Thursday, February 4, 2010
UK online shoppers spend most in Europe
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.
Labels: online marketing, online marketing uk
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Search engines ranking- latest global results 2010
Labels: bing, Facebook, Google, search engine marketing, search engines, Search Marketing, Twitter, Yahoo
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Google Analytics and the customer experience- do you have thr right tools?
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.
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.
Labels: online marketing, online marketing uk, ROI
Monday, February 1, 2010
Basic website filenaming structures
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.
Labels: Dr Search, online marketing, Search Clinic, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Services
Thursday, January 28, 2010
How to grow a forum online- the right and wrong way to go
Labels: Dr Search, online marketing, online marketing uk, Search Clinic
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Yahoo profits increase but sales fall
The profit figure is an improvemen on the £200m loss in the same period in 2008, but revenue fell 4% to £1 bn.
Yahoo struggled during the global downturn as advertisers trimmed their budgets. The firm cut more than 2,000 jobs to try to reduce costs.
Shares in Yahoo rose 1% in after-hours trading in New York to $16.17.
"The fourth quarter marked a strong finish to 2009, which was a transformative year for Yahoo," said chief executive Carol Bartz.
"Our business has positive momentum and we feel good as we head into 2010."
For the whole of 2009, Yahoo made a £598m profit, up 43% on the previous year.
Labels: online marketing, Yahoo
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Larry Page and Sergey Brin Google's founders to sell shares
According to the filing:
Google has a dual class stock structure, consisting of Class A and Class B stock. Currently Brin and Page control about 59% of the Class B stock, but a minority of all outstanding shares. Class A shares have one vote each and Class B shares each control 10 votes.
At the end of the five year diversification term specified in the SEC filing, the two co-founders would own 47.7% of Class B shares. And together with CEO Eric Schmidt they would still own more than 50% of the Class B shares.
There have been unsuccessful efforts in the past to equalize the voting power of all shareholders.
One could argue that this dual-class stock structure enables Google to do things like stand up to the Chinese government, against the dominant logic of the market and potential objections of Class A shareholders (especially institutional shareholders). Indeed, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has criticized the move as “irrational.”
With the closing price tonight at $542 (£338) if the full 10 million shares were sold today they would generate around £3.40 billion in cash. However they would still have stock holdings worth approximately another £30 billion.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Facebook campaign puts the boot into First Capital Connect
Labels: Facebook, social media websites, social web marketing
Friday, January 22, 2010
The importance of Twitter
Labels: Dr Search, Search Clinic, social media websites, social web marketing, Twitter
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Bad customer service costing billions of Pounds in lost revenue
Its survey suggests that three out of four people have switched at least one product or service in the last two years due to poor service.
More than one in five people blamed poor customer service for switching to other firms in areas including finance, telecoms and utilities.
Lifestyle firm WhiteConcierge, which commissioned the study, said the findings suggested that more than 30 consumers were signing up with different companies every minute of the day.
The report found that the worst affected sectors for losing customers over the past two years were motor insurance, electricity and home insurance.
Organisations have to work harder than ever to keep their best customers. Consumers have become increasingly demanding and discerning, and with the rise of price comparison websites for example, it is now much easier to compare and switch products.
The findings have come as no surprise to the CRM community. In the recent tough economic times, service may have been one of the many cutbacks made across the breadth of the organisation. However, service is precisely what will keep current customers and continue to attract new ones.
Much has been made of the birth of 'Generation Y'-ers – those who multi-task throughout life and communicate with organisations via a multitude of channels. This should strongly underline the need for businesses to reassess their service provision.
Labels: Dr Search, online marketing, Search Marketing, Top Tips
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Website Marketing budget guide- the real costs of online marketing
“It’s like building a shopping mall in the desert. Without the budget to promote it – who’s going to find it?”
- 1. The website: Development/Design & Maintenance
- 2. SEO – Search Engine Optimization
| Service | Low End | Mid Range | High End |
| Site Review + Consulting | $500 | $2,500 | $10,000 |
| Hands-On Editing of Pages/Code | $2,000 | $10,000 | $50,000 |
| Manual Link Building Campaign | $500 | $5,000 | $20,000 |
| Keyword Research Package | $100 | $500 | $2,000 |
| Monthly Retainer for Ongoing SEO | $2,500 | $7,500 | $20,000+ |
Professional SEO is an investment. If you’re in business for the long haul, you’d be crazy not to allocate a decent proportion of your initial online budget on SEO – (or if your budget is tight, then study hard and invest the many hours needed to do it yourself).
- 3. PPC – Google AdWords and Other Search Advertising
- 4. Affiliate Marketing
- 5. Social media, Email marketing & Ad Networks
| Cost Guide | |
| Website Development | £1000+ |
| Hosting & Maintenance | £120+ |
| SEO - 6mth program | £3000 |
| Search Advertising (PPC) - 6mths | £1200 |
| Affiliate Marketing | Depends on Program |
| Others | Depends on Tactics |
| TOTAL | £5000+ |
Labels: Adwords, Dr Search, online marketing, online marketing uk, Search Clinic, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Services, social media websites, social web marketing
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Now it's the Germans turn to attack Google
Labels: Google, Microsoft, online marketing, Pay Per Click Marketing
Monday, January 18, 2010
Top tips to make your social marketing produce profits
1. Plan your social media strategy for 2010.
Set your 2010 social media goals. Then map out the projects that you’ll need to undertake to achieve your goals. Throughout this process, you will need to start listening to determine which online communities are most important to your business. Your observations will help guide your decisions on how to engage each community most effectively.
2. Offer exceptional products and services.
Social media is simply another tool. If your products and services aren’t great, it’ll be an uphill battle to win. You’ll find yourself firefighting against a tide of negative comments. In social media, you can’t buy reach. You can’t buy market share. You can’t buy advocacy and customer evangelists.
If you want to win, create exceptional products and services that add value and delight customers. That is the fastest and most cost-effective way to get people talking positively about your brand!
3. Focus.
Prioritize to focus your time and energy on the social networks that really matter. Don’t try to be everywhere, do everything and respond to every single discussion – instead, focus on the discussions that will influence other conversations for maximum impact.
4. Create synergy to amplify your marketing messages.
Social media participants are getting savvier by the second. Treat consumers with respect and add value to the communities that you play in. When you add value, your messages will be shared. Take stock of how relevant communities are interconnected, and build your strategy to amplify communication and marketing efforts.
As you contribute content and participate in conversations, link all the disparate sites together to optimize your results.
5. Build your brand using location based social networks.
In 2010, expect to see location based social networks take off, as more customers access the mobile web through their smartphones. This will present a major opportunity for retailers to make their mark on the 'local' social web to promote and engage conversations about their brands online.
Smart businesses will get on the bandwagon first with innovative promotions which will not only capture the attention of community members but also the media.
6. Allocate a budget for social media.
Take a step back and rethink how participating in social media will be funded in your organisation. Look at your total mix of marketing spend within traditional activities such as advertising, PR and lead generation. Is social media currently an integrated part of your existing campaigns? Or does it make more sense to bypass the 'traditional' marketing outlets and create a separate social media programme? Will you be creating content internally or using external resources and agencies to produce high-quality, engaging content?
7. Reach within your organisation for social networking talent.
As tempting as it is to hire new social marketing specialists to drive and influence online conversations about your brand, don’t overlook the talent that already exists within your company – people who are already in your organisation who are passionate about your product, services and culture.
Labels: Dr Search, social media websites, social web marketing
Friday, January 15, 2010
Poor customer service- the true cost of lost sales
According to a survey undertaken by Greenfield Online among 514 consumers, 73% had terminated a relationship in the past because of bad experiences, with the average value of lost sales being £248 per year.
But the report entitled ‘The Cost of Poor Customer Service: The Economic Impact of the Customer Experience’ also found that younger customers aged between 27 and 43 were 60% more likely to go elsewhere than older ones if dissatisfied with the level of service they received.
It is becoming increasingly crucial for organisations, particularly in service industries such as finance, to ensure they retained customers by providing "exceptional" customer service.
As to what poor customer service actually meant to respondents, the study found that problems could be broken down into several categories: customers having to repeat information; feeling trapped in automated self service systems and being forced to wait too long to receive a service.
Other bugbears included speaking to company representatives who were unaware of their service history and not being able to switch easily between communications channels. Some 41% of those questioned said they were most unhappy with having to use voice-based self-service systems, while 39% said they felt it critical to integrate such systems more intelligently with human interaction.
A huge 83% also said they would welcome proactive help when they became stuck trying to undertake a web transaction or some other form of self-service activity.
Labels: Dr Search, Facebook, online marketing, online marketing uk, Search Clinic, Twitter
Thursday, January 14, 2010
New data protection fines jump to £500,000
The Information Commissioner's Office is getting tougher over data security with the imposition of fines of up to half a million pounds for serious breaches, something which could prove costly for careless marketeers.
"The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) will be able to order organisations to pay up to £500,000 as a penalty for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act," said an ICO statement. "The ICO has produced statutory guidance about how it proposes to use this new power, which has been approved by the Secretary of State for Justice, and has been laid before Parliament this week."
The size of the fine will be determined after an investigation to assess the gravity of the breach and will also be based on the the size and finances of the organisation at fault, whether the breach was accidental or deliberate, and how much distress the leak of information caused.
"The Information Commissioner will take a pragmatic and proportionate approach to issuing an organisation with a monetary penalty," the ICO statement said. "Factors will be taken into account including an organisation’s financial resources, sector, size and the severity of the data breach, to ensure that undue financial hardship is not imposed on an organisation."
"Getting data protection right has never been more important than it is today. As citizens, we are increasingly asked to complete transactions online, with the state, banks and other organisations using huge databases to store our personal details," said Information Commissioner Christopher Graham. "When things go wrong, a security breach can cause real harm and great distress to thousands of people."
"These penalties are designed to act as a deterrent and to promote compliance with the Data Protection Act. I remain committed to working with voluntary, public and private bodies to help them stick to the rules and comply with the Act. But I will not hesitate to use these tough new sanctions for the most serious cases where organisations disregard the law."
The original Act came into force in 1984. Under the most recent Act of 1998, data can only be used for the purposes for which it is collected and cannot be given to others without the consent of the individual. Everybody has the right to see information that is held about them, with the exception of crime-related data.
The cost of data breaches is already staggeringly high for UK businesses; last year the average breach cost £1.7 million, or £60 for each identity lost. If the ICO's bite turns out to be as big as its bark, this cost could exceed £2 million; a huge expense at a time when businesses and public sector bodies can ill afford to waste money.
Labels: online marketing, online marketing uk, Search Clinic
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Social media marketing spreading across the whole business function
As a result, such tools will start to be adopted beyond simply marketing departments and some organisations will start providing budgets to enable the implementation of actionable strategies. Others will even set up separate units in order to exploit them to the full.
According to a report entitled ‘Top Social Computing Predictions for 2010’ recently published by the research firm, the forthcoming year will see enterprises view such tools less as an end in themselves and more as a means to an end.
This means that they will realise that the value of social media tools lies less as simply a means of acquiring lots of followers and more in turning such followers into business assets. Therefore, there will be an increased focus on measuring the performance of such offerings and in understanding their impact.
A growing appreciation that what is said on one platform such as Twitter will be picked up on another, thereby informing consumers’ overall view of the brand, will likewise mean that interest in such tools is no longer confined to just the social or interactive arm of the marketing department.
Firms will also start work on improving mobile device support and cross-channel integration to ensure that mobile technology can be used to share information and learn about brands as easily as other modes of access.
But as the adoption of social computing activities moves more into the mainstream so will advocates come under increasing pressure to both use them to turn a profit and ensure that the privacy of customer data is safeguarded.
Labels: mobile marketing, Search Clinic, social media websites, social web marketing, Twitter
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Bad customer support leaves Google's Nexus One users fuming
Inadequate customer support facilities for Google's much-hyped Nexus One smartphone have resulted in the vendor's online forums being inundated with complaints from customers.
Google is selling its device, which was launched on Tuesday 5 January in the US, directly to end-users, which means that they are turning to the supplier as the first port of call to fix any problems.
