Oh My God! Search is Changing Forever! SEO is Doomed! Run for the Hills!

I saw an article by Aida Edemarian in the Guardian Saturday 6th December on the subject of search engine optimisation and the dark arts of the blogger.

"Can some artfully placed keywords attract billions of bloggers and instant fame? Not any more, say the experts. The dark arts of the web have grown more subtle, and new media are not so different after all"

It reminded me of a recent blog by randfish at SEOmozBlog.

"With the release of their new yippdy goobledy wobbledy, Google has changed the search game forever. Forget classic SEO, from now on, it's going to be all about blah blah blah"

But the name of the game is still the following:

It's not that Google's other shifts haven't had an impact on SEO, it's just that they haven't been earth-shattering or groundbreaking or given us new paradigms to conquer. SEO remains, at its core, remarkably similar to what it was in 2002:

-Make pages accessible
-Target with keywords that searchers employ
-Build content that users will find useful and valuable
-Earn editorial links from good sources

It's just common sense - nothing much has changed. Research your keywords and write relevant content - its good journalistic practice to include keywords in titles, headings, image labels etc.

But what most organisations forget is the measure the success of your SEO campaign using web analytics. Not only will web analytics tell you how much traffic you are getting from search engines and individual keywords but it will also give you information on bounce rates. Bounce rate may or may not be part of Google's algorithm but they sure are a great way of establishing whether users are finding your content interesting and are a proxy for landing page quality. If your bounce rates are high for specific keywords - you need to look at your content in all the usual places: page titles, headings, body text, images, images tags, anchor text. If you're running an SEO campaign get yourself an web anlaytics expert.

Great Online Tools October 2008

Here are just some of the great tools we've discovered at JU2 this month.

First up EventBrite which is an excellent tool for organising, managing and promoting events. Its easy to integrate into your website and can even handle the financial side of things for a small percentage.

Next up Powwow Now which is a free conference call provider who give you a personal conference call number that is yours for ever. This number is availabe for you to use at any time. They even send out a handy credit card sized reminder to put it your wallet.

Also take a look at Drop Send which is a handy little tool to share or move large files across the internet. Its free and allows you to upload files to a directory structure and subseqently share, send or download.

My favourite this month must be Conduit who enable you to create and share a fully branded browser toolbar. Take a look at the JU2 Web Analytics Toolbar or click on the download button below.

Last up is SheerSEO which is a great little tool for tracking your search engine rankings. You shouldn't be embarking on any search engine optimisation campaign without the ability to track rankings over time. Well thats all from JU2 this month we'll be back soon.

Nielsen Online: Nov. 2007 Search Stats See Google On Top

According to Nielsen Online, formerly Nielsen NetRatings in November 2007, Google is leading the pack, (no surprise there) followed by Yahoo and Microsoft. You'll find the press release here (PDF format), showing the top ten most popular services. Here are the top five:

• Google: 57.7%
• Yahoo: 17.9%
• Microsoft: 12.0%
• AOL: 4.5%
• Ask: 2.7%
  

The figures above are the percentage of all US searches handled by the leading search engines.