The IAB has just released their 2010 search marketing barometer which makes for essential reading if you operate in the digital marketing or search engine marketing arenas.

A total of 144 questionnaires were completed by 91 top brand (chosen as they are were the top advertising spenders for April/May this year).

A summary of the IAB findings are as follows:

1. Integration opportunity – only 28.7% of advertisers said search is fully integrated with the rest of the marketing mix, yet 99% said there is a greater opportunity to integrate and 100% of Search Council agencies felt all of their clients could do more to integrate.
2. Brand building – 78% respondents said search can build brand either directly or as part of the full user journey, reflected by actual use. 70% include brand building as a primary objective of SEO and over 50% for PPC.
3. Budget – 99% of SEO budgets and 90% of PPC budgets will stay the same or increase in 2010 (55% and 43% increase respectively).
4. PPC Activity – Only 14% of respondents DON’T employ a PPC agency; and 72% of respondents are restricted by their PPC budgets.
5. Website effectiveness – only 37% of websites are ‘good’ at achieving objectives, leaving much room for improvement once consumers reach their destination.
6. Advanced testing – 19.4% of respondents carry out A/B testing with 5% carrying out MVT (multi-variate testing); 35% carry out both. 39% of respondents do not carry out testing – so clearly there’s room for improvement.
7. Strong understanding of search? – the majority of respondent claim to understand the main principles of SEO and PPC (only 38.6% feel teams outside of digital also understand the importance of search); but few have enough information about new or advanced tools and data. This would indicate that knowledge is not being filtered to all levels, which is also hindered by an ever changing IT landscape.
8. Efficiency of search – cost, value and resource are clear concerns at the moment, indicating a shift in advertiser attitudes to search where reviewing and optimising activity is currently of greater importance.
9. Finding skills – 37% of respondents said they found it hard to find staff with skills in search marketing; and search qualifications were considered unimportant for 53%.
10. Social Media and mobile – 39% of respondents believe social media will be more important than search in 2015; 49% believe mobile search will overtake desktop search by 2015.

Out of a 357 votes, the following results were found:

The clear trend is that most voters (54%) are carrying out their social media activity in-house with only 18.18% outsourcing it.

An equal number of people reported having no plans for it in the short term and only 9.09% were considering it.

Today, Google announced some measures to ensure that online visitor privacy is maintained.

Opt-out browser add-on made available

The first announcement is the launch of a Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome (all in beta).

The opt-out provides users with a choice of whether information about website visits is collected by Google Analytics. The add-on stops data from being sent from your computer when you visit websites that use Google Analytics Javascript (ga.js) to track usage.

The opt-out browser add-on can be downloaded at http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

Google trying to repair recent privacy blunder?

The question begs, is Google attempting to “look good” re privacy especially in light of the recent privacy blunder when it came to collecting WiFi data in their Street View cars;  (Google claimed they unknowingly collected snippets of payload data such as MAC addresses as they drove through your neighborhoods).

Or is Google genuinely attempting to empower end-users who deserve to protect their privacy. Either way, if it catches on, this could seriously affect the accuracy of reported visitor data.

Ability for website owners to anonymise visitor IP address information

The second announcement allows website owners to anonymise visitor IP address information sent to Google so that only a portion of the IP address is used for geographic reporting.

It is however worth noting that the accuracy of Geographic reporting will be impacted:

Keep in mind, that using this functionality will somewhat reduce the accuracy of geographic data in your Analytics reports.

For further information on implementing this feature within Google Analytics visit: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApi_gat.html

Most notable online trends reported in this month’s market highlights are as follows:

• The top 5 websites (Google, Bing, Facebook, Yahoo! and BBC) remain unchanged; their reach is 95.55% of the UK online market!
• Google Search is still the stickiest search brand with an average reach of 81.5% followed by Google Image Search (28%); Yahoo! Search and Bing share approx 18% of reach
• Ebay remains number 1 for ecommerce reach; it reaches 45.9% (18.5m) of the active UK audience
• The highest % increase in reach comes from the Co-Operative (+58%) in the top ecommerce sites of the month
• The Co-Operative and Nectar replace Gumtree and John Lewis in the top ecommerce sites this month

View the full Online Market Highlights – March 2010

This data is crucial in measuring the effectiveness of your website metadata as well as keyphrase performance according to landing page.

As you can see from the above screen grab, Google reports on the position of keyphrases in SERPS. The reported position fluctuates from 3 – 10, which highlights the reality of personalised search where rankings will vary by individual.

The second columns refers to number of impressions over the reported time period. The third column highlights the click through rate (CTR) for that keyphrase – in this case 11%.

