We are pleased to announce the expansion of its US operations with a new location in Santa Monica, CA. STEAK LA will be headed by Norman Brauns, a long-time employee of STEAK and a well-respected industry veteran. Brauns will continue to report into Mark Schwartz, STEAK’s US Managing Director.

Schwartz says, “As STEAK’s footprint grows worldwide, it has become apparent that the West Coast represents the largest opportunity for continued business expansion. Having a client-facing organisation in the Los Angeles area will allow us to offer our customers more flexibility and provides us with a direct sales channel in an incredibly strategic growth market.”

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch,  July 20, 2011

Friends. Followers. Contacts. Circles. Social networks can be fun and productive for work or pleasure.

But social networks are also time consuming – more than most of us probably care to admit. With the average person reported to have 130 friends and growing on Facebook alone, the continuous flow of updates from individuals and organizations is overwhelming. From that page you liked on Facebook, to that industry pundit you follow on Twitter, and many others in between, everybody is updating, tweeting, posting, liking, checking in, sharing, +1ing…

Here’s the thing. It’s too much. Admit it. You’re overwhelmed.

I’ve declared a few times on Facebook and Twitter my plans to carry out a cull. A few people or pages get dropped. But…what if that person notices? What if that ex-colleague goes to work somewhere interesting? What if I miss that industry announcement or insider tip? Better not be too harsh, better stay connected.

I’m now on five social networks – four public ones and one closed network for work (Yammer). This week I’ve faced the truth: it’s too much. Time for a cull. But where to start?

Facebook

I know instinctively that Facebook is my personal space – it’s where friends and family share photos and post personal updates. It’s where I go to get away from work – not to blend the personal and professional.

Step one: un-friend work-only contacts and pages. Step two: move them to LinkedIn or Twitter depending on their social media activity; do I want to only keep in contact with them (LinkedIn) or read what they have to say (Twitter)?

Twitter

I maintain several accounts for myself and work, and the work accounts have clear objectives and strategies. My own, I freely admit, doesn’t. It’s a collection of personal and work interests, and I’m a generous follower.

Time for a change. This is the worrying bit – do I follow my instinct, and cull anybody I don’t regularly find useful? Will I miss out? What will happen to my follower volume? Should I care?

I’ve decide to not rush in here – analyzing hundreds of followers and then making bulk changes, whether un-following or adding them to lists, isn’t particularly easy and I’ve yet to find a tool with all the functionality I want to speed this up. Instead, I’m removing accounts I don’t find useful when I see messages from them – cleaning up my Twitter stream as I go.

LinkedIn & Yammer

LinkedIn is the easiest to keep under control – I’m cautious of adding anybody who approaches me (especially recruiters). Yammer, as a B2B network, is even easier to keep relevant – I have 100 percent control over groups and who I follow (OK, so I’m an admin, which helps.)

Google Plus

Now that’s a blank canvas. So how will I avoid repeating the mistakes I’ve drifted into on Facebook and Twitter?

Circles. I’ve immediately setup three – Work, Family & Friends and Acquaintances. I know I’ll add a further one for “Hobbies & Sports” when businesses and organizations have official pages. I might split my work circle up in future – but I’m keeping them small, and have already started consciously ignoring some followers who I don’t want in my circles.

Social Media Relevancy

If I used to be your friend on Facebook, or I no longer mutually follow you on Twitter, sorry. Relevancy has been one of the underpinning characteristics of the biggest success story of digital – search – and the same applies to social media.

Life’s too short, too busy, and too rushed for the irrelevant. For that attitude, I won’t apologize.

¿Hablas SEO?  We metro-ites in New York may think the buck stops here, but the real world (of which 95% exists outside the United States, thank you) stretches far beyond. Steak’s little answer to this microcosmic conundrum? Jesus Mendez.

Ladies and gents: Meet Steak’s Spanish-speaking SEO pro, here to solve all your Spanish search problems (well, almost).  Today we’re talking optimizing websites in a foreign language, or more specifically, Spanish-speaking markets.

