Archive for the 'Google News' Category
I am all for putting your best foot forward, after all that is what SEO is all about but it seems Google has used some very creative accounting in making claims about how much it contributes to the US economy.
They (Google) claim that in the US they “generated $54 billion of economic value in 2009.” How did they arrive at that figure?
How, then, do we then correctly calculate Google’s contribution to the economy?
The same way we determine the economic impact of other companies: the value of the goods and services produced, minus the value of all of resources consumed. Google generated revenue of $23.65 Billion in 2009 and by their own reckoning, their expenditures were about $17.13 Billion, which means that Google’s worldwide value addition was about $6.5 Billion. Google does just under half of its business in the US, so their US economic impact in the US was about $3.2 Billion, far less than the $54 Billion they claim.
Chitika advertising network published some analysis it did of click through percentages based on 8,253,240 impressions.
“In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.
The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 4 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.”
A friend of mine just emailed me some social circle results that came up when he was doing a search for Toronto SEO – while I think these are interesting I am worried that Google is going to make it very hard for new companies in any industry to breakthrough in the search results.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
Just announced today over at Google Webmaster Central Blog – this is something you should already have been tweaking for user experience but knowing it will effect rankings in a small way (as one of over 200 factors) this should wake up some sleeping webmasters, SEO’s and designers.
Now that Google is coming to terms (publicly) with the fact that SEO is real and important it seems they released their own SEO Report Card internally.
Very interesting report and you can download the entire thing here.
The onion takes on a Google request in American Voices:
You know search engine optimization has gone mainstream when it shows up in a Dilbert comic strip!
When it comes to engaging your grassroots demographic, forums are the best bang for your buck. I recently started at thread for a client that garnered 1,300 views and 4 pages of replies within the first week. I was able to have 3 live signature links and two additional text only links pointing to my clients site.
Now it is important to remember you won’t retire on this type of advertising but it is a great, low-key way of getting your brand out to those that matter. Long-term this type of promotion is invaluable to your online marketing mix.
Update January 21, 2010
Let’s fast-forward a couple of weeks and take a deeper look at this method of promotion. I am also able to compare it to forum posts started the same day in the commercial advertising area of the forum – the number of views is completely lopsided and this just proves that forum promotion is valuable but only if done correctly!
I can tell you from personal experience because my better half loves looking around for houses. One of her initial criteria in choosing a potential new home is the area, includes how the neighbors upkeep their lawns and how nice the local parks and amenities are. And she could start her search using Google street view…
What if you could put a virtual ‘for sale’ sign on your property by simply filling out a Google Sell your Home form and boom, 20 seconds later it would be available blended with Google search results for local search queries related to buying homes in that geographical area? What if this cost only a fraction of the thousands and thousands of dollars reactors charge to sell your home?
I smell a new revenue stream for Google and a very handy, affordable way to sell your house. A company like Google could even act as the escrow agent, after all who wouldn’t trust a company with 50 billion cash in the bank.
John Dvorak over at pcmag.com wrote an article yesterday where he complained quite mightily about how SEO is ruining Google search results by:
“tricking Google or Bing or Yahoo into ranking your particular Web site higher than the competition by reverse-engineering the tricks used by Google, et al to rank sites in the first place.”
and
“It’s killing the Internet if it hasn’t already.”
and his proof of this is:
“Try and find the best cell phone deal on the Internet. Do it by using a search engine. Every hit is some commercial site trying to sell you something.”
So basically he typed in ‘best cell phone deal’ and he was upset that they results that came up were various websites that wanted to ‘actually’ sell him a cell phone. Ummm, ya….if you type in cell phone deals or some hybrid of that query you are likely in the market to ‘actually’ buy a cell phone, ergo the results that come up will be sites trying to do just that.
The real truth is that Google and other search engines encourage SEO as a way of putting your websites best foot forward and they don’t have any problem with this as long as you represent your website and its content in an honest way. In fact here is a link to Googles SEO starter guide – which by-the-way is available in 40 languages due to its popularity.
After making the above wildly unresearched statements John continues to hoot-and-haw about how everyone is out to trick him but then he gives SEO a little free promo by stating:
“My advice to Web site managers, when you see this sort of result, is to contact THAT site and hire the consultant doing SEO for it. This sort of thing is no accident.”
Maybe he was just spouting off to attract readers but some of these comments, obviously made by search engine marketing folk got pretty nasty:
“I wonder if you have any understanding of business and marketing if you think commercial sites coming up when you are actually looking for a deal is a bad thing. That really made me laugh.”
“You’re right John, if I type in “best cell phone deal” I definitely don’t want to see sites offering me the ability to get good deals on cell phones. What I’m REALLY looking for would be a wikipedia article talking about the future of cell phones followed by a bunch of sites featuring cell phone news and tips on using cell phones to order pizza.”
“Congratulations!! You have created the worst article that I have ever found on the internet.”
“John…seriously???? you just lost all credibility.”
“What a pity to read your post! What a pity for pcmag to let you write about SEO! I do recommend reading some basics SEO before you put up another post.”
“Which is worse? SEO, which you woefully misdescribe, or linking keywords in your article to adverts so that they pop up without warning in a really intrusive way?”
“John, a long long time ago, I respected your intelligence. Today, that’s completely gone.”
Ouch, I hope John does not take all this criticism too hard but I do agree – this article did seem quite ‘light’ on research.
