SEO Blog

During an online chat with Webmasters in October, Google have answered many questions about ranking in the search engine and what factors effect search engine optimisation. Hopefully, this will put some myths to bed once and for all.

The full transcript has now been published on Google Groups - Questions and Answers from Online Webmaster Chat - or, if you prefer, WebProNews published a summary - Google Answers Some Tricky Questions - with their own translation on some of the answers that the Google panel gave.

There’s no great surprises in any of this but, if you run your own website or are responsible for the online marketing of one, it’ll certainly be worth spending a few minutes having a read through.

Google have just announced that their Google Ad Planner is now available to users within the UK.

This is ideal for anyone wishing to expand their online marketing activities and will be a useful addition for media planners and buyers.

Like most of the Google family of free tools, it is still marked as a Beta but if you have a Google account, you can now log in and use it to identify sites that your target audience may visit and fit with your overall marketing plan.

It will show websites that accept advertising by default but you can refine this further by just selecting sites that are in the Google Content Network (Adsense). With this option, media planners can refine their criteria further by selecting different ad formats, e.g. text, image or video and by ad size.

Google Ad Planner doesn’t show every site but will certainly be a useful asset for anyone involved in advertising planning and online marketing.

Whilst not quite as predictable as Sarah Palin not being the next American Vice President, it is still worth noting Google’s announcement on their blog that they’ve ended the agreement to serve it’s ads on the Yahoo! search engine.

This has been put down to the legal hassles with government regulators and concerns of some (!) advertisers.

I don’t know what impact this will have on the Yahoo share price but I’m sure that someone wishes they’d accepted the $31 per share offer from Microsoft.

As a footnote to this, Yahoo have already emailed their PPC advertisers to convey their disappointment and express their wish about how they want to reach out and work with their advertisers. I wonder if this is in the same way they were going to force PPC costs up by jumping into bed with Google?

Google have just announced an improvement to their Google Alerts service.

Previously, the results of these ‘alerts’ could only be delivered by email but now the company’s Trondheim based development team have launched support for RSS feeds.

Not surprisingly, Google make it even easier to view in their Google Reader but you can add to whatever RSS Reader you prefer. My favourite happens to be FeedDemon.

Using a combination of ‘alerts’ with an RSS feed is a great way to monitor your company brand or other areas of interest online.

Despite the general slow down in the global economy, Google continue to buck the trend with an impressive set of financial results for the third quarter of 2008.

The company reported total revenues of $5.54 billion for the quarter ending 30th September 2008. This is an increase of 31% compared to the same period in 2007.

For the UK specifically, Google reported revenues of $776 million. I’m sure that with their recent announcement to allow gambling advertising within AdWords to, ahem, “bring inline with the legal and cultural climate around this issue within the UK” that this figure will continue to rise.

Further Reading:

Google Third Quarter 2008 Results Press Release

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt has sparked controversy by claiming that the Internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” of information according to an article published yesterday in Adage (Google’s Schmidt Says Internet “‘Cesspool’” Needs Brands).

There is no doubt that the Internet is indeed awash with junk; many of these pages no doubt being served up for no other reason than to allow the Webmaster to make money by selling third party advertising.

It will be interesting to see what steps Schmidt and Google take to clean up their own part of this information mess. Perhaps we can expect to see many Adsense accounts closed in a display of putting money where their rhetoric is?

Back in the Nineties, if your website had really made it, it was found on Yahoo.  But since its development and massive expansion, Google has been the be-all and end-all of Internet Search Engines.  As Google has expanded their silent monopoly they have changed the way that companies think about advertising and inevitably changed the way we all go about the process of planning on and offline marketing strategies.

In the past 8 years, Google have dramatically influenced or changed:

• How we advertise
• Where we advertise
• Who is advertising
• What we pay to advertise

Google began experimenting with online CPM (Cost Per 1000 clicks) advertising back in 1999. Unlike the then ubiquitous banner ads, Google’s ads were designed to be unobtrusive text ads based on search terms and kept separate from the main search engine results.  At this stage, you bought your ads from a Google Ad Sales Rep, like the traditional offline ads.

