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.

For most companies online the introduction of real time search is big news. For any organisation that works with time critical information – travel, news, weather, etail, market data, plus anyone who focuses on local search – this is beyond big. This is potentially monstrous. It’s a deal that offers powerful new ways to share dynamic information with your potential audience and a strong competitive differentiation and powerful SEO tool if applied well.

The problem facing the search engines as ever is how to evaluate the worth and the relevance of any information that they are assessing. How do they aggregate the vast amounts of data (in this case Tweets) in ways that are useful to their users?

Yusuf Mehdi, senior VP of the Online Audience Business Group at Microsoft, has drawn attention to a number of criteria that Bing looks to. Bing creates a “social relevance” score based on the quality tweets as well as the popularity of the tweeter. ‘Cornflakes for breakfast’ tweeted by the Barry Jones from Trowbridge carrying far less weight that ‘Go watch The Cove it’s great’ by Mark Kermode. Mehdi says that Bing then run the tweet through spam and obscenity filtration to determine a final result. Doubtless there will be many other criteria drawn upon – trends, memes or the authority of tweeted links.

There’s a long, long way to go and much to be revealed real time search wise – the SEO jury is well and truly out at the moment. Even SEO primemovers such as Rand Fishkin of seoMOZ Peter De Vanzo of SEOBook and Adam Bunn of Greenlight are not completely clear as to how the new deals will play out.

As Twitter might say ‘Twatch this space’.

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.

The problem for such sites is that it is text that the engines crave. It’s text that determines relevance and can deliver your competitive advantage through high rankings and better search positioning. It’s also text that will convert your visitors. What can you do if your site is heavily image based? How can you best SEO your site to give it a chance?

Here are some tips that might help you achieve healthy search engine positioning even if your site is graphic heavy.

• Always apply keyword descriptions to images. Informative AND optimised descriptions contribute very effectively to positioning.

• Use every opportunity to make your copy count. Side bars, about us pages, copy ‘below the fold’ (copy not instantly visible to human visitors) and contact pages all offer useful opportunities for you to deliver your strategic keywords.

Use as much off site SEO as possible through articles, social media and press releases to drive inbound links to your graphic-dominated pages.

Make sure you talk to your SEO or online marketing partner to achieve maximum web profile.

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.

Google offers a powerful SEO (search engine optimisation) services ‘Google Business Listings’ that you should integrate into your wider SEO strategy and a local business listing will see you riding high. Whilst shifting established, well linked, authoritative and highly ranked sites from the top of the search engines of popular terms may prove nigh on impossible, a combination of keyword and location can quickly reward your site with first page local returns that contextualise the way that people find you. Moving away from wide-open, hyper-competitive, generic searches you’re also making the smart marketing move of getting inside your audience’s head to identify what they really want – a local answer to their purchasing requirement, for example, a restaurant, electrician, plumber etc.

Not only are your business details listed, you can show product details, menus, pricing, images, reviews, maps, directions, opening times, contact details, any marketing information you want and even include links to your website. All this information is accessible right at the top of the search returns – it’s like having a top-placed online brochure.

Note that the performance of your Local Business Listing is related to the SEO applied website. Well-applied SEO will benefit your listings and give that all-important competitive edge, especially in crowded market places. The search term ‘Marketing London’ for example returns 74,371 listings, ‘SEO Devon’ 924. Complete your submission wisely and understand that as a component of your overall SEO it needs to perform exactly the same task – to rank your site on the first page. Talk to your SEO or web marketing team who will be able to advise you on how to make the most of local search.
(Bing and Yahoo also run their own versions and are well worth pursuing too.)

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.

Others are quick to leap to the defence of email citing the real time speed and volume of new social media channels as the very reason that email is and will continue to be valued so highly. Email they argue allows us to filter, to control and manage our relationship with the information that surrounds us. It enables us to take a step back, to measure the input and respond with consideration. Just because the growth in the adoption of email is slower than that of social media doesn’t mean that it should be condemned as old hat. Email has an extremely important role to play for web users.

Does your website offer an email subscription option? A new blog post alert for example? It should. Despite the rise of RSS and plug-ins such as Twitterfeed that will respond to a new blog post with a Tweet often people like to manage their subscriptions through email. Without 24/7 access to the Internet there’s a very real possibility you could miss important information as Tweets and posts pass you by. Email subscriptions allow people to aggregate the information they opt to receive in manageable ways.

Are you building email lists through your website? Offering blog updates, free products, exclusive information and added value – content marketing through email subscriptions? If not you should seriously consider it.

