Implementing your social channels effectively is critical for search optimisation these days, so getting on top of your global campaign at a local level is more important than ever before.

Social means different things in different countries around the world.

So how do you handle each of these elements to deliver a consistent tone, brand message and positive campaign ROI?

Well, no one would claim it’s easy, but here’s five tips learnt from years in the trenches delivering social media strategy for multinational brands you’ll find useful.

Tip 1: Agree On A Social Style Guide

Just as important as your brand’s Social Media Policy, a social style guide should provide a framework for your social media mavens to work within in each country that ensures they have the freedom to be flexible in managing their profiles while still conveying uniformity of tone and brand message.

This is especially important in countries where the leading social networks are not your standard Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, et al. A good example is Skyrock.com, which is the second most popular social network in France and French speaking Switzerland and Belgium.

Though this will always be unique to the brand values of the business, examples of good general elements to a social style guide are:

• Don’t feed the Trolls! Always be positive.
• Write for, and to, people: don’t act like a heartless feed of information.
• Don’t repeat yourself. Don’t repost without adding value or opinion.
• You are an employee of your brand, therefore your opinions and interests reflect the brand: don’t be afraid to allow your personality into your posts.
• Write about what engages you. Don’t just parrot industry news.
• Spend time finding other people in your niche and say hi (oh: and you are in a niche, regardless of how big your industry is).

Remember, you should be providing a framework within which your social media managers can be flexible, so don’t be restrictive or paranoid: you have to trust your team in each and every country.

If you can’t, you should focus on solving that issue, rather than compromising your social style guide.

Tip 2: Get Your Branding & Social Profiles Consistent

In addition to the obvious backlink benefit of ensuring your profiles are correctly set up, engagement with those profiles is more accurately fed into your main site performance by Google when you have clear profile relationships set up fromt he outset.

It’s easy for medium-sized brands to forget that they have a huge amount of branding opportunity within social profiles: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and so on all have excellent personalisation opportunities which allow you to put your brand front and centre.

Larger multinational brands will  likely already have some basic profile personalisation in place, but very little naturalisation of that profile to the network it’s on: you should be presenting different elements of your brand to different networks (imagine trying to use a single profile to target the difference in audience between LinkedIn and Facebook: it’s not easy or recommended).

However, regardless of the current state of play, you should make sure you decide how you want your brand to be projected in the social sphere first of all.

Some brands are naturally suited to social by virtue of having a positive, globally recognised brand in the first place.

For example, Pepsi Cola’s integration of brand to their YouTube channel makes it almost indistinguishable from their own Web properties while still delivering all the advantages of being within YouTube’s powerful distribution system (not to mention the SEO benefits of YouTube activity).

Disney Pixar on Facebook also does a great job of maintaining a community for the Toy Story trilogy. And fun, relaxed, people-oriented brands like Boden or FatFace’s Twitter Accounts show how a strong community can be seamlessly built around brand ethos.

Nike has taken the social integration further than most by embodying social in itself, launching a variety of apps, and products that integrate with their applications as part of their core business.

Without going to those extremes, even a limited budget social media campaign can deliver improved campaign ROI by ensuring the core brand experience is consistent across all social profiles in terms of branded layouts and consistent profile descriptions.

Each profile should offer clear points of differentiation (for example, at a very basic level using Facebook for community groups, and Twitter for retail or promotional offer groups).

For the multinational business, the challenge is to achieve this level of integration in each country operated in, which still achieving an over-arching social brand personality.

By laying out your social policy clearly, upfront, and applying it to each territory by managing your local webmaster teams closely and ensuring buy-in, you have the best opportunity to achieve that balance. Regular (I’d suggest fortnightly at the least) and fair reviews of social profiles and activities against the policy allow you to give steer to each territory on how effective they are being.

Tip 3: Streamline Your Workflow

Once you’ve organised your social profiles’ tone and purpose by following the preceding tips, next up is the logistical challenge of mapping those networks to your global customer base.

This means you need to judge what capability you have to service as granular a localisation of your social strategy across all territories as possible.

In an ideal world, you’d look to cover off all relevant languages in all target countries. This might mean anything from unique twitter profiles for, say, your French eComms customer service team, or managing access to your global Twitter profile for different native language speakers and functions, each demarcated by unique hashtag handles alongside their post.

In practice, there are usually compromises to be made to match your in-house resources (we can’t all be Nike, after all), but to build out your process you should take into account the natural intent of each social network.

For example, if you’re a B2B business, LinkedIn is going to be a more valued network to you than Facebook or Pinterest and you should allocate resource accordingly.

You may be able to make efficiencies and therefore extend your social profile by shifting your Web-facing customer service function entirely onto, say, Twitter a lá Vodafone (also a good example of using tags to identify different real people using the account to make the account much more effective for handling customer concerns).

Whichever approach you take (and if you’re on a very tight budget, I’d suggest strictly limiting the number of networks and profiles used to execute your strategy, allowing you to concentrate your efforts), it’s important that you post appropriately and consistently, avoiding any automated solutions to try to ‘extend’ your reach: social networks ultimately are about real people, so no cutting corners!

The advantage for search is that the improved focus on profiles will trigger algorithmic benefits for your main domain in addition to increasing your brand visibility in time-sensitive searches.

Tip 4: Don’t Ignore Local Networks

A lot of countries have very strong local rivals to the major social networks, and if any fall into your target countries, I’d strongly recommend you prioritise including them in your social strategy and allocate some of your resource to developing your presence.

A colleague at QueryClick recently covered off some core multinational markets and social networks to be aware of, so I won’t repeat them here, but I strongly urge you extend the research in your core markets and also take onboard the difference in European and North American social network engagement.

Of course, each local network you identify is another profile and backlink engagement opportunity. When that link is coming from a locally important network you’re improving your algorithmic benefit most efficiently.

Tip 5: Positive, Localised Feedback

Finally, in order to manage the implementation of your strategy, you need to make the most of your analytics packages to show the value driven by your social campaigns to your team, and review the effectiveness of each country’s implementation of your brand policies.

