Australian web marketing blog

A new communication channel....

2011-03-03T15:59:00.005+11:00

After nearly 4 years and over 460 posts, we have decided to end this blog and provide news and updates on the web marketing sector through the following social media channels. This reflects the changing nature of the online market for communication and allows us to be more flexible in updating our clients and followers with the latest developments.

* Regular updates will continue to be posted through our main Twitter accounts:

- Web Marketing Workshop (latest developments in the web marketing field)
- Web Training Workshop (web search tips & advice, plus training courses)

* More detailed information will be posted on our Facebook pages:
- Web Marketing Workshop (news and trends)
- Web Search Workshop (search marketing advice and tips)
- Web Training Workshop (training course updates)

To receive these updates please Follow the appropriate Facebook pages.

* We will also post the occasional business updates through our LinkedIn business pages:
- Web Marketing Workshop
- Web Search Workshop
- Web Training Workshop

Thank you for reading and commenting on these blog posts over the past 4 years and we look forward to keeping you updated with all the important news and developments in the online marketing field, and with search engine marketing techniques.

Web marketing newsletter published for March

2011-03-01T15:34:00.002+11:00

The latest issue of our monthly Web Search & Marketing newsletter has been published for March.

This month's newsletter concludes a two-part look at Google Places and why this is an important feature for a business, particularly those targeting a local market. Following last month's review about claiming a listing, this issue covers the process of optimising a business listing and how to see the way that searchers view and act upon the listing.

This newsletter also covers 2 of the leading news stories from the search market in the past month - firstly, Google's accusation of Microsoft's cheating, and also the alleged black hat SEO techniques used by JC Penney in the US, which resulted in a Google ranking penalty.

If you want to sign up for future issues of this newsletter, please do so by using the form at the bottom of this page. To view back issues of this regular newsletter you can see the archive by date or by subject.

Google changes search algorithms

2011-02-25T16:59:00.001+11:00

Google's official blog has announced a notable change in the ranking algorithms being used by the search engine, which are initially being introduced on Google.com but will eventually affect all versions of Google search.

Google says that the latest change will impact 11.8% of their search queries and it is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites. These are sites which Google considers are low-value for users, such as those that copy content from other websites or sites that are just 'not very useful'. At the same time, Google says it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites, namely sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, 'thoughtful analysis and so on'.

This change is in response to growing criticism in recent months about the quality of the search results being presented by Google and the growth of 'content spam' to try to manipulate ranking positions. It remains to be seen how noticeable these changes are for most searchers and websites that generate visitor traffic from Google. However, this change is a restatement of Google's core principles and an adjustment to reflect what they hope are the best results for users.

Making websites mobile-friendly

2011-02-23T11:49:00.003+11:00

The Google Webmaster blog has posted some advice about making websites mobile friendly, in response to an increasing number of questions being posted by website owners and developers.

The blog explains the how the current mix of mobile phones can access the Internet, between traditional mobile phones (i.e. phones with browsers that cannot render normal desktop webpages) and the newer trend of 'Smartphones' (which are phones with browsers that render normal desktop pages, at least to some extent, such as Blackberry devices, iPhones and Android phones).

Google uses 2 types of search engine 'crawler' that are relevant to mobiles: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content. The blog post explains how to recognise and serve appropriate content to the Googlebot-Mobile.

Google says they expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content, so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters. However, for many websites it may still make sense for the content to be formatted differently for smartphones, and the decision to do so should be based on how website owners can best serve their users.

Most websites currently have only one version of their content, namely in HTML that is designed for desktop web browsers. This means all browsers access the content from the same URL. These websites may not be serving traditional mobile phone users and the quality experienced by their smartphone users depends on the mobile browser they are using and it could be as good as browsing from the desktop.

Microsoft updates PPC trademark guidelines

2011-02-17T10:17:00.002+11:00

Microsoft have emailed PPC advertisers to notify them of changes to their trademark policy in North America, and have also posted updates online. Microsoft says that 'to come in line with search industry practices' - i.e. Google - they will cease editorial investigations from 3rd March into complaints about trademarks used as keywords to trigger ads on Bing & Yahoo! Search in the United States and Canada.

This change removes the involvement of Microsoft from the practice of bidding against trademarked terms, and they now say that if there is concern that an advertiser may be using a trademark keyword inappropriately, the trademark owner should contact the advertiser directly.

Microsoft will still investigate complaints relating to alleged trademark violations in advert text, but will continue to allow fair use of trademarks in ad text. They say that advertisers are responsible for ensuring that their use of keywords and ad content, including trademarks and logos, does not infringe or violate the intellectual property rights of others.

