Search Clinic Blog news stories about online marketing

Latest search engine traffic rankings reviewed

2010-03-09T18:41:00.000Z

The latest search engine traffic has been released by comScore for January 2010 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

In January 2010, Americans conducted 15.2 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 65.4 percent search market share. Microsoft Sites grabbed 11.3 percent market share, up 0.6 percentage points versus December.

January 2010 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in January with 65.4 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (17.0 percent), and Microsoft Sites (11.3 percent). Ask Network captured 3.8 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.5 percent.

comScore Core Search Report* January 2010 vs. December 2009 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity	Share of Searches (%)
Core Search Entity	Dec-09	Jan-10	Point Change Jan-10 vs. Dec-09
Total Core Search	100.0%	100.%	N/A
Google Sites	65.7%	65.4%	-0.3
Yahoo! Sites	17.3%	17.0%	-0.3
Microsoft Sites	10.7%	11.3%	0.6
Ask Network	3.7%	3.8%	0.1
AOL LLC Network	2.6%	2.5%	-0.1

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Americans conducted 15.2 billion searches in January, up 3 percent from December. Google Sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375 million).

comScore Core Search Report* January 2010 vs. December 2009 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity	Search Queries (MM)
Core Search Entity	Dec-09	Jan-10	Percent Change Jan-10 vs. Dec-09
Total Core Search	14,737	15,167	3%
Google Sites	9,688	9,920	2%
Yahoo! Sites	2,544	2,583	2%
Microsoft Sites	1,576	1,715	9%
Ask Network	545	574	5%
AOL LLC	383	375	-2%

January 2010 U.S. Expanded Search Rankings

In the January analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the search market with more than 14 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.7 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 1.8 billion searches. Bing experienced large growth during the month with an 11-percent increase in query volume to reach more than 1.5 billion searches. Craigslist jumped one position to #6 with 636 million searches, while Facebook grew to 395 million searches, representing a 13-percent increase from the previous month.

comScore Expanded Search Query Report January 2010 vs. December 2009 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch
Expanded Search Entity	Search Queries (MM)
Expanded Search Entity	Dec-09	Jan-10	Percent Change Jan-10 vs. Dec-09
Total Internet	22,741	23,163	2%
Google Sites	14,019	14,045	0%
Google	10,101	10,378	3%
YouTube/All Other	3,918	3,667	-6%
Yahoo! Sites	2,629	2,670	2%
Yahoo!	2,605	2,647	2%
All Other	24	23	-4%
Microsoft Sites	1,620	1,772	9%
Bing	1,399	1,549	11%
Microsoft/All Other	221	223	1%
Ask Network	696	736	6%
ASK.COM	332	336	1%
MyWebSearch.com/ All Other	364	400	10%
eBay	680	659	-3%
craigslist, inc.	583	636	9%
AOL LLC	588	576	-2%
AOL Search Network	325	317	-2%
MapQuest/All Other	263	259	-2%
Fox Interactive Media	424	403	-5%
MySpace Sites	416	398	-4%
All Other	8	5	-38%
Facebook.com	351	395	13%
Amazon Sites	302	238	-21%

The key points are that Facebook traffic is still growing with the other largest moves being a surpring drop of traffic to YouTube- down 3% and the amazon group of sites which may be showing the post Christmas blues as they suffered a 21% fall.

Social gaming is the new battlefield in the battle for internet supremacy

2010-03-08T13:53:00.001Z

A Facebook fans page has attracted a huge online following- and is making money for it's owners.

Today, tens of millions of people around the world will log in to Facebook playing Farmville, a cute, colourful game where players take on the role of a farmer — a game whose extraordinary success is forcing many to rethink the future of the internet and social media.

Farmville is a fairly mundane idea, but one that draws heavily on the traditional world of board games for inspiration. Given the task of caring for and expanding their land and livestock, players have a certain number of action points each day, which they can spend on tending the farm. They can even trade with “neighbours” — Facebook friends who also play the game.

The numbers behind this simple concept are huge. More than 80 million people play every month with almost 30 million logging in every day to check the status of their virtual allotment. It is free to play, but consumers can spend real money on virtual goods to use on their farms.

Combined with advertising revenue — including some controversial revenue from advertising deals, which users complain are little more than marketing scams — this makes Farmville into a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

For years, games have lain on the periphery of the internet. Playing games online has been popular among young men for more than a decade — but this was never seen as a commercial activity that could have a significant impact on services such as Facebook or MySpace, let alone Google or Apple.

The success of Farmville, to which more than a quarter of Facebook users have signed up, challenges that assumption. Furthermore, it is leading a new wave of online games that are rewriting our most basic ideas about what videogames are, and who plays them.

The most extraordinary statistic to emerge from the research into this fast-growing phenomenon is the profile of the “average” player of social videogames — namely, 43 years old and female. Young men barely get a look in — more than 60 per cent of people playing social games on Facebook are aged between 30 and 60.

What has attracted this surprising new audience to online games? In part, it’s the subject matter of the games themselves — which ranges from Farmville’s focus on nurturing and growing to the addictive puzzles of games such as Bejeweled.

Equally important is the social aspect of Facebook. No longer is playing games a solitary pursuit — instead, it’s something you do with friends, challenging them to beat your scores or collaborating to help each other out.

Half of those who play social games such as Farmville claim that they visit Facebook each day specifically to play. Suddenly, Facebook isn’t just a tool for staying in touch with friends — it’s also a platform for games and entertainment.

While Facebook’s owners are undoubtedly delighted at the success of Farmville, there must also be a sense of unease. After all, with a game this successful now providing so much of Facebook’s traffic, to what extent, exactly, are Farmville’s creators, Zynga, beholden to Facebook — and vice versa?

It’s a sentiment that resonates across the industry. Apple, for years an online gaming ostrich whose Mac computers provided little support for game developers, was forced to publicly embrace gaming last year as it became clear that social gaming was by far the most commercially successful products on the iPhone’s App Store. Microsoft and Sony, meanwhile, have had a foot in the door of the videogames market for years.

This is the new battleground in the war for hearts, minds and wallets being fought between the world’s technology giants. The millions of acres of virtual land being ploughed by Farmville’s players each day are breathing new life into an old adage — where there’s muck, there’s brass.

