SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has been around forever, but with the emergence of Social Media, should brands focus their effort in SMO (Social Media Optimisation) instead?

The number of people turning to social networks for answers is growing exponentially and social media is currently the fastest developing tool for branding, customer acquisition and retention. 

Up until recently, webmasters and marketers used SEO techniques to get top rankings in search engines and drive traffic by hitting their target audiences with customised messages based on the most relevant keywords. Now, SMO potentially gives us an opportunity to create responsive and timely dialogues with our audiences. With SMO ,traffic is driven by two way interactions. But is SMO a bit of a flash in the pan, or should we be ploughing all our efforts into this now and worry less about SEO?

Let’s have a look at both of them:

SEO – is a part of Search Engine Marketing (alongside PPC) has grown from being a small wildcat operation run by webmasters to a multi-million pound industry. SEO aims to improve your visibility in the search engines via natural (unpaid) search results. Many factors determine the success of your campaign and the fact that Google keeps the exact ways in which it measures the relevancy of a particular phrase a secret means that it can be something of a black art to get it right. It requires constant monitoring and refinement. 

SMO - has only become popular in the past few years as the use of social networking sites has exploded. Some argue that since Google’s PageRank is social by nature all Social Networks should be considered as the new SEO. The value of SMO builds over time as the content acts as a permanent archive and creates a “long tail”. And, every piece of UGC (User Generated Content) becomes in itself a SEO landing page. By using SMO your Google rankings can be significantly increased as once you have harnessed your social channels the response is instant and leads to social recommendations, backlinks and enhancements. The success mainly depends on the content so the more interesting and up to date your content is the more traffic from Search Engines you attract. Through SMO you can also encourage influential groups, networks and individuals to spread your content further and share it with their audiences, resulting in a series of healthy keyword-optimised backlinks along the way.

Emerging trends:

• Location based recommendation engines - one of the fastest-growing segments of the tech industry.  Increased focus on personalised and localised searches (Google Places). Search engines are accommodating the geographic and personal preferences of the user which results in predicted, tailored search results.
• HotSpot – Google users will be encouraged to rate and review businesses directly from their Google-linked profile. Also, Google plans to add "layers" of social networking to Gmail
• Real time search – social media content will enjoy more real estate on search engine results pages (SERPs)
• Optimisation for mobile search - text-based queries (i.e. SnapTell). Increased focus on websites that are correctly optimised for mobile apps. The current 5% of total web browsing is done on mobile and will increase up to 15% by the end of 2011.
• Increase in link value for “in context”/quality pages/posts
• Rise of Yahoo and Bing – may grow from current 15% of total web search traffic to 20% by the end of 2011
• Decrease in the proportion of client-side companies carrying out both SEO and paid search since 2009
• The growth of SEO scams that results in paid search scams can drive up PPC costs and intercept traffic that is searching for the legitimate site.
• Social media integration – Google is expected to combine popular social networks and feeds into the normal search results (as it is for Twitter already). Facebook/Twitter pages potentially may become like physical addresses in Google Places
• Companies committing a larger portion of their budget towards social media strategies with Facebook and Twitter ever dominant. More than half of companies (56%) are planning to boost social media budgets by more than 20%
• Group buying (Groupon) – gives the ability to share deals with friends. The whole sector spreads fast and is expected to continue in a big way over the next couple of years with copy cat services
• Questions and answers sites – social media is making collective knowledge easier to spread (i.e. Quora) and drive traffic
• Twitter - promoted tweets, real-time information with commercial value
• Privacy issues – users’ tendency to turn into the companies that offer the most valuable experience alongside the reassurance that they act responsibly with our personal data
• Facebook credits – expected to be ubiquitous across the web within 2 years as people use the trusted platform to by all sorts of things
• Facebook email service (Project Titan) – the value added to existing database of information. From a commercial point of view, it has vastly more potential than the information that Google collects by knowing what we type into its search engine.

What does this all mean apart from the fact that things are moving so fast it’s difficult to keep up? Social Media is here to stay for the foreseeable future and we ignore its impact at our peril. The way we are perceived on Social Media will inevitably have an impact on the way we are shown in Search Engines and vice versa. As Google becomes a central part of everyone’s social media experience, it will be increasingly impossible to distinguish where SEO starts and SMO begins. We need to need to be good at both! 

It's the Third Thursday of the month. Mark is full of snot, so Nick stood up to the plate for the video. As usual we try and do it one 'take' - it kind of makes it a bit more real that way .... (ahem).

Other links referenced...

• Hyperion Recruitment
  
• Seven Up Facebook App
  
• Be Mindful campaign for Mental Health Foundation
  
• Rise Hall for Sarah Beeny
  
• Evolving English exhibition for The British Library
  

During the past couple of years we have seen major improvements in "modern" browsers
(or client).

When Google released Chrome back in 2008 they started an arms race between vendors to claim the title of the fastest browser in town. Under the hood Chrome uses the same rendering engine as Safari but what makes it special is Google combined it with a ultra fast JavaScript runtime called V8. Since then Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and even Microsoft have picked up their game and released faster versions of their browsers.

