The 5HITS

Yes its that time of the year again. SEO training for Bruce Clay in October and seen as the early bird offer is about to expire, what better than to provide a public service than giving you some criteria to judge SEO training on, and letting you know where to find Bruce Clay SEO Training. 

Getting your in-house SEO and consulting teams trained is critical as search engine ranking competition continues to grow. Getting them trained, armed with toolsets and methodologies and giving them the confidence to make key decisions on site structure, content and linking even more so.

Expecting SEO teams to learn from blog posts, forums and websites is not ideal. Finding the right training is however a good start and should deliver long term results.I obviously think Bruce Clay training is pretty good having done it now 5 times, but in case you are not convinced, judge for yourself. Here are 10 criteria you should consider before booking and sending your staff off to any SEO training.

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Internet, Search Marketing SEO Training

Blended search or as Google calls it Universal search was released with much fanfare in May 2007 and going to change the face of search results forever. Hearing Google Australia representives talk about it and answer questions at events on it was a case of “its coming, and will be driven by users”.

Well where has it gone? Its July 2008 and Google.com.au (Search Australia) is a Universal Search desert. Google.com.au (Search the web) has some blended results but mainly news. Universal search appears not to be that Universal, in fact its battling to straddle the planet.

The stats:

Looking at around 700 searches on product related searches from category through to a product specific terms, we established the following:

• Google.com.au – Australia only has less than 1% of its results including a blended result
• Google.com.au – Seach the web had around 9% of its results inclde a blended result however 90% of those were News results
• Google.com – Around 18% of the results included blended results and these were far more venly spread, including books, scholar and blogs, none of which showed up locally. Read more…

Internet, Search Marketing Universal search

When Marissa Meyer spoke at SMX Sydney 2008 she mentioned the impact on search from the Iphone. Google saw dramatic increases in searches in June when the IPhone was initially launched and then again at Christmas time, when they knew people would be away from home and mainly for “weather”.

Early numbers reported on IPhone sales were 300,000 on launch. Calling around on Saturday I found most stores had sold out of the 16GB model. Optus and Vodafone reported network issues due to the fact that the network had never had that many signups in such a short space of time. I predict at least 1m IPhones will be sold in the next 3-6 months. Australia has a population of 20 million, around 12-14 million potential customers for the Iphone so thats around 8% adoption in a relatively shor space of time. Say within 2 years 20-25% of users have Iphones.

Will Mobile search be different?

People will search for information. Great! Tell me something I didnt know. Well, its the information that will be different. Small snippets relevant to a current task or need, and more than likely location based, even if that was not your intent. So for example:

• Finding a business telephone number or address, running late for a meeting or checking stock
• Establishing opening and closing times, when running early or late to the shops
• Checking prices or offers, when in the store considering a purchase
• Checking sports scores, when out of town
• Filling up waiting time, waiting for a plane, lets see what I can find.
• Urgent actions, I need to find a hospital in my current location

Note, I have no doubt there will be multiple impacts the Iphone will have on search, this is just he one I have chosen to write about. If you identify others, please leave a comment.

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Internet, Search Marketing Iphone, mobile search

Twitter has some scaling issues we all know that, but its addictive. Twitter also has a blog, new offices and new funders in the form of Jeff Bizos (Bizos Expeditions) and Bijan Sabet (Spark Capital) not to mention Union Square Ventures and Digital Garage. So its all happening over at Twitter HQ.

The stated strategy is to “become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model”. Thank goodness for that, capitalism aint dead, profits are king.

But, the profits will have to wait. Twitter believes “our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust”. All from the Twitter Blog.

Well Twitter is not reliable and not yet robust, but I believe there is much effort in process to get this right. So assuming we have a reliable and robust product, whats next.

Looking at the Twitter top100 90% are based in the United States (US), 2 we were unable to determine, 1 was from Europe, 4 from the United Kingdom (UK), 2 from Australia and 1 from Mars. Who knew? So we have a global userbase already, even though it is skewed to the US. But then we would expect that, given the size and military might of the US.

By all accounts growth is exponential, just look at Twitterfacts. Twitter facts was updated in February 2008 and states that users are expected to reach 1 million by April 2008. Twitdir etimates current users around 2,1m although no date is given. On review of the top100, Mars Phoenix was the 14,693,823th thing to sign up for Twitter and that was fairly recent. In fact the first post was 13th may 2008. So 28,125 followers in 2 months, not bad. No stats were available on active users at the time of writing.

Will Twitter ever become a Global Communications Platform?

Currently the profile of users across Twitter seems stacked towards a Twiteratti, mostly with their own shows or ways of promoting their Twitter feeds, for example Leo Laporte via TWIT, Cali Lewis on Geekbrief TV and Jason Calicanis on just about anything he can find.  Great, they have the numbers and the platform. In fact around 10% of the people on Twitter appear to be following the Twitteratti, when they make up less than 0.001% of the twitter population, based on the top 100 and signups of around 15m. This is even more if you factor in accounts that are dormant which seem significant.

Most of the Twitteratti use Twitter as a means of promotion, look at TheRealDvorak, and Jason Calicanis to mention a few. These guys have to be respected, they have built an audience, maybe 75% of their posts are not related to their own sites but the rest drive traffic to an article or whatever. Lets be clear, there is no issue here, just the fact that may be more a way of rapid updates and interactive news from niche sources than a communications platform. These guys also work hard for their audience at an average of around 2,205 tweets per person normalised and around 15,244 followers each. Or maybe not if you consider madrid, the top updater who has made 322,230 tweets to date, and Im sure counting.

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Business online, Internet, Search Marketing Twitter