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Monday, October 24th, 2011
With speculation rife for months that Yahoo! is soon to be sold, Microsoft is rumoured to be working on another possible bid, this time with Silver Lake Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to buy the search engine, according to an article published by The Wall Street Journal.
The bid, which is currently being discussed, would see Microsoft put up the majority of the finance – around several billion dollars – with both Silver Lake Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board contributing a lesser sum to the deal; while banks would arrange the rest of the financing.
However, insiders close to the matter have revealed that should the financing plan fall through or become too complex, the deal could be abandoned.
Microsoft previously made a bid for Yahoo! back in 2008.
The bid, worth around $44.6 billion, was rejected and since then Yahoo!’s share value has plummeted – losing nearly 44 per cent of their value.
Although a reasonably popular platform for search engine marketing ventures, any potential Microsoft bid for Yahoo! will be aimed at protecting the Search Alliance partnership that the two struck up following Microsoft’s failed bid.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Tags: Microsoft, search engine, yahoo
Posted in Search Engine News
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Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
The state-run Chinese newspaper People’s Daily has launched a new search engine.
Jike has been approved by the Communist ruling part of China – which had previously asked Google to censor search results for Chinese people.
Jike was named after the English word “geek”.
The company behind Jike says the technology was built pretty much from scratch.
It is not known whether the results will be censored or state-approved – which could open the Chinese markets and vastly effect online marketing - but, at the launch event for Jike, the People’s Daily said younger people were the target audience and they had designed the engine specifically to appeal to young people.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
Tags: China, jike, people's daily, search engine
Posted in Search Engine News
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Monday, May 9th, 2011
According to searchenginejournal.com Google have added a site speed tool to its analytics to improve the quality of their service to users.
Google prides itself on speed and is reported to be obsessed with providing customers with an instant search, and its love of speed isn’t a ‘suit yourself if you don’t like it’ situation, the speed will impact both Google AdWords page quality and actual Google SERP, so the company are trying to create a faster experience for all users.
In the meantime, while Google figure out ways in which to improve their speed, there are a number of search engine optimisation, code and design tactics that can help users load pages more quickly.
The site speed tracker looks at all the information related to the load speed of pages and will give you indications of which pages are loading the quickest, which browsers aren’t responding at all and which demographics are experiencing difficulty.
To take full advantage of this tool, you must enable the new Google analytics, then enable the time tracking features and you must install the new Google analytics code provided.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Tags: Google, search engine
Posted in Search Engine News
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Friday, May 6th, 2011
Bing, the search engine from Microsoft, have announced a new partnership with Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices to further their search options and default maps
CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer took to the stage at BlackBerry World 2011 in order to announce the new partnership. He claimed search options on future devices would be Bing and will be integrated at OS level, meaning that switching to other search engine providers is not an option for users.
Search engine marketing firms involved in BlackBerry mobile will have to alter their strategy in order to integrate with the new partnership.
A blog post from the Bing team confirms the partnership: “Central to this collaboration, Blackberry devices will use Bing as the preferred search provider in the browser and Bing will be the default search and map application for new devices presented to mobile operators, both in the United States and internationally.”
“These new experiences highlight how the mobile landscape is changing. Devices are becoming sensors that can provide real-time access to information to help people quickly complete tasks on the go.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Tags: BlackBerry mobiles, search engine, Search Engine Marketing
Posted in Search Engine News
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Monday, March 14th, 2011
Whilst the noise about the Google Panda update (previously called the Farmer update) is beginning to die down, there will still be many websites who should consider the value and quality of all their content and how this may reduce their chances of good listing in the SERPs.
The obvious contenders may not be those you first assume. Aged and static content that has not been updated for some time may actually be bringing in long tail traffic, so don’t just bin old pages without checking your traffic stats and backlinks for those pages first. However, it may be that your business has changed direction since that content was added and it is no longer relevant, so take a look at some of your historic content to ensure it still fits the bill.