I’ve found that collating an auto-run report scorecard showing activity, reactions, traffic driven, traffic converted, signups and sales (if relevant, otherwise leads generated) is the most fair report, which you should then temper with some real word reactions to the campaign for each territory (both good & bad).

This can either be gathered by looking at conversations generated, asking for feedback directly once converted onto the main suite via a feedback form, or by simply pulling out activity posted by the social manager themselves and matching it against your policy to show where they are hitting the mark and where they can make improvements. Much like the social commandments, you should always seek to keep your feedback positive to encourage positive activity from each country: when social becomes a chore, the quality of the content delivered is weakened.

It’s also a good idea to map out the social engagement of each country to give you a very top level idea of how pro-active each country is being socially. Aiming to make this map activity match up with brand ambitions for performance in each country (there will always be key markets for your brand) ensures you keep your focus on improving the countries which are strategically important.

If you have access to Hitwise for your marketplace, request a report on social network marketshare in each country and ensure you’re tracking aggregated activity across each network, normalised by its marketshare to get an accurate (or as accurate as you can be) steer for activity being performed in the right place.

After all, you don’t want to spend your time optimising socially shared product images in Orkut in the US, but you do if you’re reporting on activity in Brazil, India and Japan.

So remember: context is everything. Make sure you’re optimising in (and reporting on) the right language, in the right networks, for your target countries. One size does not fit all in multinational social media strategies.

Image attribution: Insights Consulting

The discussion did make me realise the importance of understanding the names of things – technical terms if you like. Time someone put that right, with this glossary list.

Canonical Tag

A tag which is included in the page HTML to indicate a single URL for otherwise duplicate content. Useful for global websites especially where they run content in world languages such as English, Spanish or French and where the same content is cascaded to all same language countries.

CDNs

CDN stands for “Content Delivery Network”. The purpose of these networks is to improve the user experience of using websites because they deliver quickly and have high availability.

Global websites are important users of CDNs and this has become more important due to the speed of delivery of content now factoring into search engine algorithms. The downside of CDNs is they typically show search engines URLs not from the country the websites target.

Click Through Rate

This has been a common term for pay per click ads for many years. It means the percentage of users which see an ad and click on it. Now it has been adopted by the organic search algorithms of search engines including Yandex, Google and Baidu.

Geo-Selector

Every global website needs a geo-selector if users need to be able to navigate to different countries or languages. Geo-selectors which cannot be crawled correctly by search engines are damaging to their owners’ website SEO performance. Geo-selectors need to be fixed or alternative methods of geo-targeting should be adopted.

Geo-Targeting

This is a range of tactics which ensure that the website pages are shown to users matching the countries and languages in which they search. The geo-targeting options include local domains, webmaster tools geographic settings, canonicals and Hreflang tags, local links, local hosting and languages.

Geo-targeting Is A Critical Success Factor In International SEO

Keyword Research

Finding the right keywords is absolutely key in search marketing and that means researching them rather than translating. Translating keywords to find search opportunities in other markets produces distorted results and poor performance.

Local Domains

More technically known as ccTLDs or country codes, local domains have a number of important uses. They produce better conversion with local users and are a particularly strong signal for geo-targeting.

Local Hosting

Websites served from local servers deliver pages faster and provide search engines with a local IP address to help in the geo-targeting decision-making. Proxies delivered from local servers can also be used for this purpose.

Hreflang

 A relative newcomer, the Hreflang tag helps to provide a geo-targeting signal to search engines. It’s a tag in the HTML which indicates a connection between two countries and enables Google to correlate the two.

International SEO

It’s SEO and it’s international! Often the term is used by people meaning that the website concerned is targeting several countries – but often they are English-speaking.

For SEO in countries speaking different languages, the term “multilingual SEO” is more often used. There is much debate over whether international SEO is really different to domestic SEO, but I argue that it involves not just different languages but also different techniques and a completely different mindset.

Machine Learning

All of the major search engines use machine learning. Machine learning means that the machine (ie., the computer) sees that it has made errors in its selection and corrects, hence the term learning.

Yandex uses machine learning extensively for its organic results, Google less so though Panda is a machine learning system. It is used extensively for Google Adwords.

A Correctly Functioning Geo-Selector Is Key

Page Rank

Remember this? Invented by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and the original basis for the creation of Google, the concept of inbound links creating authority and that authority being passed to the next in the chain.

Yandex and Baidu basically do the same thing but don’t publish a figure. Google no longer regularly updates its published Page Rank figure so it’s less than reliable.

Page Speed

Although this speaks for itself, page speed still requires some definition. In its raw sense, it’s simply the time it takes for a page to appear to the user.

Google takes account of this within its algorithm but it’s important to note that the measurements Google uses are taken from the browser and so take account of the speed of delivery of the page at a local level. You can’t just measure the size of the page and extrapolate what the speed might be!

SEO-Localization

SEO-Localization is a combination of localization or translation with on the page search engine optimization. That is stating the obvious, but the trick behind the combination of these two processes is that they normally conflict.

As I have said many times, keywords do not translate so content which has been worked on for SEO purposes will lose the SEO benefit the moment they are translated – the keywords do not travel through to the translated content. In SEO-Localization, the keywords do travel!

User Agent Recognition & IP

The user agent is basically the name of the crawler or browser connection as it accesses a web page and it’s own location on the web. It is used by some to determine the location from which is visitor is coming and to re-direct that particular visitor to a particular country based on the original IP address.

This is not to be recommended, by the way, as users should really be able to choose which country information and language they wish to view. Redirecting “non-local” IP addresses can also result in non-local search engines crawlers (otherwise known as “Google”) being pointed to locations which are not the target or are not connected.

Furthermore, I am also seeing a significant number of migrations to new content management systems (CMS) that are more accommodating to Asian languages, resulting in complete changes in URL structures and content volumes.

The planning and opportunity assessment process I will outline can also be very useful if you plan to migrate from regional representation to local representation.

For example, if you covered Latin America with a LATAM site that was a single site in Spanish for the region and you are moving to local-centric sites, it is important to use a process like I describe below to find additional local opportunities.

