Top 5 SEO tips for Mum Bloggers

Thanks to Claire from BrightonMums, i am happy to share some SEO expertise with UK mum bloggers community. Feel free to connect with Tug, the marketing agency I am working for and learn more about how to promote your site.
Drop me a tweet @Tugagency if you have any questions!

Firstly, I would recommend you to use these suggestions carefully as you shouldn’t change your editorial style in order to be SEO friendly. Let’s get straight to the practice and see how a mom blog can meet Google standards:

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Series of Fun Facts: Part V

It is 2012 with many promises, predictions and wishes. Naturally with the new year new features, stories and discoveries appear:

Are you a complete coffee addict? I tried to limit my love for coffee and was successful for a month, but getting back to work makes you sleepy in the mornings, so coffee is back in my life again. Anyway, when you are getting to work, you usually stop at the near by coffee shop just to grab that life saving cup, right? Do you get late to work sometimes because of that? Well, now there is a solution! If you love Starbuck’s coffee, live in the UK and you are an owner of an iPhone, from the 5th January you are able to use the unique Starbucks App on your iPhone. This app will help to locate your closest Starbucks coffee shop, choose a drink, manage your Starbucks Card balance, top-up direct from your iPhone or iPod Touch AND pay for your drink using the virtual Starbucks

Card just by swiping the barcode at the till. Isn’t that super convenient? Did I mention that the app is available for free from the Apple App Store? They say that an Android app will follow later in the year. The app is well placed to take advantage of Starbucks’ loyal customers – one in five UK customers already pays using a Starbucks Card, so if the app will save a lot of time to Starbucks customers, no doubt it may become a hit as well in the UK.

The app proved to be a success in the United States with 26m purchases made since it was launched in January 2011.

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Facebooks trouble with worms

Apparently a computer worm has stolen 45,000 login credentials from Facebook. It has said to have largely affected accounts within the UK and France. The malware responsible is the well known ‘Ramnit’, which has been invading computers and stealing bank details since it was first discovered in April 2010.

In order to spread the virus at a higher pace it is suspected that Ramnit is using stolen credentials to hack into accounts and subsequently send malicious links to friends.

Social networks are like a hub of personal information and for this reason they are especially appealing to viruses.

“It appears that sophisticated hackers are now experimenting with replacing the old-school email worms with more up-to-date social network worms. As demonstrated by the 45,000 compromised Facebook subscribers, the viral power of social networks can be manipulated to cause considerable damage to individuals and institutions when it is in the wrong hands,” said Security firm Seculert.

Seculert has estimated that between September and December 2011 over 800,000 machines were infected with Ramnit. The problem is that it is not always visible that Ramnit has passed through your computer. It is stealing passwords with no announcement of its presence. The advice given is to run your anti-virus software and hope for the best!

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Series of Fun Facts: Part lV

Last day before Christmas Eve and the office is so calm. I guess a lot of people are in the festive spirit. I am more excited about the New Years Eve – want to see the fireworks in London. They say it will be fantastic this year, so can’t wait.

Just because it is the 23rd December, here are some festive fun facts for you:

• I always thought that every year the most popular Christmas songs would be ‘Last Christmas’ or ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas’ but it appears that in 2011 two boys are at the top: Michael Buble with his song ‘Christmas’ and Justin Bieber with his song ‘Under the Mistletoe’. Nevertheless, if you would ask random people to sing a Christmas song, no matter what year it is, I strongly believe that they will start to sing something from the classics, rather than the new songs.
• Just like for every massive occasion, Christmas is one of those when companies are making TV, video adverts and trying to put a creative note to them. Top Christmas video adverts this year were made by Iceland, Argos and my personal favourite John Lewis Christmas advert - it’s just very, very cute. I first saw it in the cinema and the ending just created a huge “Awwwww!” wave from everyone in the room. Thumbs up to John Lewis for creating such a great video.
• Do you have the struggle to choose Christmas gifts? Personally I really get confused and tired of trying to find something really good. Apparently in 2011 the most popular Christmas gifts are Tablets, Lego and Travel Mugs. So if you are doing you last minute Christmas shopping today or tomorrow this try to consider those three options.

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The Irish are angry at Facebook

The Irish data protection commissioner has strongly recommended Facebook take a long hard look at the current privacy status of Facebook, with special attention made to how data is used on the site.

