The Google doodle was back yesterday and this time was to celebrate PAC MAN’s 30th birthday.

Visit the Google homepage and start playing PAC MAN. What a cool game, I have never before seen a game on a search engine.

Mobile search is happening.

E consultancy reported last week that Marks and Spencer launched a mobile site.

Unlike the other high street retailers who have launched apps, Marks and Spencer have put all their efforts into the mobile site. I have tried it on the iPhone and it is pretty good. I also tried it on the Samsung Tocco (not a smart phone) and it was easy to navigate and the pictures were very clear. A full review can be found at E consultancy

This news just shows you that more and more companies have mobile as part of their marketing/business strategy. Then yesterday, I read another article about mobile phones . Android phones outsold iPhones in the USA, last month for the first time. The iPhone better watch out, it is not the only smartphone out there. And for those companies that want to have a mobile strategy, do not just tailor it to the iPhone. Make sure the Android, Symbian and the Samsung handsets are involved as well. According to The Times, BlackBerry controls 63% of the market for business phones, so do not exclude these handsets either.

The trend in smartphones is expected to increase. According to Garner, sales increased by 49% to 54.3 million during Q1 2010. Overall, 314.7 million handsets were sold worldwide, with Nokia the number one supplier in both categories. Symbian was the most popular smartphone OS globally, selling 24.1 million units, with a market share of 44.3%.

RIM came second with 10.6 million sales and a 19.4% share, followed by Apple’s iPhone OS with 8.4 million sales and 15.4% share. Sales of Microsoft Windows handsets were flat at 3.7 million units, seeing its market share falling by 3.4 percentage points to 6.8%.

There is no denying it, these smartphones are here to stay, so it is vital to integrate these into your marketing strategy. Next time you are thinking of redesigning your website or adding new pages, think of making it viewable on a mobile phone.

So much has happened this week, most of it within 24 hours.

I used to work at i-level, until Thursday when it closed its doors. We were only told just before noon on Wednesday and the next 24 hours seem to be a blur. It was a mixture of packing up our things, making sure all client work was transferred, finding new jobs. On Thursday, different agencies came to i-level to introduce themselves and i-level staff were very helpful in passing on HR contacts at other companies, client side as well.

I had not been working long at i-level, less than a year, so no redundancy pay for me. I had been working on some big clients and was enjoying seeing positive effects of my seo labour. I was also working closely with the paid search team and we were delivering an integrated search strategy which I wanted to see out. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case.

I have met a lot of interesting and clever people at i-level. They should not be out of work for too long as I am sure they will be snapped up very quickly. Good Luck to all you levellers, may you find rewarding work and may the company recognise how lucky they are to have you in their team.

Who will you vote for?

Today is set to be the election of our generation. Labour is going down, not that we are surprised especially after Gordon Brown’s embarrassing incident the last week. But what future do we have with the Conservatives?

Labor has been in power since 1997 and before that Conservatives from 1979 till then. So both parties have dominated politics for all of my lifetime and indeed everyone under 30 years old.

By 1997, people were tired of the Tories and Labour was seen as a fresh start. But what has Labour brought us? They took us into the Iraq war, drove us into debt and have underachieved in education which was Tony Blair’s motto. Top up fees came in 1999 and is set to increase so education will be left for the rich.

Who will you vote for? I have sent off my postal vote.

When building a website, there is often conflict between the SEO consultant, developer and the designer.

The designer wants the site to look pretty, which is of course what we all want, but it sometimes affects SEO. For example, a site designed in flash may look good, but it cannot be read by spiders and can therefore not be indexed. This means it is harder for the site to appear high up in the search results.

There is also conflict with web developers. They may build the site in AJAX and Javascript which is great for a usability point of view, it is fast and unlike flash you do not need a third party application to run. However, it does nothing for SEO. A good example of a page using AJAX is gmail, when you click on compose message, the new message appears, but the rest of the site remains the same.

There are a few issues with AJAX.

– the search engine cannot see the content within AJAX and Javascript and therefore cannot index it
– the spider is unable to crawl the site
– cannot use the back/next/reload buttons properly
– all the pages load under the same URL

AJAX can be SEO friendly by following these best practice guidelines:

– Make the majority part of the site based in HTML, including the important navigation links.
– Put all the rich content and keywords in this part of the site – not on a dynamic page.
– Put a URL for each page you want to get crawled and indexed
– Make sure you cache dynamic pages and serve them as static ones
– All links and menu items the important parts of the site should work without AJAX and/or JavaScript – browsers allow you to disable javascript

Google is also proposing a new standard for making AJAX based websites search engine friendly. Google says:

“We’re excited to propose a new standard for making AJAX-based Web sites crawlable. This will benefit Webmasters and users by making content from rich and interactive AJAX-based Web sites universally accessible through search results on any search engine that chooses to take part. We believe that making this content available for crawling and indexing could significantly improve the Web”

When this is expected to happen is not yet known, but it does mean that if it is adopted, developers no longer have to choose between site optimization and dynamic pages.

