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.

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

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

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.

I often site Google Alerts as a great competitor benchmarking tool particularly if you’re carrying out SEO campaigns, monitoring buzz for online PR or tracking blog activity. Despite its popularity among digital marketers, its power is rarely unleashed, so let’s look at some typical uses, in this case within a search engine optimisation framework:

1, Brand buzz monitoring

The most obvious use of Google Alerts is to monitor your brand activity.  Google will report on any mentions of your brand across the web. Or  should you want to limit alerts to specific indeces, you can choose to only be alerted if your brand is mentioned with blogs or news for example.

Monitoring brand activity not only enables you to assess where you brand has been mentioned, but also let’s you monitor any possible link building activity or opportunities.

2. Backlink monitoring

A more advanced use of Google Alerts is to enter a Google operator such as inanchor:Emarketeers which will send alerts if the brand name Emarketeers is found in any backlinks (within the actual anchor text) rather than just mentioned within page copy.

The same applies to non-branded search terms. So for example, if I want to track mentions of the keyphrase SEO training within links, I’ll add the command allinanchor:seo training into Google Alerts in order to be alerted of any newly indexed links containing the keyphrase SEO training.

3.  Monitoring of different types of content

By using advanced Google operators, Google Alerts allows an SEO expert to gain insight into how different types of content such as PDF files or Flash is indexed. This is particularly useful for monitoring on-page optimisation of Flash content which in the past may have caused problems as non-indexable content.

By adding the alert lighting design filetype:swf or lighting design filetype:pdf, we can to monitor the content of Flash and PDF files respectively for the keyphrase lighting design.

You might want to limit this to your own site to assess how well Google has indexed your content; if this is the case, the Google Alert would be lighting design filetype:swf site:mysite.com.

4. Competitor analysis for SEO keyphrases

Monitoring competitor use of keyphrases is the obvious use of Google Alerts for search campaigns. I can add the following alerts to keep up to speed on my competitor’s use of certain keyphrases:

“digital marketing” site:competitorsite.com – creates alerts for the  keyphrase digital marketing on my competitor’s site

“digital marketing” -site:mysite.com – prevents me being alerted of digital marketing appearing on my own site

allinachor:digital marketing site:competitorsite.com – create alerts when digital marketing is contained within links on my competitor’s website

5. Monitoring of index inclusion

I often use Google Alerts to inform me of recently indexed content on my own website. For example, to be alerted that this blog post has been indexed by Google, I could add the following alert: google alerts site:emarketeers.com

6. Generating leads through search activity

One delegate attending an SEO training course told me how she used Google Alerts for generating a list of prospects to follow-up.  Her company sold catering supplies to caterers in the Manchester area. She set up Google Alerts for phrases such as “manchester caterer”, “north west catering” and other related terms to be kept informed of prospects in her area.

7. Tracking activity of syndicated content

If you syndicate content such as articles (to article submission sites), online PR (to PR syndication services) or blogs (to blog aggregators), Google Alerts will let you monitor exactly where your content has been syndicated.

Create alerts containing the article, press release or blog post names to be informed of how they have been indexed across the web or more specifically within the blogosphere.

8. Check for plagiarism and duplicate content

This is a trickier call as any of your content could in theory be plagiarised. However if you are particularly paranoid about theft of certain content e.g. blog articles you have been slaving over, use Google Alerts to warn you of content theft.

This is particularly relevant to SEO as duplicate content can cause index exclusion.

I’ve left it rather late to book Christmas flights to Australia this year. And as it gets closer to Christmas, the prices inevitably rise steeply. So, clearly the early bird catches the worm when it comes to Christmas getaways.

Looking at the Google trends graph below, we can see an interesting trend emerging in search activity for flights from the last 5 years.

See the real data at Google Trends.

From 2004 to 2008 we can see a gradual seasonal change in searchers researching or buying flights for Christmas-time; year-on-year we are searching for deals earlier and earlier in the year.
By the time we hit 2008, there is a measurable amount of search traffic for the term “Christmas traffic” even in January.

This could be due to a number of reasons: either searchers are trying to snap up bargains earlier and earlier; we’re being subjected to marketing messages from travel companies earlier in the year; or finally holiday-makers are returning from their previous year’s Xmas holidays with post holiday blues and with the desire to book the next Xmas trip!

What’s also conspicuous is the reduction of search traffic at the end of 2008 as the recession has fully kicked in. Clearly, Christmas holidays are not top priority for consumers.

Looking at recession-hit 2009, not only have our Q1 searches for “christmas flights” bucked the trend, but in Q3 we are also marginally down on 2008; it’s also likely that the last quarter will be down on the same time last year.

Maybe I should have booked at the beginning of the year and I would have snapped up a bargain!

Back in the 1996, my first “proper” job after leaving college was at Nat. West Bank working as a project assistant on a high profile project with IBM. I worked among a team of specialists who spoke a completely different language to me – full of acronyms and jargon.

I was responsible for all documentation within a PRINCE2 environment and had to write minutes from meetings; I was awestruck (and slightly panicked) by my lack of familiarity with this jargon. I realised that this was the way things were heading and that I had better get to grips with this new language if I was to survive.

Years later, this digital or online language has become commonplace, so much so, that it has infiltrated the English dictionary. To Google a phrase, or to blog about a topic is ubiquitous in every day speak, even among the less digitally minded.

So in 2009, have we reached a point where being savvy in the online world is not so much a benefit but more of a requirement?

With the UK online audience at around 35 million* which amounts to around 70% of the UK population, you simply cannot ignore the degree to which the web has infiltrated our lives as consumers or businesses. Compared with other European countries, the UK has the most active online audience; on average we spend 34.4* hours per month online (* comScore, Dec ‘08).

Let’s also remember that estimates are somewhat distorted by the fact that some of us use our mobile phones to surf the web, so the figures above are probably understated.

So what does that tell us about getting educated in digital?

As a consumer, whether we are renewing our car insurance, doing our weekly Tesco shopping or researching our summer holidays, it is usually easier and sometimes more cost effective doing it online. Being able to carry out the above tasks is almost a given nowadays. And in the workplace, if your job requires you to be online, being web savvy is completely taken for granted by employers.

At the professional marketer level, having offline marketing skills is rarely considered enough to land a marketing manager’s job. With search engine marketing as the granddad of digital marketing and the newer social media marketing revolution almost at full throttle, the majority of employers will require candidates for marketing positions to fully understand and embrace digital marketing.

In the same vein, “getting digital” in business is crucial. We have long since passed the need to have a website simply because you have to. For a number of years, businesses have been migrating from offline to online as it is more cost effective, easier to measure results and often yields a better return on investment.
Successful businesses know they need to be cleverer than simply having a website if they want to get noticed.

Investing in online marketing in order to better generate sales or brand reach has proven its worth time and time again. If online marketing skills are lacking within an organisation, it is crucial to invest in online marketing training in order to educate staff.

Having worked in web design and development for over a decade, I’ve watched small businesses launch websites with next to no marketing strategy or expenditure. These small businesses soon fell by the way side despite my constant reminders that they required a marketing strategy – be it offline or online!

The Government clearly knows that getting digital is the future. The Digital Britain Report was published in June 2009 as a plan to secure Britain’s place at the forefront of the global digital economy. Giving universal access to broadband, enhancing the digital delivery of public services and getting the right solution to digital content rights are only some of the issues highlighted in the plan.

So, clearly, the mantra being spoken, whether you’re an employer recruiting staff or a business trading online is: “Get smart, get digital”. Ignore it at your peril!