In an interview with BusinessWeek, social media giant Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, stated that some of it’s biggest advertisers have boosted their spending by over ten times in the last year, with some even increasing by as much as twenty times.

“Two years ago big brands were experimenting with us,” she said. “They started buying with us a year ago. Now they’re going big.”

Facebook recently reported it had reached the 500 million member mark, and with every new member that signs up, comes fresh new pages on which to place ads. And half it’s users return to the site every single day, creating a great opportunity for advertisers to have their ads seen multiple times. Despite this, however, advertising prices have remained stable so far.

Display ads, which usually appear as boxes of pictures, text and video on webpages, are the main source of Facebook’s ad growth, and according to EMarketer Inc, spending on this type of advertising is expected to increase 13% to $8.56 billion in the US this year.

Finding ways to monetize social media and convincing firms to invest has been a difficult task, but it seems that advertisers are now really taking this avenue very seriously, and with a target audience of this size, it would be very difficult to ignore.

Most companies use an SEO specialist to handle their brand’s online presence, and employ link building services to assist in a number of ways. To integrate Facebook and other social media into an online campaign, the link building service can be used to place text links on third party websites, linking directly to the brand’s social media pages and advertisements.

Link building services are most widely used to boost search engine rankings, however, and form a vital part of an overall online advertising campaign.

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Google has finally entered the online travel market with the acquisition of US travel search specialist company, ITA Software, for $700 million, outbidding Expedia, Travelport and Kayak. ITA software is used by many of the major travel agencies and travel comparison sites to search, organize and check availability of airline flights, fares and departure and arrival times.

Although Google hasn’t stated exactly how it will incorporate this new software and information into it’s search service, it claims that it will “…create a new, easier way for users to find better flight information online, which should encourage more users to make their flight purchases online.” It says the move is pro-consumer, and will benefit passengers, airlines and online travel agencies, and will ultimately drive more potential customers to the airlines and travel agencies’ websites.

Google also has an advantage in this area as it is a highly trusted site, and this could encourage people who were previously reluctant to book online due to trust issues with smaller sites, take the plunge.

Many travel industry insiders, however, are worried that this will give Google too much power and could give them too much influence over the industry, though Google is still honoring existing agreements that ITA has with it’s partners.

In the future, it is possible that Google may decide to sell flight tickets directly, which would pose a considerable threat to it’s competitors, and increase the need for them to bolster their online activities, and visibility, through traditional SEO techniques like link building.

Google’s foray into the travel market is long overdue in the eyes of some, and Microsoft already has it’s own Bing travel search service.

Experian Hitwise, used by SEO specialists as a source of search data and analysis, has been monitoring the top 20 “downstream” industries from Google since 2006, where it already noticed that travel was one major area that Google had not branched into. A list of the top 20 downstream industries for June 2010, available from the Hitwise website, shows that Google has involvement in almost all of them, barring travel.

Google is the number one source of traffic to travel agencies accounting for 15% of upstream clicks in June, and accounting for a huge 32% of all upstream clicks to destination and accommodation websites.

These figures clearly highlight the ongoing importance of an effective SEO campaign, using techniques like employing a link building service via a digital agency, to ensure that travel firms maximize their positions in search engine results. No online travel company can seriously expect to succeed without it.

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Most online companies are now aware that link building is an absolutely vital part of an online advertising campaign. Gaining good quality links on websites, that link back to your own website, serves a number of purposes. The particular area which a company chooses to focus on will depend on what it’s online advertising goals are and what it negotiates with it’s digital agency.

Here are five different types of link building and the reasons for employing them:

TO GAIN MORE TRAFFIC

Your aim may simply be to gain more visits to your site from internet users. The best way to do this is to research other sites, which are relevant to, or compliment, your own site and which are already receiving a decent amount of traffic. There are a number of online tools and services which can assist in this research such as Google AdPlanner or Compete.