Back in April this year, Yahoo! made their Web Analytics tool free to search and display advertisers supported by a Yahoo! account team. I am sure we will see Yahoo!’s analytics package come to gain a decent market share of the analytics market.

Analytics packages allow you to see how well, good or bad, your website is performing; who your real audience is (you may be surprised at what you find compared to your offline audience or educated guesses) , and how well you are converting visitors to customers/enquirers. To have a website that you rely on for brand exposure or more importantly income that does not have some sort of analytical data reporting (that is easy to decipher) is a huge problem for any business. How can anyone know their websites true ROI (return on investment) if they don’t measure its performance in some way? If the website is non transactional then just tracking how many enquiries or brochures are requested via the site will allow you to actually “see” how your website is working for you, and establish if it can work harder.

Having a website without analytics is equivalent to having a high street shop, sitting in the back office during its busier times and only coming to the shop floor to empty the till during quieter times! How many of you would run a business like this, not knowing who has entered your store and actually bought anything?

The analytics over time will help you establish if your business is “seasonal”; this is possible in the online marketplace. The traffic, conversions and sales data will provide proof as to whether your website needs work with regards to your “call to actions”. A call to action can be requests such as “click here to order a brochure” or “read more” or “buy now…”.

If your website is performing poorly then you should look to hire professionals to optimise your website in several ways: better calls to action = more enquiries/sales, better site structure = visitors should stay on your site for longer, better keyword density = your website pages gaining higher positions in the search results which will mean an increase in traffic numbers.

If you haven’t got an analytics package on your website as you read this, then I urge you to set one up. When ever we gain a new client, if they don’t have analytics set up, we set one up for them immediately. There are many free analytics, such as Google & Yahoo!, that are very good so cost is not an issue. Once you have several months worth of data you will be able to see how your website is performing. If it isn’t performing as you would like then at least get an expert opinion. By getting the opinion of someone who is search savvy you will at least get an idea as to whether there is real scope for improvement in your websites performance, or if your expectations may be off the mark due to market sector you operate in. Either way knowing the answer to the question gives you one less thing to worry about, and the chance to make an informed decision on the future use of your website and how to work towards it working harder for you.

With global advertising expenditure expected to fall 9.8% this year, according to Media agency giant Carat (that’s up from earlier predictions of a 5.8% fall) you might even argue that a 5.3% drop represents a form of resilience. Figures for overall advertising declines in the UK and Western Europe are worse than the global drop with a projected decline of 16.3% and 11% respectively. On the bright side of their research, Carat believe that Internet advertising spends will rise 1% this year, globally although that’s compared to whopping 16.4% growth last year.

While we’re on the matter of online ad spends and trends comScore and Starcom USA claim in new research that only half the number of US internet users now click on display ads.

So what do all these statistics tell us? What are the conclusions to be drawn?

Well the figures tell us that companies are watching their media spends like hawks, reluctant to invest in anything that can’t offer top dollar returns, value for money and they are driving down prices accordingly to cut costs. Consequently, offline ad marketing is suffering major trauma. Terminal trauma for many printed and TV brands.

Online marketing though not doing as well as it was is bearing up relatively well – largely due to it’s core strengths of being highly targetable, flexible and measurable plus the fact that more and more people spend more and more time online as they turn away from traditional media.

That clickthroughs on display ads are falling reveals the importance of other digital marketing techniques, SEO (search engine optimisation) that offers organic profile, SMM (social media marketing) that builds online audiences and PPC (pay per click) as companies apply packages of online PR/SEO to fulfil their business objectives.

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.

Despite huge falls in the price of advertising off line, both in printed media and TV as media companies have battled to retain clients during the economic downturn the picture is clear. Internet marketing is now more valued and more important than ever. What everyone wants is maximum bang for their marketing buck and it seems clear that SEO, PPC (pay per click), SMM (social media marketing) and other ways that organisations can reach and connect with their audiences are quickly starting to turn the screw on more traditional ‘broadcast’ types channels to market.

Manna From Heaven

The flexibility, the measurability and the proximity offered by new digital Internet marketing is manna from heaven for companies struggling in the face of economic uncertainty to build their audiences and boot their bottom lines. The name of the game as with everything is value for money. What the numbers reveal in spades is that now digital marketing is the go to option when it comes to sharing your messages and making your proposition count.

The only way to take full advantage of the new opportunities on offer in the shift from broadcast marketing to interactive relationships is to make sure your company is suitably web-enabled. Your SEO, in addition to simply working to achieve high search engine positioning through the traditional ‘on page’ efforts such as meta tags now must integrate a whole selection on online PR and marketing threads to present one strong and successful Internet profile. Are you realising your potential?

