SEARCH CLINIC

Dr Search- the Search Clinic’s Principal Consultant has now been recognised by the Association of MBAs as a qualified Member.
The Association of MBAs is the international impartial authority on postgraduate business education and was established in 1967.

AMBA is the only professional membership association for MBA students and graduates, accredited business schools, and MBA employers. The membership network currently includes 9,000 members living in 88 countries.

The accreditation service is the global standard for all MBA, DBA and MBM programmes. They currently accredit programmes at 189 business schools in over 70 different countries.

In June 1967, a small group of business graduates, eight with MBAs from the US and two from the first intake at London Business School, gathered in London to found the Business Graduates Association (BGA).

Recognising that despite the value of the MBA, there was a distinct lack of knowledge about the qualification in the UK and Europe, the BGA’s intention was to promote the benefits of business education through five key objectives: help the development of existing business schools, support the founding of new business schools, encourage employers to take on MBAs, help increase the number and quality of students attending business school, and advocate the importance of professional business education in general.

By the end of their first decade the BGA had grown to a membership of 1,900.

In 1983, in response to the growing number of polytechnic business schools offering an MBA programme, the BGA established an accreditation programme to champion the MBA as a brand and to ensure standards were maintained. It soon became clear that there was considerable demand for this kind of quality assurance in the MBA market.

By 1987 the BGA’s stakeholder group had evolved into graduate members, accredited business schools and MBA employers. To reflect this change the BGA became the Association of MBAs.

Throughout the 1990s, the Association of MBAs continued to grow, adding members and accrediting programmes, including many outside the UK. The Association, until then staffed by volunteers, also adopted a more professional structure, adopting a full-time head and management team.

Jeanette Purcell came on board as Chief Executive in 2003. In 2007, the Association of MBAs celebrated its 40th anniversary as the leading international impartial authority on postgraduate business education.

You can contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Search Clinic wishes you a prosperous New Year.Search Clinic wishes you a prosperous New Year in 2012.

It’s been a very busy year with growing use of the internet to boost businesses’ ecommerce activities.

And lots of new marketing initiatives from technology companies to develop their investments.

Onwards and upwards into 2012!

Online video content creators are now making significant amounts of money from a range of ways.

Since the explosion of streaming video several years ago, hosting sites have become home to a growing numberof video makers attracting devoted followings for everything from music and sketch comedy to make-up tips.

Meanwhile, online video has become a career for thousands of video creators, with some making hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

As online video viewership has grown – YouTube draws 500 million unique visitors each month – marketers hope to take advantage of the dedicated audiences and low barriers to entry.

Video creators in turn are making money from hosting sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion and Blip.tv, which share a portion of the profits derived from video and banner advertisements.

YouTube, for one, has distributed millions of dollars in advertising revenue to its 20,000 most popular amateur producers since 2007.

A still from an episode of Annoying Orange on Blip.tv Blip.tv, which hosts the Annoying Orange comedy show describes its content as “the best in original web series”

“We share millions of dollars with our partners every year,” said Tom Sly, the site’s head of strategic partner development.

The amount advertisers pay varies with the popularity and quality of the videos, with creators receiving as much as $20 (£12.70) per thousand views.

“Across the board we’re seeing those numbers increase as we see higher quality content and the ability to target users so that advertisers have more fine-grained control,” Mr Sly said.

In 2010, the number of YouTube partners making over $1,000 (£600) per month from advertising revenue went up 300%, the company said.

The company declined to release specific figures, but Mr Sly said “hundreds” of video creators make more than $100,000 a year and “thousands” make more than $10,000 a year.

The top performing web shows on Blip.tv are on target to take in more than $1m in advert revenue each, said Eric Mortensen, senior director of programming.

“There are certain class of people, and it’s not that they are rejecting TV, they never even thought to be like TV in the first place,” he said. “And because of that they are doing new and different things and that’s how they end up making money.”

Industry analysts say that online video audiences are loyal and attentive and feel a connection to the creators.

In addition to advert revenue sharing, some video creators make as much as $150,000 a year by cutting sponsorship deals with major companies, said former YouTube executive George Strompolos, founder of Fullscreen, a start-up that aims to facilitate connections between corporate sponsors and video creators.

