Highlighting some of the changes, Apple has posted a What’s New page [Google+ translation] for iTunes on its Japanese site. The new additions include:

- 3G downloads: Music downloads from iOS devices had previously been restricted to Wi-Fi only, but users can now access content over 3G networks.

- iTunes Plus: The Japanese iTunes Store now supports the DRM-free 256 kbps iTunes Plus format, up from the previous 128 kbps versions carrying usage restrictions. Labels will need to upgrade their content to the new standard, so it may take some time for all music to become available in iTunes Plus format.

- Ringtones: Music ringtones are now available for purchase in the Japanese iTunes Store.

- Mastered for iTunes: Rolling out on a worldwide basis, Apple is now featuring songs and albums that have been specifically mastered for the iTunes Store to provide the best sound quality for the format.

- Complete My Album: Users who previously purchased individual tracks from an album can now purchase the entire album for a discounted price based on a credit for their individual-track purchases.

As for iTunes Match, Apple’s subscription service currently available in 37 countries that allows users to either match or upload their entire music libraries regardless of source for access from any iCloud-enabled device, the company is reportedly planning to bring the program to Japan during the second half of 2012.

“Proview has no product, no markets, no customers and no suppliers. It has nothing,” Hu Jinnan, a partner at Guangdong Shendadi law firm, which is representing Apple in the case, told the court.

“Apple has huge sales in China. Its fans line up to buy Apple products. The ban, if executed, would not only hurt Apple sales but it would also hurt China’s national interest.”

Apple’s tactics of highlighting the economic impact of the iPad and calling into question the validity of Proview’s trademark given a lack of physical product using the name are side arguments to its primary claims, which hold that Proview agreed to transfer the rights to an Apple-held company in late 2009 and has failed to uphold its part of the deal.
Proview’s iPAD, sold from 1998 until 2009 (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
A Hong Kong court sided with Apple last year, ruling that Proview and its subsidiaries had colluded to extort significant sums of money from Apple in refusing to hand over the Chinese rights to the trademark. But Apple needs to convince courts in mainland China to adopt the same view as it seeks to thwart Proview’s attempts at halting iPad sales and its requests for as much as $2 billion in compensation. Proview has argued that the Hong Kong ruling is inadmissible in Chinese courts, although Apple could presumably submit the same primary evidence to the Chinese court that it did in the Hong Kong case, seeking to convince the Chinese judge to independently come to the same conclusion.

Google says using the schema.org video markup is the “recommended way to describe videos on the web.” Google added that they still recommend you continue with your other video XML formats, such as Video Sitemaps and mRSS feeds, if you use them. The new schema.org video markup won’t impact the Video Sitemaps and mRSS feeds.

The technical details on video markup can be found on schema.org and Google has also created a special page on video markup with more help resources.

Here is a video introduction on this new markup:

Related Articles:

Today is the 155th birthday of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, the German physicist who was able to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves.

To celebrate his contributions to the world, Google+ has a special animated wave logo on their homepage.

He built an antenna that was able to detect and measure electromagnetic waves and thus prove they existed. Some people call it the “invisible world.”

Hertz did not realize how important his discovery was but now in the age of a wireless world, his contributions have been instrumental to our wireless technology today.

For that, Google wanted the world to know this man and his important contributions.

He died from an infection at the age of 36 on January 1, 1894. He left behind his wife, Schöne Hertz, and family who were leaders in their own rights.

Other Google Logos:

Beginning today, fans around the world can, for the first time, purchase ringtones for the Beatles’ 27 UK and US #1 hits, exclusively on iTunes.

The 30-second ringtones are priced at $1.29 each, and the full list of available ringtones includes: “Love Me Do”, “From Me to You”, “She Loves You”, “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “A Hard Day’s Night”, “I Feel Fine”, “Eight Days a Week”, “Ticket to Ride”, “Help!”, “Yesterday”, “Day Tripper”, “We Can Work It Out”, “Paperback Writer”, “Yellow Submarine”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Penny Lane”, “All You Need Is Love”, “Hello, Goodbye”, “Lady Madonna”, “Hey Jude”, “Get Back”, “The Ballad of John and Yoko”, “Something”, “Come Together”, “Let It Be”, and “The Long and Winding Road”.

