At long last Google this week confirmed what most of us in the industry knew already – meta-keywords are not used in organic search rankings. No real surprise there to be honest! Although, what those who still sell it as a service will do, we have no idea.

The announcement was made in a post on the Google Webmaster blog the other day and has triggered the usual speculation and discussion that surrounds Google’s regular dissemination of information, most of which involves the usual picking apart of the statement looking for hidden meaning. Perhaps Dan Brown’s latest book is stirring up the SEO industry in its week of release?

Our View on Meta-Keywords

Our view on keywords has always been simple and straightforward: don’t bother. We have seen no difference in ranking ability of two pages that possess and lack keywords respectively, none whatsoever. Likewise, we have never seen any impact on ranking come about as a result of meta-keyword tweaking.

Meta-Descriptions Make Sense

The post also mentions that Google has not used the Meta-Description field for ranking purposes for a number of years, however, our experience is that the description field can actually aid matters as it plays a crucial role in determining the click-through rate of a listing on a search engine ranking page (SERP). Our view is that the higher the CTR on a link, the likelier the associated page is to rank more highly. Furthermore, the higher the click-through rate of a page, the more traffic you’re likely to attract, so a well optimised and written description can really make a difference.

If you don’t include a meta-description then Google will select a snippet of text from your site, which might not work as well as a bespoke one. We use the meta-description field to display the Mackerel Media phone number on the SERPs page, as you’ll be able to see here. Neat eh?

Looking to the future, we can only hope that now Google has cleared keywords up, they’ll move swiftly on to link spam blogs, dubious paid link vendors and all the other fun issues that keep us busy. Hmm…perhaps we’re a little too optimistic.

We read some interesting research out this week from Chitika in Massachusetts, claiming that iPhone users are the least likely of all mobile users to click on an ad on their device. This contrasts starkly with their tandem finding that iPhone users account for 66% of mobile web browsing.

The survey was conducted over 92 million ad impressions and showed that in overall terms, mobile users are roughly half as likely to click on an ad than non-mobile users. The average click-through rate for iPhone users followed in the survey was a rather poor 0.30%, compared to an average of 0.8% for non-mobile users. Palm users demonstrated at CTR of almost 1%.

The view from Chitika (and it’s one we share) is that mobile users are generally unreceptive to ads as they are usually looking for quick answers to a question, looking for directions or a phone number, rather than being in a ‘browse’ mode. Perhaps there’s also something to be said of the intrusiveness of ads in the iPhone’s otherwise pure and controlled interface?

Whatever the case, it makes for an intriguing outlook, especially given the enthusiasm with which mobile advertising is being pushed by ad networks, agencies and advertisers large and small.

I’m a keen reader of the excellent research that Hitwise produce and was very interested to ready today that Twitter has overtaken myspace in the UK to become the (drumroll please) 27th most popular web site in the country, one ahead of News Corporation’s myspace. That means in the last week (23rd to the 29th of August) a staggering 1 in 400 internet visits in the UK were to the microblogging service.

Within the Social Media space, this places Twitter at a very respectable fourth, behind Facebook, YouTube and Bebo. Digging a little deeper into the stats, we see that Twitter experienced usage growth of over 1,600% in the last year against myspace’s comparatively low 5%.

Interestingly, it seems that as so many users access Twitter via their mobile phones and other applications, the real usage level may be higher, but the stats are skewed towards the number of people visiting the site’s home page.

There is a countervailing view on Twitter, with other recent reports “revealing” that around 40% of tweets are ‘pointless babble‘ and a number of other respected outlets claiming that the Twitter fad won’t last. It’s fair to say that 1,600% growth can’t continue for ever, but there is room for a huge amount of expansion in the months and years to come.

The industry rumour mills have been red hot over the last few weeks, covering the will-they-won’t-they submission of the Spotify iPhone Application to the iTunes Music Store. Well, the news just out is that is has been approved, and it’s fair to say a lot of people are very pleased indeed.

Concerns were raised over whether Apple would approve the new application, given it has the potential to cannibalise the iTunes Store music purchase model (as we wrote about sometime last year) and given the ongoing (and somewhat mysterious) spat over the Google Voice application. However, it looks like those fears are unfounded as approval has been granted.