Aware of the power of recommendations from such seemingly personal relationships, companies like Ford, GE, and Lancome are directly reaching out to video makers to hawk their products.

Online video creators work without the need for teams of agents, managers, markets and developers, Mr Strompolos said.

“Online video tends to be a one-stop shop solution,” Mr Strompolos said.  “You get not only the creative development and the authenticity of voice you’re looking for, but you also get distribution and reach.”

As the online video advertising and merchandising infrastructures become more sophisticated, analysts say more and more people are likely to strike out on their own in web video.

This is becoming the new television- a place where the average person has a much better chance of getting noticed and making money than if they were to go the traditional route via Hollywood.

Alan Lastufka, author of YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts, said: “The money may not always be headline-worthy, but it’s enough to quit your day job, stay in the basement on your computer and spend your time connecting with fans.”

You’ve got a wonderful new website- so the world is going to be knocking your door down. Or so you hope.After the initial disappointment comes the realisation that it’s a big world out there.

If your website starts with the word “welcome” congratulations- there are over three billion other websites listed by Google making the same mistake.

Go on- ask yourself how often do you search for “welcome”?

To get online traffic depends on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and SEO has a number of factors:

1. Technical (how well can it be crawled by the search engines)
2. On page (what’s on the page being crawled)
3. Off page (mainly building links)

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it.

Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value and has greatly improved the quality of web search.

Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

Of course Google does not just use links; they use over 200 indicators such as:

• domain name
• meta tags
• alt tags
• directory names
• filenames
• heading tags
• link popularity (how many links back to you there are)
• link text (anchor text indicating the subject of the link)
• page title
• Page Rank

PageRank™ is Google’s patented method to assign a numerical algorithm and weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents that provides a rough estimate of the overall importance of a web page.

In short the whole basis of Google’s success- is that success of website pages breeds success.

If you think that buying links is the key to your future success- hold on!

To find the pitfalls of blindly building links, just have a quick look at Google’s own links building rules .

As the article on paid links makes clear: “Buying or selling links that pass PageRanking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results”

So, what you need are good quality links and lots of them.

But what is meant by good quality links?

The seven most important factors for link quality are:

Contextual links. One way is obvious and contextual just means appearing within the natural flow of a page’s text. If the link is reciprocal, Google sometimes discounts some of the value of that link.

High authority websites. Getting one link from the Telelgraph or DMOZ is possible worth more than 10,000 links from your new site. Authority does not
just mean high PageRank- but a site that is also well established as one of the most important sites for a topic.

Relevant / related links. If you have loads of sites that are irrelevant / unrelated to your sites topic you will probably lose out. In natural linking by people, they tend to link to one another within the same topics and industry. Spammers- like addicts don’t care where they get their fix- or link.

Diversity of link sources. Having many links from another site is good but it’s probably better to have one link each from many sites. The former could be spam. The latter is harder to achieve.

Deep links. If you only have links pointing to your homepage and no deep links to other pages in your site then you will probably have less success than with a proportion of deep links.

Different anchor texts -the actual text of the link. For example “Dr Search is an online marketing professional” is something we might be able to place with small variations, but hundreds and thousand of individuals who may link to us will vary the text they use just because they will as they all think slightly differently.

Consistent links growth. Link building is a marathon, not a sprint. Acquiring 20,000 links on one day unless your marketing goes viral is very unlikely for the vast majority of sites, so any search engine will rightly be suspicious.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) will radically increase the number of domain endings from the current 22.The global internet regulating body has voted to allow the creation of completely new website domain suffixes- the biggest change for the online world in years.

Internet address names can now end with almost any word and be in any language.

Icann will begin taking applications next year, with corporations and cities expected to be among the first.

“Icann has opened the internet’s addressing system to the limitless possibilities of the human imagination,” said Rod Beckstrom, president and chief executive officer for Icann.  “No one can predict where this historic decision will take us.”

There will be several hundred new generic top-level domain names (gTLDs), which could include such addresses as .google, .apple, or even .searchclinic.

There are currently 22 gTLDs, as well as about 250 country-level domain names such as .uk or .us.

