Webcliq Rant Technology, Communications and Marketing on Mallorca

Chris Crum | Webpro Staff Writer

Re-evaluating Facebook as a business tool

While Facebook may provide a great way to interact with fans and market your business, it’s not all sunshine and roses. Several issues have been discussed recently that business should take very seriously.

Misperception About the Value of the Like

Brian Lynch makes some valid points about the Facebook “like” in that it’s not always as helpful to businesses as it may seem. The main issue is the visibility aspect. “As people have started to give out Likes more freely, with minimal emotional investment, the chances of an individual Like’s visibility has drastically reduced compared to more valuable posts in a user’s timeline,” he writes, after adding, “Based on our analysis of over 110,000 patron transactions that took place during a 3-month period, we found that only 1/66 Likes generated an incremental ticket sale for our customers.”

“The Facebook Like is not a direct means to drive sales, as its original purpose was to gather data and share interests, and it is also used as a metric to dictate the display order of posts in the News Feed,” says Lynch.”Companies remain slow to understand these facts, and still hold firm to the use of the Like as a method to monetize social media.”

As mentioned in an earlier article, Facebook is reportedly working on an unfiltered News Feed, which could greatly up the visibility of Facebook likes, making them much more valuable. But even still, it may not be the default, and many users will probably continue to use a filtered version of the feed much of the time. You can refer to that article for tips on optimizing for the Facebook News Feed.

Local Business Pages Lacking Local Fans

For local businesses, even the Facebook Page itself may not be as valuable as once thought. Sure, it’s still recommended that you operate one, because it does provide numerous benefits that have been discussed time and time again – a direct line to fans, a place for customers to find information, etc. A study from Roost earlier this week, however, found that only 15% of fans on the average small business Facebook Page are actually local to the town where the business is located. If this is accurate, that’s not great news for brick and mortars, though it does emphasize the need to offer e-commerce options for customers.

As Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Blog pointed out, the findings indicate that most small business Facebook pages aren’t going to do a whole lot of good for targeted marketing. It may actually make the case for increased Facebook advertising, if the Facebook audience is who you’re trying to reach. Or more specifically, the local Facebook audience. Facebook ads have very specific targeting points.

Merchant Circle recently released survey results finding that 22% of local merchants have used Facebook ads, and that two thirds of them would use them again. Still, of the 35% of merchants who said they wouldn’t advertise with Facebook again, 69% said the ads didn’t help them acquire new customers. 35% said they were too expensive.

Brand-Damaging Security Messages

Something else that businesses should be aware of regarding their Facebook Pages is that their Page may be displaying messages to users that can be very harmful for their brands. Messages like this:

Turn off secure browsing?

• We can’t display this content while you’re viewing Facebook over a secure connection (https).
• Would you like to temporarily switch to a regular connection (http) to use this app?
• You will have a secure connection upon your next login.

That’s probably not what you want potential fans to see. Dennis Yu points this out on AllFacebook, saying, “This is what your would-be fans are seeing. You spend all this effort to send non-fans, ad-driven or organic, to your default landing page, but you’ll lose them with this mistake. Facebook is getting most users to browse the site securely – so if any item on your landing page is not secure, that’s a brand killer.”

The Ban Bot

If you’re a Facebook application developer, you are at the mercy of Facebook’s ban bot. As we recently saw, some entire businesses were greatly impacted when Facebook’s algorithm deemed their apps not to be good enough, and shut them down without warning. More on that here.

Have you ever had Facebook block one of your apps?

Netpop put out a study a couple months ago indicating that 8 in 10 social media users feel “uneasy” or “ambivalent” about sharing personal info on social media sites, and that users with privacy concerns rate social sites significantly lower in terms of level of trust about sites sharing info appropriately. This is something to consider for sites utilizing Facebook log-in, and various social plug-ins from Facebook. It’s gotten to the point where it is pretty hard to find a site that doesn’t use some kind of Facebook integration.

Do you have any Facebook integrations on your site?

