Search Engine Marketing Blog | Tug

Are you a sweet tooth?

rainelda — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:00:04 +0000

It’s February already and all the supermarkets are full with flowers, heart shaped sweets and those big fluffy red hearts.

I remember working with make-up brands previously – we always created some ad copies for Valentine’s Day. Shops are now bursting with discounts and offers on gifts for him or her. Sweets are also everywhere. Just out of curiosity I wanted to find out what is more popular – sweets or beauty products through out the year.

I used the following terms to compare against each other:

Chocolate – the blue line
Make up – the red line
Sweets – the orange line
Fragrance – the green line

In January chocolate is the most searched one, but in general the searches are cooling off after Christmas and New Year.

In the mid of February chocolate kicks up and so does fragrance – obviously the Valentine’s Day effect.

Coming closer to April, chocolate searches start to kick again, as we all need to give someone that Maltesers chocolate bunny or a Mars chocolate egg (whatever makes you happy) – they start to appear in stores approximately the same time with Valentine’s sweets, which seems quite odd to me (if you don’t believe me, go to your local ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and check it out yourselves).

Chocolate searches start to drop down closer to summer time. Let’s admit, when it’s hot I think people crave for something fresh rather than a big chocolate bar. Well, at least the majority. Freshness – that’s where the fragrance industry steps in at the beginning of summer, offering a variety of different products: deodorants, body lotions, body mists, etc.

December is no surprise to anyone – chocolate Santa’s, Christmas trees and stars? Bring them on.

I must be honest and say that I wasn’t expecting chocolate to beat others so massively.

Now at least I know why I find people in the UK so nice and happy, as consumption of chocolate triggers the release of endorphins.

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Facebook IPO Filing: Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors

Ben Romberg — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:41:27 +0000

Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to investors following Facebook’s £5bn Initial Public Offering (IPO) – one of the largest in Wall Street’s history – reflects some big changes in the way the web has shifted towards being more “social” and how social networks have sought to monetise themselves.

Below we have pulled out some key quotes from his letter that are worth checking out.

On Facebook as a business

“We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

On Facebook and politics

“We believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.”

On Hackers

“The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win – not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.”

Unofficial slogan?

“We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.”

Read the full letter here on engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/01/zuckerberg-outlines-idealistic-facebook-mission-in-ipo-filing/

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The Facebook Timeline

hannah — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:39:11 +0000

So I was naive and thought that we all had a choice over whether we have to move over to the new Facebook format. On my way home last night I read an article which informed me that within two weeks I would have the Facebook Timeline!

I do like the new layout, this is not the issue I have with it. It’s more the fact that I was 17 when I first signed up and I’m pretty sure there are a few images, posts and comments that I’d rather not be reminded of. Now I’m aware that I have the chance to remove all this within the next couple weeks but Facebook is making having an account a chore rather than the social networking opportunity that I signed up for.

The debate around the changes for a lot of people is about privacy and how it’s violating our human rights etc etc etc. I wouldn’t go this far, as when you sign up to a social network surely it is with the aim of sharing information about yourself? Otherwise what would be the point? However, I do believe that there must be a method, which is not such a divulgence of personal events i.e. the break up you’d rather forget that was so publicly displayed on your wall.

The aim of this blog is not actually to moan, it’s more just a big nudge to let you know that if there are certain things you do not want your friends, employer or Mum – who’s just recently discovered Facebook, to see, then you have around two weeks to edit your life.

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Apple is plotting its universal touchscreen remote!

ben — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:26:43 +0000

Another item to add onto our growing Apple wish list could have created today when a patent application for a universal touchscreen remote was published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. It revealed Apple is playing with the idea of a universal touchscreen controller capable of controlling multiple devices including your television, video tape player, video disk player, stereo or home control system.

The application highlights many of the issues with current controllers for televisions and noted that universal remotes are overly complicated to use and are not future proof. It also looks to take the age old problem of being confronted with multiple remotes previously discussed by Steve Jobs when talking about Apple TV.

Apple’s solution would allow the remote to pair with other devices over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, with full customisation of the remote’s touchscreen for each device, such as a button layout being stored in the device and sent to the Apple remote wirelessly.

I envisage the remote control to be similar in design to that of the iPad and would display a menu of applications for each device. A welcome and nice touch would be TV voice-control courtesy of Siri, similar to that on the xbox connect. As a final note is there are also reports claiming Apple is already working on its 42-inch+ HDTV so maybe this is the second drive of apple starting to push back on Google taking over our sitting room.

Either way I think the future of TV looks great!

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Rumour has it

turan — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:58:56 +0000

The ban of side placements of brand keywords search results in the US turned out to be just a rumour.

