After Microsoft published its latest quarterly earnings last month, their Bing search engine received a lot of criticism. Microsoft’s earning figures showed that the division which is responsible for Bing was making a loss of $2.6 billion in the last fiscal year.
That’s quite a big loss to make, but that’s nothing new to Microsoft. They have a history of launching business models at a loss in order to grab a large chunk of market share (Xbox for example). (more…)
BlueGlass have announced their next conference, BlueGlass TPA 2011, which will take place in Tampa, Florida on September 26th and 27th. From the press release:
BlueGlass TPA will provide its participants with 10 incredible online marketing panels & session along with constant opportunities to connect with leaders, speakers, and others in the industry over breakfasts, lunches, dinners, hosted cocktail hours and team building events.
Whenever a company publishes research that casts its own products in a positive light, my sceptic-alarm goes off. Often this type of ‘research’ is just poorly veiled PR spin disguised as a scientific study.
There are some exceptions fortunately, and Google is one of them. For all the criticism I often levy against the big G, I have to admit that their computer scientists regularly come up with some fascinating stuff. (more…)
It seems that everyone who’s even remotely interested in search and social media has jumped on the Google+ bandwagon. This has lead to a rather explosive growth of Google’s social network, with the 20 million users mark expected to be hit this weekend:
When websites try to determine a user’s geographic location, this is usually done via the user’s IP address. In theory an IP address can be related to a physical location. This is how Google determines a user’s location in Analytics and Adwords – and even search – and Facebook in Insights.
It seems the accepted wisdom is that while IP address geolocation is not perfect, it’s mostly accurate. Estimates reach from 60% accuracy all the way up to 95% accurate. The problem is that the actual accuracy of IP geotargeting is nowhere near that. (more…)
I tend to blog about things I’m actively engaged with, and this week I’ve been digging in to a structured approach to our company’s internet marketing (IM) activities. Basically we’re developing a strategy for all our IM projects, and we’ve chosen the SOSTAC® approach as the framework, as recommended by Econsultancy .
To summarize it very briefly, SOSTAC® stands for Situation Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, and Control. Developed by PR Smith, SOSTAC® is a powerful yet simple strategy framework that captures all aspects of creating and executing an IM strategy, yet it has enough flexibility to fit around the varying requirements of our wide range of clients. (more…)
You’ve all heard about the Google +1 button and the recent Schema.org announcement. Big news, both of those, but something is rubbing me the wrong way about all this newfangled stuff Google is pumping out. Namely that Google is getting us to do the hard work for them.
Google, as a search engine, exists to find all the information on the web (crawling), make sense of what it finds (indexing), and serve us with the most relevant content for any given query (ranking). This, in a very simplified nutshell, is Information Retrieval, and it’s what search engines do.
However, it seems search engines are actually quite poor at this. Or at least poor enough that they think they need us – the masses – to do the hard work for them. (more…)
URL Shortening services are the lifeblood of Twitter. With short URLs you can share links on Twitter in abundance without having to worry too much about breaking the 140 character limit.
And, just like links are branding opportunities, so are short URLs. Yes, you only have a few characters to work with in a short domain, but why not make optimal use of it and make it a branded short URL?
Some examples of great short URLs that manage to spread the owner’s brand further on twitter are nyti.ms for the New York Times, yoa.st for Yoast (Joost de Valk) and selnd.com for Search Engine Land. (more…)
I get asked quite often what beginning SEOs need to do to become advanced practitioners of our craft. Specifically they want to know which books to read.
There are a handful of good books about SEO out there – I recently reviewed Danny Dover’s new SEO Secrets book – but no matter how good they are, none of these books will make you an advanced SEO.
When I pondered this question in detail, I realised that the books that have shaped me the most as an SEO, and have helped bring my skills to higher levels, aren’t actually SEO books. Yet these books have been vital study material in my continued development as a SEO professional.
Here I will share the five best books for SEOs that aren’t actually about SEO. (more…)
It’s a zero-sum game, this industry of ours. There are winners and there are losers. There can only be one site that ranks highest, and many sites that rank below it.
Though strictly speaking that’s not true any more – due to personalised results and the continued integration of social signals – I think we can all agree that there’s limited space at the top of any given SERP.
Fortunately we have a big playground to work in. Search engines process billions of queries a day, many of which they’ve never seen before. Every query, potentially, serves as an opportunity to reach an audience. (more…)
Yesterday I attended a fascinating lecture by Ben Hammersley, organised by the British council, about the future of the internet. Read my write-up of the lecture on the Pierce Communications blog here.
There was one small blemish on this otherwise superb evening. At one point an audience member – probably not coincidentally a grey-haired man wearing a checked shirt – in the course of asking a question, referred to SEO (with venom dripping from his voice as he pronounced the acronym) as “snake-oil” and the embodiment of all that was wrong with the corporatisation of the internet. (more…)
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