Always a good idea to a) check the link you are clicking on and b) keep a close eye on your listings and report any malicious sites above you.

There are some very striking social media icons out there, and they can only add to a website, as well as showing you are aware of social media and its importance in everyone’s online life.

Smashing Apps have put together a full range of social media icons for you to plagiarise, enjoy, to inspire or just to oooh and ahhh over.

Google has announced that it will be dropping the searchwiki feature from the search engine, and introducing Google stars instead.

These work in the same way as you may have become used to with Google Mail, News and Reader. The Google blog states:

“With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant.”

For those who actually used SearchWiki, don’t worry, your edits will be saved.

However, the reality is that whilst 35% of the Fortune 500 companies tweet and use Facebook, much smaller (and hence more agile) fastest-growing companies in the US already showed a 91% usage of at least one social media tool in 2009.

It would seem that the larger companies have some catching up to do, and that smaller companies have an advantage at present when it comes to adopting the use of social media for many purposes. Marketing, CRM, collecting consumer feedback, reviews, and raising brand awareness are all reasons you should be adopting a social media strategy today.

After the announcement last year that the 3 major search engines would adopt the canonical tag, it seems that Bing and Yahoo may be about to support it too, though not to the cross-domain level that Google plan to.

This tag helps solve the duplicate content issue, particularly prevalent when multiple URLs point to identical content eg when tracker URLs are used, or dynamic pages are created from search criteria.

If you are going to use it, make sure you don’t try to come up with methods to con the search engines and follow the guideliens carefully on its usage. It could help your SEO immeasurably, especially for top landing pages rather than similar product pages that just make your analytics task that much harder.

Google have gone from easy global searches to focusing on local searches in many of their results. So, we have gone from the days where hitting the UK sites only option brought up foreign (e.g.US-based) companies until you narrowed it down to a UK address or a .co.uk domain (often hours later) for the right result e.g. a UK company, to a situation where you can’t find a foreign company for love nor money on a Google search whatever version .com, .co.uk you use.

Which can be a problem when you know that the information you are seeking is definitely not in the UK, nor on your doorstep, nor in Slough, Birmingham or wherever your ISP is based.

There are growing frustrations being expressed about the focus on local search. If every community was self-sufficient in all that each of us require in an increasingly commercial world, none of us would need the Net at all! We would just need a car and the Yellow Pages. But the reality is that many of the products and services that each of us require on a daily basis are NOT available locally.

For instance, I have zero chance of finding a Mandarin translator in my nearby town. I have to look further afield. And if I need such a person to deliver a commercial service, I would like a choice so I find best value.

I do not want to be forced to find that person in the UK. It may be that I need timely translation services eg I send the digital recording of my interview at the end of my working day to New Zealand/Singapore/Hong Kong so that the transcript and translation is back in my inbox (due to the time difference) by the following morning so I can write my article. This is a prime example of how the global economy can be made to work for the benefit of all parties.

However, what is now happening is that I am now adding undue extra cost to my bottom line through the time it takes to find the answer on the search engines because of the focus on local search. The presumption being that what I need is available locally. Whilst this may be correct for pizzas, it is utterly mistaken for  a digital service or a specialist product.

I think Google need to rethink. It is time to advance Boolean operators and choices about searches so that Google isn’t assuming it knows better than me when it comes to entering a search term. If I want a video or photo, then that is what I will click on. If I want to find someone locally and therefore save the planet by reducing delivery miles, allow me to search ‘Local’. If I want news, let me look for news.

And every time I want to search the Net, not my local yellow pages, let me do that without giving me completely irrelevant results. If Google’s mantra is ‘Relevance, Relevance, Relevance’ then right now the search results are failing many with the focus on LOCAL.

Start here

http://www.bubka.be/

Pitch lists cause immense pain and expense to agencies and the points are well made.

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Google have been hitting the news with negative headlines recently, so perhaps the motivation to advertise at such a major event is no great surprise.

It is also great to note that you do not need to make hugely expensive ads to get a good reaction. Screenshots and a musical sound track alone add up to a neat bit of advertising that must barely figure in the Google expense budget!

Even so, a recent report from Econsultancy and ExactTarget shows that a large proportion of businesses expect to increase and maintain their budgets for digital marketing during 2010. Just under half of all respondents plan to increase their budget and 42% intend to keep the same budget as in 2009.

Potentially, this means that 88% of your competitors may well be spending more than you are on digital marketing.  It could be time to assess how much you are focussing on internet marketing within your business, and whether an increase in activity could help you to gain market share, increase brand awareness and up sales.

If there are areas where you are having problems understanding which strategies will best suit your goals and objectives, or how to reach your targets, why not take a look at the articles, blog posts and ebooks available on the Clickthrough Marketing website? Also, we are just about to launch a new book on SEO – Best Practice Strategies to Successfully Promote your Website Online. These 101 tips will help you to master search engine optimisation, so watch this space for news of its availability.

Let’s give an example: what is the height of St Paul’s cathedral?

As you can see, the information the searcher requires is (partially) in the search engine listing. However, the likelihood is that this is enough to pique the interest of the searcher, who will then click on the site to find out more information.

However, Google announced Google Squared during the summer of last year, possibly in response to Wolfram Alpha, which is a knowledge engine rather than a pure search engine.

Now, using Google Squared, results in the SERPs are likely to generate very different results for search terms if Google Squared assumes it is a research term. The potential is that the entire answer to the search is held within the SERPs.

In plain English, this means that a searcher may well find their answer on Google, in the SERPs, and will not actually visit your website at all.

It has long been known that users search the internet in different ways eg to shop, to research or to socialise, and this latest addition to Google searches is an indication of the recognition of those differences.

Go play! All of a sudden, the SEO industry cannot refer to a particular set of results to show off its prowess or portfolio, because as personalisation and search intelligence kicks in, you are likely to see very different results than your neighbour, even with similar keywords.

There is a problem here though. If Google endeavours to feed all the information to searchers, without any requirement to visit your site at all, where does that leave your carefully crafted website? Or your PPC campaign if the answers are within the organic results provided by Google?

The fun has begun!