The Twitter story just keeps going from strength to strength, its popularity and industry influence gaining all the time. Until recently the big question was how the company would monetise. How would it turn profile, popularity and adoption into cash?

The numbers, both terms of users (Twitter just hit 58 million users worldwide) and in venture capital pumped into the company have been growing rapidly. After Twitter’s recent $1 billion valuation and having raised a total of $55 million so far in private venture capital, with a further $50 lined up, the company has gone a long way to justifying the optimism – it has got into bed with Microsoft AND Google. In the process, as well as securing its future – a future now predicted to be long term, highly influential and highly profitable – Twitter has shaken up the search industry by introducing the concept of real time search to the masses. Read the rest of this entry »

Content is king without doubt. Well-written, interesting and topical copy will act as a powerful search engine signpost, winning both high search engine placements and traffic. SEO (search engine optimisation) copywriting makes a huge difference to online success.

But what if your site isn’t particularly copy based? Not all websites are bursting with copy. Many sites employ extensive graphics and images to represent their core messages and some website owners simply don’t want to compromise the aesthetic with acres of copy. It’s a fact of web life that some sites will produce better results by using more graphics than words, for example, sites for graphic designers or photographers, illustrators or companies that deal in stock images. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you using your website to let your local audience know about your products and services?
Do you focus enough attention on potential customers looking for companies just like yours in your area?
When was the last time you used Yellow Pages?

Now 76% of UK adult Internet users find out about local services online – are they finding out about yours?

As a ‘local’ business you have a big advantage over other out of town competitors – big corporations and internationals. In their quest for relevance, Google is quick to identify that a search for a local business should offer users what they are looking for: a local solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Whilst email usage continues to grow, social media adoption is growing faster. According to Nielsen in August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, that’s up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. The number of users on social-networking and other community sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo and Twitter jumped 31% to 301.5 million people during the same time.

Some say this represents the end of the line for email, that it’s a passive technology, old fashioned and doomed to extinction as people now become used to and expect a ‘real time’ web. They say that much in the same way that email replaced ’snail mail’ physical post and mobile phone communication has to a large extent replaced land lines, now social media, permanently connected ‘live’ web access, the evolution of life streams that are rapidly turning into rivers of shared information will render email irrelevant, too slow, clumsy, too unresponsive. Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent report from Econsultancy and Lynchpin Analytics, 88% of companies are using Google Analytics to track the performance of their websites, compared to 66% last year. The survey of 800 predominantly UK-based companies found 23% were using Google’s free tool exclusively, compared to 14% a year ago, while 57% were using it in conjunction with another analytics platform. Excluding Google Analytics, Omniture was the most commonly used web analytics package with a 42% market share, followed by WebTrends. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an interesting fact straight off the interesting fact press. New statistics from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers claim that US Internet advertising revenues are down 5.3% from the same period last year. Not insubstantial at $10.9 billion for the first half of this year, the fact that the numbers are down at all in light of the dramatic drop in ad spending offline is somewhat of a surprise. A break down of the figures reveals that search makes up 47% of these revenues, followed by display/banner ads (22%), and classifieds (10%). Rich media and lead generation both contribute 7%. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official – figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau recently reveal that spending on online advertising is now larger than spending on TV advertising. Few in SEO (search engine optimisation), web marketing and digital marketing agencies would express even the slightest surprise – all will tell you it was just a case of when not if.

Online advertising now has a 23.5% share of the UK advertising market in the first half of 2009, compared to 21.9% for TV according to the study carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Advertising Research Centres. Online advertising grew 4.6% during that period. Paid search made up 59.8% of online ad spend. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone loves the idea of being number one, to be ‘top of the charts’, to be looked up to. In today’s ultra competitive market place, where you’re now having to battle on a global basis, organisations will invest huge amounts of time and energy on SEO – on competing their way to the top of the search engines.

Maybe you enjoy being top 3 on Google, number one on Bing, or first page of Yahoo. That’s great. Ask yourself though – and answer honestly – are the keywords related to your successes really winning you good quality traffic? Is this real success? Read the rest of this entry »

Do you use Google Chrome? Most people don’t (we’re talking less than 10%). Why should they? Yet. Few web users even look further than their pre-installed browser as their Internet interface. It’s historically been the Technorati, the aficionados, the web-heads who’ve felt the need to get promiscuous with their browsers, to seek the thrill of Firefox, the opulence of Opera or the cutting edge offer by Google Chrome.

Times are changing though and Microsoft’s ‘critical mass’ dominance of the browser market is under threat. What’s happened until now is that PC manufacturers have paid for the privilege of installing the ever so popular Internet Explorer onto their machines and thereby perpetuate its popularity Read the rest of this entry »

Do you follow the SEO and Internet marketing news? If you keep an ear to the SEO ground then likely you will be aware of the fact that Bill Gates feels Microsoft missed a trick when it came to search. Gates has publicly admitted that the failure of Microsoft to acknowledge the potential of the Internet search market was one of the company’s biggest strategic errors.

Oops.

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