But the company is currently only accepting email based customer queries, which it promises to reply to within one or two days. Many clients are saying that such a timeframe is too long, however, particularly if they are facing technical difficulties that require telephone support.
They are also unhappy at being passed from pillar to post if they approach partners Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC, or mobile carrier T-Mobile, for help. Various complaints indicated that T-Mobile often refers users back to either Google or HTC, while HTC transfers people on to T-Mobile.
Other people have complained about poor 3G performance, but said they were told by HTC customer service staff that NexusOne does not support the technology, although the device itself does.
Some long-term T-Mobile customers were likewise disgruntled that they had to pay more for the phone than new customers, while others were told that they were eligible for subsidies when Google's sales site indicated they were not. Yet more consumers were peeved about the fact that they placed an order but failed to receive confirmation as much as three days later.
Andy Rubin, Google's vice president of engineering, admitted to Digital Daily's John Paczkowski in an interview that: "We have to get better at customer service."
The European version of Nexus One, which is based on the Android open source operating system and will run on Vodafone's mobile network, is due to follow in the second quarter of this year. An enterprise version is also expected to appear at some unspecified time in the future.
Labels: Google, mobile marketing, Search Clinic
Monday, January 11, 2010
France considers extra tax on Google, Yahoo and Facebook
A report, commissioned by the government, suggests firms such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook should pay a new tax on their online ad revenues.
The money could be used to fund legal alternatives for buying books, films and music on the internet.
But critics say the tax would be difficult to implement and Google says it could slow down innovation.
President Nicolas Sarkozy has taken a tough line on the increasing dominance of digital content.
France has just introduced tough new legislation aimed at removing those who persistently download illegal content from the net.
It has also gone head to head with Google over its plans to digitise the world's books, with a project to set up its own digital library financed by the government to the tune of £700m.
Additionally it is considering a law which would give net users the option to have old data about themselves deleted.
The proposals for a tax on content is still very much in the early stages and there are few details of how it would exactly work.
Patrick Zelnik, who contributed to the report and is also the founder of the French president's wife's record label, hopes the idea will be taken on board across the EU.
But Google is among those to have voiced opposition to the plan.
"We don't think introducing an additional tax on internet advertising is the right way forward as it could slow down innovation," said Olivier Esper, senior policy manager for Google France.
The better way to support content creation is to find new business models that help consumers find great content and rewards artists and publishers for their work."
Labels: Facebook, Google, online marketing, Twitter, Yahoo
Friday, January 8, 2010
More small businesses move online to reduce costs
Labels: Dr Search, Facebook, online marketing, online marketing uk, Search Clinic, social media websites, social web marketing, Twitter
Thursday, January 7, 2010
ENom sucks your money
Labels: online marketing, online marketing uk, Search Clinic
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Google's philosophy continues
Once Google had indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
Although Google’s headquarters is in California, our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, so we have offices around the globe. To achieve this, we maintain dozens of Internet domains and serve more than half of our results to users living outside the United States. Google search results can be restricted to pages written in more than 35 languages according to a user's preference.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
Google's founders have often stated that the company is not serious about anything but search. They built a company around the idea that work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. To achieve this, Google's culture is unlike any in corporate America, and it's not because of the lava lamps and large rubber balls everywhere, or the fact that the company's chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead. In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to our online service, Google Inc. puts employees first when it comes to daily life in our Googleplex headquarters.
10. Great just isn't good enough.
Always deliver more than expected. Google does not accept being the best as an endpoint, but a starting point. Through innovation and iteration, Google takes something that works well and improves upon it in unexpected ways. Search works well for correctly spelt words, but what about typos? One engineer saw a need and created a spell checker that seems to read a user's mind. It takes too long to search from a WAP phone? Our wireless group developed Google Number Search to reduce entries from three keystrokes per letter to one.
* Full-disclosure update: When Google first wrote these "10 things" four years ago, they included the phrase "Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat." Over time they've expanded the view of the range of services they can offer –- web search, for instance, isn't the only way for people to access or use information -– and products that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our portfolio.
The full review can be viewed at:
Labels: Google, Search Clinic, search engine marketing, search engines
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Google's top 10 philosophy part 2
5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly mobile and unwilling to be constrained to a fixed location. Whether it's through their PDAs, their wireless phones or even their cars, people want information to come to them. Google's innovations in this area include Google Number Search, which reduces the number of keypad strokes required to find data from a web-enabled mobile phone and an on-the-fly translation system that converts pages written in HTML to a format that can be read by phone browsers.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business. The revenue the company generates is derived from offering its search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on Google and on other sites across the web. However, you may have never seen an ad on Google. That's because Google does not allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they're relevant to the results page on which they're shown. So, only certain searches produce sponsored links above or to the right of the results. Google firmly believes that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find.
Google has also proven that advertising can be effective without being flashy. Google does not accept pop-up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you've requested. We've found that text ads (AdWords) that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher click-through rates than ads appearing randomly.
Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a "Sponsored Link." It is a core value for Google that there is no compromise on the integrity of our results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results. No one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust Google's objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.
Thousands of advertisers use our Google AdWords program to promote their products; we believe AdWords is the largest program of its kind. In addition, thousands of web site managers take advantage of our Google AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to the content on their sites, improving their ability to generate revenue and enhancing the experience for their users.
Labels: Adwords, Google, Pay Per Click Marketing, Search Clinic, search engine marketing, search engines
Monday, January 4, 2010
Search Clinic wishes you a Happy, Healthy and Wealthy New Year
Labels: Google, Pay Per Click Marketing, Search Clinic, search engines, Search Marketing
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Economist fans social network boost
Readers of The Economist’s website will soon be able to log in and make comments using their Facebook identity, through Facebook Connect. The Economist.com will also take on features similar to social networks itself, allowing readers to create profile pages and earn a reputation through other users’ recommendations of their comments on the site.
Ben Edwards, publisher of Economist.com, hopes that Facebook will help his site acquire new readers and develop a “deeper level of engagement” with existing ones.
“We have a mission online of being the foremost destination for global discussion and debate, which is a social proposition,” Mr Edwards told the Financial Times. Making Economist.com more social is “the core of our strategy”, he said.
Broadcasters such as Sky and ITV, as well as publishers such as Guardian and the New York Times, are finding that mingling with the huge audiences gathering on Twitter and Facebook can be a source of traffic to rival that of search engines. The Economist, in which the Financial Times owns a 50 per cent stake, currently has more than 90,000 Twitter followers.
About 180,000 people have joined its official “fan page” on Facebook. A marketing budget of “tens of thousands of pounds” will be allocated to help boost those figures to meet its targets.
Both sites publish links to Economist.com, which has 4m monthly unique visitors, 3m of whom have registered their details with the site. Mr Edwards said the number of paying subscribers was “fairly small, but growing healthily”.
Profile pages for registered users will be expanded to include additional details such as where they have studied and worked.
But more people are expected to use their Facebook profile details than registering with Economist.com directly. Although advertisers might find that data valuable if shared with The Economist rather than Facebook, Mr Edwards is betting that using Facebook Connect will ultimately bring more comment makers to Economist.com.
Reader comments on The Economist’s Facebook page are shorter than the lengthy notes on its own site. So a new Economist.com reputation system will make sure the most popular comments more prominent, whether from Facebookers or long-time readers.
The Economist will also be “a lot more active” on Twitter, which will be a “full-time job”, Mr Edwards said. “That shows the importance we place on it as a source of traffic,” he said.
The changes are expected to be introduced within three to four months, alongside improvements to its subscriber-only features.
But The Economist’s discussion forums will remain free.
“People aren’t accustomed to being charged for conversation,” Mr Edwards said.
Labels: Facebook, social media websites, social web marketing, Twitter
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Google’s tips to avoid duplicate content issues
Labels: Dr Search, Google, online marketing, Search Clinic, search engine marketing
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Nielson's top five advertising trends for 2010
Top Advertising Trends for 2010
1. Optimizing media convergence is a top priority. A better understanding of media convergence will manifest in order to deliver a better return on investment. The ability to accurately measure activity and link online ads to offline purchasing behavior will be critical.
2. New models emerge to take advantage of smartphones. Accurate mobile measurement will be required to stay head of the snowballing growth of that media platform.
3. More cross media ad campaigns surface. The massive growth of online video games played and shared online leads the way for more successful interactive and cross-media advertising campaigns to appear. Growth in the adoption of this innovative advertising across screens and activities will increase.
4. Commercialization of social networking hubs increase. Social media will provide a new sales channel for establishing product awareness and commercializing brands to better support traditional advertising or text-based ads.
5. More interesting and interactive online ads appear. Increased use of more creative advertising and content models online such as video, attention-seeking page takeover ads and mechanisms for greater interactivity will drive the next era of Web development.
From:
Labels: mobile marketing, online marketing, online marketing uk, Search Engine Optimisation, social web marketing
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Google pays no tax on £1.6bn sales in Britain
The firm, which has a substantial presence in London, diverted all its advertising earnings from customers in Britain to its Irish subsidiary.
The arrangement allowed Google legally to avoid paying more than £450m in corporation tax to HM Revenue & Customs in 2008.
The disclosure prompted politicians to criticise Google, widely lauded as a pioneer of the internet age, for “ducking its social responsibility” and for “tax avoiding”.
Accounts filed with Companies House in the past week show Google’s 2008 UK corporation tax bill amounted to just £141,519 — and that was tax on the interest generated by its cash pile in UK bank deposits.
Vince Cable, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, urged the search firm to “pay its fair share” of tax.
“Avoidance like this is hard to stomach at the best of times,” said Cable. “But when the country is in recession and everyone is feeling the pain, it really sticks in the throat — it means higher taxes for the rest of us.
“Google’s reputation will be severely damaged if it continues to behave in this way. It is ducking its social responsibility.”
Google says its structure complies fully with UK tax rules and that the company makes a “substantial” contribution to tax receipts wherever it operates.
About 13% of Google’s global revenues now come from the UK, and 770 staff are based at its London offices.
Accountants said that if the firm’s £1.6 billion UK earnings were paid directly into Google UK Limited, the London operation, it would have been liable for UK corporation tax of between 28% and 30%.
This could have raised about £450m for the public finances— enough tax to fund three NHS hospitals, buy at least eight Chinook helicopters or pay the annual salaries of about 15,000 policemen.
Any British individual or company who places an advertisement with the search engine pays a fee to Google’s European headquarters in Ireland, where corporation tax is levied at between 10% and 25%.
The Dublin operation’s latest accounts show that only €7.5m (£6.7m) of Irish tax was paid in 2008, even though the bulk of Google’s €6.7 billion (£5.9 billion) European earnings flowed into Ireland.
Austin Mitchell, the Labour MP for Great Grimsby, who campaigns against tax avoidance, said: “Google isn’t just sucking money out of local newspapers and other people who rely on advertising for a living — it’s also draining money out of the public finances.
“The search engine is a marvellous service, but the company is run by tax avoiders. If they are going to make so much money here they need to give more back to society.”
As well as paying little tax, Google UK Limited’s latest accounts disclose that it made modest charitable donations of just £5,662 during the year.
The document also reveals that Google’s highest-paid UK director earned nearly £1.1m — an 80% rise on the previous year.
The average British based Google worker earned more than £90,000 last year, with the company paying National Insurance and other social security contributions of £10m.
From the Sunday Times article at
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6962880.ece
Labels: Adwords, Google, Pay Per Click Marketing, Search Clinic, search engine marketing
Monday, December 21, 2009
Google fined over French copyright infringements
The search giant must pay £266,000 in damages and interest to French publisher La Martiniere. Google was also ordered to pay £9,000 a day until it removes extracts of the books from its database.
It was one of many to take Google to court for digitising its books without explicit permission.
Google expressed disappointment at the ruling.
"French readers now face the threat of losing access to a significant body of knowledge and falling behind the rest of internet users," said a spokesman for the firm.
Google wants to scan millions of books to make them available online.
This court case will be seen as a victory for critics of the plan who fear Google is creating a monopoly over information.
Publisher Herve de La Martiniere launched his court case three years ago but Google continued to scan books during this period.
