Mobile phones now outnumber PCs two-to-one and that ratio is expected to grow to three-to-one by 2010. By the same year mobile phones are expected to top 3 billion worldwide. In light of this Google is re-launching their mobile search engine in the company’s latest attempt to break into the lucrative mobile phone market.

After many attempts at making their content adaptable to mobile, the search engine giant has not only tailored their results for mobile phone search, but has also designed their interface to be cleaner and faster, in an attempt to draw more customers and get more people to use their phone to search for local data and news. (more…)

Seeing Woolworths and MFI both recently collapse into administration is never good news. I can’t even imagine a high street without a Woolworths on it? Where will I buy my DVD’s and general household knickknacks from now – well actually I feel guilty as I have to put my hand up and admit that I now get most of these items online. Like a lot of people this switch in buying patterns has taken a lot of business away from high street stores.

It’s a sad fact but these two prominent retail names are just two of the latest casualties of the UK economic downturn. So it’s understandable in the current economic climate that businesses are restricting and seriously squeezing their marketing budgets. However the reality still stands that search engines will continue to be the most popular way in which people will look for information and purchase products or services nowadays. (more…)

On Wednesday 28th October White Hat Media headed out from our offices in Brighton and entered a world of e-commerce for the day. Well actually we attended the e-Commerce Expo 2008 at the Olympia in London to be more precise. We went there to meet other industry professionals to discuss the e-commerce issues facing decision makers. Now in its second year the e-commerce expo is exclusively dedicated to the process of selling online – from delivery of relevant website traffic through to service delivery and customer retention. (more…)

I have been observing Google’s Search Engine optimisation (SEO) Guru Matt Cutts’ blog recently and I noticed this little gem which made me smile. In a post on the 3rd March Matt Cutts gave his views on what he predicts will happen in 2008.

“2008 will be the year that hacking and Search Engine optimisation (SEO) collide in a major way. By the end of the year, a nontrivial fraction of blackhat SEO will involve illegally hacking sites for links or landing pages. One webhost will get a significant black eye as hundreds or thousands of customers’ websites are hacked. The growth of illegal-blackhat SEO will leave traditional blackhats with a difficult choice: risk doing something illegal or sit out.” (more…)

We experts in natural search know that Google loves content but how is it possible to provide content that is interesting enough to actually bother writing.

With IP addresses now running out and everyone and his dog and cat and budgerigar building websites all the time the amount of content amassing on the web is growing exponentially. Of course much of it is utter rubbish, possible even most of it is and unfortunately much of this rubbish has been put there simply because of the search engines and nothing else. It has to be said that that is an amazing irony. (more…)

New site, new blog. Having been involved with the build and marketing of literally hundreds of sites over the last ten years or so, working on one’s own site has to be the toughest challenge of all. So what aspects did we have to consider? The first thing is that it had to be interesting and rather than full of ’stuff about us’ have ’stuff you might want to know’. This is because, let’s face it, so many sites are just plain boring. Then after that it had to say good things about our clients, our people and what we do so that organisations think they should contact us about using our services and products because White Hat Media is a business and has mouths to feed. Then of course the site has to be optimised as much as possible because that’s what we do. (more…)