By Jason Smith, Business Development Manager, White Hat Media 

The Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2008– now in its 9th year – will be held on 19-21 February at the Business Design Centre, London, UK. This search engine marketing event spans four days and covers areas such as search, marketing, optimisation & commerce and focuses on promotional tactics on the web.

Attendance at SES London last year grew by over 50% and this year we expect more of the same. Search marketing is hotter than ever now and the event organises have planned an exciting and impressive line up for us this year. Delegates at this event will be granted access to network with the largest gathering of Search marketing professionals in addition to the most comprehensive SEM/SEO learning opportunity in the UK or Europe. SES Search Marketing Startegies conference will provide instruction from the industry’s top search marketing and optimisation experts, including representatives of the Search Engines themselves.

As well as teaching delegates everything they need to know to help them maximize search engine marketing and optimisation for their business, some of the new topics covered will include:

Search Around The World: Eastern and Western companies are pushing out to international markets, but does anyone really understand the marketplace? Attendees will learn how to separate hype from actionable activity. Leading experts in the Asia/ Pacific, Europe and the Americas discuss the marketplace and the impact it’s having on the world.

All Star Analytics: Successful search analytics strategy is key to maximising ROI. Search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising is pre click. But what happens after the click? A panel will discuss everything from bounce rates, improving conversion, spotting trends and generally elevating your SEO/PPC analysis to a whole new level.

Converting Visitors Into Buyers: Getting visitors to your web site is half the battle. To be victorious, you need them to convert into customers. Learn about making this conversion. The latter part of the session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their web sites live to provide general feedback about changing them to improve visitor conversion.

The host of this year’s Search Engine Strategies conference said: “SES London will provide search marketers, developers and executives with the tools, techniques and advice they need to develop their business locally and on a global scale. There are many other factors to consider with each phase of the online marketing process, including web analytics and site architecture. We have developed a programme to cover every crucial element for successful serach engine marketing.”

By Jason Smith, Business Developmet Manager, White Hat Media Ltd

Social media networking has enjoyed explosive growth over the past three years and as of yet there is no sign that it is levelling off yet. Advertising spending on social media sites in the US is expected show a growth rate of 70%, climbing to $1.6-billion in 2008 from $920-million in 2007. Social networking sites burst into the internet communities online world with a vengeance during 2007.

We believe that social networking will gain even more traction during 2008, as even more users flock to social networking sites and tools. We may see the rise of new social media networking environments during the year, including a rise to prominence by local alternatives to the likes of MySpace and Facebook. Other examples of current social media applications are Google (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), and Flickr (photo sharing).

Facebook is a social networking website, launched on February 4, 2004. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former Harvard student. Facebook has recorded more than 60 million active users (including non-collegiate members) worldwide. From September 2006 to September 2007 the site’s traffic ranking increased from 60th to 7th, according to Alexa. It is the number one site for photos in the United States with over 60 million photos uploaded weekly.

In October 2007 Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share in Facebook for $240 million.  An outright sale of Facebook is said to be unlikely as founder Mark Zuckerberg would like to keep it independent. On November 7, 2007, Facebook announced Facebook Ads; Facebook Beacon, a marketing initiative which includes a system for websites to allow users to share chosen information about their activities on the sites with their Facebook friends; the capability of businesses to host pages on Facebook for various brands, products and services (Facebook Pages); a targeted ad serving program based on user and friend profile and activity data (Facebook Social Ads); and a service for providing businesses with advertisement analytic data including performance metrics (Facebook Insights).

MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos internationally. According to Alexa Internet, MySpace is currently the world’s sixth most popular English-language website and the sixth most popular website in any language, and the third most popular website in the United States, though it has topped the chart on various weeks. The service has gradually gained more popularity than similar websites to achieve nearly 80%of visits to online social networking websites. According to Internet research firm Comscore, almost two-thirds of all Internet users visit MySpace at least once a month.