Apple and The Beatles have an extensive history together, dating back to disputes over the Apple name that The Beatles have long used for their business ventures. As Apple moved into the music business, the two sides came into conflict over the trademark, eventually leading to a 2007 agreement that saw Apple obtain all rights to the trademark and license it back to The Beatles for their specific uses.

Following the November 2010 addition of The Beatles to the iTunes Store, Apple has prominently featured the band’s music at times. The Beatles published an exclusive free animated e-book of Yellow Submarine on the iBookstore last year, and Apple accompanied that release with a dedicated television commercial of its own focusing on The Beatles.

However, all of the recent hype and scrambling to start marketing on Google+ should not come at the expense of equally critical B2B search engine marketing responsibilities. Balance short and long-term B2B initiatives carefully.

While we’re certainly jumping into Google+ Pages for Business and building our base of knowledge on this social network, here are five indirectly related but completely separate B2B SEO initiatives to remain in focus with, as 2012 rolls along.

Benchmark Not-Provided Keyword Referral Metrics

In my opinion, the biggest short term impact of Google+ Pages, for B2B marketers, will be the potential for rapidly increasing percentages of blocked keyword data, as encrypted search becomes more prevalent.

Here is a snapshot of the average percentages for “not provided” search traffic in our client base, spread out over the first five weeks of launch, and then the full months of December and January.

This not only impacts web traffic reports, but will make retargeting and marketing automation analysis more complicated (by not providing specific keyword metrics).

B2B marketers need to set appropriate benchmarks now and ongoing, specifically calculating trends in branded, non-branded, and not provided keyword information. Here are some resources and recommendations for establishing these benchmarks.

Nurture Your Best Third Party Referral Sources

The best links send traffic, leads, and also have a positive impact on SEO strategy. Evaluate third party referral reports to identify the communities, social networks, and publishers that send traffic and quality visitors.

Know the people behind your best inbound links

Document referral sources and make attempts to secure contact information from these sources, for further link development and potential business opportunities as well.

Commercial solutions like RavenTools provide a nice interface for documenting contact information from link sources, but spreadsheets can also be a nice, free alternative.

Screenshot of RavenTools Link Contact Information

Quality Content Marketing Works, Regardless of Social Networking Platform

Content development becomes too complicated when marketers focus on how to satisfy requirements for specific, individual platforms.

Instead, focus on creating quality content marketing assets for any user within appropriate target markets and make sure to make these assets as “share friendly” as possible, regardless of platform.

Share-friendly content marketing techniques to consider:

Social sharing buttons from popular social media platforms
Multiple widths and downloadable information to fit various site dimensions more easily
HTML code for embedding images, graphics, and media files
Shorter, more memorable web addresses
Create More Permanent Communication Strategies With Site Visitors

Even though social networks like Google+ provide new opportunities for communicating to target audiences, don’t forget to attempt to ascertain more in-depth contact information once they get on the company website as well.

Conversion metrics should range from initial lead nurturing efforts to more in-depth sales-ready lead opportunities. At all times, make an attempt to collect email address information, name, and potentially ongoing communication preferences.

Also, build professional networks, within and outside of Google+ Page management.

The element of social media I find most attractive is the ability to network with other professionals in the industry. While Google+ provides another opportunity to bridge these connections, don’t sacrifice successes already made in other social networks just to jump on a new bandwagon.

Benchmark Your Customers’ Interest in Mobile

As I eluded to in a column at the end of last year, don’t forget mobile. While your customers may not be directly asking for it, the pace of Internet use via mobile device simply cannot be ignored.

My recommendation is to start querying your customer base on mobile device preferences, functionality, and what types of content they would like to see from your organization.

