A small group of Hyper Island students, calling themselves “Control your info”, received media attention last week after hijacking Facebook groups. By hijacking, I mean that they became members of groups in lack of an admin and claimed the admin spot, enabling them to handle the groups in any way preferred. As the admin of a Facebook group leaves the group the position is open for anyone to take. This means that numerous groups with high number of members are without control over their groups content. What the Hyper Island students wanted was to create awareness of this bug and encourage people to be aware of the importance to control their online information.

As social networks are gaining more influence over the search engine results and as news and live feeds are ranking highest in the search results -the importance to be aware of and to control your online identity is increasing. Read the rest of this entry »

Building a new web site is a fun, complex and time consuming process. Also it often involves large investments to get it just right. Most companies employ partners with different expertise in the process, like web agencies, web technology agencies, web designers and copy writers. However, the SEO partner is rarely part of the team and that is really too bad. When SEO isn’t part of the developing process, money is left on the table, and even more money is thrown in the garbage for good measure.

Every organization, web site project, team constellation and process is different. However, what is universal is the importance of integrating SEO and the search perspective into that process.

So – how and where does SEO fit into the process of building a new web site? Even if every company is unique, the ideas are generally the same. SEO needs to be intricately weaved throughout every aspect of the development life cycle from research to final result and release…and even further. Read the rest of this entry »

Google is now taking the step into social search with a different twist. They are integrating it with the personalised version of the Google account and adapts t0 your social network and your own personal choice of peers. Bing recently launched their integration of Twitter in the US results and that is a real time search listing that Google as well will be integrating soon. Bing now index most common and popular tweets for everyone. Google announced they will do the same thing, but we have still not seen this appear in their listings.

Google is now leading the search battle in a different category: Personalised search! Google have earlier released a personalised version where everyone that has a Google account and are logged in can opt-in (as before) to get more personalised results, change the listings as they wish and comment on the search result. Read the rest of this entry »

As you probably have heard, Bing released the news of their collaboration with Twitter a few days ago, Google was of course just one step behind when releasing the same news hours later. Bing also made an equal deal with Facebook, whereas Google haven’t (yet). What this means is that the search engines are now allowed to incorporate the posts provided on twitter (and Facebook) in their search results. As soon as a tweet is posted it will be made visible in the search results. For the search business these are the biggest news since universal search was released two years ago, but what it will lead to is yet to see.

Chris Humber from 360i discussed the evolvement within search and what has happened in the last few years in a SEMPO webinar yesterday. In 2007 the search engines only generated text based results whereas today we have a blended search where all media and categories are integrated in the results. Read the rest of this entry »

This week we got to experience the third Search Engine Marketing Expo in Stockholm. I want to take the opportunity to discuss one of the obvious buzz words from the conference, one that we have not heard much about earlier related to search engine optimization issues. The phenomenon everyone was talking about is ”the Holistic Perspective of Search”.

So what does it mean? Well – The holistic approach for search is all about widening the perspective and looking past just optimizing your web site. Websites are rarely the only channel for digital communication for most companies. Video, blogs, social media, newsletters, news articles, press releases and corporate communications are all methods of online content distribution. Read the rest of this entry »

IAB in the UK released some numbers a few weeks ago, showing that Internet advertising in the UK now has taken over from TV advertising. They add the numbers together and everything related to web ends up in this category. It might not be the best way of doing it, breaking it down and looking at growth is in my opinion the most interesting piece of information. The only thing growing right now in this climate in the UK,  seems to be paid search! up 11.8 % as Philip Buxton wrote on the Icroosing blog

First of all, it is very interesting to see the shift from TV, Print and other medias to online channels and in particular search as a medium. The usage, time spent and interaction numbers have passed the TV a long time ago but it is not until we have a different financial climate or a new wave of users that have grown up with Internet that the companies change their budgets (4 years later!). Read the rest of this entry »