By placing links on these sites, you are increasing the chance of receiving visits to your site by potential customers of the right type – almost like an online referral. For this type of linking a mixture of free, paid, dofollow and nofollow links can be used.

TO BOOST SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS

The aim here is to increase your site’s performance within search results for specific keywords and the main job of an SEO agency. For example, if Statusmedia wishes to rank highly for “link building service” the links would be placed using link building service as the anchor text.

The links need to be dofollow and can be placed on blogs, directory submissions, signatures on forum posts, publishing press release articles and gaining organic links on relevant external sites.

TO BOOST PAGERANK

PageRank is widely regarded as one of the best ways to gauge a website’s importance to Google. PageRanking runs on a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest. It is gained by having links to your site from external sites, and the higher the PageRank of the site where your link is placed, the more it contributes to increasing your site’s PageRank. “Link Juice” is a term commonly used to describe the feeding of PageRank from one site to another.

Online tools like SEO Quake let you view site’s PageRank and help identify which sites may be best to try to gain links from.

TO IMPROVE YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION

It may be important for you to simply boost your company’s profile online or to bolster your reputation as a serious business. The placement of links in this case, will centre around using your name or company name as the anchor text, and linking to various parts of your online presence such as social media profiles and blogs as well as your main website.

The links themselves could be placed within your own website linking, for example, to your Facebook profile or Twitter stream, or linking from any one of these components to another. The overall aim is to bring as much positive information about your business and website to users attention via search results.

TO STRENGTHEN YOUR BACKLINKS

By creating links back to the pages upon which your backlinks are placed, you can strengthen the overall power of your backlinks. Socially bookmarking pages your links are placed on is one simple and effective way of doing this. It encourages the search engine’s crawlers to come back to your site regularly to check for updates, which in turn can increase the frequency with which your page is cached.

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Search engine optimization requires a balance of techniques from choosing a relevant domain name, to finding appropriate keywords for your site, to choosing a reliable link building service and constructing a social media campaign. How these elements work together will determine the success of the SEO.

There are also a number of SEO practices that should be avoided. Five of these are listed below:

CREATING BAD LINKS

Link building is probably the most important technique in SEO today. Having links to your website from other quality, relevant websites boosts your site’s reputation in the eyes of Google. Conversely, if there are links to your website placed on inappropriate, weak or unethical sites, this can damage your SEO campaign. Google particular dislikes “bad neighbourhood” sites – sites that link to adult content, medications or gambling. Also ensure that links you place do not have “no follow” attributes as these have no SEO value.

PUBLISHING DUPLICATE CONTENT

Google monitors the content of websites to check that one site is not copying content from another. This could apply to any written material on your website from news stories and information pages to blog articles. It is also advisable if you share the same content over multiple domains ie you own both .co.uk and .com, to set up a redirection from one to the other, otherwise Google will see this as duplicated content. Google penalizes websites that are deemed to be displaying duplicate content.

KEYWORD SPAMMING

In the past, it was common practice to fill your website with dozens of keywords, with multiple slight variations. Google is now well aware of this practice and no longer gives good rankings to pages employing this technique. Any SEO agency will also be aware that this technique is outdated.

USING INVISIBLE WORDS

In a similar vein, hiding keywords by placing them on your site using the same colour of ink as the page background will no longer fool Google. Any effort to do so will not affect your page ranking in any way.

DOING ANYTHING THAT APPEARS UNNATURAL

Search engines are reaching a stage in development where they are becoming able to identify what is and isn’t natural. Excessive use of any SEO technique will flag to the search engines that something isn’t right.

The key to a successful strategy is maintaining a balance of different techniques that fit together in a natural way. Firms need to ensure they employ a reputable, established digital agency to manage their SEO campaign and gain the results they desire.

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The Icelandic volcano ash cloud crisis, which grounded hundreds of airlines, caused unprecedented disruption to millions of travelers and freight companies, and was headline news around the World.

