Here we take a (sanitised) look at what people are searching for on the internet  and review the 50 most popular searches in the last 48 hours, compared with the 50 most popular searches over the last 6 months.

Sex, as we’ve previously mentioned, does tend to rather dominate popular searches. Stripping out, if that’s the right word, adult, dubious, offensive, dodgy and, shall we say ‘non-family’ search phrases and keywords, we arrive at this list of the most popular searches on the internet, albeit somewhat santised.

It is, nevertheless, interesting to see just what  people are looking for. Star signs are obviously very popular with searchers, as are some websites with, what you would expect to be, fairly memorable URL’s. It all goes to show just how all encompassing the search engine now is and the importance of having your brand, organisation or message correctly represented within them and by them.

Here’s the 50 most popular recent searches:-

50 Most Popular Searches in the last 48 hours

See how this compares with the longer term trends, here’s the 50 most popular searches in the past 6 months:-

50 Most Popular Searches in the last 6 months

Bad news for all those people who have spent many hours agonising over the keywords that are most important for their website, yes, sorry guys, it’s all been a waste of time!

No, not really! Keywords are the most important element of search engine optimisation, full stop, period, end of story! Without understanding which keywords your clients, users, prospective customers , target customers, in fact anyone who you want to visit your website uses and then making sure your pages are optimised for, or at least contain these keywords, your website will not achieve its potential.

What Google is saying in this important post, that’s had the search world all of a buzz recently, is that for all those people who have spent many hours agonising over the keywords which are most important for their website and then stuffing them all into the “keywords” meta tag, anticipating almost immediate Google no.1 rankings and search engine domination, they will, unfortunately, be disappointed.

Most SEO’s have understood for some time that Google ignores the keywords metatag and filling the box consequently has little effect on a pages ranking’s. Yahoo has also confirmed that it disregards the “keywords” tag although, perhaps typically contrarily, Bing advises otherwise “take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit ” it says.

Zelst‘s policy has been that summarising 5 key phrases for a page is good discipline, provides a prompt for the other elements of on-page optimisation and given the amount of time it adds to the process, if it’s relevant, it is as well to have it there.

The really interesting thing, imho, that came out from the blog and a subsequent YouTube post is that Google has confirmed it is increasingly using well written meta descriptions in their page snippets on a search engine results page.

The snippet is the piece of text that appears below the page title in a search engine results page as illustrated here:-

This description, whilst having no bearing on search rankings from Google, is your opportunity to pitch your page to searchers, courtesy of Google. It’s your 10 second, elevator pitch so stuffing it full of keywords is not its purpose.

So what does this say for SEO?

Well, yes, something we’ve been saying for some time. SEO is not just about stuffing a load of random keywords in your page titles, meta descriptions and “keywords” tags and hoping for the best. It’s about ensuring your page is relevant to your target keywords, they appear in the relevant places on the page, not just in the meta headers, that your titles, meta descriptions, headings, content and tags are all crafted around your target phrases, that your structure, navigation and links are all conducive both to your users and search robots and that you ensure that an appropriate number of relevant sites link to your pages using your keywords in their link text. Simple? Yes. Easy? No. Quick? Absolutely not!

Firstly, what is duplicate content? Google describes it simply as “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar”. In other words pages which are identical or, at least, very, very similar.

Secondly, why is it such an issue? Spammers (website owners/masters who try to artificially manipulate search results via ‘black hat’ methods) have used the copying of pages and sites as a quick way to boost their rankings, after all you can soon create a website if you copy all the content from someone else. Similarly, some people have tried to achieve manipulation of search results by presenting their site across a number of different domains so that they have more than one bite of the search cherry.  This is obviously bad, and has led to the rise of the “Google Duplicate Content Penalty” myth, where people have believed that Google penalises, even removes sites and pages from its index which ‘suffer’ from Duplicate Content.

Google has stated through various sources and on a number of occasions, that no such penalty exists, it simply wishes to provide its users (the searcher) with the most relevant results and it does not wish to provide multiple links to what is, basically, the same content.  We have largely believed this, feeling that the main damage that duplicate content inflicts is through incorrect indexing, i.e. Google indexing your non-preferred URL’s and through page rank dilution, i.e. if you have internal and external links to multiple variants of the same pages, your page rank is potentially diluted across however many variants, which is what we have sought to address with our SEO Cients.

