I found a great list of social media sites beyond the obvious ones. Check out my post about them over at the Ogilvy PR Blog. Social Networks will continue to pop up on every topic you can think of. Eventually something like Google’s OpenSocial will link them all together, and social networks will be like air.

I just returned from a 10 day vacation in Israel with my girlfriend.  While traveling I met a guy named Elazar Heim, who is a Product Manager for Sightix.  Sightix is a social search platform offered as a service for social networks that returns personalized relevant results to their users.  Google has been trying to improve the relevancy of search results via personalized search for a while now.  There is no question in my mind that this type of technology is the next step in the evolution of search.  As social networks become a ubiquitous feature of being on the internet, Sightix social search will become more practical.  Could Facebook’s implementation of this type of social search engine be the real Google Killer?  

I was surprised to see that a Squidoo lense for FriendFeed did not already exist, so I went ahead and created one. The lense is currently fairly basic. It has a brief description of what FriendFeed is, pulls in blog posts about FriendFeed from Google’s Blog Search, pulls in content from del.icio.us that is tagged with the keyword “friendfeed”, and finally has a list of all the social sharing sites with a short description that can be pulled into your friendfeed. I learned about some pretty cool social sites like Disqus, Tumblr, Jaiku, and Goodreads. Go check it out and tell me what you think. Definitely sign up for FriendFeed if you haven’t already.

Hitwise reports search engine traffic breakdown… Google is Killin’ it!

Google - 67.9%; Yahoo - 20.3%; Microsoft - 6.3%; Ask - 4.2%; Other - 1.4%

Fresh targeted content and links are the two most important components of search engine optimization. Do the following and you will kill two birds with one stone:

1. Write as many tidbits of advice / words of wisdom / how to’s / fun facts etc… as you can think of that are geared towards the topic of your website. They should be no more than a couple sentences each, a small paragraph at most (try to get at least a few hundred to start - this is why you may want to hire a copywriter for this. I recommend LifeTips. Make sure to do your keyword research so you know what keywords to target. I use Keyword Discovery.
2. Create a page on your site called “Daily ____ Tips” ( or “knowledge nuggets” or “how to’s”, etc…)
3. Create an RSS feed that will present your tips as you upload them daily (How to create an RSS feed)

By creating an RSS feed of daily tips related to your website you provide fresh content for the search engine spiders to crawl daily. Having this information in a feed allows others to syndicate this content on their sites, which will always link back to your site. In my opinion this is the best SEO tip in the book. What’s your best SEO tip?

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch has reported that Google will launch Friend Connect on Monday. Like Myspace’s Data Availability and Facebook Connect this will allow users to bring their social profiles, friend lists, and away messages with them as they visit different sites. The “walled gardens” of social networks are breaking down.  Social networks will become ubiquitous with launching your internet browser.  Who will be the first to provide the service that is most conducive to allowing this social internet to thrive? My money is on Google? What do you think?

I just came across a great post by Chris Silver Smith, lead Search Strategist at NetConcepts, about the benefits of Flickr for search engine optimization. This is a strategy I considered about a year ago for a casino hotel account I worked on at BKV, but never did anything about. Now that I’m working with leaders of the social media space on Ogilvy PR’s 360 Digital Influence team, I’m excited to present this strategy. If you’ve had any experience using Flickr for SEO please share…

I’ve got a fairly large international SEO project a head of me, so I’ve been scouring the internet to learn everything I can about the best ways to appear in search engines in other countries.  Here are seven pretty basic tips to international SEO:

1.  Identify the language with the Meta tag: <meta name=”Language” content=”CN”>   (for China)
2. Use domain extensions of the country (.fr, .co.uk, .cn)
3. Provide crawlable text using the native language.
4. Include street addresses within the country
5. Obtain inbound links from the sites in the country you wish to do SEO.
6. Host the site in the country
7. Spell words accordingly for similar languages (”optimization” in the US vs. “optimisation” in the UK)

Here’s a great illustration showing the above.  

Here is a direct quote from the Adwords support pages:

“Google’s Gmail service, which is part of the content network, also displays AdWords ads. Gmail ads are placed by Google computers using the same automated process that matches relevant AdWords ads to web pages and newsletters. If our automatic filters detect that the topic of the email is sensitive, no ads are shown.”

What does that last line mean?  How does Google define “sensitive”?  Our ads show up on x-rated sites, but somehow Google knows if your email too sensitive to have ads show up.  I would love to know how this filter works?  Any ideas?

I recently posted on 360 Digital Influence’s group blog, How Search Engine Marketing Can Help Measure Word of Mouth.  I talked about the importance of defining and measuring goals when conducting an SEM campaign to promote Word of Mouth efforts, or the illusive request of “increased awareness.”  When there is no sale taking place on the site it becomes difficult to measure ROI, and thus difficult to optimize the campaign.  After reading this great article, Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever?, by Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics Evangelist for Google, I think we should be talking about bounce rate. “In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”.  This is the metric we in the Word of Mouth industry need to start focusing on.  Once we can readily adjust campaigns based on bounce rate, we can move on to loftier goals like getting people to download that widget or comment on that blog, but first we need to get people to stay on the site for longer than 5 seconds.