Has Facebook Peaked?

In June, we asked if Facebook has peaked. Various data points seemed to point to the conclusion that growth has slowed, and that other social sites were “eroding Facebook’s dominance of social”. And that was two weeks before Google announced Google+, which Facebook has already shown signs of panic over. You may recall the blocking of ads for G+ profiles. It has also been reported that Facebook’s been on “lockdown” since G+ launched.

A report this week from Appcelerator indicates that two-thirds of developers surveyed think Google+ can catch Facebook. 68% of think Google’s access to all of its various products is the key.

Recent Improvements Facebook Has Made For Businesses

You’ve probably already invested a significant amount of time and or money into Facebook. Don’t worry. It’s not all gloom and doom. For one, Facebook has proven to be an invaluable tool for plenty of businesses, and this will no doubt continue for the foreseeable future, despite the hype surrounding Google+.

Facebook has wheels in motion that may benefit your business more than what’s already been available.

Again, there’s that unfiltered version of the News Feed. While its “like” visibility factor may be limited, it should still be significantly better than as it stands now. They’re also supposedly working on some new ‘like” features that will allow users to share info with their likes, which could also help. The unfiltered feed will mean more people seeing their friends liking or sharing your content. It will mean a greater chance that more of your Facebook fans will see more of the updates you publish from your Facebook Page.

Facebook recently announced Skype-powered video calling. This could prove to be useful in business communication (although I’m not sure it stacks up to the Hangouts feature of Google+) other than the fact that Facebook simply has way more people.

Facebook has started bringing Facebook Places functionality (including check-in deals) to Facebook Pages with street addresses.

Facebook started letting Page admins send direct invites to their friends.

Facebook opened up its Ads API to application developers that prove they can provide something of value.

Speaking of developers, things seem to be getting better for them in general (since the big “ban bot” fiasco). Facebook has improved search for apps, provided developers with new insights, improved the dashboard, and made app testing easier.

Facebook has also launched a nice how-to guide for businesses to get the most out of Facebook.

It’s still recommended that you take some time to improve your Facebook Page. Take a look at the top 50 branded Facebook pages. Look at what’s working for them and figure out how you can emulate good strategies in ways that make sense for your own business. Here’s some things Victoria’s Secret does pretty well. What do you think are the most important elements of a Facebook Page?

There are a lot of positives and negatives that go along with Facebook as a business tool/strategy. Do you think the pros outweigh the cons? Can Facebook maintain its position as the most valuable social media marketing tool?

If you want to get backlinks from other websites, your site must have link-worthy content. Other websites will only link to your site if there’s something interesting on your web pages. There are several things that you can do to create linkworthy content.

1. Stroke some egos

People like to feel important and they like to link to web pages that confirm that they are important. You can turn this into links by doing the following:

• Find companies that have “in the news” pages on their websites and write about these pages.
• Write a positive product or company review and inform the reviewed company about your review.
• Write articles that show the importance of people (“Why garbage men are so important”, “If paid for all their work, housewives would earn $134,121 per year”, etc.).

People like to link to that kind of pages. This method also works the other way around. For example, an article “Why the iPhone 5 will fail” might get many backlinks by angry Apple fans. Of course, you have to be careful with this tactic.

1. Write top 10 lists

Top 10 lists are a popular method to create linkworthy content. Your lists could start like this:

• The 10 best…
• 10 easy tips for…
• The 10 worst…
• The 10 most important…

Your lists can contain the best tips, resources, people, experts, websites, habits, etc. The possibilities are endless.

3. Create valuable resources

Valuable resources get the best backlinks. If there is no good guide for your industry, you should write it. Create how to’s and tutorials. The more valuable the content on your website is, the more people will link to your website.

If you want to manage the backlinks of your website, try the backlink manager in IBP. IBP’s link manager enables you to manage all of your backlinks by category, you can see the status of each backlink, backlinks are checked automatically, IBP gets the PageRank of the linking sites, nofollow links are marked and much more.