JC Penney rankings expose "black hat" SEO techniques

2011-02-15T08:41:00.003+11:00

A lengthy article by the New York Times investigates the 'Dirty Little Secrets of Search', based on the recent experience of the JC Penney store in the US. It reports how the store's website came to dominate many searches for product items that they sell, even though they might not be the 'best fit' for the searcher.

An online marketing consultant was asked to investigate the issue and claimed that the 'black hat' techniques being used by JC Penney was 'the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen'. 'Black hat' optimisation describes the range of techniques that could be described as 'spamming' or methods that contravene Google's standards when targeting search engine rankings.

In this case, the JC Penney site has benefitted from some extensive link development tactics whereby their agency paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com. A spokeswoman for J. C. Penney, is quoted as saying: “J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies. We are working to have the links taken down.”

Matt Cutts at Google was shown the evidence and confirmed that the 'link farm' techniques being used violated Google's guidelines and that 'corrective action' was being taken. Apparently Cutts says that Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on 3 occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results but Google did not later “circle back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules. He and his team had missed this recent campaign of paid links, which he said had been up and running for the last three to four months.

JC Penney have since reacted to their recent reversal of ranking fortune by, among other things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex.

Google AdWords displays longer headlines

2011-02-09T08:26:00.004+11:00

The Google AdWords blog has announced a new test of the advert format so that longer headlines are appearing on some ads that appear above the search results on Google. For some ads where each line appears to be a distinct sentence and ends in the proper punctuation, the first description line is moved to the headline and separated by a hyphen. As a result, some top placement ads will have longer headlines.

Google says that in testing they have found that the longer headline results in higher clickthrough rate for those ads, as well as other top ads that appear beside them. Therefore they say it creates a better experience for users by highlighting more information in the ad (and of course more revenue for Google too!).

While only some ads will be shown with the longer headline, advertisers can now increase their chances of this happening by ensuring that each line of the ad appears to be a distinct sentence and ends in the proper punctuation (e.g., a period or a question mark).

Google accuses Microsoft of 'cheating'

2011-02-03T12:07:00.003+11:00

The surprising news of this week is the claim by Google that Microsoft has been 'cheating' by taking search results from Google to use on their Bing search engine. The story was first broken on Search Engine Land and has quickly developed into a war of words between the two leading search engines.

The articles reports that Google has recently run a sting operation against Bing that, it says, proves the Microsoft search engine has been watching what people search for on Google and the sites they select from Google’s results. They have then used that information to improve Bing’s own search listings.

Bing doesn’t deny this and say that use 'multiple signals and approaches' which seems to include tracking search activity through the Internet Explorer browser and the Bing toolbar. They accuse Google of manipulating their search results to identify one element of Bing's search criteria, and to time the exposure of the news to coincide with a Microsoft event to discuss the future of search.

This story is already generating much news and blog comment and is likely to run for some time as the two search giants exchange claims and counter-claims.

Web marketing newsletter published for February

2011-02-01T09:23:00.002+11:00

The latest issue of our monthly Web Search & Marketing newsletter has been published for February.

This month begins a two-part look at Google Places and why this is an important feature for a business, particularly those targeting a local market. This issue covers the process of claiming or adding a business listing, and the verification process, while next month will look at the optimisation of the listing to add information for users and search engines.

This month's newsletter also reviews two of the leading news stories from the search market in the past month - firstly, the introduction of Bing's search results on the Yahoo search engine, and also the surprise appointment of Google's co-founder, Larry Page, as the new CEO of the business.

If you want to sign up for future issues of this newsletter, please do so by using the form at the bottom of this page. To view back issues of this regular newsletter you can see the archive by date or by subject.

Google algorithm change targets content spam

2011-01-31T15:27:00.003+11:00

At the end of last week, Google's head of search quality Matt Cutts announced in his blog that the search engine has just implemented an algorithm change that is intended to "help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content."

The issue of 'content spam' and the increasing amount of this content that is 'clogging up' the search results has been rumbling on for some time and Google has been responsive to this criticism. Cutts says that the impact of the changes won't be that widely noticed with slightly over 2% of queries changing in some way, but that the net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

There has been some amount of discussion forum and blog comment over the past few days about these changes and the impact they are having, but for most sites it should be minimal, or if anything, a positive change that rewards original content.

Google and Sensis develop relationship

2011-01-27T09:03:00.002+11:00

As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, Google has further developed its business relationship with Sensis in Australia by signing up the Telstra arm as a keyword "reseller". This means that Sensis will be selling the AdWords pay-per-click service to its Yellow Pages customers and take a commission from Google.

