We’ve talked a lot about the impact of SEO on social media platforms, but, if you’re a news reporter, journalist or other general media professional, how can you use search engine optimisation to your advantage? More and more users are turning to the web to search for breaking news, as the internet provides the masses with an easily-accessible, real-time news feed, ensuring that the population is kept up to date with current events second by second.

As an example, way back in 2009 the BBC announced that it was to start optimising its headlines for better SERPs and many other broadcasters have followed suit. This has resulted in a highly competitive battle for first page positions and triggered most online journos and bloggers to consider the advantages of good SEO.

Writing for web users is entirely different to writing for print. It’s true that great content will engage readers no matter where it is published, but as the internet is an ever-changing medium that‘s greatly influenced by the impatience of its users, you need to consider a couple of different points if your articles are going to gain the online recognition and attention they deserve. Creating web-friendly content is the first step towards successful search engine optimisation.

• Your headline is the most important part of your post. With so many other similar articles to choose from (from countless different sources), you need to be sure that your tagline offers something particularly attractive and unique. You also need to make sure that the subject of your piece is clearly stated at the very beginning of your title. Remember that your article might not be immediately recognisable as relevant to a particular subject (and therefore to a specific target audience) – readers will find your post as a result of a search but more often than not will come across it in amongst a never-ending feed of unrelated articles.

Including your most important keywords and search phrases in your title will also aid your SEO efforts, as it’ll be more likely to achieve great rankings within the major search engines. The bots indexing your site consider your title tag to be one of the most crucial elements when it comes to matching up your post with a user’s specific search.

Naturally, these tips condemn the use of puns in your titles. Stylistically, many writers rely on wit to grab the attention of the reader, but you need to be sure that the wording you choose won’t affect your relevancy to a particular topic. By all means be creative but consider the impact on your SERPs.

• Make sure your article meets the criteria that will ensure it’s indexed by the Google News feed. This kind of exposure is second-to-none. There are no clear guidelines as to how to achieve this but plenty of discussions raging within online forums, and even a few vague points released by Google itself. The general gist of the ideas gathered by journalists encourage writers to include a visual element such as a relevant image in your post, not posting an article that’s simply a video or a graphic, and not updating your article once it’s been published (instead, post an entirely new piece).
• Regardless of what you’ve heard, keyword stuffing is frowned upon. There’s been a lot of argument recently as to the ‘ideal’ keyword density for SEO and no SEO experts can agree on the exact figure. With the recent updates to Google’s algorithms, most now believe that quality content surpasses the need for keyword repetition and will be ranked according to its relevancy and value. Stick with your writing style and make sure that your text is likeable and informative.

Once you’ve written what you consider to be the perfect article, there are a number of tricks you can employ to extend your exposure even further. Linking is a huge part of successful search engine optimisation and can be easily achieved. Simply link back to your homepage, use keyword-rich, text-based anchor links to direct the user back to previous articles that might be of interest to the reader, link to interesting sources that will compliment your post – all of these techniques will not only impress the search engines but will make sure that your reader is gaining as much from your post as possible. After all, you’re ultimately writing your article for humans, not bots!

The mention of the human element brings us to the last point. The internet thrives on the ability to share links and information between infinite numbers of users. Once your post has been published, don’t just simply sit back and wait for it to be found. Actively promote your work and develop a standing within relevant circles. Make it easy for your readers to share your posts via social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now, of course, Google+ – set up accounts with these networks and dedicate a certain amount of time to gaining fans and recognition. This move will not only generate a huge amount of interest in your articles, it will also work in your favour when it comes to SEO. Search engines are gauging the importance of social signals in its ranking process, so the amount of ‘likes’, ‘tweets’ and ‘plus 1s’ you receive will be a great indication of your new-improved online presence!

As you many know, there are quite a few web browsers currently available, but one of the newest and most up and coming web browsers has seemed to somewhat take over. Google Chrome has become the second most popular browser in the UK (Internet Explorer is still up there in first place) and this could be due to a multitude of factors.

Browsers tend to come and go, but here is a list of those who seem to be staying put throughout this year: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. All of these browsers have been around for a few years and have been upgraded quite a few times by their developers.

