’t make those pages search engine hostile! You want the search engine to be able to find the country specific domains. Make sure navigation on homepage - no matter what you do with it -better not block the crawlers from finding the content on all the different websites you create.

IP Address COnsiderations

IP Address gives the physical location of where the server is based.

• Chris said he has found that when search engines are ranking content, they will look at the IP address to decide whether it should give more weight in country specific results to sites with local IP addresses.
• Challenge: legal or residency requirements in some countries. In some cases, you may need to prove you have some legal presence in that country before you can get a local IP address.
• Google’s webmaster tools allow you to specify country, and Microsoft says this capability is coming.

Crucial - Localized Links

• Localized links are crucial when you are going into a multinational campaign. It is not enough to translate and set up a site in a different country.
• As with any site, it needs links pointing to it to rank well in search engines.
• And most of these links need to come from local authority sites, not from the mother ship or out of country sites.

Multi Country PPC

• Can be the most cost effective way to have multinational reach.
• Geotargeting can be very precise.
• Translate both ads and landing pages.
• Use PPC as a research tool to help identify most effective keywords in a specific language/country.

Global Brands in Multiple Countries

• For global brands in multiple countries, Chris suggested we trust the offline brand experts here.
• Some cultures like and accept global brands (ex. China) - others prefer homegrown, localized brands.
• Especially important - emphasizing brand attributes in a culturally appropriate way. You have to be sensitive to that and don’t neglect images!

Consider Smaller Markets

• PDF report ‘Global Search Report 2007′ by einternet is available online and has a wealth of information.
• Ex. China is on track to become the number one in terms of searches on the Internet but they have a low penetration of the population. Conversely, Denmark has 70% penetration and there is another search engine beyond Google that is popular. Report is full of good information that can help companies choose smaller markets.

Conclusion

• Chris concluded by stating that multinational search marketing offers a very appealing way to reach more customers, but it is not for everybody.
• Success requires deep, localized knowledge of markets. If you don’t have that knowledge, you need to reach out to a partner that has that knowledge.
• Campaigns must be optimized and tailored for both language and culture. Not enough just to take optimized content, translate, and expect it to work in another country. Have to tailor that information for the language and culture you are trying to target.

After this very informative presentation, there were a few minutes for questions.

How would we find out about legal residency requirements? - If you are trying to establish a site in a specific country, the hosts in that country will spell out what is require. For example, in Australia you need an Australia Business Number. Go directly to a particular host based in a country and find out the requirements that are necessary to actually register a site there.

How do you find translating services in a specific country? You can go on the web and find translation services, the key there is to get a translation service that can also work with an optimizer. The best thing to do is seek out a local SEM firm or a global SEM firm and see what they can do because they are probably going to have the contacts to do this type of work. Do not rely on automated translation systems - these are rough only and will backfire in an overall search marketing campaign.

Directories? They are emerging as a good resource and they are gradually becoming better at accommodating advertising needs. Directories are very good if you have the time and resources to find the good ones. They can give you very good reach for not a lot of cost/effort.

Source: http://www.10e20.com/blog/2008/02/13/multi-national-search-marketing-effective-strategies-for-global-marketers/

The Inconvienent Truth About Social Media Marketing

Social media is hot. Everyone wants to be on Digg's home page. Link baiting, especially using things like numbered lists, imperative rules or controversial hooks is the SEM strategy du jour. There's just one -- major -- problem with spending so much time and effort on capturing the eyeballs of social media users.

Social media traffic does not monetize.

Social media is easy to hype because there is a lot of traffic on social media sites. But if you try to do anything with social media traffic to convert it to revenue, you will be hard-pressed -- unless you are selling CPM-based advertising.

Google, in its 2007 Q4 results press conference, complained that it was having trouble monetizing social media websites. When I set up an AdWords campaign today, Google recommended I try the MySpace network. They are desperate to get anyone they can advertising on that network because the traffic has so little implied intent and so little value, and Google is already locked into an expensive partnership.

Man eats world's largest turkey in single sitting

Who would read the above line and be inspired to buy?

