Facebook’s timeline rollout, which is due to happen this week, could leave users without a good understanding of their account security settings with a completely open profile – and one which stretches right back to the day they signed up for the site.

So what are the implications of this?

Writing on the Guardian’s work blog, Philip Landau points out that once Timeline has been enabled on your account, you have seven days to review all the information you have ever posted before it is set live.

“But this is a positive security step you need to take. The default position is that Timeline will lay bare your Facebook history,” he warns.

Even the most security conscious of all of us will have no doubt failed to make a couple of photo albums private, or forgotten to only show our status updates to a custom audience, but this can prove bad news if you are on the job hunt.

In January last year, figures released by Careerbuilder.co.uk found that 53 per cent of employers use social networking sites to carry out research into candidates. If you’ve recently applied for a job and your Twitter followers list has jumped one up, then your prospective boss might be one of the four per cent of employers who said they use the site to find out about job seekers.

Unsurprisingly, 12 per cent of employers use Facebook to check up on people looking for a position, with more than 40 per cent carrying out simple search engine queries to gather information.

There are two steps which can be taken here, Landau writes. Either swot up on your security and make sure your

Timeline is only available to your friends, or look on it as an opportunity to impress a potential boss.

“A candidate who comes across as shy and retiring at interview but is able to present their “real self” online could find this acts as an extended CV, especially if their blogs are well-written and show positive interests,” he points out.

Figures from Awareness Networks showed that since May last year, more than 48 hours of video content is uploaded to YouTube every minute, demonstrating the popularity of video as a medium with internet consumers, and also showing the potential of video marketing and advertising.

In a blog about online video marketing on Socialnomics, social media specialist Mike Lewis puts it bluntly, stating that “no other tool in your marketing toolbox delivers the bang for your buck like video content”.

In the post, Mike details four main reasons why online video marketing is vital for brands trying to boost their profile, and points three and four are particularly interesting. Reason number three highlights the importance of video for inbound marketing and SEO, pointing out that website browsers spend an average of two more minutes on sites which have video content. In terms of SEO, Socialnomics turns to a Forrester study to back up its point – according to this work, a product page containing a video is 53 times more likely to get onto the first page of Google results.

Reason number four is that several surveys of marketers show that the majority expect to increase their spend on online video marketing and leave television and display advertising behind – and if your competitors are using videos, you need to be too.

Online video marketing can be used in a number of different ways, but two of the most popular are promotional videos about a brand itself or short adverts tacked onto the front of popular YouTube videos.
Those watching videos online are a captive audience, and brands targeting adverts at the start of YouTube videos should ensure their focus is on snappy and engaging adverts which get quickly to the point and give customers immediate access to the information they need to make a purchase.

Following on from this update, Google has now rolled out “Google Freshness” that is said to affect up to 35 percent of queries.  This does not necessarily mean that all keywords are affected by this update; so far, it seems this update relates to date related queries e.g real time football scores, TV programmes, election results or events.

What this means is if you type in the keyword “Manchester United”, you can see that the top result is now the premier league website.  This latest result shows the next game against Bolton and the last game played which incidentally happened to be against Manchester City (where we won 2-3, but that is besides the point).  The point is that the top result shows the latest information about Manchester United.

This is “Google Freshness”, Google wants to show the best results for users and feel that users typing in Manchester United are looking for the latest scores or fixtures or news.

This means that if you blog about a recent programme on TV or a football team, you would need to then blog about every single show or game after to ensure you stay top.

It is rumoured that since Google now crawls Social websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google +, it can see from various Social signals what content users are sharing and are genuinely interested in.  The RSS feed is also useful in helping Search Engines determine which content is the freshest from a website.

How can this work for your website?

It doesn’t matter, the size of your website, creating fresh new, unique and engaging content will help.  “Freshness” has increased the value of having a Blog on your website and also increased the value of RSS feeds.  Blogs have always been useful but now they are more useful than ever. Adding a blog could mean that your website is indexed quicker than ever and by placing anchor text within your Blog to other pages in your website, you are making yourself more visible than ever!

Google has recently made changes to its social search which put focus heavily on profiles, posts and photos from its Google+ social networking site. While the membership figures for Google+ might suggest this is a wise move – some reports have estimated its membership to now be between 60 and 70 million – the number of people with an account does not necessarily tally with the amount of active members.

A quick test of this new search function – typing my own name into the Google search box – shows the changes immediately. My Google+ profile is the seventh result  on the first page, with my Twitter account one place above. Move over to Google Images and the first result is my profile picture. The third, fourth, fifth and eighth are the profile images of people I have in my friendship circles.

This move to more personalised results was described by Google as a step which will create a “search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships” – but will it actually be useful?