This can be done in “drip format” through newsletters, social media, and traditional surveys. Over time, you will have feedback from your audience to move forward in the right direction with your mobile strategy.

Final Thoughts

We are recommending and helping our clients develop Google+ Pages. While it certainly can be cumbersome juggling multiple profiles, platforms, and responsibilities, there seems to be much stronger likelihood that this social network becomes relevant. Google certainly has the resources and reach to support this social network and drive growth (even if their other social experiments have failed in the past).

But what if Google is making a major business mistake and B2B search marketers are getting taken along for the ride? Worse, what if we’re seeing the slow decline as a result of Google’s inability to adjust business models in time to catch the latest competition?

2012 could be a pivotal year for Google, in terms of audience development and influence. What will be key for B2B search engine marketers is to focus on growing their own organizations audience and networks, regardless of specific social networking platform, in an effort to tackle short and long term business objectives.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

The new store will open at 10:00 AM on Saturday, March 3, with press reportedly having been invited to a preview event two days earlier. With the opening, the Netherlands will become the twelfth country to host at least one Apple retail store.

It’s not that you don’t have anything to say, you probably do. And it’s not that you couldn’t develop an audience, or eventually monetize that audience—you probably could. It’s definitely not that you’re not smart enough. There are plenty of people less intelligent than you already killing it online.

Unfortunately, it’s no longer 2007. There are now millions of blogs. Most of them fail, and few make any money.

Advertising rates are scraping so low, they’re now digging beneath the bottom. Monetizing your traffic is ridiculously hard, which is why you want to monetize your audience instead. Yet, using a blog to monetize your audience through quality content marketing, audience engagement, and relationship building is a slow burn at best.

The market is saturated, and competition is fierce. Sure, the gurus know what they are talking about, but what worked for them probably won’t work for you.

The environment has changed and the strategies that helped the A-listers climb to the peak of the pyramid once upon a yesterday won’t be a fraction as effective for you.

But that doesn’t matter. You can still make a great living with WordPress. And the best part is, you don’t even have to have a blog. There are smarter ways to do it.

1. Themes

Every blog needs a theme—no exceptions!

Sure, WordPress comes with a couple of stock themes, but they are so basic, few bloggers choose to use them, and the number of serious bloggers or entrepreneurs who will use them is approximately zero.

Even in a time when everyone is counting pennies, most serious bloggers don’t question the value of a quality theme. If you have the coding knowledge and drive to create a theme, along with the willingness to support it, a single theme could provide a full-time living, like it does for Eric Hamm from Catalyst themes.

Best of all, there are already marketplaces filled with buyers, meaning you have a place to sell your wares just seconds after they’re finished. ThemeForest and MojoThemes are just two examples.

2. Child themes

If you don’t want to get cracking on your own theme with crazy amounts of code, then you could take the lighter approach while still capitalizing on the mass customer bases (buyers) for existing themes.

Genesis has over 50,000 active users. Thesis has over 40,000. Other themes such as Catalyst and Headway have fiercely loyal audiences. Many talented designers and smart entrepreneurs have leveraged these large audiences to generate impressive profits.

A child theme is easier to build than a full theme because it piggybacks off the existing layout, options, and code from a parent theme. Relatively speaking, a child theme can be built in far less time, while still providing more profit to the designer.

In the time it takes to create a single fully developed theme, designers could create a handful of child themes instead. And while the profit is larger per individual purchase for a premium theme, child themes allow you to leverage an existing community, meaning you can easily make up the difference in volume.

3. Hosting services

This isn’t for everyone in the WordPress community, and may not be for you. But if it is, reselling hosting can be lucrative.

WordPress users need support. Online entrepreneurs who are serious about their success, and are using blogs as one of the most powerful tools in their box, are smart enough to know they shouldn’t waste their time swimming lost in the back end of their blog.

Servicing this community could be your fast track to success. WPEngine, ZippyKid and Page.ly are all examples of startups that have been extremely successful in this market.