The list, described below, is not in any order or priority of what will achieve a good Page Rank in a Search Engine.

It is an essential and standard part of the work that we perform, as soon as we, as the web design team, receive the information from the Client that we require. Whilst our configuration activities are extremely important, they are relatively easy to perform. The hard work and effort in obtaining a good ranking for a Website in a Search Engine primarily rests with the Client. However we can assist a client and recommend  ways in which the Client can utilise their dynamic web site to achieve the desired result.

Webcliq as a full service internet presence provider and marketing organisation are always prepared to provide content generation and search engine marketing services. Webcliq does not represent itself as a Search Engine Optimisation specialist, primarily because we do not wish to be seen in the same light as some of the companies that appear make extravagant promises of results and charge silly prices. Webcliq will create a package of services for an agreed monthly retainer.

If you are one of those people still skeptical about the business uses of social media, you may be interested to know that Google’s Social Search is no longer just an experiment. Though it does have the beta tag on it, it is now mainstream. This is something we’ve all known would come sooner or later, but now it’s here.

If people were already seeing different search results from one another before, that is really going to be true now, now that Google is plugging results based on the individual’s social circle into any given SERP. This is one of the many ways SEO is changing, and it would appear that any business looking to get some play in Google search, would do well to have as many connections established as possible, via various social networking sites and tools.

Keep in mind that the social circle is based upon information that Google has about you from your Google account. You can see your list of connections anytime from here (assuming you have a Google account). It pulls connections from your Google Contacts, and any services you have listed on your Google profile (assuming you have services listed on your profile). If you have Twitter listed for example (Facebook connections are not public), anyone you are connected to through one of those services is fair game for potential search results.

Google’s thinking is that if the user is connected to certain people, results from those people will have relevance because you know and trust them. Google says, “You can improve social search results for your friends and contacts by linking to content you have created such as blogs, photos and videos on your Google profile.”

“We’ve been having a lot of fun with Social Search. It’s baby season here on our team — two of us just had little ones, and a third is on the way,” the company says in the announcement. “We’re all getting ready to be parents for the first time and we have lots of questions. So, what do we do? We search Google, of course! With Social Search, when we search for [baby sleep patterns], [swaddling] or [best cribs], not only do we get the usual websites with expert opinions, we also find relevant pages from our friends and contacts. For example, if one of my friends has written a blog where he talks about a great baby shop he found in Mountain View, this might appear in my social results. I could probably find other reviews, but my friend’s blog is more relevant because I know and trust the author.”

Appearing in social search results means:

1. Make sure you have all of your important links on your Google Profile.
2. Make as many connections as possible.
3. Encourage customers to follow you via social networks.
4. Participate in social media so people will engage with you.
5. Encourage sharing of content (there are plenty available social media buttons)
6. Include social network info on business cards/signage, etc.
7. Include social network info in your online advertising
8. There are probably many more worthwhile tips (if you have any, share them in the comments).

Google’s social search doesn’t end with regular web search. They’re adding it to image search, and who knows what else. Look for a lot more features to become part of social search, as Google leaves that Beta tag on. Let’s not forget that Gmail only left beta last year, and I don’t have to tell you they’ve added a lot to that over the years.

Just remember that social results will always be clearly marked as such on Google’s SERPs. They will be accompanied by a heading that says “Results from your social circle”. Still, for traditional SEO it is just one more thing to compete with as far as page real estate. That’s why social is a much more of an important part of search than ever.

Google has been making many moves over the last couple years that seem to slowly turn it more and more into its own social network. Now that its profiles have a direct impact on search results, how people view Google in this light is likely to change significantly. Once more and more average users start to realize the social features are being integrated more into their everyday searches, they may find themselves getting sucked into using Google as more of a social tool, as opposed to just search.

Chris Crum | Web Pro News

Also bossnapped, defriended and redacted during 2009

By Lester Haines, The Register

She said: “It has been another rich year. Last year, we found that ‘credit crunch’ was the most familiar new word, and the effect of the recession has stayed with us through 2009.”

