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03.28.06
The UK Says “What’s A Yahoo?”
 By
Jason Lee Miller
In a Cockney accent: In the United Kingdom,
three out of four punters use Google - yeah, mate, that's some
75 percent. That's what WebSideStory, Inc. said anyway. Yahoo!
barely gets a mention, and Jeeves, no wonder he retired, hardly
anyone was making use of ‘im.
WebSideStory collected searcher data for the month of February 2006 and found that Google referred an average of 74.67 percent of all U.K. visitors to other sites on the Web.
Yahoo! commanded just 9.3 percent as Google's nearest competitor. Google search percentage in the U.K. exceeds both the U.S. average (55.39 percent), and the global average (62.4 percent).
"Even more so in the U.K. than in the U.S., when people think of search, they think of Google," said Rand Schulman, Chief Marketing Officer for WebSideStory.
"This has large implications for U.K. marketers, whose search engine marketing and optimization strategies should be Google-centric."
The U.K. top five search engines are the same as the U.S. with a bit of a smaller share of the market. After Yahoo!, MSN referred 5.46 percent, AOL 4.21 percent, and Ask Jeeves 2.28 percent.
About the
Author:
Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
Shelf Life Of SEO
 By
StraightUpSearch
As we move into the information age of technology, positioning
on the internet rollercoaster is just that, "a whirl of a ride."
What may be in place one day can conceivably change the next. It's all about the positioning of a company - where one ranks in the search engine listings can equate to the success or demise of a company. It made me wonder how we evolved to this era of technology. Did we anticipate a wide-world market at our fingertips allowing us the power and ability to promote a product or service? How does one anticipate the juncture in which the market will change or evolve in the next decade? How do we prepare our children and our educators to learn and teach for the upcoming season or passage of time? How, as a society, do we become proactive and not reactive to the demands of the consumers in their conquest of searching for the perfect match in a limited amount of time?
The answer to all these questions came to me during my last visit to our local grocery store. In search of a product that met the desire of my taste buds, I realized that it's all about positioning. We tend not to look at the bottom shelves for a particular brand since it's proven to be the most difficult to reach. According to hearsay, bending over causing misalignment of the shoulder muscles with the middle-toe muscle causing life-long damage to the left ear lobe. Of course, one should not reach above ones own shoulder to know that extended height extension wears down the padding of your left index finger causing inability to point or make a point. So you ask, "What is your point?"
My reply is that search engine optimization is just that, finding just the right place on the World Wide Web for your product or service. You don't want consumers to find your website on the 30th page of search engine results, nor do you want them to spend too much time perusing the listings, making them vulnerable and at risk of falling into the laps of your online competitors. You want to be smack dab, ninety degrees, forward motion, in their face. As a consumer in a grocery store or the internet, you don't have the time to search aisle after aisle for a product, or page after page of the listings; you want to be able to glance at the labels above each aisle or type in that keyword phrase, find your product or the website, make the easy reach and sprint for the shopping cart for the easy purchase. The labels are the keywords, and it's just a matter of making sure that your product appears in that aisle and positioned at just the right height for the consumer to grab it.
So the next time you decide to pick up a gallon of milk at your local grocery store, think about search engine marketing. The positioning concept is the same, and your ability to find what you are looking for becomes more of a challenge as more products enter the market. And sometimes, even a quality product can find itself at the end of the aisle in the "clearance" cart, one step away from the dumpster. Search engine optimization does indeed have a shelf life; it just depends on selecting the right shelf for you.
About the
Author:
Oneupweb is the only two-time winner of the ClickZ award for "Best Search Engine Engine Marketing Firm". |