Trying to appeal to larger web communities using shock and awe, at the expense of creating content that your community and subscribers find relevant, costs you trust and attention with each swing and a miss. When you finally hit a homerun and get exposure on social media sites, most of those people leave within 30 seconds. Few link to your site, few buy, and few subscribe.

Leading publishers even worry about too much social media traffic deflating their CPM ad rates. And StumbleUpon, a leading social media site, sells traffic for 5 cents a visitor. So is it really worth the effort to target social media?

Why social media usually fails

Within your own field you likely know what people care about, why they care about it, and key emotional touchpoints that you can appeal to. But if you can't get exposure in your own market it is going to be even harder to appeal to larger and less related markets.

When social media actually works

The most effective way to target social media is to find something on a network that already relates to what you are doing and co-brand it, rather than trying to create a new hit from scratch.

Community gold

Get featured or referenced on a site like Search Engine Land and thousands of people interested in SEO and SEM are going to see that reference. If you create useful content and get covered by leading editorial channels in your field, what are the odds that some of the people who passionately subscribe to content directly related to your topic will also read, subscribe to, link to, trust, and/or buy from your site? Many will.

The relevancy is so great that you do not need a large stream of traffic to create a lot of value. Why does search work? Great relevancy. Why does social media work? It usually doesn't, at least when you factor in opportunity cost.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/080214-080046.php

The SEO Success Pyramid

John Wooden, the greatest basketball coach ever, never talked to his teams about winning. He talked to them about preparation and about the process of becoming a great team.

Wooden’s philosophy on coaching (and life) is summed up in the “Pyramid of Success,” which beats the tail off all that Self-Help Guru junk you see peddled in books, on blogs, on daytime chat shows, and on late night TV. I was lucky to hear Coach Wooden speak about the Pyramid of Success while I was a student at Pepperdine University; to this day, it’s one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. (Seriously, if you don’t know what his Pyramid of Success is, visit CoachJohnWooden.com.)

What’s all this have to do with SEO and online marketing? Well, the best SEOs don’t talk to their clients about rankings; they talk about the process of making great web sites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers. They talk about the process of creating great content that attracts links like bees to honey.

I would never compare myself to John Wooden, but I do like teaching others about online marketing. So, with that in mind, and inspired by the great coach, here is the….

SEO Success Pyramid

What’s It All Mean?

Commitment:

Every successful project I’ve ever worked on has involved a client whose team is enthusiastic and engaged. Whether you’re big or small, one uninterested department or person can sabotage everything.

Planning:

Success in any pursuit begins with setting goals and developing a plan to achieve them — detailing the strategies and tactics you’ll use, the people and resources needed, and so forth. Search marketing is no different.

Product/Service:

Although you can fool some people into buying crap for a while, real long-term success involves a product or service that people want or need. There’s no substitute for quality.

Education/Information:

You’re a business owner; you don’t need to become an SEO expert. But you’ll succeed faster if you have access to great information. And as fast as the search marketing industry changes, ongoing access to intelligent information is critical.

Patience:

True, there are exceptions every now and then, but for the vast majority of companies big or small, search marketing is a process that takes time to implement correctly. There are no short cuts, no quick fixes. Success almost always takes many months, if not a year or more.

Design & Usability:

Yes, there are some ugly sites that make lots of money; but there are more that don’t. Your best bet is to have a web site that’s attractive and easy to use. Get out of your customers’ way and let them do what they came to your site to do.

Keyword Research:

If you target the wrong keywords, you’re doomed to fail. You’ve heard that a million times, I hope. More than that, you also need to know what to do with your keywords.

Analytics:

How will you know you’re successful if you have no way of measuring what you’ve done? Measure, analyze, adjust strategies and tactics as needed.

Tools:

Having access to appropriate SEO tools can give you an advantage over the competition. Of course, more important than the tools is knowing how to interpret the data they provide.

Crawlability:

A search engine cannot index pages that its spider cannot crawl. Be careful with the Flash movies, the complicated DHTML and javascript, the robots.txt file, etc.