Yes, you’re reselling hosting, putting your hosting on someone else’s servers and managing the network, but that’s not what you’re selling at all.

Hosting is the steak, but you’re selling the sizzle. The sizzle in this instance is the safety, security, and comfort your potential customer will have knowing that someone highly qualified to work within the WordPress framework is there for them when they need them most.

Again, this isn’t for everyone. If you don’t have the technical knowledge to pull it off, you will be wasting your time, crash into a hard wall of certain frustration, and possibly irreparably damage your reputation if you leave behind scores of unhappy customers.

Yet there is a huge demand for this type of service. If you specialize, meaning aiming your market towards professionals who need hosting for their businesses (restaurants, realtors, dentists, lawyers, or any other market in need of hosting – that’s pretty much all of them!), then reselling hosting might be one of the best ways for you to leverage WordPress for your personal profit.

4. Plugins

Most WordPress users would agree that plugins are a large part of the pixie dust behind the world’s best CMS. With a few clicks, plugins can change the behavior of your entire website.

A well designed plugin can be money in your pocket. And the market is exploding. This makes sense, since a well-designed plugin can help your blog make money faster, which is appealing to anyone who is using their block to turn a dollar.

Plugins must do something specific, and do it especially well, if you expect to charge for them—especially considering there are already countless quality plug-ins available for free. Scribe and Gravity Forms are two excellent plugins that make their customers happy and developers rich.

Plugins can generate revenue through upfront purchases, or through donations and premium upgrades that improve upon the user experience from the base plugin. There are also plug-ins such as Wishlist (a plug-in that turns your WordPress blog into a membership site) that have added monthly continuity programs to their offerings.

5. Content creation services

You already know content is king or you wouldn’t be here. But what if you were the one supplying the crowns?

Populating a blog with quality content is the hardest part of growing a blog; video, text, audio—everything adds to a blog’s growth, yet content creation is time-consuming, and one of the biggest reasons to find ways to make money from WordPress without having to run a blog.

There are countless online entrepreneurs and full-time bloggers, knee-deep in their growth who can’t afford to step away. They require content to fuel their continued growth, you can be the provider to give it to them.

You have a specialty. Whether that’s video, copy, or voice, your specialty is what would have fueled the growth of your blog. Rather than creating that content and publishing it to your own site and waiting for it to quickly wither upon the WordPress vine, you could create the same content and charge top dollar to those who need it most.

6. Blog creation services

Professional blogs are started every day, and many of the professionals starting those blogs would be happy to pay someone else to put the pieces together for them.

Some bloggers like to tinker, but others see their blog as a serious tool in a serious business and don’t want to spend the time it takes to learn WordPress inside out. Most online entrepreneurs would rather outsource the setup, paying someone else to install the framework, upload the themes and plug-ins, and get the blog otherwise ready for business.

The person they pay could, and perhaps should, be you.

You can make a blog setup service especially lucrative by making it your specialty. Whenever you do the same thing over and over, you can continuously improve your quality while shaving minutes from your time. And whenever you can produce higher quality work in a shorter period of time, your growth and profits will both soar.

You can also sell content creation services as suggested in the tip above. This is a perfect upsell since a buyer who just paid to have a blog created will often be happy to pay an additional fee to populate that blog with content as well.

Of course, you must be comfortable creating content, and the decision to add the service to your business must be personally scalable for you. outstandingSETUP does an remarkable job with design, installation, setup and security, but we don’t offer content creation services since it doesn’t fit the model.

Your model must always fit your goals.

7. Support services

You know all those online entrepreneurs and bloggers who are paying for blog creation or content creation services? Well, most would be perfectly happy to pay for quality support as well. And if you’re already offering creation services, continual support is an easy add-on, as long as time and strategy allow.

There are two primary monetization models for this sort of service. The first is to charge by the hour. And while hourly rates for tech support are often high, hourly service isn’t scaleable unless your outsourcing the work, which is why you may want to go with the second monetization model—charging a monthly subscription for support.