As a result of the deal, Google gains access to this additional network and customer base, while Sensis maintains its reach by ensuring its customers' ads can be found when people are searching the web. The Yellow Pages service has been suffering in recent years and the most recent annual results have shown that revenue for Yellow and White Pages fell by 2.9% with revenue from the print edition down 6.9%. However, revenue from digital and mobile versions grew by 10 per cent, although this is a much smaller proportion of the overall revenues.

This new deal between Sensis and Google follows the agreement in 2008 for Yellow Pages business listings to appear in Google maps (Google Places). Google also powers Sensis's search engine as a search partner.

Larry Page to become Google's CEO

2011-01-21T09:31:00.003+11:00

In a surprise announcement at Google's 4th quarter earnings review, Larry Page is to take over as CEO at Google in place of Eric Schmidt. The BBC reports that co-founder Page will take over the role in April and Schmidt - who has been in the job for a decade - will become executive chairman with a focus on "deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships".

The news upstaged the earnings report, which showed that Google had a strong rise in net profits in the last three months of 2010, at US$2.54bn on revenues of US$8.44bn. The profit figure also compares well to the $1.97bn made in the same quarter the year before. Although there will be much speculation about the change, it appears that Google timed the potentially unstabling news to come out at the same time as the positive financial figures.

The BBC report says that, in corporate terms, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been 'grown-ups' for quite a while and now they are taking charge at the company that is rightfully theirs. Mr Schmidt said the management changes were part of a plan to "streamline" decision making and create clearer lines of responsibility and accountability.

Google adds Contextual Targeting Tool for display ads

2011-01-17T09:58:00.001+11:00

Google has announced the introduction of a Contextual Targeting Tool to help display advertisers select and reach customers more easily with the Google Display Network - part of the AdWords advertising service.

By using contextual targeting, advertisers can reach potential customers as they read webpages related to the products or services being sold and this new tool enables advertisers to create new contextually-targeted campaigns more easily and quickly. The tool automatically builds keyword lists that can be used to show ads on relevant webpages in the Google Display Network.

When planning and selecting lists of target keywords, the tool can help create new groups of terms more automatically and also provides suggested bids and predicted placements to give advertisers an idea of the types of sites in the Display Network where the ads can appear.

The Contextual Targeting Tool has previously been available to advertisers using AdWords Editor but this new launch means that all advertisers can now access it from the Opportunities tab in their AdWords account. However, advertisers will still need AdWords Editor to implement the new adgroups in their account for now but Google says that this requirement will be lifted soon and so that the new adgroups will also be added directly from the online AdWords account in the coming months.

Myspace cuts back workforce

2011-01-13T14:19:00.003+11:00

In a sign of the changing social networking landscape, the once market-leader and pioneering site Myspace has announced a significant reduction in its workforce by nearly 50%. The Wall Street Journal reports that Myspace has cut 500 of its more than 1,000 employees worldwide, as the site struggles to remain profitable in the shadow of Facebook.

Myspace notified staff of the cuts on Tuesday, as parent company News Corp. considers ways to make the social networking site more popular again. A recent relaunch positioned Myspace as an entertainment destination, to build on its traditional strengths as a music focused site, and the company claims that this has led to increased sign-ups and also stronger mobile usage.

However, since News Corp bought Myspace for $580 million in 2005 it has been overtaken in recent years by the rapid growth in Facebook usage, which has grown to more than 500 million members while Myspace's numbers have dwindled.

Yahoo7 to take Bing search results this month

2011-01-06T09:19:00.003+11:00

Yahoo7 in Australia has sent out an announcement regarding the integration of Microsoft's Bing search results, which has already taken place in the US at the end of 2010. In the email, Yahoo7 says:

"As you may know, we are working closely with Microsoft to implement our global search alliance. Now that we've transitioned Yahoo!'s organic and paid search technologies to Microsoft's platforms in the U.S. and Canada, we are ready to begin these transitions around the world as well.

In Australia, we expect to transition Yahoo!7's organic search results (the non-paid listings found on the main body of the page) to Microsoft during January 2011.

While no action is required on your part for the organic search transition, if organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website, you'll want to make sure that you're prepared for this change:

* Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo!7 Search and Bing for the keywords that drive your business, to help determine any potential impact to your traffic and sales
* Decide if you'd like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate
* Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Bing crawler, to help ensure your site is prominently listed in both Yahoo!7 and Bing organic search results.

For more specifics on the organic search transition, please read the Organic Search Transition FAQs."