In the following steps, we are trying to identify the content with the highest value to ensure that we know what it is, keep it alive, redirect to the new pages and lastly measure the increase and decrease at a word/page level.

If you follow the steps outlined below and gather all of the bits of data in Excel the resulting pivot table should look something like the screen capture below. This pivot table shows how all of the information comes together. to allow you to sort the data and make decisions about migrating content.

Note, due to image size restrictions the URL’s are not shown in the graphic but they would be off to the right.

Step 1:  Develop Master Keyword Lists

Start the process by creating a master list of keywords that are important to the country and business unit managers. You should have this already but just in case, check with the local teams to see if they are retiring any products, services or sections of the site as part of the transition. Even if they are, you should handle this properly as well since there is often significant opportunity long after you stop selling the products.

Step 2:  Master List Of Pages

In this step, we want to get a good idea of how many pages we have on the site for each country and language version that will be part of the change. You can develop this list by crawling the site or exporting from a database.

There are a number of tools you can use, but two that are easy are Screaming Frog’s Spider or Microsoft’s IIS SEO toolkit. Both will get you a decent list of pages. If you have a tool that develops XML sitemaps, you can use that as well to create that base list of URL’s. The list will never be perfect but it is a great start.

This list can also be used to check redirects post-launch to ensure they were all implemented correctly. Note: of the last 5 site migrations I worked on, we were 5 for 5 where the developers implemented the redirects incorrectly.

It is critical that you check these as quickly as possible post-launch in order to salvage any mistakes.

Step 3:  Inbound Links

Another often-overlooked step is to identify pages on the site that have a lot of quality links to them. We work so hard to get these links and most of the time there is little consideration for link equity during a rebuild or a site migration especially in overseas markets.

If you have an account, you can use MagesticSEO’s Bulk Back Link checker to check up to 150 URL’s at one time for authority and relevance. You can also use the MozScape API from SEOMoz to do this as well, but that requires some programing skills.

If you are migrating from a regional site to local sites this step is critical. In many cases, individual country sites and blogs may have linked to your regional site (since that is all you had available) and these are the links we need to make sure are redirected to the local version with the best authority.

For example, one page of a Latin America regional site had over 2,000 links from Mexico and none from any other country. There was no plan to migrate the links and they would have been lost. We redirected the LatAm version of the page to the new page in Mexico, resulting in the new page jumping to the top of the search results.

The challenge is when you have a lot of links from different countries to the same regional page. For these pages, you have to look at the link value from different countries and conduct outreach to the local sites to get them to link to the new local versions. You can redirect the old page to a dominant country or one that has the highest number of links.

Step 4:  Page View Data For Each Page

In this step, you are looking for the number of page views of each page. This helps you to understand the overall value of the page to visitors.

You can draw the line where you feel comfortable. I have seen companies use last month, six months or even one year to determine the cut off. One year makes the most sense if you have a lot of seasonality in your traffic. The key is to identify high page view pages to make sure they are replicated in the new structure and/or redirected to the new content.

Step 5:  Keyword Traffic

Export a master list of traffic by keyword from your analytics tool. This will allow you to see which keywords are driving traffic. You can merge the highest traffic generators from this step with those generated in Step 1. You can also add in your PPC keywords and traffic to this mix as well, but we are mainly concerned with organic search traffic.

Step 6:  Keyword & Landing Page Current State

Once you have your merged list of words from Steps 1 and 5, throw them into your favorite ranking tool to see how well certain pages are ranking for top queries.

While many of you are adverse to rank reports this is a great pre- and post-launch diagnostic tool to see which words and more importantly, which pages, are ranking so that we can add that to the content value matrix we will develop later.

This list of high-ranking keywords and pages will offer an additional attributes to score the pages. Additionally, post-launch we can use this list of keywords and ranks to see which pages have been negatively impacted by the update rather than just guessing. The goal is to increase rankings post launch but we can be satisfied with no change as well.

Step 7:  Develop Keep/Redirect Or Delete Lists

In this step, we need to develop a criteria that we will use to decide which pages to keep, which pages to redirect and others to remove from the site.  Based on various performance attributes, we can identify pages to keep or delete from the site and our redirect/outreach efforts. I typically use a weighting such as (25+ page views (3 months) 10+ monthly visits (monthly), Top 10 organic ranking (in local version of search engine) and 5+ quality links.

Use your own criteria based on the type of site you have and available resources to work with the content and handle redirects and testing. I typically will use a few variations of this until we get the right mix.

For those pages you are not migrating, you should evaluate if it is best to send them to a higher level page (typically not possible with regional site migrations) or if you should use a 410 header response to tell the engines to purge them. Obviously, for those of high value and that have a one to one relationship on the new site, you should set up a 301 redirect.

Note: if you are creating new country sites from a regional site or changing any of your previous geographical signals like sub domains or directories, make sure you update your Google Webmaster tools geographical targeting settings.

Step 8:  Measure & Monitor Impact

Once the site goes live, you can run steps 3, 4 and 5 to monitor inclusion in indexes, identify pages and keywords that had a drop in rank and those that may not have been redirected correctly.

Doing this immediately after launch can help find problems before all value is gone. The value of doing this “before” the build starts you can get a good sense of the content that must be preserved, currently performance an that that should perform that is not which can be optimized in the migration.

It’s a challenge many organizations face. That’s not to say that these businesses are bad at retaining staff — the very fact that they are global often means that they offer something special to the world. Their staff are often not moving onto other organziations either — but simply are being promoted to a different position, team or department. Some, of course, are leaving the company too.

Another issue is that “SEO” responsibilities around the world aren’t often held by people who are dedicated to the cause of SEO. Mostly, they have other marketing tasks to handle too and have a relatively limited bandwidth for SEO.

Before going further, I have to declare two areas of personal interest. My company runs the International Search Summit with SMX and training programs. I’m also a long standing fan of SMX and SearchEngineLand and first attended conferences by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman in 2003 in the UK and 2004 in the US. So this gives me something of a bias, but also I think a unique insight into the industry we’re all in.

In many sectors there have been studies into the value of training. I don’t propose to labour this point – I think we’re all aware of the rapidly changing nature of the business.

