Clearly large companies see the usefulness of social media, many companies are trying only one thing at a time, dipping a toe, not jumping feet first. At least it’s a move in the right direction, has the landslide finally happened?
What do you think? let us know your thoughts?

While large amounts of similar is data available, we found this visual representation, informative and easy to use. We also liked specific parts of the data set, such as the fact that more than 3 in 5 Americans (63%) use the net to influence others’ oppositional views, opinions or expression of contrasting or oppositional views.

Intent-driven Social Media

What do you think of this visual look at user trends? Are thier any more visulisations like these that you know of? Please drop us a comment and share our stuff!

This is all fine, untill your data grows in size to petabyte scale, then old way simply isn’t feasible. Tagging, sorting, and categorizing, would take an emmence amount of time. A single computer, no matter how large, just can’t crunch that many numbers at once.

Google Data Structure

Google use a very different approach, when sifting and ordering the world wide web. Thier solution for working with colossal data sets, is an approach called MapReduce.

It works like this:

1. Collect

MapReduce does not depend on traditional databases, where information is collected then categorized. We’ll just gather up the full text of every book Google has scanned.

2. Map

You then write a function to map the data: “Count every use of every word in Google Books.” The request then splits among all the computers within your army, each is assigned a chunk of data to work with.

3. Save

Each PC doing a map, writes the results to its local hard drive, cutting down on data transfer time. Then the computers that have been assigned a “reduce” function grab the lists from the mappers.

4. Reduce

Then the Reduce computers correlate the lists of words. Now you would know the frequency of a particular word that is used, and in which books.

5. Solve

The system finally creates a data set about your data! In my example, the final list of words is stored as separate sets, so it can be quickly referenced or queried. So then you don’t have to plow through unrelated data to get your answer.

Please drop us a comment, and share our lovely and insightfull post…thanks!

Its All in the Stats

1. 40% of SEO campaigns aware of their ROI achieve returns in excess of 500%, while only 22% of PPC campaigns were able to achieve this value.

2. When two top-ranking links are artificially switched, the click-through ratio of 42-8% drops to 34-12%, demonstrating the importance of engaging copy in addition to rank position.

3. 23% of searches progress to the second page. Presumably the difference between 62% and 23% stems from searchers trying either another keyword or another engine, or giving up.

4. 41% of searches unsuccessful after the first page choose to refine their keyword search phrase or their chosen search engine.

5. 77% of search users choose organic over paid listing when searching, 67% choose organic search when purchasing.

6. When the searcher is purchasing, organic click-through generates 25% higher conversion rates than equivalent Pay-Per-Click (PPC) click-through.

7. 80% of unsuccessful searches are followed with keyword refinement. Meaning if unsuccessful the searcher inputs an altered query.

8. 62% of search users click a link on the first page of search results

9. 42% of search users click the top-ranking link. 8% click the second-ranking link, and the click-through rate (CTR) continues to drop after.

So there you have it, stats proving the value and importance of SEO. Use these yourself to show the facts. Share and pass on this articles and check back soon for more fabulous SEO tips.

Without getting too sentimental, a new favourite of mine, and hopefully yours too, so be sure to check her out soon.

Great eye tones, and shading

Cool uses of pink here, urban looking!

This also applies to many other areas, say, recipes, fitness programs, diet programs, definitions, explanations and many others.

Search engines can penalize a sites ranking if it looks as though content has been taken from another site. However, these sites do sit in index and even rank very well. How can this be? Does it mean there are no filters?

Filters exist, but they are in a primitive form

Search Engine’s need lots of resources to check the entire internet. Therefore, engines use simple forms to uncover duplicate content.

How?

The most common pattern is links. In general engines check between two linked sites for duplicate pages/content. If they exist, then engines try to get rid of the duplicate – usually the one who links to the source site.

How does this work?

If website B (healthy news) republished an article from site A (health research institute) and puts a link from B to A for reference, search engines understands that site A is the original source and the site B has copied it. Site B is seen as dupe content website.