Influential Hispanic Americans

1. Before we get into the whole so how do you do it sermón, let’s make one thing clear: This population is no joke.  As this study shows, with 136 million Spanish-speaking Internet users worldwide, Spanish ranks third worldwide in both content and users on the Web, just behind Chinese’s 383 million users and English’s 478 million.  The Association of Spanish Language Academies also found that by 2050, 10% of the world will speak Spanish, with the largest Spanish-speaking country none other than … the United States.

So how exactly do you optimize foreign language sites?  Relax, niño. The answer to all your problems is in this little blog post.

2. Why would a company optimize its website for Spanish?

JM: Two reasons why a company would add Spanish content are: 1) if they are opening properties around the world in say, Latin America or Spain or 2) because the Spanish population in the U.S. is growing exponentially.  There is a huge market and money to be made by advertising in the native language of a population.  A lot of Spanish speakers in the U.S. are not fluent in English.

3. To optimize a site for Spanish, you have many choices to target, right?

Google Mexico Search Engine

JM: Right, you have:

• English websites with a Spanish component, if companies create a section and optimize (see below).
• Spanish companies with English-Spanish sites. You’d apply the same SEO practices here, but with caution of translator programs because they miss many nuances and often get things wrong (see below, again).
• Straight foreign language sites: sites based in foreign countries vying to rank on Google’s 100+ foreign-language or -dialect search engines like Google Mexico, Google Argentina, Google Columbia.

4. So, SEO for Google’s 100+ foreign language search engines: same practices?

JM: Yes, same SEO principles, just translate correctly.  Culture plays a huge role though. In Mexican Spanish, we’re taught formal Spanish but the majority of Spanish speakers use informal Spanish—especially in search: Keyword research proves it.

For example, tu (informal “you”) is used instead of usted (formal “you”), so keywords need to target informal Spanish because that’s what people use to search.  Even a five-star hotel should target informal Spanish.  But while users don’t use formal Spanish … online translation programs do.

Yahoo! Babel Fish Translator

5. Why else wouldn’t online translation programs work?

JM: Translator programs give you proper Spanish. They don’t take into consideration different dialect.  There’s definitely a human factor to building strategies for different countries.

If you have to use a translator program like Google Translate, Babel Fish (Yahoo translator) due to budget constraints, you would get some benefits but the terms could be misleading.  It wouldn’t be optimal.

6. According to Google, it has 681 million pages in Spanish, which ranks Spanish just behind 806 million in Chinesez and 9,890 million in English (see “Spanish on the Internet” study). Along those lines…

Do these foreign sites have less SEO competition with fewer websites in their language?

JM: They actually have it harder because they still compete with English sites in search engines. For example, Google.com.mx (Mexico) still lists plenty of American sites targeted to Spanish speakers.

Pastel de tres leches

7. How do dialects affect Spanish SEO?

JM: Well, in Mexican Spanish we call cake “pastel” but in the Dominican Republic, it’s “bizcocho.” Pastel in the DR is not a pastry at all; it’s a different kind of food.  Without a human translator, you may not convey the right message or hit the right keyword for the Dominican Republic.

Translating between Castilian (dialect in Spain) and Latin American Spanish would just have an added component. You would have to look up dialects for Mexico and Spain, but also know the cultural and formal-use differences, which no online translation program could give you directly.

8. Do you think foreign language sites are up to par in SEO practices?

JM: They’re definitely not as up-to-date as we are in the U.S. The number of skilled SEO pros and SEO as an industry elsewhere is not as advanced as we are here.  The biggest reason is that SEO originated in the United States, and it takes time to get that knowledge out to remaining countries.

9. You’ve worked in SEO and digital marketing for five years, with some major clients and considerable budgets.  Have you seen more clients optimizing for foreign languages?

JM: I’ve worked both in-house and on the agency side, and I haven’t seen much focus on optimizing for foreign languages.