Indeed, try the current “Great Recession” for size (cf “Great Depression”), which might force the cash-strapped to enjoy a “staycation” – a holiday in your own country or at home.

The wonderful world of entertainment is not well represented on the list, although “simples” stands proud. Dent explained: “It appeared on the ‘compare the meerkat’ TV adverts for insurance and quickly become a catchphrase said by anyone to mean something very easy to achieve. It really seems to have captured the public’s imagination in 2009.”

If your nerves can stand it, here are some more of 2009′s pick:

Epigenome – The pattern of chemical switches in human cell that indexes genetic information.

Freemium – Business model punting basic services for free in the hope that users will stump hard cash for additional bells and whistles.

Geoengineering/ecohacking – Major climate manipulation in an attempt to counter the effects of global warming.

Minute mentoring – “A system of advising aspiring professionals based on the format of speed-dating,” according to the Telegraph. Nasty.

Paywall – Disagreeable demand for money in return for access to website.

Phantonym – A word that looks like it means one thing but actually means something else (= phantom + antonym). Eg, “fulsome”, deployed by Obama in the sense of “full”, whereas it “is now chiefly used in reference to excessive flattery”.

Redact – Censor or obscure part of a text for legal, security or ▇▇▇ purposes.

Tag cloud – A visual depiction of user-generated tags, where the importance of a tag is denoted by font size or colour.

Unfriend/defriend – To remove someone from your friends list on a social networking site. “Unfriend” was voted the Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year.

Zombie bank – An effectively broke bank which is propped up by government money.

Should I worry about my pages’ toolbar PageRank?

There are two kinds of Google PageRank – the actual PageRank that is a part of the ranking algorithm, and the toolbar PageRank that is updated from time to time and is aimed to provide webmasters with a general idea of the actual PageRank of the webpage.

The actual PageRank is one of 200+ factors that influence webpage’s ranking, it is constantly recalculated. Lately, its importance has decreased even more seriously. Susan Moskwa, a Google Employee has informed webmasters :

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it [from Google Webmaster Tools] because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. “

Unique content, inbound links from relevant, authoritative sites, keyword-rich link text, and good neighborhood are the things that will influence your site rankings, and not the toolbar PageRank.

Should I use PageRank sculpting?

PageRank sculpting is a method of managing link juice flow by using a rel=”nofollow” link attribute and/or by organizing your non-priority pages for SERP’s in an external include file blocked with your robots.txt. All these are done to prevent your site link juice from being passed to untrustworthy sites that may create bad neighborhood or to secondary, unimportant internal pages.

“The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. – says Matt Cutts in his post about PageRank sculpting, – I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.” Things like intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs are easily and successfully managed by webmasters rather than manipulating crawl prioritization.

Will external linking reduce the Google PageRank of my pages?

One SEO myth says that outbound links without the rel=”nofollow” attribute decrease Google PageRank of the page. Like the majority of the myths, this is untrue.

Webpages’ PageRank is affected only by quantity and quality of inbound links, not the outbound links. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of the Google system encourage links to good sites. But you should remember that your page may be marked as spam and deindexed, if you place 1000 links on it or link to bad neighborhoods. But this has nothing to do with Google PageRank which will stay intact.

Another myth says that the more outbound links you mark with the rel=”nofollow” attribute, the more link juice will stay within your site and flow to other links, which is good if the links are internal. However, Google has changed the PR flow rules in the past year, and even though you may forbid a Googlebot to follow all the outbound links on your page, its PR will be divided among all the outbound and internal links and the link juice won’t stay.

So, if you are afraid of linking to an external site because your PageRank may decrease or your site may drop some link juice, forget this and go ahead and link to valuable relevant pages.

SEO Experiment – Is Page Rank Still A Ranking Factor?