Facebook Ireland was given responsibility for all non-US and Canadian data back in September 2010 hence raising the significance of these findings. Facebook now has six months to consider and implement these new changes.

Facebook apparently welcomed the review, saying: “We are pleased that the report demonstrates how Facebook adheres to European data protection principles and complies with Irish law.

“Of course, the report highlights some areas where we can improve and reach best practice.”

The report suggested widespread changes, including:

• a mechanism for users to make informed choices about how their information is used and shared on the site, including in relation to third party apps
• increased transparency and controls over how personal data is used for advertising purposes
• transparency and control for users via the provision of all personal data held to them on request and as part of their everyday interaction with the site

A second formal review will be carried out in July to check up on the progress.

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Series of Fun Facts: Part lll

It was snowing this morning! Did you see that?  Outside everything is dedicated to Christmas – the lights, the shops, the markets and now even a little bit of snow. So I decided not to do anything related to Christmas, but pull together fun stuff that is going on in the World Wide Web.

This time I wanted to look at the things that are really popular at the moment in the Twitter environment, when people are trying to have fun:

• 9GAG is a comedy website set in Hong Kong and hosted in the United Stated. It launched in 2008 and currently is very popular amongst people. A lot of people are sharing the images they find in 9GAG via Twitter. The site is best known for recurring use of internet memes. It is among the 500 most visited websites ranking 468 place globally. According to alexa.com the sites users tend to be under the age of 35 and they tend to be childless. Visitors to this site spend approximately 64 seconds on each pageview and a total of 13 minutes on the site during each visit. I must admit it is pretty addictive sometimes.
• What internet memes do you pass over? I personally use hashtags at the moment, although I’m keeping my options open. So internet memes are basically a concept that spreads via the internet. While doing this research, I found out that the earliest usage of meme in general is in the book created by Richard Dawkins called “The Selfish Gene” – it was published in 1976. Internet meme is an idea that is propagated and spreads through the internet. A meme can be a hyperlink, video, picture, website, hashtag or just a word or phrase. One of the most popular internet memes are misspellings, such as the word “more” as “moar” or “the” as “teh” simply because misspelling is very common. Internet memes spread from person to person through various places like blogs, news sources and social networks, so no wonder Twitter is full with them. Academically, researchers model how the memes evolve and predict which memes will survive and spread throughout the Web, while commercially they are used in viral marketing where they are an inexpensive form of mass advertising.
• Rage comic is an extremely popular internet meme at the moment. It is a comic made from a stock set characters, commonly known as rage faces and centre on the rage guy. It started on 4chan in 2008 and in 2009 the meme experienced an upsurge in popularity. In 2010 shirts with the rage face started to appear and were sold by Hot Topic. The comic usually focus on small moments in daily life from the perspective of a protagonist the reader can identify with. The face seems a bit creepy to me, though.
  

• And a little discovery for the ending. The most popular Twitter hashtags in 2011 were:

1. #egypt
2. #tigerblood
3. #threewordstoliveby
4. #idontunderstandwhy
5. #japan
6. #improudtosay
7. #superbowl

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Wishing you a Mobile Christmas

Figures out from Google suggest that people are going to be using their mobile phones a lot more this Yuletide for Christmas shopping, inquires, recipes etc. (you name it!) According to Google’s stats 24% of UK consumers use their mobiles for in-store comparison.

An analysis of UK search volumes on desktop versus mobile has found that in November 2011 mobile searches on popular Christmas gifts represented 14.60% of the online total – a jump from 1.83% in 2008 and still growing steadily.

Google’s research also shows a “triple peak opportunity” on mobile. Data from the past two years from the search-giant shows that UK mobile queries for top retail brand terms spike three times in the season of giving.

The first peak pops up around the end of November and the last payday before Christmas. The second is in the final days before the actual holiday itself, and the third happens when the January sales kick off.

This opportunity is growing fast for e-commerce brands and these kinds of search queries demonstrate a 166% year-on-year growth, which is staggering given that estimates are for it to rise, rather than fall!

For more on this and other stuff, follow me on Twitter @benromberg

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Series of Fun Facts: Part ll

I don’t know about you, but this was a crazy week for all people here at Tug. However, we managed it, as well as we won GOLD at the DMA Awards 2011 for  Best Use of Search. Overall an exciting week.