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?

Often you will notice the terms companies use to claim high placements aren’t necessarily particularly competitive terms within their industry at all. Yes, the search engines do act as assessments of a site’s relevance – BUT only against specific search terms. If you’re an SEO or Internet Marketing specialist then first page Google or Bing for the terms ‘SEO’ or ‘search engine optimisation,’ ‘web marketing’ or ‘Internet marketing’ would be great news. You would be reaching exactly the sort of audience you want on highly competitive terms.

Conversely, what’s the point to an SEO company in having a Google top 10 on the terms that can’t genuinely help their business? Would being number one for “carp fishing” or “jam making” really do you any favours? What’s the point in visitors bouncing after 5 seconds because your site doesn’t meet their needs? All you have achieved through badly deployed, ill-focused SEO is to interrupt the browsing of people most unlikely to be interested in who you are or what you do.

When it comes to business profitability and ROI, an unhealthy concern for hitting the top of the search engines might not actually be in your best business interests. Yes, of course high search engine positioning puts you in front of many more people than if your site was languishing on page 14, and yes, being ignored is hell (it’s also highly unprofitable). The question you need to ask yourself, when considering all these new ‘eyeballs’ is, ‘are these the sort of visitors, that I want to visit my site?’ In other words, are you reaching your target audience? Are these the kind of visitors who are interested in what you have to say and in what you have to sell?

Focus your energy on people who do care – your target audience. Be creative in your keyword selection, focus on landing pages and go for long tail terms by deploying a wider, shallower semantic net.

Traffic is vanity – conversions are sanity

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 – it’s Microsoft’s massively lucrative wheel of fortune. Firefox over recent years and now Google in particular, with their Chrome browser look set to challenge Microsoft’s dominance. A new browser era is dawning.

In a radical departure from traditional business practice, Google instead of charging computer manufacturers to bundle the browser are actually paying them to include it. In doing so they are banking on achieving a foothold, a user base – the additional revenue generated through their search facilities more than able to compensate for the initial outlay. Perhaps more radically still Chrome threatens more than simply Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, it challenges the Windows operating system itself and Microsoft’s vice-like grip on the whole computer industry as people seek to take their processing remotely. Chrome might well be the first wave of cloud computing interfaces and in the perfect position to take Microsoft’s market from under their noses. No wonder the battle lines have been drawn; not just for browsers, but operating systems and office productivity – I.T’s sacred cash cows.

What are the implications for your SEO and your online marketing other than better products, more opportunity and better prices? Here are a couple of possible impacts on SEO:

• Google retains data. Focus on your brand for instant partial matching and address bar (Omnibox) search completion.
• The more your brand is searched the more it will show up when people search for broader related brands.
• Awareness advertising, website interactivity, and consumer generated content all become more important.
• Social media driven web references and citations will matter more.

Oops.

With the launch of Microsoft’s new semantically based search system Bing (not quite as romantic a name as the beta version Kumo – Japanese for cloud or sea), Gates in hoping to make up lost ground and establish Microsoft alongside Google as a search giant.

The big SEO question on the lips of SEO professionals and clients alike is how might the introduction of Bing influence your SEO (search engine optimisation)?

With Google so far ahead of the competition and currently handling around 70% of internet searches in the U.S and 65% of global searches on any given day, does Bing even matter when it comes to SEO?

Well any serious SEO company will have an eye firmly on Bing AND Yahoo because now, in effect, they are one and the same. Over the next few months it is reported that the new technology used for Bing will start to migrate over to Yahoo search. Though their combined presence amounts to somewhere in the region of only 20% of the total search market in most Western countries the Bing/Yahoo marriage represents the only serious threat to Google’s dominance and plenty of solid marketing opportunities to those skilled enough to take advantage of their search technology.

Launched with a major marketing bang, Bing has already picked up enough positive reviews and a large enough following to start posing serious questions of Google. What must also be encouraging for Microsoft is that at last they seem to have established a bridgehead from which to have a chance of taking on Google. High profile launches of other search engines such as Cuil and Wolfram Alpha saw them both lose share rapidly after the initial buzz. Bing though is on the rise.
It’s early days but initial investigation already reveals a couple of areas that may influence your SEO in the future. Research suggests that Bing may be more meta data oriented than Google, offering more diverse page results and be less focused on exact terms. In comparison Google appears more social media friendly with an emphasis on fresher content.

There’s all to play for, and the search algorithms will inevitably evolve over time. Make sure that your SEO is up to date on all the latest twist and turns in this fascinating search war.