The thing is you don’t need a whole separate website. You can have a Spanish section, a Spanish subdomain, and that would benefit your English pages too.

What’s an example of this?

JM: Well, let’s say an English-speaking company creates a Spanish section on its website for its Spanish-speaking clients.  But they never optimize that Spanish section because it’s not part of the overall strategy.  That Spanish component could have 2,000 visitors a month, while the main site has 50,000 visitors a month.  Creation without optimizing equals failure.

There are good business opportunities here.  You’re not necessarily fighting for rank on Google Mexico because there’s huge Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. too.  For example, typing in “abogado” (lawyer) would pull up mostly English and Spanish sites.

10. Any last tips on optimizing SEO for Spanish websites?

JM: A lot of companies don’t appreciate that Latin American countries speak different dialects. So you have to create and optimize sites for each, but you don’t need a different strategy for each Latin American country.

There are similarities between South America, the Caribbean and Mexico. If you group by region, you can facilitate an optimization strategy.

Spanish websites optimized for SEO

So, another day, another Google announcement that shakes the foundations of social and search strategies. Or does it? Here are our initial – and I stress initial – thoughts on Google +1. Right now we’re focusing on the search side of this as that’s the initial thrust of Google’s announcement, and where most consumers will encounter this functionality first.

What is Google+1?

Simply put, it’s Google’s equivalent of the Facebook “like” button – a way of saying “I like this” or “I recommend this”. Of course, Google aren’t using the word “like” anywhere in their PR.

Consumers can click it in both paid and natural search results – for the former, advertisers have to add it as an option. It’s very important to note that consumers need to be signed in to a Google account (AdWords, Analytics, Gmail etc) to see the button and click it. We have to wonder how many consumers are aware they have a Google Account as a result of using one of Google’s products – it’s not something Google have historically promoted.

If you are wondering about your own Google Account at this point, see this page and login to see which products Google associates with your login – and edit your Google Profile. Yes, you have a Google Profile too. Which brings to me to where Google+1 “likes” appear.

Your Google Profile

If you have a Google Account, you have a Google profile. It might not be public, you might never have filled it in, but you do. You can check yours here https://profiles.google.com/

When a consumer clicks the +1 button, this recommendation is shown in their public Google profile. As shown by Mashable’s example :

Will this Impact Search Results?

Yes. Google have stated this will affect SEO/natural search rankings. So, if your brand gets lots of +1 clicks, it could boost your position in results as Google views your site as “recommended” and therefore of interest to it’s consumers. No guarantees, as ever with Google.

Of course, there will be companies who try to “game this”. We already seen a brand encourage retweets as part of a competition, for example, on Twitter. Brands and their agencies will need to decide what they can do to encourage these clicks without crossing the line – and of course, Google will continue to develop their algorithm to counter such efforts; no doubt a sudden flurry of +1 clicks will be seen as of less value that a continual steam of them that suggest genuine “recommendations”.

This also means every time you click the +1 button you are effectively working for Google, helping them improve their results.

Paid Search and +1

PPC advertisers can opt to include the button on their ads. UPDATE: Google tell us will be enabled for all PPC adverts if the searcher is logged in. Then, when logged in consumers can click it and their friends (as determined via Google’s Profile system) will see they did so, as show in these two images from Google, where “Brian Walker” clicked to recommend an ad.

Will this Change PPC Quality Score and Rankings?

No. Google have clearly stated that unlike natural search, this won’t be used at the present time to determine rankings etc. No surprise – there’s an even clearer financial gain to gaming this if it did impact QS and therefore CPCs.

UPDATE: Whilst it might not affect Quality Score, it could increase CTRs and therefore have a beneficial advantage in PPC.

Beyond Search

Like Facebook’s “Like” button, Google will offer a version of this for brands to put on their websites – so start putting real estate on your site aside now.

This is when the +1 button will really take off – consumers may not be logged in, ignore it or not know what it is in search results. Engagement rates on features like “block site” and earlier feedback mechanism in search haven’t been high. On the websites of brands they like, however, they are much more likely to click the +1 button.