Google Chrome

Let’s take a look at Google Chrome. Chrome was first released September 2008, developed and released by Google Inc. Now in comparison to other browsers, Chrome is, metaphorically speaking, just a child. Children however, tend to have a lot of energy, and also tend to be more on trend than their elders. This reflects on Google’s creation perfectly. Chrome has the quickest page load speeds and in version 13, instant page loads are possible. A page that loads instantly is, in my opinion, astonishing, it really just goes to show how far technology has come along, remember when pages loaded from top to bottom at a snail’s pace? One row at a time, well Chrome is showing that in can load these pages instantly, in comparison there has been a lot of progress ma

de. In relation to it being trendy, Chrome has a very sleek interface and an expanding amount of themes, all easily changeable by the user depending on personal preference.

Mozilla Firefox

November 2004 was when Firefox first hit the scene, possibly the best time for any browser to join, as there were only a few real competitors in that time. Some of its features include tabbed browsing, spell checking, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, private browsing, location-aware browsing. However a lot of these features are quite typical in browsers now. The only thing, I think, that makes Firefox stand out is its tools. Seen as Firefox has been around for quite a while, it’s had more time to develop tools and so on, so it is understandable why it has so many. A massive SEO tool would be SEOBook, this is an example of a tool that is exclusive to Firefox, this is one contributing factor that could lead to users.

Internet Explorer

Explorer debuted August, 1995. IE is the oldest web browser still running today. It is a typical web browser and has the same amount of features as any other. However Microsoft does own this browser and naturally it is set as any PC’s default browser. Additionally, Internet Explorer has a very simplistic feel. I don’t mean this in a negative way – it just seems as if what isn’t necessary isn’t there.

Opera

The Opera browser is also one of the oldest browsers (not as old as IE though!), released in December, 1996. Again like most web browsers it has the tabbed browsing, and other popular features, like private browsing, a bookmarking bar and so on. However something unique about Opera is its speed dial feature. For those who are not familiar with this tool, users have the ability to add up to around 25 links, this makes access to your favourite and most used sites easier than some other browsers, and this speed dial feature opens every time the browser or a new tab is opened up. Chrome has a similar feature however it gives off a completely different feel and experience, due to the layout and general processes that are used.

Safari

Apple runs the Safari browser, and to no surprise it follows the same layout and schemes as their other software. This platform is very similar to Internet Explorer, the only real variance between them being the obvious differences between a mac and a PC – just a few minor tweaks here and there and also, of course, visual differences.

The SEO point of view

Being a part of SEO Positive obviously makes it easy to gauge an SEO opinion on browsers. I’ve found that all of my colleagues are using Firefox. In all fairness, Firefox is not particularly slow, and it does have tools that are essential to the work of SEO consultants. SEOBook is the main tool that my colleagues use, the reason for this is that it shows the vital statistics of each site visited, ie page ranking, different types of page links to the site and the page you are on, as well as other handy elements such as Alexa ranking. All of these things are vital for those who use SEO.

The Social Media Marketing point of view

I personally deal with Social Media Marketing quite intensely. Aspects of SEO and other variants of SEM do come in to my field from time to time, but my main focus would be on Social Media integration. Now the time that a webpage takes to load is very important for me; I use the internet about 75% of the time I work which is why I need a fast browser. If a page is loading slowly, then it cuts into my productivity. Also I use multiple sites for bookmarking, networking and blogging. So a toolbar that clearly displays each website is vital and will help me navigate through the sites that I am active on. For these reasons I have chosen to use Chrome. It matches what I require and I have never experienced a problem.

The public’s opinion

I know that there are a lot of polls and so on regarding this topic. I have conducted my own using Twitter, Warrior Forum and Linkedin. What I have found is that the majority are using Chrome and the rest are on Firefox. Chrome is being used mainly for things like the speed of the browser and its instant Google Search option, along with the bookmarks toolbar and the general appeal of the layout. Firefox users tend to be drawn in by the multitude of tools, the rest of the features are quite typical but this factor will sway them. Also I have found a lot of people don’t like to use Google due to their algorithms, it seems people have developed paranoia about Google “watching” them. I disagree with this; it is fair to say algorithms are used to show targeted ads for the user. However it is a program that pretty much picks up keywords, it is not a case of an actual person sitting and reading your mail or reviewing your history. Google doesn’t scare me in that sense.