More likely culprits for content deemed to be of low quality by the search engines are those which may seem far too similar to other pages on other sites. For instance, if you sell products with a generic product description that other companies also sell, and you have one page per product (required for inclusion in Google Shopping/Base), these product pages may not appear unique to the spiders.
A quick fix would be to add the capability for reviews and testimonials. Until those reviews begin to appear on your site, add a “no index” tag, and then manually remove this from any pages where reviews have been added. You can request reviews from your customers for products that they have purchased, which will also give you a chance to get in touch with your customers and ask for feedback.
Other low quality pages may be a links page that includes broken links, links to irrelevant content, or links which are not providing any link juice to your site. Keep a weather eye on any links on your site to ensure that these are working, relevant and worthwhile.
Check your traffic stats (analytics) to see which pages are rarely visited or have high bounce rates. Check to see why this might be the case – is navigation difficult to reach that page? Is the content out of date or off-topic for your target audience? A quick revamp of your navigation or content may be all that is required to raise the quality score for that page.
And whilst we are talking about Quality Score – take a good look at your PPC, or ensure that your internet marketing agency understands how Quality Score works. One or two keywords in your Pay Per Click campaign that are not performing as they should can have a decidedly negative effect on your QS rating, which will affect your PPC positions.
Tags: Content, farmer, Google, links, Panda, PPC, quality, quality score, search engine, spiders, traffic stats, update
Posted in Blog, Google, Link Marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC), SEO, Tips & Tricks, Website Usability
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Saturday, March 6th, 2010
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.
Tags: Google, search, search engine, searchwiki, stars
Posted in Blog, Google, SEO
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Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
I know you won’t believe me, but it’s true.
Recently, we wrote about phone call tracking. The point being that it gives very strong data about conversions from landing pages when the call to action is to ‘p.p.p.p.pick up the phone’.
Interestingly, this has now cropped up again as a subject for discussion on SearchEngineLand.
Let’s ask why consumers might call a number, rather than send an email or complete a form. The article above fails to address the issue from a consumer point of view, instead looking at all the reasons why the industry has ignored phone calls to date and why there is now a resurgence of the humble call.
As a consumer, how many times have you emailed an enquiry to a company and then not received a response? Not received a timely response? Or not received *any* response? Ditto with forms on websites. You complete the form, which is often far more lengthy than it need be, and you hit ‘submit’. You get an error and are thrown back to the previous page, yet now all the fields are blank. UGH!
Having cursed all coders under the sun for that last primary school error, which are you most likely to do:
a) just return to a search engine and seek another company offering a similar deal?
b) start all over again completing the form and pray that this time it will actually be delivered and that there isn’t another bug in the system that has failed without informing you?
Now, let’s look at it a different way, but still from the consumer’s point of view.
You are looking for a particular item, to be delivered by the weekend, and the first website you fall over clearly has the item in stock (great landing page, BTW, it took you straight to what you were looking for!), they can deliver in 2-3 days guaranteed (force majeure excepted), and have the item at a price you are prepared to pay.
You have Skype or similar installed, and the only call to action on that page is “Call this number and order today”. No alternatives. Just call. No email address, no online web form, although there is obviously clear navigation to the rest of the site.
You click and the phone call is initiated. Within moments you are through to a lovely receptionist who, within literally moments, has taken down and double checked your address, your order and removed a reasonably substantial amount of your money from your account on your instructions.
Two days later, the item you wished for is on your doorstep and is precisely what you had anticipated.
Next time you try online shopping, having been more than happy with your last purchase, and less than happy with other companies’ failures to answer emails, respond to forms etc, will you be:
a) More confident using the phone to order
b) Less confident
Each time a company gets it right by having well-trained staff to answer the phones, a back-end system that confirms the product is in stock, processes the order, and ensures that is sent out to the customer’s spec, that customer will use the phone.
