Search Engine Optimisation - 80/20 rule

Wow, first few months of setting the new company up have been busy – am making time for my blog postings by writing them whilst on the train in the morning. Just not finding time during the working day!

Was discussing search engine optimisation with a potential new client the other day and was amazed that there are still loads of agencies and consultants out there who still position search engine optimisation as a ‘black art’. Having played in this space for the past 4 years I would not call myself an expert but have found that the usual 80/20 rule applies to search engine optimisation as it does to most things in life. Just a few key things drive 80% of the impact and if companies focus on these few items and do them well, then they will see major improvements in their natural search engine ranking.

Although each search engine has its own algorithm in determining natural search rankings and is a closely guarded secret, there are 3 high impact areas to focus on for Google and Yahoo that will help improve a company’s search engine ranking.

For Google these are:

1. Page Title
2. Page Rank
3. Page Reputation (back-links)

And for Yahoo:

1. Page Title
2. Link popularity
3. Keyword density

Over the next few weeks I will post some of my top tips for writing better page titles, how to improve page rank and building a great page reputation. Search engine optimisation success for us has been to follow some founding principles and continuously tweak and test different ideas. Would be great to hear from anyone on their experiences / issues on search engine optimisation.

Always happy to discuss, share my experiences and try to help anyone. So please post your comments or thoughts - or get in touch with Mark or myself @ klickdigital

Microsoft Bing has arrived

Well Microsoft’s Bing is finally here! And is it going to be Microsoft’s challenge to beat Google in the search arena.

Here are my thoughts after using Bing for most of the day:

Visual
I really like the look of the Bing homepage. It has pleasant wallpapers that are easy on the eye and they also change daily, some users may, or may not like this and see it as unnecessary.

Search
Forget about all the frills - the most important part of any search engine is the results that are returned to a user. With Bing, when you type in a keyword you not only get your results down the centre of the page but on the left hand side you also receive “Related Searches” similar go Google, but I think that they are more accessible. And as for the results that are returned, it does seem to come up with what I was actually searching for – so far.

What I really liked about the search results is the “Also On This Page” feature - which displays information in a subtle pop-up when you hover over the thin line, it brings up a description and further links within the page – a really nice touch.


Images
Bing also has the usual Image and Video search functions etc. But what really is cool is that you are able to personalise your image search by choosing from categories such as Size, Layout, Colour, Style and people. Also, if you click on an image it opens up the image and it also it shows rest of the images in a preview pane on the left hand side, which makes life a little easier rather than going back and searching through again.

Videos
A Nice touch on the videos is when you hover over a video it previews it – so no need to open up the whole video. Again, with videos you can choose from options Video Length, Screen size, Resolution and Source, which is excellent, to filter out the videos.

Overall
Bing is not going to conquer the search market straight away, but in the future who knows. It really is a great start and will no doubt extending on the already great features. Microsoft still has work to do, but is heading in the right direction with Bing.

Personally - I’m not yet confident to make that permanent switch from Google, but I will be using Bing.

Google Wave

In my eyes Google never fail to come out with something special. With the imminent launch of Microsoft’s Bing - Google go and announce Wave which is due for launch later this year.

So what is Google Wave? Well to quickly sum it up, it’s a real-time communication platform. It cleverly unites all aspects of email, instant messaging, social networking, wikis, chat and project management into one browser communication client.

Just a few of the benefits Google Wave:

• You have the ability to respond to a certain sentence within an e-mail or ‘wave’, not just the standard reply to the e-mail itself.
• Real-time instant messaging conversations - you will no longer see the ‘your friend is typing’ message, you see characters on your screen as they are being typed.
• Easily drag and drop files directly into Wave and upload them ready for download from other Wave friends or work colleagues.
• Real-time interaction with your blog – upload text and photographs to your wave and they will instantly appear on your blog
  

If you want to be notified when it is first released and receive further news, you can do an early sign up, and also watch their 1.1/2 hr developer preview at Google I/O below:



Google Wave wants to change the way we use email and communicate by making it completely dynamic (real-time). The tag line is “What would email look like if it were invented today?” I would not be at all surprised if Google Wave revolutionises the way people and companies communicate with each other. I’m really looking forward to this one.