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News - Google social search released, The Matt Cutts video is linked below. Matt explains about Google identifying a social circle which allows you social networks to be indexed by Google. This then means you will have the ability to search for specific content from a chosen network.

Tutorial - Long tail SEO is the process of ensuring that products within an e-Commerce are correctly names and individually optimised. Long tail keywords are more precise and specific which essentially convert at a better rate, the idea being that someone searching for a specific product is more likely to buy that product.

Example - Johnsons Jewellers

This also work for specific blog post titles, so if you query a blog post such as ‘Microsoft and Yahoo Merge Video’ you can see the blog post appears in the organic listings. This is a big source of traffic for both Creare Design and Creare Communications.

Showcase - SEO site check up: http://www.seositecheckup.com/

Resources:

What You Can Expect For Video Over The Next Year

This week saw the release of an incredibly useful document from TurnHere detailing the potential for growth in the online video market for 2010. Many SEO companies have been racking their brains about the implications of online video and video SEO for most of 2009 – so what can we be expecting for the coming year?

Trends indicate currently that over 21 billion videos are watched online every month – and this figure looks set to grow.  Distribution sites such as YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo and Hulu have seen an unprecedented growth over the last twelve months, and if the latest statistics are anything to go by, this looks set to continue.

What is important is to look at this from both an SEO and a business perspective.  There are increasing opportunities in the field of video SEO, and any practitioner worth their salt should be looking into these now.  From video indexing, to fresh content distribution, high viewing figures and much more, the increase in businesses using video will lead to a resurgence of interest and therefore plenty of new research on the potential for video SEO.

With regard to businesses – the statistics contained within the TurnHere report suggest that 83.5% of respondents are currently already using video, 90.7% of respondents are likely or very likely to use or continue to use video over the next 12 months, and startlingly – online video was ranked as more important to marketing than email and search marketing for 2010.  Whether or not these statistics turn out to be entirely accurate in the long term or not, they certainly serve to show that video deserves our attention more than ever in the current months.

With the unveiling of Google’s Social Search on Monday along with the announcement last week that Bing has signed deals with Twitter it would appear that the world of search is moving into real-time. Even Yahoo has moved in on the action by joining forces with real-time search engine OneRiot.

What do these new features actually do though? Well Google’s Social Search allows you to find information from your friends and associates. Social Search aims to find information specific to the users’ interests, by including blog posts written by friends’ and information gathered from social networks. The idea behind it is to make the results even more relevant for the user. The Twitter / Bing deal is about sharing information between the two parties, or more specifically Bing using twitter as a database. Bing offers a real-time search of twitter updates through bing.com/twitter where you can use bing to search Twitter.

The big question is how will this affect SEO in the future?

Well unfortunately I left my crystal ball at home, but I can give an educated guess. I simply say social media is going to play a bigger and bigger role in SEO. This is good because social media is quite transparent at the moment.

We recently released ‘The SEO Song’ on YouTube and have successfully used Twitter, blogs, facebook and other social media networks to promote this example of pure musical genius. The interest in The SEO Song has been quite impressive (with 6000 views reached today), and we simply couldn’t have done this without Social Media.

My advice to anyone starting out in the SEO industry would be to get into Social Media. Today. Use it to it’s full potential, because over time that is where the trust will be, and everyone knows you can’t market anything without trust.

Don’t Forget Facebook, Perfect Tool For Networking

It’s everywhere, you can’t avoid it, but there is more to social media than Twitter, especially for a business. Many people have lost touch with other areas of social media that can be vital for SEO and networking purposes, does no-one remember Facebook?

We at Creare have a Facebook, Twitter and new media focussed social media site Virb account. This has proved to work well and we not only have an excellent ratio on Twitter between followers and followed, we keep in touch with those that take time to post feeds.

However, we have recently received a vanity URL within Facebook after gaining 100 fans for our page. Now do people see how this has a tremendous affect on social media? Our page is no longer a list of numbers, we are recognised in the world of face as a company, via our page’s URL.

Our fans and friends of course have made this happen, but we have not found these people through any other means than Facebook itself, building up relationships rather than adding them for numbers alone. Taking the time to speak to them, thank them and interact with them on a daily basis.

I am not disputing that Twitter isn’t the best way to get kick started with social media, it’s is just vital to explore other ways to help your company grow and gain more brand exposure. For SEO purposes this can’t be bad, and by gaining fans, friends and followers you have to take the time to make them want you, as much as you need them.

Don’t forget the old school ways that are still proving to be effective, and don’t neglect your Facebook page. Get to know people and you will meet those that can contribute to your business in more ways than simply recommending a friend request.

News - In a recent blog from Google‘s web master help blog, low quality backward links are mentioned and how to deal with them. Google mentions being part of a bad community and whether this could essentially lead to a negative effect in your search engine results positions.

We have always been under the impression that low quality bad links are essentially worthless rather than them actually effecting your sites listings, the reason we believed this because otherwise webmasters could quite easily savatage a competitor. Google backs this up by essentially saying that link building is on of many variables taken into Google’s algorithm and for webmasters no to worry.

Tutorial - Google Insights, we will look at the following sections:

• location
• time scales
• predicted search volume
• regional interest
• top related search terms
• rising search terms
• issues (Data centers)

Showcase - Cufon font replacement, plug web design blog tutorial. We will expand more in the web design video blog, how to use the cufon font replacement method. We also think that the search engines will be fine with the process as the cached version of a page looks as it should with 1 version of the font, it also claims to be SEO friendly.

Question - IP address question.