Bing Increases Facebook Integration: What this Means for SEO and SMO

• By: John E Lincoln
• Categories: Bing, Facebook, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing
• Comments: 0

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Bing and Facebook are forming a strong alliance and Google may pay the price. Nothing reinforces this statement more than recent news of increased Bing and Facebook integration. Here is a quick list of recent updates regarding Bing and Facebook strengthening the tie between the two sites.

 

Bing Users Can Now

• See search results that have been liked by their friends on Facebook, with their friends profile picture.
• Share Bing shopping lists with friends on Facebook with the click of a button.
• See highly liked items on Facebook that relate to the search query. This can include pages, status updates, etc.
• Find Facebook user information by simply searching Bing. This includes info such as enhanced profile search results, including profile picture, location, education, and employment details.
• Have travel updates sent directly to their Facebook feed. You have to “Like” Bing’s travel search function to make this happen.

One more important point: Facebook “likes” now directly impact Bing search rankings.

As social media marketing and search engine optimization truly become integrated strategies, it is interesting to watch the evolution of Google and Bing. Bing has been non-resistant and welcoming to Facebook, while Google has done its best to develop its own tools that are similar to those created by Facebook, in an attempt to keep the sites and businesses separate. Google has also formed a strong alliance with Twitter. Ultimately, it is now Facebook and Bing vs. Twitter and Google. It’s a little uncomfortable for all of us, don’t you think?

Who will win the U.S. Display Ad Network? Facebook, Google or Yahoo!? [Poll]

• By: John E Lincoln
• Categories: Pay Per Click, Search Engine News
• Comments: 4

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Answer the question below (there are no wrong answers), who will win the battle for the U.S. display network by 2015, Google, Facebook or Yahoo!? Read some compelling figures below.

While Google is still winning the battle for the overall U.S. online ad market, things look quite different when looking only at the U.S. display network. By 2012, Facebook is expected to own 23.8% of the U.S. display advertising network. While Google is only expected to own 16.7% and Yahoo! is projected to own 16.3%.

Facebook is climbing the ranks slowly in the total U.S. online ad marketing, but is dominating in the display arena.

After considering the latest news on the Google Panda update and recent strategic decisions at Facebook and Yahoo!, who do you think will win the battle over the U.S. display advertising network?

Who will be in the lead by 2015? Tell us what you think and why?

Facebook Releases Ability to Tag Pages in Photos

• By: John E Lincoln
• Categories: Facebook, Social Media Optimization
• Comments: 5

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Yep, it is that simple folks. Don’t need to waste a lot time here. Facebook has just made it possible to tag business pages in photos. This has been a feature we have been anticipating for some time now. The ability to tag Facebook business pages in photos went live today, Wednesday, May 11. It has not been pushed out across the entire site just yet, but it will be coming soon.

With the implementation of this update there are a few things to consider…

First, do not worry you can un-tag yourself if necessary. Also, you can take certain measures to ensure your brand does not end up in the wrong picture.

According to Mashable, “Tagged photos will appear in the Photos tab of a Page, rather than on that Page’s Wall, and anyone can tag a Page — even if a user hasn’t “Liked” it. Page admins can also nix photos from the tab by going into Edit Page > Posting Options > and unchecking “Users can add photos.”

In addition, all Facebook privacy setting will still apply to photos. So if you have it set so only certain people can see photos, those same rules will apply as far as who can see the business pages tagged in the photos.

As of right now, Facebook is only allowing Facebook pages showing brands, products and people to be tagged. We expect that they will be rolling out more options in the future.

Are Facebook Open Graph Tags the Future of Social Media Optimization?

• By: John E Lincoln
• Categories: Facebook, Social Media Optimization
• Comments: 0

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I’m sure many of you are familiar with meta tags for search engine optimization. For those of you who are not, they are basically a piece of code you place in the header of your site that tells Google what the page is about. But did you know that there are comparable tags for Facebook? Well there are… In this post we will cover what Facebook Open Graph tags are and why they are important for social media optimization.

According to Facebook, “Open Graph tags are <meta> tags that you add to the <head> of your website to describe the entity your page represents, whether it is a band, restaurant, blog, or something else.”

What do Facebook Open Graph Tags Look Like?

First off, the format for the Open Graph tag template looks like this:

<meta property=”og:tag name” content=”tag value”/>

Now, if you are going to use Open Graph tags on your site you will need to specify the following six tag values. This would go in the quotes at the end of the tag.

• og:title – The title of the entity.
• og:type – The type of entity. You must select a type from the list of Open Graph types. An example of this would be an athlete. The code would be implemented as follows: <meta property=”og:type” content=”athlete” />
• og:image – The URL to an image that represents the entity. Images must be at least 50 pixels by 50 pixels. Square images work best, but you are allowed to use images up to three times as wide as they are tall.
• og:url – The canonical, permanent URL of the page representing the entity. When you use Open Graph tags, the Like button posts a link to the og:url instead of the URL in the Like button code.
• og:site_name – A human-readable name for your site, e.g., “IMDb”.
• fb:admins or fb:app_id – A comma-separated list of either the Facebook IDs of page administrators or a Facebook Platform application ID. At a minimum, include only your own Facebook ID.

So this is a lot to take in, right? Take a deep breath; it is going to be OK. Let’s walk through this piece by piece.

What you need to know about Google Blocked Sites

• By: John E Lincoln
• Categories: Google
• Comments: 1

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Google is now allowing users the option to block certain websites from search results. This new feature is definitely not something to browse over. Because of this, I wrote an extensive post on Search Engine Land covering the topic. The article, titled Google Blocked Sites & Why Making a Good First Impression Matters covered a few key points. In this post will briefly summarize the article.

You now have the option to view a link which lets you block a website whether or not you are logged into a Google account. The option to block a website usually appears after you have visited a site and then bounced back to the Google search results page. Once you are back on the search results page you will have the option to block a site. If you click this option you will need to log into your Google account to confirm the block.

3 Ways to Get Facebook Likes – Earned, Owned and Advertised

• By: John E Lincoln
• Categories: Facebook, Social Media Advertising, Social Media Marketing
• Comments: 1

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We have been talking to Facebook quite a bit lately in an effort to help our clients fully embrace and succeed in social media marketing. This has resulted in us refining our services to the point where we feel very comfortable with our offerings. While that is all well and good, while talking to Facebook three concepts keep arising. In this post I want to share those concepts with you and discuss how they relate to building your Facebook community.

3 Ways to Get Facebook Likes

Those concepts are Earned, Owned and Advertised. These are the primary ways acquire Facebook fans and anyone involved with managing social media needs to understand all three concepts. I really like this method of segmentation because it allows us to easily explain the way that we approach the Facebook community building process here at SEO Inc. So let’s go through this one by one.

Earned Facebook Likes

Earned Facebook likes are the ones you work the hardest for, in my opinion. An earned Facebook like comes about when you develop an awesome piece of content that gets noticed. For example, consider that you do a popular blog post and it gets shared 20 times on Facebook. Assuming that each Facebook user has 130 friends (this is the average number of friends a user has as stated by Facebook) this would result in a distribution potential of 2,600 impressions. This amount of content exposure on Facebook, as well as other social media sites and online properties, would result in you earning Facebook likes. We call this an earned like because you worked hard, came up with the idea and created the content.