Archive for the ‘News’ Category
I have a friend (probably ex-friend after me publishing this) who works as a private detective in California. Much like any smart businessman he knew he’d need a niche specialism to really command capital for his time. So he became an expert in Silicon Valley industrial espionage.
He’s worked on a number of really interesting projects over the year, but he’s normally pretty professional when it comes to revealing specifics. Not the case last week. He had a few too many rum and cokes when we met up, and revealed a bit too much about his work infiltrating Twitter to find out about their advertising platform. Read on
We’ve got a mixed audience here; current clients, potential clients and quite a lot of competitors. We try to keep our blog fairly on-topic around natural search, PPC and social media strategies and techniques, and avoid talking too much about the business or company.
We’ve done a slight website refresh and new logo as well…
But as it’s a New Year I thought you might be interested to hear about some of our exciting new plans for 2010.
Read on
Most businesses budget for 0-10% revenue growth per annum; in fact, many shareholders and company Directors might be pleased with 5% revenue and profit growth in the current uncertain economic environment. SiteVisibility’s parent company, AI Digital Ltd, achieved a 5 year compound annual growth rate of 725%, which resulted in being awarded 45th and 234th place in the EMEA Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and EMEA 500 company rankings last night. It is our third year in the rankings.
The winners achieved truly incredible growth; I can’t imagine what the owners of Turkish software company Biotekno felt about achieving growth of 42,4186.82% (I’m not kidding), but given they’re a husband and wife team, I hope she (the boss) books in a major celebration of their awe inspiring partnership.
Read on
As you may know at SiteVis we’re lucky enough to get a day off work a year to do something charitable, so I got thinking about what charities I would like to help out, and my mind settled on helping bees http://www.bumblebeeconservation.org.uk/
Artist’s impression of Kelvin during the ride!
Mainly because colony collapse disorder is so freaky and scary. (even if you don’t care much about my ride you should still read this http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/saving-bees-what-we-know-now/)
So I thought what could I do that would somehow be tangent-ly related to the charity, so I decided why don’t I try to cycle from Bournemouth to Brighton, and to make it more interesting why don’t I take a de-tour via 13 places beginning with letter b. (Including a completely off route visit to the Isle of Wight)
Read on
Excuse us while we blow our own trumpet. But I’d like to say a massive thanks to everyone at SiteVisibility for the great work you’ve all delivered throughout 2009, which led to us winning the Online Marketing Consultancy of the Year award at this year’s Data Publishers Association (DPA) awards.
Google have released a beta version of their new search engine which is supposed to be faster and more accurate than the current model. Coined by industry insiders as Caffeine, Google engineers claim the back end changes are, “the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”
Superficially it’s much the same because all the implemented changes are behind the scenes in order to vastly improve the results, Caffeine allows Google to index the web at a faster pace, gathering more information quicker and hopefully providing results that are “less spammy.” Which to be fair, they seem to have achieved, sometimes there are considerably less results than I’m used to but they’re all relevant.
photo credit: Gret@Lorenz
Read on
I recently had a letter published in NMA which recognised the strategy the bookstore called Borders had implemented, namely closing 5 of its high street stores but keeping its recently relaunched website open for business. I wondered if anyone had any comments or anecdotes of other retail businesses preparing for the upturn by, amongst other things, fine tuning their SEO. If consumer demand continues to grow into Q1/Q2 2010, that’s 6 months away which means SEO strategies being implemented now are going to be coming on stream in Spring next year. It sounded like a timely online strategy to me.
Well yesterday’s cricket match was much enjoyed by all involved, as were the beers and the sausage rolls – good show everyone!
AI Digital batted first and after kitting up I was bowled for a duck. Bryan did marginally better with a single run while our Batsman of the Match was Damon, slogging the balls all over the shop despite some wild bowling. Damon scored 64 not-out, and retired to give other batsmen a turn. Overall we scored 177 and next was our turn to field.
Read on
Following on from England’s success against Pakistan, and swiftly forgetting about the Netherlands drubbing, we are appealing for volunteers to help complete our AI Digital/SiteVisibility Cricket Squad.Just have a look at how we did last year.
It should be a fun early evening battle against ROCC Software Systems at Braypool, Brighton from 5pm on Thursday, June 18th. Hopefully we’ll be enjoying some sunshine as well as a bit of a barbecue and a few beverages.
Don’t worry if you’re not a seasoned pro – this is more about having fun than hitting sixes and bowling perfect overs. If it takes your fancy, please get in touch
Google map ‘Braypool’ – http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB304GB304&sourceid=chrome&q=braypool%20sports%20maps&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wl
When I first heard that Microsoft was yet again attempting to launch a search service to rival Google, my initial reaction was ‘why bother?’ Google dominate search, always have and probably always will, and they deserve it. They’ve earned it over the last 10 years through developing increasingly complex algorithms and adapting the search engine to respond well to the increasing amount of multimedia content available on the web.
Now Microsoft unveil Bing, their ‘decision’ engine and plough the field of marketing with a $100 million campaign, in the hope that money and semantics might challenge Google for the top spot in search. But have they considered the consequences of delivering more accurate results through the categorisation for generic search terms, such as hiking up the cost of keywords? Or perhaps it means that all us lowly search engine optimizers will have to adapt our analysis and implementation skills.
But I wouldn’t worry, the only reported merit of Bing so far is its cosmetics and the ad revenue opportunities the design might open up to Microsoft. The Guardian recently published some interesting data from user experience research agency User Centric who used eye-tracking software to monitor where people looked on the page when using Bing and Google. The results showed that users searching with Bing paid more attention to the ads on the search engine results page. In the study they conducted, on average 42% of Bing users looked at the sponsored links, compared to only 25% with those using Google.
However this didn’t translate to the actual click-through rates on the ads, as this number was actually similar for both search engines. And there are further discrepancies, Bing’s three column design may be more ad-friendly but the nature of these results from User Centric could only be down to the fact that Bing is new, therefore the users were more likely to take a general look around the search engine results page.
I don’t imagine people will be Binging over Googling any time soon, but what do you think? Is it high time for an alternative to Google?