La Martiniere, the French Publishers' Association and authors' group SGDL who started the court battle initially demanded that Google be fined £13.2m.
The book publishers claimed that scanning books was an act of reproduction and, as such, was something that should be paid for.
Google's plans to establish a digital library have hit several road blocks. It agreed to a settlement with US authors and publishers but is renegotiating after the US Justice Department concluded that the deal violates anti trust law.
Labels: Google, online marketing, search engines, Search Marketing
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Quick tips to boost your holiday sales
1. Increase Your Campaign Budgets
Throughout December there will be a big spike in the number of people looking for gifts online. If you are promoting your business through a pay per click program like Google AdWords, make sure to increase your campaign budgets to take advantage of the extra search activity.
2. Don’t Stop on December 25th
Even though the big day has come and gone, keep your holiday campaigns running into the New Year. Boxing day can be the busiest day of the year for online retailers, with many people looking for retailers trying to clear excess stock.
3. Clarify Your Shipping Dates
A large majority of your customers will want to receive their goods on or before the 24th December, so make your shipping policy clear. On your home and product pages, list the final order dates for guaranteed delivery before xmas.
4. Consider a Holiday ‘Sale’
Give yourself an edge over competitors by running a special offer or discount during the holiday period. Some examples may include:
* Free Shipping
* Shop wide discounts- like a £10 off your next sale voucher code
* Buy One Get One Free Offers
* Free Order Bonuses- like a T shirt
5. Prompt Customer Service
Frantic, last minute shoppers will be looking for quick answers to their questions. By speeding your response times you’re more likely to keep their business away from competitors.
Good Luck- Dr Search hopes that you’ve found these tips a useful addition to your holiday marketing!
Labels: Dr Search, online marketing, online marketing uk, Search Clinic
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Google and Facebook launch URL link shorteners
URL shorteners have grown in popularity over the last 18 months, with an increasing number of web users using services such as TinyURL and bit.ly to condense links so that they can be shared more easily on social networking sites such as Twitter, which imposes a limit on the number of characters that can be contained within a single message.
Google and Facebook's foray in to link shortening could be a disaster for rival service bit.ly, which has rapidly become the de facto URL-condensing tool. It is the URL shortener of choice for many third party Twitter clients, and bit.ly short links currently account for around 75 per cent of all shortened URLs circulated on the microblogging platform. Last month, bit.ly shortened more than two billion links, up from just 11.8 million the previous year.
Much of bit.ly's popularity stems from the metrics that can be gathered from every clicked link, enabling website owners to see where their traffic comes from. At present, neither Google nor Facebook has announced any plans to add analytics to their URL shortening services, but some industry experts believe Google could leverage its existing web trends and analytics tools and apply them to its goo.gl service if the tool is made generally available to businesses and consumers.
Within hours of Google's and Facebook's announcements, Betaworks Studios, which helped to develop
bit.ly, said that the company was launching a new service that would allow websites to create their own custom URLs built on the bit.ly platform.
Some industry experts have warned that the sheer volume of short links that could be generated by Facebook's and Google's URL shorteners could "overwhelm" the number of bit.ly links circulating on the internet.
Labels: Facebook, Google, online marketing, online marketing uk, social media websites, social web marketing, Twitter
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
4 predictions for online marketing in 2010
Prediction 1: Mobile will drive local search growth
BIA/Kelsey predicts that mobile local search ad revenues will grow to $130 million by 2013, and that mobile local searches will increase to 35 percent of all searches by 2013. Amid this growth, we’re seeing significant innovation on the mobile front, from new Yellow Pages iPhone apps to mapping technologies that deliver relevant local information to users on the go.
In 2010, advertisers will be faced with a growing set of options, and many will have limited knowledge of how to break through. The providers that will do well will be the ones who can make sense of this quickly changing platform and deliver programs that offer quality sales leads to advertisers.
Prediction 2: Local search providers will vie for social media
The truth is that no one owns social local search yet, but all the major players have an eye on getting there. Here’s why: Neilsen reported that ad spending at top social media sites increased 119 percent over the last year, and the share of social media ad spending to total online spending doubled to 15 percent in 2009.
Advertisers know that significant trust exists within online social communities and that social networks have become a crucial way in which we relate with others. The question in 2010 will center on how we can authentically tap into those networks to serve local business information to consumers looking for it.
AT&T has said it will launch its answer to this question in 2010, and SuperPages has a Twitter search tool available right now. Praized Media launched Calgary.com this fall as a beta program and is hoping to expand it additional regions. I can only imagine where we’ll be a year from now.
Prediction 3: Local print advertising will continue to decline but won’t disappear
Dr Search has been predicting the death of print media for quite some time. I don’t believe that print media will disappear anytime soon, but certainly usage is changing. Media fragmentation is causing a gradual decline in the quantity of print Yellow Pages references, for example, although the quality of those references is still very high. Quite frankly, the perception of the usage decline in the printed Yellow Pages far exceeds the reality of what is actually happening.
For advertisers, this means taking a close look at advertising spend and evaluating their print investment. Those who are too quick to abandon it may see a reduction in qualified sales leads, while those who aren’t open to some of the newer platforms available might be missing a big opportunity.
Prediction 4: A hybrid marketing approach will win
My colleagues spent a good part of this year talking about the hybrid model that they’ve deployed in their sales teams. Yellow Pages sales representatives, for example, are now armed with portfolios of options ranging from owned products to partner products. And in this way, have essentially become advertising consultants to small businesses.
Advertisers should think about taking advantage of these kinds of information resources by devoting an hour or two to thinking through the options out there and devising a strategy that spans the appropriate media for the business.
Labels: Dr Search, mobile marketing, Search Marketing, social media websites, social web marketing
Monday, December 14, 2009
Now it's Google's turn to blow your personal data
In addition, Yahoo got called out for trying to suppress its surveillance menu for law enforcement. And Asa Dotzler of Firefox railed against Google and urged users to switch to Bing in response to comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt that made the latter seem indifferent to consumer privacy.
So what exactly did Schmidt say about privacy?
He told CNBC Anchor Maria Bartiromo, on the cable network’s recent special “Inside the Mind of Google,” that people who have something to hide shouldn’t be doing things online that might potentially expose them if law enforcement seeks access to their search histories.
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” said Schmidt.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have decried that position, especially as others within Google, such as Google VP Marissa Mayer, seek to assure consumers that their privacy is “protected” at Google.
In fairness to Schmidt he was saying that Google (and others) are subject to US law (the “patriot act”) and that law enforcement and government authorities can, as a practical matter, get access to search records because they’re retained “for some time.”
That then — the period of data retention — becomes the practical privacy battleground.
In Signed-Out Web History, Google knows that it has seen someone using a particular browser before. Behind the scenes, it has tracked all the searches that have been done by that browser. It also logs all the things people have clicked on from Google’s search results, when using that browser.
In Signed-In Web History, Google knows that a particular Google user is using Google. Behind the scenes, it has kept a record of all the things that person has done when signed-in, regardless of what computer or browser they’ve used. If they’re using the Google Toolbar with the page tracking feature enabled, then it has also kept a record of all the pages they’ve viewed over time. This information can be viewed by the user at any time, and the user can selectively delete info. They can also delete everything, if they want. If they don’t, then Google forgets nothing.
For those not signed in data is retained for 180 days and is associated with a particular browser. For those with a Google account who are signed in, data and web search history are, as mentioned, retained indefinitely until actively deleted.
The Google Chrome browser has a private “incognito” mode where no web history is captured. (Microsoft’s IE8 offers comparable functionality, called inPrivate browsing.) However if you’re signed in to a Google account while in incognito mode Google will still capture your search history:
if you sign into your Google Account while in incognito mode, your subsequent web searches are recorded in your Google Web History. In this case, to prevent your searches from being stored in your Google Account, you’ll need to pause your Google Web History tracking.
All this is not unlike the Facebook default “everyone” settings. Google will capture your search history and behavior unless you take affirmative action to prevent or block it.
Labels: bing, Facebook, Google, Yahoo
Friday, December 11, 2009
Facebook destroys you personal privacy
The changes allow users to apply more specific privacy settings to the content they post on the site. But many of the default settings mean that, unless users follow a prompt to go in and change their settings, they end up sharing most of their information with everyone on the internet.
“Under the banner of simplification, Facebook has pushed users to downgrade their privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a US advocacy group.
Facebook first announced the changes in July. Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive, reiterated them in an open letter to users last week when he also announced the site had 350m users.
As Facebook has grown, privacy advocates have grown increasingly concerned that users are ceding control of their most intimate – and valuable – information.
“These new ‘privacy’ changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information,” said Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US digital rights group. “Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data.”
Facebook maintains that it is not trying to trick users into sharing more data. The latest settings offer more control of what information users share and with whom, it has said.
However, the company acknowledged that the introduction of the settings could lead users to make more of their information publicly available.
“As a result of providing more control, there will be more sharing,” said Elliot Schrage, vice-president of public policy for Facebook, on a conference call on Wednesday.
Along with other internet companies, Facebook has been working on the delicate balance between storing personal data and using that information to enhance services and gain a business edge. The issue of privacy has dogged Facebook since its inception in 2005.
Because of Facebook’s sizeable social footprint, Mr Rotenberg said it was unlikely users would abandon it for a newer social network. But he expects a push for better regulation.
“I think you’re going to see a political maturing of the Facebook community,” he said. “These are issues that require legislation and some regulation.”
Labels: Dr Search, Facebook, Search Clinic, social media websites, social web marketing
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Tiger Woods sex scandal better for websites 'than Michael Jackson dying', says Yahoo CEO
Carol Bartz told an investor conference in New York that major Internet businesses and niche publications alike are benefiting from stories about the world No 1.
The scandal is "better than Michael Jackson dying" for helping Yahoo make money, because it is easier to sell adverts against racy stories than tragic events, she said.
"It's kind of hard to put an ad up next to a funeral," she added.
In response to a question, Miss Bartz even said Tiger Woods will "absolutely" help Yahoo hit its targets for this quarter, a comment the a spokesman later claimed was meant as a joke.
Google and Yahoo, which account for more than 80 percent of all Internet searches in the US and an even higher number in Britain, said they've seen a significant spike in traffic from people looking up Woods and his alleged extramarital affairs.
Yahoo says searches for the golfer's name are up more than 3,900 percent over the last 30 days.
However traffic levels have not matched the peaks seen in June following Jackson's unexpected death or Barack Obama's inauguration in January, both companies said.
Revelations about Woods' private life began emerging last month after he crashed his car outside his home in a gated community in Florida.
Yahoo has been more successful in capitalising on the Woods story than Google, according to Hitwise.
Hitwise says Yahoo and Yahoo News captured more than 17 per cent of all the traffic to major sites that came from searches of Woods' name. That's ahead of Tigerwoods.com, CNN.com and Google news.
Labels: Dr Search, Google, online marketing, Search Clinic, search engine marketing, search engines, Yahoo
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Speed matters- Britons lose temper after three minutes 38 seconds
It found that the Internet has increased people's service demands and is eroding the classic British trait of patience as more than half admitted they lose their temper quicker than ever before.
People have become so used to the speed and convenience of the internet that more than seven in 10 get angry if forced to wait longer than one minute for a web page to download.
"And with 37 per cent of people saying they have cancelled a service after being forced to wait it poses some real problems for companies.
Being kept on hold made Brits see red more than anything else, with the average person reaching their impatience threshold after five minutes and four seconds.
In today's fast food culture, restaurant rage kicks in after only eight minutes, 38 seconds, when the average diner will start to wonder whether the meal they have ordered will ever arrive.
People running late to meet a friend should not leave it any longer than 10 minutes, one second if they do not want to face their wrath.
And tradesmen arriving to a job more than 10 minutes, 43 seconds late should not expect a cup of tea from their impatient householder.
Finally, when receiving a text or voicemail, be warned that the clock is ticking as the average Briton expects a response within 13 minutes and 16 seconds.
The research found that younger people were much more impatient than their older counterparts. A third of 18 to 24-year-olds expect to wait up to 10 seconds for an internet page to load compared to only one in 10 of over 65s, most of whom were happy to wait up to a minute for a page to load.
