The last few months have been particularly busy for us here at Mackerel Media and one of the exciting projects that has been keeping us occupied is a search engine marketing campaign for Edinburgh Edge, a new partnership venture between Dalmahoy, Maximillion Events and the Edinburgh International Climbing Arena (EICA). It’s particularly fitting that we were approached by the team at IfLooksCouldKill to partner up on the project.

Edinburgh Edge is a collaborative project designed to offer superb value accommodation, conference and activity packages in the West (or edge) of Edinburgh. The team has many years of experience working together to deliver world class events to both corporate and leisure markets.

Our work started with detailed keyword research, looking at the competitive search landscape, followed by an on-site search engine optimisation exercise to the ensure the site is as friendly to search engines as possible. A link-building campaign is underway, which will in turn be followed by a comprehensive pay-per-click campaign to drive highly targeted traffic to the site.

Designed and developed by the chaps at The Weather, the new shop builds on the tremendous success and popularity of the previous incarnation, focusing in particular on sales of the Distillery’s excellent Personalised Whisky Bottles that are despatched daily to customers around the world. The new shop is powered by the very flexible Magento ecommerce software, replacing a bespoke system developed a number of years ago.

Our role was to ensure the new shop is as well-optimised for search-engines as possible and to ensure that  - from a search perspective – the migration from old shop to new went as smoothly as possible. We’re also carrying out a link-building campaign to get the shop in front of as many prospective customers as possible.

With the nights drawing in and Christmas fast approaching, there’s nothing quite like settling down in front of the fire with a good book and a dram of beautiful whisky. And where better to buy that whisky than direct from the distillery? Get on over there!

We’ve been a little lax here in keeping the blog up-to-date with our new clients wins and completed projects, so in the spirit of more frequent announcements, we’re extremely pleased to announce Welcome to Scotland as a new search engine optimisation client.

Owned and operated by Landmark Press – the group also responsible for the Landmark Visitor Park, Inveraray Jail and Edinburgh’s Camera Obscura – WelcometoScotland.com is the country’s premier tourism portal, featuring over 11,000 providers of accommodation in Scotland.

We were approached following the redevelopment and re-launch of the site to assist with a broad search engine optimisation campaign aimed at promoting the site and the many businesses it features to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who make Scotland their destination of choice every year. With the recent upsurge in holidaying at home, the campaign focuses on the local, national and international markets, a combination that presents an intriguing set of challenges, namely the need to promote a huge range of accommodation providers including Hotels, B&Bs, Self Catering, Holiday Cottages,  Caravan Parks and Hostels.

Already the signs are looking good, with a number of excellent ranking positions secured for prominent keyphrases. Watch this space though – we’ll keep you updated on progress.

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!

In the past I’ve been a bit of a die-hard when it comes to digital music. Although I’m a huge fan of iTunes and I’m on my second iPod, thus far I’ve been a little resistant to purchasing digital-only music. I have purchased a couple of iTunes plus albums, but apart from that everything in my collection has been ripped from CDs I’ve bought. Why am I boring you with this background? Well, I was recently introduced to Spotify and I think it might have completely turned my attitude to digital music upside-down. And, if it’s done that to me, chances are it will do the same for thousands, if not millions of other music-lovers.

But why? It totally removes the need for an on-disk music library. It has the potential to be an iTunes killer, and an Amazon MP3 killer, and in fact the death knell for any other download-based music service you’d care to mention. By eschewing the traditional model of downloading tracks to your PC or Mac, Spotify streams the music to you, on demand. Unlike the other ‘iTunes Killers’ that aim to replace the desktop application and/or  subvert DRM, Spotify totally changes eliminates the music-ownership model.

How Does it Work Then?

First off, you sign up for one of three accounts:

• Free – which is ad-supported
• One Day Pass - gives you 24 hour access for £0.99
• Monthly Subscription - ad free and gives you more features for £9.99 a month

Then you download the application to your computer, search for what you want to listen to, and away you go. Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? And it sounds fairly run-of-the-mill as well? Not worth getting excited about? You’d be dead wrong.

Spotify’s aim is to have everything available for listening to. Everything. It’ll take them time to do that, but right now, there’s an absolutely amazing choice of music. Since signing up barely a week ago I’ve listened to some old favourites, albums by artists I already know and love, and music from artists I’ve never heard of before. Without Spotify, I wouldn’t have been introduced to the amazing ‘Smokin’ O.P.’s‘ by Bob Seger, I wouldn’t have heard the Stereo MCs ‘Live at the BBC‘ (that took me back!) and I certainly wouldn’t have listened to Eilert Pilarm and his staggeringly bad rendition of Suspicious Minds (it’s really something). Piano trio jazz, my favourite music, is very well served indeed, thanks to the huge back catalogue going back to the 1950s.

A New Digital Marketing Opportunity?

One of the reasons I’m particularly excited about Spotify (aside from pure geekery) is that it presents a new and very compelling digital marketing opportunity. I mentioned the Ad-Supported Free Version and whilst most of the ads have been for HMV or “MADAGASCAR THE MOVIE!!”, an ad for Snow Patrol caught my attention and caused me to act. When was the last time you acted a few seconds after a radio ad? Or a banner ad? Err…

The ad started with a member of the band introducing himself and encouraging you to listen to their new album, which is of course available on Spotify. In that instant, the interface changed to show me the album and gave me a link to their biography and back catalogue.

So that was me – I played the album, listened to it all the way through and also checked out some Bon Iver, also recommended  by Snow Patrol.

Looking back on it, I was amazed at just how compelling the ad was, even at this early stage. As the number of advertisers grows, and as the profiling improves, so the integration between advert and action will improve. And with that will come more effective advertising – neatly solving the problem of how to finance digital music.

Sad to say, I could almost see a day when I don’t buy another iTunes track or a CD and simply stick to Spotify. Given a couple of years, the catalogue will be even bigger, they’ll have videos in there, movies potentially…

If I Were Steve Jobs

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I’d do if I was Steve Jobs, but in this case, if I were him I’d be firstly very worried and secondly looking for my cheque book.

I’m not one for predictions but this really could be the iTunes killer, unless it’s snapped up whole by Apple before it gets too big.

What Do You Think?

Share my enthusiasm? Disagree with my assessment of Eilert Pilarm? Let us know with a comment!

We’ve been working on a couple of campaigns for different clients, playing the game, patiently waiting for new links to be established. Out of the blue, we found we had two fantastic links on our hands – from two of the most visible sites on the web, let alone in the UK. Both The Guardian Newspaper and The Sun are sending traffic to sites we manage. Needless to say we were very pleased, as it was somewhat unexpected.

What was the secret to this? Content, pure and simple. It just goes to show that for all the talk of enticing links through quality content, it’s quite true. And whilst these not might be the Holy Grail of links, (we’re still holding out for that elusive front-page-of -Google link – we might be waiting a while!) it shows that with a little effort, directed cleverly, you can achieve great results.