After six years, Facebook is still gathering influence. The company estimated earlier this year that out of its 400 million users, 175 million log into Facebook every day. Many users enthusiastically interact with brands and artists in Facebook as well as other Fans of those communities. Remember that all of this is indexable content, and everything you do in this realm can play heavily into your future SEO strategy. The increased emphasis on fresh content in search may also play a heavy role in search ranking.

Here are the three most important building blocks to consider right now:

Regular and Relevant Content Updates – your Facebook posts will be contextualized though image tags, keywords used on your Page, your page title and other relevant content. The more focused your posts are topically, the more likely they are to help your overall SEO strategy.

Jump-Start Fan Growth – there are many reasons to want to create a critical mass of Facebook Fans (commerce potential, for one). But knowing that Google search is increasingly personalized, increasing your social network in Facebook may prove to be incredibly important down the line. Already, Google’s social search serves up content that your friends logged into Google social products have published or interacted with, much in the way that Facebook’s post quality now partially determines the “Top News” in your Facebook news feed. It’s completely conceivable that the same effect may start happening with Facebook Pages in Google down the line.

Facebook Connect – start looking for ways to introduce Facebook connect to other social and non-social Web properties you operate (blogs, Web sites, community areas). It’s unknown how this might affect your overall search ranking over time, but it’s a good idea in general to begin weaving your Facebook presence into your other properties.

This may seem like a small development – and it was indeed a minor event in Boland’s address to OMMA Social attendees – but it is actually one of the most significant steps in Facebook’s revenue model thus far. There are plenty of businesses that are already using their own methods of conversion tracking, but this model will allow businesses of all sizes to begin to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Not surprisingly, nearly all the followup questions from those in the audience were about ad conversion tracking. The product is expected to be released to the wider public in late March.

Bolan also talked up the success of “Friends of Connections,” an ad targeting feature that allows advertisers to target the friends of Fans and connections that have installed Facebook apps. According to Bolan, this feature has so far shown a huge lift in conversion rate.

See the video featuring Brian Boland here:

For this project, the platform of choice was Marketo, an impressive marketing automation suite that integrates quite seamlessly with Salesforce to not only drive more leads, but give the sales team critical behavioral information that influences their sales strategy (disclosure: DemandResults is a proud Marketo Alliance Partner and also a Salesforce AppExchange Partner). As anyone with enterprise-level CRM experience knows, a CRM is only as good as the information that sales reps put into it. This directly affects marketing automation software too, as Marketo attempts to match demographic information and behavioral activities on prospects with data already in the CRM in order to score lead and customer profiles. The higher the user adoption rate, the more powerful it is.

This launch was a resounding success. First, the pilot program yielded results that could not have been achieved without Marketo. Secondly, the company’s SVP of Sales – who had once been understandably resistant to the idea of introducing yet another sales tool – went on record before the executive team that after witnessing the results of the project, he was now “drinking the Kool-Aid.” He also laid down the law to his sales team that Marketo use was mandatory.

The secret to successful system deployments aren’t necessarily technical, but rather tactical. After reflecting on this latest project, here are our top 3 tactical tips:

1– Involve the Sales Team in Early Planning Stages – Very often, marketing automation platforms are desired, researched and purchased by progressive members of a company’s marketing team. Since their jobs often depend on their ability to drive leads, they inherently want the latest and greatest tools available.

Sales teams, on the other hand, are often indifferent or even adverse to anything that might alter their existing process. As a result, the sales team is often left out of the loop for the most important part of the project – the strategic and configuration stages. This can be absolutely devastating; remember that companies are built around sales, not marketing. Thus, it’s important to involve the most important members of a sales team and ask them the most important question: “if you could wave a magic wand and make the system do something that would help your job, what would it be?” More often than not, the system can be configured to do what they asked for. Later, when it’s time to test the system, the sales team will be more invested in the project.

2 – Start with A Pilot Group of Prime Movers – In an enterprise-level company, it’s inadvisable to begin testing the system with the entire sales team. Work with executives to handpick a group of early adopters on the sales and marketing team who will be able to provide valuable feedback about the results of early tests. On the sales side, these should be effective sellers who are already heavily committed to using CRM. Start by involving them in one strategic campaign, touching base early and often to make sure that the system is wowing them with business intelligence that makes them more successful.

3 – Promote Early Successes – Were any leads progressed to a near-committed sales stage during the pilot program? What was actually sold? Were there unforeseen benefits that impressed members of the pilot group? Celebrate success from the pilot group at the beginning of company-wide training. The most difficult part is actually getting users to involve marketing automation in their daily routine.

As with any set of truly powerful tools, configuring Marketo use and implementation is an evolving project, as it becomes clearer over time how to best leverage it for each scenario and each organization. A strong initial deployment can set the entire project up for long-term success.

Microsoft Bing's official logo

Bing’s increased market share means increased opportunities for paid search advertisers as the company continues to take users from competitor and future partner, Yahoo. Thus far, DemandResults’ early forays into Bing PPC advertising have been fruitful in terms of conversion rates, although the advertising administrative interface lacks the flexibility of Google AdWords and is at least a generation behind.

