With a 100 million active users worldwide, twitter has earned its place along with Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as one of the ignore at your own peril social networks.

Twitter has many strengths as a communications tool, but one of its great weaknesses has been in the area of an ability to search its rich archives for anything that may have been said about a product or prominent person more than a few minutes ago. Search just hasn’t been a priority for twitter management, despite their 2008 acquisition of twitter search engine Summize.

In 2009 twitter signed deals with both Bing and Google to provide privileged access to twitter tweets in real time, the so-called twitter firehose. Bing provides its own dedicated social search, but they only return results for the last week of social activity. Google offered realtime search, but shut it down after two years when they weren’t able to reach new terms with Twitter. Those looking to do ad-hoc analysis of their own conversations, or those of competitors, have had to turn to lessor known twitter search tools like Topsy and Snap Bird.

A year has already passed since search engine blekko launched and while Google and Bing aren’t trembling yet, others have shown significant confidence in blekko’s prospects. For marketers who keep an eye on keyword driven web traffic, a significant question arises: where’s the blekko keyword data?

By default, web analytics measurement systems like Google Analytics aren’t able to correctly recognize blekko as a search engine, but it is possible to configure digital media measurement tools to properly attribute site visitors to the keyword searches they performed using blekko. My new Search Engine Land article shows how and explains why the data isn’t available by default. Happy measuring!

One of the many reasons to be passionate about the Internet, and to defend it from politicians who want to curtail it, is its capacity to be a great democratic leveler. Social media tools, with their potential reach limited only by language and access to an internet connection, provide a megaphone for the little guy to be heard as never before.

Dave Carroll’s video United Breaks Guitars on YouTube is the social media case study de rigueur, a not too subtle warning to companies that they ignore the power of bottom up communication at their own peril.

Carroll’s video, 11 million views to date, resonates in part due to its authenticity, its sincerity. Carroll demonstrates that effective communication on a shoestring budget is indeed possible using social media channels.

United breaks guitars

Naturally social network sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ have each done their part in spreading his message by virtual word of mouth.

Google Analytics offers a wide range of advanced features and reports, one of the newest being the Site Speed report, introduced in May 2011. Upon first glance many marketing professionals might want to dismiss Site Speed as just another technical report by engineers, for engineers.

Yet users do prefer fast sites: numerous studies (e.g slide 4) have demonstrated site page load time to be a determining factor in the success of a site.

Web marketing practitioners should also bear in mind that Google introduced landing page loading time as an AdWords quality score factor in 2008 and as a SEO ranking factor in 2010.

Google is beginning to make advanced social badges available which allow Google+ Page “owners” to promote their Google+ page on their website(s), hopefully not to the detriment of their own site(s).

Enhanced Google+ badges are part of a reciprocal link, required, at least on paper, for a site to appear as a Google Direct (i.e. for a query which starts with a plus, e.g. +Antezeta) result in the Google web search box. Google Direct appears to be limited to searches on Google.com for now, so don’t get your hopes up just yet if your site isn’t in English.

To configure enhanced badges join the Google+ Platform group. ONLY those associated with the platform will actually see the advanced badges on a website. Those who log out won’t see anything.

The standard g+ logo badges are already available and visible to everyone.

Readers with a cursory knowledge of SEO best practices are probably familiar with the rel=”nofollow” link attribute which tells search engines in essence that the site owner doesn’t vouch for the quality of an outgoing link, a link which was more than likely added by a site visitor. Perhaps even the rel=”canonical”, used to provide search engines with the definitive document URL for content reachable through multiple URLs, rings a bell. But what about rel=”author” used by Google’s authorship markup or rel=”next” for pagination?

Even seasoned SEO practitioners need a cheat sheet now and then to sort through some of the more arcane HTML markup used by search engines (our comprehensive meta tag listing may be helpful as well!).

The following table is a survey of rel= link attribute use by leading search engines. Let us know of any additions or corrections!

The modern plazas online are arguably social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Google+ and, particularly for those selling to other companies, LinkedIn. But before a company decides to dedicate time and resources to preside over social networks, not to mention the definition of necessary processes and metrics, there are a number of advantages and disadvantages worth assessing.

Social network pros and cons

The most evident disadvantage to social network participation are the predictable expenses, such as allocating people and investing in training to avoid getting off on the wrong foot. Social network participation will also require some changes to internal processes – such as integration of social media activity with sales and service departments, and the development of policies regarding the usage of social media by employees and associates. In assessing the benefits, there are the obvious ones, like increased customer visibility and an increase in virtual word of mouth promotion. There is also the opportunity to participate in discussions which are already happening about company products and services. Discussions taking place in the online plaza can be very useful not just to understand what is important to customers, but also to welcome suggestions from customers and potential customers. Another advantage to social media participation which is easy to overlook is the increased visibility it brings to a company and its products and services in search engines like Google and Bing.

In June 2011 Google introduced a way for content authors to enhance the display of their articles in Google search results by associating a photo and an author byline to the result. The addition of author information in search results continues Google’s rich snippets implementation, a concept originally introduced by Yahoo as enhanced results.

In implementing authorship markup, Google said they’ve used existing standards such as the anchor and link tag attribute rel=”author” from HTML5 (in reality, rel="author" has actually been around for a while) and the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) defined attribute rel="me".

Figure 1: A Google search result with authorship markup; this case includes Google+ follower count

When Google Analytics added event tracking in June 2009, you could almost hear the cheers – it was now possible to track non-page “things”, such as site errors and zip file downloads, without artificially inflating page view statistics. Yet it wasn’t too long before a fine reading of the documentation pricked the balloon: by default Google Analytics events are treated as user engagement, thus if a user visits a single page on a site, proceeds to trigger an event in that page, such as viewing a video or downloading a file, then leaves the site, the single page visit won’t count as a bounce.

Perhaps this outcome is a logical consequence of the increased user interaction yet it isn’t always the most intuitive nor desired result, as students of my Google Analytics course have reminded me all too often.

Now on its third significant iteration, Bing’s Webmaster Tools merits a closer look in light of Yahoo’s continuing transition to Bing search technology as part of the Microsoft/Yahoo Search Alliance. During the summer lull in the northern hemisphere, Bing and Yahoo each made a series of important announcements regarding the Alliance. On July 22^nd Yahoo stated that a further 6 countries are now powered by Bing organic search results; Yahoo added another 6 countries to this list on August 4^th, bringing the total to 17. On August 16^th Bing noted the integration of Yahoo traffic data into Bing Webmaster Tools.

Figure 1: Yahoo logo in Bing Webmaster Tools to show combined traffic sources

Why SEO practitioners should care

The Bing / Yahoo consolidation won’t immediately challenge Google’s effective monopoly in most markets, with the US being as an important exception, it does put Bing in a better position to give Google a run for its money – important for anyone working in international SEO.