Big Brands Gain the Most?

One of our initial reactions to this here is that big brands will gain the most. They have the brand awareness, brand search volumes and onsite traffic levels to attract the most clicks via SERPs and more significantly via their websites when they’ve integrated the button – just like with Facebook’s button.

We’ll blog more and speak to our clients direct as we assess this more, but for now, here’s the initial action points we recommend:

1.     Educate your colleagues – they’ll start seeing the button on English language searches soon (send them this blog’s URL!)

2.     Warn your developers you’ll need some screen space in the future – unfortunately, date TBC from Google on the onsite button at the time of writing

3.     Discuss this for PPC with your agency – will your brand be recommended? Will this improve your CTRs – or a competitors to your disadvantage? Will Google’s Profile network actually connects your consumers and their friends? The penetration of Google in the UK at 90%, for example, won’t translate to that sort of penetration into consumer’s friend network via Google Profiles (did you know you could have one until today?) You can opt out – see the end of this post.

4.     Discuss your SEO and Social integration strategy with Steak. This is something we’ve been doing with clients for some time – in fact, we first engaged in the Yahoo Answers for brands awareness and SEO reasons for a client back in 2008. We’ve written about SEO and Social regularly on Search Engine Watch too.

5.     Open a Google Profile, and try this out for yourself – that’s the best way to understand it further.

Conclusion

This will be big – because it’s from Google. The real growth in +1 clicks will be once it’s onsite and not just in SERPs; but for search it is now part of strategies going forward.

In social, this could be the way Google finally manages to attract consumers to it’s social platform – whatever that will look like beyond a Google Profile – but it’s early days. It’s not a Facebook or Twitter killer, that is for sure; if anything, Google will try to be the place your profiles merge and connect across social networks and their product network.

The question is: do you actually want to connect those worlds? We’ll leave that hanging in the air for now…

We’ll post more search and social thoughts as our analysis of this develops.

Sources:

Google’s +1 Announcement
Mashable’s original post

UPDATE: We’ve just had an email from Google UK – sign-up to find out when the onsite button is available here.

UPDATE 2: It’s not opt in for PPC; it’ll be turned on as standard (above edited accordingly). AdWords customers can request an opt out here.

As a follow up to all of the noise generated in the SEO industry by the frank admissions of both Google and Bing that Social Media elements are part of their ‘relevance factors’ for search, SEOMoz have started a worthwhile mini-trial. Namely, taking 2 very similar pages and tweeting the hell out of one of them while building links to the other and see which one ranks better for the target keyword.

As it is much easier for people to tweet the link than add it to a website, Steak are lending a hand in the form of this short blog post, with the required link as follows:

Help end Hunger in Sierra Leone and meet the life you change.

Obviously this is the website of a very worthy cause on top of everything else and we await the results of the test with baited breath!

We are delighted to have been appointed by online print business MOO.COM to handle its international digital marketing activity.  The account, which was won in a three-way agency pitch, will focus on paid search and digital display advertising, and we will be responsible for driving sales and acquiring new customers across UK, USA, Australia and other English speaking territories.  We will utilise teams in our London, New York and Melbourne offices to manage the MOO account.

Our task is to help raise awareness of the MOO brand and its range of innovative personalised print products and accessories through targeted display campaigns and to drive a high volume of quality traffic to MOO through paid search.

Paul Lewis, Head of Marketing at MOO comments, “We’re excited to be working with Steak; we feel that their energy and passion, as well as their understanding of driving efficient results, is a great fit with MOO as we look to accelerate global growth”.

Phil Burgess, Client Service Director at Steak adds, “MOO is one of those brands that you can’t help falling in love with a little bit, because it mixes traditional skills such as print and makes it personal and accessible to everyone via the web. We’re looking forward to working with them across multiple territories and utilising the Steak network to deliver sales”.

