From an Internet marketing perspective, spreading content virally through Facebook can be a great addition to almost any type of web marketing campaign. Everyone who’s used Facebook understands just how easily great content can be shared and circulated through people’s news feeds. But how exactly does Facebook determine which content should surface in people’s news feeds and which should not? Of all the thousands of posts made daily by your friends, how is Facebook able to figure out which one’s you’ll probably want to see versus the ones you won’t? Luckily for us, Facebook answered this very question at their 2010 F8 conference.

EdgeRank

Whenever you login to Facebook, what you see in your news feed is only a very small fraction of all the content being posted by your friends at any given time. In order to determine which items should appear within your news feed, Facebook grades all content posts according to what it thinks your level of interest with each of them is likely going to be. The mathematical formula that determines this for Facebook is known as Edgerank.

Some Terminology: Edges and Objects

Facebook uses the terms “object” and “edge” to help describe user’s interaction with content. An object simply refers to a post or status update made by a user; a piece of content. The term “edge” describes any user interaction with an object; a “like”, a comment, a tag, a “share” and the action of creating the content itself. (It’s probable that clicks and page views also qualify as edges, but I wasn’t able to definitely confirm this.)

The EdgeRank Formula

Here it is:

The variables:

U - the affinity score between viewing user and edge creator

W - weight score for this edge type (create, comment, like, tag etc)

D – time decay score based on how long ago the edge was created

The idea:

The higher the combined value of the affinity score, weight score, and time decay score, the more important an edge will be. Similarly, the more edges, and the higher their total scores, the higher an object’s EdgeRank. Objects with a higher EdgeRank appear more prominently within people’s news feeds on Facebook.

Affinity Score

Affinity is the value Facebook assigns to an object’s creator relative to other Facebook users. In plain English, the more a person comments, likes, or interacts with your posts, the higher their affinity to you, and the greater the likelihood that your posts will show up in their news feed.

For example, I’ve been following 6S Marketing social media strategist Sam Macmillan’s Facebook page because he recently became a finalist in, and then actually won, a local social media marketing contest. Since I’ve been viewing and interacting with Sam’s Facebook page relatively frequently, I have a high affinity to him on Facebook, and the content he posts regularly shows up within my home feed.

Weight Score

The weight score is a measure of the combined value of all an object’s edges. The more edges an object has the higher its weight score will be. Not all edges hold an equivalent weight on Facebook. So for example a comment likely holds more weight than a like or a simple click or a “like”.

Generally speaking, the more interactions a content post has on Facebook, the more prominent it will be in other people’s feeds. A post with 12 comments and 10 likes will appear in people’s news feeds more prominently than one with no comments and no likes.

Time Decay Score

Like Google, Facebook is concerned with the freshness of content. Newer content and interactions hold more importance and have a higher likelihood of being published in your news feed. The older the interactions are with an object, the lower their time decay score and less of ability they have to push content to the top of people’s news feeds.

What now?

While it’s interesting to have a better understanding of Facebook’s content ranking algorithm, much of this information reaffirms what we already know. It’s not surprising that the more people interact with your posts, and the more interactions there are with a post, the more likely that post will be to be visible in people’s feeds.

If you’re promoting a campaign on Facebook, be sure to share content that your audience will want to engage with. This doesn’t mean that everything you share has to be unique, it just means that the content you do share has to be able to draw the attention of your audience and then connect Facebook users with your message.

Many sophisticated online marketers spend allocate large budgets to daily Facebook pay per click campaigns, but in contrast, every time a content item you post on Facebook surfaces in people’s feeds it’s a free opportunity to get your message out. Figuring out how to run content campaigns that actually get published within people’s news feeds can therefore save you money and get your message out.

Questions or comments? Don’t be shy, leave us a message in the comments section below. We love hearing your feedback.

Also be sure to check out 6S’s Facebook marketing services or social media strategy page for more information about our social media marketing services.