Content:

This can take many forms: a blog, articles, videos, a FAQ page, or even user-generated content like product/service reviews. When you get this one right, you’ll have an easier time getting…

Links:

Your great content isn’t going to rank well without links, preferably from relevant, quality sites. I brain-dumped (almost) everything I know about links early last year.

Social/Local Findability:

Let me explain this since I might be inventing a new term. Social Media Marketing and Local Search are musts. The size and scope of your company may dictate which you emphasize more, but neither should be ignored. Local SEO is a must for most small businesses, but social media can work, too. Bigger companies that target an audience more than a location will find social media offers a lot of opportunities. In either case, the goal is findability. You want customers to be able to find you as easily as possible.

Reputation Management:

It’s imperative to know what people are saying about your company. This isn’t just for Big Business, either: An old client of mine runs the only roller skating rink in our area, yet is probably losing business because they have a couple negative reviews on a certain Local Search site. Given the growing influence of user reviews, knowing how to manage your reputation is a must.

Trust:

In my first post of 2007, I said trust is the No. 1 factor, and nothing has changed since then. Trusted domains are powerful domains. When you have trust, from users and search engines, you’re on the way to search marketing success.

As you climb the pyramid, you’ll find buzz/word-of-mouth marketing or maybe community helping you along. To a large degree, these are two sides of the same coin. It’s the people factor, the human element that often separates the winners and losers in search marketing. Get people talking positively about you, whether it be one-to-one conversation among friends or in the larger setting of an online community, and you’ll climb the pyramid that much faster.

Source: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/the-seo-success-pyramid/971/

Part One: What Is Yahoo! Answers?

This is part one in a series on social marketing using Yahoo! Answers.

Yahoo! Answers (YA for short) is one of Yahoo!’s social media success stories. The question-and-answer service launched in December, 2005, and, according to Hitwise, it surpassed the market share of the now-defunct Google Answers within two months.

Usage Stats

In August, 2007, comScore listed Yahoo! Answers as the #2 reference site on the web, behind only Wikipedia. Yahoo’s own data from the same time shows the site with millions of users and millions of answers in the U.S. and across its 26 international versions. In December, Hitwise reported that YA gets about 1/6th the U.S. traffic that Wikipedia gets.

My very unofficial observations show users asking dozens of questions per minute at off-peak times of day, and upwards of 100 questions per minute during busy times.

How It Works

Obviously, YA is all about people asking and answering questions. There’s a point system in place that has no real reward other than status and authority. However, as you move up from one level to the next, you do gain additional privileges, such as being able to ask and answer more questions, rate other questions, etc.

You earn points mainly by answering questions, by having your answer judged “Best Answer”, and by having other users give your answers a “thumbs up.” You lose points when you ask a question. I asked a Yahoo rep about this not long ago and was told it’s an attempt to keep the quality and quantity of questions high. (Imagine how many crap questions people would ask if they earned points for posting a question!)

The system relies on community moderation to support the community guidelines. (Of particular note for our purposes is that the community guidelines do allow link dropping in some cases. More on that later.)

Users who successfully and correctly help report spam and support the guidelines can become trusted reporters. It’s very easy to report spam, and I’ve written before about how quickly spammy questions can be removed.

Social Elements

Your use of YA is, like many social sites, based around a profile page. Your profile page is where you (and any other user) can see your activity and points earned while using Yahoo Answers. It also keeps track of every question you’ve asked, answered, and marked as “interesting”.

Like most social sites, you’re allowed to include a link in your profile. And like most social sites, that link is nofollowed. (see red circle) Yahoo! Answers is not a linkbuilding exercise; all links in your profile, your questions, and your answers are nofollowed.

Like any good social site, YA offers several common social features: you can add friends to grow your network, you can invite friends to join YA, you can send individual questions to friends, you can vote good or bad on other answers, and so forth. As you add friends and build your network, their questions will be highlighted for you on your profile page. For that reason alone, I suggest you build your network carefully. You don’t want a lot of low-quality questions taking up space on your profile page.