The value of keeping abreast of search engine and social media developments pays for itself many times over – I’m sure we all agree. You would think that investing in training would be a no-brainer but it’s still a cost and it’s value isn’t always recognized. (My staff at this point are also nodding.)

We also have to recognize at this point that for those working in international SEO the challenges are particularly tough. No one speaks 20 or even 10 languages well. If you see someone who claims that, I suggest you challenge it. So how can a normal human being SEO working internationally actually cope? Let’s look at some strategies.

1.  Conferences Like SMX & The International Search Summit

If you think I’m about to say it’s a good idea to go to conferences, you’d only be half right. There are conferences all over the world so you could quite easily send staff to the most local conference for them. I think there is a better strategy which I’ve seen a few companies deploy.

A good strategy is to choose a big and wide ranging conference somewhere in the world and then to fly in the relevant staff from all over the world. Yes I can hear the sharp intake of breath and I know there’s a little more cost involved with that, but the value is clear.

With all of the global SEO team in one place, they can discuss not just what they’ve seen and heard but also their own issues. In effect you can organise a parallel conference for you own organisation alongside the main conference with the inspiration of the main conference in the team’s minds.

Bring The International SEO Together And Have An In-Conference Conference

I have to say that in my humble opinion, major conferences such as SMX have made a major contribution to the development of this industry.

2.  Work With An Agency Which Shares Knowledge Rather Than Tactics

I wish I saw this more often in RFPs. There are basically two types of agency in the world; those agencies who keep their insight and knowledge up their sleeves not wanting to share it with their clients, presumably because they take the view that they will earn less money if they “Teach our clients how to do it!”

Then there are those agencies which take the view that if they do not pass information to the people working within the client company, they will simply not achieve their combined goals.

3.  Create A Center Of Excellence & Best Practices

There are many tools available where you can create a repository to store information on best practice. If you don’t have a system for this in place, then you are going to find that you constantly need to re-invent the wheel and to spend much more money on training. But be careful, the information stored in your repository needs to be regularly reviewed to keep things up to speed with the latest developments.

Use Best Practice Guides Such As This One On SEO-Localization

4.  Create Your Own In-house Training Materials

You can share responsiblity around the organization for creating in-house training materials. A good system is to allocate areas to cover such as link building, content management, on page code and so on and give these to different people around the team to manage and to provide the training to others.

The process of creating and maintaining the training materials actually turns the people involved into experts in their own field which makes you much less dependent on external resources.

5.  Use External Webinars & Training Courses

There are some pretty good resources available which staff can participate in remotely. Consider that it might be wise to get translated transcripts produced to enhance the understanding of your co-workers. Never forget that whilst your colleagues appear to speak good English, when it comes to training, it’s harder if you don’t speak the language as your mother tongue.

I also believe that in the end, quality face-to-face training in small groups makes a huge difference to your success.

A few Florentines, mostly former colleagues from the Italian internet company Dada, set out in April 2011 to develop a new search engine, Attrakt, which would focus specifically on hosting specialized search engines curated by the Web community.

Attrakt’s Index Relies On Curator Contributions

As such, Attrakt isn’t a generalist search engine, with a broad index ready for everyday searches. Attrakt’s index is primarily seeded through links specified by curators of custom search engines, what Attrakt calls boxes.

As in the early days of Wikipedia, if you’re lucky enough to search on a topic someone has already curated, then you might be impressed. But for the most part, Attrakt is fairly empty, a problem Attrakt partners Andrea Dotta, Luca Ciavarella and Gabriele Miceli acknowledged won’t be resolved until Attrakt reaches a critical mass of contributing editors.

Putting Attrakt To The Test With Schema.Org Rich Snippets Use Case

Users can explore Attrakt’s potential by searching or creating a customized search engine on a topic of particular interest; the Attrakt team mentioned travelling in Italy and 80s synthpop among many examples. These two illustrate the use multimedia in addition to textual resources. I decided to try a search marketing use case: the Schema.org semantic web markup standard defined and supported by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.

By implementing Schema.org standards, websites can enable the display of many types of enriched search results, what Google calls rich snippets. Enriched results can be very beneficial for Web marketers and users alike but there’s a lot of material to wade through.

There’s the official standard, supplemented with separate documentation from each search engine. Extensions are available for many CMS‘ including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and IBM WebSphere. Google, Bing and Yandex each offer testing tools.

Armed with around 60 selected links to pages and sites regarding schema.org and rich snippets, I created a new Attrakt box, or specialized search engine. Searches using the resulting Schema.org Attrakt box provide answers from these curated resources.

Creating an Attrakt custom search engine is a fairly straight forward process. An editor needs to provide a name for their engine, assign a category and country and add a few tags.

Each link is then specified together with a few attributes such as a link category (e.g. Blog, News, Tool, Official) and whether Attrakt should index just the URL or the entire site. The link categories allow an end user to browse through the links assigned to each of these categories.

Overall, the creation interface could be simplified: entering 60 URLs, one by one, is a tedious process. It would be quicker to paste all the URLs into a single form, assigning categories in a successive step. The box country should be optional. The topic of many curated search engines, including this one, will transcend geography.

Link categorization is also problematic: should an official Google blog post on Schema.org be tagged as Blog, News or Official? While at first glance blog might seem to be the best answer, a Google Blog Post is really an official company statement which in of itself is often a news item, which happens to appear on a blog publishing platform. Clear?

Once a custom search engine box is created, it can be modified or deleted, although the use of grayed out text for the edit link both makes it hard to find and implies it isn’t available as a function.

To be fair, the Attrakt team is continuing to refine both the user interface and the underlying search engine technology. By the time you read this article, much of what you see will undoubtedly be improved. In the future, it will apparently be possible to assign a link to multiple categories. Attrakt is also working with researchers at the University of Florence on algorithmic solutions.

Once a box is created, it can be shared with others via a link. Attrakt will periodically crawl a box’s URLs to check for changes. Box curators will see a message display when Attrakt detects changes. It would be nice if they could also receive notifications via mail or RSS, similar to the way Google Alerts works. Search box curators will be able to embed their Attrakt search box on other sites, a feature planned for May 2012.