Twitter to copy Google's advertising business

2010-03-05T17:53:00.000Z

Twitter is examining whether to post adverts tied to searches of its social networking website as a means of making money from its business.

Twitter has been working on different ways to generate revenues from advertising over the last six months and intends to use the $100 million it raised in financing last summer to fund this and other potential options, which are still in the process of being developed.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the idea is that if users search under the term ‘laptop’, they could generate an advert from an advertiser such as Dell. Such adverts would only appear in search results, however, and not in regular Twitterstreams.

Adverts would also be based on the standard Twitter format of 140 or fewer characters and be distributed via the third party software and services that use the organisation’s application programming interface to connect to its platform. Participation by service providers would be optional, however, and any resultant revenues would be shared with Twitter.

The organisation intends to work with advertising agencies and buyers to seed the programme, but plans to move to a similar self-service model to Google’s over time.

The scheme is expected to be launched during the first half of this year in pilot mode, but Twitter is currently still trying to work out such details as how advertisers would buy and price adverts. It is also considering how to refine its search mechanism to make it more useful to users.

Another issue is finding ways to gather user data in order to make targeted advertising more meaningful. The model works for Google because it has a reasonable idea of consumers’ identity and intent, but Twitter does not currently require users to provide any personal information when they sign up to its services.

The online search model was pioneered by Google, which now generates 97% of its £18 billion in revenues from advertising. Twitter users currently send about 50 million tweets per day, up from 5,000 in 2007.

Google search engine optimisation requirements official review

2010-03-04T17:48:00.000Z

Dr Search's post yesterday in Google's own official search engine optimisation requirements exposed highlighted Google's own internal research into it's website.

Today I'm examining in greater depth the results of that reserach.

The first observation from the 49 page pdf is that metatags in the form of both the titles and descriptions are key search engine optimisation elements.

The heartening point is that Google admits that roughly 90% of it's own pages could do with improvements in these respects.

Nearly a third of it's pages need headings improvements.

Even it's internal text links- a key algorithmic element of Brin and Page's mathematical calculations, need improvements in a third of it's own pages.

Conversely only a third of it's pictures and logos have correct links.

For the full Google report card, please see: http://www.searchclinic.org/google-seo-report-card.pdf

It is 1.64 Mb in size and in PDF format.

Dr Search at the Search Clinic openly lives by the adage- "Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day, give a man a fishing rod and you will feed him for life."

Yes you can learn and do your own search engine optimisation- but would you rather spend time doing what you do best- building your business or on improving your website?

Google's own official search engine optimisation requirements exposed

2010-03-03T09:42:00.000Z

Yesterday Google's announced it's own search engine optimisation requirements for it's own site.

Topics covered included- how many of Google's web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google's SEO Report Card.

Google's SEO Report Card is an effort to provide Google's product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products' pages using simple and accepted optimizations.

Google's blog says: "These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users' experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines.

From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products' pages.

The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released the report card within Google last month and since then a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to."

Dr Search wil ge going through the 49 page download and will post back for you.

Yahoo- 15 years old today

2010-03-02T14:38:00.001Z

Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic says Happy 15th Birthday Yahoo! and reproduces this message from their founders.

We want to share our pride, gratitude and excitement on this 15th birthday, with all Yahoo! users (600 million of them), customers and partners. It continues to be an incredible ride for the two of us, as well as for thousands of Yahoo! employees we have had the privilege of working with over the years.

We’ve had the unique opportunity to help create an industry and shape the online world, and will continue to focus on the values that brought us here —working hard, having fun, being passionate about your ideas, believing in each other, and always trying to invent the future. And as we celebrate 15 years today, we are even more excited than ever about what lies ahead, and the potential of Yahoo! and the Internet.

Of course, we didn’t set out to start one of the world’s largest Internet companies or be leading a movement that has changed the world. We were just a couple of Stanford graduate students doing our research (supposedly) while our professor was on sabbatical.

More interesting than our research was our total fascination with the web and all the cool stuff it suddenly made available. But it was incredibly hard to keep track of the thousands of great websites sprouting up everywhere. We thought it would be fun to catalog the sites by developing a simple directory. So all this began with nothing more than a hobby to help other early Internet users.

Amazing things happen when we’re doing what’s fun.

We soon learned a huge lesson just as relevant today as then: change and growth on the Internet happen at warp speed—especially if you’re filling a need. With the proliferation of websites and with hundreds of thousands of people accessing our guide, it was simply impossible for us to continue doing this on our own.

Taking big steps takes belief in yourself—and in others.

After many late nights and a lot of pizza, we decided to take the big leap, turn our hobby into a business, raise money and devote ourselves totally to building a company. This was no sure thing. For example, 15 years ago, we wanted a free service that was ad-supported.

But the conventional wisdom was that our business needed to be subscription-based. Few people thought that advertising could be the key revenue generator for the Internet. Of course, the conventional wisdom was wrong and so today we know that August, 1995, the month our first ad went live, was a critical milestone in the history of Yahoo!, as well as the history of the internet.

Focus on the future: it still looks phenomenal.

Internet growth continues to be simply phenomenal, and we’re nowhere near done. Fifteen years ago, there were 18,000 web sites and fewer than 10 million people globally on the Internet—less than one third of a single percent of the world’s population at the time. Today there are more than 200 million websites with 90,000 created daily. There are estimated to be 1.6 billion people on the internet today—about 25 percent of the world’s population.

These numbers are astonishing, but even more important and more exciting is the impact that the Internet is having on so many people around the world. From socio-economic opportunities to more accessible health care to educating the next generation and beyond, the Internet has changed the way we live, work and learn. It has overcome geographic and political barriers and has made it possible for people to raise their voices as they seek greater economic opportunity and freedom. And Yahoo! has been a leader in enabling these tremendous technological advancements every step of the way.

Let’s aim to be even prouder fifteen years from now than we are today!

All this in just 15 years. Yahoo! has been built by thousands of dedicated employees, hundreds of millions of loyal users and scores of advertisers who envisioned a future that was exciting, challenging and at times daunting. To work in the sandbox that is Yahoo! and the evolution of the Internet is truly amazing.