Coming tomorrow in part two of this social marketing series: Why Use Yahoo! Answers

Rumor: Is Google About to Buy Bebo For $1 Billion To $1.5 Billion? Or Will it Be MySpace?

An unconfirmed rumor has surfaced that either Google or MySpace is about to announce a big $1 billion to $1.5 billion acquisition in the social space. After checking around with multiple industry sources, we’ve concluded that if the rumor is true the most likely candidate is Bebo, which we are told is raising capital and simultaneously shopping itself around again. We put the chances of this rumor being true at a solid 50 percent. Update: Make that a solid 51 percent.

To be clear, there is a long history of rumors surrounding Bebo as an acquisition target that turned out to be false or never panned out. The last one was in May 2007, when Yahoo supposedly wanted to buy it for $1 billion. At a TechCrunch party last summer (before I was working here), Bebo CEO Michael Birch told me that the Yahoo bid was a complete fabrication and the first he heard of it was from his Dad, who called him up after reading about it. When I contacted Birch last night about this latest rumor, he had no comment.

Let’s just go through the logic for each potential buyer, who might be bidding against each other. An acquisition of this size by Google in the face of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo would show how swift Google can act while its competitors dither. It would also show that what it is really scared of is not a combined Microsoft-Yahoo, but the growing threat from fresh-faced upstart Facebook.

Google already owns Orkut, one of the biggest social networks globally, especially in Latin America. It just has not caught on in the U.S. Bebo is also a global play, but its strength is in English-speaking countries such as the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. According to comScore, Bebo had 21 million unique visitors worldwide in December, 2007, with about 4 million in the U.S. Orkut had 25 million worldwide unique visitors. So Google would nearly double its social networking market share, as measured by active members. And it would have a strong English-speaking social network with which to begin to challenge Facebook here in the U.S.

Bebo is already part of Google’s OpenSocial platform, even though it embraced Facebook’s competing platform also. You can bet that Bebo’s Facebook effort would get a bullet in the head pretty quickly if it became part of Google. Still, given Google’s recent earnings shortcomings, which were partly attributed to an inability to make its ads on MySpace pay off, investors might not be so keen to see the search engine double-down on social networking. It is a distraction it can do without.

So what then of MySpace/News Corp.? What does it need Bebo for? It’s 107 million worldwide unique visitors overshadows every other social network out there. But Bebo could help MySpace with its global expansion, particularly in markets like the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, where it is weak. Securing the No. 1 spot in each international market is the key to dominating them.

There is also a technology play here for MySpace. Both MySpace and Bebo are adopting OpenSocial as a way to let outside developers create apps for their social networks, so there would be interoperability on that front. But more importantly, Bebo has done a good job of adding the latest features to its site while still keeping it clean of clutter. MySpace could use some of that DNA, and beef up its engineering ranks with a serious Silicon Valley presence. One billion dollars to future-proof its site does not seem like too much to pay.

Source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/06/rumor-is-google-about-to-buy-bebo-for-1-billion-to-15-billion-or-will-it-be-myspace/

Controlling Search Engine Access with Cookies & Session IDs

What's a Cookie?

A cookie is a small text file that websites can leave on a visitor's hard disk, helping them to track that person over time. Cookies are the reason Amazon.com remembers your username between visits and the reason you don't necessarily need to log in to your Hotmail account every time you open your browser. Cookie data typically contains a short set of information about when you last accessed a site, an ID number, and, potentially, information about your visit.

As a website developer, you can create options to remember your visitors using cookies for tracking purposes or to display different information to users based on their actions or preferences. Common uses include remembering a username, maintaining a shopping cart, or keeping track of previously viewed content. For example, if you've signed up for an account with SEOmoz, we'll give you options in your My Account page about how you want to view the blog and remember that the next time you visit.

What are Session IDs?

Session IDs are virtually identical to cookies in functionality, with one big difference. Upon closing your browser (or re-starting), session ID information is no longer stored on your hard drive (usually). The website you were interacting with may remember your data or actions, but they cannot retrieve session IDs from your machine that don't persist (and session IDs by default expire when the browser shuts down). In essence, they're more like temporary cookies (although, as we'll see below, there are options to control this).