However the process will not be simple or cheap. It will cost £114,000 to apply for the suffixes, and companies would need to show they have a legitimate claim to the name they are buying.

The vote completes a six year negotiation process and is the biggest change to the system since .com was first introduced 26 years ago.

Icann said it was beginning a global communications programme to raise awareness of the new domain names.

New applications will start on 12 January 2012.

New research has shown the importance of Google’s search results rankings- especially in one of the top three organic positions, as these spots receive 58.4 percent of all clicks from users, according to Optify.
Websites ranked number one received an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent; number two had a CTR of 12.5 percent; and number three had a CTR of 9.5 percent. Being number one in Google, according to Optify, is the equivalent of all the traffic going to the sites appearing in the second through fifth positions.

Here’s Optify’s look at Click Through Rates of the top 20 sites’ rankings:
Basically, Optify concludes that moving up to the top spot in Google from second or third could triple visits to your website.

Optify’s study of U.S. Google search engine results pages, conducted in December 2010, analyzed organic keyword visits for B2B and B2C websites. Optify analyzed data from 250 randomly chosen sites and an initial set of 10,000 keywords.

Here are some of Optify’s other findings:

The average CTR on Page 1 of Google was 8.9 percent, but the average CTR on Page 2 was 1.5 percent. Ranking first on Page 2 had a slight benefit over ranking in the last spot on Page 1 (2.6 percent vs. 2.2 percent CTR).

Optify concludes that, because predicting which position your site will appear in Google is basically impossible, your SEO efforts should first focus on getting on Page 1, and then on investing in working your way up to one of the top three spots. Also, ranking beyond Page 2, while good for tracking trends, has almost no business value, Optify noted.

Optify’s study defined head terms as keywords with more than 1,000 monthly Google searches and long tail terms as keywords with less than 100 monthly searches.

Head terms had a higher CTR (32 percent) in the number one position than long tail terms (25 percent). However, long tail terms had a higher overall CTR on Page 1 of Google than head terms (9 percent vs. 4.6 percent).

Optify concluded that you won’t see “huge benefits until you get to the top few positions” with head terms. However, long tail terms can see decent CTR almost anywhere on the first page, though there is less benefit of moving up to higher positions.

Bottom line: let your business goals shape your SEO strategy.

The research was analysed at: Top-Google-Result-Gets-36.4-of-Clicks-Study

In the latest search engine usage results from comScore Bing again continues to grow in search numbers- whilst Google continues to decline.As the Search Clinic mused last month Could Bing overtake Google in the search engine rankings? Microsoft’s Bing is continue to grow in it’s usage.

However the growth is still not meteoric as Google still holds a commanding 65.4 per cent of the market.

But those results numbers show a trend over the past year in which each month Bing grabs a slightly bigger slice of the U.S. search engine pie, while Google sheds a tiny amount or stays flat.

For the month, Microsoft’s market share gain was just 0.2 of a percentage point, while Google’s loss was 0.3 of a point.

Yahoo, which traditionally has been losing market share, actually gained 0.2 of a percentage point last month, according to ComScore.

As always, the numbers include just explicit core searches that people manually enter on a Web page.

Reviewing the raw data- online searchers conducted more than 16.2 billion explicit core searches in April. Of those, Google had 10.6 billion, Bing had 2.3 billion, and Yahoo had 2.6 billion searches.

Google’s organic “powered by” searches, which include those at its own sites as well as Google-branded searches at AOL and Ask, accounted for 67.8 percent of all organic searches.

Microsoft’s “powered by” searches, which tap into those at Bing and Yahoo pages, took in 26.5 percent of all organic searches.

Compared with March, those numbers show a gain for Google and a decline for Microsoft. But looking at the longer-term picture over the past several months, Microsoft’s “powered by” searches have continued to inch up, while Google’s have gradually dipped.

The CIM- Chartered Institute of Marketing is 100 years old this week.The CIM was formed on May 16 1911 and marketing as a profession began when 12 people met at the Inns of Court hotel in London and created a new professional association.

Dr Search the Search Clinic’s Principal Consultant is a Chartered Marketer and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

The Institute’s solid branch and regional network, first established in 1926, reaches marketers throughout the UK and overseas.