And yet as fast as the Internet and Yahoo! have grown and as remarkably our lives have changed, we are just at the beginning of this great transformation.

The Internet still has enormous and untapped potential. There are billions of more people we need to drive online, and then provide them with relevant content and opportunities that they’ve never dreamed about before.

We are confident that 15 years from today, we will look back in marvel at how far you, and the Internet have traveled in such a short time. Just as we are doing today.

Jerry Yang and David Filo

Co-Founders & Chief Yahoos

From:

http://ycorpblog.com/2010/03/01/yahoo15/

Out of date social networks sites are harming brands

2010-03-01T19:44:00.000Z

Eight out of ten multinationals may be using social media, but only twenty per cent are employing the multiple tools necessary to deliver a truly effective communications strategy.

Furthermore, abandoned social networking initiatives can also be damaging - with idle, out of date accounts having a detrimental impact on the brand.

These are the findings of a survey undertaken by PR and communications company Burson-Marsteller, which looked at the use of social networking sites Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and corporate blogging among the world’s largest companies.

The study called the 'Fortune Global 100 Social Media Check-up', found that most companies had dipped their toe in the water, "some with a big splash and others with a timid ripple".

But while 79% were using at least one social media platform, only 20% were using all four to try and engage with stakeholders. The report warned, however: "No single social media tool can stand on its own. For a company that wants a truly effective communications strategy, leveraging multiple social media tools for their individual strengths is required."

Another problem was that many organisations had multiple accounts, which included not only the main one controlled by corporate headquarters, but also others handled by local offices and divisions as well as accounts set up for one-off corporate events.

Of those surveyed, some 65% had Twitter accounts, 54% had Facebook fan pages, 50% had YouTube video channels and 33% corporate blogs. But of the companies that were actively engaged in communicating with customers via such channels, each had 4.2 Twitter accounts, 2.1 Facebook pages, 1.6 YouTube channels and 4.2 blogs.

Again the report warned, however, that the situation was generating challenges by "creating mixed messages and tones and by leaving abandoned Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages, which may be detrimental to the brand".

Buzz causes Google a storm on data privacy worries

2010-02-26T14:13:00.000Z

Good Customer Service is always the key to profitable businesses. However upsetting loyal users is only part of the danger. Like Microsoft before it, Google also risks antagonising business partners and regulators.

Any move into a new area can now seem like a naked attempt to grab market share, or a defensive gambit to shore up a weak flank.

The warning from Vodafone, for example, is a sign that mobile operators are starting to worry that Google’s dominant advertising business will eventually suck all the profits out of their industry.

That fear echoes the mobile industry’s distrust of Microsoft a decade ago, when it tried to extend its Windows monopoly on to phone handsets.

In a telling moment earlier this week, Google revealed that 60,000 handsets a day are now being shipped with its Android software installed – a rate that exceeds the number of handsets carrying Windows.

For now, the mobile industry has not reacted to Google’s incursions by repelling it: its open-source Android software is viewed as an independent platform to counter giants such as Nokia and Apple, making Google still more of an ally than a threat.

After the rapid changes it has made to correct the missteps in Buzz, the privacy row will no doubt fade and users may indeed see the benefits in a social networking service tied closely to their e-mail.

But this week’s developments carry a clear message: if Google wants to keep the goodwill of customers and business partners as it continues to expand, at the very least it must work harder to convince them it truly has their interests at heart- rather than just it's own.

Buzz causes a storm on privacy fears II

2010-02-25T14:05:00.000Z

Further to my last post on the botched launch of Buzz the fiasco, it has intensified a feeling that has been growing as Google has sought to extend its reach: that it is deliberately using its dominance in one area to gain a stronger foothold in new markets, much as arch-rival Microsoft did before it.

Antitrust regulators have already rebuffed Google’s attempt to forge a deal with Yahoo in search and are investigating its plans to extend its advertising reach into the mobile arena through the acquisition of Admob.

This week, in clearing a rival Microsoft search alliance with Yahoo, the US Department of Justice highlighted the arrangement’s importance in countering Google’s “dominance” of internet search and the advertising that accompanies it.

In any other industry, Google’s conduct would be considered good corporate practice. In the technology world, however, where start-ups with disruptive new products are romanticised and companies such as Apple and Google have built their brands largely on their ability to out-innovate rather than outmanoeuvre their competitors, it is often seen as unimaginative.

For ordinary internet users, there are clear potential benefits from Google’s strategy of extending its influence into more and more corners of the internet – as well as some obvious dangers.

Yet as the Buzz privacy debacle has shown, internet users have different expectations of the different services they use. Trying to merge them can lead to confusion and distrust.

Facebook has learnt this to its cost. In its pursuit of Twitter, where most communication takes place in public, it recently reset some of the default settings for its users so that more of their information appears publicly. As with Buzz, that brought an outcry from privacy interest groups.

Buzz caused a storm on privacy fears

2010-02-24T13:57:00.000Z

Google has caused a lot of anger since the catch up launch of Buzz it's social networking service.

Launched on February 10 2010, it is meant to give Google a stronger foothold in the booming social networking business, where it is rapidly losing ground to Facebook and Twitter.

Its main effect in the short term, however, has been to stir up an outcry over privacy that the internet giant could have done without.

It has also served to reinforce a bigger narrative about Google that has surfaced in other ways this week. This holds that the company is prepared to use its growing market power as a blunt instrument to muscle its way into new markets – and is not too concerned about whose feet it treads on in the process.

In one sign of these growing fears, even Vittorio Colao, chief executive of Vodafone – nominally one of Google’s business partners – raised a red flag over the potential spread of its search dominance into the mobile world. Regulators should take a close look at Google’s massive market share in search, he said, “before it is too late”.

The outcry included an official complaint to US regulators and left Google scrambling to stem the anger, with a public apology and two changes to the service announced within its first four days. In the aftermath of its recent decision to abandon censorship of its search results in China, this looked like another case of testing the limits of the “Don’t be evil” motto, only to later back down.

At the root of the problem is Google’s decision to use Gmail, with its 175m active users, as a launchpad for its latest push into social networking. All users were enrolled as soon as they clicked a link to look at the service, and many found the names of those they corresponded with most frequently by e-mail – usually a private list – became the basis for a public “social network” of contacts on Buzz.

