Anyone who’s serious about online marketing needs to know a thing or two about Search Engine Optimisation. Even, it emerges, the Queen. In a recent report for The Daily Telegraph, Julian Sambles, the Telegraph’s Head of Audience, conducted a review of how well the Queen’s new website would rank on search engines.

You may well think that for an institution as important as the Monarchy, they would be pretty spot on with their SEO. However, as Julian discovered, this was far from the truth. He found there were several problems with the site’s SEO (including, quite shockingly, not including the phrase “Queen Elizabeth” in the homepage’s keywords). He goes on to list the six key SEO problems with www.royal.gov.uk, including problems with the use of title tags and url structure.

This article got me thinking that it should be important reminder to any business with an online presence that they need to make sure their website is working in the best possible way for them. It’s imperative to understand the application of SEO correctly, as it is one of the most cost-effective elements of marketing strategy for many companies.

We are LexisClick Online Marketing have considerable experience in SEO for both large and small projects. To find out more about our SEO services, click here.

To read the full Daily Telegraph article, click this link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/4601422/The-Royal-Website-The-Queens-new-website-SEO-review.html

Search Engine Optimisation Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Website Testing

YouTube could be the next SEO opportunity, as Google are planning the Google Universal Search application. This clever application will begin to be integrated directly into the regular Google search results and will search all of the Google search application and return the most relevant results.

This means that if you have a high quality video that ranks well in YouTube, you’ll have a high chance that the video will be feature in the regular Google search results.

If you haven’t done so already, now would probably be the time to test your popular search terms in Google. A case in point is searching on internet marketing news. Internet marketing news returns 27,600,000 results on Google, whereas the same search on YouTube only returns 5,270. With the differences in those results which do you think will give you the best chances to get on the first page?

Video appears to be an opportunity ripe for the picking and with YouTube beating both Yahoo and MSN in the traffic figures, it could be seen as the second search engine. If you are willing to go out there and make high quality video content for your market place it could provide you with the opportunity to get one step ahead of your competition.

Search Engine Optimisation

Google has developed their book search functionality one step further and now provide magazines in the site at http://www.books.google.com. There is a wide variety of magazines featured including everything from science journals to lifestyle magazines. The choice is currently reasonably limited but Google are planning to increase the inventory considerably over the next few months, with back catalogues from a number of publishers.

The magazine functionality is quite fully featured allowing browsing of the magazine covers, selection of the magazine to read and then browsing of scanned pages, with options to read both single pages and in double page spread mode.

The functionality of magazine search really extends the book search and opens up a whole genre of published material to the search indexes. It could be very useful online resource when an extensive inventory of titles is in place.

Search Engine Optimisation

Google CEO Eric Schmidt implied that in some respects search engines are benefiting from the economic slow down, as he announced a 26 percent increase in third quarter profits. Following year on year growth in search queries across all verticals, he believes that Google are well placed to continue their growth. He is quoted as saying.

“We believe that these results reflect the fact that as marketing budgets are squeezed, targeted, measurable ads are becoming more valuable to advertisers. As consumer budgets are squeezed, people use the web for comparison shopping to hunt for bargains online and in stores.”

However he did add a note of caution, that he thinks it will be tough even for Google to compete during the recession.

Search Engine Optimisation

Google’s market share has risen again. A recent report from the research firm Comscore revealed that Google’s share of the US search market in August was at 63%, up from 61.95% in July.

This means that it currently has over two thirds of US search traffic or nearly 7 billion of the 11 billion web searches taking place in the US.

Google leaves Yahoo and MSN trailing with 2 billion and 977 million searches respectively. The increase in Google’s market share has meant that both Yahoo and MSN have experienced decreases in their share. Yahoo’s market share decreased from 20.5% in July to 19.6% in August. Microsoft held its third position with a share of 8.3%, a decrease from 8.9% in July.

The forth position is held by Ask which really trails the pack at 4.8% of market share, but at least showing a slight increase from 4.5% in July. AOL is not far behind Ask in fifth place with 4.3% of the market share.

Search Engine Optimisation

Google appear to has once again started to change its algorithm for PageRank, leaving many web masters confused. A growing number of websites are now giving up on chasing Page Ranking and just concentrating on their search engine rankings. It appears that many sites with low a low Page Rank can show up high on the SERPs and vice versa.

Google’s last official change to the PageRank algorithm was in January 2008. As the months go by Page Rank seems to fluctuate considerably. Penalties have been given to a number of sites causing some website provider to panic as they do not know what is going on.

Search Engine Optimisation

The latest search engine on the block “Cuil” was launched yesterday. It is a new search engine founded and created by some of Google’s lead engineers. The team comprises Tom Costello, a former technical lead of Google and his wife Anna Patterson, chief architect of the company’s TeraGoogle search index.

Tom says “The Web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it, our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user”.

This means that Cuil could continue to grow and take over search engine giant Google. Cuil further states that its search result algorithm scans through 120 billion web pages, which is actually three times the number that the giant sifts through. Additionally, www.cuil.com offers reminiscent page and Google’s has minimalist one.

To differentiate itself Cuil offers no ads on its pages, and also claims that it would not monitor a user’s search habits for advert targeting.

However, Cuil will be fighting against the might of Google’s massive advertising platform backup and will need deep pockets if it really does want to get one step ahead.

Search Engine Optimisation

Google has silently released a new feature, called search-within-search, which is causing a stir with a number of well known online publishers and retailers.

These publishers and retailers are concerned with loosing customers through the feature to their competitors. Search-within-search allows users to refine their search results once they are within a destination site. This is undertaken through Google’s search technology rather than the onsite search and as a result, Google Adverts are displayed alongside the results. This means that even though the potential customer is on the destination site there is a high possibility they could leave through one of the adverts which could even be a competitor’s.

Search Engine Optimisation

The team at FathomSEO has noted that the option to check inbound links through MSN has now been enabled again. MSN removed the option to check on inbound links using the method of link: used by Google and Yahoo a while ago.

They have noted that a variety of different operators can be used to query inbound links, all providing different results. They have experimented with the standard Google and Yahoo format of link:www.site.com but found this does not work, but that the following options do:

link:http://www.site.com
link-http://www.site.com
(link:http://www.site.com)
(link-http://www.site.com)

link site (using only the word link and your domain name without the “www” or TLD)

In addition MSN have enabled the OR operator for link: queries allow the following formats to be used:

link www.site.com OR www.site.com
link site OR site
(link site OR site)

Now analysing the inbound linking to your site is possible again through MSN thanks to the team at FathomSEO.

Search Engine Optimisation

Tech Crunch recently posted an article highlighting that in July of last year, Google filed a patent application on image and video search technology. However it was only recently that it made the news public that it plans to patent technology that will allow its search bots to understand specific text featured in images and video clips.

This has the potential of massively changing the search landscape, especially for websites that have a lot of photos or links to video content. Google’s new image search technology would mean that photographs and videos indexed by Google would be searchable by the text located within them and presents a huge step forward in the indexing sites that have not previously been available for search.

Digital images often do include text, but were previously unavailable for search since it was impossible to index using older search technology. Image text (text inside an image) typically includes text of varying size, orientation, color and typeface.

For example, text in a digital image derived from an urban scene often provides information about the displayed landscape or specific location. A typical street scene would include text as part of street signs, building names, physical address numbers, window signs and a lot more.

This technology could probably make every book in the Google Books database really searchable, with the next step being YouTube, Flickr, Picasa Web and more.

It will be interesting to see how Google develops this new image search technology.

Search Engine Optimisation