Global Usage

Statcounter’s statistics, show that Internet explorer is the most used browser, worldwide, followed by Firefox then Chrome, then Safari and lastly Opera. However the only browser that is receiving an increase in users is Chrome. Firefox and Internet Explorer are decreasing significantly, whereas Opera and Safari have had the same amount of users for at least 3 years.

Conclusion

It seems that, for now, Internet Explorer and Firefox remain at the top of the tree. However, in the foreseeable future, I imagine users of all current browsers converting to Chrome. Meaning that the amount of people using Chrome will increase, and as a result of this all competing browsers will suffer a decrease.

The use of the ‘nofollow’ attribute has greatly affected the link building process for many website owners. The hyperlink value essentially tells the search engine bots crawling your site not to pay any attention to the links specified. This has its pros and cons – by implementing the ‘nofollow’, you’re ensuring that the specified links aren’t adding to the link juice of your site, ie they won’t be increasing your popularity rating. However, they will still help associate your website with other relevant pages and so improve your exposure. It has been extremely useful to deter spammers from gaining any sort of advantage from posting irrelevant comments on your pages or blogs.

The ‘nofollow’ is an attribute that can be added in to HTML coding – it’s often called a tag by mistake.

All links are set to ‘dofollow’ by default. This means that their worth is assessed by the search engine crawlers as standard. To turn the link path into a ‘nofollow’, use the following code:

rel=”nofollow”

in your code syntax as below:

<a href=”www.yoursitename.co.uk” rel=”nofollow”>Example of Page</a>

If you want to, you can also make the entire website ‘nofollow’ by implementing the code into your meta deta on each individual page. An example is listed below:

<html>
<head>
<title> NoFollow Tutorial Example</title>
<meta name=”description” content=” “/>
<meta name=”robots”> content=”nofollow“>
</head>
<body>

Using ‘nofollows’ correctly will lower the number of outbound links that are indexed by the major search engines and aid a natural, white-hat link building process.

There’s been a lot of talk in recent weeks about the future of the video streaming device Hulu. The service, currently based in the US but looking to expand worldwide, offers users the chance to stream a huge variety of programmes whenever and wherever they choose, and is owned by some of the largest players in the current entertainment market – Disney, News Corp, Comcast Corp and Providence Equity Partners.

Hulu recently decided not to go ahead with an IPO worth an estimated $2 billion but instead has put its service up for sale. The platform’s potential has been spotted by multimedia giants such as Google, Yahoo and, more importantly, Apple Inc, who have reportedly expressed their interest in the company, striking speculation as to who will eventually partner up with the popular online platform.

Hulu’s accessibility stretches to include compatibility with the latest smartphones and tablet computers, a major reason why industry experts believe the company is best paired with Apple. Other observers believe, however, that Apple Inc would bid for exclusivity and pull the platform from non-Apple machines such as Roku Player and rival companies’ DVD and Blu Ray systems. As one of the world’s most powerful companies, Apple have been looking for a solid video platform for some time now, a move that would challenge Google’s popular YouTube site and place the organisation in an even stronger online position.

Web titans Google and Yahoo are also said to be in talks with Hulu but a decision is yet to be made as to the future of the service. It’s widely expected that Hulu will have to make sizeable adjustments and alterations to their existing service if they were to partner with one of the aforementioned companies. Huge discussions would determine the licensing terms behind the content available from Hulu, the results of which could lead Hulu to compromise their existing offerings and potentially jeopardize the popularity of the site.

Any SEO company will tell you that reputation management is a growing element of the service. Search engine optimisation can make or break the status of a business but this concept can also be extended to improve the reputation of a geographical area, it would seem.

Chelyabinsk, a barren Russian region that sits close to the border of Kazakhstan, has suffered a number of devastating nuclear disasters over the years, and the authorities linked with the town are looking to improve its image to improve tourism and encourage investment in the area.