Are Curated Search Engines Really Useful?

A curated search engine potentially has two specific advantages over a generic search using Google, Bing or Yandex. The first is it will exclude content which strictly speaking answers the query but is of low value, like the plethora of parrot posts which appear just after a Google blog post is published. It often seems that 9 out of 10 repeat the official news without adding any additional insight.

A second benefit is to surface specific content which might not have otherwise showed up in a generic search. At the time of this writing, Bing’s Schema.org testing tool is poorly indexed in Google, but can be found browsing the Tools links of the Attrakt Schema.org search box.

Attrakt Wants Crowd Sourced Curated Search To Go Social

The quality of a custom search engine depends on the ability of the curator and on the technology providing the search results. Currently, Attrakt will display the user name of a box curator, but there’s no way for a casual user to determine if the curator is authoritative or not.

Attrakt currently collects profile information during the user registration process; it would be nice if they would also display profile information together with other box attributes. Such display would also give search box curators a greater incentive to contribute quality search boxes to Attrakt.

Attrakt highlights some hot search boxes on their homepage, but it isn’t possible to search for a search box on a topic nor is there a directory of search boxes.

In some cases, search boxes are listed next to results in a general Attrakt search, although there are some geolocalization issues still to work out. Attrakt primarily relies on a search box’s author to promote a specific curated search engine.

Attrakt search boxes are curated by a single user. It would be interesting to allow collaborative search box editing, similar to Wikipedia’s support for multiple authors. In a world filled with spammers, this isn’t so simple to successfully implement.

Attrakt plans on adding a robust social layer – a layer which will undoubtedly make Attrakt much more attractive to curators and search users alike.

On this point, Attrakt says:

Users will soon be able to follow each other and each others’ boxes, create elaborate user profiles to declare their areas of expertise. A Twitter stream will soon help animate search boxes with up to date content. Boxes already have static URLs for sharing, and sharing will be encouraged by share buttons.

Outside of the Attrakt platform, we’re planning on using twitter to drive traffic to peoples’ search boxes using relevant hashtags, and if a twitter account is present in the user’s profile we’ll tag that user.

Attrakt Is Still In Early Stage Of Development

A reader would be forgiven if they have the idea that Attrakt is very much a work in progress. The Attrakt team began armed with a dream and a modest €50,000 in self-financing. They’ve come a long way in a year and attracted an additional €500,000 in funding but are still months away from realizing the product they have in mind.

Mindful of this, they’ve eschewed seeking out press coverage, preferring to release and refine features out of the limelight. However, a site focusing on Italian news tipped me off to this new source of traffic, so now you know about Attrakt too.

Services Similar To Attrakt

Google’s customized search is probably Attrakt’s closest competitor. Many websites have added a basic version of it to supply a quick and easy site search, although it also includes features like Attrakt’s link categories, what Google calls refinements.

Perhaps the primary difference, beyond Google’s algorithmic prowess, is that Attrakt says its embedded search boxes will be advertising free (Attrakt does carry advertising on their site).

Attrakt also facilitates the sharing of curated custom search engines and plans on further differentiating themselves with additional social features. Readers can compare the search results for the same Schema.org resources indexed by Attrakt and Google.

Mahalo has positioned itself as a human edited search engine, but they don’t crowd source their contributions.

Delicious is by far the most used collaborative bookmarking service, however they don’t actually index the content of the saved bookmarks.

Volunia is a social search engine also from Italy, however their focus is more general.

Attrakt Opportunities For Marketers

Attrakt offers marketers the opportunity to demonstrate their personal or company expertise in a particular subject area through the creation and promotion of a curated search box.

As with all things social, the rules of the game have changed. The most successful search boxes will include comprehensive coverage of a subject domain, even if that means including resources from competitors.

What Webmasters Should Know About Attrakt

Attrakt robots.txt Support

Attrakt supports the robots exclusion protocol, known as robots.txt. Attrakt’s crawler is called attrakt. If Attrakt is crawling the site, web server logs will contain the user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; attrakt/1.0 +http://www.attrakt.com)

Meta tags are not yet supported, nor is there support for sitemaps.org and schema.org protocols.

Keyword Tracking In Google Analytics And Similar Systems

Attrakt provides search query information in URL referrers using the defacto standard q=<query> URL parameter name/value pair.

Users of most digital media measurement systems will need to add recognition logic for Attrakt searches, otherwise Attrakt will show up as a simple site referer. Google Analytics asynchronous tracking code users can add ['_addOrganic','attrakt.com','q'] to their tracking code.

The story behind the Attrakt name? When asked, the Attrakt team demurred. Its origins seem to be lost in the sands of time.

Let’s take the raw sales performance first. Below is a chart which looks at the rate of growth of the US, UK and then the rest of the world. You can see that the dramatic peak of two quarters ago (mainly from the international markets) has disappeared and things have returned to steady growth rates around the 30% year on year level.

International Stabilises But Growth Rates Declining

A 30% growth rate is great in anyone’s book — but we tend to forget that this isn’t just a Google figure, this is a reflection of growth in the market as traditional forms of advertising fade on the vine and online takes off. Google has done a lot to help it along, but the market has generally been going dramatically in that direction.

As the chart below shows, the market for search outside the US and UK now exceeds at least $23 billion.

Google has at least 80% of that, which we’ll dig into in a few moments, but the two biggest global competitors (non-US, non-UK) are Baidu and Yandex who between them earn around 16% of the total market share.

The Global Search Market Outside The US And UK

The last two quarters of more “muted” growth have seen the huge rate of increase in spending from Google on people and advertising dipping also. Which was the chicken and which was the egg? I guess we’ll never know the answer to that.

What we can say is that the Larry Page inspired shift upwards in gears, has settled, albeit at a higher level. The spend on advertising and staff hasn’t abated, it just hasn’t accelerated to the same degree it did last year.

Google Growth Rates In Headcount & Sales Dramatically Slow

One feature of Google’s last quarter’s report was a drop in the value of clicks at the same time as the number of clicks increased. The Web conference to explain the company’s financial performance this quarter pointed much more at clicks in the mobile sector being part of the cause.