What’s interesting about the decision, and what we think people will realise, is that the potential loss in iTunes revenue is only a single piece of the puzzle – there are in fact a number of economic considerations for Apple:

1. The Spotify App will influence consumers’ decision to purchase an iPhone: more iPhones sold = more product revenue and more subscription share from the networks.
2. More iPhone owners may well lead to more Apple owners in general.
3. Apple may use their relationships with Record Labels to build on the service offered by Spotify. In fact, there are already a number of iTunes tracks on offer through the service.

The way we see it, this is just another super-savvy decision on the part of Apple – all credit to them.

Despite the continued talk of recession, we’re busier than ever at Mackerel Towers and are pleased to reveal a clutch of exciting new client wins from the last few months.

WildDay

First up is WildDay.com, Europe’s biggest online outdoor clothing retailer. Established in the heady dot-com days of 2000, they have consistently remained at the forefront of their sector and stock many leading brands such as Vango, Outwell, Gelert, Helly Hansen and Coleman, all of which are offered at amazingly discounted prices.

We’ll be working with them in the coming weeks and months to help raise their profile even further, particularly in the run-up to the wintersports season.

Oliver Asset Management

We’re also very pleased to welcome Oliver Asset Management on board as a client. The firm specialises in helping their clients understand the ‘truth about their money’, thereby enabling them to make sound plans for their financial future. We’ll be working to raise the profile of the firm and put across their unique proposition to prospective customers.

Partnership Successes

We’re also working for a few clients on a white-label partnership basis, which is going very well indeed. If your agency needs a helping hand with the services we provide, don’t hesitate to contact us and we can have a chat about how we can help.

And There’s More….

…But sadly we can’t talk about them quite yet – as soon as we can we’ll let you know!

It is a truism of almost every industry that change happens at a rapid pace and in the last few months the search industry has witnessed enormous changes that will have a huge impact on how we go about marketing online. Mergers, acquisitions and overhauls have been the order of the hour, with the usual mixture of winners and losers.

Hello Bing, Goodbye Yahoo

Perhaps the most significant recent development has been the long-mooted coming together of Microsoft and Yahoo in a partnership that sees one of the web’s oldest and most revered search engines make way for the Redmond giant’s technology. The two companies had been in a will-they-won’t-they dance for what seems like years, but at the end of July the deal was finally inked.

In exchange for an 88% share of search ad revenue, Bing will replace Yahoo’s search engine and bring much-desired exposure of Microsoft’s technology to the 570 million or so visitors Yahoo currently attracts. The immediate gain for Microsoft is the potential to increase its share of the search market to around 28%, which will bring with it vastly increased search ad revenue. Interestingly, more recent statistics have shown Bing’s search ad market share soaring by around 44%, a seemingly clear sign that advertisers and web users appreciate the service.

Microsoft is of course taking something of a multi-pronged strategy, with its earlier investment in Facebook: see below for more.

The deal also puts another nail in the coffin of Yahoo’s strategy, which through the tenures of Terry Semel and Jerry Yang has been somewhat suspect: remember, this is the company that in 2002 failed to acquire Google for $5 billion – what a bargain that would have been!

What does Microsoft-Yahoo Deal mean for Search?

Rising Traffic – The clearest implication is that Bing is now a much more important consideration for search optimisation and marketing campaigns. Hitherto, our experience of Bing traffic has been somewhat underwhelming, typically our clients see a roughly 20:1 Google to Bing ratio. That is now highly likely to change and as such we’ll be focusing much more on Bing.

Lack of Back-link Data – From an SEO perspective, one of the jewels in Yahoo’s crown is the superb Site Explorer, which provides a very thorough breakdown of the back-links a given web site enjoys. Google’s Webmaster Panel does have a backlink tool, but next to Yahoo’s, it’s rather poor. With the M:Y deal, are we in danger of losing Yahoo’s backlink data? Will it be migrated to the new platform? We can only hope it will as losing it would put a huge dent in every SEO’s toolkit.

Facebook, Friendfeed & Designs on Real-Time Search

One of the hottest topics on in the search community right now is real-time-search and whether the major players are actually capable of delivering updates to their indexes in the same way that the likes of Twitter can. With this in mind, Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed is very interesting, as it brings the social networking site closer to being a provider of real-time search results across your network of friends and contacts. Some have said this pits them squarely against Google and have even spoken of a Google vs Facebook war. Adding the rising popularity of Twitter to the mix, and the scene is set for something of a search showdown.