Younger people are more impatient in the offline world too. Twice as many 55-64 year olds than 18-24 year olds were prepared to wait more than 30 minutes for a friend to show up for a meeting.
Frustrated youngsters are also more likely to get physical, with 19 per cent of 18-44 year olds having thrown something in anger after reaching the point of impatience, compared to just four in 10 of over 45s.
Top points of impatience:
- Waiting for an Internet page to load 3 mins 38 secs
- Waiting on hold on telephone 5 mins 4 secs
- Waiting for the kettle to boil 5 mins 6 secs
- Waiting for food in a restaurant 8 mins 38 secs
- Waiting for friends to show up 10 mins 1 secs
- Waiting for a tradesman to show 10 mins 43 secs
- Waiting for someone to reply to a vm/text 13 mins 16 secs
- Average 8 mins 22 seconds
Labels: Google, online marketing uk, search engine marketing, search engines
Monday, December 7, 2009
Cyber Monday shoppers to spend £350m online today
The first Monday in December – so called Cyber Monday, is the cue for a stampede as shoppers who see goods on the high street over the weekend use their office high speed broadband connections to place orders once they return to work.
This year’s forecasts from the IMRG, the trade body for online retailers, are exceeded by those of Kelkoo, the shopping comparison service, which predicts sales of £417m.
Total sales are expected to be £5bn for December, a 14 per cent increase on last year, according to IMRG.
“To reach that amount during a recession shows the huge resilience of the online sector,” said David Smith, IMRG director of operations. “People are turning to the internet to look for value.”
On the equivalent Monday last year, Amazon said it saw 1.4m items ordered in 24 hours. The website expects this to rise about 10 per cent this year.
Kelkoo found that about 70 per cent of people plan to shop online, while the IMRG’s research suggests that nearly three in four people who shop online will buy most of their gifts over the internet.
Christmas will be less frugal than in 2008, according to indications from Google. Searches for “Christmas gifts” have risen 22 per cent in the past year, while searches for “gold jewellery” are up 39 per cent and “diamond rings” 76 per cent. In contrast, searches for “coupons” were a theme last year.
According to Kelkoo, about 40 per cent of British shoppers plan to spend more on gifts than last year. The average household spends £665.
Labels: Dr Search, Google, online marketing uk, Search Clinic, search engine marketing, Search Marketing
Friday, December 4, 2009
3 tips to ensure B2B content is SEO friendly
Standout B2B websites are usually brimming with great content, including lead generating materials such as whitepapers, articles, and case studies.
But despite the valuable time and resources spent on developing great content, it often doesn’t get the chance to fully live up to its potential to create external linking opportunities. Why?
For example, let’s say that a consumer research firm publishes a whitepaper about shopping trends by the day of the week. The document is emailed to existing clients, who then copy and paste key callouts in emails to their colleagues, quote the whitepaper in their blogs, comment on other blogs with snippets, and mention it at a meeting, prompting others to search for it.
Obviously, the content succeeded in engaging the target, and it was shared amongst many potential customers.
To effectively leverage your content for external links, you need to ensure that your shared content is accompanied by a link – even when it’s just snippets. But keep in mind that generating external links through online citation is not the responsibility of your visitors.
1. Social Bookmarking – An old favorite, social bookmarking widgets have evolved to encompass nearly every social media platform and network available – from Facebook and Twitter to more niche sites such as Slashdot and Sphinn. These widgets are commonly customizable to match the aesthetic of your website and the platforms you prefer, and are easily implemented with the code generated by the provider.
2. Site-Hosted jQuery Script – Search and Share, a jQuery script for your website, takes automated citation to the next level. Recognizing that when visitors highlight your content they’re most likely interested in sharing it with others, Search and Share automatically provides sharing options when text on your site is highlighted. In addition, the script embeds the source page’s title and URL when the content is shared — even when a mere snippet is copied and pasted.
3. Providing Optimized HTML – For online marketers, it’s sometimes hard to remember that not everyone on the Web is an HTML whiz. Considering that, one of the simplest ways to make sure people are linking to you in the way that fits your optimization strategy is to actually provide them with the code.
If you are going to invest in developing interesting and engaging content for your website, be sure to leverage it as a means to generate external links via proper online citation. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that your visitors are citing your content. With several tools that eliminate the hassle and increase the likelihood of linking back to a site, there’s no reason to miss this opportunity.
With thanks to Search Engine Land at:
http://searchengineland.com/3-tips-to-ensure-b2b-content-gets-seo-friendly-citations-30456
Labels: online marketing, online marketing uk, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Services
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Top Yahoo! searches in 2009
Don’t have the time to scan them all? Here are the highlights of the most popular searches on Yahoo! in 2009:
Top 10 Overall Searches
1. Michael Jackson
2. Twilight
3. WWE
4. Megan Fox
5. Britney Spears
6. Naruto
7. American Idol
8. Kim Kardashian
9. NASCAR
10. Runescape
Top 10 Celebrity Farewell Searches
1. Michael Jackson
2. Farrah Fawcett
3. Patrick Swayze
4. Natasha Richardson
5. Jett Travolta
6. Billy Mays
7. David Caradine
8. Steve McNair
9. Jade Goody
10. Ted Kennedy
Top 10 Sudden Fame Searches
1. Jon & Kate Gosselin
2. Erin Andrews
3. Susan Boyle
4. Kris Allen & Adam Lambert
5. Nadya Suleman (aka Octomom)
6. Carrie Prejean
7. Mark Sanford
8. Portuguese Water Dog
9. Falcon Heene (aka “Balloon Boy”)
10. Sonia Sotomayor
Top Finance Searches
1. Coupons
2. Unemployment
3. Stimulus Plan
4. Cash For Clunkers
5. Student Loans
6. IRS Refund
7. Foreclosures
8. Government Jobs
9. Bernard Madoff
10. Health Care Bill
“Market Darlings” Related Searches
1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Hulu
4. Bing
5. iPhone
6. LinkedIn
7. Dollar Stores
8. Palm Pre
9. Rosetta Stone
10. Kindle
Top Yahoo! Mobile Searches
1. Megan Fox
2. Mobile Games
3. Michael Jackson
4. Movies
5. Rihanna
6. Mail
7. Lady Gaga
8. NFL
9. Ringtones
10. iPhone
Top Obama Searches
1. Obama Inauguration
2. Obama Biography
3. Obama Speech
4. Obama Stimulus Plan
5. Obama Family
6. Obama Health Care Reform
7. Obama Approval Ratings
8. Obama Facebook
9. Obama Overseas
10. Obama Dramas
Among the other must read lists ae the Top Travel Destination Searches 2009 and the Top Viral Videos of 2009 which has a number of funny vids.
Labels: Dr Search, search engines, Search Marketing, Yahoo
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Bing's top 2009 searches
In fairness, Bing did officially release their Most Popular Searches for all of 2009, including data from the first half of the year as Live Search. Decidedly, Michael Jackson would have made it to the top of the list, whether it was Bing or Live Search.
Twitter seems to have infiltrated Bing in the same way, clearly users needed help trying to decide, “To Tweet or Not to Tweet?” Or could it be that the Bing-Twitter integration was that big of a deal?
1. Michael Jackson
2. Twitter
3. Swine Flu
4. Stock Market
5. Farrah Fawcett
6. Patrick Swayze
7. Cash for Clunkers
8. Jon and Kate Gosselin
9. Billy Mays
10. Jaycee Dugard
Top 3 Celebrity Searches:
1. Perez Hilton
2. Robert Pattinson
3. Megan Fox
Bing plans to unveil a relevancy quiz on Facebook, so you can test your knowledge of the most popular searches in 2009. Stay tuned to the Bing blog to find out more.
For a real-time look at what’s popular on Bing, don’t forget about Visual Search, where you can view the Top Albums, Top iPhone Apps, Top Movies and more at any given time.
Labels: bing, Microsoft, search engine marketing, search engines, Search Marketing
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Top questions at Ask search engine
Ask Jeeves’ UK fastest rising searches of 2009
Labels: Ask, search engine marketing, search engines
Monday, November 30, 2009
Black Friday searches up 20% on last year
Labels: Google, search engine marketing
Friday, November 27, 2009
Search marketing- what's in the future?
We’re all familiar with 80-20 problems, where the last 20% of the solution is 80% of the work. Search is a 90-10 problem. Today, we have a 90% solution: I could answer all of my unanswered Saturday questions, not ideally or easily, but I could get it done with today’s search tool. (If you’re curious, the answers are below.) However, that remaining 10% of the problem really represents 90% (in fact, more than 90%) of the work.
Well, Dr Search agrees with the philosophy, if not the time lines.
Microsoft’s Director of Product Planning Stefan Weitz also said in an Ars Technica interview with that we’re early in the game of search:
“’We’re not at where we’d like to be,’ Weitz began, and then dove in to explain that people are generally happy with how their search engine is working, until the data shows that they are not.”
So, there seems to be consensus that there’s a lot to do to improve web search. The question is, what does that improvement look like? A blog post by author and industry pundit John Battelle caught my attention:
I describe my frustration with search as it relates to helping me make a complicated decision: How to possibly buy a classic car. From it:
So first, how would I like to decide about my quest to buy a classic car? Well, ideally, I’d have a search application that could automate and process the tedious back and forth required to truly understand what the market looks like. After all, if I’m looking for classic Camaro or Porsche convertibles from the mid to late 1960s, there are only so many of them for sale, and they can be categorized by any number of important variables—price, model, region, color, features, etc. And while a number of sites do a fair job with a portion of the market, I don’t trust any of them to give me a general overview of what’s really out there. That’s where an intelligent search agent can really help.
So here, Battelle hits on the idea of search assisting in complex decisions. And then, from our own Search 2010 series of interviews, usability expert Jakob Nielsen voiced a similar concern:
I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems.
In the same series of interviews, I talked to Marissa Mayer about where search may go, and she envisioned a more interactive set of search results:
We will be able to have much more rich interaction with the search results pages. There might be layers of search results pages: take my results and show them on a map, take my results and show them to me on a timeline. It’s basically the ability to interact in a really fast way, and take the results you have and see them in a new light. So I think that that kind of interaction will be possible pretty easily and pretty likely. I think it will be, hopefully, a layout that’s a little bit less linear and text based, even than our search results today and ultimately uses what I call the ‘sea of whiteness’ more in the middle of the page, and lays out in a more information dense way all the information from videos to audio reels to text, and so on and so forth. So if you imagine the results page, instead of being long and linear, and having ten results on the page that you can scroll through to having ten very heterogeneous results, where we show each of those results in a form that really suits their medium, and in a more condensed format.
The common theme, it seems to me, is aspiring to move beyond relevancy as the metric by which a list of search results is ordered to providing us with information that we can do something with. For that quest, there seems to be two different approaches.
I believe Bing is on the right track, but they’re still are too bound to the typical search format. Even searches in these targeted categories don’t usually deliver a search page that offers substantially more useful results than Google.
Labels: bing, Google, Microsoft, Search Clinic, search engine marketing
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Firefox double celebrations- turns 5 and 25% Market Share
Labels: online marketing, online marketing uk
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
New Google search results layout preview
I don’t like jazz, because you never know what’s going to happen next…I’ve been calling this problem ‘user interface jazz.’ This result looks this way, and that result looks that way [something much different], and it really does slow you down.
- do you think it improves usability?
- how do you think it will impact website owners?
- will you be doing anything to leverage the improved access to other modes e.g. video, local?
Labels: Dr Search, Google, Search Clinic, search engines
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Speed- another reminder from Google
“A lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience and so it’s fair to say if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus, or if you have an awfully slow site, maybe users don’t want that as much.”

- Google’s Page Speed Tool – This is a firefox plugin from Google that enables you to see which areas of your site need improvement.
- WebPageTest.org – Another speed tool which provides optimization recommendations and other interesting stats.
Labels: Google, online marketing, search engine marketing
Monday, November 23, 2009
How you can create a UK Bing local listing
Labels: bing, Dr Search, Search Clinic, search engine marketing, search engines, Search Marketing
Friday, November 20, 2009
Cyber Monday is coming- is your website ready?