While technically speaking, session IDs are just a form of cookies without an expiration date, it is possible to set session IDs with expiration dates similar to cookies (going out decades). In this sense, they're virtually identical to cookies. Session IDs do come with an important caveat, though - they are frequently used in the URL string, which can create serious problems for search engines (as every request produces a unique URL with duplicate content). A simple fix, however, uses conditional 301-redirecting to show bots a non-sessioned version of the page (described in detail here - search engine friendly cloaking by removing session IDs).

IMPORTANT NOTE: Any user has the ability to turn off both session IDs and/or cookies in their browser settings. This often makes web browsing considerably more difficult, and many sites will actually display a page saying that cookies/sessions are required to view their content or interact. Cookies, persistent though they may be, are also deleted by users on a semi-regular basis. This Comscore study from 2007 found that 33% of web users deleted their cookies at least once per month.

How do Search Engines Interpret Cookies & Session IDs?

They don't. Search engine spiders aren't built to accept cookies or session IDs and act as browsers with this functionality shut off. However, unlike visitors with non-cookie-accepting browsers, the crawlers can sometimes reach sequestered content by virtue of webmasters who want to specifically let them through. Many sites will have pages that require cookie or sessions to be enabled, but will have special rules for search engine bots, permitting them to access the content as well. Although this is technically cloaking, search engines generally allow this type of segmented content delivery.

Despite the occasional access granted engines to cookie/session-restricted pages, the vast majority of cookie & session ID usage create content, links, and pages that limit access. As web developers, we can leverage the power of this "accepted cloaking" to build more intelligent sites and pages that function in optimal ways for both humans and engines.

Why Would I Want to Use Cookies or Session IDs to Control Search Engine Access?

There are numerous potential tactics to leverage cookies and session IDs for search engine control. Below, I've listed many of the major strategies one can implement with these tools, but there are certainly limitless other possibilities:

• Show Multiple Navigation Paths While Sculpting the Flow of Link Juice
  

Visitors to a website often have complex needs for the ways in which they'd like to view or access content. Your site may benefit from offering many paths to reaching content (by date, topic, tag, relationship, ratings, etc), but expend PageRank or link juice that would be better optimized focusing on a single, search-engine-friendly navigational structure. By showing one group of navigation to cookied users and another to the engines, you can effectively have your cake and eat it, too.

• Keep Limited Pieces of a Page's Content Out of the Engines' Indices
  

Many pages may contain both content that you'd like to show to search engines and pieces you'd prefer only appeared for human visitors. These could include ads, login-restricted information, links, or even rich media. Once again, showing non-cookied users the plain version and cookie-accepting visitors the extended information can be invaluable. Note that this is often used in conjunction with a login, so only registered users can access the full content (think sites like Facebook or LinkedIn).

• Grant Access to "Human-Only" or "Registered User-Only" Pages
  

As with snippets of content, there are often entire pages or sections of a site on which you'd like to restrict search engine access. This can be easily accomplished with cookies/sessions and even help to bring in search traffic that may convert to "registered-user" status. For example, if you had desirable content that you wished to restrict, you could create a page with a short snippet and an offer to continue reading upon registration, which would then allow access to that work at the same URL. Registered visitors would continue linking to the same URL spiders index and rank, yet wouldn't give away the content for free in a cached version. Be aware that in these instances, the search engines will only be able to "see" the content you've listed on the non-registered-user page, so be careful to target your titles and snippets with keywords to receive the most traffic possible. You can see examples of this at sites like the Economist, the New York Times, and WebMasterWorld.

• Avoid Duplicate Content Issues
  

One of the most promising areas for cookie/session use is to prohibit spiders from reaching multiple versions of the same content, while allowing visitors to get the version they prefer. As an example, here at SEOmoz, logged-in users can see full blog entries on our blog homepage, but search engines and non-registered users will see only the snippets. This prevents our content from being listed on multiple pages (the blog homepage and the specific post pages), and provides a positive user experience for our members. I discussed this specifically in this post on dealing with pagination and duplicate content on blogs.

