We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.
Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

As opposed to previous launches of algorithm updates, Google has decided to wait until after the Christmas holiday period for the release. Their rationale behind this is that they don’t want to stress online retailers out during what can be their busiest period.

Although nobody outside of Google can be sure of the impact that Caffeine will have, we are confident that solid SEO strategies will continue to yield positive results. The only webmasters that need to worry are those using dodgy SEO tactics.

So what I propose with this series of posts is to outline the role of the URL, how they are constructed, and what happens when they change.

The Role of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

If you think of your own house for a moment and how important your address is (number, street, suburb, etc) for people to be able to locate your home, you can begin to grasp why it should be a part of every website development discussion.

Would you ever receive a piece of mail, or a visitor, if your house did not have an address? Think about how frustrating it is when you have taken down an address incorrectly, realizing only when it is too late. Or have you been in a situation where in a particular street, many of the houses may look the same – how do you locate the one particular to your situation?

All those above examples outline that there should be a clear address for your home on the Internet. Wisely, those that were a part of developing the Internet recognized the fact that we as humans remember names and words much better than a string of numbers, so they created URLs (Uniform Resource Locator/s).

What this enabled them to do is mask the true identify of the server computer (identified uniquely by an IP Address – a topic for a separate discussion) with a string of words. So in our case the IP address of E-Web Marketing is something like 122.200.85.129, but that is not what you type into your browser – you type www.ewebmarketing.com.au to find our website. How nice!

Can you imagine the confusion then, if your website has 2 different address that lead to the same location? Imagine if everytime you invited your friends to your home, you gave them 3 or 4 addresses, each with a different name. How would they ever find your house?

The same thing is true with URLs. There should only be one address to one particular page – it really is that plain and simple. So many fall into the trap of having multiple URLs for one particular page, and we as humans can fumble our way through and piece together the fact that we have arrived at the destination that we wanted to be at. But the search engines have a different issue. They follow addresses, and when they find 3 or 4 addresses all leading to the same page, how does it decide which one to choose? That is a very interesting and important question, and many SEOs have their own ideas and opinions.

I personally like to make it as easy as possible for the bots, and have implemented code and redirects to make sure that they know exactly what address they should be using.

What can you do to make sure your website has the same?

Speak to your web development or online marketing firm to implement the following:

• 301 redirects - when relocating old pages and capturing external links so they never 404.
• Canonical tags on key pages
• A standard across the whole website regarding the format of internal linking.

Your visitors and search engines will thank you. I promise.

Next week, we will look at the actual construction of the URLs and how we can change it to help the search engines and your users.

Here is an example search made by The Inside Source:

For kicks, we decided to do a comparison of all the Hall of Famers participating in the concert series (there’s a second show at MSG tonight that includes U2, Metallica, Aretha Franklin, Lenny Kravitz, Ozzy Osbourne, Lou Reed, and more) to see which names popped up most frequently on eBay over the past week.

The results were pretty fascinating: in terms of keyword searches, Metallica was far and away the most sought after band among the bunch (more than 86,000 searches!)… Second to Metallica in frequency of keyword searches was U2 (75,190), followed by Bruce Springsteen (32,690). The number of search per artist dropped off significantly from there, with but Ozzy Osbourne coming in fourth (5,290) and Sting rounded out the top five at 4,570… The supply of concert tees correlates pretty well with the demand, with the top five live listings for the concert performers and the term “shirt” as follows as of this afternoon: Metallica (1,759), Ozzy Osbourne (327), Bruce Springsteen (376), U2 (680), BB King (61).

This new release trend-spotting data is definitely geared toward encouraging positive user activity, and increasing sales.

This maybe useful for internet marketers out there to target products that are not currently in their product portfolio. This includes specific brands and models that sell well all year round. Currently eBay offers a research-focused API which reveals some interesting pricing information for a given search term.

So as you can see, this is something that can be added to an internet marketer’s research tool arsenal.

So how exactly does this new service work and what can it do for you?

The new dashboard covers more than twenty of Google’s services including Gmail and YouTube. Depending on how many Google services you utilise, you may be surprised at the level and type of information you have given away without being completely aware of!

Having used the Privacy Dashboard myself, I must admit I was a little underwhelmed. Despite Google’s claim that the “scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented,” most of the information Google claims that you can now access is actually already available. The true benefit of this new service lies in the fact that you can review your private information stored by Google all in the one place and so this will work to maximise your time.

So what is Google doing to protect your privacy?

This asked in light of Google’s own admission that “Google reads your Gmail account once in a while.” Further, it’s also important to remember that by giving Google our data in the first place, we also give them our permission to do as they see fit with it.

