You visit Google because you have a need – a need for information or a product and any salesman will tell you that if you identify the need you’re half way to selling a customer a solution. That’s what Google does – it offers solutions; advertisers pay to be seen as the solution providers – visitors come to click on their ads. Everybody wins; visitors fill a need, vendors sell a product, Google makes ad revenue ($36.5bn in 2011). As more advertisers enter the market they out bid each other forcing the click price up for advertisers, giving Google even more revenue… and that will continue for the foreseeable future (despite a surprise 8 per cent decline in the average cost per click in 2011).

You visit Facebook because… well why do you visit Facebook? Boredom? At a lose end? Usually I’m in a queue or about to snuggle up in bed and am curious to see what my friends (past and present) are up to. See a sales model there? Nope – which is why Facebook are trying to persuade the business world that ‘Facebook users influence each other’s buying decisions’. It’s true that they could of course, but I rarely see it on Facebook; you’d have to assume that people either already had a need for that recommended product and needed a nudge, or were holding spare cash and were easily persuaded to change their ‘Facebook boredom’ mindset to a ‘I need to buy something’ one.

That puts Facebook in the same place as most media companies – ad space as a distraction from looking at something else – they sell ads based on demographics because their readers are ‘the target audience’ but distraction banners average a ‘click through’ of 0.2% whereas Google’s ‘need targeted’ sponsored ads are at least ten times that and usually much more.

All I really check on Facebook now is my newsfeed and for the most part news feed updates that I see are either:

• Comment on breaking news / music / memories
• Comment on the weather
• Comment on kids and pets
• Photos of nights out / weddings
• Funny pictures (most of which stopped being funny via email years ago)
• General moaning (work, in-laws etc.)
• Subtle gloating ‘life doesn’t get much better than this’

As for the status updates from things that I’ve liked (note the tense) – I’ve hidden ALL of those from my feed because they interrupt the flow of miscellaneous trivia being generated by my ‘friends’. I like or liked those companies or products, but I don’t LOVE many of them now… so a promotional post is VERY annoying. Of the Facebook ‘company’ pages that I have been involved with, the ‘Facebook Insights’ data shows that after 3 months most posts are only seen by around 33% of those who originally ‘Liked’ the page (despite the best efforts of all involved). That’s quite telling – if a page says it has 10,000 fans, it’s likely that 6,666 of them have already hidden any communications from their visible Facebook news feed. They took whatever special offer was running to make them ‘Like’, and then blocked out the irrelevant follow-ups… that’s what company promotions are within a social context, they’re irrelevant, and anything else just doesn’t make direct money even if it gets engagement.

Where’s this all leading? Well I have been paying attention for a number of months to web traffic data gathered by Alexa.com (“Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources“.) Alexa shows some interesting trends when comparing Facebook with Google – trends which investors should be aware of.

Firstly as we entered 2012 the number of Facebook visits starting AND ending with a single page view (known as the bounce rate) are gaining and have now matched the same level as Google. This is a worrying sign because Facebook needs ten times as many page views as Google in order to generate the same number of clicks (and ad revenue). At the same time Google’s bounce rate has fallen marginally – suggesting improved repeat search and user experience. Winner? Google.

Secondly between 2010 and 2012 Facebook’s average daily time on site has dropped from around 33 minutes to around 24 minutes. Now 24 minutes is a substantial amount of time per day but it’s 27% less time than was being spent two years ago. Is the decline indicative of visitor apathy? Google’s time on site is largely flat over the same period at 12 minutes per day. Winner? Google.

Thirdly the number of pages being read per day on Facebook is falling – it’s down from 15 per day to 13 per day, for Google the total is largely flat at 12 pages per day. Facebook needs to put a zero on the end of it’s figure to compete on ad revenue. Winner? Google.

Finally from Alexa’s ‘clickstream analysis’ we can see that 8.24% of Facebook visitors are on Google.com before visiting Facebook and 8.24% immediately after visiting Facebook. On the flipside 4.95% of Google’s users are on Facebook before coming to Google, and 4.56% return afterwards. One could also surmise that if 8.24% of Facebook.com users going to Google.com represents only 4.95% of Google’s upstream visits, Google has an ACTIVE user base 66% larger than Facebook. In June 2011, comScore put Google’s worldwide reach at 1 billion unique visitors, if that’s 66% larger than Facebook it puts Facebook’s active monthly account usage at 600 million, not the 800 million frequently quoted in the media. Winner? Google.

So, before we all get carried away with investing in an overpriced Facebook IPO, it’s worth remembering that Google’s share price dropped 10% on the NASDAQ in January because investors were disappointed with their MASSIVE $36.5 billion ad revenue. Given that Facebook ads perform 10 times less effectively on click through than Google’s, the difference in visitor mindset, AND the data they have on me is LESS than what Google have, I wouldn’t ever expect Facebook ad revenue to exceed one tenth of Google’s… and with that in my ‘mindset’ I’m off to buy some shares in Google.

Matt Peskett is Online Marketing Consultant at Firetop  and a Twitter addict (@PensionFunds)

1. Popular YouTube videos appear at the top of Google search results pages (SERPS) alongside standard website listings so it’s quite easy to understand that if you have a popular video in YouTube, titled with your relevant keywords, then it could get you an extra spot in Google search results alongside your main website. The downside is that this traffic will go straight to YouTube so you have the job of ensuring that the video viewer knows your website address and decides to go and visit it for more information. In a way this isn’t an SEO benefit to your site, more a way of grabbing an extra position and keeping a competitor off of the search results.