In 2008, Cyber Monday spending hit a record high, with consumers spending a whopping $846 million online.
So the big question is: are you ready? The key to improving your sales during this period is to focus on marketing that can deliver instant results.
In the online world, this typically includes:
* Google AdWords / PPC Advertising
* Local Search Listings
* Featured Listings on smaller search engines
Google AdWords (PPC) Advertising
Google AdWords advertising would definitely be the number one way to target holiday shoppers. It offers pinpoint targeting and instant exposure enabling you to get on the first page of Google when customers are searching for your products and services.
Key Benefits:
* Campaigns can be live within hours.
* Ability to target customers via keyword and location.
* First page placement on Google.
Local Search Listings
If you’re targeting local customers, a local search listing across Google, Yahoo and Bing is another way to get on the first page of organic search results. It’s simple to setup and there’s no limit to the number of people who click on your listing.
Key Benefits:
* Once verified, listings are live almost immediately.
* Can be included on the first page of results.
* Free organic traffic.
Featured Listings
If your customers use a search engine besides the top 3, there’s no harm in being found there either. Top 10 featured listings can help boost the efforts of your PPC and Local campaigns.
Key Benefits:
* Listings are live within 48 hours.
* Traffic is free – no click fee’s.
* Keyword targeted traffic.
This year, Cyber Monday falls on the 30th November, so there’s only a few weeks now to get prepared. But don’t leave it to the last minute!
Labels: Adwords, bing, Dr Search, Google, online marketing, online marketing uk, Pay Per Click Marketing, Yahoo
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Google’s major Caffeine update coming after US holidays
"I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over."
Google’s caffeine update is a major upgrade to their search technology which is expected to improve speed and accuracy of search results.
Users have been testing the caffeine-powered search results via the Google sandbox for the past few months, but this has now been pulled, with a message that Caffeine is ready for a larger audience.
We’ll be sure to update our blog as soon as this starts being pushed out across more data centers.
Labels: Adwords, Google, Pay Per Click Marketing
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Google adds gold stars to AdSence presentation
Labels: Adwords, Google, Pay Per Click Marketing, PPC
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
6 ways local URLs beat .com in international SEO
1. Clear unequivocal geo-targeted signal
To own a country code domain or ccTLD (in this article called local domains), you actually need to go and buy them and register with a local authority. As such, the local domain has always represented the best controlled and strictest identifier of a specific geography. There are some exceptions of course, but these are mostly to do with certain domains, such as .tv (the tiny island state of Tuvalu) having found that their particular geography had a gold mine domain name it could use to generate revenue.
On several occasions I have been approached by engineers employed by search engine specifically who were working on geo-targeting of their results. In all cases they have given the local domain as the first and best signal they would look for in determining a local result.
2. Good site architecture
The argument is often put forward that it’s far too expensive to switch an existing dot com website with zillions of pages over to its relevant local domains in the various countries its owners wished to target. It can, of course, be expensive to switch the domain used and this needs to be done with great care.
Many great SEOs will repeat to you over and over again how important it is to have good site architecture. I’m a firm believer that using local domains for your site is a very good place to start when structuring your site.
3. People generally buy locally
Purist SEOs may not see conversion factors as the most important in recommending which steps a client should take. However, I firmly believe users read URLs in the search engine results and that it has a direct impact on how many of them click on links. Say you’re looking for a “second hand car” and you live in Germany. If you know nothing else about a website, which is most likely to be the most compelling: “secondhandcar.com” or “secondhandcar.de?” To me, it is clearly the latter.
Even beyond the results page, the local domain plays in the mind of the user. “If this is a .de and I live in Munich, then they’re more likely to deliver” is a reasonable conclusion for most folks to draw.
4. Link attractiveness
Having a local domain also helps in your link building programs. Other sites in the same country are much more likely to link to you if you have a local domain. But it’s especially true that they’ll be more interested in receiving links from you if you’re local—after all, they need local links too. Many local directories will only accept local domain names in any case.
5. More powerful internal linking
Links between sites of the same dot com are less valuable, in my view, than links between truly international versions using local domains. So a site which splits its dot com into many countries has an opportunity to reap some benefits from the many different domains it now controls—subject to the normal caveats such as having quality content and offering a good experience to the user.
6. Resistance to the shifting sands of algorithms
I can’t prove this one to you, but after more than a decade of experience I’m convinced that local domain sites tend to be more stable in results than dot coms which move up and down when search engine algorithms change.
Enchantment from the dot com sirens
Why do so many talented SEOs first conclude that dot coms are just as acceptable as local domains when they first start working in the international field? The first issue is that many look at the situation in the UK as a test case for what happens internationally.
Second, the structure of a site’s geo-selector—the method by which countries and languages are chosen—plays a key role in sharing link values around the site. Dot coms have an advantage here,but only because using local domains shows up the poor structure of the geo-selector. With improvement, they will easily overtake the dot com.
The third reason is that SEOs just love research and data. So they head into the search engines and check some keywords and then assess how many dot coms or local domains show-up. I have seen this so many times.
Labels: Dr Search, online marketing, online marketing uk, search engine marketing
Monday, November 16, 2009
Loca Social Search- a powerful marketing channel for small businesses
For a number of years, consumers have had a collective, powerful online voice through ratings and reviews. That voice continues to grow and has never been more powerful thanks to social media. Now, small businesses must learn how to harness “local-social search” or risk missing important growth opportunities.
Social networking has taken ratings and reviews to the next level by giving them a real influence on a local scale. Early local-social search products like Yelp raised the bar.
And so it goes. Mobile search has mutated into mobile-local-social search. Some local search destinations have recently launched user-generated content. YellowBot, for example, offers local search results based on networking and tagging. Unique users? One million since March.
While Yelp catered to foodies, and vice versa, should we expect to see such social network forums for florists, dog groomers, hair salons, doctors, etc.? I’d say, most certainly.
Social networking companies are providing local-social search platforms targeted to their unique audience demographics. For advertising and product marketing, local-social search enhances the ability to promote products and identify micro-target markets. And for business listings, local-social search provides a fundamental change in how listing information is collected.
User-generated content not only enhances the local-social search experience, it changes the game. And local search companies not embracing social search are ignoring an important avenue in how local information will be found today and tomorrow.
As local business information becomes less static through the partnership of social networking and local search, businesses must take advantage of the growing and ever-changing environment to help consumers and businesses connect in meaningful ways, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter, or new platforms that have yet to be launched.
Labels: Dr Search, Facebook, Google, Search Clinic, search engine marketing, social media websites, Twitter, Yahoo
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Switzerland suing Google over StreetView
"Numerous faces and vehicle number plates are not made sufficiently unrecognisable," said Swiss data protection commissioner Hanspeter Thuer.
Google said it was disappointed by the move. The firm says it is sure that Street View is legal in Switzerland and will "vigorously contest" the case.
Mr Thuer is especially concerned about people shown in sensitive locations such as hospitals, prisons or schools.
He also said that the height of the camera was problematic because it allowed a view over fences, hedges and walls, meaning that more could be seen from Street View than by a normal passer-by.
The commissioner said Google was asked in August to take various measures and had not complied with the requests.
It is likely to take months before any court case actually starts, but it could have a more immediate impact on the Swiss availability of the service.
Mr Thuer has asked a tribunal to order Google to remove all pictures of Switzerland and to cease taking any more until a ruling has been made.
Labels: Google, search engine marketing, search engines, Search Marketing
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Analyzing short and long keyword phrases
Labels: Search Clinic, search engine marketing
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Bing gains search engine share in October
Labels: bing, Google, Microsoft, search engine marketing, search engines, Yahoo
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Yahoo’s closure of GeoCities.com could decrease your ranking
* There were 7,450,000 GeoCities URLs indexed in Google
* GeoCities.com had around 10 million visitors in September
* GeoCities URLs ranked in the top 20 of Google for around 680,000 different keywords
Labels: search engine marketing, Search Marketing, Yahoo
Testimonials- a free link building opportunity
Testimonial link building really is a win win scenario for both sites and usually has a much higher approval rate than your standard link request emails. The contact gets another testimonial to place on their site, while you get a new incoming link.
Another good feature of testimonial based links is that they can be often found on core product pages or even the homepage. This means they’re going to have a strong positive influence in your overall link popularity.
Getting started is as simple as writing an email to a few of your suppliers. Explain to them how happy you are with the service and offer to write a few lines they can place on their site.
If they accept, write something specific and ask if it would be ok for them to provide a link to your site. You can make it simple for them by showing an example of how you would like the link to be created:
Hello Supplier name,
“This is an example comment praising the suppliers business.”
Your Name, Director of Company name – a leading provider of xx services.
Obviuolsy only offer to write a testimonial if you are genuinely happy with a supplier’s service!
Labels: Dr Search, online marketing, Search Clinic, search engine marketing
Monday, November 9, 2009
Google Commerce search - powering large online retail websites
The release is timed perfectly for the holiday season rush, which happens to be online retailing’s busiest time of the year.
Google Commerce Search is a new enterprise product which allows website owners to power online retailing directly via cloud based product database. According to the New Google Commerce Search area, it aims to:
Improve your shopping experience with fast, intuitive Google search technology.
* Enable visitors to find the right products faster
* Filter results by category, price, brand or other attributes
* Provide user-friendly spelling options and synonyms
* Increase website conversions and sales
* Boost or promote chosen products within search results
* Deploy search solution in days, and scale effortlessly
* Customize, track, and optimize performance
To use Google Commerce Search, users will submit their product data to the Google Merchant Center and Google Product Search. This can be done via direct upload, data feeds or using Google’s API.
User can then go to the Commerce Search administrative console to customize look and feel of the search experience, and also add special offers, promotions and other product/search options.
As with most Google enterprise offerings, there’s extensive reporting to ensure you can optimize the results from your online retailing efforts.
Now before you cancel the subscription to your existing e-commerce software or application, please note that the new Google Commerce Search starts at a cool USD$50,000 per year.
Labels: Google, Search Marketing
Friday, November 6, 2009
Why it pays to be optimised
Ergo the long standing definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO): “Making your site the best it can be for users and search engines.”
SEO is both as simple and as difficult that
Making something optimal by its very nature is going to be hard work. Being the best you can be at your job, your schoolwork, your relationships, or anything else is not easy. Very few people, if any, will ever be optimized, or perfect. The same is true for websites. But that shouldn’t stop you from attempting to be optimized.
Rule #1: Optimization shouldn’t turn people off
Take a bartender who has a great sense of humor, but can be sarcastic at times. While thick-skinned patrons (like me) find her extremely witty and amusing, others don’t. These folks didn’t come to a bar to be teased, thus, making this bartender not truly optimized. Or take the bartender who can never quite pour a full beer and doesn’t notice that your glass is empty until 10 minutes later. He or she is far from being optimized.
As it applies to your website: Is your website stuffed full of keywords? Is it extremely slow-loading and/or all Flash? Is it optimized for search engines, but not people?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re turning people off and therefore, your website isn’t optimized.
Rule #2: You can’t fake optimization
As it applies to a bartender: Take the one who is super-duper nice to everyone. While you might think she is an optimal bartender, she’s not; her extreme niceness comes across as phony to many. While it does fool some, and may even be optimal for them, she’s not optimized because she’s only pleasing one segment of her clientele.
As it applies to your website: Are you creating doorway pages/domains? Are you writing about “the history of whatever”? Are you using automated software to scrape articles off others websites and then mixing up the words? Are you hiring someone to write hundreds or thousands of low quality articles?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you may be faking your optimization. While it may appeal to some search engines for a time, it’s certainly not optimal, nor will it provide you with long term results.
Rule #3: Optimization is hard work
As it applies to a bartender: The optimized bartender is not necessarily perfect, but she is authentic. Everything she does on the job is to be the best bartender she can be. She works her butt off to please each and every customer the way they want to be pleased, which is no easy feat.
The optimal bartender treats both genders equally, and quickly learns their drink preferences, where they like to sit, little tidbits about their family, etc. She also discloses bits of personal information about herself and family, but not so much as to be always talking about herself. She’s humorous and can be self-deprecating, but in good quantities. And by the end of her shift, you know she’s exhausted (it’s often exhausting just watching her!). You can bet that this level of optimization is hard work.
