FOUR IN TEN OVER 50s USE SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

Almost half of all baby boomers in the UK belong to at least one social networking site, a new study shows.

According to a survey from InSites Consulting, four in ten UK web users over the age of 50 use social networking sites - a figure that amounts to 4.7 million mature social networkers nationwide.

Around 93 per cent of respondents said they know about popular social networking site Facebook, while 35 per cent said they actually use it.

UK boomers are much more enthusiastic about social networks than their Continental cousins, with just 22 per cent of Dutch boomers engaging with the platform.

The survey found that online professional networks such as LinkedIn are also popular with older internet users, although to a much lesser extent than social sites.

"The figures show that these are not just a few isolated individuals using sites such as Facebook," commented Steven Van Belleghem of InSites Consulting.

"We are seeing a clear rising trend amongst the over 50s to make more use of social networks in order to communicate and stay in touch with their family and friends."

Bing a very worthwhile search engine

Microsoft has put aside a HUGE budget to promote Bing. That means at the very least, you will see an early surge of Bing users. If you optimize for Bing today you will see your rankings shoot up. Will Bing last? Time will tell. I plan to optimize for it as much as possible for the chance that it might bring rewards as its Marketing peeks and into the future.

I often see search engine results that don't have meta tags or any other textbook paraphernalia, they often don't even contain the searched keyword

Content can also often be misconstrued in SEO as simply large quantities of keyword-scattered pages. Yet content can be just as much a concept with out hundreds or thousands of text-heavy pages.

Content is certainly critical to achieving the much needed linkage data to surround pages for ranking purposes. Search a major search engine for "foreign currency exchange," "currency converter," and other foreign-currency-related searches. You'll always see XE.com in the top results. It's one page with a banner ad, a tool, and a little bit of instructional text. It ranks for so many popular searches and has done so for years. The page has excellent linkage and, perhaps more important, huge end-user traffic via search.

Links are good. But you can only get links from other people who have Web sites. What about the millions of end users who don't have sites? The only way they can show a search engine their approval of results' relevancy is by voting with clicks.

Google's 5 other search Engines

Google has other search engines besides web search that people use all the time. To rank on them might double your traffic.

YouTube
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. Businesses using online video are going to want to maximize their YouTube efforts by employing some easy strategies to gain more visibility.

Google Image Search
One in five searches are image searches, and that alt tags and file name optimization are key.

Google News
Bruce Clay notes, "News page views are up to trillions monthly." More and more people are getting their news online. That's why the newspaper industry is struggling.


Ranking in Google Maps/Local Search
While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords.

Ranking in Google Blog Search
Looking at positive and negative things that can have an affect on your Google Blog Search Rankings. Among the positives are:
- Number of RSS subscriptions
- Clicks on SERP post links
- Blogrolls
- ability for visitors to tag posts
- whether or not people are tagging them
- References to the blog by sources other than blogs
- Pagerank

How to Make the Best Title Tags:

Brand your traffic
Use the title of your site or brand at the beginning or end of every title tag to help searchers know where they're going and to increase return visits. If you're struggling to find justification for this component, think of all the ad studies showing that consumers are willing to pay more for a "brand name" product than an off-brand or store brand item of the same type - apply this logic to the SERPs and you'll find that users will go further down the rankings to click on a "trusted" brand.

Limit length to 70 characters (including spaces) or less
Engines have fluctuated recently and Google, in particular, is now supporting up to 70 characters in some cases.

Incorporate keyword phrases
Make sure your keyword show prominently in your title tag. It doesn't have to be the first words, but it should be the semantic and logical center of attention.

Target longer phrases if they're relevant
Include in a title tag as many as are completely relevant to the page, while remaining accurate and descriptive. You shouldn't include one term in other page titles - you'll be cannibalizing your rankings by forcing the engines to choose which page on your site is more relevant.

Be consistent
Once you've determined a good formula for your pages in a given section or area of your site, stick to that regimen - you'll find that as you become a trusted and successful "brand" in the SERPs, users will seek out your pages on a subject area.

Repeat in the headline
Re-using the title tag of each page as the H1 header tag can be valuable from both a keyword targeting standpoint and a user experience improvement. Users who go to a page from the SERPs will have the expectation of finding the title they clicked - deliver and you've fulfilled that obligation. Users will be more likely to stay on a page they're reasonably certain fits their intended goal or query.

Target searcher intent
When you're writing titles for web pages, keep in mind the search terms your audience employed to reach your site. If the intent is browsing or research-based, a more descriptive title tag is appropriate.

Check out this tutorial out

If there is one thing you can do its improve your Link Anchor Text

A link’s anchor text, the underlined link text a user clicks on, is important for search engines to confirm the theme or topic of the target page. Text which contains pertinent keywords are the way to go. Stop using “click here”. This will be more useful both to end users and search engine algorithms.

What are your views on PageRank sculpting?

Google’s Matt Cutts sent a shockwave through the advanced SEO community by saying that site owners could no longer perform “PageRank sculpting” using the nofollow tag in the way they’d previously thought. Now Matt’s posted more explanation about the change.

Rodney Bartlett interviews Google's Matt Cutts on Local Search and everything for Small Business Search

Rodney Bartlett interviews Google's Matt Cutts at Pubcon 2007 in Las Vegas. Matt had some excellent tips for small business owners and answered a few great questions on doing your own SEO.

A Boost for Local Businesses

It appears that Google's main motivation behind its new analytics dashboard is to entice more business owners to claim their listings. Google's official blog post and video introducing the dashboard offer some suggestions as to how businesses might use what they learn from the dashboard. Resourceful entrepreneurs will undoubtedly find other ways to leverage it to their advantage. The statistics it provides are basic but a real insight into local search:

* Top search queries people used to find your listing.

* How many people viewed the search engines' results pages where your listing appeared.

* click throughs to view your Maps listing.

* click throughs to get driving directions to your location.

* Zip/postal codes of the searchers who requested driving directions to your location.

* How many people clicked through to your Web site.

When a person comments on a blog or website, who owns the rights to that comment?

Is it the commenter or the blog/website publisher?

The obvious answer, an opinion shared by some prominent bloggers, is that once a commenter comments, they submit the comment with the knowledge they've lost control of that comment forever. Of course, there's more than one way to look at it, but there is also more than one platform (or publishing model) to consider. A newspaper or magazine editor, for example, elects to publish response letters from readers. Not all responses are published, and thanks to some legal language, letter-writers lose ownership of those letters. So why should it be different on a blog!

Stumbling blocks to receiving emails

If the server from which you broadcast the Ezine is black listed you will not get into most networks. Assuming the broadcast is not blacklisted the other stumbling blocks are:

• Some corporate networks only allow listed email to come into their network. Subscribers usually can update the list.
• If you send the images as attachments some servers will strip the attachments out.
• If you link the images, then you have to accept the images manually through the load button on the top left hand side of the email browser. This happens in Internet Explorer in some instances. The default on Internet Explorer is to prevent graphics coming through.

A safe figure to work with is the possibility of only 50% of emailed will get an option to view your email in it's full glory. Best practice recommendation is go with images and give an option for subscribers to go to the web to view the whole page. 'ALT' tags should be used.

For more about emails and open rates for your industry visit: http://kaz.am/email.html

A list of social media sites

I have scoured the Internet to find a quality list of sites that incorporate a sense of socialness to them. Let me know if I'm missing some of your favourites. Its hard to keep track of all the sites, but here goes.

