Many companies are jumping on the social networking bandwagon for numerous reasons, some with the intention to build a bigger network of prospects others to increase their brand awareness. Whatever the reason might be, social networking sites are becoming so popular that companies who do not take advantage from it are missing out big time.

Small companies with a well-planned online marketing campaign are increasing their revenue year by year and are gaining advantage over big organisations that failed or were too slow to predict the potential of social networking.

Take the bakery trade for instance. More and more bakeries around the country are investing part of their marketing budget on social networking sites like Bebo and Facebook, and they are receiving great feedback from it.

In one of these bakeries based in London, clients can order the products online and have it delivered to any address in Greater London. Besides the website, the company has a Facebook Page, a blog and accounts in other social networking sites like YouTube and Flickr.

What is so great about social media marketing is that there is no need to spend rivers of money or many hours of work to achieve good results.

So, what are you waiting for? Jump on the Social Networking Bandwagon!

Wikipedia defines anchor text as:

“…the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the Anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.”

I have a simpler explanation to it, a hypertext link is any text placed between the <a> and </a> tag also known as anchor tags, therefore the term “anchor text”, here is how  a hypertext link looks like in a HTML document:

<a href=”/search-engine-marketing.php”>SEO Bedford</a>

Where <a is the beginning of the anchor tag, href is an attribute of <a> and refers to a specific location of the web or within a website and “SEO Bedford” is the anchor text.

Making use of the right anchor text puts you one step ahead of your competitors, my advice here is to use your most competitive keywords in the anchor texts of your inbound links, sometimes you don’t have control over those links due to the fact that they are in sites others control.

My suggestion here is to constantly monitor who is linking to your site and contact the site owners or webmasters and ask them if it is possible to modify the link to add the correct anchor text.

All this process is not as easy as it seems, nowadays getting an anchor text link from another website, specially an authority site, is worth much more than gold due to its value from a ranking standpoint.

My last piece of advice is, ensure you do your keyword research to optimise the anchor text to its full potential and try various link building tactics, then stick to them and create unique and link worthy on page content.

Time’s criteria to choose these sites is quite simple, they pick websites that help users improve their internet experience like yelp.com and its UK version yelp.co.uk – Yelp helps you find the best restaurant, pubs and other local services in your area.

Or another site that meets the selection criteria is Fora.tv; a site with a wide variety of videos in a variety of subjects that are piped in from the top leading conferences from around the world. Its a great site to visit when you are tired of watching cat videos on YouTube and you feel that your brain needs some intellectual stimulation.

Within Time’s 50 best websites for 2009 you will find a list of sites to help you surf the web better, enjoy yourself, shop or just kill time on the Web.

But the big surprise is that sites like Digg and MySpace were left out of this year’s list.

Digg, as most of you already know, is a leading social news site famous for driving tons of traffic when content is promoted to its front page.

MySpace needs no introduction, the second biggest social networking site on the web which over the past year or so lost its top spot to Facebook.

Over the past year both sites have encountered ups and downs which might explain why they were not included in this year’s list.

Do you know any site that should’ve been on that list, or do you not agree with some of sites you saw on it? Please leave your opinions in our comments section and maybe we can make our own top 50 websites list!

The politician is also planning to use social networking sites to try to get people involved in a global deal on climate change.

In his new role, Prescott is responsible for finding out the opinion of the public and reporting back to the Council before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

The Copenhagen meeting will bring together more than 90 countries to find a way to keep global warming below two degrees C by 2050.

Mr Prescott is also launching a new website, New Earth Deal, designed to promote the idea of a fairer settlement on climate change by requiring bigger cuts in emissions by rich countries and financial help for developing countries.

Online Marketing is fast becoming the most effective way of promoting any kind of business or event and with the help of blogs and social media yours can now be found easier.

For more information on all of our online marketing services including blogging, website development and search engine optimisation please visit the THUK website.

According to Matt Cutts the changes are in how Google finds and indexes pages. Based on the blog post on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, the new Caffeine infrastructure will be able to crawl the web more comprehensively, which may include other ways of determining sites authority and reputation and off course return more relevant and quicker results with perhaps a better understanding of related words and synonyms.