As it applies to your website: Like patrons at a bar, every website is different. While there are basic strategies and tactics most websites need, there’s no SEO formula that will work for each and every one.
If you answered yes to those questions, you are probably tired! But you’re also on your way to having a successful website and business online. Congratulations! But first, go take a nap–you deserve it, and will need it before the real work begins!
Labels: Dr Search, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Services
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Lucky 13 reasons why your business needs a blog
1. Attract an audience
Every business needs traffic, whether this is foot traffic in a high street store or 'eyeballs' to an online store. A good blog not only generates traffic, but also helps retain that traffic, keeping people coming back and growing in loyalty.
2. Inform, interact and learn from your audience
Informed and educated visitors become confident, loyal customers. More people are turning to the internet to research before they buy. You can position your company as a go-to resource, thereby winning more business.
3. Retain your audience
Too many marketers focus on gaining initial visibility through advertising or attention-seeking stunts. If that tactic does not convert into instant sales, the budget and effort are wasted. With a blog you can hold prospects' interest for longer, winning customers round over time, and bringing them back to hear from you long after their first contact. No need for spammy, desperate-sounding sales messages.
4. Energize your audience
Even better than a growing, loyal audience is a growing, loyal audience that takes action. A blog can motivate your visitors to do things. All you need is copy that warms them up, a motivating story and a clear call to action.
5. Recruit help, contacts, employees
Why spend thousands on recruitment consultants and advertising when you have the best recruitment mechanism at your fingertips? Your blog audience is the most likely to respond and the most likely to be appropriate future employees and networking contacts.
6. Respond to stories and customers
Customer service and public relations have never been more important; a bad story can spread around the web’s social networks at speed. Your blog becomes a responsive outlet to explain your side of any story and douse the fires of negative activity.
You can’t beat valuable, authoritative content for attracting links from other websites, forums, discussion lists and social networks. These links bring a quantity of attention, as well as quality, targeted visitors that turn into good leads.
As well as the direct traffic benefit of leads, links are important in bringing in search visitors. The more linkable your website, the better your search results will be. Very often traditional websites are difficult to link to and not easy for search engines to index. This can be due to the website's structure, the software it's built with, or its overly complex URLs. Blogs are almost always superior in this respect.
9. Building trust and familiarity
Trust is vital in making sales and important for encouraging visitors to opt into your lead-generation process. By starting with compelling information and resources, and by encouraging repeat communication, you build familiarity. Over time, this creates a strong bond of trust, making sales so much easier.
10. Branding
This positive attention and these value-based, long-term experiences don’t just create trust. They help to create a stronger, better brand. This leads to word-of-mouth advertising, which is one of the best forms of promotion you can get.
11. Grow a community
Through discussion, interaction and comments, you can help forge a sense of community that can be strengthened both online and off.
12. Offer better service
Your blog provides multiple routes for customers and prospects to get in touch. It can show your human, approachable side, allow better customer interaction, and improve customer service.
13. Initiate more sales
All of these benefits add up to more new and repeat sales from much happier and better informed customers.
Labels: online marketing, online marketing uk
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Google Adwords boost your PPC CTR with Search Clinic's 7 steps
That advice came from Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic and here he shares it with you.
2. Use Keyword Matching options to lower costs
200 is the magic number. 200 ad impressions and 200 clicks.
6. Run Search Query Reports to find new keywords to bid on
7. Schedule your Campaign to be on when customers respond
Labels: Adwords, Dr Search, Google, Pay Per Click Marketing, PPC
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Google updates PageRank and confuses online marketers
Here’s the statement Google made when removing PageRank values from their webmaster center:
We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.
If this is Google’s stance, why bother updating their toolbar PageRank values?
It’s also important to remember that toolbar PageRank values can be a couple of month’s old, so you’re not likely to notice any changes in your ranking from the update.
Labels: Google, online marketing, online marketing uk
Monday, November 2, 2009
Google indexing content from RSS newsfeeds- how you can get your content listed
Historically Google has relied on URL submission and links on other web pages as its primary way to find new online content. Using these submissions and links, Google’s spiders crawl and index the relevant content it uncovers.
RSS and Atom Feeds aren’t new, having come to prominence with the introduction of blogging. Most blogging platforms include some form of RSS and Atom feed service as a way for publishers to push their content online. For example, here's the Search Clinic's RSS newsfeed:

RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication” but sometimes “Rich Site Summary”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically.
Google has been using RSS and Atom feeds to index content into its Blog and News search indexes for some time, so it seems this latest move will simply be an extension of this practice, with the goal to feed it’s core web search database.
As pressure in the real time search arena heats up, the use of RSS and Atom feeds to find content was an obvious next step - and in real terms, probably long overdue.
Unlike its Blog and News search engines, where feeds are submitted for consideration, Google is suggesting it will use existing aggregators to find content.
We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds. Going forward, we might also explore mechanisms such as PubSubHubbub to identify updated items.
So how should you ensure your content is being found? If your site publishes an RSS feed for new content, be that web pages or blog posts, you should seek to have it aggregated as much as possible.
As a starter, get your new web content syndicated or published through the following services:
* Google Reader
* iGoogle
* Friendfeed
While I am sure there’ll be much debate as to the spam risks of this indexing via RSS, it’s a method that lies at the foundation of Google’s real time search plans. Accordingly expect to see this practice grow, with Google sure to find a way to ensure it maintains the integrity of its search database.
Labels: Google, online marketing, online marketing uk, search engine marketing, search engines, Search Marketing
Friday, October 30, 2009
Bing and Google keep gaining search market share in September
It’s a whole other story for the new kid in town, Bing, whose search share continues to rise and unlike many of the other major search engine also had an increase in the number of total queries.
Labels: bing, Google, search engine marketing, search engines, Search Marketing, Yahoo
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The science of rating your search engine optimisation (SEO)
A dichotomy is that SEO is both subjective and objective. The point at which a title tag, URL, or headline is “good enough” and thus moving on to the next task is warranted — that is certainly subjective. Also consider what might comprise the most optimal URL structure? Does it end in / (slash) or a file extension like .html? Again, subjective.
In my view, SEO for the most part is cut-and-dry, it’s objective. That’s because it can all be boiled down to an algorithm, and in fact, it already has. The algorithm I speak of, of course, is Google’s (or Yahoo’s, or Bing’s).
Running algorithmic analysis on a site-by-site and a page-by-page basis will then allow you to ascertain a site’s SEO health, and more importantly, the subsequent actions required in this never-ending process known as optimization. That is data-driven decision-making, my friends, and it will be a key driver in the next stage in the evolution of SEO.
To be effective, SEO scoring has to get granular. Knowing you scored an 89 out of 100, or a B+, overall with your SEO may be reassuring, but there weren’t any next steps that followed from that knowledge. The same is true even if you individually score each of the major SEO areas of focus.
Score the title tags, internal anchor text, keyword prominence, H1s, meta descriptions and so forth separately, and on a page-by-page basis, and now you’re talking!
SEO effectiveness can be deconstructed into its many components. It can be benchmarked against competitors. Inferences can be made, priorities can be set, content can be massaged, link juice can be directed. Consequently, the SEO practitioner relies less on their gut and more on the data to drive their actions.
Labels: Dr Search, Search Clinic, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Services
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
DMOZ- the Open Directory- everything you wanted to know part 2
Debra: Why can’t DMOZ notify webmasters when their sites are included or rejected? Has there been any discussion on being able to pay for this feature?
Bob: Because the ODP is not designed to be a site listing service, creating a notification system has not been a priority. In the past, there was a “check my site status” thread offered via the editor-run public forums at Resource Zone (www.resource-zone.com). It was not hosted or administered by AOL. It was a good faith effort to reach out to the webmaster community.
However, the thread got quite unruly and unmanageable, so it was taken down. Moreover, some editors felt the “check status” thread conflicted with their other editing pursuits. Nonetheless, I can see us adding this as a feature in the future. As with any feature associated with DMOZ, it would be provided at no cost.
Debra: What are the top three reasons sites don’t make it into the ODP?
Bob: They are:
1. The site was submitted to the incorrect category. Editors may move these submissions to the correct category (which can significantly delay review); or delete them from the submission queue.
2. The site is incomplete, under construction, returns an HTTP error, or lacks adequate or unique content.
3. The site’s content mirrors a URL that is already listed in the directory.
Debra: Mention DMOZ to a group of webmasters or read forum posts discussing the directory, and you’ll usually find the negative comments far outweigh the positive. How is the ODP dealing with their legacy issues?
Bob: Webmaster angst stems from the fact that the ODP is not designed to be a site listing service for webmasters. Webmasters have worked very hard to make the ODP work for them, and the editors have worked equally hard against Webmaster tactics that are contrary to how the directory operates. As result, this conflict has created a cloud of distrust and negativity between both camps.
The Webmasters feel shut out of a community that was intended to be open to all types of contributions. For a while now, our challenge has been to create system that allows Webmasters to contribute to the ODP in a mutually beneficial and meaningful way, while preserving editorial quality.
The solution is not as simple as turning the ODP into a submission service or maintaining the status quo. Rather, the solution involves expanding the ODP’s scope, offerings and levels of participation. This is at the heart of what we are working on today.
Debra: It’s great to hear the ODP is working to expand its scope, offerings and participation levels, can you tell us a little more about your plans and when we can expect to see them implemented?
Bob: ODP is committed to expanding its scope, offerings and participation levels, but I can’t share any details with you at this point. When we are ready to announce more details, we will be sure to let you know.
Debra: Do you think people would be so passionate about being included in the directory if it wasn’t used by Google?
Bob: It depends if you are talking about Webmasters or editors. Clearly, webmasters would not care much about DMOZ if it weren’t for its influence on search engines. Editors, on the other hand, have a different perspective. The reasons editors participate in the ODP are as diverse as the global makeup of its participants.
Debra: There was a post on the DMOZ Blog recently where an editor (crowbar) outlined what makes content unique by ODP standards. It listed a number of points but seemed to dwell on the issue of mirror sites, or that “A site should not mirror content available on other sites”. Since this is a strong criteria for inclusion (or not) in the Directory, why does the DMOZ give away its content through the dump program? On one hand, DMOZ admits to deleting sites submitted that don’t have unique content and yet they provide mirror content to anyone who asks. Is this a case of do as I say and not as I do?
Bob: There are two separate issues here. One is content distribution and syndication, which the ODP does as do billions of other websites. Sites that include syndicated content are not considered “mirror sites” simply because they include syndicated content.
The other issue is content that an entity replicates over different branded domains. This is a common tactic in e-commerce, and is the issue the guidelines around “mirror sites” are intended to address.
The interview ended there. Here’s my tidbits and takeaways:
The tidbits
When I heard Bob make this comment:
“the lion’s share of agency sites are directed and listed in the Regional area of the site, which is where a lot of the editors in this area are spending their time and effort.”
The word “regional” caught my ear. I’ve been following Tim Armstrong since he came on board as AOL’s CEO and understand he (and now AOL) have a strong interest in Patch.com. It’s interesting to note Patch.com is a regional, community specific platform showing news and events from specific cities and towns. Seeding Patch.com with regional results from a respected directory would make a lot of sense, so if you’re bricks and mortar based, now might be a good time to submit your business to DMOZ.
The second tidbit worth noting, is the comment about the notification service. Notifying webmasters why their sites aren’t being added to the directory would go a long way in eliminating the frustration many feel about the ODP; after all, education is preferable to being ignored. I sincerely hope this project moves along much faster than the DMOZ 2.0 project they dropped hints about back in June 2008.
The last and most notable takeaway from this interview, IMO, is the response to my question on why sites don’t make it into the DMOZ. Bob’s answer is informative and also very unsettling because it speaks directly to what I feel is the core problem with the DMOZ – a lack of editors.
Here’s what he said when I asked “What are the top three reasons sites don’t make it into the DMOZ?”
“The site was submitted to the incorrect category. Editors may move these submissions to the correct category (which can significantly delay review) or delete them from the submission queue“.