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Style vs SEO-Friendly Semantics

Until very recently most web browsers only supported a handful of standardized fonts. If a web developer needed to use a unique font within a page, they were often forced to resorted to work-arounds such as embedding the font within an image file. This practice, most commonly associated with image headers, can be optimized with proper use of alt attributes and image file names, however we find that these two simple optimizations are often ignored. This presents a problem as search engines have historically had difficulty  identifying the focus of image content when not accompanied by other optimization signals.

Google’s New Font API

Yesterday, Google unveiled its new SEO friendly font API. The API is supported by the four major browsers (Safari, FireFox, Chrome, and IE6 and above), and allows many new fonts to be displayed within web pages in a manner that relies on plain text instead of images. This is great for SEO and could potentially replace the common practice of using image-headers instead of text marked up with CSS and heading tags. All an SEO or developer has to do is insert a snippet of code within their page’s HTML and make a minor adjustment to a page’s CSS. It’s incredibly easy!

Here’s an example of the new Google API at work (NOTE: the code and result sections below are just implementation examples; not an actual functioning demonstration.)

Code:

<html>

  <head>

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine">

    <style>

      body {font-family: 'Tangerine', serif; font-size: 48px;}

    </style>

  </head>

  <body>

    <h1>Making the Web Beautiful!</h1>

  </body>

</html>

Result:

(and search friendly)

Have a question or opinion on this subject? Don’t be shy, leave me a comment in the comments section below – I respond to all of them!

For more information on our SEO Services please visit the 6S Marketing search engine optimization page.

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Google’s search engine reportedly uses over 200 different factors to weigh the importance of a web page and then rank it within search results. This past week, after months of speculation within the SEO community, Google announced that a page’s loading speed is now officially a factor that will affect a website’s ranking within search results.

Fast Sites 1, Slow Sites 0

We all like happy users right? Google’s research repeatedly indicates that users spend more time on websites that are faster, and that faster websites create happier users. Faster sites provide visitors with a quality of user experience that their slower counterparts simply cannot match. And if Google has the choice of providing a higher quality search result instead of one of lesser quality, it will always try to return the better of the two.

Will Page Speed Affect My Website’s Google Ranking?

Currently, page speed is only being used as a ranking factor within 1% of all Google search queries. However considering that there are no less than 1 billion searches made daily on Google (and probably even more by the way!), this means that this ranking factor is potentially already affecting the result page positions of tens of millions of websites each day. We can expect this number to only rise with time. So while your site’s result page positions may not have already been affected by this ranking factor, it is always advisable to optimize for ALL possible factors.

Page Speed SEO: Some Tips

While the list below is by no means exhaustive, if you’re looking to improve your website’s page speed, here are a few things you probably want to consider. At first these may seem overly nitpicky, but to put things in perspective we’ve got to remember that Googlebot measures page speed in milliseconds, so every little bit of time savings actually helps.

Page Loading Data from Webmaster Tools

Reduce HTTP Requests

Before it can render a web page, your browser must contact the host server in order to download components like stylesheets, scripts, and images. The more components your page contains, the greater the number of HTTP requests your browser will make from the server, and the slower your web will load. In order to speed up your website, try to minimize the number of HTTP requests each page needs to make in order to load. Try combining all CSS within a single external stylesheet, using sprites to combine images, and removing any duplicate scripts which may exists on pages.

Reduce Cookie Size

Nope, we’re not talking about the kind you can eat. HTTP Cookies are text files that a website can store within your web browser for the purpose of authentication, session tracking, storing preferences, and any other function that is enhanced by the retention of textual information. Exchanging larger cookies requires more time for the transfering of information between your browser and the web server. Minimizing cookie size cuts down on the necessary response time.

Do Not Scale Images in HTML

Web developers often scale images using the height and width attributes for HTML image tags. Doing so can cause a browser to download image files that are much larger than your page requires. For example, if your web page contains an image that has dimensions of 400 x 400, but is being scaled in HTML to 100 x 100 by height and width attributes, then browsers will be downloading an image that is much larger than necessary for your page. Larger files require more loading time, and will decrease your page’s overall speed. You can easily re-size images in Photoshop in order to avoid this problem.