Any company who starts ensuring that their phone answering process is up to scratch, and PROMOTING THAT FACT publicly, will begin to win out as customers feel let down by technology and revert to the one thing that they can rely on – the goold old telephone.
Tags: email, forms, Landing page, marketing, search engine, telephone, Web search engine, website
Posted in CRM, Online PR, Small Business Resources, Stats & Trends
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Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
You can’t beat competition to inspire innovation and keep everyone on their toes. It looks like Microsoft are being quite determined in their attempt to capture some of Google’s market share in the search market.
Wolfram Alpha had a marginally rocky start last June when, after a blaze of pre-launch publicity, the servers crashed big style and then it turned out much of the world didn’t understand the difference between ‘search engine’ and ‘knowledge engine’. Meanwhile, Bing, after similarly loud launch, has crept slowly into the consciousness of many and has become the favourite search engine of choice for a few.
It will be interesting to see whether this turns into a re-run of the Apple vs MS debate/saga, with a minority of users adamantly declaring the solution is AlphaBing and the ROW sticking with the only solution many of them have known since they first got online.
In some ways, it is hard to see how people will adapt from the “Just Google it” mentality, which seems to have become a common term in a vast number of languages. It’s more than just engrained habit; for some, it’s a little like being unaware there are other operating systems, software choices and so on out there, Google is THE internet search engine.
What search engine(s) do you use? Do you prefer Bing? Or Google? Or A N Other eg the meta search engines? Do you think AlphaBing is a match made in heaven, or doomed to lose? What do you think Wolfram Alpha and Bing together will bring to the search party?
Tags: Bing, Google, Microsoft, search engine, wolfram alpha
Posted in Google, SEO
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Thursday, November 12th, 2009
The 10 UK search terms for the 4 weeks since Oct 19th 2009 show that UK searchers still don’t comprehend how a browser works.
The top 10 search terms include Facebook, Bebo, Youtube, Ebay, Argos – all major brands with basic TLDs eg argos.co.uk, facebook.com and so on. What this implies is that users are not using the location bar to directly enter the domain name or URL of a site, even when it is a global company with a simple and recognised name, such as Facebook.
Therefore, even if you have picked an obvious domain name for your widget company, such as widgets.co.uk, the majority of users don’t even have a stab at guessing the domain in the location bar – they use a search engine instead.
This snapshot of search behaviour should indicate to many businesses that one of the most important terms they need to be optimising for is their business name and brands, in order to show up in the search engine rankings.
It is surprising how few companies get this, and insist on putting their business name in a pretty logo invisible to the search engines, and giving the index page of their site a page title such as “Homepage”.
Whilst it is not necessary, nor desirable, to scatter liberally across every page the name of your business and brands, to the point where users can’t see beyond those terms to actual quality content, it is vital to ensure that they are included in visible text and indexable content. This includes alt img tags, reference tags, H1 and H2 and so on.
Check your website today and see how many instances of your business or brand names occur on your site, and how many are indexable. Searchers may be researching the availability, price, existence etc of a product they desire, and not know the names of companies who offer it, many more will be searching directly for you if your advertising and marketing is working as it should. If they can’t find your company even though they know the name, they will resort to researching the product/service type instead, and that is where deeper optimisation on many more keywords is essential.
Tags: Brand, business, Domain name, optimization, search engine, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Web search engine
Posted in SEO, Tips & Tricks
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Monday, August 17th, 2009
It is surprising how many people struggle to think of the keywords that potential customers are likely to use to find your website, products, services and so on.
Use a keyword tool such as Google’s new Keyword Search tool to brainstorm keywords today.
By including these keyword variations in your content, code, alt tags, and so on, you will increase your long tail visibility, as well as bring in targeted customers who are seeking on 3+ word search terms. On-page optimization is essential if you want to be found!
Tags: Google, Keyword, search engine, Searching
Posted in Keywords, SEO, Small Business Resources, Tips & Tricks
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