I’ve spoken to many DMOZ editors who all say the same thing, they delete submissions made to incorrect categories rather than send them along. Why? I’m told it’s because so much of the directory is without editors and/or because they have the authority to do so.
Hmm. This attitude is interesting especially since the DMOZ states “fairness and objectivity prevail here” in their editor requirements. It doesn’t seem “fair” or “objective” to simply delete a submission added to the wrong category but hey, that’s the way things go at the DMOZ.
One of the reasons for doing this interview was to find out what the DMOZ was going to do about recruiting editors to fill its very empty ranks. While Bob reaffirmed the DMOZ’s commitment to quality editing, he didn’t address the issue of recruitment, even though I asked the question twice.
How can the directory maintain quality content with so many categories missing editors? Case in point, when I view the page dedicated to the hot topic of H1N1/Swine Flu, see no editor and note the page was last updated October 18, 2009 I wonder if the DMOZ is really a serious search source.
Add to it, I don’t see popular sites such as the Mayo Clinic, the World Health Organization, MedicineNet or FluView listed and now I’m also wondering about the ability of ODP to provide relevant information. It’s not hard to list the top health sites on the Web for the term H1N1/Swine Flu, but it’s impossible when you don’t have a editor working the category.
Yes, yes – I know section editors can and do come in to edit but they’re obviously not doing that here, are they? For topics in the news or representing financial/health issues, every effort should be made to fill those categories with qualified editors and keep the category updated. To do anything less is a disservice to the public and the directory.
I sincerely hope DMOZ doesn’t become invisible like the Great Pumpkin, as it has been an integral part of the search industry for 11 years and deserves respect for its contributions. A hand-edited directory of 4.5 million websites is an accomplishment no one else can claim and I support the stringent admission standards they have in place.
Labels: AOL, online marketing, online marketing uk, search engine marketing
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
DMOZ- the Open Directory- everything you wanted to know
Since DMOZ is not a search giant, and seemingly does little to promote itself or the core values of the directory, you have to wonder why editors and SEO’s even bother with it.
Debra: Tell us a little about yourself Bob, how did you get started with the Open Directory Project (ODP) and how long have you been there?
Bob: I have been working on the ODP since I joined AOL in June 1999. Initially, I was brought on to work on a directory solution for AOL Search. I joined the ODP team shortly afterward to help develop the ontology and the community self-governance model. About a year later, the ODP Founders appointed me Editor in Chief.
Over the years, I’ve worked on number of search and publishing projects at AOL. In 2004, I left full-time employment with AOL, and took a position with the Federal government to start-up a new search engine program, but I remained as a consultant on the ODP. Since 2006, I’ve worked in the strategy consulting space, helping Federal clients develop product strategies around search, social media, and web-based services.
But through all these career changes, the ODP has been a constant in my life. For the last five years, my involvement has been more focused on overseeing the community and advising the ODP team at AOL on everything from the project’s history to community interaction.
Debra: Why is the directory sometimes referred to as the ODP and other times DMOZ? Is there a difference?
Bob: The directory’s “official” name is DMOZ: The Open Directory Project. DMOZ means “Directory Mozilla” – the idea was to align the directory with the Mozilla brand, even though it was not actually part of that group. DMOZ and ODP are now used interchangeably to refer to the directory.
Debra: Most of us know that DMOZ is owned/operated by AOL, but the site still lists Netscape as “hosts and administrators”. Who ultimately makes the “big decisions” at DMOZ?
Bob: By design, it is the community that makes the “big decisions.” But in terms of the corporate entity that is ultimately responsible for DMOZ, it is AOL.
Debra: Can you explain the chain of command at DMOZ?
Bob: DMOZ is essentially a meritocracy in which editors are granted high permissions based on their interest and quality of participation. There are two general types of permissions: those that allow one to edit anywhere, and those that allow one to participate in community management. An editor with the former permission is known as an “Editall.” Editalls can edit anywhere are engaged in discussions around taxonomy and the editorial guidelines.
An editor with the latter permission is known as a “Meta Editor.” Meta Editors are community managers and are responsible for reviewing editor applications, investing and resolving abuses, and leading editor discussions. For all intents and purposes, Meta Editors and Editalls are “equal” permissions but focus on different aspects of the community.
The “Administrator” permission is the highest community management permission, and is granted to a few, trusted editors to oversee the day-to-day operations of the community. They ensure that Meta Editors and Editalls are being fair and equitable, and that the guidelines are kept current.
The ODP’s governance model is intended to be self-regulating, so there are checks and balances in place to ensure all topics and all points of view are represented, and to foster an inclusive environment in which any editor who wants to contribute is encouraged to contribute. This model doesn’t always work perfectly, but it has been very successful in creating a self-regulating environment, which actually has less to do with the model and more to do with the extraordinary group of editors who contribute to the directory’s governance.
Debra: How do you respond to the allegations some DMOZ editors accept money for submissions?
Bob:Accepting money for submissions is strictly against the community codes of conduct. In cases where we have confirmed this is happening, we revoke the editor’s account. That said, in more cases than not, the allegations are just that… allegations. Still, accepting money in exchange for submission is a consequence of an open directory operation in a closed community.
As I mentioned previously, our challenge is to create a system that allows Webmasters to contribute to the ODP, rather than feeling disconnected from it, which gives one incentive to abuse the system. This solution involves expanding the ODP’s scope, offerings and participation levels. I can’t promise the solution will rid the ODP of nefarious activity, but I think becoming more inclusive while still retaining the directory’s self-governance model will be a significant improvement.
I think it’s important to note that our editor application review process is very thorough. From a directory quality perspective, the best time to identify potential abusers is before they get a foot in the door. We ask that applicants provide a thorough listing of site affiliations and we use full disclosure (as opposed to the affiliations themselves) as a criterion for selection along with general editing quality of the sample sites they provide. While this may mean that we occasionally reject good applicants, the end result is that we keep out many potential abusers. That’s good for everyone.
We unfortunately do sometimes encounter editors who abuse their editing privileges for personal gain. We have a system of community policing to help weed out these “bad eggs.” The public, as well as other editors themselves, are able to report suspected abuse via our abuse reporting tool. When a report comes in, meta editors investigate these allegations fully and if we find that they have merit, we revoke the editor’s account. In the case that a meta editor is suspected of abuse, the case will be investigated by an admin.
We recently did a blog post about what editor abuse really is and what information we need to have in order to fully investigate it.
Debra: There are a lot of categories at DMOZ without editors. I know there is an open invitation for anyone to apply, but what is DMOZ doing to recruit people to fill the empty categories?
Bob: Even though there are lots of categories without listed editors, anyone listed in a parent category or with directory-wide editing permissions can edit these categories. So, even though an editor is not listed in a category does not mean the category is not being maintained.
We are an all-volunteer force, so recruitment is primarily through word of mouth from our current editors and through data users themselves. The editors reach out to others within their own communities and this has produced tremendous growth in some areas.
Debra: Yes, I understand category editors can/do pitch in, but when I look at a major category like Real Estate and notice seven of the first nine categories are without editors and one category shows 2007 as the last date the page was updated, I have to wonder what the Directory is doing to keep its results fresh. How can a handful of people in a major category like Real Estate keep that section of the Directory current?
Bob: The date at the bottom of the page can be misleading. It’s not always an indicator of freshness. Some pages are not updated frequently simply because they are directional pages (i.e., they direct users to categories where sites are listed); or because the kind of site listed in the category is so specific that few sites are listed at that particular level. http://www.dmoz.org/Business/Real_Estate/Agents_and_Agencies/ is a good example.
The category description page explains how agency sites are listed. The lion’s share of agency sites are directed and listed in the Regional area of the site, which is where a lot of the editors in this area are spending their time and effort.
Debra: Has there been any discussion about the ODP offering a paid review program?
Bob: This issue has been raised and discussed many times. Paid review really goes against the whole idea behind the ODP. In fact, our Social Contract with the web community takes an especially firm position on this issue.
Dr Search hopes that you found this post educational. For more, please see tomorrow's post.
Labels: AOL, online marketing, online marketing uk, search engines
Monday, October 26, 2009
Links building- 5 simple tips for you
1. Internal Linking
One of the easiest methods simply involves linking to relevant pages from other pages on your website. By using content based links, you can control the anchor text of each link to ensure you get the maximum SEO benefit.
2. Directory Submission
Submitting your website to free online directories doesn’t take much time and can be a very effective way to increase your inbound links. Many directories also allow you to write your own title and description which is another chance to include relevant anchor text.
3. Social Media Links
Bookmarking your website across some popular social media sites is another way to ensure you receive a keyword based incoming link. To get you started, here’s a list of some of the more popular sites:
* www.delicious.com
* www.folkd.com
* www.diigo.com
* www.reddit.com
* www.weblinkr.com
4. Article Distribution
Writing informative articles and distributing them online is another powerful link building tactic. Write original articles, keep them to around 500 words and submit them to popular sites like www.ezinearticles.com and www.articlebase.com.
5. Start Writing a Blog
Setup a blog using Wordpress or Blogger and get into the habit if writing one new post per week. Make sure to link to your website using targeted anchor text where possible. Aside from the direct linking benefit, your blog posts might also get syndicated on other sites which will create another incoming link.
If you want to build more incoming links but don’t have the time, you can also consider our new link building service which can help to improve your ranking.
Labels: online marketing, online marketing uk
Friday, October 23, 2009
More on the Twitter, Google deal
I’m in a bind because I can’t say more about the product than what Mayer released today. I wasn’t able to make it to Web 2.0 nor were her remarks on the product broadcast live. TechCrunch was there and summarizes what she said this way:
For example, I have a Google Profile here. On that page, I’ve listed my Twitter account. This means when I’m signed into Google, it can tell who I am and what my Twitter account is with certainty. Then when I search, it can offer to show me web pages that are related to other people in my Twitter profile.
More specifically, if I were do to a search relating to journalism matters, because I follow a number of people in the journalism field (not everyone might see this Twitter List yet), I’d get back both “regular” search results as well as those that are from people who I follow. News.com notes that Mayer said these would appear at the bottom of regular search pages.
Other links from social sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn could also be added to your profile (any link can be added to it). To the degree Google can see your network, those can be used to filter your results.
The social search product also predates today’s news that Google has a partnership with Twitter to tap into its data. That means Social Search doesn’t depend on the Twitter deal, but it certainly should help.
What exactly will Google do with the Twitter data. Are we getting a dedicated Twitter search engine like Bing Twitter Search launched today?
Google’s kind of cagey on that front. Mayer said at Web 2.0 that it will be integrated in to regular results. But what’s that mean? Integrated only using Universal Search, which could mean there’s also standalone Twitter search engine out there (just as there’s a standalone image search, news search, blog search and so on)? Integrated to use Twitter data as part of the core ranking data?
I couldn’t get clarity on whether there will be a standalone Twitter search. Personally, I think there will be, or that there will be a combined microblog search service. We know Google has at least gotten people to translate a name for that service.
Whether that type of dedicated search for microblogged content service gets integrated into the completely different Social Search service that refines results on your social network remains to be seen.
Certainly Google sees the microblogged content as something that needs to be gathered and somehow integrated alongside web pages. Johanna Wright, director of product management at Google, talked to me today about this.
“There are things on Twitter that you can only find on Twitter,” she said, especially local happenings that might never see an actual news article written about them.
One example Wright gave, of stories she says Google is collecting, was about an art project where 2,000 “invisible dog” leashes were handed out in Manhattan. You know, those solid leashes that look like you have an invisible dog holding them up? No one wrote a news article about this, but if you were trying to figure out what was happening if you saw people with them, the information was blogged on Twitter.
Labels: Google, social media websites, social web marketing, Twitter
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Google and Twitter also agree tie up
That was published minutes ago on the official Google blog by VP Marissa Mayer. Not coincidentally, she’s due to speak shortly at the Web 2.0 Summit — where Bing made its announcements earlier today. We plan to live blog her appearance just as we did earlier when Microsoft’s Qi Lu was on stage.
Labels: Google, social media websites, social web marketing, Twitter
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Bing to do deal with Twitter as it launches it's own Twitter Search
The deal will make Bing the first major search engine to have access to Twitter’s “Firehose” of tweets. It’s not exclusive, however. Google potentially could still do a deal, to.