2. If you create several videos and your own keyword branded YouTube channel to house them all, then you can benefit from the placement of a back-link to your main website on your channel page (a little like the Twitter profile back-link benefit discussed in Part 1). However, creating YouTube videos just for the benefit of an extra back link to help your search engine optimisation probably isn’t a good use of your time and money unless you know you can create a fantastically popular video channel that everybody will link to – and boost the channel’s Google PageRank score.

3. Google likes YouTube embedded videos in content – don’t ask me why this is, but Google seems to give web pages that hold embedded video content a higher position in the results. Bizarrely this means that you don’t need to create the video but simply embed useful videos that you find relevant to your audience into your website. Of the three reasons for using YouTube with SEO in mind, this is probably the most effective and requires the least amount of effort. Of course the ideal is to combine all three ideas and embed your own YouTube videos into your web pages.

Optimising your videos within YouTube itself is something quite different but does impact on ‘1’ above – since only a popular video makes its way into the Google results. Therefore you need to consider the following factors when uploading a new video:

1. Make your video informative, interesting and snappy ( 5 minutes or less).
2. Give it an optimised title (using your target search terms and website name) e.g. How to save money on car rentals – car-rentals.co.uk.
3. Optimise your video description. Include keyword based informative content in the description (more info) of your video and link to your website from it – ideally do this in the first line – to appear in the main YouTube descriptor.
4. Ensure that your keyword tags are relevant and contain most of the search terms you used in your title and description. As with SEO try and avoid keyword stuffing.
5. On your main website aim to create hyperlinks to your YouTube video URL containing keyword-rich anchor text.
6. Watermark the video with your URL and use an interesting freeze frame shot.
7. Create and customize your own YouTube channel using search terms to create a keyword friendly URL. Consider the creation of multiple channels for multiple niches.
8. YouTube’s internal site search factors in other rules including the video’s rating, total views, how many times the video has been favourite. The age of the video is also a factor because new videos tend to appear more highly to keep YouTube looking fresh.
9. Ask all your friends to vote and view your video, share it on your Facebook profile page to help with video ranking.
10. Post your videos towards the end of the week, weekends are YouTube’s busiest days (for a B2C audience anyway).

That about covers search engine optimisation and YouTube, both the indirect benefits to your main SEO strategy and also the methods of optimising your videos within YouTube’s own search results. I’d really like to be selling the virtues of this hyped up video technology but personally I’ve only really found it useful for showing clips of the Oompa Loompas and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to my 2 year old daughter…

A professional developer has to test multiple browser platforms with each new Website build and create CSS work-arounds to fit the whole gamut of versions, this ensures that a consistent screen display occurs for the majority of people. For the website funder / customer this means more time spent and consequently a more costly development. One could argue that the BBC headline may as well be ‘Microsoft to make Web development more expensive until 2014’.

Given the recent Twitter hashtag popularity on ‘IE6 Must Die’ we would have hoped that Microsoft might have paid attention to the Web developer community! However, as they appear to have done quite the opposite we shall continue to test multiple browser versions via a single PC on an IE6 simulator. This isn’t particularly straight-forward until you look into it and discover Microsoft’s free Virtual PC 2004 download and associated ‘VPC images’:

1. Download Virtual PC 2004

2. Download a suitable Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image
Here there are many VPC images for IE6, 7 and 8 on XP SP3 and they provide the only really stable and well supported browser testing environment that we can find. The VPC images currently expire on 31st August 2009 so here’s hoping that with the new IE6 support announcement new VPC Images will be loaded in the next few weeks! September update: new VPC images expire January 1, 2010 – PHEW!

There’s rather a lot of Twitter rhetoric being bandied about in the Web marketing industry these days so naturally a common question that’s been coming from Firetop clients is “Would being on Twitter help our search engine positioning?” and my short answer on this is “Indirectly yes, but nothing momentous“.

In my opinion the biggest SEO benefit of Twitter is in providing a publishing vehicle that you can syndicate onto a website’s home page to provide an element of freshly updated daily content. We’ve known for years that Google weights pages that have daily content on them more favourably than those that stay static for long periods of time, so in this way one might argue that Twitter post syndication helps SEO. However, by the same token you could just as easily change your home page content daily through some other means like a Content Management System.

If you’ve already decided to seriously embrace Twitter for the benefit of marketing to that social medium then of course you may decide to use Tweets on your home page for SEO as it’s really not much extra work to implement (typically). Micro-blogging with 140 characters via Twitter takes almost no time at all versus full article blogging and if fresh content for SEO is your primary goal then it does the job. It’s important to remember though that saying something useful, on topic and of consequence is important on Twitter in order to drive followers who will be seeing your regular Tweets.

Your Twitter followers do provide a potential link building source if they like what you are saying and decide to investigate your main site as a consequence of your mini biog link (which incidentally is one extra back-link). If you are writing blogs you can promote each newly published blog entry via Twitter to your followers, which again means that you might more quickly generate back-links assuming followers are in a similar field and that what you have produced is useful content that they want to promote on their own blogs or ‘Retweet’.

Finally, in addition to the extra biog back-link already mentioned above, your personalised Twitter profile page does provide an opportunity to have an additional Google search result listing – separate to your main website’s. Remember that your Twitter profile name appears at the start of the page’s <title> tag (still the most important tag for SEO in my eyes) so it’s important to make use of the 20 or so <title> characters you use there… within reason! The more useful your Tweets, the more followers you will gain and the more links your profile page might gain – making the back-link you have there more valuable too.

To summarise, all of these small search engine optimisation gains from Twitter are indirect and in my opinion it’s really not worth considering Twitter for commercial gain unless you  intend to fully maximise Your Twitter experience…

DECEMBER 2009 > An update on this topic which all changed with Real Time Search Results!

Great Hitwise article on Twitter about the key uses of Twitter.