Update You Google Analytics Scripts

In December 2009 Google Analytics released a new asynchronous tracking code. Among other things, this new tracking code was designed to minimize the time required to load the on-page scripts your website uses to run Google Analytics. While older scripts still function perfectly well in terms of tracking, upgrading your pages with the new script will decrease a page’s loading time.

One Last Thought

Really great SEO is all about creating websites that are useful and relevant to the things users are searching for online. By adding page speed as a factor within their ranking algorithm, Google is actually improving the quality of websites that will be returned to users within its search results; something that we can all benefit from. Hopefully, the days of slow and unresponsive websites will now be numbered.

Questions or comments? Don’t be shy, drop me a line in the comments below.

-

You can follow the @6s_marketing team on Twitter for the latest in search engine optimization, internet marketing and social media. For more information on our SEO services, please see our Search Engine Optimization page.

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This Whitepaper will cover the following topics:

• What is Google Local?
• Where Google validates & gathers business information
• How to create a proper & well optimized Local Business Listing
• How to create Local Business Ads in AdWords
• Mobile Ads for Google Maps for Mobile
• Global Recommendations
• Google Local Quality Guidelines
• Google Local Reporting Capabilities
• Conclusion

Download the Google Local Whitepaper »

History

In March 2004, Google introduced Google Local, offering relevant neighborhood listings, maps and directions as a local search platform. This was Google‟s answer to “Localize” search results in the global search realm.

In February 2005, Google Maps goes live offering an even more advanced form of localized search with plotted business locations relevant to the type of business searched for.

Present

Three years later Google Local has combined with Google Maps to offer traffic information, transit information, street views, and the ability to serve both sponsored and free business listings.

What Is Google Local?

Google Local is a combination of Google Maps and localized business listings, search results & sponsored Ad serving. The two Ad serving components that make Google Local are:

• Google Local Business Center (LBC)
• Google AdWords

The Ads created in the LBC and AdWords are called Google Local Listings.

There are two types of Local listings that are served in Google Maps:

• Business Listings – Free business listings created in the Local Business Center. These can be used by those businesses that do not have a website.
• Business Ads – Sponsored (paid) business ads created in Google AdWords. Part of the AdWords Online Advertising platform, these Ads are for those businesses that do have a website.

To truly ensure maximum exposure online and full benefits of Google Local, it is recommended that both of these listing types be utilized.

For the full 6S Marketing Whitepaper on Google Local, Download the PDF

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Personalized Search

While personalized search is an established functionality, Google and the other search engines are competitively
innovating to create results, browsers and toolbars (like Google Chrome and Microsoft’s Live Search bar) that
are tailored to the individual. Yahoo! recently released “Search Monkey”, a plug-in that pulls information from a
website and from a site owner data feed to create personalized search results that include videos, addresses
and other relevant details that Yahoo! feels may be important to the user. For SEO strategists this causes
difficulties in standardizing results. But on the positive side, niche industry websites now climb in their own
specialized area of search rankings, resulting in a new era of micro-search success.

Geo Location

Google has long been logging users’ IP addresses and serving results based on where the searcher is in the
world. However, since they started to include the ‘Local Business center’ listing in results pages, geo-location is
now vital when establishing search tactics. As Google ranks sites in their local listings differently to their organic
SERPS, SEO specialists must strike a balance between clients gaining rank in either local or organic results. For
instance clients in the hotel and leisure industry have found it increasingly important to appear in local listings for
users looking for accommodation in their area. Other companies with a more global appeal (like Nike or Nintendo)
have less need to specialize. Establishing how important geo targeting is to a client and tailoring search tactics to
accommodate it has become standard SEO practice.