Google has confirmed that there was no change in policy with regards to the placements of brand keywords search results. Ads still can appear at the top, on the right hand side and at the bottom of the page. That applies to all countries.

Google suspects that the confusion with regards to the placements of the brand keyword searches came from the November updates. As of November ads that have previously shown to the side of the results started in some cases appear below them. The space on the side is taken over by maps, local business locations and Google +.

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Focus on the User

Faye — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:51:03 +0000

Since the launch of Search plus Your World, Google has increasingly come under fire for acting in its own best interests and edging out other social networks from its search results.

So much so that engineers from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have teamed up to create a new tool, or bookmarklet called ‘Focus on the User‘. by using this tool, which runs in chrome, Firefox or Safari. Users can see search results from a wide range of social networking sites from LinkedIn to Crunchbase instead of being automatically met with Google+ results.

How it works:

The bookmarklet’s creators had this to say on how it works

When you search for “cooking” today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result. That makes sense. But rather than linking to Jamie’s Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was last updated nearly two months ago. Is Google’s relevance algorithm simply misguided?

No. If you search Google for Jamie Oliver directly, his Twitter profile is the first social result that appears. His abandoned Google+ profile doesn’t even appear on the first page of results. When Google’s engineers are allowed to focus purely on relevancy, they get it right.

So that’s what our “bookmarklet” does. It looks at the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+

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Google announces privacy changes – no opt out

Ben Romberg — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:34:01 +0000

Google plans to learn a lot more about who you are and what you do on the Web. The company announced plans to monitor user activity across its properties, Gmail, Youtube, Google+ and its search engine in an effort to better target its advertising.

Tug believes the aim is to directly compete with Facebook’s ad model which targets users specifically based on their interests and the personal details shared on the social network.

Google looks set to offer advertisers direct targeting of ads to audience/ demographics based on this collected knowledge of activity.

Consumers won’t be able to opt out of the changes, which take effect March 1st 2012.

“Google’s new privacy announcement is frustrating and a little frightening,” said Common Sense Media Chief Executive James Steyer. “Even if the company believes that tracking users across all platforms improves their services, consumers should still have the option to opt out — especially the kids and teens who are avid users of YouTube, Gmail and Google Search.”

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Link building in 2012: predictions and changes

Carlo Pandian — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:40:02 +0000

As Google gets new updates and the algorithm becomes smarter, the job of SEOs has to modify its practices in order to keep up. As my main activity is link building I am always testing new ways to deliver great results and to anticipate trends. I strongly believe that social mentions and back links have an equal weight for rankings, saying that, I have compiled these suggestions to get the most out of your link building campaigns:

When you are looking to publish a guest post for your clients or get a link, avoid evaluating your host with the old criteria: Page Rank, DA, MozRank. Nowadays it is more important if your contact has a good amount of followers and fans because you need to get tweets and likes out from your guest blogging activities.

Make a good use of Social Bookmarking tools and open themed accounts for every industry you are working for. After that remember to bookmark all your links and articles out there. If you want to be more efficient organise a community of people that bookmark your content, that will make your content attractive for the search engine and it will be indexed quickly with good social signals.

When you are doing guest blogging, maximise your effort. Tweet about a new post from the client social media account; ask the blogger to do the same and social bookmark everything.

Establish online relationships and start multiple collaborations. I have a great new idea, which is to get in touch students with businesses they are interested to work for. This way you can really set up new ways of producing great content for free.

As Google+ is definitely supporting the creation of personas (now you can connect articles to authors via G+) every business should choose a public speaker that can produce useful content for the web. It is something that was already in the sight as some companies started to use this strategy on Twitter for customer service.

If you want to talk about link building in 2012, drop me a tweet @tugagency

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Start a conversation in the Search results using Google+

Nick — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:09:25 +0000

I’m starting to think that Google actually had a plan when they launched Google+ and even better than that – they are sticking to it and rolling it out bit by bit. OK it’s still early doors for Google+ but its starting to feel less of a flop than everyone was predicting.
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Read more about Google’s integration of Search and Social here

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Facebook Sponsored Stories in the News Feed

turan — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:55:54 +0000

Facebook has begun rolling out Sponsored Stories in the news feed. The ads started rolling out gradually from the beginning of January, allowing brands to reach users whose friends have interacted with their pages – for instance with a like, a comment, or another action.

“You will only see Sponsored Stories in your news feed about your friends or people you are connected to,” Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson confirmed. She added, “We want to be really thoughtful about this, so we’ll have a lot of rate limits in place. We hope to show people no more than one Sponsored Story in their News Feeds per day and we’ll clearly label the story. They’ll also be of the same size and treatment as other stories in News Feed.”

The new ad placement could lay the foundation for Facebook to finally begin advertising in mobile.

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