But don’t for one minute be sitting there thinking “yeah but those sorts of sites are for kids”. Research shows that half of the users visiting social media sites are people over 35. Facebook alone has more than 100,000 users older than 64. These sites are doubling in popularity at ridiculous speeds. I can bet that a number of you now bypass Google and head directly to Wikipedia when searching for certain kinds of information.

The reason for the rise of social media sites isn’t that big a surprise really. It’s the same reason why the telephone - and later the mobile phone - have became popular and why the internet has become indispensable to us now as a communication, marketing and research tool. Can you imagine life without your mobile and access to the internet now!?

The reason for this is that these social media sites have made it easier for us to connect with people on a much deeper level than we could have imagined a few years ago. I’m guessing that a lot of you know a lot more about people you have never met in person than you do about some of your neighbours. I know I’m guilty of this! This is because it’s now easier to collaborate and share information on social sites.

The main point I’m trying to make here is don’t just think these social media site are just playgrounds for children. They are powerful marketing tools and you should not overlook the importance of social media marketing to your business right now, as well as in the future. If you’re currently advertising on Google AdWords, you may want to check out Facebook Ads, which gives businesses another avenue to get in front of the right audience based on demographic and activity data.

By Jason Smith, Business Development Manager, White Hat Media

It used to be the case that if a web user was to type the words miserable failure into Google they would get the biography of US President George W. Bush on the White House website as the top result. The reason for this is that Google searches more than just the contents of web pages - it also place high importance on how many in-bound links a website has pointing to it and what words that actual link say. Using specific terms (or anchor text) as hyperlinks to another website is a very power search engine marketing tool. Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text.

However this search engine marketing technique has been misused by the members of the online community who Google Bomb sites to get the pages ranked highly for humorous or political intentions. A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is an internet slang term for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. The man behind the “miserable failure” Google bomb was George Johnston, a political activist and software programmer in Bellevue, Washington, USA. 

Google has finally won its war on the miserable failure result and defused that specific Google Bomb. But the wasn’t to help Bush keep face amongst the online community, it was instead part of an overall algorithm change designed to stop such mass in-bound link pranks from working. Google said in its official blog that “by improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web” such mischief would instead “typically return commentary, discussions, and articles” about the tactic itself. Writing on the blog, Matt Cutts, who specialising in search engine marketing for Google said that Google bombs had not “been a very high priority for us.” But he added: “Over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Google-bombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.”

Despite these changes by Google against using this search engine marketing tool as a means of playing pranks, some other Google bombs still exist. If you type in the words “French military victories”, the first result at the top of Google says, “Your search — French military victories — did not match any documents.” If you click on this site you will find a mock up of a Google search page asking the question “Did you mean: French military defeats.”

By Jason Smith, Business Development Manager, White Hat Media 

Search Wikia, a new open source search engine was launched today in an alpha version. Search Wikia is the brain child of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and his company Wikia, Inc. Wikia Search aims to improve search by letting users change search results in a fashion similar to how users edit entries on Wikipedia. Jimmy Wale has stated that this new search tool will reduce the “bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic.”

Wikia Search was born initially in July 2007 when Wikia, Inc acquired a distributed search project called Grub and Jimmy Wales announced he was going to release this product with an open-source license. But there are many people in the online community that are sceptical about this new search engine and its ability to dethrone a giant like Google. Sceptics believe that Jimmy Wales does not really understand the scale of what Google has to handle in terms of the queries from around the world. 

The question on every ones lips is will Search Wikia and its user-edited model be able to scale to the demands of consumer search engines. Google indexes billions of pages and has become deep rooted into daily lives of internet usres, providing them with highly targeted search results, Wikia Search on the other hand will launch its search engine today with only around 50 to 100 million Web pages indexed. It’s truly a David vs. Goliath battle. Even though this new internet search tool has been now officially released, Search Wikia is still essentially useless as a search engine because even Search Wikia admit themselves that the search results being produced are currently very poor.

Lets now sit back and see if Search Wikia can in time start to index the same amount of websites as Google and more importantly will they be able to stay ahead of the spammers.