A Marketing Mix

Yesterday afternoon Google’s search engine results page (SERP) included clickable menus for select websites. [1] Here is a screenshot: If you click on a menu item, it loads another group of links.

Why would Google include menus in its search results and what are the implications for searchers, advertisers, and website owners?

First, these menus produce a better experience for searchers. You can quickly find the most relevant pages from within Google’s search results.

This saves you time. This feature also benefits advertisers and Google. If users are spending more time browsing Google’s search results they are probably more likely to see and click on a sponsored result. Higher click-through rates on ads equates to more revenue for Google.

Full Article: http://blog.intigi.com/google-launches-serp-menus/

From the original article: "In the biggest study of its kind, we have found that there is strong correlation between the amount of tweets about a URL, and its Google ranking.

Key Stats

1) Study shows that URLs receive a significant boost in Google rankings when they are shared on Twitter

2) The effects of this boost seem to level out at around 50 tweets, and the subsequent benefit of gaining additional tweets is minimal until around 5,000 tweets

3) After 5,000 tweets the average ranking of URLs improves considerably
URLs receiving over 7,500 tweets almost always rank inside the top 5 results

4) Average rankings are heavily correlated to the number of tweets about each URL".

Full Article Here: http://www.branded3.com/tweets-vs-rankings

From The Original Article: "For years, the best way to gain rankings in search results was to have:

1) Accessible pages featuring
2) Quality content
3) Targeting the right keywords
4) In a way that naturally earned external links

Now a huge social reach is a competitive advantage in SEO. If you're doing SEO today, I think it's no longer possible to ignore the growth of your social connections as a big part of your SEO strategy.

Honestly, I expect in 18 months, Twitter followers, Facebook connections, LinkedIn account size and engagement across these won't just be social metrics; they'll be KPIs for our SEO, too".

Full article Here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/social-annotations-in-search-now-your-social-network-rankings

According to research by BlueCaribu it is in fact Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, that is still dominating businesses thoughts, with 9.1 million related searches every month.

The complete research carried out by BlueCaribu is presented in this awesome info graphic they have produced.