The latest figures on Google’s market share compared to its primary search competitors Yahoo, MSN, and Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) have been published by Hitwise. As always, the numbers are astounding, revealing that Google holds a 77% market share, meaning overthree quarters of UK internet searches are made through Google. Yahoo is now holding 8%, and while MSN and Ask are both at 5% and falling.

Comparing the UK to the US figures, for which Google has just broken 66.6% or two thirds market share, it’s clear that UK internet searchers even more than US searchers turn first to Google.
A collective 23% is not to be sniffed at, but clearly firms services the UK market and requiring SEO services should look first to SEO specialists with strong results in google.co.uk.
Technorati Tags: seo, uk, search engine market, google, yahoo, msn
“Web Standards” is like another of these modern-day web buzzwords, like “Web 2.0″ and “The Blogosphere”. But buzzwords become popular for a reason - let me give this one a simple definition, and explain the business benefits of web standards, namely reduced website costs and risks.
Web standards are, quite simply, a set of coding guidelines developed by a consortium of experts to reduce the risks involved in producing a website. The simple principle is that if everybody codes in the same way, the standard way, then everybody is compatible. More >>
This is a great image from an eye-tracking experiment that clearly demonstrates the importance of organic SEO. Check it out.
If you are still using just hits and pageviews to measure your website’s performance, it’s time to ask yourself a few questions about how well you understand the performance of your website. How do these metrics contribute to understanding of how well you are acheiving your business objectives? eMarketing is just like offline marketing, in that requires measurement followed by optimisation. Only better, because we have more data.
Thus, central to every web project should be a Website Performance tracking sheet outlining targets and progress across a variety of measures that together communicate to your web management teams a picture of performance towards objectives. Use your imagination to find those indicators that provide into the performance of your website.
Below are a few alternative metrics to get you thinking. Do you know how well youre website is performing? What would your targets be?
- New Referrers
- Basket Size
- Repeat Purchase Count
- Number of Commenters / Comments
- Other Content Contributions
- Monthly Membership Registrations
- Newsletter Subscriber Count
- Click-Thrus from Newsletter Links
- Number of Social Bookmarks (i.e. Diggs)
Update: Bud Caddell has also written a post about website performance indicators along similar lines over at seoMoz.org, with a more exhaustive list.