MOO, founded in 2004, combines the values of professional design with the accessibility and reach of the Internet.  With the patent-pending ‘Printfinity’ technology, MOO helps its customers to showcase their business or brand, their products or personality, by printing a different image on every card in a pack.  MOO has raised over US $5M in venture capital from the Accelerator Group, Index Ventures and Atlas Venture – the investors behind Skype, Betfair, Lovefilm, Last.fm and MySQL.  MOO’s customer base extends to 180 countries, and has a 75% NetPromoter rating.

Press Coverage:

Campaign

Brand Republic

Media Week

Marketing Magazine

Mobile SEO is becoming increasingly important for your brand to capture the growing number of people using their mobile to search. Recent research has revealed that Google mobile search grew 76% during the first three quarters of this year, accounting for 4% of search traffic for the engine. Now 4% may not seem a massive number, but when you take into account that in a typical month there are 9 million searches made through mobile browsers, it’s essential that you’re considering how your site performs for mobile.

So with this in mind, what are some of the things you need to consider when it comes to optimising for the mobile web?

Generally speaking, optimising for mobile is no different to optimising for desktop, if you follow good SEO best practice for your traditional website, you’ll rank well for mobile. However there are things to take into consideration which need to form part of your on-site work, like the way a user searches on a mobile, and the importance put on local search.

Because on mobile the average query takes longer to input than on a desktop, people don’t tend to search for longer tail terms.  According to Google’s research, the average query on mobile search is 15 characters long, but takes 40 seconds to enter. The searches that are made usually consist of one or two words requiring immediate action or information as the user is likely to be on the move, i.e. the user needs to know where a sports shop is or what time a restaurant closes. This is why searches on your mobile will produce local search results and produce feed results more readily.

Therefore it’s important to ensure localised terms form part of your on-site mark up, and your business and product listings are optimised for the location of your store, opening times, user reviews and as much information as possible that you can enter.  It’s worth seeing what your listings look like in Yahoo Local, Yell and other local online directories for any missed opportunities. Supplementing this with a mobile sitemap will further ensure you are in the best place to rank well and as with desktop search; you need to be on the first page to see any traffic.

However for mobile, search results pages differ in layout from desktop; with only 5 results displayed, and as a mobile user is less likely to view a second page, it’s important to note where there are differences between mobile and desktop SEO in order to rank well.

As newer factors like location, type of device and content formats represent the mobile web experience more, the search engines are beginning to figure out how best to harness them. Morgan Stanley’s latest ‘State of the Internet’ report predicted that in the next five years “more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.” Whether this turns out to be the case or not, it’s clear that the share of search traffic for mobile will only increase in the future, so it’s important to keep up with the mobile landscape to ensure your mobile SEO is in place and you stand to benefit from the increase in mobile usage.

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch,  Nov 19, 2010

The search industry never stops. From AltaVista to Google, and GoToast to Search Ignite, the fortunes of companies and technologies evolve over time.

I was reminded of this recently when training new hires. They’d never head of names like AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, etc. — companies that defined the search space less than 10 years ago.

So, how do you keep up to date?

Ignore the Noise

It’s important to recognize that there are many, many blogs and articles published about search every day — and many more “experts” on forums and Twitter and in Facebook and LinkedIn groups.

You can ignore most of them. The ability of the search industry to report on, discuss, analyze, argue about, and regurgitate a fact until it has been distorted out of all proportion and attained myth-like status is legendary. There’s a lot of noise — so you need to spend your limited time on sites that are credible and, most importantly, correct.

It’s also important to note that the search engines are no longer search companies — they offer much broader product lines; so you will need to keep up to date on developments in all their products, too, as search is often integrated into them (and paid search revenues pay for them).

Select an RSS Reader

I can’t think of an industry news site that doesn’t have an RSS feed — so choosing a good reader is crucial. There are many available. I use Google Reader to collate and organize feeds by topic in folders as it’s tied to my Google login and easy to use on any computer, iPad, or mobile.