8. Build an ad network

This is the most difficult one on the list, but if it matches your personal skill set, it can be extremely lucrative, much like the reselling hosting suggestion up above.

An ad network connects publishers and advertisers, in exchange for a cut. There are countless blogs with decent traffic who would be happy to sell ad space, and countless of advertisers looking for places to place their banners. If you can effectively put the two and two together, it could equal a whole lot more than four for the time that you spend online.

Building an ad network can be an especially good idea for entrepreneurs with existing, sizable networks with both publishers and advertisers. This usually means someone who’s been online for a while and dabbled in a lot of different enterprises.

But this isn’t the type of business you want to start from the ground up. You will be most successful if it naturally fits your existing skill set. If it does, you may want to give it a try. It might just be the best way for you to make money from WordPress websites.

9. Offer website reviews

Every author needs an editor. Every website should have one, too. It’s hard to see the forest through the trees, and you never know what other people are thinking when they land on your website.

All the traffic in the world means nothing if a website isn’t optimized to convert visitors into leads, fans, or paying customers. If it an online business owner doesn’t know how to organize their site for maximum conversion, you can be the one to show them (so long as that is your specialty).

MenWithPens and Derek Halpern have both done this extremely well. It’s a win-win for the provider since they are advertising their skill set and steadily increasing their authority, while helping business owners maximize the value of their visitors.

Because you are directly helping a website owner generate a higher average profit per visitor, they will be willing to pay you well for your time. The more sites you optimize, the better your reputation will be in the more you can charge per optimized site.

The above list is by no means exhaustive. There are countless ways to make money with WordPress, limited only by your imagination. But the message is indisputable.

There is a time of money to be made from with in the world of WordPress, but due to massive competition, running a blog might just be the worst one.

Google hasn’t publicly announced every acquisition that it has made, and the search engine has also purchased intellectual property such as pending and granted patents from some companies as well, without necessarily buying the companies behind the patents. For example, in August of 2010, Google was assigned a handful of patent filings from Appmail, LLc, recorded at the USTPO in May of 2011. A pending and a granted patent from that group appear to be related to Grouptivity, which was a social service run by Appmail that used a social mail service to enable people to share content they found on the web with others, either privately or publicly. That service allowed for the creation of groups to “keep your personal contacts separate from co-workers and other categories.” As a publisher-centric web service, grouptivity was described as a service that:

…provides content publishers with improved content distribution, increased traffic, and enhanced search engine exposure. By simply replacing existing “sharing tools” (email a friend, social bookmarks, i.e.) with a power set of content sharing and discussion services and by transforming sharing activity into “user-generated” content, Grouptivity enables publishers to build a community around their content. Publishers also become part of a Grouptivity’s growing “content network” where their audience can easily share news and content with others in their social network, and search or browse for similar content based on its popularity or their personal interests.

The Grouptivity website is no longer online, but the website of another company that is or was run by Appmail, Sharetivity, is still online. There’s a short video linked to on the site that might remind you of Google Plus. That movie pauses at one point, and you need to click on the right-pointing arrow in the top right corner to see the whole video. Sharitivity inserts pages that are socially shared by members of your social network into your search results, ranked algorithmically.

Grouptivity and Social Mail

Searching for the grouptivity blog on the Internet Archive, it is possible to find some information about Grouptivity if you travel back to 2007. After that, the Grouptivity pages appear to have been 302 redirected to the Sharitivity pages. Here are some of the original features of Grouptivity:

Create surveys, voting ballots and feedback forms to collect ideas and informationProvide a central location for all of your group to discuss, post, and chatCreate questions for your group, helping you to manage the informationCommunicate, collaborate, and collect information back in a single emailUse your regular email address: recipients don’t have to register and login to respondAccess all your information and previous messages anytime in our databaseCreate, send, and manage your messages with our simple and powerful applicationAutomate Send dates, reminders and recurrencesDraft your messages fast and easy with our pre-designed templatesEnhance your collaboration with less work!