Now in a post on Google’s Official Webmaster Blog, Google has categorically denied that a Duplicate Content Penalty exists, stating that whereas they do penalise spammers and spammers who use Duplicate Content, “Spammers also use Bold tags” but they don’t penalise everyone who uses them.

Google realise that not all duplicate content is malicious. They point to real examples of multiple versions of a home page, e.g.

• zelst.co.uk/
• zelst.co.uk/?
• zelst.co.uk/index.html
• zelst.co.uk/home.php
• www.zelst.co.uk/
• www.zelst.co.uk/?
• www.zelst.co.uk/index.html
• www.zelst.co.uk/home.php

This is something that we have found on most of our client sites (and fixed), Google points out that it even occurs on the Queen’s website !

When you add in that some people also have .com and .net, etc., versions of their site, can you see the potential issues? In addition to which URL should Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., select, which URL do other webmasters use when they link to your site? As well as the issue of different urls being selected by the search engine, if links are split potentially 8, 16, 24, etc., times the value of these links in your page rank is diluted accordingly.

There are also issues relating to the breadcrumb trail of your URL, different size, weight options of the same product, if you are selling online, different country versions of the same language site, e.g. Irish, UK, US and so on.

Added to that we can think of Affiliate versions of pages, inadvertent/innocent cloning of pages, non-approved copying of content and a number of other issues, which all can affect a site/pages particular ranking.

Google re-emphasises the use of permanent “301 redirects” and use of the “rel=canonical” tag as ways to address this, which Zelst has been successfully using for a number of months to deal with these issues.

If you would like to discuss your potential duplicate content issues or want help to address them contact Zelst today.

Well, no one saw that one coming did they?

Of the hundreds of different internet search engines available, up until last Wednesday there were only really three meaningful ones. And now that number has shrunk by a third, with Microsoft’s announcement that it was joining forces with Yahoo. The essence is that Yahoo will replace its own search engine with Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, for users of its popular pages (and split the resulting revenue) and Yahoo, errr…. Well, they’re going to get their salespeople to sell all the advertising, although they won’t be selling advertising to their self service customers, i.e. the vast majority of them, this is Bing’s job. Oh yes, and Yahoo has licensed its Search Technology to the new Microsoft Bing operation, although it hasn’t clarified the monetary aspects of this deal. Sounds like a good deal, especially if you’re a Yahoo shareholder….not?

Microsoft and Yahoo have been flirting and/or playing the mating game for over 18 months now and the recent intensified spats with Google have flagged up that the two were getting ever closer to consummation.

The launch of Bing, a much improved search engine compared to its predecessor, which took  big chunks out of Yahoo’s market share, was Microsoft’s trump card or the final nail in Yahoo’s coffin, depending on your perspective and choice of metaphor.  Not only did Yahoo see its users deserting it for Bing but the realisation of the scale of resources needed to keep its own search engine in the game not to mention the marketing costs to persuade people to use it left Yahoo feeling increasingly irrelevant.

So Yahoo is now positioning itself as a media company, has ditched its tech roots (and founder Jerry Yang in the process) and has launched a new home page! And the main thing that Yahoo was known for and the source of the bulk of its current revenue will be provided by Microsoft.  Yahoo Search Marketing, aka Overture, the inventor of the PPC search model that has powered its rival Google to world domination will, essentially, cease to exist.

What Does This All Mean to You?

In real terms to most people there was only really one search engine last week and there still is today. Google is so far ahead of the game that, to a lot of people, putting Bing and Yahoo together is largely irrelevant.

With most of our clients we are seeing shares of between 85 and 95% to Google, 5-10% for Yahoo and 1 to 2% for Bing, with around 1% for the rest. Yes, this is distorted because most of our clients are running Google AdWords campaigns but even stripping out the paid clicks doesn’t make the comparisons any less stark.  As an example for the keyword  ”cheap beds for sale” even with a Yahoo ranking of 6 compared to a Google ranking of 12 Google produced 3 times more traffic and of a significantly higher quality for our bed client. With the keyword  ”buy cheap beds online” despite a no 1 Bing Ranking compared to a no 8 Google ranking Google produced 20 times more traffic than its newest challenger. With Ottoman Beds despite ranking of #1 on Yahoo,#7 on Bing and #10 on Google the split was 4% Bing, 36% Yahoo and 60% Google.