I often use Feedly linked to Google Reader as it offers a slicker interface that feels closer to a magazine. Another bonus of Google Reader is that you can add any URL to it — not just RSS feeds — and Reader will monitor the page for changes and present them as if a feed has updated.

Many sites offer several feeds — follow those most relevant to your area of work and interests; it’s easy to overload yourself with feeds and find you have more than 100 articles to wade through every morning. Pretty soon you’ll find you’re too busy to bother, and end up reading nothing.

Keep an Eye on the Mainstream Press

Sometimes announcements by the search engines receive mainstream coverage — or a story breaks about a negative issue, like the recent Google Street View privacy coverage. Add the technology sections of mainstream sites like the New York Times, USA Today, BBC News, etc., to your reader to ensure you know the stories your clients (and their bosses) are reading over their breakfast.

Digital Overall

To keep any eye on the wider industry I follow a few key sites — Mashable, The Next Web, Robert Scoble, John Battelle’s Search Blog, and Econsultancy, to name a few.

The Search Stalwarts

There are a few search-focused sites that are must-reads. Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land are the two heavyweights; I receive their newsletters every morning as well as follow their feeds; they provide a summary of the most important search news and topics. Search Engine Roundtable is also important and often have details of new Google tests or rumors with some basis to them as reported on other sites or forums.

There are of course many other digital industry and search sites — the above sites link to good sources as they cover stories, helping you find other sources.

Don’t Forget To Cull

One last piece of advice: don’t forget to delete feeds. Over time, sites change editor, or their focus shifts or their writing declines in quality. So when a site seems to publish nothing of interest, delete it — your time is precious.

We are very excited to announce that Steak won the sought after DADi award for ‘Best Digital Media Strategy’ for our work with Swiftcover.com and the ‘Summers’s Hottest Playlist’. Steak, also received a commendation for ‘Best Use of Organic Search’ for  Virgin Holidays.

The ‘Summer’s Hottest Playlist’ campaign harnessed the passion of Swiftcover’s music-loving audience and sought to engage with its fans through a fun online campaign.

Car insurance isn’t something that usually sparks much excitement but with Swiftcover we tapped into the music festival spirit with a Facebook app and interactive challenge to social media fans to devise the “Summer’s Hottest Playlist”. The campaign worked in collaboration with top Absolute Radio DJs and Spotify.  Facebook fans increased by 280% in a two-week period, and 22,000 people voted for the playlist.

We were also very pleased to receive recognition of our work with Virgin Holidays’ January Sale in SEO, where we beat our sales target by 168%!
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So it’s smiles all round.

John Barton, Head of Social Media and Lynsey Galashan, Senior Accout Executive, receiving the award for ‘Best Digital Strategy’ on Friday night.

Targeting is one of the corner stones of the success of paid search. The ability to place a message in front of consumers actively seeking out the advertiser’s product is gold dust – if you had told an Ad Man in 1950s Madison Avenue you could do that and provide them statistics related to copy and location, they’d have offered you their daughter’s hand in marriage. And a large bourbon.

One area of targeting in paid search that seems to be missed repeatedly is the use of negatives. Each week I see ads in search results that clearly shouldn’t be there and are diluting CTRs and Quality Score; the examples are numerous but a recent example:

Google results for "Stolen Cars for Sale"

I am confident that Ask and VivaStreet do not want to be aiding car crime, but without “stolen” as a negative in their account (ideally at campaign level) they’ll continue to be the car thieves best friend. Negatives are not hard to come by. Good sources include:

• Google Keyword Tool
• Search Query Reports
• Analytics / Server Log Search Strings
• Related Keyword Tools
• Typo and Misspelling Generators
• Brainstorming around a topic (with a good old pen and paper!)
• Common Sense!

There’s really no excuse – Google introduced Search Query Reports to help with this based on advertiser and agency feedback, my own small voice included. When I started out in search in 1999 we had no keyword research tools that were UK specific (even at search engine Lycos where I worked) so we’re spoilt these days – and there’s no excuse!