Tag Archives: social search

Bing and Google and their social search additions

There’s been some interesting social news from both Bing and Google recently…

Bing have been looking at Facebook and have discovered that 90% of people look for advice from their family and friends and this friend effect heavily influences our purchasing decisions.  (I see this lots of times when women are talking to me about shoes and handbags).  They call it the Friend effect and they’ve incorporated this into social searches – to make your searches more relevant.  Here’s an example I’ve just snipped.  You need to log into Facebook on one tab and change your location in Bing to United States to get this feature by the way. 

image

As your friends like links, then they will appear on your bing results page.

 

Google on the other hand, have released their social search results globally.  I’ve just had a quick look at recent Tweets sharing links from my stream and entered them into Google.  Here are the results shown on Google …

image

whereas Bing have a Twitter stream constantly updating – and results from everyone discussing the Tornado – again from the bing.com site – where my preferences are set to be United States.  This is the live stream from the News tab

image

 

Googles social results are relevant to you when you sign in to your Google account, with Bing, you can either sign in – or connect to yor Facebook account.  Both will add a great dimension to your search results and give you great personalisation.

Come on Bing – roll this out globally – and Google – let me sign in with Facebook.  Why should I HAVE to use my google account.  OAuth is ok you know… Smile 

 

How does SEO actually work?

Search Engine Optimisation seems baffling to those of us who hire a consultant to get our sites higher up the search engine rankings, and frustrating for those of us who have to keep up with all the changes that Google makes to its algorithm to stay one step ahead. (See my blog posts from the other day to see just how much Google has changed SEO.  This infographic  from the Datadial blog makes things a little bit clearer – well a little bit less muddy anyway.

Media_httpwwwdatadial_amssg

Now its more than just meta tags within the html pages.  image file names, Body text, headings and bold text are all counted as are reviews and links.  Embedded images and badges all help too.  So Embed your button wherever you can.  Create one!

It’s good also to see that great activity on social media sites has a good boost for being discovered and discoverable.  Fresh activity on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all contributes to your ranking.  Keep it fresh, keep it relevant and the search engines will reward you for it…