Thanks to the huge rise in Android and a strong increase in mobile advertising, Google has seen a significant rise in the number of mobile clicks on its ads.

The problem is, the value of the resulting clicks is much lower as the chart below seems to show. In fact, the average cost of a click now is less than it was in 2008, according to Google’s own figures extrapolated in the chart.

This is good news for advertisers for sure, but does mean if that’s not the pattern you’re seeing, you may need to think about which types of ad to buy? Might this be a time to consider adding mobile to your portfolio of activity?

Average Value Per Google Click Drops To 2008 Levels

If we correlate the clicks volume to rising revenue divided by the US, International and the rest of the world, if you check out the trends in the red circle below, it does seem that click volume might be putting revenues under pressure.

US revenue is following its normal cyclical pattern of a decline in the first quarter of the year, but looking behind the figures, this decline is actually slightly more than usual.

Mobile ads, and the US decline might all be linked to the lower value of clicks.

Regional Revenues Correlated To Click Volumes

Perhaps more influential on the Google’s psyche and strategy is the concept of a falling global market share outside the US and UK. Our figures show that from quarter 1 2009 to now, Google may have lost as much as 8% market share.

This doesn’t mean that Google isn’t getting people to use it or to use search, but it might mean there’s much more competition for online marketing bucks than there was just a couple of years ago.

These figures are based on publicly declared reports, but they are nonetheless difficult to calculate as all businesses have multiple sources of revenue.

However, just suppose that Google was looking at a similar pattern internally, how would you change your strategy?

I think you’d try spending more on advertising, recruit more people to push the Google message home, focus only those developments that could help take your business forwards competitively and you’d try launching products that trod on the toes of your budget stealing competitors (Facebook?) — namely something like Google+.

Does this sound familiar? Oh this might be a good time to change the share structure to protect your control for the future too — while you still can!

Google Global Market Share Outside UK And US - Estimated

Before we have a wholesale bashing of our IT brethren, let’s consider that some of the problems might actually be coming from the SEO side. I have done a number of interviews during projects various IT teams and have looked and what has been submitted by their SEO experts and too often it is quite embarrassing what the IT teams are given by these SEO experts.

SEO Distrust & Frustration

It is this lack of documentation and prioritization that has fostered an era of distrust and skepticism of SEO practitioners. I have been in far too many meetings where the IT teams cringe when the meeting topic is SEO since it means they are about to be blamed for many things they have not done or have done wrong.

Even bigger problems arise from non-enterprise SEO’s trying to shoehorn in small site tactics which cannot scale and cause more harm than good to large scale sites requiring rework or other massive changes to the site when they do not work.

Flawed Requirements

Along with small site SEO tactics comes inaccurate or non-detailed specifications. I see too many requests of IT that are simply “add canonical tags to all pages” or “remove parameters from URL’s” with no suggestions on how to do it or a business case for why it should be done.

A Web Content Manager in Italy recently told me he is allowed to allocate two hours per month to anything related to SEO and the rest of his time was translating and making changes local product pages.

He had a list of over 100 changes provided by a local agency with little to no instruction. It was a simple Excel file with 100 rows of things to do. He did not have the time to make the changes let alone time to figure out how to make them.

Keeping Pace With Google Changes

Most SEO’s like to impress clients and family with how tough their job is by reminding everyone of the 500+ annual changes Google makes to the algorithm. This boast goes a long way to justify our existence as consultants but can be a major barrier in IT discussions. Many IT teams simply say “why bother since Google will just change it next month.”

This is becoming more of a problem since Google seems to be changing their recommendations more frequently and/or not really taking the enterprise’s ability to implement them into consideration when they make them.

I can only hope that Google will begin to offer more detailed instructions when making the changes and I strongly suggest that SEO’s not immediately jump on them but read multiple iterations and interpretations from Google’s team on the forums and within the community.

A great example of this is a recent post by Maile Ohye, 5 Common Mistakes in SEO, where she gave some great advice especially for the enterprise on how to approach SEO more effectively.

Unfortunately, a few “expert SEO’s” incorrectly interpreted her comments about the canonical tag usage and told their IT teams that Google will delete the variations of pages other than the canonical page from their index. At one such company, they had just spent over 300 man-hours to develop the logic and deploying canonicals to cover the various domain and parameter permutations of their site.

It took quite a bit of time to explain that is not what she said and that their solution was working as Google suggests.

Another recent example is with the HRefLang tag recommendations dust up that Andy Atkins Kruger wrote about last month, where companies were instructed to add this tag for each of the language and country variations.

Perfect for a small sites, but what about an IBM sized site that has representation in over 100 countries and languages? Most companies would need to add an additional 20 to 130 lines of code to their page to add all of these language options.

Talking to a number of enterprise development teams, this would require significant resources to implement which they will not likely allocate since there are no concrete examples of how well it would work.

Almost immediately, most enterprise IT teams have pushed back saying “you just told us to reduce the lines of code now you tell us to add hundreds more?” These types of recommendations cost SEO’s a lot of credibility.

Web & Technical Resource Allocation

We can lump a lot of the problems into the ole’ lack of resources bucket. The global recession has resulted in deep cuts of people in local Web teams or realignment into central hubs in Bratislava, Argentina and India. These teams now handle global issues and are overwhelmed with large-scale revenue generating changes and often making SEO changes to local sites are some of the least important things they have to do.

This is the very reason we on the SEO side need to do a better job of detailing our requirements, creating the business case for change and working hard to identify ways to create scale especially at the global level.

Lack Of Global Considerations

Lastly, many companies rarely think globally when they make major changes. I just spoke to a large European company that was rebuilding their entire global presence. They have spent seven months planning it and thought they had everything thought out and implemented.

I asked about handling countries – they were moving from a combination of ccTLD’s and language structures /german to country structures /de and /at. I asked them what their plan for the content was and they were simply going to copy the single site into all the applicable subdirectories to create local versions and redirect the top level domains.

As you can imagine, this is less than optimal, but the end was near and the code locked down so no changes were possible until far after the launch.