Air travelers were forced to seek alternative means of transport by land or sea, or simply wait for the ash cloud to pass in hotels and paid accommodation, in the hope they would find replacement flights once conditions were resumed to normal.

The quest for alternative travel, accommodation and information on the crisis took place for many on the internet. Online competitive intelligence firm Experian Hitwise, reported significant increases in internet searches for many travel and volcano-related search terms.

In the week ending 17th April, 10,000 different searches containing the word “volcano” were performed by internet users, ten times the amount for those searches from the previous week. Those companies whose websites appear highest in Google’s results, and likely received the most internet traffic, will be those who have most effectively employed an SEO agency to boost their online presence.

There was a 45% increase in the number of UK internet visits to aviation websites, including airline and airport homepages, as travellers desperately searched for alternative flights and updates on the crisis.

UK Searches for the term “eurostar”, and visits to the Eurostar website, increased by 67% in the week, and in France the search traffic increased by 22%.

Ferry companies also saw a rise in internet traffic, with a 59% increase, and car hire firms saw a 9% increase.

The top 10 fastest moving travel industry search terms for the period were:

1) easyjet
2) ryanair
3) Manchester airport
4) Heathrow airport
5) British airways
6) Easyjet.com
7) Eurostar
Travelodge
9) Gatwick airport
10) Flybe

The impact of the crisis on search behavior of internet users, highlights the importance of having an effective online advertising strategy. All these firms invest heavily in search engine optimisation to ensure that they can easily be found in search engines, and it is at times like this that the investment in SEO, through a digital agency, can pay dividends. Individual parts of the strategy, for example making best use of a link building service, add to the success of the campaign.

All in all, the crisis has cost the aviation industry 3.3 billion dollars, two thirds of which has been at the cost of European airlines, and according to reports by UK’s Centre For Economics And Business Research, this loss could result in an increase of 5% in airfares.

Despite this, a survey of 1010 holidaymakers by TNS RI Travel & Tourism, has found that the crisis has failed to deter the majority of people canceling or postponing holidays, with only one in ten looking at canceling their Summer holiday.

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Last week, 13th April, social media and micro-blogging site Twitter, launched it’s first attempt at generating advertising revenue from Tweets with it’s Promoted Tweets service. The service allows companies to pay to promote existing Tweets so that they appear at the top of user’s realtime search results, when they search for relevant keywords and topics.

For example, a digital agency may be planning to set-out a stand at a forthcoming industry exhibition. They can select any existing Tweets they have made about the exhibition to be part of the Promoted Tweets campaign, and when users search for Tweets about the exhibition, the promoted Tweet will appear at the top of the results.

It doesn’t end there however. Twitter will include Promoted Tweets in “the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user”. This will be the first time ever, that users of the service will see Tweets from people that they have not specifically decided to follow.

Also, Promoted Tweets must “resonate” in accordance with a set of nine resonance factors that Twitter has in place, including the number of people who saw the post, number of people who replied to the post, the number of people who passed it on to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on the links within the post – a similar method of quality control to that used by Google.

If a promoted Tweet doesn’t resonate, it will simply disappear.

So, from an online lead generation perspective, it is essential that brands come up with interesting, engaging and quirky Tweets to promote, in the true tradition of Twitter, or they will not reap the rewards. Social media sites are notoriously risky places to launch overt and direct sales pitches, and users can very quickly form negative views on brands trying to impose their will upon them.

Social media optimisation is extremely important for any company and the use of social media has to be undertaken with a creative and innovative approach.

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Every company, and every digital agency, now knows that social media plays a vital role in an online advertising campaign, and all are rushing to try and look for ways to take advantage of it. But it is those companies that were at the forefront, and were prepared to take a risk at the very beginning, which are reaping the biggest rewards.

Major brands like Ford, Starbucks, Bravo and Zappos were all prepared to embrace social media and take a proactive and innovative approach to using it, and were successful in identifying future trends just as they were about to sweep the internet. Having the foresight and taking the risk has had massive benefits, beyond what they could originally have perceived.