The published fluctuations in rank gives us a useful insight into the effects of personalised search. But even more crucially, the reported click through rate allows us to measure our SERPS effectiveness and adjust our metadata as part of our SEO copywriting campaigns.

Whilst the Webmaster Tools data may not exactly match our web analytics data, it gives us enough insight to make iterative improvements to our SERPS content.

Most notable online trends reported are as follows:

• The top 15 sites remain virtually unchanged
• 35-49 audience shows the largest increase month on month
• The top 5 sites reach 95% of the total online universe with Bing/MSN/Windows Live in second place after Facebook
• Member communities represent the most time spent online by consumers
• Google Search is the ‘stickiest’ online brand
• World of Warcraft is the number one application, in terms of average time spent on applications online
• Ebay remains number one in the e-commerce category

View the full Online Market Highlights – February 2010

As of June 2010, News International will be charging £1 to access The Times and Sunday Times Online for a day’s subscription; or £2 for a week’s subscription.

News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, also hinted that its other titles, the Sun and the News of the World, would follow with a paywall model.

This is a landmark moment as both The Times and The Sunday Times are set to become the first UK national newspapers to charge for access to all of their online content. The Financial Times is currently charging for a large bulk of its online content.

As ad revenues fall, this is seen by many as a necessary business move, but of course it is commonly regarded as a high risk strategy as many competitor online newspapers will not be following suit.

Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, said:

“We expect to attract a growing base of loyal customers that are committed and engaged with our titles.  We are building on the excellence of our newspapers and offering digital access to our journalism at a price that everyone can afford.”

The Time Online currently attains 1.22 million readers per day. If we were to assume that only 5% of these readers convert to the paywall model, it would yield £1.83m if they each buy a £1 daily subscription. At a 10% conversion rate, it would net £3.66m per month for both papers. Whereas if the weekly subscription was selected,  revenues would be reduced.

Below is a guide to 18 common SEO mistakes or omissions made by website owners or web designers.

1. Incorrect Keyphrase Deployment

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that deploying commonly-searched-for keyphrases within your on-page content and metadata, will yield better search results. Avoid deploying content with keyphrases that have poor search demand or are less likely to convert humans.

2. Poor Website Architecture

Good website architecture will promote better website crawling, distribute PageRank more effectively throughout a website and will also land humans at the right point in the searching or buying cycle.

Don’t create your website information architecture out of isolation of search engine optimisation.

3. Ineffective Anchor Text

Our SEO audits continually cite poor use of anchor text such as “click here” or “more info” etc. These anchor text links add little SEO value and are not helpful for accessibility. You will improve your overall link equity by using searchable terms in your hyperlink (anchor) text.

Hyperlinks with good anchor text inserted into body copy are effective for SEO, as they are often contextually relevant and often have good keyphrase prominence.

4. Missing or Duplicate Metadata

We commonly find that websites have either poor or missing website metadata. Or the other extreme is when websites duplicate their metadata across all pages.

Follow best practices when writing your website metadata and keep your title tags and meta descriptions unique per page. If your website is huge, consider how you can dynamically generate meaningful metadata.

5. Hosting Location and TLD

UK websites that use a non UK top level domain name (TLD) such as .com or .org – and that are hosted outside the UK – often find themselves excluded from the UK indices of Google, Bing and Yahoo! The same applies to any other localised websites using generic TLD’s.

It’s an easy mistake to make. But it it easy to fix? There are a variety of options available, but the quickest solution is to use Google’s Webmaster Tools to localise your site. However this doesn’t work for Bing and Yahoo! And furthermore, this doesn’t always resolve the problem if the website is targeting an international audience. In an ideal world, site owners should have local country TLD’s with content unique to that country. Easier said than done!

6. No Linkbaiting Strategy

Too many websites still adopt a “brochureware” strategy when it comes to content, where there’s little valuable, up-to-the-minute useful content that would naturally attract links. Brainstorm what kind of linkbait should be available on your website and make sure it’s kept fresh.

7. Zero or Low Content Velocity

Following on from the previous point, ensure that your content is kept up-to-date and fresh. New or recently updated content is likely to be crawled and indexed more readily. Brainstorm your content velocity strategy and ensure that you have the resource to maintain your audience’s expected level of updates.

8. Missing XML Sitemaps

Sitemap submission is often ignored, as the work often falls between the role of your web design agency or your SEO agency. In most cases, submitting XML sitemaps is simple and cost effective. Ensure sitemaps are submitted to the major search engines every time your website content is updated.

9. Poor Keyphrase Relevance

Keyphrase relevance refers to matching popular on-page keyphrases (that have good co-occurrence) with the content found in your metadata, link anchor text, URL structure, header tags and ALT attributes for images. Tackling SEO holistically – either across a single page or across a website – will yield improvements in search rank, so maintain a good level of keyphrase relevance.