There is still no evidence that Bing is taking market share from Google. That could change quickly if rumors that would make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone and other Apple products materialize.

Back in November, just before the Dreamforce conference, DemandResults launched our answer to that fundamental question – SEO for Salesforce, a highly configurable Salesforce.com app that enables companies to track which organic keywords convert to leads, opportunities and sales. Since then, we’ve been diligently working on the SEO for Salesforce premium edition, which will feature turnkey reports, dashboards, automated tools that check your site for high-impact optimization techniques, and much more. Look for a release sometime in Q2.

Our dev team appreciated the shout-out from Salesforce yesterday when Customer Success Manager Kirti Patel featured SEO for Salesforce in his whitepaper “5 Proven Ways to Generate More Leads.”

“Look for apps that will enhance your SEM efforts. For example, the free edition of the app SEO for Salesforce automatically connects to intelligence data through Google Analytics. Use this information to track lead origins and report by search engine, search type, keyword, and campaign through your entire sales cycle.”

We’re also listening intently to the needs of current app users and integrating some of their needs into the final product. Thanks for all the feedback, everyone.

Don’t have it yet? Download SEO for Salesforce

Yount’s advice started making the rounds on Twitter, and the post was later edited – perhaps due to objections from Bing execs – to read as follows:

“Okay, the original post didn’t work out so well. While the ideas were sound, they were, apparently, a little too specific [sic]. On that note, if you are looking for link building ideas, I suggest reading our blog posts which may provide you with some ideas for developing links”

It’s clear that the advice wasn’t too specific for Web publishers and search marketers – any facts regarding how Bing generates search rankings is welcome. Unfortunately, his comment was too specific for Bing itself, which could be a sign that the company plans to be more cryptic about what Web publishers can do to participate in Bing’s rankings than even Google.  In the past, Google’s Matt Cutts has gone on the record about specific directories and news aggregation sites that meet with the search giant’s approval without censorship from Google execs.

The comment may also shed light on Bing’s treatment of nofollow markup. In 2009 it was widely observed that Bing, like Yahoo, did not seem to observe nofollow. At that time, Yount commented on Bing Community that it was a “known issue that we are working quickly to resolve.”

But if Yount’s comments about indexing links from Yahoo Buzz are correct, then perhaps Bing has rethought the issue. Yahoo Buzz contains nofollow on seemingly every outbound links. This begs the question: do Twitter links count? Do Delicious links count? Since Bing’s policy will affect how Web publishers handle their content, including outbound links, it seems only fair to state definitively what the company’s stance will be.

Bing– Just when Apple’s brilliant and searing marketing schemes had convinced the world that there was nothing less sexy than Microsoft product, the software giant launched Bing – a bodacious, complex and visually stimulating search engine that users seem to like. The latest ComScore stats reveal Bing continuing to gain market share, at 10.3%. Bing continues to roll out a motherload of innoviative, addictive features such as Map Apps and Visual Search, and the Bing API. The company is also gradually releasing guidelines and information for Web publishers.

Google Personalized Search – After experimenting with Personalized Search for four years, the company made personalized search an opt-out service. Apart from the few who will opt-out of personalized search, no two people are experiencing Google Search in quite the same way. It remains to be seen how much this will change SEO strategies.

Real-Time Search – Rather than face the prospect of Twitter emerging as a major search engine competitor, Bing and Microsoft struck separate deals with the service to serve up real-time search results. In addition, both services struck a deal with Facebook to index portions of its service, prompting a surge of Facebook users adjusting their personal privacy settings.

Google PageRank Goes In-House – PageRank has long been at the core of Google’s complex ranking algorithm. The company went so far as to display PageRank scores for Web sites and display them prominently in its Google Tool Bar. Suddenly last year, the company changed course. It began telling Web publishers not to worry about PageRank, then made it impossible for Web publishers to use nofollow to determine how PageRank would be distributed. Finally the company stopped publishing PageRank in most of its toolbars altogether. Given the company’s push toward personalized search, it will be interesting to see whether the building blocks of PageRank stay intact behind the curtain.

News Industry Backlash – Both the Associated Press and Rupert Murdoch turned their back on Google this year, citing loopholes that allowed users to access paid content through the search engine and index content while contributing nothing in return. Murdoch is reportedly in negotiations for an exclusive deal with Bing. Exclusive content deals with the world’s major news industries might give Bing the advantage it needs to cut into Google’s market share.

Cross-Domain Canonical Tags – Canonical tags were developed as a way to for Web publishers to control which versions of content should be seen as the “original” version. This helped Google to determine which version to display prominently in search results. Now the tags have been modified to allow publishers with a single piece of content on multiple domains to use the tag as well. In some cases, Google is promoting use of the tags as a replacement for 301 redirects.