Since the founding of the Sri Lanka branch in 1995, the CIM network has expanded to champion marketing best practice in 11 overseas regions from Asia to Africa.

This is supported by its established professional qualifications, which began in 1928 with the first annual certificate examinations, and today comprises of entry-level marketing certificates and degree-level qualifications, CPD and training programmes.

The CIM is the world’s largest group of marketing professionals.

Events and celebrations planned during this centenary year will provide marketers with an opportunity to show off the positive power of marketing and demonstrate the beneficial contribution that marketing provides to both an organisation’s bottom line and long-term future.

To mark our momentous milestone, a Centenary Banquet was organised on 4 April 2011 at Windsor Castle in the presence of our patron His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, K.G., K.T.

Our long standing patron H.R.H. supports our quests to promote the positive influence marketing has for organisations today and in the future. The Centenary Banquet was an excellent opportunity to celebrate the importance of marketing and the beneficial contribution it makes to organisations’ success and long-term future.

Around 300 selected guests attended the Banquet where H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh addressed the guests followed by one of Britain’s most popular public speakers Tony Ball, MBE.

Apple has finally admitted snooping on it’s users and released a software update after complaints that iPhones and iPads were secretly recording locations.The issue only came to light when security researchers found a hidden file on the devices containing a record of everywhere they had been.

Dr Search posted the story on the Search Clinic blog last month at: Apple in iPhone location tracking data snooping storm

At the time Apple denied that it has used the information to track user location and blamed a bug in the software.

The update, which is available through the iTunes store, cuts the amount of stored data to just a week and no longer transfers it to the owner’s computer when the phone is connected.

And if users disable the location services setting on their iPhone or iPad, it will stop collecting data completely.

It transpires that permission for the tracking was given by users, albeit hidden away in the terms and conditions for the iTunes store.

The data was logged via cell towers and wi-fi access points.

The storage of the data was brought to light in a blog post from researchers Alasdair Allan and Peter Warden.

At the time Mr Allan said that he did not think there was “any sort of conspiracy going on”.

“However, we’re both worried about this level of detailed location data being out there in the wild. While the cell phone operators already have this data, it takes a court order to obtain it from them. You can now do the equivalent by simply leaving your iPhone in a bar. That doesn’t seem right to me.”

Many smartphone owners chose to voluntarily opt in to location tracking services such as Foursquare and Mobile Me but there is rising concern about how companies use such data.

Later this month Apple and Google are due to testify at a US senate hearing on mobile privacy as the firms come under increasing pressure to reveal how they collect and store location data.

Smartphones running Google’s Android operating system also store data but it is an opt-in service, according to the firm.

Further to the Search Clinic post last week: Top UK search engine and social media websites- latest figures by HitWise research, new number crunching hypothesizes that if current search engine growth rates continue Bing will overtake Google in  2012.

According to the report from Hitwise, Bing dominated 30% of all searches conducted in the U.S. in March 2011. That’s an impressive 5% jump compared from February 2011 results.

Though Google still leads the market share with 64.2%, the search engine actually dropped 3% market share in March.

While these stats are good news for Microsoft, Google should be paying a lot of attention to these results. Its market share has been constantly dropping: from 69.7% in December to 68% in January to 66.7% in February to 64.4% in March.

So what would happen if this trend continued? Check out the chart below. Looks like Bing will take the number one spot by January 2012.
Image Source: Mashable

Why is “search giant” Google seeing a decline in its market share? A WebmasterWorld forum discussion has many theories including the following from Brett Tabke:

Google has so screwed around with their serps this last year, that any alternative dependable and reliable that users can count on is going to gain share. Google has done something I didn’t think possible – they have broken the trust of the end user. While Bing has been busy showing that they are in it for the long haul and staying-the-course with a user experience that people are coming to trust.

I believe the reason for Google’s increase in market share is the fact that they have been playing around a lot with their SERPs over the last year. Such changes could have upset users who are looking for a more dependable and reliable source which Bing has been able to provide.

So while Google still controls two-thirds of the market, I think it should start getting concerned at Bing’s impressive market share growth.

From: http://blog.ineedhits.com/warning-to-google-bing-to-control-search-by-2012