However, this blogger believes that this new service is only letting the user know what information Google already has about their behaviour. This is no cause for alarm as many of Google’s new service offerings and updates have only happened as a result of the data they have collected. Further, if Google’s data collection helps to aid their search function – which in turn will serve users – then the benefits will definitely out way any perceived negativity.

What do you think?

Watching a race and having an office sweep just isn’t enough for us eager E-Webbers! Marc and Michael, the event co-ordinators, went all out with an office sweep, fashions on the field, prizes, photos, food and drinks.

The event started with drinks on arrival, followed by watching the race. With everyone backing the favourites to win, it was a Shocking finish. Andrew however was pleasantly surprised to see his horse came first. Hot on the tail of Andrew was Aris and Roberto who managed to scoop up second and third prize respectively.

Once the race was over the fun continued with fashions on the field, or more accurately, fashions on the rec room carpet! We started with the women, all three of us! Each person took to the runway to strut their stuff and Anne came out victorious.

The men however were a different story. Each guy had their own individual look and style on the catwalk. This ranged from Aris’ comical hat and wig combo, to William throwing his pimp style hat into the audience. These tactics however were not enough to beat out the men’s fashion champion… Forzan! With his strip tease mixed with the comical use of suspenders, he provided everyone with a good show.

Once the organised festivities were over, everyone was left to mingle, eat, drink and in true E-Web style, play guitar hero and foosball.

Everyone returned to work excited and on a high. All in all, the afternoon was a pleasant break from the nonstop action of the E-Web office.

Apart from getting updated footage, the Google map vehicles will also be equipped with more advanced recording equipment this time. When this new footage is launched sometime within the next year we will have much clearer and detailed views of the surrounding objects for zooming. Some important items that this will enable us to see more clearly are house numbers and restaurant names.

Its fleet of what looks to be Holden Astra’s (below) will commence at the beginning of December, so keep your eye out for one and ensure you are on your best behaviour.

So how will the Twitter search results work on Bing? Here is an overview of what to expect:

•Tweets updated in real-time: View all tweets “roll in” in real-time by watching the “tweet SERP” update. To view more tweets than what’s displayed on the first page of search results, click “See more tweets about…”
•Results ranked by tweeter’s influence and uniqueness of the tweet: According to Microsoft, “If someone has a lot of followers, his/her tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other tweets, it will get ranked lower.”
•Private tweets remain private: Tweets by users who have private or protected Twitter pages will not be indexed.
•Real-time only lasts so long: Tweets will only be indexed in Bing for 7 days, further indication that Bing intends to use the Twitter integration as a way to capitalize on real-time events and searcher interests. There’s no indication that Bing intends to index and provide a historical record of tweets.

The implications for marketers is that it will provide real-time social data within search result and encourage brands to embrace and try and keep up to the changing consumer search habits as they change. For example, a searcher seeking information on where the latest brand name sale is on, or the waiting time for an up and coming concert. Although the search engines cannot generate results as events are happening, user generated content from Facebook and Twitter may be able to address this.

The key takeouts from this news:
•Big opportunities for companies to
•Marketers who currently use Twitter and Facebook will experience greater importance and potentially traffic. However it will act as a double edged word in that brands will need to closely monitor any negative conversations that come up.
•From an SEO perspective, certain brands and industries may lose potential traffic and opportunity if they have not already taken up social media.
•Social media will continue to grow with search engines as it continues to move towards social commentary to determine data relevance.

Even though AdWords uses a number of things to show relevant ads to users when they send through a search query, sometimes the ads aren’t targeted enough to provide the right information for the visitor. This is where comparison ads comes into play.

With Comparison Ads, you can also target your offers at a more granular level, leading to more valuable, qualified leads…If they click the promotion, users are taken to a page with more detailed sponsored results. They can choose directly from the offers listed on that page, or they can further refine their search by providing additional information like income and home value. By giving users the ability to refine their search on a number of relevant attributes, we are able to show more targeted ads and provide you with more valuable leads.

Here’s what a sponsored results page could look like:

It’s hard to say when this feature will be available to Australian advertisers as it is still in its early-stages. But if Ad extensions was any indicator, it could take up to 2 years before we get our hands on it. Stay tuned! If you’re a US advertiser and would like to know more, click here.