The email also says that the transition of the paid search services to Microsoft technology is scheduled to take place in the second half of 2011. It is hoped that the new platform will be more user-friendly than the existing Yahoo! one, and that it will help to give advertisers a more effective alternative to just focusing on Google AdWords.

Web marketing newsletter published for January

2011-01-04T11:28:00.001+11:00

The latest issue of our monthly Web Search & Marketing newsletter has been published for January.

As usual with our first newsletter of the year, we try to predict some of the main trends that we expect for the online market over next 12 months, with a particular focus on the web search and marketing sector. We also review the predictions we made a year ago to see how they shaped up over the last 12 months.

The online sector continues to be an area of rapid growth and regular product development, with the landscape looking quite different now compared to 12 months ago. This past year saw new PPC advertising opportunities, with Google AdWords in particular introducing a new range of tools, reports and services. The merger between Microsoft and Yahoo search advanced, personalised search and Google Instant made a mark, and local search marketing options continued to improve. On the social media side, Facebook and Twitter continued to be signficant players and for 2011, more is expected to develop in the social networking and mobile marketing field.

If you want to sign up for future issues of this newsletter, please do so by using the form at the bottom of this page. To view back issues of this regular newsletter you can see the archive by date or by subject.

Season Greetings!

2010-12-24T10:32:00.002+11:00

Our office will be closed from midday today until Tuesday 4th January 2011.

We would like to wish all our customers, and readers of this blog, a very Happy Christmas and best wishes for 2011.

Online ad value now exceeds newspapers

2010-12-21T14:37:00.003+11:00

The Wall Street Journal has published a summary of new research in the US by eConsultancy which estimates that advertisers will have spent more on Internet ads than on print newspaper ads in the past year. Figures for US spending on online ads are expected to hit $25.8 billion, which is higher than the $22.8 billion spent on print ads in newspapers.

This change has been expected for some time as the gap was rapidly closed between the two types of advertising media and as the Internet became more maintstream. As the article says, the online platform provides many more options for news although newspaper publishers can't charge as much for ads online as they can in print. Therefore while the total audience for many newspapers may have grown in recent years, the publishers have been unable to stem revenue declines.

Other research mentioned by the article includes recent findings by Forrester Research which show that US consumers are now spending as much time online as they do watching television. But they aren't necessarily spending less time in front of their TVs, so the media that are seeing a declining share of usage are radio and print newspapers / magazines.

Twitter raises $200m funding

2010-12-16T14:20:00.002+11:00

The micro-blogging website Twitter is ending the year with a new round of funding, having raised $200m against a valuation of $3.7 billion. According to All Things Digital, the funding included the addition of 2 new board members and is a significant development for Twitter as it continues to upgrade its management and business model.

This new input of funding will help support Twitter's expansion plans and also indicates to bigger companies (such as Google) that it's not for sale!

In another article from Paid Content, which also reports on the Twitter funding, there is a summary of the main venture capital funding for online companies in 2010, including Yelp, LivingSocial and Groupon (which recently rejected a takeover bid from Google).

New enhancements in Google AdWords

2010-12-10T10:21:00.003+11:00

Google continues to develop new features for AdWords and has released a number of new enhancements this week.

Firstly, on Wednesday the AdWords blog announced some new additions to the Keyword Tool, based on feedback from users. The new tool hasn't been that well received since it was first introduced and compared to the previous version, but the new features are helping this to become a more valuable resource for advertisers.

There are some new filters added to the tool, including the option to choose specific terms to include or exclude from a keyword list. There is also a new ‘More like these’ button to search for terms that are similar to the specific keyword ideas that have been selected from the suggested list of terms. Users can also access results that include just the exact words or phrases (and their close synonyms) that have been entered in the search box.

Several other new features include adding 'stars' to keywords that users may want to save while still searching for new keyword ideas. There is also the option to view the selected keywords in text form, so that users can easily edit them and paste them in a spreadsheet or AdWords Editor.

The second announcement this week was for some new options in the Opportunities tab which include:
* First page CPC ideas - to help users adjust bids so that ads have a better chance of appearing on the first page of search results.
* More robust statistics for keyword ideas - the broad estimates for suggested new keywords have now been improved to show estimates for impressions, cost, and clicks whenever these statistics are available.
* Bid ideas for ad groups - bid ideas can now be found at the ad group level in addition to the keyword level.
* Exporting ideas - if there are a lot of ideas being listed, users can now export these to a .csv file to allow review and editing.

