The importance of SEO for small businesses has been highlighted yet again by some new research.

According to a YouGov poll, UK organisations with less than 50 employees generated just 2.4% of their annual sales from online activities last year.

That’s in contrast with companies with more than 250 employees whose online revenue totalled 18.7% of their total income.
In monetary terms, that equals total online revenues for small businesses of around £36bn last year compared with larger businesses’ online revenues of £349bn.

A worrying 38% of respondents said that they were not investing in any online tools such as social media, email marketing or SEO.

A correlation between the low amount of investment in online marketing and low online sales is clear.

Phil Kingsland, from the not-for-profit resource knowthenet.org.uk, told the Daily Telegraph: “While small businesses are beginning to make considerable amounts of money online, many don’t yet see its full potential. There are limitless possibilities for small businesses to profit here – either by selling goods and services directly, or by marketing themselves to customers.”

For small businesses wanting to up their online game, an SEO strategy is a must – and it needn’t cost that much. In fact, small businesses can experience a great return on investment when working with a reliable SEO agency.

Social networking for senior citizens got a boost last week with the launch of Gransnet, a new social network aimed at the UK’s grandparents.

The site has been launched by the bosses of Mumsnet, the UK’s most prolific parents’ social networking site.

Gransnet has a similar format to Mumsnet, bringing together features and news items together with a range of blogs and forums.

Mumsnet’s forums are hugely popular and allow users to discuss anything from parenting to lifestyle to entertainment issues: Gransnet’s forums have been designed along the same line.

Gransnet already has backing from two major sponsors. Its life and style section will be sponsored by Nintendo in an effort to position its games consoles as something grandparents can use in order to keep fit, healthy and active. Gransnet’s learning section will be sponsored by Pearson, the global education company. It will provide content on themes such as online yoga and photography courses.

Speaking to Media Week, Justine Roberts, co-founder and CEO of Mumsnet, said: “Mumsnet has proved to be a godsend to parents by allowing them to pool advice and information to make their lives easier. The Mumsnet community has a powerful collective voice whether holding politicians to account or letting companies know what parents want. We’d like to do the same for older people, who are active but often unheard and in need of a place for support, advice and recommendations.”

Friendster, the original social networking site and precursor to Facebook, has finally shut down after eight years of business.

It will officially closed down on 31 May after years of struggle against its competitors.

Despite a steady decline in user numbers in the past few years, Friendster launched extremely successfully. It was founded in 2003 with a US$ 12 million investment by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Benchmark Capital and private investors and continued to receive hefty dividends for the next few years.

The founders were Jonathan Abrams, a computer programmer and his friend Peter Chin. Their aim was to found a site that would provide a safe and effective environment for people to meet and connect with each other by browsing user profiles.

Google made the management team a US$30 million offer shortly after its launch. This offer was declined.

In 2009, the site was bought for US$40 million by Malaysian internet firm MOL Global. The site had stayed popular in Asia despite its decline everywhere else: nearly all of its 19 billion page views came from the continent, especially the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Friendster has now been bought by Money Online, a Philippine-based company which plans to convert it into an online gaming site geared towards Facebook users.

Despite Facebook’s minimum age limit of 13, more than 30% of its members are aged 9-12, according to a new report. Social Networking, Age and Privacy, authored by the London School of Economics (LSE), also reveals that 43% of children in this age group have a profile on more than one social networking site. In total, 88% of 13-16 year olds are registered on at least one social networking site.

EU Kids Online, the survey carried out for the report, canvassed 250,000 young people across Europe about their use of social networking sites.
The results reveal a lack of awareness around privacy and safety issues amongst young social networkers.

A massive 25% of 9-16 year olds across the continent have public profiles on social networking sites whilst 20% state their address and/or phone number on their profile.

In slightly encouraging news, only 10% of UK youngsters have their personal contact details displayed on their profile. Professor Sonia Livingstone of the LSE says:  “It seems clear that children are moving to Facebook – this is now the most popular site in 17 of the 25 countries we surveyed – and the UK is fairly typical.

“Many providers try to restrict their users to 13-year-olds and above but we can see that this is not effective. Especially younger children are less likely to use privacy options and to understand the safety features that are available.”

To view the report in full, visit http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/EUKidsOnline/ShortSNS.pdf

Google has revealed how it treats URL shorteners in terms of SEO in a new video released this week.

In the latest video in his YouTube series, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, took time to answer the following question, which was sent in by one of the many web professionals confused about Google’s new algorithm and how it impacts on URL shorteners: “Since Google is now using Twitter and Facebook links as ranking symbols, will custom URL shorteners be looked at as providing anchor texts for links?”

Cutts explained that custom URLs work in same way that most redirects do. This means that using custom URL shorteners or keyword-rich custom URL shorteners shouldn’t have a negative effect on SEO.

He said: “Custom URL shorteners are essentially just like any other redirects. ”If we try to crawl a page, and we see a 301 or permanent redirect, which pretty much all well-behaved URL shorteners (like bit.ly or goo.gl) will do, if we see that 301, then that will pass PageRank to the final destination.

