We often talk about keywords in this industry.

“Social Media Optimisation” is one of the big keywords for progressive SEO companies in 2008.

It is still something of a tricky concept for people to get their heads around. While the benefits of SEO are measurable and highly visible, SMO is often viewed as more like traditional marketing; ie harder to measure. Actually, this is something of a sweeping statement, as certain aspects of SMO can be easily measured, while others, admittedly, cannot. If you are looking increasing traffic to your website, for example, or linkbaiting, this is all just as easy to measure as traditional linkbuilding work. Of course, you are putting yourself on the line a little more by releasing material into the public sphere, but a well planned and controlled project can be very rewarding.

Blogs, file sharing, social bookmarking, forums. The internet facilitates the transfer of information. Interacting with Social Media allows a brand to influence at least some of the information that is being passed around. Many people are afraid of potential negative comments harming their brand, as opposed to building it, but a well managed complaint can be a real positive.

Think about it. If you have had a complaint about a product or service in the past, what do you remember about it now? The fault itself or the way your complaint was dealt with? It’s probably a mix of the two. If you had a complaint that was badly dealt with, it is unlikely that you stayed loyal to that brand. If the complaint was handled with thought and care, it is likely that you remember that good service.

Don’t be afraid of Social Media!

For all its public travails, nobody can accuse Yahoo!’s developers from slacking off. We were quite excited to see del.icio.us results being integrated into SERPs a couple of months ago, and are very excited to learn about SearchMonkey.

Effectively, SearchMonkey allows developers and webmasters to affect how their sites appear in SERPs. Of course, this has always been possible through meta description tags, but Yahoo! are now pushing this to the next level.

SearchMonkey allows you to make incredibly visual listings, as illustrated above.

The potential of this is huge for driving qualified traffic - the goal of most SEO work. Would you be more likely to click on a plain, old textual entry, or a visual one with more information?

As a site owner, you have to provide Yahoo! with structured data to create these listings, according to the guidelines laid out here. Once you structure the information as Yahoo! want to see it, you can include user reviews, addresses, phone numbers, prices, photos and smarter page summaries in your listing.

With this and del.icio.us intergration, Yahoo! are giving us a glimpse into their vision of search in the coming years. It will be very interesting to see Google’s response - while they still hold a 90% market share in the UK and much of Europe, advances like this could well threaten the hegemony in the medium to long term. Yahoo!’s market share in the States is still much higher than in Europe - around 20% in April 2008.

Search Engine Optimisation is more than just getting top positions - it is making sure that this visibility converts into visits and sales. We are keeping a close eye on this cheeky SearchMonkey.

I’ve been busy writing about internet marketing for Sussex’s daily paid paper The Argus. Here’s today’s offering:

For the past week, Google UK has allowed Adwords users to bid on trademarked names. Advertisers still can’t use the trademark in their advert (unless the trademark is theirs, of course) but can bid to have their advert appear when someone searches for the name in Google.

For example, two weeks ago, a search for “iPod” brought up only two paid advertisers: Apple’s own online store and a price comparison site. Now, all of the major names like Argos, Dixons, Curry’s and Comet are bidding on the keyword, alongside niche websites (paying an average of around 60p per click).

This matters on a local scale too. One of Brighton’s many small estate agents, for example, could now bid on the name of a higher profile rival. “Gentlemen’s Agreements” not to bid on each others’ names are technically illegal (although there are murmurs that the large car companies are doing just this).

Google’s motivation for this change is clear: money, and lots of it. But where does this leave businesses? Not only can rivals now advertise on the strength of your reputation but, as the owner of a trademark, you now have to allocate more money to your own Adwords campaign to ensure that you still appear top!

Fortunately, there are some ways that you can put yourself at an advantage when bidding for your trademark (or any keyword). Firstly, word your advert carefully. Google will automatically give your advert a “Quality Score”, which is based on how relevant your advert is for a particular search. The higher your Quality Score, the less you have to pay to get high positions for your ads.

Also, remember that the content of your website itself is very important: have a sitemap and contact page on there, and make sure that there is text about the product you are selling. Search engines like text that they can read easily, so html is much better than flash.

If your website is well optimised for the search engines, this also has a positive effect on the cost of Adwords. Elements like site structure and which other sites link to it are very important. This is known as search engine optimisation, or SEO. Being at the top of Google’s natural results also brings a lot of visitors.

One very good (and easy) idea is to set up a selection of different adverts for the same search and see which one performs best over a couple of weeks. This is a great way of finding the right wording for your ad.

If you are confused, there are lots of online forums that can offer advice. Just search Google!

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Big developments are in the pipeline for our paid search consultancy. Keep your eyes peeled!

We’re all Mozilla Firefox users in the Upstream office. Let’s not get into why.

A month ago Mozilla released the 5th beta of the latest version of Firefox (v3), rumoured to be the last beta before the first RC appears. Having tested it for a couple of weeks now, I have to say, it’s superb. Not only is it a huge upgrade from the latest v2 build, but Mozilla claim to have made over 750 improvements since beta 4, so you can tell they’re working hard on delivering one hell of a browser.

The buzzwords for the v3 beta are the same old ones you’ll hear with every release of pretty much every browser, be it Internet Explorer, FF, Opera, Safari or any other: “more secure” - citing the Site Identification button as its most visually obvious upgrade - “easier to use”, “more personal”, and “improved performance”.

The thing is, for the first time since I had a go on the IE5 beta all those years ago, the upgrades are actually noticeable. Even with all my extensions still installed, Firefox 3 beta 5 flies along at an almost scary rate - it really is noticeably quicker; both in startup and in rendering web pages. The download manager has inline search - something woefully lacking in previous versions (though those who enjoy that kind of thing would probably have grabbed the pretty-much-must-have Download Statusbar extension by now). Smart Bookmarks tracks your most-visited pages and does all the work for you, a functionality only achievable in earlier versions with extensions.

One of the most popular complaints with Firefox is its memory leak issue - but right now, with 20 tabs open and numerous downloads, firefox.exe is using a mere 97,000Kb of RAM. Not bad considering if I load the exact same tabs into my current 2.0.0.14 build, I get RAM usage of over 250Mb.

And what’s more, unlike most other betas I’ve been happy to play around with, Firefox 3 has not crashed on me. In 2 weeks. Not once.

Bravo, Mozilla. Download your copy of the beta right here; but if you’re happy with 2.0.0.14 for your casual browsing and fear the upgrade may disable some of your favourite extensions, probably best to wait for the finished article to be released - according to the Mozilla wiki, we can probably expect a mid-summer release!

The domain name is yours for the meagre price of $5,000,000!

Nice work if you can get it, eh?

Apologies to Alex for breaking the chain of SEO-related posts, but…

As one of these irritating people who constantly claims to ‘love words’ (’words’ said in that horribly reverential way, as if somehow… Welsh), stumbling across this site not only gave me an opportunity to learn a few new ones, but also to help out those who are significantly worse off.

FreeRice.com gives you a word and 4 possible synonyms, and simply asks you to pick the one closest to the meaning. The simple way in which it works means that you will find your vocabulary increasing unconsciously; and what’s more, for every word you get right, they’ll donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. New words are constantly being added by ‘a team of professional lexicographers’, which sounds like a wonderful job.

20 grains of rice doesn’t sound that much, but over a few months you can really make a difference. Plus today I learned that a ‘bluestocking’ is another word for a ’scholarly woman’. Incredible.

But then again, I do love words. And we like charities.

So, why not do your bit? Even if it’s just a couple of words a day, you’ll be helping yourself and others, and you don’t even need to get your cheque book out. Win-win!

A large part of any good SEO’s work is keeping up with the latest developments at Google and watching where they are going in the future. All forward thinking SEOs are also working more and more with social media optimisation, as it is becoming known.

In the last couple of weeks, you may have become acquainted with iGoogle, which is the new default start page for your Google browsing experience. The service itself is nothing new, with its (less catchily named) predecessor Google Personalized Homepage having been available since 2005, but the search giant is now really pushing this idea.

Suggested content for your iGoogle is selected according to your browsing habits. This can be hit and miss; for example, if you say that you are interested in sports, Google assumes that this means basketball, baseball and the NFL.

One thing that people of a nerdier disposition (like us) have always enjoyed about iGoogle is that it encourages developers to create applications, rather like Facebook. Very recently, Google has modified the interface to include an “update” sidebar that shows users what their friends are up to. Rather like Facebook.

This second point is important - alongside traditional search, Google is looking more and more at the social aspect of the internet. The marketing implications of this are pretty big. Social newsfeeds like that in Facebook are a fantastic form of viral marketing - seeing that a friend has done something encourages other people to have a go too. This mainly benefits sites that make an effort to include good content that actually adds something to the internet.

Google is stepping into the world of Social Networking again. After the mixed reception to Orkut (which is, oddly, the most popular Social Networking site in Brazil and India), this time they want to do it right… basically, by mixing whats good about Google and Facebook. This is one to watch.

PS. While searching for images to accompany this post, I came across this. Oh dear.

Facebook was the big internet success story of last year. The media, and the British public at large just couldn’t get enough of poking, posting and tagging. In fact, Brits took to the site more enthusiastically than any other nation and still spend a larger percentage of their browsing time on Facebook (and social networking sites) than any other nation.

So we’re hooked.

Recently, some people have been saying that Facebook has peaked and is starting to go the way of myspace (which is decidedly niche nowadays). The truth is far less clear cut. Social networking sites are maintaining incredible growth: 20.8 million Britons (63% of Britons online) visited at least one of the ten most popular social media sites in January 2008, compared to 17.1 million in January 2007 (stats from Neilsen). And while YouTube may now see more monthly UK visits than Facebook, which site do you think has a stronger infrastructure?

Judging by the frequent service outages and glitches that you find on YouTube, it’s hard to imagine that the site was expected to become as popular as it has. Facebook, on the other hand, has always given the impression that it is ready to swallow the world.

The recent addition of pay per click advertising has been subtle enough not to anger users, despite actually being quite intrusive. All of that information you added to your Facebook profile (your favourite films, music, brands & places, not to mention your marital status, sexual orientation, family etc) can now be used to create super-focused marketing. This gives brands the opportunity to zoom in much more closely on their target demographic and stay away from those potentially expensive wasted clicks.

I recently attended a talk give by Blake Chandlee, Commercial Director of Facebook UK, in which he talked about the power of Facebook for marketers. His talk brought up a couple of interesting points. Firstly, brands can communicate directly with people who have mentioned a fondness for that brand in their profile. This is marketing to those with open ears. Secondly, marketing through Facebook is pretty close to viral marketing, because of how newsfeeds work. Basically, interacting with a group/brand shows up in the newsfeeds of your friends, therefore giving them your “vote of confidence”.

This business is all about trust: if people trust a site they are much more likely to make a purchase. If people see your site at the top of SERPs they are much more likely to trust it. If a friend trusts your tastes, they will follow your paths on Facebook. But beware… someone will be watching!