• Display Content Based on a User's Actions or Patterns of Action
  

Many sites like to keep track of their users' activities and serve targeted content that is more likely to fit their interests. In the case of many media websites, this means advertising, while for e-commerce sites, it's more likely to be related or recently-viewed products. Bluefly.com is a good example of this - showing visitors the clothing they've most recently browsed.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/controlling-search-engine-access-with-cookies-session-ids

8 Ways to Turn Negative Feedback into an Opportunity

We’re all working hard to get somewhere with our blogs and businesses. With lots of my hard work paying off lately, I’m finding that the increased exposure is having some side effects that I’m having a difficult time with. It’s getting increasingly difficult to respond to comments and links - which is really stressing me out because I really miss doing that and I know it’s really important to you. Every week I’m digging myself out of nearly 1000 email messages and sometimes things slip through the cracks.

But the hardest part of all is that I’m getting to a point where people are not exactly always saying positive things about me and the way I approach business and life.

You’re probably saying “Well, you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” And you would be 100% right about that. But putting yourself into a position to actually have to read and hear judgments or attacks is… well, challenging at best and it downright hurts at worst.

A little self-coaching was in order. What would I say to a client with this question?

Try it On - Does it Fit?

As hard as it is to admit it, sometimes people can deliver great feedback in a nasty package. Sometimes the things that bother us the most have a shred of truth to them. It makes it even harder to hear when people say it in a mean or attacking sort of way. But if there IS a bit of truth to hear, it’s far better to acknowledge it and grow from the experience. Otherwise it will come up again. And again.

Pick Your Battles

Ask yourself - is this really a good use of my energy and time? Some nasty comments are best blown off - especially if you “tried it on” and it didn’t fit! Sometimes misunderstandings can spread and become big problems - it’s important to draw a line between potentially damaging information and someone who is just venting or being an idiot.

Spin it Baby

They say that there is no such thing as bad PR. I guess that’s true, but good god, you’ve gotta have a strong stomach to deal with bad PR!! A great example of this is the Heart Attack Grill in Arizona, who spun the spun the controversy around his artery-clogging menu items into big business and press mentions nationwide.

Let Your Brand do the Talking

I was personally attacked (via email) for moderating members of a group who were breaking the TOS. While I sat back and composed myself, friends defended both my decisions and my actions - by the time it was over I never had to say a thing! If you consistently act in a manner that comes from a place of integrity and caring, people who know you will speak out when the trolls act up.

Pick up the Phone

For some reason, the anonymity of the internet can really bring out the worst in people. Remember that body language and tone of voice accounts for over 90% of what we communicate. Sometimes even the most nicely worded emails can be grossly misunderstood without the right visual and voice cues. When things get out of hand, it’s time to pick up the phone and set things straight.

Respond Only When You’re Centered

Responding to negative feedback when it is fresh and stinging is NOT the right time. You may be able to come up with some real stinging comments yourself in this state, but in the end, this doesn’t serve your highest good (nor anyone else’s!). Always take a few moments (or days!) to chill out before you respond to ensure that the message you are sending is the one you WANT to send.

Find the Silver Lining

In every mess there is a gift - and after living through my share of messes, I can safely say it’s ok to trust the process when negativity raises it’s head. Sometimes it’s exactly the shakeup you (or a community) needs in order to get on the right track. Seeking out the lesson always makes the situation brighter.

Stay Focused on Your Outcome

Sometimes, there’s just nothing you can do about the negativity - you can’t address it, and you can’t change someone’s mind. While you walk away, don’t walk away “backwards” while you continue to look at the problem. Look to the future, and at the very least, you can tell yourself, “Well, this must mean I’m getting more famous and closer to my goals!!”.

Source: http://www.emomsathome.com/blog/2007/04/25/8-ways-to-turn-negative-feedback-into-an-opportunity/

15 Fundamental Truths About Social Media Marketing

Here are 15 of the most important things about social media marketing for those completely new to the approach.

