Entries Tagged 'Search Engine Optimization' ↓

Speakers: Allan Dick (Vintage Tub&Bath), Cam Balzer (Performics Inc), Nilhan Jayasinghe (Spannerworks), Heather Hopkins (Hitwise UK)

Most of the things discussed in this section are pretty obvious. There are however some useful tools that deserve to be mentioned.

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Speakers: Chris Sherman (Executive editor at searchenginewatch.com), Graham Hansell (Head of Search Strategy at Sitelynx), Bob Ivins (Managing Director at conScore Europe), Jonty Kelt (Managing Director UK&Europe of Performics, a DoubleClick division), Elisabeth van Couvering (didn’t catch the company name and not sure if I spelled the name right).

Elisabeth starts by outlining areas of activity for internet users:
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Speakers: Alexander Burmaster (Internet Analyst at Nielsen NetRatings), Ashley Friedlein (CEO of e-consultancy.com), Heather Hopkins (director of research at Hitwise) and Massimo Burgio (co-chairman of SEMPO global committee).The first session of the day, still fresh and making a lot of notes :). This session was data data data, so please do forgive me if I got some number down wrong.

Burmaster starts off: there is a 13% growth of search in Europe compared to 2005 which makes search the number one online sector with 95 million European users (as of April 2006), with portals at number two (90 million users). Search penetration according to markets shows France at 85%, UK 84%, Spain 83% (in comparison to Brazil 82% and USA 80%). Google has an enormous market share in Europe of 79,9% (or 84 million users), second is MSN with 16,5% (19,5 million users) and Yahoo third (didn’t get the exact figure). It is remarkable how big the gap is between the numbers one and two: Google having a piece of the pie almost 5 times bigger than the number two, MSN.

The breakdown per market is as follows:
Italy: Google, Virgilio, MSN, Libero, Yahoo
UK: Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, AOL
USA: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask

Despite the popularity of search in Europe, there is room for growth. The average time spent on search engines per month is 44 minutes in USA, 39 minutes in France, 34 minutes in Brazil and 33 minutes in UK.

Interesting is the outcome of searchers behaviour with respect to how many search engines are used. In USA 47% of searchers use 1 engine while 53% are visiting at least 2. Same data for other countries:
Italy: 43% of searchers use 1 engine, 57% at least 2.
France: 49% of searchers use 1 engine, 51% at least 2.
UK: 50 – 50
Germany stands out: 65% use one engine while 35% use at least 2.

Top destinations in Europe:
France: member communities (Google, Yahoo and MSN)
UK: mass merchandise (Google, Yahoo and MSN)
Germany: shopping directories (Google and MSN) and member communities (Yahoo)

Percentage of international audience with Google as homepage:
Italy 21% (3.6 m users)
France 17% (3.1 m users)
UK 17% (4.2 m users)
Germany 14% (4.5 m users)
USA 6% (8.6 m users)

Non-search behaviour on search engines
More and more people are using search engines as a navigation tool: they type the actual URL in the search box as if it were the address bar, or they know the URL of where they want to go but just put the brand name in the search box and click the first result to save time, eg. Typing Ebay in the search box instead of www.ebay.com in the address bar.

The percentage of Google search audience entering www as part of a search query in the search box:
UK: 15%
Germany: 12%
USA: 11%
Italy: 11%
France: 8%

Second person to speak is Heather Hopkins with more of the same, but still interesting :). The data she is providing comes from UK internet users only. She sums up the top 10 web sites visited in the UK in April 2006:
Google UK – 7.25%
MSN Hotmail – 3.46% (mind the gap!)
Ebay UK
MSN UK
Wanadoo
Google
Yahoo! Europe Mail
Yahoo! UK & Ireland
MSN UK Search
MSN

Search engines accounted for 9% of internet visits in April, making it the third largest category after adult (13%) and shopping (10%).

Market share of Google (.co.uk and .com) in the UK is 64%, leaving Ask (13%) far behind and making Google really really dominant. Whereas in the US, Google’s market share is “only” 59%, with Yahoo second at 22%.

Share of executed UK searches shows more of the same, Google accounting for 77% of searches. Yahoo (7.6%) and MSN (7.4%) are competing for the consolation price. The gap with other search engines is widening: the top 4 search engines own 96% of all UK executed searches.