That risked exposing the details of “estranged spouses, current lovers, attorneys and doctors”, according to the complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic), a privacy advocacy group in Washington.

Google executives concede that they did not do enough to warn users that their private contacts would be disclosed publicly. But they put this down to a mistake made in good faith and characterise it as one of the inevitable teething problems of a new online service.

“You can’t incubate these kinds of products in a Petri dish and pull back the covers on a fully baked opus,” says Bradley Horowitz, vice-president of product management for Google’s applications business. “If you look at any company that’s been successful in this space it’s because they have been able to iterate, refine, listen, stumble, dust themselves off, get up.”

However, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of Epic, says that Buzz’s privacy settings were in fact the product of a deep corporate agenda. “The way they could compete was to enlist all their Gmail subscribers. That’s a very clear corporate decision.”

Dr Search will continue my review of Buzz in my next blog posting.

Evil let loose after Google's buzz breaches email privacy

2010-02-23T13:51:00.000Z

Once again Google has breached millions of peoples' personal privacy- this time with the launch of it's new social networking site Buzz.

The launch of the Buzz networking site has backfired badly

On Tuesday Feb 16th Eva Hibnick, a Harvard law student, opened her Gmail account and saw an offer for Buzz, a new service from Gmail’s owner, Google. She wasn’t interested. “I just clicked ‘No, go to my inbox’,” she said. Within hours she and millions of others realised that sometimes no means yes.

Now Hibnick is taking Google to court, and the search giant is left fighting a rearguard action in the latest skirmish over privacy on the internet.

Hibnick, 24, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against Google over the launch of Buzz, a social networking service that lets people bring their online connections together to share status updates, videos and photos.

With 146m users, the sheer size of Gmail instantly catapulted Buzz into the top ranks of social networking sites alongside Facebook and Twitter.

As Gmail users were quick to point out, though, they chose to join those networks, while Buzz’s new army was conscripted. The service raided a Gmail user’s contacts book to set up the social network.

The people we contact most frequently are not necessarily those with whom we have the closest relationship. Within hours of the Buzz launch, angry tales were being told of people’s contact details and other information being passed on to the “psychotic” and “abusive ex-husbands”.

Actress Felicia Day, Vi in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, found herself deluged with messages from strangers after posting one message on Buzz. “Buzz things turn up as a message in your inbox? Disabling now. Heart attack,” she wrote. Before Google changed Buzz, some fans would also have been able to see who Day emailed most frequently.

Hibnick and her lawyer claim that information she had a right to consider private had been shared among her Gmail contacts. “I signed up for a private email account, not for a social networking site. They can’t just opt you in,” she said.

“Basically all my email contacts were accessible. Everyone is so shocked that Google would do this.”

Fellow Harvard law student Benjamin Osborn, who is assisting on the case, said the initial problem was that it was not clear what information was being shared and with whom.

Hibnick’s lawyer said Google could face statutory damages of $1,000 per occurrence — a potentially huge sum given Gmail’s size. But he added that the real aim was to force Google to put better checks and balances in place over privacy.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, the watchdog based in Washington DC, has now asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether consumers were harmed and has asked the commission to demand that Google ask Gmail users to sign up for Buzz instead of enrolling them automatically.

Google moved swiftly to contain the crisis last week, dropping the automatic sign-up and offering clearer instructions on how to opt out of the service and keep messages private.

“We made some mistakes and we accept that,” said Peter Barron, Google’s head of communications. “But if you look at the way we responded, I hope people will see that we reacted quickly to those criticisms and made significant improvements.

“These days everyone leaves a data trail, whether it’s from shopping online, using your mobile phone or doing a search. When you use a credit card you are exposing far more about yourself than in an online search but people generally trust credit-card companies not to misuse their data. At Google, users’ trust is all we have. We take privacy very seriously and build privacy features into all our products based on the principles of transparency, choice and user control.

“Those features were and are present in Buzz, but we accept they could have been clearer. Buzz is not about making private information public unless you choose to.”

Don Cruse, a Houston based lawyer, said that what disturbed him most about Buzz was that it was automatic. In a blog he warned clients, and journalists, that they could end up sharing confidential contacts if they used the service. He said Google was “repurposing old data in a way that flouts our expectations of privacy”.

“People have an expectation of privacy with email. There are lots of famous examples of emails making it to people they shouldn’t have reached. But this was not an accident, it was a deliberate change in structure,” he said.

“The big story is that they wanted to set up a social network, something they have failed to do well in the past. The downside is that they have hurt the Gmail brand.”

The Buzz controversy is unlikely to end in epic fines for Google. Last year Facebook paid $9.5m (£6.2m) to settle a similar class-action lawsuit over Beacon, an advertising system that tracked Facebook users’ online activity outside the site and told other users what they had been up to.

Perhaps more damaging is the damage Buzz has done to Google’s image. John Quelch, a Harvard Business School professor, said it faces two problems in any new venture. “First, Google is a hostage to its publicly stated aim to ‘Do no evil’. That definition of evil is open to considerable interpretation. They have to be very careful that this aim isn’t viewed with cynicism rather than respect.”

Second, Quelch said the execution of Google’s search business is so far ahead of its rivals that people had high expectations of any new service. “They rather missed it on Buzz,” he said.

Dr Search suggests that if the financial penalty is a grand apiece that equates to a worst case scenario of a whopping $146,000,000,000 fine. That's equivalent to roughly it's entire shareholder value.

However even greater reputational damage has been done by reminding everyone that despite it's "does no bad" stance Google has past form on the rough and ready treatment of people's data privacy.

And a wake up call to those of you thinking of joining the GoogleWave- where all of your documents and files sit on their servers. Not just your emails.

Interview with Eva Hibnick on Times Online at:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7034912.ece

Apple removes 5,000 apps from App Store

2010-02-22T19:56:00.000Z

Apple has banned thousands of apps from the App Store, blaming inappropriate content for it's censorship.

Apple has removed around 5,000 apps from its App Store, including some that it claims feature "overtly sexual" content.

