I often receive requests to diagnose and prescribe solutions to remedy the poor showing of a corporate website in search engine results.  The causes of below average rankings are usually easy to discern and appear deceptively simple to fix. As I explain the ‘how’, a row of bright-eyed executives lean forward in anticipation.  Executive responses are usually punctuated by exclamations of enthusiasm and promises of buy-in. Article marketing! Blogging on a daily basis! Tweeting like crazy! Yeah, where can we start!! Let’s go!!  Go where? Nowhere that’s where.  The Cost Is Work  Today the task of raising awareness of a Website within a competitive niche is significant and comes with a high cost in terms of both labour and time.  Sadly the Web/search/marketing consultant can no longer manage the entire workload responsibilities alone.  The relatively simple task of directory submissions and plugging in of keywords to optimise web pages can no longer suffice.& ...

Bigger is Better for Google Search Bar In an update to the Google Search Bar, Google has enlarged the text size of the search items we type in as well as the sizes of the Search buttons. So if you think that maybe you have sipped one too many, this time you can relax, because it really has grown bigger. In most cased the growing bigger part is an unwanted consequence of excess, appearing ny surprise in the batrhroom mirror, however according to Google, this upsize was intentional... As Marissa Mayer Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience says: "For us, search has always been our focus. And, starting today, you’ll notice on our homepage and on our search results pages, our search box is growing in size. Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we’re excited about it — because it symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use" The grahic below shows the difference in sizes.      ...

The Environmental Working Group - an organization that studies the health implications of using cell phones has recently published a list of all major cell phones and the exact amount of radiation that each phone produces. The study of course ranks the Worst Ten phones - that produce the most amount of radiation. The list is available here: Environmental Working Group Radiation List all Phones. However an even more practical list coming out of the EWG is a short list of Eight Safety tips that any cell phone user can follow to reduce exposure to the radiation emitted by all cell phones. Here they are in summary - but please click here to visit their web site and read the Safety Tips for yourself.  Buy a low radiation phone Use a headset or a speaker Listen More - Your phone only emits radiation when you talk Hold phone away from your body when possible Text more - Talk less - texting uses less power and the phone is away from your head when you text Don' ...

A Google Labs experiment called Fast Flip which is accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com represents a move by Google to provide a news magazine like experience. This allows a reader to literally flip thru the news articles in a given category. This allows you to quickly glance at a number of publications sequentially and to pick out content that interests you. There is also a personalization element where Fast Flip will try to present content for you based on your previous selections. Fast Flip will try to guess your preferred content by topics, news sources as well as writers that you show a preference for. Show Me The Money Naturally for Google to do this kind of product there has to be some context based Ad revenue somewhere in the mix! What happens is the Google partners with the publishers of the news feeds, in order to publish their content to the Fast Flip stream. In return the publishers receive a portion of the context based ads that get shown alongside the content. Publ ...

Spurred on by the announcement today of the purchase of reCAPTCHA by Google, I did some belated research on how CAPTCHA works. < Frankly I was amazed at how smart it is. It not only stops spammers but at the same time it helps to digitize old books which at the moment can only be stored as pictures. (A picture cannot be searched or cut and pasted!) Amazed? Read on and you will be glad you did! Above is an example of a CAPTCHA form.  We all know what CAPTCHA is, even if we didn’t know its name. An estimated 200 Million CAPTHCA forms are filled in each day by internet users. Its primary goal is to prevent the filling in of online forms by nasty BOTS. The idea being that an automated BOT will be unable to recognise and decode the murky letters presented by a CAPTCHA form, while a human will usually be able to decode the words. Usually that is, ...

As some will probably know I have a conviction that Bing search engine capabilities are not quite in the same league as Google's. In fact I believe that Bing is far behind in some areas. One such area is the decoding of search phrases into meaningful words and somehow guessing the intent of the human searcher. Google IS Search and it often does an uncanny job of decoding the intent of the searcher, while at the moment Bing does a good job of pretending to do search. I know (or hope) that this will change as the Bing engine gets better in the future, but at the moment, that is what my tests tell me. (You can see my original Bing vs Google article here: Bing Bong your Rankings Gone). In the article, I said that Bing search sucks and maybe that was a bit harsh but looking at the example below makes me clench my jaw with frustration. Sense to Google can be Nonsense to Bing I was looking for a website with info on South African Sectional Title Law (a site that we built BTW). The website name is www.sectionalt ...

Earlier this year Microsoft announced a new gaming technology code named Project Natal. The new platform interprets data from various sensors including a camera, depth sensors and a microphone, in such a way as to remove the need for game control hardware. Without the need for game controllers to interact with their computers, gamers we be able to use their bodies and body motions to interact with their games. What has to happen for this to work properly is for the Natal platform to recognise what the person is doing and to translate this, in near real-time, into signals that the software can understand and react to. (This also means that there is going to have to be tons of processing power available to do the job in way that delays do not become evident) Since the Microsoft announcement, a wide range of gaming companies have been involved in Natal R&D. Last week at the E3 Gaming Show a demo of Natal by Peter Molyneux of Microsoft Game Studios showcased the capabilities in a stunning demo. Click here t ...

In the EU courts in Luxembourg, there is currently a court battle being waged between  Google and Louis Vuitton over Google’s  sale of trademarked keywords in its online AdWords search ads. LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA maintains that Google has no right to “sell” keywords that are trademarked by the group.  (The original case started in 2008 and was appealed by Google) In the latest news about the case, the European Advocate General issued an opinion on Sept 22nd advising that its anticipated ruling will allow the continued sale of trademarked keywords by Google AdWords. The main reason behind the finding in Google’s favour was the fact that the use of trademarked keywords in search does not constitute the sale of services or goods that complete with the original trademarked items. To quote: “Since the use by Google does not involve identical or similar goods or services, in principle there can be no risk of confusion on the part of the consumers.” The ruling in Google’s favour repr ...

Google today confirmed what has long been known to search engineers; the Keywords Meta Tag is dead. In a short note to all Search Engine Optimization fans on its Official Webmaster Central BLOG, Matt Cutts pronounced Keywords DOA in clear an unequivocal terms. Thus from a Google Search Engine perspective: The Keywords meta tags are not used, considered or taken into account in any way for ranking of web pages The Keywords meta tag will not be used by Google at any time in the foreseeable future So from now on forget about keywords, save the bandwidth and leave the tag out of your pages in future. Which begs the question – Does Google Ignore ALL Meta Tags? To which the answer is a resounding NO! Google supports and actively uses some Meta Tags. Two good examples are Description, which is often used in parts of the returned search results and Title which has a big impact on page rankings (in my experience). You can watch the movie and read the entire post by clicking on this link  

Last year in March, Google released an update for AdSense, that promised to deliver Interest Based Advertising. Which is Googleze for Behavioural Targeting.  This means is that as you move about on the web Google watches and learns about you, your habits, likes and disliked from your behaviour. For more you see my article Website 101: Google is Watching - Introducing Behavioural Targeting. Yahoo! also uses a similar techniques. Thus there is a database somewhere that holds personal information about you. And guess what? Lots of people don’t like it! Google of course holds that the data collection is optional and that one can opt out. It further holds that the implementation of the data will provide a better web experience for you. However... University of Pennsylvania/California (Berkely) report indicates that a sizeable majority of people can be expected to opt out of this kind of data collection, if given the opportunity. The results showed that of the 1000 adult internet users surveyed about ...