An example Google uses is that those searching for an ideal holiday destination could be guided to photographs from the place added by their Google+ acquaintances, but is this really a useful option for getaway planners? Wouldn’t they rather be taken to the country’s tourist information site, or a cheap flight comparison website?

Most of us still get our social networking fix from Zuckerberg and the crew over at Facebook and Google’s changes may simply be a tactic to try and boost interest in its own social networking options – but is personalised search the best way to encourage interaction from Facebook loyal internet users?

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;

2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following

3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

This will not really come as much of a surprise to many in the SEO industry due to the fact that ever since Google launched their own social media platform Google Plus last year there has been a significant push towards delivering the end user a richer and more personalised experience. For some time now savvy internet users have questioned some of the overall relevancy of certain search queries but if you have website returned in a search query returned because your best friend recommended it, well what can be better or more trusted than that?

This latest development form Google has not everybody happy and a few people – namely the big wigs at Twitter whose official response to the news was “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the internet.

“Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million tweets every day on virtually every topic. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users.”

However, Google countered this argument by saying that that Twitter and also Facebook have made it a lot harder for them to include results from their websites by limiting the access that their search engine spiders can collect.

So are Google unfairly using their position as the most powerful internet company in the world to drive more web traffic via their own social media platform? Or are they merely breakdown the barriers between online search and social media by bringing the two another step closer together?

One thing is for sure 2012 is already hotting up to be another exciting and intriguing your for SEO.

By Barry Ryan

For users unfamiliar with Twitter, the @ sign lets you add other users to your tweets, a bit like a call out, this will be posted on the other users homepage, the Hashtag # is used to highlight keywords in a Tweet and the RT, this is normally placed before a “Re-tweet” is to show that a message has been re-tweeted (this can be used to highlight good feedback or other interesting tweets to your followers).

Research!

There are many ways to manage a Social Media campaign but it is important before you commence a campaign to figure out exactly what you want to achieve from it. Is it to manage customer services and client expectations? Or is to to sell stuff? Do you want to create a fan base by offering excellent, engaging content to become more visible in the search results? Do your research and discover how your customers are using Twitters and what they are saying about you before decide how to engage your customers.

I recently had an issue with a large mobile phone provider. I have been with this provider for many years and was extremely disappointed with the resolution offered from the customer services department and voiced my opinion on Twitter by placing the company name in the Tweet using the @ sign followed by #customerservice and #fail. Surprisingly I received an immediate response from the Social Media team at the service provider and my complaint was handled and resolved to my full satisfaction within hours of Tweeting which was excellent. I followed my first “moaning” Tweet with a thank you, again naming the business to ensure that this was visible on their Twitter homepage and then proceeded to tell all my colleagues about it and the fab customer service I had received!

Moral of this story?? If you monitor conversations about your business and stay actively involved in these conversations, you can control any negative feedback and turn it into a positive experience for an unhappy user.

I see lots of competitions on Twitter requesting users follow them to have the chance to win and IPAD 2 or an Iphone 4 etc, whilst this will work and people will follow, the real trick then is to keep these followers engaged. The question has to be asked, will you benefit from these followers and will they value and share your information?

Personally I follow some sports stars to keep up to date with news about my beloved Manchester United, I follow fellow SEO enthusiasts to keep up to date with industry news and I also follow some of my favourite brands for sales news and new products launches etc. In regards to tweeting, my personal profile is more used to re-tweet or share good quality articles or content online, I might share a great product that I come across on a website and of course more recently I used it to complain!!

Professional or Personal?

Should you choose a professional business presence with a branded business page or should you use a personal profile for an employee to engage your users on behalf of your company? Branded pages are great for industry news, providing customer service and competitions etc. A personal profile is good if you want your business to have a more personal presence online, it is still important however to have a branded personal profile page to ensure that users are aware that an individual is representing your business i.e. @daniellefromaddpeople or @addpeople_dan.

You then need to develop your reputation as being a trusted provider of information, this does not necessarily involve building your followers but ensuring that you are viewed as an expert in your field. When this is established you will soon start to build followers and have your information re-tweeted. Being an industry expert means that you cannot push solely sales and marketing messages at your followers, users will just choose not to follow you anymore. Keep your tweets conversational or personal and keep sales messages to the minimum.

Get Going!

Twitter is a great platform to stay in touch with your customers, although research is important, what is more important is to actually get up and get started! Don’t spend weeks and weeks thinking up your strategy, get your hands dirty and get stuck in before it’s too late and you have missed all the best bits of conversation.

But one of the oldest ways to generate interest and create content about your website is press releases. In fact even before there was something called the World Wide Web and Google, companies used Press Releases as a way and means to communicate new services and products they were able to offer to their customers. In many ways this hasn’t really changed and when done in the right way Press Releases can have many plus points for your website and online marketing strategy.