Dozens of developers received a message from Apple stating that the company was refining the guidelines under which the App Store operates, and that content that it had "originally believed to be suitable for distribution" were now no longer deemed appropriate, following "numerous complaints from customers about this type of content".

Jon Atherton, the creator of Wobble iBoobs, said he had received a letter saying his app was being removed from the store. The letter, from Apple's iPhone App Review team, said that if Atherton made changes to the app so that it complied with the recent changes to Apple's terms and conditions, he could resubmit iBoobs for review.

However, Apple has not confirmed whether it has made specific changes to its App Store rules. Instead, it said it reviews problems on a case-by-case basis.

"Whenever we receive customer complaints about objectionable content we review them," said Apple in a statement. "If we find these apps contain inappropriate material we remove them and request the developer make any necessary changes in order to be distributed by Apple."

According to AppShopper, which monitors App Store activity, the number of applications being removed each day grew sharply on Feb 17, with a higher-than-average number of removals taking place over the following days.

Industry insiders believe Apple is cleaning up the App Store ahead of the launch of its iPad tablet, which Apple is hoping to promote as a device for families and schools.

But the move has sparked renewed criticism of Apple's already confusing App Store approval process. Last year, the company was criticised for banning the Eucalyptus ebook application, because it allowed users to download the Kama Sutra to read on their iPhone.

However, it allowed Baby Shaker, an app in which players violently shook a virtual baby to stop it crying, to go on sale before hastily withdrawing it.

In the latest round of deletions, Daisy Mae's Alien Buffet, a game for the iPhone and iPod touch, has also been removed from the store, allegedly because the cartoon heroine wears a bikini.

Yet the official Playboy app, featuring pictures of scantily clad "playmates", remains on sale, as do dozens of other applications that could be considered to feature "overtly sexual" content.

HootSuite adds social media CRM functionality

2010-02-19T14:21:00.000Z

Social media dashboard HootSuite has released an upgraded version boasting social CRM tools for marketers and customer support teams.

Already popular for enabling users to distribute messages across multiple social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, the latest iteration features tools to gather intelligence, manage audiences and track campaigns.

Designed to appeal to marketing departments and customer support teams, HootSuite has announced it will enable users to:

* Know your audience by learning who follows you, and who they are via a ‘Friends and Followers’ chart, and by viewing profiles, influence and activity levels.

* Gather intelligence and discover what outreach tactics work best with customer URL parameters which allow deep analysis in Google Analytics and Omniture

* Answer efficiently by building an archive of stock responses to common customer support queries

* Track success by examining click-through rates on messages, examining time and region breakdowns and reporting as CSV for custom reports or PDF for printing

"In the last update, we added Wordpress, URL previews, and trending topic details, but we didn't rest in the nest," said HootSuite President Ryan Holmes. "With the new version, marketers can hone tactics with deep campaign tracking and reporting tools.

Further, the friends and followers charting features will help everyone build the relationships which make social networking tools so useful."

Dr Search handles a growing number of Twitter, Facebook as well as Google accounts. So the growing idea of one contrilling panel appeals to us.

Social web marketing suggestions

2010-02-18T14:05:00.000Z

On Tuesday Dr Search posted- Few online shops have social networks media, but the majority of UK shoppers buy from them.

More than two thirds of all UK online shoppers use social media, with Facebook being by far the most popular but half of top online retailers have a minimal or non existent presence social media presence.

When we reported on the findings of a poll among 10,000 visitors to the UK’s top 40 e-commerce websites undertaken by ForeSee Results, an organisation that measures online customer satisfaction.

The main conclusion was get a Facebook page Now!

With follow up suggestions of:

Make sure you have someone to monitor it and post good, timely information.

Promote it to your most loyal customers through your regular communications venues (emails, ads,

stores, coupons, etc.).

Use your Facebook page to post promotions and product information.

Easier said than done admittedly. There are a lot of ins and outs to social media strategy and the right formula will differ for each company. But for those retailers who have a poor to middling presence on Facebook, it’s a good place to start while you figure out how social media plays into your global brand strategy.

However here’s a truly revolutionary idea: DON'T listen to all of these ideas and opinions about what your customers and prospects want based on over 10,000 online shoppers of 40 of the biggest online retailers in the United Kingdom.

Instead ask your own customers what they want.

Find out what social media sites they frequent.

Find out whether they want sales or coupons or technical support or product information.

Find out how satisfied they are with your current social media efforts and

How likely they are to purchase, return, and recommend your business as a result of your interactions.

There’s a lot about social media and online marketing initiatives that is really hard to work out, but asking customers what they want from you is a truely great marketing initiative.

Few online shops have social networks media, but the majority of UK shoppers buy from them

2010-02-17T09:39:00.000Z

These are the findings of a poll among 10,000 visitors to the UK’s top 40 e-commerce undertaken by ForeSee Results, an organisation that measures online customer satisfaction.

The study indicated that of the 69% of online consumers who use social networking sites, about 37% opted to ‘friend’, ‘follow’ or ‘subscribe’ to retailers, with more than half of such respondents doing so in order to learn about their products.

A further 40% did so to learn about special deals, while only 6% used social media primarily to obtain customer support.

About 56% of all online shoppers used Facebook, however, with the figure jumping to a huge 80% if the focus was narrowed to regular social media users.

This would appear to imply that the site is the best place to reach shoppers in both categories, not only because they are there already, but also because it appears that many are keen to hear from chosen brands.

Despite such findings, an unofficial look at the Facebook pages of the top 100 online retailers indicated that a quarter had no official presence and a further quarter had less than 10,000 followers.

In a further note of caution, nearly three quarters of social media fans chose to ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ less than five organisations, with only 4% interacting with more than 20. This means that the majority of online shoppers give very few retailers any air time.

Kevin Entell, vice president of retail strategy at ForSee, said: "Site visitors who also interact with a company on a social media site are more satisfied, more committed to the brand, and more likely to make future purchases from that company."

But there was a chicken and egg situation taking place, he added. "It is likely that customers who are more satisfied and loyal to begin with are the ones who will friend us on Facebook or subscribe to our YouTube channels," Entell said. "However, research shows that when retailers provide rewarding social media experiences, our customers become even more satisfied and loyal."