Advertisers should welcome a stronger competitor to AdWords, but it will mean there will now only be one meaningful alternative rather than two. Bing’s new PPC offer is considerably improved but it still probably isn’t as good as Yahoo’s Overture PPC set-up and even if you put the absolute best bits of Microsoft’s paid search together with the absolute best bit’s of Yahoo’s, it still wouldn’t be as good as Google’s AdWords.

The main difference should be volume. To smaller PPC advertisers it simply isn’t viable to run ads on either Bing or Yahoo. Search volumes are so much smaller in comparison that the cost of setting up, monitoring and managing campaigns across Bing and Yahoo only makes sense for large advertisers. That, added to the fact that generally clicks are poorer quality from these two has left us recommending to most of our clients that they just stick with Google. Hopefully an improvement in the PPC search engine combined with the increase in search volumes of the two will change this. The danger is that in putting two smaller mediocre operations together the end result will be one slightly larger mediocre operation, which will play once more into Google’s hands.

The best case scenario is that with Bing’s much improved search engine combined with the more than doubling in volume will provide a worth competitor for Google and keep it on its toes.

There are also things like the venerable and still really useful Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo’s sponsored placement ‘Search Submit’, of which as yet announcements have still to be made. What will happen to these?

And What for the Immediate Future?

One of the big issues here is that the deal is subject to regulatory approval and could take up to two years to complete, which is a heck of a long time in search engine terms. The big worry is that Yahoo will limp along as a lame duck, lose even more of its best people and users in the uncertainty, Bing will continue to get a little better and raise its market share a little and Google will rub its hands and get even stronger. Stay tuned…….

Then imagine they’d agreed to a date, with you!

The Perfect Date?

So you set out to impress, yes, you’re going to impress definitely…

You look a million dollars, you feel great, you smell divine, how could they resist?

You’ve laid on the cocktails, taken them to the most exclusive restaurant, ordered the most exquisite dinner imaginable, chosen the most expensive wine and, at the culmination of the evening, as you wait breathlessly on their words, they utter that classic, knee trembling line ‘I’ll call you later’.

How would if it feel if that happened to you? Imagine how you’d feel if it happened every Saturday night?

What if it happened every night?

Then imagine how you would feel if it kept on happening to you, repeatedly, all day and every day.

You’d be really stupid wouldn’t you?

Can you really believe anyone would be daft enough to let that happen to them, over and over again and do nothing about it?

And yet amazingly this sort of thing goes on all the time on the internet.

I daren’t count the amount of times I’ve been told ‘we need more traffic!’. Yet getting more traffic is like asking for more water when you have a hole in your bucket, or asking ever more people out on expensive dates when something you do or say every time makes your perfect partner never want to see you, ever again.

Traffic isn’t the issue, it’s what you do with it, just like it’s not your chat up line that’s not working, it’s your conversion process.

Peter Van Zelst is the founder of Specialist Online Marketing, which runs an integrated online marketing service for small to medium sized UK organisations,using PPC, SEO, Email, Affiliate, Social Media and a number of other activities and utilising Analytics to ensure every click counts.

There’s lots of debate in online marketing and search engine circles (even in general discussions down the pub, for that matter) about the best way of online marketing. SEO’s will always tell you that Natural Search is best; PPC Search Professionals will advocate that Pay Per Click is far more effective; Affiliate Marketing experts will advise that the Affiliate channel is the only way; the email marketing guys will shout that nothing works like email and so on.

The truth is that they all work really well but what YOU should use depends on what YOU want to achieve.

Depending on your objectives; products/services/industries/markets or segments; product lifecycle stage; different customer/target customer groups or such criteria, one or more of these online marketing activities is going to be best for you. The secret is selecting which!

Pay Per Click Search Advertising and how to use it most effectively

Because PPC is immediate, flexible, controllable, targeted, measurable and, in some cases, extremely cheap, it is ideally suited for certain situations. In these appropriate situations, PPC will give you a significantly higher return on your investment than literally ANY form of marketing and advertising, and I can more or less guarantee that.