Death of the Traditional Search Engine – For years, Yahoo remained reasonably competitive with its aging keyword-based search engine, even as it watched Bay Area rival Google ratchet up both revenues and the complexity of its search algorithm. Even if Microsoft hadn’t acquired Yahoo this year – Bing is set to replace Yahoo’s back end in 2010 – the company has been bleeding market share all year. Given Yahoo Search’s lame-duck image, it will be interesting to see how long Bing waits to replace the front end as well.

The attendees were noticeably  more international this year, coming from more than 60 countries around the world. And although Salesforce did not release details regarding professional track, it seemed that there was much more interest in cloud computing topics affecting customer service, marketing and social media than ever before.

Our very own DemandResults CEO Howard Brown offered evidence-based marketing tips and fielded questions in two standing-room-only sessions. The first, “Search Engine Marketing Junkies,” included brief presentations by DemandBase’s Jason Stewart, CPC Search’s Terry Whalen and Lauren Vaccerello and Sean Whiteley from Salesforce.com.  The questions from the audience to the panel demonstrated, more than anything, a great desire to learn more about SEO and how Google’s policies regarding duplicate content and similar issues may be impacting their business.

The second session, titled “Improve the Health of Your Business by Being Service-Oriented,” focused on service issues within the healthcare industry. Brown discussed the use of Salesforce.com in building specialty healthcare-focused verticals at 4therapy.com, CRC Health Group and Senior Transitions.

Narinder Singh, CEO from DemandResults’ partner company Appirio, took the main Dreamforce stage to discuss Salesforce Chatter. Chatter is a promising app that brings Facebook-like functionality to a business environment, allowing employees to monitor discussion threads from other employees as well as data and alerts from Salesforce.com apps in real-time. Appirio also shared the spotlight when Avon demonstrated a Force.com-powered referral engine built by Appirio to run on Facebook.  According to Avon, purchases made through the Facebook app were roughly double their average order size.

Avon is one of many enterprise-level customers that started using Salesforce.com CRM but are now rolling out apps and other efforts in Force.com. It’s exciting to watch the platform explode right before our eyes, and it was great to get firsthand feedback on our pitch for the forthcoming SEO for Salesforce app.

In 2007, Google began experimenting with personalized search results – serving up a unique set of Web sites in its search engine based on patterns in your online behavior. Until last week, search results were only altered if you were logged into a Google-based service, such as your Gmail or Google Apps account.  This means that most people – regardless of location or behavior – experienced the same search results. Suddenly, however, personalization is the new status quo. Unless a user actively turns off personalization – and Google hasn’t made doing so particularly obvious –search results are influenced by a variety of factors that Google tracks using cookies placed on your machine.  So long as the personalization toggle remains 2-3 clicks from the home page, only a small, savvy number of people will ever see “normal” search results again.

Is Personalization Unfair to Startups?

It would be inconsistent with Google’s philosophy to stop exposing search users to Web newcomers based purely on past search habits.  It will be interesting to see which portions of search results are personalized over time, and whether Google will choose to clearly demarcate them from other results.

Still, the change presents a legitimate worry for any business launching a new Web site.  Consider that new sites already have a very difficult time getting found in Google search. This is because so many items that affect search results– PageRank, domain age and the quality of inbound links, just to name a few – place the advantage firmly on the side of established brands with older sites. Already, our employees have noticed our clients’ Web sites appear in personalized searches more frequently, and in higher ranking position, apparently because they have shown a propensity for visiting them in the past.

Shifting Campaign Emphasis

Depending on how far Google goes with personalization, this change could make SEO even more important than it is already, as companies find themselves working even harder to break into online search results that are dominated by larger and older companies with more popular content. It really depends on how much emphasis Google chooses to place on prior search history, and how those results are displayed.

Although search ranking position will still matter, it may matter a little less than it did before.  This means that much more emphasis needs to be placed on monitoring business performance from organic traffic, such as sales and leads. This type of business knowledge can help companies focus their search efforts on areas that really pay off as opposed to just striving for more traffic volume.

How to Turn off Google Personalization

When logged out of Google, perform a normal search. On the search engine results page, click on the “Web History” link in the upper right hand of the page. Then click on “Disable customizations based on search history.”

The rollout also contains a bevy of highly addictive toys. For fun, Bing offers “Twitter Maps” – the ability to see local Tweets in either a “recent” or real-time format from Twitter. Even if everybody in a given neighborhood is just spouting nonsense, the interface, which is built in Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, is hard to put down. It may not be practical, but it is, hands down, the most enjoyable way to experience Twitter so far.

The Maps Apps experience gets significantly more fun and quirkier from there. “Roadside Sculptures” is just what you’d expect, as are local “Urban Graffiti,” “Urban Murals” and “Signs and Billboards” are, at least for the mega-cities, incredibly entertaining. This is a search engine with major personality.

So what’s the point?

Maps Apps will get a lot of use. Skyrocketing search queries will mean an incredible number of ad impressions, which will in turn create significant revenue opportunities that may even, someday, cut into Google’s local search advertising market share.

And if Microsoft keeps churning out goodies like this, Bing may just become a verb.