The results were backed up by another poll from digital marketing agency dotCommerce among 100 UK retailers. It indicated that a mere 42% of UK retailers had a social media presence, with only 12% using more than one site.

Of the retailers using such sites, only 24% had a Facebook presence, while 26% preferred Twitter. They preferred to employ the latter to keep consumers aware of product updates (73%), push out marketing messages (63%) and company news (58%).

Dr Search asks if you one of the three quarters being left behind by the social web marketing growth? If so and you would like some help- please just ask here now!

Mobile firms unite to offer mobi apps applications

2010-02-16T09:16:00.000Z

Twenty four of the largest phone operators have banded together to challenge Apple's dominance of mobile apps applications.

The Wholesale Applications Community, as it is known, aims to make it easier for developers to build and sell apps "irrespective of device or technology".

The alliance, which includes Vodafone, China Mobile and Sprint, has access to more than three billion customers.

Analysts said it was an attempt by operators to "regain control of apps".

The app market is currently a lucrative business for mobile firms.

Analysts at Gartner have predicted that spending on the specialist pieces of software will hit $6.2bn (£4bn) this year with the number of downloads rising to 4.5 billion from 2.5 billion last year.

It predicts that downloads will top 21 billion by 2013, yielding almost $30bn.

Apple currently dominates the app market, with more than 3 billion downloaded from its app store in 18 months.

Blackberry, Google, Nokia, Symbian and Microsoft all offer their own app stores.

As a result, developers often have to create different versions of apps and go through separate approval processes for each individual store.

The Wholesale Applications Community aims to overcome this fragmentation by offering a single "open platform that delivers applications to all mobile phone users".

It aims to develop a common standard for applications in the next 12 months.

As well as the 24 network operators, the work is also supported by hardware manufacturers such as LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, as well as industry body the GSM association.

The consortium's approach to simplify application development and distribution is echoed by software firm Adobe.

The company has announced that it will begin to offer its AIR platform on mobile devices, starting with phones running Google's Android operating system.

AIR is currently available on desktops and allows developers to build desktop applications for services that are more commonly found in the browser.

For example, there are a number of Twitter applications that use AIR. Until now it has been unavailable on smart phones.

The technology could make it easier for developers to create and publish apps that can run on many different platforms at the same time.

Apple has traditionally spurned some Adobe software - such as Flash - on its iPhone.

However, Adobe has now built a tool that allows developers to build an app for phone running AIR and easily publish a slightly different version which should also run on the iPhone.

Dr Search notes that the implications are clear for online businesses if you don't already have a version of your website that is mobile compatible- do so in the next 12 months as your competitors are already.

Fundamental flaws found in UK's chip and pin security systems

2010-02-15T12:48:00.000Z

Cambridge University scientists have discovered a fundamental design flaw in the UK's chip and pin credit card readers raising worries that the defects could be exploited to perpetrate fraud on a massive scale.

More than 90% of point-of-sale card transactions in the UK are now conducted using chip-and-pin systems, according to the UK Payments Administration, which represents the interests of payment card companies. In 2008, plastic cards were used to make 7.4 billion purchases, worth a total of £380 billion.

But Cambridge academics have now found a way to trick the system into thinking that the correct pin number has been entered by exploiting the way that remote readers communicate with the main shop terminal.

Flaws in the Europay, Mastercard and Visa (EMV) protocol, which enables chip-and-pin transactions to be validated, means that third party devices can be introduced between the readers and terminals to intercept communications.

Such breaches are known as "man-in-the-middle" attacks and would allow fraudsters to use stolen credit or debit cards by simply entering four zeros. The cards tested were issued by Barclaycard, the Co-op Bank, the Halifax, Bank of Scotland, HSBC and John Lewis.

Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University told the BBC’s Newsnight programme last week: "Chip-and-pin is fundamentally broken. We think this is one of the biggest flaws that we’ve uncovered – that has ever been uncovered – against payment systems, and I’ve been in this business for 25 years."

The researchers, who have already contacted the banks about the problem, said that the programming skills required to build a ‘man-in-the-middle’ device were relatively simple.

But the UK Payments Administration rejected the conclusions found in their paper entitled 'Chip and PIN is Broken'. It said that there was no evidence that such attacks were not happening in UK stores today, although the research would help it to evaluate the direction in which criminals may move.

Dr Search has long known of flaws, not only in the chip and pin process, but more fundementally in the UK banking system.

UK banks have repeatedly failed to state in a UK court of law that their offline systems are 100% secure. So how can an online system be 100% secure? Until such time as the UK banks finally make their systems secure or they admit to errors we suggest that you don't trust your bank.

Dr Search lectures at University of Gloucestershire

2010-02-12T19:52:00.000Z

Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic yesterday gave a talk to MBA students at the University of Gloucestershire on the subject of Managing Online Customer Relationships for social media marketing.

Dr Search commented- "It's amazing the lack of online marketing knowledge of really intelligent people."

Over a century ago Lord Leverhulme the founder of Unilever worked out that he wasting half of his marketing budget.

The Search Clinic has saved one of our clients over 93% of his pay per click budet- and still get the smae amount of traffic.

If you would like some help with your online marketing, please just click here now- online marketing.

Facebook is the new threat to Google

2010-02-10T15:50:00.000Z

Facebook is now sending more traffic to US news sites than Google- as the proportion of traffic from Facebook has tripled while that of Google News stayed static.

More people are coming to US news sites via Facebook and other social networking sites such as Twitter – supplanting Google News, which had been one of the primary sources of readers, according to research by the metrics company Hitwise.

During the past year, the proportion of traffic that Facebook sends to US media sites has tripled from around 1.2% to 3.52%, while that sent by Google News has remained roughly static, at around 1.4%, says Heather Hopkins, North America analyst for Hitwise.

The growing power of Facebook also means that publishers which want to demand money from – or alternatively to lock out – Google News because of claims that it "leeches" on their content could do so without fearing a dramatic impact on their reader figures.

With more than 400m users, Facebook forms the newest – and most unexpected – threat to Google, say some analysts.

Last weekend the search engine spent $5m on a TV advert during the Superbowl, puzzling many who do not see a threat from rival search engines such as Microsoft's Bing, which has less than half of its proportion of search queries.

