UK Google Market Share - March 2007

Posted by Iain on Thu (12/04/07) at 9:42am to Web Project Management, Search Engine Optimisation

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

       

Improve Website Performance - 10 Fundamentals

Posted by Iain on Wed (11/04/07) at 5:25pm to Web Project Management, Web Design

1. Are you using Google Analytics (or require and use an alternative)?

   You can’t gauge success unless you measure performance. Google Analytics is a free and very effective tool for just this. For businesses that depends on local custom, it will qualify the proportion of your visitors that reside nearby and are therefore of value. eCommerce sites can drive sales by adjusting their site layout or structure based on the analysis of search terms used within their site when people can’t find information. The available measures are extensive.

2. Is every page of your site connected to every other via a site map?

   Page Rank is a measure of how valuable or important Google considers a web page to be. It is based largely on the number, page rank, and relevancy of web pages that link to that page. The pages of a site can also inherit Page Rank from other pages of their website, but the more links to reach those pages, the less page rank is inherited.A site map thus maximises this inheritance by ensuring every page is just one page from every other.

More >>

Tags: website design performance optimisation
       

10 Direct Routes to Reduced Website Costs and Risks: That’s what web standards are about!?

Posted by Iain on Mon (19/03/07) at 11:18am to Web Project Management, Web Design

“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 >>

       

SEO: Evidence for the importance of Organic Search Engine Optimisation

Posted by Iain on Wed (14/03/07) at 1:16pm to Web Project Management, Search Engine Optimisation

This is a great image from an eye-tracking experiment that clearly demonstrates the importance of organic SEO. Check it out.

       

Website Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) - How Do You Measure Up?

Posted by Iain on Fri (9/03/07) at 11:24am to Web Project Management, Web Analytics

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.