We suspect that the Caffeine update may allow Google to improve its algorithms, as the faster infrastructure might allow the use of algorithms that are currently not practical with its current set up. This is similar to how bigger and faster computers allow ever better and cheaper computer models in films and TV shows.

Caffeine will be the next generation of Google’s search infrastructure and will gradually replace the existing one. In an interview to Web Pro News during last week’s SMX San Jose, Matt Cutts said Caffeine will represent a major in search and compared it to the 2005/2006 BigDaddy update.

Major changes like that one can not be done over night and Google knows that very well, that is the reason why they’re providing a “developer preview” for power searchers and developers to try it out, compare with the current search results and send them your feedback. You can try the Caffeine structure here.

As usual, these upcoming changes have already generated tons of questions and theories in the search engine optimisation industry; some say Caffeine could make SEO more challenging others believe impacts will be minimal and that fundamental elements like site structure and good content will still reign.

From an SEO standpoint what you have to say, will Caffeine have major impacts in the way we do SEO today?

The deal still needs to have regulatory approval but both sides expect to have everything in place by early 2010, so here are some of the key points agreed so far:

Microsoft will have total control of Yahoo! search technologies for the next 10 years, which will see Yahoo! using Microsoft technologies in its search platforms, in this case Bing.

Bing will be the official search engine for organic and paid search for Yahoo! sites, but Yahoo! will still be allowed to use its technologies and data in other areas. Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.

After full implementation and following regulatory implementation Yahoo estimates to provide a benefit to annual operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditures savings of $200 million, numbers are based on the current levels of revenue and operating expenses.

Yahoo! estimates that the deal will generate an annual cash flow of approximately $275 million – though there will be more than a few investors wondering why Yahoo! didn’t take the billions on offer last year.

We can only see Microsoft benefiting from such deal, and don’t see any advantages for Yahoo! itself. And it certainly gives Steve Ballmer a big boost as a lot of people thought he would struggle when he took over from Bill Gates.

What this means for search in the longer terms is interesting some people like Jason Calacanis commented that now there are only two major search engines maybe there is space for a new search engines  or will we see Ask step up to the mark and become a bigger player? Though as Jason owns Maholo (a search engine) he might be a bit biased.

“Interesting Times” as the Chinese proverb says but we suspect that it will be at least nine months to a year before we can see what’s really happening. And lets see if Google can resist making major mistakes like they did over the last time Microsoft and Yahoo tried to merge.

There is a merger specific website here that Yahoo and Microsoft have set up, to provide information on the deal.

With this in mind Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone believes it will lead new users to more compelling questions like “How do I get Involved?” which theoretically will lead to more users joining the service.

Biz Stones own words:

“Defining a ‘tweet’ for the uninitiated and explaining how to create an account doesn’t resonate with everyone. ‘Why would I want to do that?’ is a common reaction. However, demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, ‘How do I get involved?’”

What’s New?

Besides the new look, Twitter’s home page now has a search box where non-registered users can search for a term of their choice and see what the twitter community is saying about it.

On the same lines as the search box, Twitter’s home page is also showing popular topics by minute, day and week, which highlights even further Twitter’s power for real time search results; again you don’t need to be a registered user to see what’s hot.

We want to hear from you now, what do you think of Twitter revamped home page? Will this incite more users to join the service?

P.S: If you already have an account you need to logout to see the new front page.

Since the 1st of July Bing has been showing real time date from a few iconic Twitters based on their followers count and volume of Tweets as well as their influence in certain fields. The SEO field is represented by Danny Sullivan do a search for [Danny Sullivan Twitter] or [Danny Sullivan Tweets] or even [@dannysullivan] and you will get as the first result Danny’s latest tweets as well as link to see more tweets from him which will send you to his Twitter profile.

It is worth noting that Bing has no special relation or any kind of deal with Twitter and all data is coming from the Twitter API.

This new feature is not at its full potential yet, but we can expect innovations to roll out anytime soon as I’m certain Bing is not the only Search Engine looking into ways to integrate real time data to its SERPs.

All this makes me wonder, how long will it take to Google to respond to it? What are the search giant plans to deliver real time data in its SERPs? Will real time search results have any impact in search engine optimisation?

We want to hear from you now, what you have to say about this real time search trend? share you thoughts in our comments section.