If you have experience in optimising sites for SEO which use AJAX, then let me know.

For more information about AJAX and SEO, please refer to searchenginejournal

I read a great article on search engine land by Damien Bianchi

The article was about refreshing content on your website and this made me start to think about some of the work I have done on sites and how that has affected rankings.

Photo is from flickr

If you want to change the content on your site, you should consider for what reasons and which areas of the site.

You should also consider the SEO impacts. Do not just update the content for the sake of it. If the site is already ranking well, don’t change it. If you must amend some text, just amend a small area.

Damien Bianchi gives three tips to avoid having your rankings drop.

1. Run a rank report for all URLs that will be updated

I call this a benchmark report, you need to measure where you are currently ranking for your keywords. You should also see which keywords are driving the search traffic which will show the top priority URLs. I have helped clients change content on their website and have seen a drop in rankings for key terms. It has sometimes taken four weeks to see rankings get back to the positions they were previously. From my experience, another URL may be ranking for the key term which is an unexpected result for the market team.

2. Establish 301 redirects

If you are refreshing the content, it may include removing sections of pages or whole pages of the website altogether. If a page that is ranking well and is driving a lot of traffic is removed, then this traffic and link juice is not passed on to the new page. To avoid this valuable traffic and link juice from being lost, you should put a 301 redirect on that URL.

3. Carry out research and plan new content

When a client asked me for help with a content refresh and wanted help optimising pages, it involved a lot of research. It is important to use the seo tools such as Google keyword to find out the keywords that are driving the most volume. If you are working with the paid search team, it is also a good idea to find out the keywords generating the highest impression data and clicks. This is a more accurate representation of the terms that are driving the most traffic.

If you have any other experiences of content refresh where you have seen a change in rankings and traffic, let me know.

Orange has been in the news a lot this past week.

Firstly on April 1st, it was announced that T-Mobile and Orange had become a single UK entity. Tom Alexander who is the Orange UK boss is the chief of the new company and T-Mobile UK boss Richard Moat is the chief financial officer. It comes seven months after France Telecom and Deutsche Telekomeir first announced their plans to merge the UK operations.

This means that the organisations can share confidential financial and customer information and begin consolidating the two businesses and Orange UK and T-Mobile UK now cease to exist.

Orange said : “Further to announcements of September 8, 2009, and to the obtaining of all necessary approvals, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom today announced the successful completion of the UK merger transaction and the formation of the new Joint Venture. The JV will be accounted for using the equity method as of April 2010 for both Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom.”

Last week Orange also announced their new business mobile broadband packages allowing customers to choose a package that suits the way their business works. They have two packages both tariffs cost £10 a month and Orange has included an additional 1GB usage allowance per month to dip into:

1. Business Everywhere 5 to 9 – as the name suggests is for businesses who work from 5pm – 9am and want unlimited data. It is mainly aimed at start-ups and entrepreneurs who have day jobs and need mobile broadband access outside regular office hours.

2. Business Everywhere 9 to 5- are for businesses who want the same package but access 9am to 5pm.

There is also a service for frequent travellers who access an extra 5MB of data every month to use in Europe. Not worldwide yet, but who knows in the future?

Not to be outdone by Orange, T-Mobile expanded its Business Unlimited tariff by offering free conference calling and compatibility with its Boosters. There is conference calling for up to 20 people and customers now have access to a range of international boosters for businesses working abroad. They are Euro Talk and Text, Euro and Australasia Talk and USA and Canada Talk.

The plan “Business Unlimited” comes with unlimited calls, texts, email and internet access and costs just £35 a month. Customers will also receive free voicemail, free next day phone replacement, free 24/7 online account management and dedicated UK-based customer support.

Max Taylor , head of business marketing said: “We know that transparent pricing and predictable costs are crucial to any small business trying to manage its cashflow. By adding more to Business Unlimited at the same price, we’re enhancing what is already the best value small business tariff on the market and giving businesses greater control and peace of mind over their mobile costs.”

Watch out for more news from Orange.