The cause of all the bad press, Chelyabinsk’s nuclear power plant Mayak, instigated the destruction of tens of thousands of square miles of land and nearly half a million people in the process. As you can gather, the area is no closer to recovery even decades after the nuclear waste was leaked uncontrollably into the local ecosystem. Local governing bodies, however, are concerned that the area has been given an unfair amount of bad press online by environmentalists and are looking to spend close to £8,000 employing an SEO company to iron out the negative reviews and ensure that the negative material brought to search user’s attention shouldn’t exceed 20% of the overall results. Google and the Russian-language search engine Yandex are the particular search providers in question.

Search terms to be targeted would include ‘radiation in Chelyabinsk’ and more importantly ‘dirtiest city on the planet’, keywords for which the town ranks highly. Interestingly, Chelyabinsk itself isn’t featured in an official top-ten list of the world’s most polluted places, a clear indication that reputation alone can overshadow the facts.

This issue highlights the diverse range of responsibilities for modern SEO consultants and demonstrates how search engine optimisation can be used for a variety of purposes aside from simply sales-driven promotion.

As an SEO company interested in the psychological impact of advancing technology, an interesting study from the past week that grabbed our attention was that of Science Magazine authors Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner. Writing for www.sciencemag.org, the psychologists collectively conducted a series of experiments into the capacity of human memory and the effect that search engines have on our ability to recall information.

The study, titled ‘Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips’, didn’t discover that having access to such dynamic search tools lessens your ability to call up knowledge, though. Sparrow and the team came to the conclusion that human memory has adapted to the huge developments in communications technology, and as such, we’ve come to rely on the Internet as a resource. Becoming dependent on the web essentially means that we’ve become good at remembering where to find information, rather than recalling the information itself. The common response from the participants seemed to be that if they were aware that the information was going to be readily available to them, they were less likely to remember the data itself but more inclined to remember where it was stored so that they were able to access it at their convenience.

Many argue that the integration of such a powerful search tool into our everyday lives has ‘dumbed down’ our ability to think for ourselves – or the need to think for ourselves. This particular study, however, focuses on the shifting memory patterns of those more inclined to use the Internet to find answers. Scientifically speaking, it seems that our brains are coming to rely on a transactive memory system, i.e. the concept that all information can be stored and retrieved from a ‘group’ mind, and humans place more importance on locating the information than recalling its details. This ‘frees up’ the brain for other activities and so can be claimed to be a positive thing.

It’s hard to tell exactly how these attitudes towards information will shape the development of our memory systems in decades to come. It’s quite reassuring to find solid proof that search engines such as Google can enhance our lives and act as a positive resource for Internet users, especially as there is generally so much cynicism and pessimism surrounding the concept. If you were to take away the search engines, however, where would that leave us?  Without the convenience and accessibility that search engines provide, net users would be experiencing a completely different perception of the world wide web.

Indisputably the world’s greatest social network, boasting 400 million users from around the globe, Facebook is clearly a good place to start if you’re looking to advertise online and wish to target specific demographics. Ever since the developers realised the potential of the site, Facebook has been running an ad platform similar to that of Google’s Pay Per Click service, but it seems that the performance of such ads is falling in relation to their cost-per-click.

In a report published by Efficient Frontier, a leading digital marketing platform vendor, the actual average cost of purchasing the Pay-Per-Click ads on Facebook has risen by 22% in a quarter. This is likely to be due to the demand for such ads as more and more businesses are discovering the potential of targeting precise audiences via the social media giant, although the report also confirms that companies are only spending approximately 5% of their entire advertising budgets on Facebook. This figure naturally rises to around 25% if the company are pushing a short-term promotion. Anyone familiar with Facebook will also know that there is limited ad space available, which could also be a contributory factor to the price rise.

The report also suggests that particular markets such as the entertainment industry are more inclined to spend a larger portion of their advertising budget on Facebook.

These findings indicate that companies need to consider Facebook advertising sooner rather than later, as eventually it could become too costly. The actual conversions gained from acquiring Facebook fans are not always as effective, either. It seems that SEO companies should consider Facebook as a useful advertising medium but place more weight on constructing solid PPC campaigns within search as a priority.