The Announcement from Google says:

“Today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be. Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.”

Google says that the operating system is a light weight one with the applications running in a browser – presumably an updated version of the chrome browser.

However, it actually turns out that this “New” Google OS is nothing more than an already existing operating system – with an updated windowing system and browser. It’s like a second hand car dealer claiming a 10 year old car with a quick re-spray was brand new. Its funny when Top Gear tries to “Improve their cars” in this way – not so much for operating systems.

And some of Googles’ senior employees claims that “users won’t have to worry about viruses” are not readily believable. A major problem with Google’s Chrome OS is the security implications, putting all your applications in the browser, has not been entirely thought through. Both the Firefox and IE development teams put a lot of time and effort into finding and fixing loopholes in their browsers that allow viruses and trojans to do nasty things to pc’s.

It’s a pity that Google haven’t really done something radical and, for example, bought out the rights to BeOS or AmigaOS, both of which where much better operating systems when launched than the competition at the time.

And Its certainly amusing to see Google claim that its system using Linux as the base is newer than Windows XP, as Linux is a derivative of Unix (developed in the 60’s and 70’s) than Windows XP (which is based on work done at DEC on successors to the VAX operating system in the early 80’s)

As with all Linux distributions the main problem that stops widespread use of Linux Is driver support and a consistent look and feel across applications (Apples greatest strength in my opinion). And getting the open source community to knuckle down and produce all the applications that will be needed would make herding cats seem easy.

Google is relying on the Open Source community to help it – though whether they will be happy to contribute to such a large and profitable company is another question.

Some more questions raised by this Announcement are:

• What happens to Google’s support for Firefox.
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s position on Apples Board looks even more untenable.
• And the wisdom of drawing attention to your self when you have such a dominant position in the advertising market.
• Has Google really got the resource and skill to do this? this posts author has worked for companies who had individual divisions with more developers that Google has employees in total.

Hours after MJ’s death, 30% of all Tweets were about Michael Jackson, which led the terms Michael Jackson and MJ to be featured on Twitter’s trending topics, two weeks after the death both terms are still there at the top of Twitter’s trending topics.

Major Search Engines like Google and Yahoo recorded huge traffic for Jackson-related searches. On Facebook, Michael Jackson is already more famous than Obama and the King of Pops’ page on the social networking site is the most popular with 6,708,180 fans, 3 hundred thousand more than the US President’s page.

Michael’s tunes have been download more than 2.6 million times and the video Thriller is the most viewed on YouTube with 50 million views. But the biggest winner with MJ’s death was the site that broke the news on the web. TMZ.com traffic rose 70% attracting 7.95 million visitors in the week that ended June 28.

Today Michael’s memorial service will be held at the Staple Center in L.A and the event is expected to be the biggest online ever, which will put to the test the Internet infrastructure and web servers around the globe, as millions are expected to follow the service via the Internet.

Experts believe the event will be the MOST WATCHED ONLINE EVENT EVER, surpassing Obama’s Inauguration Ceremony.

Facebook and MySpace users will also have the privilege to watch it online thanks to an alliance made with major media companies, Facebook teamed up with CNN Live while MySpace made a partnership with the entertainment group AEG and both will be live streaming videos of MJ’s memorial service.

Sure, millions of Michael Jackson’s fans will be in front of a TV or a computer screen during the service, but not the lucky winners of one the 8,750 pairs of tickets raffled over the weekend via an online lottery, 17,500 lucky fans won a chance to go and see The Michael Jackson’s Memorial Service live at the Staple Center today. These tickets are like Willy Wonkers Golden Tickets – priceless, how much would you pay to get your hands on one?

According to MJ’s family more than a dozen famous artists, singers and sports personalities will be involved in the 90 minute service which will feature performances from Mariah Carey, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, Jennifer Hudson, Smokey Robinson, Usher, John Mayer and 12 year old Britain’s Got Talent contender Shaheen Jafargholi hand picked by the Jackson Family to a tribute to the late King of Pop.

According to Michael’s family the list is a subject to change as other big-name stars could be fitted in at the last moment.

Will you be watching tonight’s good bye to the King of Pop, if so where will you watch it, on TV or via the Internet? Please leave your answer in our comments.