In 2000 the Dot Com bubble burst and online advertising briefly vanished.  When Google bounced back, they turned their Search-based Text Ads into the forerunner of the self-service PPC/CPM system we have today.  Google essentially invented PPC or Pay per Click advertising.  Now we bid to hold the primary position for certain search terms and customise our ad campaign to hit matching searches within specified geographic regions.

Google’s Search-based advertising changed the way advertising works online.  For the first time it specifically targeted people who were actively looking for the product or service advertised.  This creates uniquely cost effective advertising and every click has a potential sale attached to it.

Google put the power to design and orchestrate commanding advertising campaigns directly into the hands of anyone with a credit card. Since you can advertise on Google for a price within any budget, you can reach millions of customers across the UK for only a tiny fraction of the cost of television, radio or newspaper advertising. PPC and CPM allow us to set our own budgets and bid for the top advertising spots on the Internet.

Google have changed the way that we all think of advertising and how we use it.   Now a small greengrocer in London can compete for attention with the big high street supermarkets.  Now a small home IT business in Southampton can compete for new business with a massive corporate IT business in Edinburgh.

With 69% of the UK’s population regularly using the Internet, and 87% of online searches using Google, when your potential customer wants to find something, they look to Google.  This has made Google the most powerful advertisement placement position ever.

As Google Pay per Play Video is rapidly advancing and online video advertising overtakes offline video advertising in terms of amount spent, experts believe that Google will strongly influence and change advertising habits on and offline in the future.

Google’s influence is so strong that we no longer ’search’ for something, we Google it, the brand has entered the popular lexicon as a verb and that’s advertising that can’t be bought!

Google have just announced the launch of a beta version of their new Internet browser, Chrome. This open source application will be launched next Tuesday and will go head-to-head with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Just so us mere mortals can understand what’s going on, Google have very kindly described the release of Chrome in comic book style. I particularly liked the use of the word ‘adopted’ on page 2 of the comic. Look out for that on the next Crimewatch when we’re asked to look out for a suspicious looking character who’s adopted some priceless jewellery from a stately home!

Continuing the policy of appearing not to do evil, this browser will be freely available. With the beta launch, it will be available for Windows users in 100 countries. Mac and Linux versions will follow later.

Google’s VP Product Management, Sundar Pichai said “What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build,” So, that’ll be a browser then?

It will be interesting to see how the community respond to this latest development with open source favourite, Firefox, already offering an excellent browser, supported by many innovative applications whilst allowing you complete flexibility over how you use it. In fact, the only people I can see not enjoying Firefox would be shareholders of large search engine companies.

Google’s online ad revenues will continue to grow despite the US economical downturn according to data released by eMarketer.

They predict that Google’s online ad revenues in 2008 will increase by 27.4% in the US alone. Even in comparison the other leading search engines (Yahoo, MSN and AOL) which take 25.7% of all US online advertising dollars Google exceeds them with a staggering 30.7%.

It seems that even in economical downturn that the power of online marketing shows through and it’s no surprise that when other areas of marketing spend are dropping of that online advertising continues to grow.

So if you’re looking for where to get the biggest return on investment for your advertising spend then why not look into online advertising.

Yesterday Gmail saw a big email outage leaving its users unable to send or receive email. The Outage started around 10pm here in the UK (GMT) so chances are it didn’t impact on UK businesses to much.

Around 10:30pm official word from Google was they were working on it and aware of 502 errors (as reported in a Google Groups thread). This then prompted hundreds of posts from upset Gmail users keen to see the service back up and working as soon as possible.

This does raise questions about not only the Gmail service but also the other widely available free email services that people take for granted. There are many UK businesses that rely on Gmail and the other free email providers to handle their company email. Although these services are free you should carefully consider the implications of using them for business use.

Remember the free email providers have the right to remove the services from use at any time (although this is unlikely to happen).

First impressions count for allot so ensure your business is well represented online and avoid using the free email services for business email as it really doesn’t create the right impression about your business.