Video Search When Google acquired YouTube it was not a financiallymotivated move. The Ad revenue that YouTube could provide was far less valuable than the content it made available to Google. A recent Google Labs experiment, “GAudi” demonstrates how seriously Google is taking the ability to index video content. GAudi uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to that portion of the video – providing amazing potential for indexing rich media content on the web. For now, the video search optimization solution is viral; creating a customized video player widget for your website or blog audience and encouraging them to share. Mobile Search Mobile search is on the up. According to comScore Metrics, the number of mobile search queries in June 2008 was double those of the previous year. Since Yahoo! analyst Russell Beattie declared: ‘it’s really not a matter of IF the mobile phone will become the dominant internet platform any more but WHEN” – SEOs and developers have been hard at work optimizing their sites for mobile search. And with a screen of two or three inches wide, designing for the medium is more challenging and calls for an elegant user experience. While traditional SEO still applies in mobile, there are now techniques to be considered for your mobile site to gain exposure on the search engines. SEO’s need to ensure the site is compliant and coded in XHTML as well as submitting a mobile sitemap to Google and Yahoo who both now accept these formats.

Link Quality

These days, more and more emphasis is being placed on the quality of link building. In 2003 when Google
bought Applied Semantics it was obvious which direction they’d take their linking strategy. The ability to collate
and index a page based on its overall content has become a central part of the Google inbound linking strategy.
As search engine algorithms evolve to include more semantic linking technology, it’s more critical than ever to
gain quality, authoritative and trustworthy links rather than the former sheer quantity. As Ivan Strouchliak noted
on seochat.com, “Users abandoned former search leaders AltaVista, Excite, AllTheWeb, Hotbot and others
because they could not maintain spam free indexes and return useful websites”.Expect to see growth continue
in the area of semantic linking as the need for quality over quantity increases.

Search Functions on Social Networking Sites

TechCrunch recently reported that Google is in final negotiations to buy Digg for about $200 million. Aside
from terminating Microsoft’s ad deal with Digg the ramifications of the purchase could pose further reaching
questions about the direction Google intends to take its own search algorithm. Even Google, the best so far
at search advertising, has acknowledged difficulties making money on social networking sites. However the
pursuit of Digg could be seen more as an interest in the platform’s search algorithm than the revenue it
could add to Google. Are we potentially looking at Google experimenting with social bookmarking as a way
of ranking pages and sites? It’s too early to tell where they’ll take the technology but it’s certainly one to
watch in the future.

About The Author:

John Blown is the Managing Director of 6S Marketing Inc., Canada’s largest Search Marketing Agency. As a
veteran of the Search Marketing industry, John has been providing Internet marketing consulting for over
10 years to hundreds of clients across the globe. John is consistently called upon to provide expert
commentary and articles within the Internet marketing discipline. To contact John directly email -
john@6smarketing.com.

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Economic Woes

Recessionary trends across world markets have spiraled in recent months and show no signs of stopping soon. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has reported that global economic growth is due to slow to 3.9% this year and be stunted an additional 3% in 2009, bringing economic activity to the lowest levels experienced since 2002.

Despite the intervention of governments around the world to rescue economies in peril, numbers continue to dip in sales, equity value, and consumer confidence. US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has stated that despite an injection of $700-billion into the economy, an increasing number of firms that were previously stable are likely to fail in the months ahead.

Traditional Marketing and Advertising: Downward Trends

Unfortunately, the traditional marketing and advertising sectors are bearing the brunt of the current economic conditions budget cuts. Emarketer reports that 59% of marketing executives initiated a decrease in spending on traditional marketing in 2008 and 65% decreased budgets for traditional advertising. Additionally, the Newspaper Advertising Association of America reports that total newspaper advertising revenues fell by $3-billion in the first six months of 2008, marking the lowest level in 12 years.

The Strength of Online Marketing

In stark comparison to the struggling traditional marketing sectors, online marketing firms have been steadily building market share for several years and are surprisingly unaffected by the current failing markets. Displaying a clear strength in a clearly chaotic business environment, both paid search and online advertising revenue have grown by 28% since 2007. Marketing Sherpa reports that 29% of medium to large businesses in Canada plan to increase their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) spending in the upcoming year.