Automated Rules for Google AdWords

2010-12-08T14:54:00.002+11:00

Google has announced the introduction of a new 'automated rules' feature in AdWords, so that advertisers can set up specific requirements to be adjusted depending on campaign performance. This new addition to the available tools for advertisers allows users to create rules to automate bid, budget, and status changes on a specific part of an AdWords account (such as selected keywords, ad groups, campaigns, and ads) that are triggered at a particular time.

For example, Google provides some examples of when automated rules could be set up to perform the following tasks:
* Enable ads promoting a special offer late on a Sunday night when the offer goes live
* Automatically raise the bids to the first page CPC for all keywords in a campaign that contain the word ‘sale’
* Generate more traffic on peak shopping days by automatically increasing the daily budget on Mondays and decreasing it on Wednesdays

This last function has been something that's been required for some time and will enable more flexibility in managing campaigns and adjusting settings to suit the market or business requirements.

As usual with the introduction of significant new features, the automated rules are only available to US advertisers at the moment but are expected to be gradually rolled out over the coming months to other countries.

Skipping Ads on YouTube

2010-12-06T11:15:00.002+11:00

As reported by Information Week, YouTube has launched a new service, called TrueView, which allows users to select an ad-skipping button in the first 5 seconds and then only charges advertisers for viewed ads.

The Google-owned YouTube site added the service last week and aims to reduce the frustration of users who don't want to be disrupted by ads, and to reduce the cost to advertisers to that they only pay for the adverts that are shown. The ad-skipping button has to be pressed within the first 5 seconds to be effective and also the advertiser will choose whether to offer the option. It will also improve the creativity of advertisers to get users to wait beyond the first 5 seconds.

The advertiser will also learn more about who is watching their ads, with access to demographic and other information that YouTube gathers on users. YouTube will charge advertisers only when a viewer has watched the full ad or the first 30 seconds, whichever is shorter. During the beta testing phase, YouTube found view-through rates of 20% to 70% (the measure of how many viewers opt-in to watch an ad, which is a strong indicator of the ads effectiveness).

YouTube is making the TrueView available in the United States and Canada initially but plans to make it available in other countries in the future. For now, advertisers have to contact a YouTube representative to buy the new format. The site plans to eventually offer it as a self-service option.

Web marketing newsletter published for December

2010-12-01T09:16:00.002+11:00

The latest issue of our monthly Web Search & Marketing newsletter has been published for December.

Following on from last month's issue which looked at 10 common questions about website analytics, this month's issue focuses on Social Media Marketing and how this can be used to improve the marketing of a business website. It lists the 10 most common questions that have been asked about Social Media Marketing, including marketing on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

If you want to sign up for future issues of this newsletter, please do so by using the form at the bottom of this page. To view back issues of this regular newsletter you can see the archive by date or by subject.

Walled gardens on the web

2010-11-25T15:39:00.004+11:00

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has published an article in Scientific American that calls for continued open standards and net neutrality to protect the web as it was originally intended. This marks the 20th anniversary of the WWW next month, when the first website and browser was tested by Berners-Lee, to use the structure of the Internet in a use-friendly manner to exchange information.

The Web has now evolved into a tool that is taken for granted. However, Berners-Lee is concerned that the future of the Web is being threatened in different ways. In particular, he identifies large social-networking sites, such as Facebook, that are walling off information posted by users from the rest of the Web. He also cites wireless Internet providers who are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. And Governments that are monitoring people’s online habits and endangering important human rights.

He says that if these trends continue unchecked, then the Web could be broken into fragmented islands and users would lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites they want. He also asks why should you care? The answer is that the Web was created for public use and remains a powerful public resource on which everyone now depends. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation.

It's an intriguing and thought-provoking article from the man who started it all, and who remains protective of the ideals of the Web, reminding users that after the first 20 years there remain challenges and threats to the future development of this medium.

Google launches Hotpot

2010-11-16T16:25:00.002+11:00

Google has launched a new service called Hotpot, which is described as a local recommendation engine powered by users. This social recommendation tool will contribute information to local search results for places on Google, making the information more personal, relevant and trustworthy within a social group.

By using Google Places as the base information, logged in users will be able to rate places and see information about other similar rated locations. This rating information can then be shared with friends and, in return, users can also see the places their friends have recommended. To accompany this service, Google has created a Hotpot rating app that allows users to quickly rate all the places they’ve been to and choose exactly which friends they want to invite to Hotpot.

As a logged in Google account user, people can see recommendations in search results, or recommended places by using the new Place Search and clicking on the “Places” filter. Users can also see recommendations when searching on Google Maps, Google Maps for Android or when checking the Place pages for a specific business.