But Hopkins notes in a blogpost for Hitwise that: "Facebook could be a major disruptor to the News and Media category. And with the Wall Street Journal already publishing content to Facebook, perhaps the social network can avoid the run-ins that Google has suffered recently with Rupert Murdoch. We will continue to watch this space."

Murdoch's editors and executives have repeatedly criticised aggregators such Google News, claiming it is leeching off their content by displaying snippets of their work. In the UK, the Murdoch-owned titles have gone as far as blocking access to their sites by Newsnow, a smaller news aggregator.

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has argued that publishers should take advantage of the traffic that it sends them – pointing out that it sends about 4bn such links per year.

But Facebook provides the perfect counterweight, where publishers can choose how much of their content they display and view how well it is followed. Sites such as Facebook and increasingly Twitter contribute hundreds of thousands of visits every month to UK sites, according to analysis by the Guardian.

John Minnihan, the founder of the software code respository Freepository, warns that Facebook poses one of the biggest threats to Google on the web. "With recent data showing a large uptick in 'Facebook as home page', [Google] may well indeed need to remind emerging generation who/what it is."

"In that case, the [Superbowl] ad makes some business sense. Whatever the real reason, it has nothing to do with 'sharing video more widely'. If FB dev'ed an integrated web-wide search engine, think about how much traffic would evaporate [from Google] overnite. That's nightmare stuff."

Tellingly, Minnihan's comments were made on Twitter — which Google is rumoured to be trying to compete with in a "social version" of its Gmail webmail product.

Google has already tried – and failed – to create a world-scale social network with its Orkut product, but been obliged instead to purchase access to Twitter's search results to provide real-time insight into what people are talking about.

Facebook's content however lies beyond its reach – and that could be crucial in the forthcoming months as news publishers in the US and UK consider putting up higher paywalls or demanding money from aggregators.

Dr Search found the social media news story on the Guardian's website at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/09/facebook-google-news-search

Return On Investment (ROI) for social media marketing

2010-02-09T11:51:00.000Z

Only 22% of UK organisations use social media marketing as a core part of their communications strategy because they are unsure how to prove return on investment cases, measure value or even how to use it.

These are the findings of a survey among 80 UK senior marketers undertaken by researchers Opinion Matters on behalf of the Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Social Media Council (SCM).

The study found that social media played a key role in the marketing campaigns of a mere 22% of companies, although a further 20% indicated that it currently played some role in most of their activities. Another 23.5% said that they tended to use such services on an ad hoc basis, while 27% of respondents had undertaken trials.

Although about a third planned to allocate between six and 20% of their digital marketing budgets to social media over the year compared with only 14% last year, 7% said that they had not touched such technology at all.

The main challenge in the social media context, according to almost three quarters of respondents, was in proving that it could generate a ROI. Another 64% said that measuring value was a problem, while 57% felt that they needed more education on how best to use such offerings.

There was also uncertainty as to where social media activity should sit within the business. While three quarters of those questioned felt it should reside within the marketing department, a third felt it fitted best within the PR function. Some 12% felt that researchers should have responsibility for it, 16% customer services and 7%, IT.

It would differ from organisation to organisation as to whether they should set up a new dedicated team or re-skill staff but keep them in individual departments. But it was important to clarify current strengths wherever they were located and map them to requirements, not least in order to establish skills gaps so that expertise could be hired in from outside, he added.

Among those organisations currently using social media, meanwhile, the most popular application was as a tool to help boost brand awareness (77%). Three quarters had used such services to drive engagement or for advocacy purposes, while 60% had employed them to undertake market research. About half had also used the technology to try and increase product sales.

Twitter and social media monitoring tools were the most popular offerings, however, with just over half of brands citing them as very important. Other appealing services included Facebook (47%) and own branded communities (39%), but 27% of respondents were unaware of what such terms as crowd sourcing actually meant.

Google closes Blogger support- to save money

2010-02-08T11:27:00.000Z

So much for Google's vaunted promise to “do good”. Dr Search has recently learnt that in order to cut costs Google will no longer offer support to it's Blogger clients who have the cheek to host their own content on their own servers, like the Search Clinic Blog.

Dr Search wasn't terribly chuffed last year when google's blogger usurped the Search Clinic favicon with their own favicon.

When questioned about this doubtful behaviour by Dr Search google claimed that it was solvable. However blogger's template doesn't actually allow for google's suggested changes.

As a result we started to question google's motives for trying to stealing third party blog content.

This lie has proved the unprofessionalism of google as their latest plans now attest. The balance of the communication with google is reproduced below:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here:

http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows:

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP â€” yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing.

(If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

* We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
* We will be providing a dedicated blog and help documentation
* Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

Regards,

Rick Klau
Blogger Product Manager
Google
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Well Rick Klau in the Search Clinic's all of our clients- including ourselves are on the march- to WordPress.

UK online shoppers spend most in Europe

2010-02-04T01:54:00.000Z

UK shoppers spent more online than anywhere else in Europe last year- totalling almost a third of all European sales.

UK consumers spent £38bn online in 2009, or an average of £1,102 per shopper, according to the Centre for Retail Research (CRR).

Online sales now account for almost 10% of total retail sales in the UK, the centre calculates.

It added that internet shopping would continue to grow sharply this year. The centre foresees total online sales hitting £42.7bn in 2010.

UK online shoppers are growing in confidence, with the proportion of them prepared to spend more than £1,000 or more on a single transaction rising from 12% in 2008 to 25% in 2009.

The recession, from which the UK has only recently emerged, helped to explain the increase in online shopping, he argued.

Germans were the next most prolific spenders online last year with a total spend of £29.7bn, while the French spent £22bn, the research indicates.

Search engines ranking- latest global results 2010

2010-02-03T12:04:00.000Z

comScore has published a report on the global search market which shows more than 131 billion searches were conducted across the web in December 2009.

The top 5 leading countries in the search market are the United States, China, Japan, UK and Germany:

One of the interesting things to note from the report is the relatively slow growth rate of searches from China.

Whilst they are sitting second in terms of overall volume, their growth rate is by far the lowest amongst the top ten countries.

When you compare this to the high volume and growth rate from Japan, it is foreseeable that the Japanese, British and the Germans may claim second spot in the not to distant future.

