Oscar Carreras speaks about Social Media Optimisation in the International Search Summit.

Social media optimisation was the big topic of the last year in the industry, and at the moment agencies are trying to build a business model around it. Most of them are going down the consultancy path plus offering specific services in the way of building widgets or Facebook applications to boost viral campaigns. Most of them are struggling to give value out of it and most companies marketing departments are still reticent to invest money on not so tangible services.

The erroneous way to approach Social Media services, advocated by some other agencies, it is the pay per profile, pay per automatic tools to be present in social networks or per tweets/Facebook friends/Linkedin contacts, etc. This approach is the equivalent of blog comment spam or automated link requests and goes against the intrinsic nature of social media which is based in engaging in the conversation.

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Link analysis is one of the most important areas of search engines ranking algorithms. Although some international search engines are less sophisticated in the way they assess link relevance, there is no reason to believe that these engines, such as Baidu or Yandex, will apply similar more advanced link quality indicators as part or the usual improvement on information retrieval techniques, in a similar way that more developed search companies have evolved, mainly Google.

Relying on link quality indicators has the advantage for search engines to avoid the “noise” and improve results relevancy for specific queries. This is due to the complexity of manipulating a link profile, which can be done, but it is much more onerous and time consuming.

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There are tons of articles on the net about meta tags optimisation best practices and the concepts have been repeated ad nauseam. In a Google centric world as Internet market is,  a westernised approach is usually taken, overlooking the algorithmic or linguistic differences of optimising for other languages/search engines in countries where Google hasn’t got the lead in share market. Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia or Yahoo Japan are examples of search engines where meta tags optimisation guidelines are tailored to the linguistic and cultural characteristics of those respective countries. More on International Search Engines meta tags optimisation best practices

Spanish media association On, accused the official Spanish online ratings bureau(Oficina de la Justificación de Difusión (OJD)) and also Nielsen,  alleged “irregularities” in the way Internet audience is measured in Spain. As a result of the recent published data about Internet ratings in Spain, a couple of very big offline publishers came up on top of the list (Elmundo.es s and Marca.com) which sparked controversy and opened up the debate about what methodology should be used to create the ratings.

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We already talked about website localisation in this blog and it is a topic that I would like to revisit since it is a not very talked about issue in the SEO arena, and it is a huge sticking point for most sites I get to analyse in my daily routine, which seem not to be able to get it right.

Localisation is not translation, involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target market. The fact that some SEOs settle for direct translations when they have to target local markets never ceases to amaze me.  These are the same experts that advocate to use the language of the customer for the English copy, and strongly encourage to make keyword research the cornerstone of the optimisation campaign, and are very sophisticated about it. I even heard from some SEO gurus that using the Google Translate feature will help you target local markets. What the h***? It is a very Anglo-Saxon, narrow minded way of thinking.

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During the symposium on Web 2.0  which took place in Madrid on February 18, in Camilo Jose Cela University, the Director of Communications of Tuenti, Icarus Moyano, defended the privacy provided by social networks compared to the lack of regard for security showed by the traditional media outlets which have no scruples to reproduce private information from social media sites.

Spanish Social Networks have been under the scrutiny of traditional media channels which have deemed social media outlets in Spain as partly responsible of indiscriminate violence. A journalist found out that the 17 year old girl killed in Seville, Marta Castillo, had a profile on Tuenti, the most popular Spanish social network among teenagers, and so did her friends. One of them has confessed being the criminal.

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Social Media, social behaviour in the web in general, has arguably been the most significant phenomenon in the Internet world in 2008. Google zeitgeist compiles annually some of the highlights from Google searches around the globe and it is not a surprise to see the supremacy of Social Networks within the list of the top 10 countries with the highest number of Internet users.

Social networking in 2008 has spread like fire worldwide but the most interesting factor to highlight is that almost half the list of the most searched social media sites are based outside of the U.S.

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One of  the most notorious showman in TV in Spain, going by the nickname, “El Gran Wyoming”, member of the TV channel, La Sexta, has proved to be an expert in spreading shocking-but-false information to increase the audience.  This week, the “El Gran Wyoming” has been in the eye of the hurricane after a video of him bullying a journalist trainee hit Youtube and stirred a huge controversy among his detractors.

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According to ComScore the number of Internet users in Latin America now has risen to the point of almost 75 million. That figure excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes which is a current practise in South America. Considering that the IMF economic forecast places the south american continent as the only one which slight economic growth for this year ( North America will shrink 1.4 %, Europe around 2% and Asia an almost 3% if we don’t include China), we can confirm that looking at South America as a powerful emerging market is a truism.

Just to put things into perspective; Brazil is the ninth-largest Internet market worldwide, with 27.7 million users, while Mexico ranks 14th, with 12.5 million users. Brazil goes ahead of such countries as South Korea, Canada, Italy and Spain, while Mexico ranks ahead of The Netherlands. The Brazilian economy is predicted to grow a bit more than a 1% for this year, which although meager, is still much better than most of European markets.

The great opportunity about targeting South America as a prospective online market is that your optimisation efforts only need to focus on two main languages, Spanish and Portuguese. By using native speakers that comprehend the special peculiarities of the Latin market a business can expand in the continent with a reasonably little investment.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras