Yahoo filed a lawsuit against Facebook this week, alleging the social media giant has infringed upon ten patents owned by Yahoo!, including patents specifically on advertising methods.

This comes a few weeks after Yahoo! issued a warning saying they would take such legal action should Facebook not enter a licensing agreement for the disputed patents. Apparently, other companies agreed licensing agreements on these patents.

A Yahoo! statement said: “Unfortunately, the matter with Facebook remains unresolved and we are compelled to seek redress in federal court.”

The timing of this lawsuit could not come at a more inconvenient time for the social networking site, who recently announced their plans for a share offering, potentially valuing Facebook at $100billion. An amount which is largely based on advertising capabilities and potential of the 850million member site.

Facebook have notably made several changes to their advertising structure over recent months, all of which could come under scrutiny should this case reach federal court.

Yahoo! have argued that Facebook’s methods were generally considered as among the worst performing for advertising. Allegedly it was Yahoo!’s Customization Patents that led to the rise in popularity of the Facebook Newsfeed in terms of click through and return customers.

The failing search engine also claims that Facebook’s privacy policy is largely based on Yahoo!’s privacy patents.

Yahoo! have only recently appointed CEO, Scott Thompson, who is reportedly under pressure to raise revenues. It seems that patent licensing may be a sustainable life-saver.

Yahoo! sues Facebook is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

Original, good quality content is crucial for attracting and engaging site users and in turn converting them into our clients or customers. Creating quality content is also not cheap and must be maintained, especially with the latest Google algorithm updates, designed to display the most up-to-date results in their search engine. With no proper planning, it’s easy to let the content well dry up… Another problem that companies face is simply running out of integrated ideas to get their readers involved with the brand in any meaningful way. This is where crowdsourcing comes into play and is a potential solution to solve both of these challenges.

A crowd-sourced solution

Where user-generated content (UGC) is most often associated with ratings, product or services reviews, forum discussions or sharing viral photos or videos – crowdsourcing provides new ways to generate original content and create an opportunity for recognising different participants within your brand’s online community.

As brands participate in social communities, like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn – asking and answering questions, engaging their users, and sharing relevant content – numerous opportunities arise to involve the community with content creation. Crowdsourcing means a practice of presenting the community with a problem along with a plea to assist in its solution; it can also just be about having an open forum so your customers can share their feedback.

There are compounded benefits, in short:

• Gain more trust from visitors and improve brand awareness

• Contributors have an interest in helping promote the content they have written.
• Crowdsourcing provides more content for search engines.
• It provides more information about products and services for prospects and customers, allowing for critical feedback about such products and services.
• It facilitates brand conversations within the marketplace

Of course there are downsides as some resources are needed for oversight and moderation. If not monitored, the ease of publishing may lead to spam and some information provided by users could be false and outdated. But the rewards far outweigh the obstacles so long as you keep on top of these potential issues.

6 ideas for implementing crowdsourcing:

1. Blog interactions: One of the most meaningful ways for a community to engage with a brand is through comments on a company blog. Write blog posts that encourage interaction, spark debate, consider the occasional area of controversy to polarise opinion.
2. Contests resulting in content. Create contests in which visitors produce their own videos and share images in their social networks and on their blogs. Search engines love any kind of content, especially text.
3. Co-authoring thought leadership pieces: Working with other experts in your field enables you to ‘stand out’ from the crowd. Asking the community for suggestions of whom to interview and what questions to ask is a great way to get people involved. Interviewing industry thought leaders provides the brand’s audience with unique content and creates a positive association between the “brandividual” and the company
4. So – the question is how creative can you get with crowdsourcing content for your brand? Start simple and scale-up!
5. Influencing site content or brand behaviour: With tools such as User Voice and Get Satisfaction you can pose a topic question and/or leave an open feedback board. Let your customers share their feedback about your brand.
6. Social Q&A or Social FAQ An unanswered question can kill a sale. But an answer can create a brand advocate for life. Enable customers to ask questions and get the information they need when they are early in their purchase decision-making. This information is also captured and leveraged by search engines to drive traffic and acquisition.

Consumer In The Driver’s Seat: How to Use Crowdsourcing To Generate Fresh Content For Your Site is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

Once you have optimized your website and made sure all aspects of your website are SEO friendly, the most important part of optimization happens off the page.  This is where you start link building and get external sites back to yours. That plays a crucial role in telling search engines how important your site really is.