One of the most significant advantages that these companies have gained is continuing, strong relationships with the media. As pioneers in the field, media firms look to these companies for information on new developments and news, and can call on contacts for quotes and statements, which they can pass on in their own publications and articles, generating massive free publicity.

When Twitter launched Promoted Tweets, it used a screen shot of one of Starbucks’ Promoted Tweets as an example of how to use the service, and subsequently every mainstream and new media article that has been written about Promoted Tweets has mentioned Starbucks. This is an incredible piece of free advertising for the coffee chain.

In a similar way, a company, digital agency or an individual can refer to these early adopter brands when presenting case studies about social media. For example, clothing retailer Zappos, which used Twitter in a new and innovative way to promote it’s association with happiness, became a widely used case study by many speakers in the industry.

Car manufacturer Ford, also took full advantage of social media during their recent financial struggles, which made for a great example for presentation.

Location-sharing service Foursquare, is another example of a brand which has experimented with trends happening now in a new and innovative way, and by working with firms like Starbucks, Lucky Magazine and City Of Chicago has provided another interesting case study.

On top of this, by showing innovation and willingness to try new ideas, new companies have more chance of building brand partnerships with the really big players on the internet, and getting the edge over other start-up businesses. It can give them access to far greater media coverage and publicity, by being part of a respected inner circle.

Firms still need to ensure online campaigns still target traditional SEO techniques and online lead generation, but by using social media optimisation, thinking outside the box and being prepared to lead rather than follow, it is possible to gain massive rewards.

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Google’s personalized search facility has changed the way in which search results are returned, with the aim of making results more relevant to the individual user. If a user were to perform a keyword search, for example personal injury leads, and then from the results selected statusmediaplc.com, the next time they performed the same keyword search, statusmediaplc.com would appear on the first page of results. The facility remembers the previous visit, along with any other pages you may have viewed from other sites, and these are the “personalized” results.

This tailoring of results obviously means users get a more refined search experience, which could make use of the search engine faster and more convenient, as well as generating a potentially regular visitor/customer for the website in question.

However, from a digital advertising agency point of view this creates a potential problem, which could affect the effectiveness of an online lead generation and SEO campaign. This is because, with personalized search activated, when a company checks it’s Google ranking position, the tailor made results are specific to that user and not necessarily the same results that their customers will see.

So, when checking it’s actual rankings, a company should deactivate peronsalized search. In order to do this, follow these steps:

1) Sign out of Google

2) Click on “web history” in the top right corner of the search results page

3) Click on “disable customization”, bearing in mind this will prevent personalized searches for anyone that uses the computer

Also be aware that if you clear your browser cookies, this will reactivate personalized search.

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Social media campaigns have fast become one of the most important areas of an online advertising strategy. Companies of all sizes have taken to using sites like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube to engage with their audience and promote products and brand awareness. Facebook fan pages, where a company page is set up, free of charge, and users invited to “become a fan”, are particularly useful for a variety of reasons, not least because of their value as part of an SEO campaign. Here are the main advantages of setting up a fan page, from an SEO point of view:

1) A fan page is recognized by Google as a legitimate website that links back to your website. This means that anyone could come across your fan page in a search engine query and any subsequent traffic will ultimately increase ranking of both your homepage and your Facebook fan page.

2) It costs nothing to create a fan page and you can create as many as you wish. For example, a fashion retailer could create a fan page for each of the designer labels it stocks, or for it’s Spring/Summer collection and Autumn/Winter collection. Google recognizes them all.

3) A standard Facebook profile allows a maximum of 5000 friends, but a fan page has no limit and therefore allows a business to reach as wide an audience as possible. This audience is only limited by your ability to attract new fans, and the larger the fan base, the greater the opportunity for online lead generation.