But it is Friday – the best day to learn something new and fun. When you see a little, green robot, what is the first thing that comes up your mind? Personally my brain generates two words and connects them together – Android and Google. Once again I did a little research and here are my personal discoveries about this operating system:

• Originally Android wasn’t Google’s product. Android Inc. was founded in October 2003 (Palo Alto, California) by four men – Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears and Chris White.
• Andy Rubin was the co-founder of Danger (a company specializing in platforms, software, design and services for mobile computing devices), Rich Miner was the co-founder of Wildfire Communications,  Nick Sears once was the VP at T-Mobile and Chris White was head of design and interface development at WebTV. So all four lads had a background on software engineering. At the beginning Android Inc. was operated secretly, revealing only that it was working on software for mobile phones.
• In August 2005 Google acquired Android Inc. making it a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Not much was known about Android at the time of the acquisition, but many assumed that Google was planning to enter the mobile market with it.
• A lot of you definitely noticed that all Android versions are named after desserts and go in an alphabetical order – Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. I strongly believe that I’m not the only one asking the eternal question “Why?” After browsing around and searching, I came up to this CNN article, where the same question was asked. It appears that Google doesn’t want to explain the reason for these names. A spokesman from Google said to CNN that it is an internal thing and that Google prefer’s to be a little bit inscrutable in the matter. So here we are with The Mystery of Android version names.

1. Question: Which of these (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogspot, Gmail) you use on a daily basis? (multiple answers were available) – No surprise that most of the respondents use Facebook (75%) and in second place it’s Gmail (45%) followed by Twitter (37%). WordPress and Flickr received 2% each – Yes, I use them both, but I didn’t complete the survey. Honest.
2. Question: Do you retweet offers of brands that you follow on Twitter? – 54% said that they do not retweet offers, while 16% said that sometimes they do. Only 2% said that they retweet offers of brands.
3. Question: Do you share offers, stories, music etc. on Facebook? – Now this question’s results surprised me a bit. Only 40% of the respondents said that they share things on Facebook and a whopping 32% said that they don’t share anything on Facebook. Why did this surprise me? To be honest, I was expecting that about 80% to 90% would say “Yes”, as every time I log into Facebook, it’s never empty and a new post comes up every 2 minutes (majority being video, news article, blog post etc. sharing).
4. Question: Which mobile OS you find visually attractive, convenient and quickly manageable? – People were offered 3 options: iOS, Windows Phone 7 and Android. 67% voted for Android, 19% voted for iOS and 5% voted for WP7.

Have great weekend all!

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Tug win GOLD at the DMAs with milk&more!

Last night Tug scooped the gold for Best Use of Search for our milk&more campaign at the DMAs.

Great team effort for everyone involved on milk&more and congratulations to Dave, Hannah, Ollie, Juan, Faye, Rainelda and Neil who have all worked so hard to make it the winning campaign!

Judge’s comment:““This campaign really pushed the boundaries, taking a functional search strategy to another level. Not only did it demonstrate the full potential of what search can achieve, but it delivered depth within each aspect, driving some fantastic results.” Phil Nunn, Draft FCB

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How many social networks are there on the Web?

At the beginning it was MySpace with a large community of music fans and bands sharing the same profile layout and functions. After that social networks have exploded in the market and now these can be divided by functions and objectives. If Facebook is the place for fun and for making contacts (that girl I met at the pub last night), then Linkedin does its job in providing career opportunities and taking care of my business contacts.

When Facebook started to decrease its market share in the States, some business analysts thought that more specialized networks would have space to grow. Since then other sites have started seeking my attention and begun to adventure into the crowded field of social networking sites.

On the 30th November 2011, Wikipedia lists 204 social networks currently providing active spaces for conversations, profiles and great organization services.

Here’s a selection of my favourites:

1) DeviantArt
It aggregates illustrators, photographers, painters, computer artists that share their works online.

2) TravBuddy
Community of travellers that share their experiences writing reviews about locations, attractions and special places that have visited.

3) SoundCloud
Looking for music producers and bands? This is the best place to discover the next coming star in the music world, it is a great source for independent stuff and a great marketing tool for every musician

4) Habbo
It started in 2003 and it has an amazing 3D pixel graphic design. It looks like an old school game where you can use an avatar to play a second life. Good luck with it!

5) Asmallworld
This unites the European jet set and the social elite worldwide. Many marketers use this for B2B leads. Members share similar backgrounds, interests and perspectives. Asmallworld offers memberships by invitations only

Any question or more on this, follow me on Twitter: @carlopandian

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