Public Relations (as well as other related tactics and effective methods of promoting your business like issuing press release), when used in tandem with your targeted keywords in mind, can produce spectacular results in helping your website achieve its objectives.

SEO Tips for Public Relations

We are sharing with you key SEO tips for your press releases to embrace when fine tuning for maximum SEO impact:

Headline:

Your most important keyword must appear within the first 65 characters of your headline. Remember- and the closer to the beginning of the headline, the better.   Search engines do really place weight on the prominence of keywords in your PR content – key phrases that appear higher on the page are assumed by Google to be what that press release is really ‘about.’  Don’t wait for the boilerplate to utilize your keywords.

Lead:

Repeat your important keyword in the first paragraph, and link it using anchor text to a relevant page on your web site (preferably a specific page related to that word, not the homepage.)

Body:

Write naturally, and feel free to use synonyms (e.g. “SEO” and “search engine optimization” and “optimizing for search engines”). The advice from Google has always been to use synonyms/abbreviations and search engines understand them. It definitely improves the readability of your text and your readers will appreciate them.

Don’t stuff your press release with keywords. Focus your document on just one or two keywords, and insert just one or two hyperlinks.   Trying to cram too many keywords and links into one document is not visually attractive for your readers and is not SEO friendly.   Less is more in this case.

Anchor Text:

Anchor texts (aka hyperlinking a keyword to a specific URL) are like a channel directing readers straight back to your web site. This achieves one very important goal:  it has enormous potential to increase overall SEO for your website.

If you have any comments of questions, share them with us in the comments below!

Why Online PR And SEO Go Hand in Hand? is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun

Site migrations are fairly common and happen for a many reasons. You might be changing hosting server providers or simply changing your website’s design and structure. Whatever your reasons are for doing so, there is something you must remember to do before the big change happens –come up with a good site migration plan, i.e. a blueprint of what is going to happen (including events that occur before and after the migration). Your website migration plan should be created before any work on the site has been done, just like an architect has a blueprint of the build before laying the foundation or first brick.

If the only thing that changes is the main domain, then setting up domain and page level 301 (permanent) redirect should be enough. However, if there are other changes, such as moving from one content management system to another, or changes to the permalink structures of your site, then it requires much more work and a good plan is a must.

Below is a presentation from our Strategy Manager, Ugo Smith, who talked about Site Migrations during this year’s AdTech conference, held in London in September.

To recap, your migration plan should include the following:

1. Plan for redirecting old links. Implement redirects appropriately and if you know which websites link back to you- get in touch with the webmasters and let them know that your links are changing.
2. Plan for submitting your sitemap – When your website structure architecture changes, you’ll need to notify popular search engines (Google, Yahoo or Bing) of your changes. A sitemap is the best way of providing the new blueprint in conjunction with 301 redirects.
3. Plan for creating new pages – This portion of your plan will include your tasks for creating new pages as well as redirecting old links and making sure you have all the important site content ready.
4. Plan for changing links on social media and similar websites – Make sure that you update links on your social media accounts, if applicable (i.e internal pages or domain).

Last but not least, before you start working on migrating your site, make sure you have answered the following questions:

1. Do you know who is doing what? – Make sure that all the people on your team understand their role in the process. Have a list of responsibilities, tasks (with dates when they should be completed) for each team member.
2. Are the third parties informed about the migration? – If you work with third parties, such as search agency, PR agency or a web development company, make sure they know of your migrations plans well in advance, so that they stay on top of their projects when you start migrating your site.
3. Have you set aside some time to watch for errors? – Make sure that you have a plan in place to watch your new website for errors once all the changes have been implemented.
4. Have you created a benchmarking report? Its aim is to provide an overview of search activity and an insight into key trends before the migration that forms the basis for comparison.
5. Do you know what to test? – Are you ready for some extensive testing of your website? It might not be the most enjoyable thing to do, but it’s necessary if you want to prevent a catastrophe. You should test to make sure that all aspects of the new site are working properly and that there’re no missing links. Ensure you analyse your traffic in Google Analytics.

Have you migrated a website before? How did it go? What kind of issues did you face? Or maybe you’re planning a website migration and have some questions? Share your comments or questions below!

Plan your domain or site migration without affecting your SEO traffic is a post from: Response Marketing Blog - Search Engine Marketing by Mediarun