4) With this massive potential audience, you have the opportunity to spread viral media quickly and effectively. If you post something that catches the attention of your fans, they may post that on their own profiles, to their own friends, therefore reaching a whole new audience, who in turn could become fans.

5) You can contact all your fans in an instant. Any message, like notice of a new product launch or advertising campaign, can be posted on the fan page and instantly seen by all your fans at once, in the same way, but perhaps more efficiently, than an email marketing campaign.

6) Because you are directly available and contactable by your audience, you can gain instant feedback about anything you choose and make valuable market research, for example a food manufacturer could canvas opinion about what new flavour of sauce they should launch or a compensation company could canvas it’s fans about recent accidents and generate personal injury leads.

The disadvantages of fan pages are few, but should not be overlooked:

1) Fans can post negative comments about your company, which can be seen by all the other fans and could be potentially damaging. It is important to address negative comments or complaints as quickly as possible.

2) Content must be regularly updated in order to keep your fans’ interest. This is an ongoing job, which requires time and investment.

3) Once you name your fan page it cannot be changed, so it’s important to choose something that sets the right tone and image for the company.

4) Setting up a fan page alone is not going to draw a million fans. The fan page must be promoted properly, for example the URL added to company stationary or emails sent to customers announcing it’s launch.

Given that fan pages are free to set up and very simple to maintain, there is no reason not to use them and the potential benefits are huge. Any digital advertising agency should manage it’s client’s social media presence as a vital part of it’s online advertising campaign.

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Global marketplace analysts Nielsen and social networking giant Facebook have announced the launch of a new tool designed for measuring the effectiveness of online PR and advertising. Called Nielsen BrandLift, the tool will place opt-in polls on Facebook for users to give their opinions on different aspects of a company’s online strategy. Questions within the polls will aim to gauge consumer’s opinions on brand perception, ad recall and purchasing intent.

Since their alliance in 2009, this is the first time Nielsen and Facebook have offered a product of this kind outside of the US. More than 70 studies have been conducted across various sectors in the US.

Any digital agency stands to benefit, as Stephen Haines, UK commercial director at Facebook reportedly said, “Helping marketers measure the effectiveness of advertising using Facebook has been a priority for us and working with Nielsen helps us continue doing just that. Marketers have responded positively to BrandLift studies in the US and we know marketers in the UK will also benefit from a better understanding of how people react to their online PR campaigns.”

Louise Ainsworth, EMEA Managing Director for the Nielsen Company Online added, “The power and scale of Facebook’s community provides a unique platform for research and this offering complements the portfolio of tools available to marketers in the UK with simple and fast insights on brand advertising.”

The results of earlier studies highlighted the importance of gathering this data from consumers. 97% of the studies showed that at least one brand lift metric, such as brand awareness, had increased after an online PR campaign, and 85% of the studies showed increases in at least two key metrics.

The information will help brands make best use of online PR, ensuring that any digital agency working with them is focusing on the right areas of their campaign from search through to display advertising and social media helping ensure the right messages are being pushed to the right audience at the right time.

Understanding brand perception could also help to influence decisions about traffic and strategy such as budget allocation to activities such as SEO and link building making sure that all channels are being effectively maximized for optimum ROI.

As a simple example, if a digital agency has attempted to promote a product’s slogan via social media, but a BrandLift poll shows that consumers could not remember what it was, the agency could then analyse why this was the case and adjust future campaigns accordingly.

And with the sheer volume of users on Facebook, this could prove to be the most valuable source of online market research yet.

BrandLift could represent an excellent development in measuring the effects of social media and digital advertising strategies for lead consumer internet brands. Gary Collins, CEO at Status Media, a UK based digital agency commented that, “It seems that social media marketing is still for the early adopters with many companies still focussing much of their budgets on traditional SEO, link building and PPC. As an agency we’re proposing social strategies as part of an integrated approach, it’s all about customer engagement and consumer interaction really”.

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