Alas this has left older browsers looking decidedly long in the tooth. To put the speed difference into perspective imagine for a moment browsers were vehicles. Chrome would be a Ferarri speeding down the autobahn, IE8 an electric milk float creeping down your street, and poor old IE6/7 about as fast as a broken down Lada being pushed uphill by a geriatric. The difference is really that profound.

So why is JavaScript so important anyway?

These days many of the sites you spend your time on are in fact large JavaScript applications. Think of Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, Mobile Me, or the new Twitter. Even the average Joe's otherwise static blog includes a bunch of facebook "Like" buttons and social widgets. JavaScript really is everywhere.

If anything the trend is accelerating, users have come to expect responsive applications and the web apps we build have to compete with native mobile experiences. Studies have shown that that if UI is blocked for more than a tenth of a second users start to perceive the slow down. Having users wait seconds while your render the whole page just isn't cool anymore. In order to meet these requirements its necessary to change how we build websites. Rather than doing all the work on the server then serving up the resulting page in one go, the code runs in the client (the web browser) and updates the page dynamically in real time.

For web developers the shift in logic from the server to the browser brings with it challenges. Unlike on the server where we have many mature frameworks in the browser the frameworks are more nascent. Many developers are familiar with jQuery and use it to add small bits of animation and interaction to pages. While it's perfectly suited to this task it's not sufficient for building well structured applications, it quickly becomes rather messy. To me a piece of the puzzle is missing.

Necessity is the mother of invention and I'm happy to see many great developers working to fill the void. One of the core developers of the popular server side framework Rails has left to work on Sproutcore (an Apple backed framework) and only last week news broke that 37signals had been experimenting with building a Rails-like framework in CoffeeScript. Personally I'm putting my money on what Jeremy Ashkenas and crew are cooking up over at Document Cloud. I'm willing to bet during the next year we will see one of these new frameworks gain significant traction and kick off a new breed of web apps.

What does this mean for clients?

Clients may not care which technology developers use to build their apps. However it's important to understand the impact it will have. If you choose to go with modern technology you must accept that there are tradeoffs to be made. Not everyone driving a Lada can come along for the ride. If you hold back users may vote with their feet when a competitor releases an app that's much more responsive.

As Technical Director it's my job step back and see where things are heading and ensure we are ready as an agency to meet future challenges. Through our internal work on apps we are investing resource in learning new ways of structuring applications, what works and what doesn't. This is valuable knowledge we are then applying directly to client projects. When you consider your next project ask yourself if you are building a classic web site, a modern web app, or some hybrid of the two. Are you planning on having an API? Do you need a mobile version? Be prepared to challenge your assumptions and most important of all make sure you are working with the right team.

--------------------

A geeky aside

One interesting bonus you get by shifting your logic to the the client side is that your choice of server side technology becomes far less of an issue. In effect your server side code becomes your API that handles your backend business logic and the client handles the UI and view. It's a nice separation and makes it easy to support other clients in future. Also the app doesn't have to be confined to a web browser, it could be wrapped in something like Phone Gap and distributed through the app stores to mobiles or even downloaded to the desktop.

In praise of Hardboiled Web Design

For years, there has been a consensus that great web developers are those who can make pixel-perfect replicas of Photoshop-made designs inside Web browsers, from Internet Explorer 6 to more modern browsers. The markup didn't need to be good (hell, clients don't even see it!), and it didn't matter what dirty tricks you used to make the design come to life, or even if it actually was usable, as long as it was working in IE6.

Today, techniques like "progressive enhancement" or "progressive enrichment" prevail. We have got used to building for the least capable browsers first, and improving the experience where possible for more modern browsers. Dumbing-down the experience, we felt lucky when we could squeeze in a few CSS3 rounded corners.

But that needs to change. There is more to CSS3 than rounded corners and drop shadows. Rewarding viewers using modern browsers isn't enough anymore. This is why I got so excited when a few weeks ago, Hardboiled Web Design, a new book from Andy Clarke, was released.

Hardboiled web design is about never compromising on creating the best work we can for the web. The postulate is simple: it is possible to give clients what they want and at the same time use new technologies such as CSS3 and HTML5 to expand creative options. This is the new Bible of Web development. Quoting from the book:

"The reality is that the web has changed, and our work and our clients' expectations must move beyond the one-size-fits-all approach we have laboured over for so long if we're to make the most of what it has to offer. No two browsers are the same, so to make the most from emerging technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3, we need to banish the notion that websites should look and be experienced exactly the same in every browser."

It is no longer about progressive enhancement or even graceful degradation, it's about acknowledging the browsers' differences, and offering the right experience, appropriately crafted and responsive to the capabilities of the browser. Do websites need to look exactly the same on every browser? No. Do websites need to be experienced exactly the same in every browser? Nope.

Potentially this is a radically different work process, where the Photoshop design phase is skipped, and the site is directly designed inside the browser, using the latest technologies available, and with a strong focus on quality, meaningful markup. Development time is reduced, quality improves, clients get to see the design in action very early on (instead of flat images, which fail to represent the browsers' rendering differences), and users benefit from tailored experiences.