We recommend that the 10 best uses of PPC are as follows:-

1.Starting out with a new website

When you first launch your website it is extremely difficult to get initial traffic. Google and the other search engines take time to index your pages, you have yet to start building any links, other webmasters can’t see your page rank, no word of mouth or recommendations have started to kick in, referral traffic doesn’t exist, you’re faced with spectre of the mythical Google Sandbox, and the list goes on.

If you launch your website at 10 o’clock, you can have traffic coming to your site at 10:00:01 with PPC. What’s more, with a correctly built, optimised and managed campaign you can be at the top of the search engines from day 1, minute 1. Even better with a good campaign, every single visitor that hits your site is looking for exactly what you do and is ready to buy.

2. Competition, around your name or in general

Just like when you’re starting out, if you have a common, generic or widely used name, e.g. ‘john smith’ or ‘flowers’ or ‘sarah palin’, it will be very difficult for you to achieve high search engine prominence. Which means if you’re marketing your business offline, people won’t be able to find you. Using PPC for this is an extremely important and very effective way of protecting your brand name and making sure your customers find you.

Similarly, sometimes it’s just not possible to get a top Google ranking for a particular term or would be prohibitively difficult. In these cases, if you need presence for that keyword phrase, then PPC is your option.

3. Testing

In search engine marketing you need to know the keywords that will be used by your customers, and the words that will attract them to your site and not those of your competitors. You also need to know which keywords deliver conversions, be that sales, leads, enquiries, downloads, etc., and which don’t. You also need to know if that keyword will bring lots of traffic or hardly any.

There’s no point in optimising for a particular keyword that no-one searches for or having descriptive text and titles that don’t drive people to your site.

Because PPC is so flexible, immediate and measurable you can test out any conceivable number of variations of keywords and phrases, titles, advertising messages, landing pages and so on.

You can then be sure that when you do start to optimise those important keywords, they will drive viable volumes of quality traffic that bring in business.

4. Low volume/high conversion search terms

Just as in the above, because Pay Per Click is flexible, instant and highly measurable, if you identify that a particular keyword phrase brings in a high level of conversions but has very low search volumes, you can assess whether it is more profitable just to run with PPC for that particular phrase.

5. Sales Push or Demand/Workload Control

Most businesses are limited by capacity but also have a minimum level of business they need to cover overheads. With a well run PPC campaign the moment you feel like you’re going to need some new business you can either turn on or turn up your PPC advertising volume and, lo and behold, in comes the business or at least targeted leads.

Once you’re reaching capacity and are worrying about how you can fulfil all your orders or work, simply turn off or reduce the PPC advertising volume.

Few advertising media can compare with the speed, immediacy, controllability and flexibility of PPC and I would say it is a superb tool for controlling your businesses work load.

6. Perishable Products/Services

If you grow Strawberries, offer coach tours, run seminars or sell Valentine’s Day gifts you have a very time specific offering and a limited window to sell your product or service. There’s no point in offering your Strawberries two weeks before they are ready and there’s little point in advertising valentine’s gifts on the 15^th February or your seminar they day after you ran it.

Just like the above point, you can regulate your advertising according to demand so if you still have empty spaces on your seminar the week before you can promote heavily or you can cut back your advertising once your coach is nearly full.

7. Promotions/Special Offers

If you have a twice yearly sale, a one week promotion or a 10% off day, then PPC is highly effective. You can advertise whenever you need and pull the moment you stop the promotion. You can take your potential customer to the exact landing page that advertises your promotion or even multiple promotions. Your advertising is fresh, exciting and you’re not promoting something that finished 3 months ago.

8. Time Specific Advertising

If you offer next day delivery up to, say, 2 o’clock in the afternoon, then you don’t want to be promoting next day delivery at 2:30pm. With Pay Per Click Search Advertising you can time your adverts so that they appear from say 1am to 1:55pm each day so you never disappoint or mislead a customer or potential customer.

9. Geographic targeting

If you only sell to a local market you don’t want to be promoting your offer in India or to the Highlands of Scotland when you only service London. With the Geographic targeting options available on the main search engines you only need to advertise to the geographic area you cover, so your ads aren’t shown to people outside this area.