How do search engines penalize?

One or two articles like this won’t harm your site much for example, if website B has lots of original content. However, if duplicate content fills a significant number of pages, websites can be penalized by being moved down in the search result pages, moved to supplemental index or even unlisted from search index.

Test Conducted

Website X has 5 pages of original content and ranked #1 for very uncommon search term. This website has 100+ links pointing to it and Google PageRank of PR4. After few weeks 30 pages of content from another site that required a link back to it were added. In results, after Google indexed the website, it went from #1 position down to about #67 – #100. The test was continued by adding even more links – but even an extra 100 links
(now site has over 200 links) didn’t help to move it back of even above these #67 – #100 low positions.

After 3 months – duplicate pages were removed.  After search engines updated the website – it slowly moved back to position #2.

What does it mean to you?

The idea is simple – don’t link to websites that have the same content as yours – especially if it is in huge amounts compared to total number of pages.

What you should do?

You may not link to websites with duplicate content but your website may have lots of popular articles like from MoreNiche Content Connection, it is useful to follow few rules of thumb which are based on the fact that engines evaluates the whole page’s code not just the article itself.

To put it simply  – engines see all page as code, that probably includes site specific menu, HTML tags, layouts, title, descriptions etc. so it mix it up and articles aren’t considered  as duplicate since it is part of some bigger code. That’s the secret.

Some useful tips for Content Connection users

To ensure even more security from search engines it is recommended to use one or more of these tips:

1) Use articles on pages that have a solid size menu
2) Try to have a unique intro and closing for used articles, change titles
3) Use synonyms to replace words
4) Insert comments in the middle of an article or links to detailed info
5) Insert contextual short product reviews (1 picture plus one paragraph and link to full review will be just fine)
6) Split longer articles into 2 pages or more as long there stays 150 – 200 words on each page
7) Rewrite articles into your own words
Combine two or more articles into one
9) If there are bullet points – mix their order if possible
10)Think outside the box…

Last tip

Don’t try to host a DMOZ directory or part of it for making more pages on your website. Google can easily ban you for that and remove your entire site as happened to a website about coffee that hosted 10000 pages from DMOZ to drive extra 500 visitors a day.  Sad but a fact. Duplicate content is evil. Be aware.

Your Own Website:

The most important and indispensable tool in Affiliate Marketing is your own website. The first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Thus, you must first build a user-friendly website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the products and service you are promoting and make a purchase. Therefore, you must first concentrate your efforts in building a website that will cater to what your prospects need.

The most important thing you should consider is that almost all web users go online to look for information, not necessarily to go and buy something. Above all else, make your website full of original, relevant and useful content. People will love articles that are appealing and helpful. Keep in mind that, on the internet, content is still king and good quality content will not only build your credibility, but will help you achieve a higher search engine ranking. By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a credible expert in the field, making you a more trustworthy endorser of the product or service you promote. Establishing a good reputation is a good step in building up a loyal consumer base.

Incentives:

The internet is a very competitive world. You need to stay ahead of your rivals to make sure that you get significant share of your market. So, you must use everything within you power to encourage people to visit your site and click through to the websites of the products you are promoting. By building an opt-in email list you can start to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or better yet, offer incentives to your prospects to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can present free software, access to exclusive services and other freebies that will be helpful to them.

Link Popularity:

Once you have set up your website you are going to need traffic, unfortunately ‘build it and they will come’ doesn’t apply here. It cannot be emphasized enough how important it is to drive highly targeted traffic to your site. Attracting the right people should be the first step you take. Do everything you can to achieve a high search engine ranking. Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to determine search engine rankings. The more links you have pointing to you site, the more popular you site is. Therefore, to enhance your link popularity, you must launch an aggressive link building campaign.

One of the best ways to do this is to submit articles to article directories with links back to your website in the resource box. You will not only gain exposure, you will also have the opportunity to advertise for free. The more sites you submit your articles to, the better your link popularity will become. Make your articles relevant, original and useful so that more websites will pick it up and link back to your site.