Throughout recent years SEO companies have had to make several notable changes to the way they approach search engine optimisation. The major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo are constantly the changing the way they rank certain pages to keep the industry fresh and challenging and it’s up to the SEO experts to keep on top of these preferences. It’s equally important for such SEO specialists to commit themselves to the fact that search engine optimisation as a process is best approached as a long-term strategy and is not a ‘quick fix’ for companies looking for immediate results.

There have been a number of important developments and SEO trends within the past year or so and one of the most interesting is the way in which the search engines now approach keyword density levels.  SEO companies should not only be looking to drive more traffic to your site by influencing the search engine’s algorithms but should also be looking to increase your conversions, so it goes without saying that readers, in order to sustain their interest, will expect quality, informative content from the websites they choose to view. There are a number of theories surrounding keyword density techniques but simply ‘spamming’ your webpages with low-quality text and saturating the said content with relevant keywords is now frowned upon by the search engine bots and is a mistake commonly made by those uninitiated with SEO.

The bottom line is, you should be developing your site with humans in mind, not merely looking to impress the search engines, and humans appreciate readable, educative text. It seems that the huge search engines such as Google are increasingly taking into account the trend of opinion when it comes to page rankings and if users aren’t impressed with the content on your site, it’s unlikely that the search engines will list it advantageously.

In the world of search engines the biggest names have constantly battling each other in order to gain the top spot in terms of the number of users of such search engine. This is because the more people that uses their search engine the higher their return of investments, so far Google has been in the forefront of this race to getting search engine users. Google’s battle with the other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing became obvious to SEO companies when Microsoft’s Bing has undergone several changes and agreements with other companies which includes the social media giant Facebook and Bing’s second rival Yahoo. The merger of Yahoo with Bing made SEO consultants believe that Google the sole target in this continuing battle.

However in a very rare moment the big three of search engines have set aside, in the meantime, their differences in order to  develop what is dubbed as schema.org. The schema.org initiative from Yahoo, Bing and Google aims to standardise or develop a common set of data which will serve as a universal and common language which will be utilised by all search engines.

The markup data collection will serve as a list of different markups that will be utilised or that can be utilised by SEO specialists in their website in order to organise such website properly and have it displayed on the search engine results page of a search engine. With thousands of markups and snippets of code cropping up every week especially with the development of HTML5 the SEO agencies will be having a difficult time in determining which tags or attributes should be used in order to organise their site data for the efficient crawling and ranking in the search engine results page.

Schema.org therefore can be considered by SEO experts are a collection of SEO friendly attributes and elements which they can utilise in their SEO Campaign.

For several years or ever since the search engine business began the algorithm or the process has always been the same for the users that is; to type in the keywords and hope that the content you are looking for will show up in the first page of the search engine results page. Up to the present it is common knowledge among SEO companies that search engines are highly dependent on its algorithm in order to determine which websites are supposed to be ranked high or first in their search engine results page. This is what is being considered, by Microsoft at least, as the traditional search.

According to Microsoft’s Bing Director, the search engines such as Google who are using “traditional search” processes that such processes are already failing and that type of method of search is no longer what the people or the internet users want. The Microsoft Bing Director Stefan Weitz said that the search engine giant, Google has failed in adapting to the changing needs of their clients or the changing needs of the myriad internet users because the company has maintained its general algorithm of ranking websites.

According to Stefan Weitz, the present internet users are looking for something that would help them decide. Social search is one such feature that may help people in deciding, by recommendations from the different “friends” in their social account. This is what Bing has started with its integration of the Facebook Like feature with its search engine.

Bing believes that the most relevant search may emanate from real people or from those that were highly recommended by people in social networking sites. Google however is not far behind in this goal of social search as it will also roll out its Google +1 feature which is similar to that of a Facebook like button on a website. What many SEO consultants may be thinking and asking themselves is this, isn’t Bing also following a set of search engine algorithm that gives preference to highly optimised websites? And is it not that Bing is also offering features that is similar to that of Google?