1. You must get involved in the top social media sites to understand them thoroughly.

My thought process behind this was that the only way to start understanding the type of content that works is by being exposed to the stories, titles and content on a daily basis. Therefore this mainly involved using Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon on a regular basis.

2. You must be a real user.

When getting staff to start using these sites I encouraged them to forget about the client side of things. I simply asked that they vote for what they found interesting whether it be fashion, cars or music and then add content submitters as friends if they wanted to read articles on the same subjects. At no point did I tell them to focus on our clients needs or topic areas, as then there would be no interest in the social side of social media.

3. Not everything you try will work.

I've spent hours on a content piece that had all the hallmarks of popular social media content. It was a list post, was relevant to current events and had a catchy title. Nonetheless, it didn't make the Digg homepage, received minimal votes on StumbleUpon and no bloggers really picked it up. Just because the content is good it doesn't guarantee success. All pieces of the puzzle have to fit together, and you never know in advance what's going to click with social media users.

4. Digg failure doesn't mean campaign failure.

I dislike the fact people think Digg *is* social media marketing. What people have to understand it's not Digg that can drive the links to your website—it's the people that notice your content from Digg. Remember, they can notice your content from a lot of other places as well. As an example, two articles that didn't make it on Digg but attracted a lot of links from social media sites include 50 Beautiful Things You Can Do With Vaseline and The 22 Worst Place Names In The World.

5. Results can't be guaranteed.

If you're responsible for social media marketing, it's important convey to account managers that not everything can go viral. Just because we've made the Digg homepage, the StumbleUpon buzz page or had over 100 bloggers write about an article previously doesn't mean it will happen again—and we can't guarantee it for clients. This is very similar to why you shouldn't guarantee search engine rankings because you can't control them.

6. Going niche is often better.

If I was helping a client to spread an article about environmental issues, I would expect to have much better success on the likes of Hugg and Care2 than I would on Reddit or any other general news sites. Focusing on a niche might send fewer visitors but these visitors will likely find the content more relevant and are more likely to talk about you and help expose your content to like-minded people.

7. Don't try to game the systems.

Voting submissions between site friends is one thing, but really trying to game the systems with sites like Subvert and Profit will almost always be obvious to the community—and do your clients or your own reputation no good.

8. Respect client brands in the process.

When promoting content for huge automotive companies and consulting with them to network with the top bloggers, I made it clear they must never try to force things on people, and our staff must never spam the content anywhere. This could only get ourselves or the brand in trouble.

9. Go light on selling or promotional messaging.

Any advertising in content is a huge turn-off to social media users, so minimize anything related to buying or selling products. Instead, make content that's not directly about a company or product, but rather more of a byproduct of what they are about. For example, don't write about how great your client's cars are, but rather about the greatest cars in the world.

10. Engage in communities.

Whether this be on social networks, forums, blogs or social news sites it's important to really embrace and engage with communities. From joining groups on Facebook and discussing a topic to leaving comments on blogs or helping users on forums—all of these things can help build online presence and get people to notice what you are all about.

11. Offer people value.

Value means different things to different people. Some people want content that makes them laugh; others want to know how they can hack a wireless network. A lot of content you see on Digg and Mixx is created for people on Digg and Mixx and the authors of the content understand they have to offer value whether it's in new-found information, an interesting study or even a funny image people can share with their friends. If you aren't offering people value you are just marketing at them, not to them.

12. Create something that is honest.

Sony was famously outed online when the company created a fake blog called All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP (no longer live), where two people were trying to get others to promote their wish for a PSP. Turns out these people were actors. Sony subsequently was subjected to a backlash of brand bashing which really highlights the risk involved in a dishonest marketing campaign.

13. Understand the benefits.

If I'm asking others to spend a large amount of time engaging in popular sites and watching what content gets a lot of reviews on StumbleUpon and makes the Digg homepage, I need to make sure they understand why they're doing this and how they (and subsequently, our clients) will benefit. In my initial presentations I explained that doing well on social media sites can easy lead to a lot of traffic and a lot of link potential.

