There are increasingly a range of acronyms being thrown around in web marketing that sometimes slip out when interacting with clients. Here’s a brief overview of some of the more common e-marketing acronyms to ease the conversation.
- SEM
Search Engine Marketing
SEM is a broad term covering the range of activities you might engage in to improve the extent to which you generate revenue via search engines
- SEO
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO focuses on the organic listings as opposed to sponsored listings, or PPC. The position of your site in the listings for a given search term is determined by a wide range of factors, each contributing to the search engine’s algorithm. They can be broadly divided, however, into two groups:
- Content Relevancy: The greater the extent to which the content of a page matches the search term in question, the better it will rank (subject to the engine’s spam protection measures).
- Trust relevancy The greater the extent to which a page is connected (by hyperlinks) to sites also well connected to other sites relevant to the search term, the better it will rank, based on it being a trusted resource.
- PPC
Pay Per Click
Many search engines present two listings when the user makes a search - the main, organic search results, and the sponsored listings. To achieve a sponsored listing, you must agree to pay a certain amount to the search engine every time someone clicks on your listing. Your bid compared to that of your competitors determines your position in the listing - bid prices can range from a few pence for less competitive phrases to several pounds for very competitive phrases. Most often however clicks will cost less than £0.50.
- SMO / SMM
Social Media Optimisation / Social Media Marketing
More recently, a new area has opened up in web marketing with the arrival of social networking and in particular social news websites, such as Digg, Reddit, and a host of others. These sites allow you to submit content to their ‘Upcoming’ listing, presented initially in reverse date/time order. As time passes, if your site receives votes, it maintains it’s high position and may reach the ‘popular’ listing. This is encouraging marketers to be creative and generate interesting content, as the potential returns of getting ‘dugg’ are substantial in the short and long term.
Following our post last year on Google UK’s market share in 2007, here are some figures providing an indication of Google’s Market share in the UK in 2008. Hitwise are providing the numbers again, and in a relatively short sampling period during March 2008, they found Google to be holding a market share 87.5%, 10 percentage points greater than the same figures for 2007. They found 73.7% to be using google.co.uk, and 13.8% google.com. Clearly Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask among others have therefore lost ground to their primary competitor.
Particularly interesting in the same report was the statistics regarding the proportion of users opting to use Google’s ‘Pages from the UK’ search option. The report confirms intuition by showing only 13.6% of searchers to make use of this facility. This will help you decide the relative value of a .co.uk TLD vs. a .com or alternative (a google.co.uk search for ‘Pages from the UK’ will only return pages with a .co.uk TLD).
For more details, click through hitwise.
I wrote a post before the weekend about some performance issues with MooTools, DHTML and AJAX, but having found the solution to a related problem this morning, I wanted to post a followup.
I’ve been working with a large, dynamically generated and AJAX populated table that features sorting, filtering and row highlighting, and was finding that my table took a long time to render, and was also very slow to close - that is, when I tried to close the window or refresh the page, there would be a delay when the browser would first hang for a few seconds. IE often (but not always) popped up the error/prompt Stop this script running?, and Firefox less often threw it’s Unresponsive Script warning.
I’d heard of MooTools’ garbage collection functions that reduced memory leakage, and figured that these were probably responsible. I then found Kevin Smith’s write up of his similar experience, and came to understand the problem. MooTools’ garbage collection takes time to clean up any element that has been extended. My table was executing the following code, effectively extending every table row in the table, resulting in some 500+ extended elements.
// MooTools Code
Element.extend({
…
getChildren: function(){
return $$(this.childNodes);
},
…
});
…
// My Code
this.tablerows = this.body.getChildren();
When it came to cleanup, this javascript processing took longer than IE’s configured script timeout, and thus prompted the warning.
To avoid this cleanup overhead, you’ll have to avoid extending the elements with MooTools’ extensive set of functions and instead extend the specific elements in question with the specific functions required.
I’ve just been struggling to enable full-text search on my installation of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, and so want to share the solution.
If, like me, the ‘Use full-text indexing’ checkbox was greyed out under Database > Properties > Files, you first need to test whether Full-Text Indexing is installed or not. To do this, execute the query.
use [dbname]
select fulltextserviceproperty(’isfulltextinstalled’)
If this returns 0, you need to install Full-Text Search.
Firstly, did you install SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Advanced Series? Only the Advanced Series contains full-text. If not, you may need to reinstall.
However if so, then you just need to change the installation to include Full-Text Indexing. But if you originally installed from a download from the above link (most of you) then you’ll find that when you try to modify the installation via Control Panel > Applications / Programs, Windows prompts you for the installation file ’sqlrun_sql.msi’. This is because the download unpacked the installation files to a temporary folder which can no longer be found.
To resolve this issue, you need to download the file again from the link above, move it to a folder, and unzip (I used WinRAR). Then point Windows to the sqlrun_sql.msi file (under /setup, wherever you unzipped the download) when it prompts you for the installation file.
For additional info, see here.
For additional support setting up Full-Text Search once installed, watch this video on the topic from Micosoft, BUT I think you’ll find my new tutorial on seting up Full-Text Search in SQL Server 2005 Express much quicker and more intuitive to be honest..
These statistics source from a compilation of SERPS behaviour studies for which I’ve listed source information at the end of the article. If you disagree with a figure, or have additional figures or sources, please do post them to the discussion.
- 42% of search users click the top-ranking link. 8% click the second-ranking link, and the click-through rate (CTR) continues to drop thereof.
- When these two top-ranking links are artificially switched, the click-through ratio of 42-8% drops to 34-12%, demonstrating the importance of engaging copy in addition to rank position.
- 62% of search users click a link on the first page of search results
- 23% of searches progress to the second page. Presumably the difference between 62% ans 23% stems from searchers trying either another keyword or another engine, or giving up.
- 80% f unsuccessful searches are followed with keyword refinement.
- 41% of searches unsuccessful after the first page choose to refine thir keyword search phrase or their chosen search engine.
- 77% of search users choose organic over paid listing when searching, 67% choose organic search when purchasing.
- When the searcher is purchasing, organic click-through generates 25% higher conversion rates than equivalent Pay-Per-Click (PP) click-through.
- 40% of SEO campaigns aware of their ROI achieve returns in excess of 500%, while only 22% of PPC campaigns were able to achieve this value.
- Daily use of search engines rose from 33% in 2002 to 59% in 2005. The average day in 2005 reported 60 million people using a search engine. As of March 2007, Google accounts for 64% of US searches and 77% of UK searches
The validity of these statistics depend on various experimental factors (i.e. large, representative samples of searchers/searches), and on accurate statistical analysis.
For more in depth analysis, the sources for this article were:
Please post addition figures or sources, or your view, in the comments.