Interesting with regards to these findings, is that in April the travel web site Expedia UK was sent the second largest share of visits by Ask.co.uk. Ask recently re-launched its search engine with enhanced maps which could account for these data. Maps & weather are indeed search terms driving traffic to travel sites.

In overall map searches, most popular destinations were:
Multimap 32.4%
Google maps 13.1%
Google UK maps 4.5%
Google Earth 4%
Ask.com UK maps 0.69%

Email services:
Hotmail 52.4%
Yahoo! Europe Mail 17.2%
Yahoo! Mail 6.3%
Windows Live Mail 2.4%
Gmail 2.2%

News & Media
Bbc.co.uk 15.8%
Yahoo! UK & Ireland 1.7%
Google UK News 1.5%
Yahoo news 0.8%
Conclusion is that Yahoo! is strong in finance and shopping while Google is best in search and maps.

Next is Ashley Friedlein who talks about marketing budgets. In 2005 in the UK, spending was 1.41 billion GBP of which 1.26 billion for paid search (67% growth) and only 147 million for organic search (50% growth).
The SEM context was:
83 million GBP for commissions in affiliate networks in 2005
148 million GBP in email marketing in 2005
60 million GBP in online advertising
46 million GBP in web analytics
120 to 140 million GBP in shopping comparison search

Several crucial factors play a role in the growth of SEO:

Better ROI!
- 70% of traffic comes from natural search listings
- improved tracking makes SEO-ROI more transparent and it is easier for executives to understand and measure the value of SEO
- SEO is being recognised as a very strategic tool
- SEO can easily be integrated with other marketing efforts
- PPC is used more tactically thanks to a combination with SEO
- there is more transparency around SEO, i.e. the “dark arts” reputation of SEO has somewhat faded.

PPC poses several challenges:
- concerns about click fraud
- there is a shortage of inventory in PPC
- last but not least: top rankings in natural results are becoming more important

There are several market trends resulting from this:
- a recruitment nightmare for everyone, good people these days are hard to find
- there is a tendency towards in-house SEO instead of outsourcing
- it is easier to add value with SEO:

online PR
- social media (custom tagging)
- new developments: e.g. Google Notebook and Google Base
- indexing maximisation (Google Sitemaps)

Finally, Massimo Burgio talks about a survey held among SEMPO members. Growth of search seems to be a positive note, while spam and blackhats receive a lot of criticism from Spanish members. Eastern European members find the low penetration of search in their market problematic. 90% of local search budgets are spent on PPC while SEO gets only 10%. Only Germany seems to have a solid awareness of the importance of SEO. In Italy and France, online PR budgets are growing. Operational issue addressed by members: get country specific domain names!

Technorati tags: ses - search engine strategies - search

I’ve been bad! I haven’t blogged in about three weeks but intend to better myself and become massively active! And I am starting by writing the third SEO for Newbies entry! In case you missed them, my previous SEO for Newbies entries were about choosing the right keywords for your site and SEO copywriting.

Now that we know how to write good site copy, we want all the quality content we have written to be easily found by search engines and humans.

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Lawsuits are flying in the search world, and there is no better way to get some press coverage (free link included ), hence loads of traffic you wouldn’t have received otherwise. Who had ever heard of KinderStart.com before they sued Google over rankings?

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Apparently, Google’s Webspam and Sitemaps teams are joining forces to notify webmasters of possible penalties for their web site if they believe the site in itself is legitimate and they are not dealing with a die-hard cheating spammer, in which case they won’t notify and just penalize and / or remove the site from their index.

technorati tags: webspam, seo

After Matt Cutts officially confirmed that Googlebot is being helped by the Adwords Mediabot for the Google Big Daddy index at PubCon in Boston last week, he has now posted further information on his blog about Google’s crawl caching proxy.

technorati tags: seo - google - googlebot - matt cutts - googlers

Now that we have determined which keywords we want to target, we are going to put them to good use. If you missed it, you can read my choosing keywords post first.

title tag
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First things first: when optimizing your site the first thing you should be doing is picking the keywords and keyword phrases that best represent the content of the web site you are trying to enhance. The best thing to do is pick 2 or 3 keyword phrases per page in your site. Let’s say you are an inn-keeper in London and are trying to optimize your business web site. Continue reading →

So what is SEO anyway?
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization and it consists in tailoring your site’s content, architecture, meta data and code so that it can easily be found and indexed by search engine crawlers such as Googlebot. It is done on the basis of carefully selected keywords and keyword phrases that are appropriate for the site’s content. Continue reading →