14. Keep track of what is going on.

A few months ago, graphic and logo designer David Airey was on the Digg homepage with news of somebody stealing his domain. As soon as he got it back I submitted the news to Digg and it made the homepage as well. I only submitted because I knew the original story had been on there in the first place. Keeping up to date involves knowing what people want to read about, the memes on the web and new ways or sites that get people's attention such as Pownce or Mixx.

15. Social media marketing is only one strategy.

Although it can bring great results, it shouldn't be totally relied on and certainly should not replace any existing SEO or PPC campaigns. I am also a fan of ad buy to get people to content that may encourage them to interact with a site.


Source: http://searchengineland.com/080129-122519.php

How To Create Compelling Social Media Profiles

Social media is not really new anymore, but many people still struggle with the subtle things that might help or hurt success within the top social communities. Recently Muhammad Saleem published a great article on the various tips you can follow to help you succeed in most social media communities.

In this article, I'm going to discuss in detail how to best create a profile and persona within the social communities, to help you achieve better success.

Since Digg is currently the largest social community in regards to marketing, I'll use it as a model for this discussion. However, all the points detailed here apply to all social communities on the web today.

It should also be mentioned that the advice provided in this article is from a marketing point of view and does not always apply to users who want to participate in a social community for entertainment value.

1. To be or not to be... Yourself?

There are two ways you can present yourself through your profile. You can either be yourself or take on a persona. When you choose to be yourself, you limit the freedom and anonymity you can have within any given social community. You have to watch what you say and what you submit, as it will have a bearing on your intentions and reputation. Additionally, you open the door for people to research you and possibly link you to any content or product you might be trying to promote.

However, when you choose to use a persona, you are free of those concerns, for the most part. You are not directly tied to any content, product, or service you may represent, and you are free to participate in any way you see fit.

2. Choose a memorable name

Make sure that you choose a name that is easy and memorable. You want people to be able to say your name aloud and recognize it instantly at a glance. Names like “msaleem, “burento”, and “MrBabyMan” are all names you can easily recognize and speak aloud to a friend in conversation.

3. Choose an avatar that works in all sizes

Digg uses three different sizes for your avatar image, depending on the section and way it is used. Often a picture can look very recognizable and clear when it is in full size, but look bad when in smaller form.
Choose an avatar that is easy to recognize and memorable at all sizes and try to make your image represent your chosen name whenever possible.

4. Be careful what you link to

Avoid linking to sites that could identify you or products and services you provide. You do not want to portray yourself as someone that is on Digg for profit or gain. Think about the links you add and what they end up saying about you as a user.

5. Be active

Digg sorts friends by recent activity and tracks the last time you logged into your account. All your recent submissions, diggs, and comments are also logged in the recent activity section of your profile. Make sure that you log in to your account as much as possible and perform various actions to keep your account looking fresh and active.

6. Be a good user, statistically

Digg’s profile pages display a lot of your user stats for other users to see. Everything from how many stories you dugg in the last 30 days, which categories your diggs where in, how many submissions you have made, and how many total diggs your account has is visible to anyone who’s viewing your profile.

It is important to make sure those statistics tell other users how good of a friend you would be to them.

Make sure that you are voting on other people’s submissions and not just your own. You do not want your stats to show that you have submitted 100 articles and only voted on those same 100 submissions.

Also make sure you vote multiple stories in various categories to have a diverse and high level of votes per month. I normally like to see double digits in 3 or more categories in a potential friend.

Try to make comments on posts from time to time. Don’t leave silly “good post” comments but take a minute or two and actually give a real comment. It is always better to avoid having a 0 statistic field in a profile.

7. Don’t be too friendly

Digg shows all the friends you add under your recent activity section on your profile page. It never looks good to have 300 newly added friends at one time. All the people you added will visit your profile and see that they were not individually added but rather as a part of a mass friend adding campaign.

8. Be natural

You want to grow out your profile slowly, like a natural account would. You should not have 400 friends after just joining Digg 2 days earlier.

Users have been banned from Digg for having unnatural account activities and growth. Profiles are something you should really put the time and thought into doing correctly. Many social community users will review profiles before choosing to friend you or avoid you like the plague.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/080129-083225.php