10. Short Term Campaigns

If your site is built around an event that is going to take place in 3 months time and then be over, PPC is really the only way you can effectively drive viable levels of traffic to your site. You can launch your campaign whenever you’re ready and then go like mad until you’re satisfied. As soon as the event’s over you can switch off your PPC campaign.

Conclusion

An intelligently used, highly targeted, optimised Pay Per Click Campaign is one of the best forms of internet marketing and when used appropriately is an invaluable weapon in your marketing armoury.

Peter Van Zelst is founder of Specialist Online Marketing, which runs an integrated online marketing service for small to medium sized UK organisations,using PPC, SEO, Email, Affiliate, Social Media and a number of other activities.

Despite this, it’s staggering how many people haven’t grasped the impact of this word ‘relevancy’ on their business or ambitions.

Traditionally marketing people liked to think of cross selling possibilities, up-selling and impulse purchases opportunities. If you went to someone looking for a hammer, you might also buy some nails and a screwdriver (That’s why Supermarkets are laid out the way they are).

Don’t get me wrong, the same can happen in today’s online world, but when someone is searching for a hammer on a search engine, the statistical probability that they will abandon this search and buy some nails instead is, at best, remote.

A simple search for hammer on Google throws up the possibilities of Horror films, Data Storage, a legendary 1980′s US Rapper, a heavy metal rock band, Communism, Computer Parts and many other variances, aside from our intended target, the eponymous impact tool.

Refining the Hammer Tool search then throws up: – hand operated hammers, machine hammers, framing hammers, demolition hammers, air hammers, metal hammers, wooden hammers, claw hammers, dead blow hammers, sledge hammers, lump hammers, cross-peen hammers, hammer drills, and so on.

Refining our search to hand operated hammers throws up another raft of options and the search process continues.

Users refine their search to become more and more relevant to what they are precisely looking for at the time. Anything else is lost in the periphery.

Relevance is fundamental in natural search but it’s crucial in Paid Search

You can see this effect in Pay Per Click Search Advertising so clearly. If you don’t target your keywords and advertising message with precision, laser-like accuracy, your Click Through Rates will be poor, your quality score will be poor, your minimum bid costs rise and/or your Ads won’t be shown.

The other side to this, is that if you inaccurately target your keywords but your ad copy leads people to believe that your site offers what they want, you will get visitors to your site (and have to pay for the privilege in PPC) but they will leave almost immediately once they realise your site isn’t relevant to their requirements. The resulting high ‘bounce rate’ will adversely affect your quality score, your minimum bid costs will rise, your Ads won’t be shown and your partner will probably leave you and take with them all your possessions.

As an online marketing company, we see this all the time (Though not the last bit too much, thankfully). Sensible, experienced, successful business people who obviously understand their markets and customers, but don’t fully understand the keywords that drive their users and customers to visit their website. ‘Yes’, they say, ‘I know that’s really not exactly what we do, but if someone was looking for that they might be interested in this’. NO! Sorry it just doesn’t work like that.

So you’re talking about relevancy in search, surely web 2.0 is different?

The huge amount of information that is now out there in this web 2.0 world makes relevancy (and search) even more important. Many sites are so huge you almost have no option but to use Google to help you find what you want.

If you think back to the early days of Google, its results weren’t anywhere near as relevant, but then again there weren’t so many web pages out there as there is today. The sheer volume of information now on the web; the way Google has positioned itself as an organiser of information based on the criteria of relevance and the growth of both are inextricably linked.

Which leads us to the information overload question. With so much stuff coming at you, what do you do? Errm, focus on what you want at that particular time, back to Relevance, again.

So what does this mean to me?

It means you have to understand relevance. Which means you need to fully understand your business, your customers and your target customers. Try to articulate exactly what it is you do and what your customers/users value. The start to develop an understanding of the sort of words that your target users/customers will use when looking for you and what you do, and which words will attract them to visit your website not one of your competitors. And then test, analyse and ruthlessly refine your target keywords. And DON’T go thinking that if lots of people are looking for info on Theo Walcott there’s a good chance they may be interested in your site that sells mobile phone cards!

Peter Van Zelst is the founder of Specialist Online Marketing, which runs integrated online marketing campaigns for small to medium sized UK organisations, using PPC, SEO, Email, Affiliate, Social Media and a number of other activities.