Google Plus doesn’t integrate into GMail quite like Grouptivity integrates into email, but there seem to be a good number of similarities in how they enable social sharing in a collaborative manner, as can be seen from the screenshots from one of the assigned patents, Collaboration system and method (US Patent 7606865):

This first one shows a “Compose New Social Mail” interface. Note the ability to add individuals or groups to send a mail to, as well as a link to a public profile page

This next image from the patent shows a third-party webpage at the top, where people can click on a “socialmail it” icon to share that content via their social mail, with an example of sharing the first item from the page at the bottom.

Before Grouptivity seemed to disappear from the Web sometime in 2008, there was a Share+ widget for WordPress. The description of the Share+ plugin tells us:

For Your Readers Empower your readers with a social tool for sharing, saving and discovering new content with the click of a button. Our plugin provides social features for sharing content across all major social bookmarking sites and a clipping feature for adding text, images and personalized messages for friends, family and co-workers.

Search Rankings Based Upon Sharing

Another pending patent application from the assignment describes something like the social web search rankings in the Sharitivity, which might just remind you a little of Google’s Search Plus Your World. Google may not be following the processes described in this patent application, but it does describe how social sharing might play a role in ranking content shared by people who might be connected to each other within a social network. The patent application is:

Page Ranking System Employing User Sharing Data
Invented by Ankesh Kumar
US Patent Application 20090125511
Published May 14, 2009
Filed: December 31, 2008

Abstract

Standard web content search result relevance and ranking is improved by considering certain social reference data, such as the number of times an item of content is shared, normalized for the number of times it is viewed. A system and method for improving the relevance and ranking includes a system and method for tracking the social references and a system and method for operating on search engine results to either:

re-order the results based on social reference data,re-order the search results based on a combination of the social reference data and the web search engine’s ordering, and/ordisplay the social reference data either with the search results reordered or in the order provided by the web search engine.

Many different forms of data constitute social reference, including sharing content or a link thereto by email, SMS, posting to a link-sharing site, blog, and bookmarking in a web browser.

Social Reference Factors

Search engines might presently be looking at some social factors in ranking pages presently, such as:

The number of third party comments added to a blog post or article after it’s publishedThe number of links pointed to an article or post after it’s publishedA re-written article or post pointing a link back to the original.

Services like Yahoo! Buzz, may also use things like email shares, user ranking and other signals to decide which stories to present on a news web page.

What this patent application adds is the use of social reference factors in the form of content sharing, to help algorithmically determine the relevance and ranking of web content search results.

Content sharing social reference data includes interactions someone has with web content which result in some peer-to-peer, peer-to-group, or group-to-peer sharing of the address of the content, or a portion of the content itself.

A search engine may base its relevance and rank systems exclusively or partially on content-sharing social reference data, and show searchers relevant search results based in part or whole on that data.

Examples of individuals sharing social references can involve someone:

Sending (via email, instant messenger, etc.) a link or “bookmark” to content to another userPosting content (e.g., adding to a blog which becomes visible to others)Applying a label to content visible to othersMaking making a purchase or request from a websiteParticipating in social bookmarkingPromting or demoting content in search resultsCreating and upkeeping a directoryPosting comments on bookmarks, news, images, videos, podcasts and other web pages

Information such as counts of this type of sharing might be used by itself or in conjunction with other ranking signals (such as PageRank) to weight and rank search results.

The weights related to content sharing might be calculated a number of ways, including the use of some amount of normalization such as:

Number of page shares over number of page viewsNumber of shares for a retail page over a number of similar retail pagesNumber of shares for bookmark by email over number of bookmark page shares

Some of the the counts of shared may be weighted differently as well. For example, since it might take more work to share something via an email than through a Facebook share, the email shares may carry more weight than the Facebook shares.

When searchers enter keywords into a search box, the web search results they receive might include content from people within their social networks who may have socially shared that content in some manner.