These are just three of the many tools that you as an affiliate marketer need to use to maximize your earning potential. The possibilities are endless and are limited only by your imagination, creativity, resourcefulness and determination.

Implications For Your Brand!

This obviously has huge implications for previously indexed sites and brands. Business have to adopt a more universal methodology when optimizing and branding content. This will engage the searcher with as many of these additional properties which will now be included in standard search queries, if they do not, they will be lost in the noise once more!

A Universal Search example, KW 'credit cards'

Engage Or Die

That being said universal search is here, and here to stay, adapt or die is the message reverberating throughout the search community. If brands choose to engage with multiple mediums, then surly the searcher will have a richer user experience, and the brand will have greater opportunity for branded impressions right? But which stakeholder within your organization will this task fall on? Why the good old CMO of course. CMO’s who are already engaged with search marketing must learn to adapt and move with the change, embellishing their online artifacts to include Universal search within their media spends. Brands and organization who are just entering this space must also be made a aware of Universal and Blended Search, and engage with it as much as possible. Its my belief that companies who do not optimize a range of content, will see a diminished CTR and traffic volume.

What Is It?

Yahoo as always are in hot pursuit, naming their new SERP output ‘Blended Search‘  increasing integration of  video and photos directly in search results, and Search Assist which feeds suggestions and query refinements to the user. Yahoo’s version of Universal search aims to work in  much the same way.

So “Universal Search” as Google defines it:

Over several years, with the help of more than 100 people, we’ve built the infrastructure, search algorithms, and presentation mechanisms to provide what we see as just the first step in the evolution toward universal search. Today, we’re making that first step available on google.com by launching the new architecture and using it to blend content from Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into our web results.

Historically search rankings focused primarily on HTML based text content, optimized by keywords, relevancy, meta data and all those other lovely SEO methods. With the shift to Universal Search, mixed within the regular content will be media rich properties such as images, video’s, maps, books, shopping feeds and much more. If a brand or business engages and optimizes with all these mediums, then their coverage an brand value must be greater for it.

What About Vertical Search?

Googles organic results for several years have included a results  filtering system, dividing the SERPs content into verticals, this had the obvious name of Vertical Search, but due to lack of use of these filters, Google has evolved the concept. Many people just didn’t know vertical search existed, and I think if google had made the vertical filter a little more prominent then a larger number of user would have used them, user interface design for dummies guys.

New Google Universal model explained

Vertical search is part of a subset now aptly named “specialized” search, it consists of search engines focusing on slices of content such as news or images. For instance avideo search engine would simply relay video results excluding all other results. Or a books search engine would topically relate too author and book information only…simple! What universal and blended search does is combine that search data. and outputs a mix of results; the user can still filter the results. Search engines have effectively taken the default choice out of the hands of the user.

The images below shows the old model of vertical results and below the new model of blended results now not necessarily structued in a linier manor. Previously a query on google would only return webpages (html text) and document content. A user now will be faced with mixed media results.

Challenges for Search Agencies

Agencies are often to slow to move with changes in industry, as a result of client uncertainty or institutionalized MD’s. What ever the case the big bears in the room, Google and Yahoo have repainted the walls, this new search paradigm cant be ignored and its not going to go away! Agencies and search intuitions have to lead brands to water, advocating the benefits of this change with confidence; after all this universal search is free, and billable right? Its a fantastic opportunity for brands to engage with there user base through mixed media, for free, ….well the cost of content production and optimization, but still a low cost of entry. I for one, am excited and inspired by the change, and will be shouting about Universal and Blended search from the rooftops for some time to come!

What do the pro’s say about all of this? John Battelle at SES

So what do the search engines say? Dr. Larry Cornett from Yahoo

Let us know your thoughts on this subject, has your brand engaged with this? Are you an agency? How have you updated your SEO strategies for the change?