Find out more news

The other week, I went to a Google mobile event. – Google loves mobile

I knew mobile was big, but after this event, I knew it was no longer the future, it was happening now. Those that are not using a mobile strategy should be seriously thinking of starting one today.

It may seem daunting, but mobile internet is the same position that the internet was 10 years ago and look how big that has grown. A user should have the same experience on the mobile and on the web. It is interesting to see how much internet on desktops has grown. Check out on the bbc’s website to visually see the growth of the internet.

There are 4.6 billion mobile phones world wide, more than 1,000 customers sign up every minute. You can no longer ignore mobile.

So where do you start?
If you are working agency side, you should start to introduce mobile marketing to your clients. The first step is assessing their website, which should be visible on a regular handset. I do not just mean smart phones such as the iPhone or Android but symbian phones as well such as the Nokia 6303. There are a lot of retail, finance and travel companies that are planning mobile at the moment. If you do not have a site that can be seen on a mobile phone, make sure there is at least a landing page that can be built in line with your advertising campaigns.

To app or not to app?
A lot of people when they want to get into mobile think they should build an app. There are over 50 million iphone and iphone touches and more than 3billion downloads for these apps. I wrote about apps in another post mobile app or mobile site and when I was at the event, Carl Uminski from Somo mentioned that there was a life cycle of apps. If it gets featured in the App store (which is luck) then it can get to top 25 of the Apple app store. This equates to 500 downloads a day. If the app is promoted to the top 10, then it can get 1000 downloads a day. However, there is a sudden decline.

He said people should think ahead of time and have ad campaigns to promote it. There is a lot of competition, 130,000 other apps people can choose from. You need to have a mobile advertising strategy before you build.
Somo have witnessed conversion to download range from 4% to 12%
Advertising click through rates range form 1% to 4.8%
Cost per download can range from 80p to 1.50 for free applications

Mobile search
Another interesting point raised at the event was that people on mobile phones who access the internet have different needs, they are more hunters than researchers. They are out and about and use their phone to look for something specific. Therefore there needs to be different ad copy for the paid adverts. Your digital agency should be able to build creative for you.

2010 is the year for mobile search and I challenge you to start using it with your clients or with your agency.

Photo is from flickr

The Digital Economy Bill became law on Thursday. It was one of the bills pushed through parliament before Monday’s dissolution.

It aims to clamp down on illegal file sharing. But it wasn’t completely thought through. It was rushed, discussed in House of Lords, but not House of Commons. It aims to protect big business, the film and music industry without fulling thinking through the affect on the individuals.

The bill is full of controversy as it covers such a broad range of areas, public service televisions, broadband providers, music copyrights and photographers rights all in one bill. It is also being rushed through at the end of a session. It is trying to address digital privacy but it is very heavy handed. The bill is designed to protect the interests of big business.

The privacy of individuals has been affected. The music and film industry has the power to look at the download records of people and can then ask the internet provider to cut off the internet if anyone in the house is accused of file sharing. People’s internet connection can be taken away without any fair warning.

Obviously illegal downloading and piracy is wrong. However, the people who backed this bill are not fully aware that this bill affects innocent people who are using the internet correctly who are sharing the same broadband line (eg public WiFi or Student accomadation) as those downloaders.

For more information about the Digital Economy Bill please visit the Guardian.

Photo is from flickr

In the news last week, I read a very interesting article in the Times about how facebook is the biggest rival to Google.

According to Hitwise, for the week ending March 13th, facebook got more traffic than Google in America. Who would have thought this social neworking site set up by Mark Zuckerberg would have achieved this milestone.

Facebook now has more than 400million active users which makes it the third most populous “country” behind India and China. In the UK, it has more than 23million users, or a third of the population. The speed at which facebook is growing is staggering. Visits to facebook has increased 185% in the last year and Google’s number of visits has increased by 9%

There is a threat to Google, called “discovery” which is the finding of products/services on facebook that has been recommended by friends. More people will go onto facebook and search for products and reviews from their friends and peers instead of searching on Google. However, this information within facebook cannot be seen by Google as customers have to sign in to their account.

Social media is changing the search landscape. More people will be using social networking sites to find out news and information. Even Google wanted to get onto the social media band wagon with “buzz” but it failed to have made any headway in that area. People spend a lot of time on social media sites. According to Nielsen, facebook is the third most visited site with 2.5billion hits in February 2010 which is close to Yahoo’s 2.7 billion and Google’s 3billion. So Google better watch out, it doesn’t want to lose its position as the number 1 search engine.