Explaining it All

During a recession, the initial instinct for most managers is to cut back on marketing expenditure – leaving them vulnerable to strategically minded competitors. But why shouldn’t they be strengthening marketing efforts to ensure market visibility when competition is tightest?

-Businesses aren’t forgetting marketing completely, but simply being strategic about how and where they spend their money. Evidence reveals that the only areas in marketing avoiding the current budget cuts are online. The uncomplicated reason behind this is that marketers are not likely to cut budgets that drive sales efficiently with an attractive ROI.

Vancouver, BC-based 6S Marketing is one of the largest online marketing firms in North America. They provide search engine marketing services aimed at driving profits with targeted and effective online presence. Co-founder and President, Chris Breikss, reports that the company has seen relatively unchanged client volume and levels of spending during these past few months of economic turmoil. The simple reason is that “Clients are more willing to spend money if they can see that they are gaining results.” explains Breikss. Breikss makes this critical point explaining the edge of online marketing over traditional methods that has been further revealed as a result of recent economic decline. Online marketing differentiates itself from traditional marketing methods in several ways: 1. Quantifiable Results Traditional marketing and advertising often involve multiple media campaigns and a process of testing strategies and techniques. Measuring results is a very difficult and subjective task that is at times impossible. Despite the esteem of traditional marketing and advertising, it is difficult to prove who actually saw your ad or received your message, or when and how they responded to it.

Online marketing is quite the opposite. Businesses who advertise online or use SEO can track and measure precisely how their company was discovered, the keywords used in a Google search, click through rates on advertisements, and direct sales results based on internet ads or searches. With this specific knowledge, tailoring campaigns to a particular market becomes easier and ROI can be easily monitored.

2. Flexible Messaging

With traditional marketing and advertising methods, there are no second chances at making an impression or communicating a message effectively. Once an ad is placed and printed it is essentially permanent.

Online marketing is a much more forgiving and flexible option. If it is shown that internet ads are not getting enough attention, companies can quickly and easily make strategic adjustments and reap the rewards. Changes to direction, strategy, and style can all be made with the click of a mouse. Using internet marketing, managers are able to ensure that their marketing strategy is in line emerging trends quickly and efficiently.

3. A Focused Approach

Using traditional marketing, a business can purchase a magazine ad or bill board in hopes that in the right place and at the right time their message will convince a potential buyer to purchase or become interested in their product or service. This approach does produce some results, but suffers from inaccuracy and high inherent costs. Additionally, many consumers are used to traditional approaches, and tend to ignore them. Modern consumers change the channel during commercials, skip over ad space, and have essentially tuned out such passive advertising methods.

Using internet marketing, a company can hone in on specific customers that are searching for a particular product or service. Rather than convincing a customer to try their product, internet marketing works to position a company as a resource for those consumers actually seeking their specific business offerings.

4. Cost Effectiveness

SEO and internet advertising is quite cost effective in comparison with traditional marketing and advertising, especially taking into account the factors explained thus far. A comparison of costs shows that the creation and distribution of an offline leaflet/magazine typically takes between 16 – 23 days to develop and deploy, compared to 4 days for an electronic version. Pair this with the fact that response rates from electronic publications are typically higher (20%) in online promotion versus offline (5% – 7%) and we have a clear winner for the savvy marketing dollar.

In the current economic conditions, more than ever, it is important to think strategically about where and how a marketing budget is spent. Those who understand this will be able to reap the rewards of greater market share when the economy eventually rebounds. With online marketing options showing marketers greater value, flexibility, and insight into the changing trends of the market, we can expect to see more companies advertizing online to help their firm weather the storm and succeed in the future.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7659086.stm

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7660236.stm

http://www.gannett.com/investor/data/2008/data0808.pdf

http://images.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006621

http://adcentercommunity.com/blogs/advertiser/archive/2008/10/07/uk-search-spend-up-28-how-does-this-affect-you.aspx

http://www.iabcanada.com/newsletters/080703.shtml

http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/tpcpa/feb2001/internet.htm

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