10. Complex Data-driven URLs

Nowadays, search engines are much better at crawling websites with query strings and session variables attached to URLs. But, having infinite or very long URLs can slow down crawl rates which in turn can cause index exclusion.

Furthermore, humans will react better to “human-friendly” URLs and are more likely to click on those search results in SERPS. Encourage search-engine friendly URLs that follow your keyphrase research strategy.

11. Duplicate Content

Google is well known for excluding content that looks appreciably similar to other content within your domain or across domains. Avoid duplicate content such as repeated boiler plates, repeated product descriptions, syndicated content or stripped down printer-only or mobile-only content.

Check for duplicate content using Copyscape and if you are syndicating content such as online press, create a backlink to your original content to indicate the original source of the content.

Also, ensure your website architecture is improved, so that duplicate content is avoided i.e. link to one version of a page rather than repeating the same content across multiple pages.

12. Domain Canonicalisation

Domain canonicalisation is harder to pronounce than to understand! In short, ensure that only one version of your page URLs exist. For example, if your home page is http://www.domain.com – avoid publishing alternative versions such as http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com/index.html etc.

Set up appropriate 301 (permanent) redirects to canonical versions of your URLs. If necessary use Google’s link rel=canonical command within your domain or across multiple domains. Lo0k at configuring your server to add www if the URL is referenced without it (or vice versa).

By choosing the right canonical URL, you will avoid possible duplicate content exclusion, and you will also direct link equity more efficiently throughout your website.

13. Accidentally Blocking Bots

If you happen to be deploying a robots.txt file or on-page metadata controlling bot activity, ensure you aren’t accidentally blocking bots. If you’re unsure how to use these techniques, it’s probably better not to use any at all.

14. Excessive Link Velocity

Link building is a huge part of search engine optimisation. But over- zealous link building can be picked up by search engines as black hat SEO, normally seen among link exchange schemes. Encourage link building – yes. But don’t use schemes that build thousands of links in a very short space of time – especially if they all have the same anchor text. Chances are you will suffer for it!

Use Majestic-SEO’s backlink history tool to measure backlink discovery over time.

15. Non-Indexable Dynamic Content

My mantra with search engine optimisation is to keep things simple. Avoid publishing content using scripting languages such as JavaScript or AJAX if you can do it in a simpler way using CSS or HTML. Search engines won’t always be able to execute complex JavaScript which means that some dynamic content e.g. in arrays, won’t be indexed.

Log into Google’s Webmaster Tools or Bing’s Webmaster Tools to gain a better understanding of non-indexable content on your website.

16. No Header Tags

When adding page headlines and sub-headers, follow best practice CSS. Whilst H1, H2, H3 tags etc won’t instantly propel you to position one in SERPS, they are nonetheless considered best practice for both SEO and accessibility.

17. Missing or Ineffective Image ALT attributes

If you are adding images to your website, give each image an alternative description to help with SEO and accessibility. Here’s your chance to squeeze in a couple of useful keyphrases whilst adhering to accessibility guidelines. Best practice says avoid ALT attributes on incidental images that have little or no meaning.

18. Poor Link Building Techniques

I’ve left one of the most common SEO mistakes ‘til last. Don’t bother trying to attract links from websites that have little contextual relevance with your website. Also avoid bad neighbourhoods such as link directories, link farms, banned sites and websites with hundreds of outbound links.

Encourage links from websites that have a good PageRank and search rank for keyphrases in your sector. Try to encourage the backlinks to contain searchable anchor text. Look to see what other links are contained on the donor page; ensure they have good co-citation i.e. the other outbound links backlink to websites within your sector.

Whilst the above is by no means an exhaustive list of common SEO mistakes, these should keep you busy for now!

The proposition of reducing information overload is clear enough. So 8 out of 10 for clarity there.

It’s the creative execution that I’m just not sure about. The aim of the ad is no doubt to irritate viewers with its schizophrenic and fast paced exchange of dialogue and scenes, mirroring the experience searchers experience when using Google. Whilst the editing works for me, does it persuade me to us Bing? Most likely not.

Judge for yourself…

Social Media may well be the zeitgeist of the moment, but has its popularity eclipsed that of search engine optimisation in Google?

We compared two commonly used short tail search terms: social media and SEO (more popular than search engine optimisation in search).

In the UK, SEO is still more popular in search than social media, with consistent year on year growth since 2004.

Late 2007 sees early adopters searching for social media content, but the news reference popularity doesn’t really kick in until the start of 2009.

This year’s trends show that SEO is still more popular in search, but interestingly social media is the clear winner in news reference searches demonstrating its zeitgeist.