In this situation, many would resort to translation and translation agencies (readers of this column know already what a poor view I have of that) — but that’s not how Niall and the team at Be2 approached the international roll out of their sites internationally.

First a quick bit of background. Be2 is a dating site which operates in 39 countries and 18 languages — pretty global you’d have to say. It relies on international PPC for the recruitment of subscribers who are interested in dating.

Be2's Roll Out Comprised 31 Countries

The challenge for Niall was how to achieve that with a relatively small team operating in so many countries — the approach kept his audience spellbound for 30 minutes.

It was decided to “Hire based on SEM skills and experience, not on language skills. To focus on getting the best SEM account managers we could find and not to limit the profile to certain language sets.”

This is interesting because my concept in business for many years has been the opposite, to recruit people with the right attitude and native language and then to train them the practical skills they need on the job.

Keep Translators As Far Away From Campaigns As Possible

I have always taken the view that it takes years to learn a language correctly — plus a cooperative mother. To train in something as technical as international SEO or SEM is, by comparison, a little easier to do.

Niall did also say they aimed to, “Keep translators as far away from the campaigns as possible.” The Be2 team was actually split into portfolios taking responsibility for a group of countries with specialists advising on areas such as YouTube or Retargeting.

Be2 Allowed Broad Match To Select Its Keywords

The process was to work with a native speaker to get the core words, the most important keywords, for the language. These keywords would then be used to set up a small campaign in Google using the broad match settings. This would then go live for a week or until there was sufficient data. “Let the millions of users decide your keyword list,” said Niall.

The generated keywords would be grouped into campaigns and ad groups using intuition. Google Translate would be deployed to help with understanding what the keywords roughly meant.

Further keywords, plus negative keywords, would be “fished” from broad match occasionally seeking the support of native speakers. Stir and repeat.

The Be2 Internationalization Process

Niall confessed that the most challenging aspect was creating the adtexts to accompany the campaigns, but even here, they found a workable cheat.

Working on the assumption that very high volume keywords are unlikely to contain grammar errors, they created ads from the keywords they saw searched for in high volumes and then tested different versions against each other.

The benefits of the approach were faster development of the the accounts, longer and more accurate long tail, keywords close to what people actually search for and it was easy to optimise going forwards.

Dating Is A High Volume Sport

The approach is fascinating and one I’m sure is used by many more than most would expect. However, before you rush off and fire your agencies, bear in mind the following thoughts.

Firstly, dating is a high volume sport which interests a lot of people.

This type of approach would hold much more risk for business-to-business companies or for businesses operating in very specific niches where the likelihood of the keyword set falling out of Google’s broad match would less — especially if you didn’t get exactly the right terms in the account at the very beginning.

Dating is also a powerful human need which means that people are highly motivated to find a solution even if your adtexts don’t hit the nail on the head when they show up.

If you were trying to sell something like insurance, which people don’t really want to buy, then you’re going to find this approach less successful.

Do The Millions Really Decide?

When you let the “millions of users decide your keyword set,” do bear in mind that that is technically not the case.

It’s Google broad matching algorithm in the first place. The way this works is it is constantly testing new matches to see if people click. If they click, it will continue to be matched up in that way. I imagine, but can’t prove, that Google measure up the conversions it’s seeing in Google Analytics too — but it’s still not exactly that users are “deciding”.

Finally, built into the approach is an acceptance of a certain rate of failure compensated for by the lower cost of implementation. My concern with this, however, is that for many businesses this could lead to the conclusion that, “There’s no opportunity in international search for me!”

I’m not saying that this is not a good approach for some and it may be something you wish to try at first. And when you’ve don’t that — you know where I am!

Leveraging multinational markup while clearing up in-site duplicate content and avoiding multinational homepage calamities is no easy matter to coordinate for big site SEO.

Bringing all of those strategies to bear, and then also attempting to integrate a mobile site strategy would seem, on the face of it, to be a difficult task.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Mobile Sites, Feature Phones & The Smartphone Revolution

We are fortunate to be living through a time of radical change for mobile website optimisation.

Every year since 2003-2004, I’ve heard well respected industry figures declaim the ‘Year of Mobile’, only to be sorely disappointed when it comes down to looking at where their client’s online revenue is being generated (with the notable exception of gaming, of course).

The last couple of years have seen mobile-derived revenue finally push on to the point where we are genuinely on the cusp of smartphones (and of course tablets) taking centre stage.

This is especially true for retailers. And you can multiply that sentiment by 10 for multinational brand retailers.

So why now?

If you’ve ever tried to make a purchase through a feature phone (AKA: a ‘dumb’ phone), then you’ll know the answer.

Smartphones and tablets provide a genuinely convenient and pleasurable shopping experience, whether via applications or HTML5, or simply thanks to clever adaptive CSS styling.

They also allow big sites to avoid the common SEO pitfalls of deploying a specially created ‘Mobile’ website intended for feature forms. To demonstrate my point, step forward UK hardware supplier B&Q, owners of the SEO friendly domain ‘diy.com’.

The Pitfalls Of Mobile Content Duplication

Using our site operators we can drill through B&Q’s domain to spot the issue created by their current mobile deployment.

We can see that for a domain with 937,000 indexed pages initially listed in Google’s cache, a chunk of 50,000 are caused by the entirely duplicate m.diy.com subdomain: their mobile website.

(Of course, a rather larger chunk of 108,000 are caused by their ‘Asset Bank’ feature: if you’re reading B&Q, please do check out the clearing up website duplication tips I linked to earlier.)

We can also see that because the mobile site is cached in Google’s main index, they will return pages like this and this for users searching on desktop computers, creating extremely bad brand experiences and the cause of massive bounce rate issues which have a knock on effect on the domain’s SEO value as a whole.

A B&Q mobile page indexed in Google's main SERPs.

Effectively, the poor performance of the mobile pages will damage the performance of the ‘main’ website pages. So rather than providing value by being useful for feature phone users (who tend not to make a purchase via their phones anyway), they in fact detract value and lower sales.

So why has this happened and what’s the solution?

B&Q have done the right thing: they are catering to their customers regardless of their browsing device. This is a good thing.