“So, in general, there really shouldn’t be any harm to using custom URL shorteners in your SEO. The PageRank will flow through. The anchor text will flow through, and so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that at all.”

The explanation will be of use to anyone who uses the likes of bit.ly and tiny url to direct surfers to their website on bookmarking and social networking sites.

More than 10 billion social networking and online world (SNOW) accounts now exist on the internet, with nearly half of those accounts being active.

That’s according to digital marketing analysts In-Stat, who say that these impressive figures are partly due to a rise in interest in the way games, retail and social networking are linked to each other these days.

Until recently, consumers wishing to play online games had to visit dedicated sites where they would pay a monthly subscription fee or a series of one-off costs.

These days, things are markedly different, with many games available via social networking sites.

The research shows how providing games as part of your social networking strategy could help to drive traffic to your site and build revenue in the long-term.

Vahid Dejwakh, analyst at In-Stat, says: “The virtual goods model is one of several mediums that SNOWs use to general revenue. The basic premise is to allow everyone to create an account and play for free and then offer users the option of purchasing virtual goods to be able to move up and advance in the game or just to have more fun.”

Banners, adverts and competitions are also used by social networking sites to build revenue, according to In-Stat.

The UK has the highest number of people using social networking sites on their mobile phones in the whole of Western Europe, according to new research.

TNS’s Mobile Life 2011 report reveals that more than 11 million people in this country use social networks on their mobile.

Strikingly, the research also shows that 16% of people in the UK log on to social networks on a daily basis from their mobiles. The research goes on to state that almost half of those in the country who do not currently use social networking sites on their mobiles would like to do so.

The research shows not only the rapid rise of mobile-based social networking, but also the very real need for companies to engage with customers via social networking sites on mobile phones as well as PCs.

Stephen Yap, group director at TNS Technology explains: “Mobile technology is transforming the lives of Britons at an unprecedented pace. With social networking emerging as a killer application, mobile content and applications have never been more important. Handset makers and operators take note: it’s no longer just about the device or the network, but rather what people are doing and downloading.”

17 million people in Britain own a smartphone, with the number of mobile phones in Britain exceeding the number of people, averaging out at around 1.3 phones per person.

Could the end of Myspace be nigh?

The former social networking site du jour has lost a devastating 50 million users since February 2010, according to figures released this week.

According to the comScore Media Metrix, the digital industry’s audience measurement tool, Myspace also lost 10 million unique visitors in just one month (between January and February of this year).

The latest figures are just another kick in the teeth for Myspace, which has certainly fallen from the position of grace it once used to occupy when it was launching the careers of singers like Lily Allen and Kate Nash.

It seems as though the mighty giant Facebook is partly to blame. Many former Myspace users have now deleted their accounts and moved over to Planet Zuckerberg. It was a very different story in, say 2005, when users would have active Myspace and Facebook accounts or even just the Myspace account.

The news comes despite Myspace’s desperate attempts to keep up. The site has introduced a range of features over the years. They even designed an app called Mashup with Facebook to allow users to get customised entertainment streams on their Myspace profiles via their ‘likes’ on Facebook.

Now, with more than 500 million users at the beginning of this year, Facebook definitely reigns supreme over Myspace. No mashup required by Facebook, it seems.

Twitter celebrated its fifth birthday this week with a move to a new data centre in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Really, what says ‘happy birthday’ more than a new data centre?

In all seriousness, the move is a clear signal of Twitter’s continued expansion and success. As the social networking site’s engineering blog said: “If you look back at the history of Twitter, our rate of growth has largely outpaced the capacity of our hardware, software, and the company itself. Indeed, in our first five years, Twitter’s biggest challenge was coping with our unprecedented growth and sightings of the infamous Fail Whale.

“These issues came to a head last June when Twitter experienced more than ten hours of downtime. However, unlike past instances of significant failure, we said at the time that that we had a long-term plan.”

That long-term plan was the migration to the new data centre which will be able to support Twitter as it moves through changing capacity needs, ensuring that users and developers will be able to rely on the service.

The move is described on the blog as an impressively time-consuming and painstaking task which Twitter hopes “will have a significant impact on the service’s success for many years to come.”

The micro-blogging platform Tumblr is currently enjoying prodigious growth, drawing a quarter of a billion impressions – or page views – every week, according to its founder Dave Karp.

Mr Karp – who founded Tumblr in 2007 – said in an interview with Tech Crunch TV that the website’s third year saw a marked increase in visitors compared to the previous two years, courtesy of Tumblr making an impact in the American mainstream. Karp associated the drive in popularity with a wealth of younger users joining the site as they returned to school and college, along with a significant increase of hits in Europe, Japan and Brazil over the last 6 to 12 months.

Established as one of the first micro-blogging mediums, Tumblr suffered from the arrival and subsequent dominance of Twitter a few years ago, but Tumblr’s unique service – one lets users creatively share images, video and links – is definitely in vogue.

Tumblr has been cited as a valuable marketing tool by the media and social web guide Smedio. The platform can be used in conjunction with other social media sites to increase a company’s online presence, while helping to give unique material high exposure in the blogosphere.