facebook is Google’s biggest competitor

In the news last week, I read a very interesting article in the Times about how facebook is the biggest rival to Google.

According to Hitwise, for the week ending March 13th, facebook got more traffic than Google in America. Who would have thought this social neworking site set up by Mark Zuckerberg would have achieved this milestone.

Facebook now has more than 400million active users which makes it the third most populous “country” behind India and China. In the UK, it has more than 23million users, or a third of the population. The speed at which facebook is growing is staggering. Visits to facebook has increased 185% in the last year and Google’s number of visits has increased by 9%

There is a threat to Google, called “discovery” which is the finding of products/services on facebook that has been recommended by friends. More people will go onto facebook and search for products and reviews from their friends and peers instead of searching on Google. However, this information within facebook cannot be seen by Google as customers have to sign in to their account.

Social media is changing the search landscape. More people will be using social networking sites to find out news and information. Even Google wanted to get onto the social media band wagon with “buzz” but it failed to have made any headway in that area. People spend a lot of time on social media sites. According to Nielsen, facebook is the third most visited site with 2.5billion hits in February 2010 which is close to Yahoo’s 2.7 billion and Google’s 3billion. So Google better watch out, it doesn’t want to lose its position as the number 1 search engine.

Kids facebook – Moshi Monsters

If your children are too young for facebook, they may be using a kids site called moshi monsters.

Michael Acton Smith set up the social networking site for kids in 2004. Last week it reached 15 million members, and according to Hitwise is the quickest growing site online. It is now one of the biggest sites for children.

Welcome to Moshi Monsters

Children login to the site and adopt a monster which they create from 1 of 6 basic designs. Each monster has name and the children can choose the colour of their own little monster. The graphics are amazing as well, you can tell the founder was inspired by Pixar.

Parents do not have to worry about their children on this site as privacy is very important and users are unable to post photos and send messages. Conversations are also monitored and filtered. I was really impressed with the terms and conditions for the site. Everyone has to accept these before they are allowed to enter the site and play games.

Rules for Moshi

The monster has to be regularly fed and interacts with others in the virtual town. Users can also get virtual pets called “moshlings”. You can get your own moshling by planting the right combination of seeds. You can learn online, maths puzzels, spelling and play games, all for free. The site is educational, perhaps the 21st century edition of Sesame Street. The kids come from all over the world with a third coming from the UK and the US. It was originally aimed for 7 – 11 year olds but now there are players as young as 3 years old. The site is all about learning and where kids can be kids.

Last year the number of visits to the site grew by 424% and this year it is set to grow even more. Michael Acton Smith has signed a book deal for Christmas and has licensed the track “Hey Mickey” for “Hey Moshi”. 2010 is set to be the year for Moshi Monsters.

For more information, please read the feature from the Evening Standard.

How to optimise a video on YouTube

I often have clients who produce a video to promote their new product and ask for help to optimise it. This means the video has all the correct tags in place to make sure it is easily picked up in in universal search.

YouTube

Here are a few tips I recommend for those wanting to optimise their videos
1. Title & Description
The title should contain a good keyword phrase , it needs to be short as YouTube limits the length.
The description can be 2-3 sentences and should contain keywords and variations of keywords.
Include a URL link at the start of the description. By default, the description is almost hidden, but the link you create
will still be visible if it is at the beginning.

2. Tags

Include at least 5-7 relevant keywords as tags for your video eg if you have a cake business and are advertising a new cake for Mother’s Day you may want to consider the following:

Mother’s day cake, bake cake for mother’s day, making cakes, cake for mum

It is important to use tags that will associate your video with other videos that use the same tags.
When people watch a different video, yours will be shown as a related video hence getting more views from people
who were originally watching other videos.

3. Provide transcripts of your videos

Write on page copy next to the video which will be indexed by the search engines and help you to rank higher. This will be in the description part. I would recommend you put this under the text

“http://www.bake-a-cake.co.uk Bake a cake shows you how easy it is to make a cake from scratch. Show your mother you care and bake the best cake for Mother’s Day.

4. Offer the option to embed your video

Links from other websites to your website or video, are very important in SEO

An embedded video is when someone puts the YouTube video into their own website. It works same way as an
inbound link. Promote your video to people who might embed it or link to it.
Use the video as a portal with links to related content on your site

5. Keep the video to under 3 minutes. Make it short and concise and exciting to watch !! Make it relevant and
interesting.

6. Allow users to rate your video

The videos that receive higher ratings from users are the ones that users tend to favourite and save.

7. Brand the video with the company logo

This way you are generating brand awareness with your site bake-a-cake.

8. Link to the videos using important keywords in the anchor text – eg bake a cake, mother’s day cake, mum’s cake. You need to make sure the keywords are the same ones you are using on your site.

So there you have it, a few simple ways to optimise your video for Universal Search.

Happy Birthday Yahoo!

Yahoo! turned 15 years old this week.

Happy Birthday Yahoo!

Yahoo! was started by David Filo and Jerry Yang both Ph.D students at Stanford University. It was originally a student hobby as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the internet; It started life in February 1994 in a student trailer and now is a global brand. Once called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” it is of course now know as Yahoo! which is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”

People from outside of Stanford began accessing their guide and by autumn 1994 it celebrated its first million hiy day which was almost 100 thousand unique visitors and by March 1995 the founding members incorporated the business. By the next month, Sequoia Capital, (who has invested in Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems) agreed to fund Yahoo! with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.

As stated on Yahoo!’s webiste, it is now a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 345 million individuals each month worldwide.
Yahoo! has its HQ in Sunnyvale, California with offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and other parts of the United States.

cake is from filckr

YouTube and auto-captioning

YouTube announced earlier this week that it will start giving all videos on the site access to its auto-captioning technology. There are two benefits to this:

1. Deaf viewers will now be view and understand YouTube videos
2. Better search and advertising opportunities on the site.

YouTube has allowed video creators to add captions to YouTube since 2006 but transcribing was expensive and time consuming. Creators of videos and users can now request video transcription

So what does this mean?
Having searchable text has huge potential for search capabilities in YouTube.
This is a beta launch and will continue to develop over the next few months, but it means that it will be easier to search for auto-caption videos. As you may be aware, YouTube is owned by Google and this is a step in the direction of improving its search technology.

This new feature will also mean it is more accessible to speakers of different languages. English subtitles can be added into any of the 50 languages supported by Google’s translation service.

This is great news for those hearing impaired who were previously unable to take advantage of YouTube. Now they can watch all the YouTube videos without having to download any additonal software.

The other benefit of having auto-captioning is for advertisers. it will help brands serve ads relevant to specific parts of YouTube videos.

How will it work?
When you upload a video to YouTube, you will be able to create an automatic caption of the clip’s soundtrack. You will then be able to download the subtitles file to the personal computer in a SUB or SRT file format. If you have already uploaded a video, then you will be prompted to add captions for existing content.

Interesting to see how this feature develops. Read more information about YouTube on Mashable