This is obviously not a "one size fits all" approach, but it is definitely worth experimenting with.

Paraphrasing Hardboiled Web Design one last time, the question to be asked for your next Web project is and should be: would you rather have developers spending your budget hacking around issues for older browsers like Internet Explorer 6, or spend this time future proofing the website to look the best it can on better, modern desktop browsers, as well as on a whole host of mobile devices?

So what does this mean in practice?

For Desktops:

• The modern browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and IE9) get the best experience - the one we design for, right from the start. Webkit browsers (Chrome and Safari) get the best experience of all, as they provide the most advanced CSS3 features.
• IE7 and 8 get a simpler version (this generally means no rounded corners, no drop shadows, and little to no eye-candy effects)
• IE6 gets a custom version of the site, different from the other (possibly very different), to accommodate with its rendering capabilities. Simply put: same content, but different form

For Mobiles:

• Depending on the type of site, modern mobile browsers (iOS and Android browsers) can be served the same version as modern desktop browsers, but with a tailored experience adapted for mobile use (using CSS media queries for instance)
• Older and less capable mobile browsers should be served a different website (to save bandwidth and cut down the load time for the user), requiring separate development

Click here or here if you would like up-to-date statistics on browsers market share.

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace? They are all the most popular social media networks of the moment. But in the eyes of teenagers they have always existed… and to an extent that’s true. These networks for social interaction, which have the power to boost your business, are far from new.

A 50s Invention

It started illegally. One of the first social medias was “Phone Phreaking” which was born in the 50’s. I can’t imagine my grand parents using this early homemade electronic device called a “blue box”. You would plug it into a phone booth and hack landline systems to receive secret messages… awesome. This ancestor of Skype was the start of the movement.

But social media networks did not see any real progress until computers started to arrive in people’s homes. BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) made the first steps in the 70’s by allowing users to log on and interact with one another. Have you heard of ICQ, the first instant messaging device? Or Prodigy, the discussion platform? Or 26000 Meetings, the first “tweetup” type social media events? I had no idea they existed but they really helped to amplify and expand the movement in the 90’s. Classmates.com proved instantly that the idea of a virtual reunion was a good one and in 2002 social networking really started to hit its stride with the launch of Friendster.

Why Social Media can improve your business

So Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook creator) didn’t invent anything after all, all he did was prove how much people like to talk about their experiences, their actualities, their lives. To keep in touch the world over and have a presence on the web by sharing.

There are now plenty of social media options for sharing almost everything: not just discussions, but also videos, images, ideas, passions for pets, shoes or trainspotting. They are all potential platforms to communicate on and create a marketing buzz according to your business. But why?

Social media raises the game to another level. Before, the information would go from a billboard to you, now, it goes from a billboard through you. People are becoming vectors but more precisely trusted vectors who will lead messages to a wider and like minded target. For example, I share the same interests of Matt, my Creative Director, about Design. Hence I follow his tweets, have a look at his blog when I have a minute, and watch his arty pictures through Instagram for inspiration. Now Matt saw a very interesting coffee place which presents temporary exhibitions. He liked the idea and decided to promote the place by sharing the information through his social media networks. All his contacts and friends will see it on his feeds (knowing Matt we are talking about hundreds of people). This information doesn’t come from a shiny brochure, it comes from a respected colleague and friend. Its importance is much higher. Now I have seen it, and inevitably like it too I have also decided to promote it through Twitter and Facebook. My own friends may like it and so on. Imagine how many people’s attention this little coffee place will command? Thousands.

This is why it appears crucial for you to have share buttons on your website. Twitter and Facebook can definitely make a strong difference to the traffic generated on your website. And whether you are creating a buzz for dance choregraphy or pumpkin carving, other social medias can be added such as Youtube or Flickr to amplify your weight on the web. Social media is an extraordinarily powerful medium and is set to remain the key call to action for your success.

WARNING: Do not abuse it

Now that you know how great social media is for your business, you will probably want to reach a maximum amount of people by pushing them to share your content through all possible social media networks. From the best known which has millions of users to the tiniest, which might have 20 members.

Quality must come before quantity. You won’t gain more impact by proposing 10 different social media sharing buttons on each of your webpages. The exact opposite will happen. Desperation is not appealing.

Recently I was talking with a friend who works for a business advisory company, specializing in social media. He kept saying that networks have to be strategically placed and be specifically linked to the company’s activity. Social media networks don’t all share the same functions and they do not operate in the same context: Facebook is mainly used by friends, Linkedin by professional contacts, Digg shares and rate links and is more about collective opinion… They can serve you and give you crediance if they are thoughtfully placed upon your webpage and carefuly selected depending on who the target audience is and how they engage online.

Finally, the wider world is slow. When I ask people what social media they know, I usually get Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Myspace. Web people will add Delicious, Tumblr and Digg. Fundamentally only some people use Tumblr and a few others Myspace but there are two ubiquitous presences: Facebook and Twitter. In coming years, others may get more and more important and gain critical mass on the Net, but for the moment their curves are low, and won’t bring you much of an audience.