Social Networking Sites

http://consumating.com/

http://www.blogcatalog.com

http://www.linkedin.com/

http://www.ning.com/

http://www.facebook.com/

http://www.myspace.com

http://allconsuming.net

http://www.othersonline.com/

http://www.mybloglog.com

http://www.tickme.com/

http://www.orkut.com/

http://standpoint.com/

http://www.meetup.com/

http://www.43things.com/

http://www.43people.com

http://www.43places.com/

http://www.efamilyties.com/

http://www.9rules.com/

Photo Sites

http://flickr.com/

http://www.slide.com/

Video Networking Sites

http://youtube.com/

http://www.broadcaster.com/

http://www.dailymotion.com/us

http://www.metacafe.com/

http://vsocial.com

http://www.springdoo.com/

Micellaneous Social Sites

http://alexadex.com/ad/

http://www.jot.com/

http://www.spinspy.com/

http://googlemark.org/

http://www.meebo.com/

http://www.slawsome.com

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

http://rollyo.com/

http://quimble.com/

http://www.twitter.com/

http://metawishlist.com/

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc

http://www.rawsugar.com/index.faces

http://www.squidoo.com/

http://wink.com/

http://kinja.com/

http://tailrank.com/

Wiki Sites

http://swicki.eurekster.com/

http://www.wetpaint.com/

http://pbwiki.com/

Job Sites

http://www.jobsinsearch.com/

http://cssbeauty.com/

http://www.pagebites.com/

Organization Sites

http://hipcal.com/

http://www.backflip.com/login.ihtml

http://www.connotea.org/

Tagging Sites

http://www.citeulike.org/

http://www.tagtooga.com/db.tag

http://tagalag.com/

Music Sites

http://odeo.com/

http://www.mystrands.com/

http://www.last.fm/

http://upto11.net/

Political Sites

http://gabbr.com/

http://www.newsvine.com/

http://www.blogniscient.com/

Shopping Sites

http://www.judysbook.com/

Program Sites:

http://www.campfirenow.com/

http://www.basecamphq.com/

Feeds Sites

http://www.feedburner.com/

http://www.tagsy.com/

http://www.feedmeme.com/

http://technorati.com/

Maps Sites

http://www.wayfaring.com/

http://www.frappr.com/

Social Bookmarking Sites:

http://www.blinklist.com/

http://del.icio.us/

http://www.fark.com

http://blogmarks.net

http://smarking.com/

http://segnalo.com/

http://www.shadows.com/

http://www.gifttagging.com/

http://www.simpy.com/

http://www.wists.com/

http://www.feedmarker.com/

http://lilisto.com/

http://ma.gnolia.com/

http://www.faved.net

http://www.spurl.net/

http://www.blummy.com/

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/

http://buddymarks.com/

http://feedmelinks.com/portal

http://www.hyperlinkomatic.com/

http://www.linkagogo.com/

http://unalog.com/

http://tag.zurpy.com/

http://de.lirio.us/

http://www.furl.net/

http://www.linkroll.com/

http://blogmarks.net/

http://www.givealink.org/

http://www.looklater.com/

http://netvouz.com/

http://simpy.com/

Content Rating:

http://www.slashdot.org

http://doggdot.us/

http://www.listible.com/

http://www.digg.com/

http://www.blogmemes.net/

http://www.blinkbits.com/

http://www.netscape.com/

http://www.spicypage.com/

http://www.shoutwire.com/

http://www.youhypeit.com/

http://reddit.com/

http://www.rojo.com/

The Power Of Social Media

2009 has seen the power of social media reach an all-time high with many of us dedicating our time daily to blogs, chat forums and popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Social media is a great and powerful marketing tool. As the popularity of social networking, blogging and web chat continues to rise, it is no secret that those brands who fail to embrace such concepts will find themselves lagging behind competitors and possibly losing out altogether on what is an extremely powerful method of customer engagement and communication.

Good Digital Marketing is Good Direct Marketing

We believe that the boundaries between digital and direct marketing are now blurred. Good digital marketing is good direct marketing.

The only constant in the world of Digital Marketing is change. Google seems to dominate the internet, but it was not so long ago when it was Yahoo who held pole position, and then, Altavista. In today's competitive market you need information that is up-to-date with case studies. This site, with its regular factsheets and stats is designed to help your pitch and target your end results. The search engines never stand still and are continually changing and fine-tuning their methods and filters to deliver accurate and relevant results to the online community. So whether it's PC or Mobile you will over the coming months find everything you need to support your proposal on site.

One day very soon we will all be Digital Marketeers.

If you're looking to attract qualified and targeted traffic to your website or mobile campaign, we're here to help. We cover details of Search Engine Opimisation. PPC, social media optimization and more.

Your feedback will be much appreciated.