With over 3,000 applicants this year and stringent acceptance criteria, it was certainly the most competitive BRW Fast 100 to date and a huge achievement for any company worthy enough to even make it into the top 100 list. The venue chosen for event was ‘Comme’ located in the heart of Melbourne CBD and the evening kicked off at 7pm with the announcement of the top 10 companies to make the Fast 100 list. With all fingers and toes crossed we ambitiously kept all ears out for an announcement of “E-Web Marketing” alas our name wasn’t called out for the top 10 however we managed to achieve a top 50 ranking by placing 43rd in our first BRW Fast 100 début. The entire team at E-Web Marketing were elated to hear of our achievement as it was confirmation that all of our hard work over the years was recognised and had paid off as we were the only online marketing agency that made it onto the BRW Fast 100 list this year.

The IT sector was certainly the most competitive with 28 companies out of the 100 heavily involved in Information Technology followed closely by property and business services which made up a further 26. This number dropped to 11 for those in retail trade, 6 in construction, 5 in communications and education, 4 in finance and insurance, 2 for Heath and community along with manufacturing, mining and wholesale. The remaining applicants in accommodation, cafes and restaurants, energy, products, publishing, sports and recreation, transport & storage and wholesale trade all made up the rest of the numbers.

Each of the top BRW Fast 100 applicants received an official BRW certificate with their placing on the Fast 100 to commemorate the event and their BRW Fast 100 accolade.

The entire team at E-Web Marketing wishes to congratulate all the successful businesses who made it onto the BRW Fast 100 list for 2009… We hope to see you all again in 2010!

E-Web Marketing CEO, Gary Ng, has thanked his team for their contribution in helping E-Web place 43rd in the rankings on the 2009 BRW Fast 100 list.

The accolade, which acknowledges E-Web Marketing as being among Australia’s top 100 fastest-growing companies, was announced last night in Melbourne 28^th October 2009.

Being an online marketing company that specialises in helping businesses grow via Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), E-Web Marketing ranked 17th in the Information Technology category and 43rd overall.

Mr Ng said: “E-Web has had a remarkable year of consolidation whilst still expanding. To mention just a few milestones: We have ranked by Google Australia as the number 1 “SEO” agency in Australia for the last two years; doubled the size of our office and our team over the last year; enjoyed the opportunity to work with leading Australian companies such as NIB, Grant Thornton, Fitness First and Crown Plaza”.

This is the first time E-Web Marketing has made a submission to enter the BRW Fast 100.  Ng said: “In the past, our policy has been let our work and results do the talking for us. However, we felt the time has come for us to have our business performance independently evaluated against that of other leading companies in Australia. We are convinced that E-Web Marketing is truly one of Australia’s most exciting emerging companies and the best way to test this is via the BRW Fast 100 entry”.

To achieve 43rd place on the 2009 BRW Fast 100 list in our first year of entry is a testament to the extremely high quality of our team and the value they are able to deliver to our clients.

I congratulate our loyal and growing client base and E-Web’s extremely dedicated team for helping us make the top 50 in the 2009 BRW Fast 100.

The 2009 BRW Fast 100 highlights Australia’s 100 fastest growing companies in terms of annual revenue growth in the three years to June 30 2009.

To qualify, companies must meet the following criteria:

• Have recorded turnover of more than $500,000 in 2005/2006
• Have a fewer than 200 full time and part-time employees
• Not be a subsidiary of an Australian or overseas company
• Turnover for 2008/2009 must be greater than 2007/2008

For more information, please contact:

Gary Ng
CEO
E-Web Marketing Pty Ltd
T: (02) 9438 5633

About E-Web Marketing Pty Ltd

E-Web Marketing’s mission is to provide world class, state of the art, high quality Search Engine Marketing solutions to help companies to increase their website’s traffic, leads and sales. E-Web are professional marketers who understand how to utilise your website to and convert it to one of your most effective sales generation tools. E-Web’s consultative and research-driven process can exponentially increase in lead generation and online sales, providing value for your online investment.

E-Web’s methodology is to provide a customised program that includes natural search engine optimisation, pay-per click management, web traffic optimisation and sales conversion optimisation services designed to deliver ROI. E-Web develops their own technology and unique methods to maximise client visibility and traffic within search engines. To date, E-Web has undertaken SEO for more than 1,000 organisations. Clients include ACP Magazines, Fitness First, NIB, Sydney University, Kennards Self Storage, Ninemsn - just to name a few. More information at www.ewebmarketing.com.au.

About BRW Fast 100

The BRW Fast 100 list has established a reputation as being the premier guide to the fastest growing small and medium businesses in Australia. The annual list ranks Australia’s 100 fastest growing small and medium enterprises as measured by their annual revenue growth over a three year period. Companies from all of Australia’s major vertical industries are represented in the Fast 100 list which is prepared in collaboration with Melbourne-based RMIT University.