Unfortunately, they have not followed Google’s advice for registering mobile only pages in their mobile search engine. And so, they have ended up creating issues and failing to reach their intended audience.

By listing their mobile URLS in a Mobile sitemap.xml, and using (and declaring!) a mobile markup standard such as XHTML MP 1.2, cHTML or WML 1.3, B&Q could disambiguate their mobile content from their destop-intended pages and Google would reflect that in their indexing.

For a belt and braces approach (always preferred if you ask me!), using the robots.txt to restrict access to the m.diy.com subdomain to mobile user-agents only (for example Googlebot-mobile) would prevent the poor brand experience and SEO duplication issues in their tracks.

A Modern Mobile Website

However, if you are contemplating building a mobile site today, then I’d suggest you do none of these things, and instead break out a bit of CSS3.

By indicating the ‘media’ value for your stylesheets using CSS3 mediaqueries, you can pass different stylesheets based on the width of the browser used. For example, a value of “max-device-width:480px” would mean the contents are only used for the most common smartphone browser width.

You could be as granular as you like and provide small and full-size tablet width layouts, or indeed provide a unique layout for very wide monitor widths for more high value boutique brands looking to make a splash when visited by higher net worth individuals. The possibilities are extensive.

So detecting the user-agent (your browser, for example) display width is a snap, and serving different styling to a well structured XHTML (or, even better, HTML5) page means to can use exactly the same content – and therefore URLs – for your desktop or mobile devices. So, no duplication.

With HTML5′s additional strength as a surrogate phone/table app replacement, building to this specification allows extremely valuable future linkbait promotion of features without the additional expense of specific device application development.

We use that approach on QueryClick’s company website, so try it out in different devices (and of course feel free to copy out the code for your own purposes, I’d be pleased to hear what you make of it) and see how it scales from mobile, through to desktop all with just a small change in the CSS.

But when I added the word “Apple” to the headline, it completely changed its dynamics — just like Apple does every time it enters a new business area.

So, I must be talking about Siri right? Wrong. I agree actually that Siri is a really important development, but Apple has much more up its sleeve than just Siri.

What Does Apple Have Up Its Sleeve?

On the 23rd of February, Techcrunch followed by the Financial Times reported that Apple had paid $50 million to acquire a start-up called “Chomp”, whose homepage is shown below.

Chomp is an app search engine where you can find apps using keyword search. Intriguingly, it covers both iPhone and iPad along with Android.

Chomp Is The New Global Search Engine Due To Launch Soon

The image below shows how Chomp currently presents listings (that’s rankings right?) for apps giving you their ratings and clearly identifying if they are free are not.

The team which created Chomp is already working at Apple on the company’s plan to replace the current “App Stores” with Chomp or a version of it.

Chomp Shows Apps Trending In Popularity And Algorithmically Selects Categories

A little testing of Chomp reveals that it is a little more sensitive to keywords than the App Stores themselves – but much needs to be done. Don’t forget, there are now well over half a billion apps which have been downloaded over 25 billion times.

For “apps” read “websites” and for listings read “rankings”, this is big world search and its happening all over again. The app world is now bigger than Google was in the year 2000 when Google had indexed one billion pages — since an app typically has several “pages”.

“Expect To Be Penalized For Abusing Our Rankings!”

Apple is already releasing warnings to app developers saying, “You should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership.”

That is such an uncanny parallel of warnings which Google gave to users of analysis and positioning software in the early years including that they would have their websites de-indexed.

Search For Apps By Keyword

Although Chomp’s multilingual capability is currently still sadly lacking (as was Google’s before 2006), the image below suggests that the potential for rolling this out successfully globally is just vast. Don’t forget, Apple already has the apps “indexed”, it just needs to provide greater access to them via a more effective search paradigm.

Multilingual Keyword Search Works - Sort Of

The Big Question Is: Will Apple Keep Android Listings?

Chomp currently lists Android apps too. The big question is whether Apple will continue this with some revised version of the App Store. I suspect they will close down the Android side — even though I believe this would be a strategic error.

Obviously users of Android phones only really want to find listings which will work on the Android platform — and vice versa for iPhone and iPad users. But if you’re looking for a solution for a particular business problem, wouldn’t it make sense if you could search for that before choosing which phone you buy?

A universal search engine also builds better brand loyalty and would, in my view, enable Apple to stay firmly in charge of the market which they created.

Some Brands Will Clearly Be Winners!

Above, you can see how one brand marketer is already benefitting through German language searches in targeting the Austrian market.

This image is included solely to help you visualize the potential, particularly if you’re a brand marketer in a world where even Google says that more than 50% of searches will eventually come from a mobile device with more than a billion people globally using them.

Will Keyword Search Become Part Of The Mix?

Chomp Already Offers Keyword Search Advertising

You may not be aware of it, but Chomp already offers keyword advertising. What a fantastic tool for Apple to make more money from apps in which it then shares a margin for every sale. In this context, Apple is a step ahead of Google.

But this is also a big opportunity for advertisers and search marketers to get involved right now as this market develops.

Keyword Research Is Already Possible

See below for some rather rudimentary data which Chomp publishes on popular searches. You can already see the lack of sophistication from searchers using Chomp since it doesnt really make sense that “Apps” is so frequently a component of the keyword — in a search engine which, for now, only lists apps.

Rough And Ready Keyword Search Is Already Available

What The Chomp Team Needs To Fix

There have always been weaknesses in the App Store and Chomp doesn’t solve all of them. For international search marketers, they need to fix the following:

• Geo-targeting by country – for searchers and advertisers
• Geo-targeting by language – for searchers and advertisers
• Much more relevant search results
• More effective social sharing

I’m pretty puzzled (please explain someone) why more of us are not talking about this. The game is about to start – it’s time to get on board!

How? Here are a few ideas which might help:

• Analyse the keyword searches on Chomp to better understand the mobile user
• Develop and launch an app or two
• Advertise against keyword searches on Chomp
• Review strategies to see if apps can replace web investments

Don’t forget that people who are searching Chomp are searching for solutions. They have a need to solve — just like any searcher at Google!