Google continues to lead the way as the dominant search engine, followed by Yahoo! and Baidu claiming the number three spot.

If Google follows through on their threat to pull out of China, it’s possible that Baidu could pickup their lost market share and claim the number two spot above Yahoo. Which would be an interesting situation if you work at Yahoo.

Another two thoughts are these figues do not include Twitter, nor do they include the searches on google's You Tube.

Google Analytics and the customer experience- do you have thr right tools?

2010-02-02T11:28:00.000Z

Website analysis can generate improved performance, but your focus should be on measuring and analysing perception against expectation in three key linked areas.

The argument as to whether marketing is an art or a science has raged for years. It is interesting that long-term brand appeal is built primarily on emotion not rationality. The great TV ads are primarily emotional in nature; think of Guinness and its sea horses; does it matter how long the wait for the wave actually was, the point is that waiting pays off. Interestingly the same is true of oratory; Winston Churchill did not say how many owed how much to how many less; it was the idea that counted. People buy and recall ideas. Numbers were put to the sword in '1066 and all that'.

It is clear that people make emotional decisions in the main. They may think that they are making rational ones, or even post rationalise them. I would argue that an emotional decision is the sum of a number of rational trade offs. One example is whether we choose the highest interest rate for our savings or the lowest premium for our insurance.

It is clear that the majority do not, but will take name awareness, features, security, recommendation, history and a range of attributes into account.

Customer experience measures

It seems to me that a similar approach is likely to be most helpful in developing analysis of customer experience. Customer experience is also very much about perception. In essence it is a measure of external perceptions against external expectations, not internal measured results against internal standards.

It is not terribly helpful to know that we answered the phone in 8 seconds against a standard of 10. The customer might have expected 10, but perceived to be waiting for 12. Why? Largely because of prior, perhaps negative, experience of the brand, but more likely because the call was unsatisfactory when the connection was made – i.e. the customer did not get what he or she wanted.

The key question then in using analytics to help improve customer experience is to ensure that we analyse the things that matter to customers. Customers will be much influenced by the recency and frequency of their interaction with the brand and these are key members for us. But the focus is on the emotional response to those interactions.

Hence, we argue that the key numbers for analysis are three:
    * How did you feel about your interaction with us today?
    * How do you feel about us as an organisation?
    * Would you recommend us to your family, friends and colleagues?

This is crucial. It is the day to day measurement of perception against expectation, and enables daily tracking of customer experience. Analysis should track both the customer’s previous answers and, in a person to person interaction, the performance of the agent. This data should then be viewed in the context of the operational performance on the day; were systems fully functional, was there a particular call flow issue?

This is a wider concept. How people feel about the organisation as a whole, takes into account not only day to day interactions but the total set of experiences and perceptions of the organisation and its brand. The customer will be influenced not only by his or her experiences but also by the experiences of others. This is because brand associations are a reflection of the individual’s personality. People wish to be seen to have made good choices in the eyes of others.

Whilst customer satisfaction tracking surveys will provide meaningful numbers for analysis, it is likely that qualitative research will be required to better understand customer attitudes and motivations.

We know that customer satisfaction and loyalty are closely linked and that they are correlated through the Net Promoter Score to business performance.

In a separate article we shall analyse in more depth the true relationship between loyalty and business performance across various business and activities. Satisfaction is clearly linked to both longevity and frequency, value, volume of cross sales and repeat purchase. We shall explain the mechanics.

Key to understanding the benefits of customer experience is measuring and analysing recommendation. We know that people only recommend if they are highly satisfied; satisfaction in its own right is not a motivator.

There are two aspects of recommendation which require analysis. Firstly, the characteristics and motivation of the recommendee. In sum, people recommend for altruistic reasons and also to build esteem in their social group. They like to be seen as early adopters. We also want of course to look at the value of our recommendee; there may be a correlation between their value to the organisation and the recommender.

Secondly, we want to understand the value of recommendation to us both in terms to reduce marketing costs and increased customer flows, including the performance of recommended customers compared to those joining by other means.

However, the real value arises from considering the perceptions of customers against their expectations on day to day and long-term horizons, in conjunction with their behaviour vis a vis recommendation.

Basic website filenaming structures

2010-02-01T11:15:00.000Z

Your website's URL structure is an important search engine optimisation factor, so Dr Search thought I’d write a quick post covering some useful guidelines for you to keep in mind when building your website.

Let’s take a look at a typical small business website. While this may not be the case for every business, most sites often have the following pages in common:
    * Homepage
    * Services/Products Page
    * Testimonials Page
    * About Us Page
    * Contact Us Page

Using the pages above, here’s an example of how to maximize the SEO impact of your URLs.

Homepage (www.example.com)
When choosing your domain name, always try and include your primary keyword somewhere in the name. A good strategy for this is creating a keyword + generic domain name. For example, if you’re targeting the keyword "electrican", you might go for gloucestershireelectrcian.com, cheltenhamelectrician.net, or gloucestershirelighting.com etc.

Services/Products Page (www.example.com/[keyword])
On the page which lists your services or products, use another major keyword as the directory for this page. Using the example above, you might want to create the following pages:
    * /electrcian-services
    * /electrican-qualifications

Testimonials Page (www.example.com/[keyword]-testimonials)
The testimonials page is another chance for you to include one of your important keywords. Try using the format /[keyword]-testimonials, where keyword represents your business type or industry. Some examples might be:

    * /electrician-testimonials
    * /gloucestershire-testimonials
    * /lighting-testimonials

About Us Page (www.example.com/about-[business name])
The about us page is a chance to make sure your website ranks strongly when customers search for your business name. Using the directory format /about-[businessname] with the business name in Meta tags and body content a good way to achieve this.

Contact Us Page (www.example.com/contact-us-[business name])
For the contact us page I’d recommend sticking with a simple /contact-us [business name] format which is standard across most sites and is easy for customers to remember. You will also get your name in regularly if you have a contact us link at the bottom of every page- as a call to action.

Whilst URL structuring is no magic bullet for search negine optimisation, following the above guidelines is a good way to build a solid foundation.

If you’ve got any other URL advice, please let the Search Clinic know in the comments box below!