If a web page is slow to load people will click off and follow another link. And because a search page is an extremely competitive place to be (All your competitors are listed there) if you don’t respect your visitor by loading your page instantly you’ll lose them.

This has been extremely important in Paid Search (PPC) for a long time. After all, you pay your per click money to Google once someone clicks on Google, not when, and if, they land on your website.

Now Google has added a stick to the carrot by penalising further slow loading pages.

From June 18th, Google has implemented an additional landing page load time factor into keywords quality score, which will mean sites with slow loading pages or multiple redirects will end up paying more and or not achieving as high an Advertising position.

All the more reason to make sure your landing pages are not only relevant, easily navigable, easy to understand and follow but quick to load!

Without delving into the motivation behind such behaviour, perhaps the first thing to consider is whether or not Google, Yahoo et al has considered this and whether their legions of PhDs and other highly trained, educated and paid people could possibly be a match for a load of slightly inebriated blokes and bored call centre workers? Google ranks as the 241st biggest corporation in America (in the 2007 Fortune 500 list – although its sales have grown by 56% then). It has annual revenues of over $16.5bn, almost all of which come from PPC Ads. Call me naïve or blasé but do you think they would put their reputation and the incredible income streams that this reputation allows them to generate, at risk for the sake of not dealing with one of the few potential weaknesses of their product?

There are rumours that some of the lesser search engines are not quite as rigorous in their pursuit of click fraud as the big 3, but in reality stopping repetitive clicking and identifying large volumes of clicks from a single ip address or range is not rocket science, certainly not when considering all the other stuff they are doing and amazing technological advances they are making. In most of our larger advertisers accounts, we see regular ‘quality adjustment’ credits, where Google has concerns over the validity of clicks and automatically pays back the cost of these.

Secondly any PPC manager worth their salt has fraud prevention procedures in place; regularly analysing traffic patterns to identify possible click fraud and notifying the search engines of any dubious traffic. It is the fundamental concept of PPC is that everything is traceable, so if a particular keyword is generating huge volumes of rapidly departing traffic i.e. bounces, or any level of poor quality, i.e. non-converting, traffic, your PPC manager should eliminate it as a matter of course. Likewise, if a particular area of the country is generating large volumes of poor quality/non-converting traffic, your PPC account manager will exclude it, even barring IP addresses or ranges from seeing your ads if necessary.

And finally the main point about PPC is that it is dynamic, flexible, responsive and controllable. If your PPC campaign isn’t working you either change it so that it does or you stop it. Call me naïve again, but I really struggle to understand how anyone can fall foul of some of the anecdotes I hear, with all the potential safeguards that are available.

One area that I do see has more scope for fraud and that is regularly discussed in Search Engine/Online Marketing circles are content ads and, in particularly, AdSense. Because Google shares the revenue of these ads with the owner of the website, there is a genuine incentive for the website owner to become a happy clicker. However, that said, Google deliberately prices content clicks at much lower rates than search clicks, every click is still traceable so particular sites with high levels of poor quality traffic can be excluded and (again) dubious IP addresses be excluded from seeing your ads, so, once more, you can get really good value advertising from the content network if you run it correctly.

When considering the ways that newspapers and television stations regularly over inflate their readership and viewing figures to sell their advertising (which has no guarantee of even being seen, let alone result in an action), it seems almost churlish to moan about people deliberately taking the time to click onto a site and incur a cost to the advertiser of a few pennies each time. Click fraud does happen but you must put it into context. We at Specialist Online Marketing deliver highly effective PPC advertising that gets results, almost always at a far higher level of cost effectiveness and profitability than any other form of advertising. Though the yarns we hear are very entertaining and will always get people talking down the pub, most of what we hear has an element of ‘a bad workmen blames his tools’ about it. Perhaps its not quite so entertaining to talk about really boring nerds who spend hours analysing data to generate high quality traffic which delivers fantastic results and makes PPC marketing the most profitable form of advertising available?

Coming soon PPC Myths No 2 but if you have any PPC Stories, Myths, Fallacies or Rumours you want discussing please contribute!

Peter Van Zelst is founder of Specialist Online Marketing, PPC Search Marketing Specialists and Makers of More Profitable Search Marketing for Your Business. Visit http://www.specialistonlinemarketing.com to see how Profitable PPC Search Marketing could benefit your business.