We’re told that:
* The deal will be announced today shortly after Microsoft’s Qi Lu takes the stage at the Web 2.0 conference at 11:30 Pacific Time today. Some sessions are being broadcast live here, and Lu’s might be one of them.
* There will be a standalone Twitter search service offered at Bing, with some ranking technology other than sort by date involved, and that shortened URLs will be expanded. That service should go live today.
* There will be some integration within the regular Bing service itself
Discussions to gather data from Facebook are also continuing, and there’s a chance a deal might be concluded for announcement today.
We’ll update as we learn more. To understand the importance of Twitter and Facebook data to the major search engines, see my What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players. It covers what Bing currently does with limited Twitter data it’s able to get now.
Labels: bing, online marketing uk, search engine marketing, social media websites, social web marketing, Twitter
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Social Media- top tips to avoid getting burned
1) Develop your vision. Get creative and develop a vision of what your brand looks like in social media. For example, will your brand be personified, or will it have a catchy tagline? Will the user get special deals or coupons if they connect with you in this space? What is the message you wish to have transcend the brand?
2) Understand your goals. Outline what you are trying to achieve with social media and be specific about your goals. And note that jumping into the fray just because your competitors are doing so is not a valid reason. Instead, perhaps you want to leverage social media to interact with your customers, or drive sales, or simply to reinforce your branding efforts in alternative channels.
3) Identify your success goals. Decide how you will gauge the success of your social media efforts and the specific metrics you will use. For example, if the goal of your campaign is to create awareness for a contest that you are running, it’s important to measure contest and brand impressions, numbers of fans or followers, video views and interaction with the site. In addition to identifying your success metrics, be sure to have analytics in place so that you can track on-the-page site interactions and monetary value.
4) Define how you will communicate value. Identify the value you are offering your audience and how you will communicate it. In doing so, be sure to make the connection between cool and valuable. Why? Because while creative content generates initial interest, the communication of value will keep the discussion with your audience going longer.
5) Integrate your efforts. From the outset, you should plan to integrate your social media efforts with the rest of your marketing initiatives as it can produce a symbiotic effect. For example, by integrating social media with your offline programs, you can create “buzz” for the launch of a new commercial, or solicit feedback about your latest magazine feature. Likewise, by integrating social media with search, you can leverage SEO tactics to help your social content rank in the search engines, build a PPC campaign to capture the demand created by you or your competitors and leverage optimized press releases to promote your efforts.
6) Identify sufficient resources. Give thought to the effort and resources necessary to launch your social media initiatives and keep them going. Remember, just showing up in social media won’t suffice. Instead, you need to continually update your presence on a daily basis. For example, you can’t just create a Facebook fan page and walk away from it.
Social media is a growing channel that offers brand marketers creative ways to interact with their audience and keep the conversation going, but getting started requires more than a cool idea. To derive the most value from it, you first need a plan, and these tips should help you get started.
Labels: online marketing, online marketing uk, search engine marketing, social media websites, social web marketing
Monday, October 19, 2009
The correct content for a landing sales page
My friend and ongoing client Michael runs Very Colourful Jewellery, an store for handmade fashion accessories. He recently asked me for some online marketing consulting to help him increase his conversion rate. I thought I’d share this mini-usability review to help Mike and other store owners who may be struggling with these issues.
First let’s check out detail page.
The page gets the general info down fine. It obviously matches the keywords likely to deliver visitors, and like the rest of the site, there’s shopping cart info in the top right.
Possible solutions to test:
* By far the easiest solution is to offer no alternative colors. By making the color question a simple yes-or-no decision, momentum is a lot easier to maintain.
* A better solution is to offer a very limited range of popular colors. You could probably copy The Gap and go with blue, pink, gray, red and black. This avoids leaving money on the table in the case of people thinking, “No, I don’t like the default color.”
* Add pictures of the product in the alternative available colors.
* Have some pretty girls model the product, and explain what size they’re wearing. Tests typically show that actual-use pictures convert better.
Shipping questions for detail pages- two common questions visitors have are:
* When will the product arrive? (Sometimes phrased as, “When will it ship”)
* What will the price of shipping be.
The product arrival date info is automatically estimated, which is a great piece of functionality. Unfortunately, this too is hidden in the discreet “Additional Information” box below the product image.
As to the price of shipping, this is nowhere to be found on this detail page or any others.
Normally this emphasis on the checkout is good, but in this case it will create a lot of scenarios like this:
* Add to cart
* Check cart info
* Continue to checkout
Then when people move on to the billing page, the ‘Standard’ and ‘Rush’ shipping options don’t provide any more info on price.
So what?
So the net effect of this lack of information on shipping times and rates creates anxiety. Again, this slows momentum towards conversion.
Possible solutions
* Embed a simpler calculator in a reasonably prominent part of the product detail page. For example, some of the whitespace on the right hand side could be used without affecting how clean the page looks. Of course, that’s just a hunch – you’d have to test that to know for sure.
* Since most products have a standard weight and size, Mike could use USPS’ “If it fits, it ships” product and just automatically list shipping rates on his product detail page according to product type.
The fundamental role of a product detail page is to decrease anxiety by spelling out clearly what the product offer is. It should offer enough information to answer visitors’ questions, without overwhelming them and making them bounce.
Labels: online marketing, online marketing uk, SEO Services
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Yahoo to drop paid inclusion program
Yahoo wasn’t sure how they would handle paid inclusion when asked on the Yahoo/Microsoft press conference a few months back.
If you try to access Yahoo’s paid inclusion sales page you are redirected to advertising.yahoo.com. Both the “Search Submit Basic” program that charged an annual fee per URL and the “Search Submit Pro” cost-per-click program will end as of Dec. 31, 2009.
Yahoo has sent us a statement on this change:
We are committing our resources and efforts to our core areas of focus, including improving the search experience and relevancy of our ads to increase user engagement and ROI for advertisers, and as a result, have decided to exit Search Submit. We have stepped up innovation in Search Marketing, recently rolling out search retargeting, Rich Ads in Search and improved matching technology, and in Consumer Search, with enhancements like the new search results page. These enhancements deliver value, control, innovation and relevance to our advertisers, leading to increased ROI.
Yahoo! will exit Search Submit at the end of 2009. Yahoo! is providing those advertisers affected by the decision a sufficient lead time to assist in the transition. In addition, Yahoo! has recently announced a series of important enhancements to its Search advertising business and will work closely with many Search Submit advertisers to provide them with search solutions that will benefit their businesses.
Labels: search engine marketing, search engines, Yahoo
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Google’s Caffeine update- what it means for your website
Based on Matt’s description of the algorithm changes, we shouldn’t expect to see vastly different search results in the short run.
We all know that Google’s organic and paid search listings are two completely separate entities and your performance or lack thereof in one does not impact your standing in the other. While the upcoming update will directly impact organic search results, paid search managers should not completely write-off the update as insignificant to the PPC world.
Any change to Google’s algorithms, whether on the organic engine or in the AdWords platform, in one way or another will effect the user experience over time. In this case, as with previous algorithm updates, Google is pushing forth changes that may alter the mix of organic results.
Many have speculated that the Caffeine update is geared directly towards competing with recent moves made by Facebook (acquiring FriendFeed) and the rising popularity of Twitter’s real time search capabilities.
As a PPC manager, what should I do?
In almost all situations, any change brings some level of uncertainty and the Caffeine update is no exception. Thankfully for PPC managers the upcoming update should only affect the organic listings and will not directly alter cost-per-clicks in anyway. This however does not mean that PPC managers should ignore the “Caffeine Update”.
Most SEM managers have multiple responsibilities, including maintaining the SEO and PPC programs (not to mention affiliate and email marketing duties, etc..). A well-balanced SEM campaign often includes a strategic mix of SEO visibility complemented by PPC listings and vice versa. In some cases, SEM managers don’t feel the need to bid on certain terms due to outstanding organic visibility. Over the next few weeks, do yourself a favor and
Monitor your SERP positions closely
No one is 100% sure how the latest update will shakeout, so your best bet is to run a position report on key terms and watch for any fluctuations – not to mention the fact that it is a generally smart idea to track your SEO positions from time to time. If you are one of those mangers that have shied away from bidding on keywords (because you’ve felt that your SEO visibility is sufficient) you may want to start supplementing your organic efforts with PPC listings.
Google is responsible for the majority of traffic for many online businesses. While it’s great to have a reliable traffic source, it’s also extremely risky to rely so heavily on one source.
The next tip should go without saying, but paying attention to your competitors is also very important.
To summarise, with every change to the Google algorithm comes a level of uncertainty, and by taking proactive steps to monitor and minimize your risks, you will be in a better position to make smart decisions for your online accounts.
Labels: Dr Search, Google, Pay Per Click Marketing, Search Clinic, search engine marketing, search engines, social media websites
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Sir Tim Berners-Lee the web creator apologises for his backslash strokes
Labels: Dr Search, Search Clinic
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
SEO training should be a marketing imperative
One company had an existing site that they wanted to migrate to a new domain. A key goal was to preserve the legacy search traffic as much as possible. They selected a CMS for the project and built the site. Then they brought in the SEO firm to begin working on the site. The trouble was that the CMS was an SEO disaster, and did not allow unique title tags on each page.
Another company was rebranding their site. They were going for a major upgrade in look and feel, and they had made a corporate level decision to target all their messaging at the “C-Suite” (CEOs, CFOs, CIOS, etc.). Based on this they made a decision to implement an all-Flash site. They created a site with a beautiful user experience, but that was virtually impenetrable to search engines.
In large enterprises one of the big challenges is that there are many different groups that are involved in decisions. You have marketing, sales, development and the executive staff. Anyone of these groups can make decisions that are basically fatal to SEO.
There are two ways that the problem gets worse, both of which are examples of bad decisions being made about SEO. These are:
A- In some organizations SEO is thought of as something you do after the site is built. This is just too late. At this point the damage has already been done.
B- The organization hires someone to do SEO work for them, and they are knowledgeable about SEO, but they are relatively junior and do not have the confidence or presence to sway the C-Suite or other decision makers.
To summarize, either bringing in an SEO resource too late, or making use of one that is too junior to have sufficient influence in the organization is a mistake you do not want to make.
How do you solve this problem? You put key people in all constituent groups in your organization (including the C-Suite) through basic SEO training. Knowledge can be a very powerful thing. Once people “get it” they are in a position to make much better decisions. Sometimes there is a tension between corporate objectives and the requirements of SEO, but these can nearly always be handled elegantly if the issues are confronted up front.
In one training session I did, I had the senior management team of a good sized company for a full morning. The group was comprised of really smart people, but with no background in SEO. During the course of that meeting we kept everything at a high level, and we covered a lot of ground. There were tons of questions and dialogue, and by the end of it all the team had gotten the basics down.
The outcome of the meeting was amazing. Historically, they had a great focus on onsite SEO (or technical SEO) but the focus on link building and web site promotion was not high enough. After the meeting decisions started to get made a bit differently. The focus on link building went way up, and the improved results on new business obtained from search engine referrals has been impressive.
The key to success
Large organizations are complex beasts, and a lot of different people have the opportunity to provide input (or directives) about the web site. Everyone is usually well-intentioned, but what you don’t know can hurt you.
The best time to do this is as soon as possible. Decisions about the web site are made on a regular basis. Of course, there are other priorities in the organization, and those need to be taken into account. Sometimes a good time to fit this training in is in conjunction with planning meetings for site redesigns or updates. These meetings usually bring the various constituent groups together to make decisions anyway, so it’s an ideal time to provide them with the knowledge they need to make better decisions.
Training can help prevent disastrous decisions, and can also enable great decisions. Knowledge is indeed power, so make sure that those with power over your web site have the knowledge they need to be successful.
Labels: Dr Search, online marketing, online marketing uk, Search Marketing, SEO Services, social media websites
Monday, October 12, 2009
Twitter- focus of attention for Google and Microsoft
A few months back, Twitter repositioned itself as a search engine for its own content. Given the rapid adoption of the platform, this move caught the attention of the major search engines.