Thinking laterally, for many people Facebook is the de facto starting point for a web browsing session, so if the site can deliver a rich and compelling search experience it has a very strong change of diverting the searching habits of some of its 240 million users away from Google.

Google Perks Up

We do love a pun here, and Google’s latest Caffeine update provides ample opportunity for them. Silliness aside, the update does represent something of a step change for Google as it aims to tackle a number of persistent challenges: Speed, Relevance and Index Size. Whilst access to the preview system has been limited, early feedback from the search community has been generally positive, particularly on the speed of results (halved in many cases), the ranking of authoritative domains over ones that are less so and a closer alignment of search results with relevance, something that Bing has incidentally been making noises about. Social Media links seem to be rising in rank, but with the recent ‘revelation’ that 40% of Tweets are ‘pointless babble‘ is this necessarily a good thing?

Friends Reunited Perks Down

It was announced a few days ago that Brightsolid, the internet arm of D.C. Thompson Publishing, agreed to acquire Friends Reunited from ITV for £25 million, the troubled broadcaster thereby taking a hit of £150m on the £175m it paid for the site back in 2005. Whilst the popularity of the site has waned (with Facebook bearing down, it’s no surprise), it does allow BrightSolid to develop its interests in the Ancestry and Geneaology market, one into which it has made tremendous strides.

With FRU now in the hands of a smaller (and arguably nimbler) owner, we certainly hope that it’s a positive sign and wish them all the best – there aren’t enough internet-based companies in Scotland for our liking!

Google is usually very hot when it comes to spelling errors and spelling suggestions when you use their search service. However, it looks like someone at the GooglePlex is having an off-day.

The search giant is showing a handy summary of today’s tennis at Wimbledon, but as the screengrab below shows, they haven’t quite spelt “Quarterfinals” correctly, rather it says “Quaterfinals.”

Oops.

We’re very pleased indeed to announce that FreeAgent, an online accounting application company, has come on board as our latest PPC client. As the title of the post suggests, we are also a client of FreeAgent: we use their brilliant software to manage all our accounts, bills, expenses and financial admin.

With a keen eye on expansion and after having secured funding for growth, FreeAgent appointed us to work on their Pay Per Click campaigns, with the objectives of improving click-through rate, reducing cost-per-click and reducing cost-per-conversion. Our approach involves a variety of tactics, all of which are designed to bring visitors to the site who have a very good chance of becoming a customer. Without giving too much away: so far, the results are looking very positive.

We’ve found their software absolutely invaluable over the past year (if you’re a freelancer, a small trader or a small business, do check it out!) so we’re particularly pleased to be able to help Roan, Ed and Olly achieve more from their advertising and attract more customers. All the best guys and thanks for choosing us!

An internet marketing firm will always tell you that if you’re going to start blogging, write regularly and widely. However, in a classic case of cobbler’s children, our blog has been somewhat neglected of late.

The truth is that we’ve been very busy on some very interesting client projects and precious little time has been left for the blog. So, apologies to our regular readers. Unfortunately we can’t talk about the projects we’re working on – they’re strictly confidential – but when the right time does come we’ll be able to explain exactly what we have been up to. Until then, not a word!

Incidentally, we’ve just passed a year in business – the time has flown by. As always, thanks to our clients for their support and business and thanks to our colleagues and partners for their hard work.

Despite the enormous economic turmoil going on all around us, the digital sector (as far as we can see) remains relatively buoyant. We’re finding that the recession is positive for us, in that clients are looking to squeeze as much as they can from their marketing budgets and that those niggly SEO and PPC problems that were overlooked are now being given attention – all the more work for the likes of us.

For what it’s worth, we think the downturn will also be positive for the internet marketing industry as clients become much more selective about how they invest their money and with whom they do so. That will only lead to us all having to up our game, proving that we can and do deliver a return and showing clients exactly where their money is going.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to chip in and get the discussion going.

Regular readers of the Mackerel Blog will recall our announcement late last year about the launch of the new web site for Southlands Farm, home of three beautiful Northumberland Cottages. Well, the client is a firm believer in a web site being a fluid, developing resource and as such we’ve just completed a re-design and migration of their blog.

The blog previously ran on the Serendipity Platform, which proved to be a little restrictive for their needs. We’ve now migrated the blog to WordPress (of which we are great fans) and applied a customised theme that ties in much more neatly with the design of the main site. Read more →