Three years ago we tested if Google PageRank was correlating with the page’s position and pages with high Google PageRank were ranked higher on Google SERPs. The result was more than convincing: for any given keyword – be it popular or not – the average PageRank of the top 10 pages was always greater than the average PageRank of the next 11-20 pages, and so on. We didn’t find much exception from that rule. This time we’ve tried to remake the test and check if PageRank is an important ranking factor.

We assume that, in principle, the lower a page is in search results, the lower toolbar PageRank number it has – at least this rule remains as a general trend. So, we’ve requested results for some very popular and unpopular key phrases and checked the average PageRank of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th “10-position” results pages.

In detail: with the help of the Google Adwords Keyword tool, we have carefully selected 450 keywords (the 250 most competitive and the 200 least competitive) belonging to a few popular topics – real estate, vacation rentals, job search, and cooking recipes. We queried Google for these keywords and got 2250 webpages, retrieved PR for each webpage on the top five results pages, and then found an average PR for each of the five SERPs.

The results prove that the general trend remains only for large amounts of keywords, i.e. the PageRank simple average of 50-60 words gradually decreases from 1st to 2nd, from 2nd to 3rd and so on up to 5th page. However, on the single key phrase level, among all the keywords (popular and unpopular alike), only 22 key phrases out of 450 have an uninterrupted decreasing trend.

What does it mean? Google guys and girls were right, high PR is not all you need for your site’s success in terms of link popularity, and on-the-page factors now matter more than three years ago. PageRank is still a ranking factor, but its role is not as significant as many webmasters think. High PageRank is good proof that you have an established site, but is a doubtful traffic driver.

Although many people shun email applications for webmail solutions, there are still some of us who prefer the configuration, security, and performance of a decent email client. Microsoft dominates the Windows world with Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail but, if you’re not keen on those products, Mozilla’s Thunderbird could be for you.

Work on Thunderbird started when the Mozilla Suite was abandoned in favor of Firefox. Although it has never achieved the popularity of their browser, Thunderbird is a great email application that deserves more attention.

Thunderbird 3.0 has finally been released. The client is available in 49 languages and offers new features such as:

• a simplified user interface
• tabbed email — yes, tabs have migrated from Firefox to Thunderbird
• easier account set-up
• a faster and better search tool
• message archiving
• smart folders that group inbox views
• IMAP folder synchronization, so you can access your messages when offline

Perhaps the most useful new feature is the attachment reminder. How many times have you sent or received an email which promised a file that was never attached? The Thunderbird reminder scans your email text for words such as “attached” then prompts you before the message is sent.

Thunderbird is free and available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Download it from getthunderbird.com.

Know Your Future Browsers

One of the easiest ways to get the jump on your fellow developers is to keep a close eye on upcoming versions of your favorite browsers. Here are three important browsers to watch:

• In November we learned that the Internet Explorer team had started work on IE9, which is great news. In a blog post, the team revealed some sneak peeks at what’s inside the latest iteration of their browser: huge improvements in JavaScript performance, hardware acceleration for graphics (check out this nifty video from Channel 9), and some promising signs on the CSS3 support front. Chances are slim that IE9 will appear on desktops before 2011, but in the meantime, I’d hope that we can all look forward to plenty of updates from the IE team as they work on the latest version.
• Firefox 3.6 beta is available to test right now, and it’s full of lovely new bells and whistles. According to the release notes, we can expect to see some great new ways to deal with background images and gradients, support for HTML 5′s local file access API, and improvements for Firefox add-on developers. Firefox 3.6 was originally slated for a late 2009 release, but has yet to reach release candidate status — so keep a close eye out.
• Google Chrome Extensions are finally here. Will this help Chrome chip away at Firefox’s market share in 2010, especially among those of us who love our Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug? We put this to our Twitter friends and responses were mixed indeed: some people absolutely can’t wait, while other friends are fairly loyal to Firefox. One thing’s for sure — in 2010, as more extensions appear, there’ll be more incentive to try Chrome. (We reproduced selected tweets in last week’s Community Crier, if you want the full scoop.)