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As of September 30th, Google will shut down its first social-networking service, Orkut, which was launched in 2004 the same year that Facebook, which is the most popular social media platform in the world was founded by Mark Zuckerberg.

With Pinterest being the fastest growing social media site ever! Many businesses are trying to work out ways to incorporate the use of Pinterest into their social media strategy. Luckily this isn’t all that hard as one of the benefits of using Pinterest is that it can be an extremely powerful tool for increasing awareness and gaining exposure in the online marketing climate.

Tips on how to approach social media differently in order to be noticed

The FIFA World Cup is in full swing which means my life has been taken over by FIFA Updates; 2AM matches and statistical analyses of the coaches and teams. I pay so much attention, that it almost seems like my research would have some sort of impact on the outcome of the games, of course, that’s not how it works. The other side of my life is search and for this reason I couldn’t help but draw a few similarities between the two areas.

As a business owner, regardless of industry or targeted client base, anyone would agree on the benefits of having a physical shop front or office. If this shop front is well staffed, well maintained and in a good location, then clearly foot traffic will come into the store, giving your staff the opportunity to make sales and/or generate leads. The better the location, the greater the volume of foot traffic. The better your staff, the more sales and leads (not to mention the quality of these) will be achieved. All fairly simple stuff isn’t it?

So you’ve built a great Facebook page. You have a captive audience, growing numbers of likes and are achieving great results in the areas of branding and client interaction. Now how do you take this amazing work and turn it into a lead generation tool?

Over the past few years there have been a lot of speculation on whether social signals from sites like Facebook and Twitter and even Google Plus factor into Google’s search algorithm. Do things like the number of Facebook “Likes” , Twitter “retweets” and Google +1s have a direct impact on how you are ranked on Google Search?

I hear this every so often from some of my clients, a sense of desperation when attempting to deal with the Google Adwords system. And while I don’t think Google set out to make navigation of the system difficult, on the contrary, I believe they attempted to make it as accessible to everyone as possible, I understand why it would seem this way to many clients.

Ever since Google released their Penguin search algorithm update there has been the potential for someone to hurt the rankings of someone else’s website. Penguin looks for spammy links to a website (a good indicator that someone is doing cheap and nasty SEO) and drops the Google rankings of that website as a penalty for black hat SEO practices. Negative SEO, also known by the slightly more dramatic term “Link Assassination”, involves actually purchasing large numbers of spammy links for a competitor in the hopes that Google will penalise their rankings.

As we explored in my last blog, Facebook have tightened their newsfeed algorithm reducing the organic reach of your posts (i.e the number of your ‘likers’ who actually see your posts).
This week it was confirmed that Facebook are looking at reducing this organic reach to 1-2% of your audience…ouch! This means up to 99% of your hard-earned likers may not see your posts at all. You’ve invested time and money in growing your page, so what do you do to counteract this?