Avoiding Manipulation of Search Results

There’s the possibility that people might try to abuse a ranking algorithm like this one, but there are steps that could be taken to try to stop people from gaming this system.

Since this system would have access to collateral data about social shares, such as what the IP address was of the person sharing at the time that they shared something, that data could be used to do things like ignore multiple sending of the same content from the same source. Requiring a sender to have a valid account at a subscription site (Digg, Facebook, etc.), and possibly only using social sharing information to include that kind of content in search results for a recipient or recipients who are also members of that subscription site.

Other patent filings acquired by Google from Appmail, LLC

System and method for integrating e-mail into functionality of software application (US Patent 7219130)
E-mail based decision process in a hierarchical organization (US Patent Application 20050021646)
System and method for task management (US Patent Application 20050197999)

Takeaways

Google Plus was originally launched on June 28, 2011, around ten months after the acquisition of the Appmail patent filings, and it’s possible that Google had already charted a strategy for their social network that contained many of the same elements that were found in Grouptivity’s social mail, and social ranking signals. But it’s also possible that Grouptivity influenced the future of Google Plus in a number of ways, and the Page Ranking System patent seems tailor-made for use with a search engine like Google.

There were definitely other influences upon what we see in Google Plus today, but the Appmail LLC patents that I’ve written about in this post are probably worth going through by anyone who might be interested in exploring the roots of the social service from Google.

I think there’s a good chance that Google is also incorporating ideas from its Agent Rank patents into the scoring and ranking of social signals, which involve the use of digital signatures associated with the creation of content, such as authorship markup. There’s also a very good chance that the Credential Score approach developed for use with code-named Confucius Q&A sites help to measure the quality of interactions on social services and the Web is incorporated in social rankings of content as well.

But looking at Agent Rank and the Confucius credential scores in combination with the Grouptivity patent filings fleshes out more of the background of Google Plus, and Google’s attempts to add social elements to search results.

Through integration with the Open Graph API, third party content appears to users as updates through the timeline, news feed and ticker — allowing users to interact with content directly through Facebook, while observing the activities of their friends and receiving social recommendations accordingly.

This stuff is gold dust for any SEOs/Developers working with sites that regularly produce or host engaging online content/resources - be that blog posts, videos, apps, images, informational resources or any content form which involves active engagement from the user base.  If you’ve got any sort of engaged community that typically visits your site on a regular/semi-regular basis — you need to be thinking about building an open graph app in order to catapult that engagement to a new level and really begin to see ROI from social media. It’s not complicated to do and to explain the whole system to us, Distilled have brought in an expert.

Mixcloud’s Mat Clayton, a frequent speaker at distilled conferences popped into the office to give us the low-down on Open Graph — what it is, how it works and how you can use it to increase traffic and user engagement.  

1. What is Open Graph?

Mat covers the basics of Open Graph, explaining “Objects” and “Actions” concept and how some of the biggest sites in the world are using it to improve social media ROI. For more information, Facebook have a great page Explaining the Open Graph and a page Explaining how the ticker works with Apps.

2. Enabling your App for Social Graph

Mat explains the process of creating an app, some of the technical elements involved, and how you need to think of the Open Graph concepts as relating to elements of your content. For further reading, check out Facebook’s excellent tutorial for building an Open Graph App. To start creating your app, you will need to register at Facebook Developers Center

3. Social Plugins with Open Graph

Facebook’s social plugins, such as Facepile are the core of building functionality into your site, which encourages users to link up their activity on your site with their activities on Facebook. Mat explains the conversion value of these social plugins with Open Graph functionality.

4. Authenticated Referrals

Mat explains what authenticated referrals are and how the system helps to dramatically improve brand awareness and engagement from users who may have never even visited your site prior to discovery through Facebook.

Phil Nottingham Phil is an SEO Analyst at Distilled London, where he specialises in video, wacky link-building strategies and complaining about poor design.

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