First of all it is worth noting that Press Releases still have to have many of the SEO principles that you would find in other forms of SEO content (for example in a well written blog post) the Press Release needs to be keyword rich, be engaging and read well. If you are a new business then the audience what sets you apart what can you offer that no one else can? If you are an established business then what new products and services are you set to offer your customers?

Remember that a Press Release is essentially a form of PR for your business and is a great way to sculpt and create your Companies image and how you want to be perceived by the world. Press Release websites are more often than not very established within the search engines and thus carry a lot of weight if your website appears on them. A well written press release can also offer one of the best ways that there is to get high quality traffic back to your website. Why? Because people reading your press release are interested in your market place and what you can potentially offer them and remember that better quality traffic to the website will resulting more conversions once they are on your website.

You may have seen the adverts recently where by a women uses only her voice to search the internet for a catalogue of films and books related to the X-Men films before finally choosing one and then watching it with her family. The obvious unique selling point of this is that she does it all from the comfort of her chair by only using her voice.

This is exciting in itself as it does cast some life on the future of search and how the use of voice recognition is going to play a big part in how users look and find relevant information. Microsoft will also of recognised the potential captive audience it has for this new technology via its xbox Kinect system. The Kinect became the biggest selling console of 2011 and potentially the millions of people who bought one will be using Bings new search system to browse the web. A very clever way of using their own technology and hardware to steer users in the direction of Bing and thus giving them a bigger slice of the search market share.

Although voice recognition technology has been used to varying degrees of success in the past it seems that finally the likes of Microsoft, Google & Apple have really found how to best utilise the technology  to really improve the end users experience and the intelligence and interaction of these systems seems set to get better and better over the next few years.

When it comes to business, these two words separated don’t really scream useful, but bring them together and you have a new generation of resource; the online generation.

Obviously there’s a lot of different levels of usage for social media. Today we’re going to discuss what to do if you’re completely new to this vibrant side of the internet, so we’ll start slow.

The biggest players in social media are Facebook, Twitter and YouYube, so it makes sense to be involved with all three, at the very least. Create a facebook profile, log in to Youtube and give some details about yourself, that sort of thing. Having a profile is the first step to visibility in social media.

It’s important that we spend time adding friends across all social media platforms too. Start with people you know, but try to expand your circle as best you can, to increase your visibility online.

The next step is creating interest. Are there ever any events, services or products that you think might be interesting for the outside world to see? Maybe how something is built, or how your team work together? The possibilities for telling people about these ‘behind the scenes’ events are endless, but start with something you feel you can handle.

The next bit is simple, but probably the most important. Take your idea, and blog it. Write about it on twitter and facebook. Upload a photo and attach that too. Record a video clip and upload it to YouTube. Basically – get your own content onto your profile, and give people a reason to look at your profiles.

Once you’ve connected to the social media world, don’t forget to share it. Send your videos to facebook, share your status updates  as tweets. These social media websites play well together, and need to take advantage of this. There’s a million and one sites like facebook, twitter and youtube, so think about branching out too.

In reality, these really are small steps in a big world of online interaction, but more importantly it’s a start. Having a profile on social media sites gives you access to a world of brands, companies but more importantly, customers. Ignoring social media really is like ignoring your customers – take it for granted, and you may regret it!

Luckily, technology giant Microsoft realises that for many internet users, updating computer software is something easily forgotten, and the software firm has recently announced plans to “silently” update users to the newest version of its Internet Explorer browser.

Using outdated versions of a browser can be both risky and frustrating, with older versions of IE unable to support certain types of web content and also leaving a machine vulnerable to more sophisticated and recent malware scams.

Many phishing scams target those using out-of-date software, luring them to install fake updates which are in fact viruses that can lead to a computer becoming corrupted and unusable.

Microsoft IE head Ryan Gavin explains: “The web overall is better – and safer – when more people run the most up-to-date browser. The biggest online threat these days is socially engineered malware, which typically targets outdated software like web browsers.”

From January next year, Microsoft is planning to update all IE users to the most modern version of its browser. Many less than technologically savvy users may not even be aware of the version they are currently using, or just how out of date it is, so the news is certainly positive for general internet safety.

Those who want to move on from IE to a different browser – Firefox or Chrome for example – can also opt out of the automatic update plan, and users who have already declined update requests for Internet Explorer 8 or 9 will also be exempt from the silent update scheme.

The silent updates will begin in Australia and Brazil, and UK users can expect to be running the latest version of Internet Explorer before the end of 2012. Once the update is complete, users will see the same home page they had before when they open the net, and default browser and search provider settings will also remain unchanged.