The new Sidewiki tool is an extension of Google’s personalised search functionality and ’search wiki’ option launched at the end of 2007, which allows users to adjust their own search results and add comments against ranked websites. The Sidewiki tool now takes this a step further by giving users the chance to share knowledge, experience or advice against web content.

In developing Sidewiki, Google says that a priority was for users to see the most relevant entries first, so they have developed a system to rank the comments that are added in the ‘best’ order. So, instead of displaying the most recent entries first, the Sidewiki ranks entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from users, previous entries made by the same author, and many other signals they have developed and tracked.

This should help to address the obvious concerns of website owners that competitors will post negative comments and reviews against their web content, in much the same way that review based websites have been trying to deal with competitive ’spam’. There is also the eventual question of how the tone of comments will be used by Google in the long term to add another layer of data to the relevancy of search ranking results.

Another feature of the Sidewiki is that the technology will match comments about a web page with other websites where the same content is displayed. This will help to broaden the value of the system and to reduce the need for duplicated comments or posts. Google is also going to use relevant posts from blogs and other sources that talk about the specific page of content so that users can discover their insights more easily, right next to the page they refer to.

Google Sidewiki is being made available as a new feature of the Google Toolbar so you need to download the latest version to access this sidebar and add or view comments. It’s still going through a beta stage of development and Google will be improving and enhancing this feature in the coming months. You can read a more detailed review of this new tool by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land.

To find out more about using Google’s Sidewiki and the potential implications for your website, please contact us.

The Filter Manager is an excellent function within Google Analytics that allows a company to remove data about its own internal traffic to their site, or exclude activity data from other known IP addresses that it deems to be providing unreliable statistics. This method of filtering enables the more accurate recording of relevant third-party visits to the site.

This is done by selecting the Filter Manager from the main Analytics settings page, then choosing either pre-defined or custom filters. These are in the form of exclusion of a single IP address, an you can exclude an IP address range through the use of Google’s regular expression generator that can be found here. This can be useful for larger organisations that may have their IP addresses mapped to their domain name rather than to their ISP, so this is a useful way to exclude the company’s visits as a whole. Filters can also be used to include or exclude all traffic from a sub-domain so that a profile can be created within the Analytics account to track activity within one section of a website, plus geographic regions can be analysed by setting up filters and custom reports.

Custom filters provide more flexibility and more advanced settings to help exclude or analyse certain traffic from the Analytics reports. It is also possible, for example, to exclude internal traffic by cookie content, which enables the exclusion of dynamic IP addresses through custom filters. However, all computers in a company’s network that have a dynamic IP address and need to be excluded have to visit a specially created page in order to have the cookie placed upon them first, so it can be quite complex to set up this level of filter.

By using Google Analytic’s Filter Manager in any of these ways, the relevancy of the data retrieved about a company’s website can be vastly improved and hence the resulting accuracy of the related figures can be deemed to be much more precise, reflecting only those visits from external users. If the internal site usage is also needed, then a separate profile for the same website can be created without the filters, which will therefore show the difference in usage statistics between the two.

If you’d like to know more about how this particular function, or how Google Analytics could be used to enhance your website’s performance, please contact us for further information.

When websites and search engines were being developed in the 1990’s, the keywords meta tag was a section of code that was used to determine the content and relevancy of a website within search results. However, as Google has stated in their recent blog post, the early trend of search engines to judge pages only on the web page content - including the meta tags - led to keyword ’stuffing’ or spamming which couldn’t be seen by the regular user of a website and were techniques designed to manipulate the search engine results.

However, one of the main reasons for Google’s success was that they placed more emphasis on so-called ‘off-page’ factors, such as the links pointing to a web page, and they ignored content that was hidden to the website visitor, as this was seen to be irrelevant and open to manipulation. As a result, the keywords meta tag was ignored as a factor within the search engine’s ranking algorithm and so content placed here didn’t have any influence on how a website would be ranked for a search query.

Therefore, obsessing about this meta tag and which words to include in it is mostly a waste of time. It is recommended that the keywords tag is still used on each web page, but mostly as a default tag with some of the main terms that are relevant to the site content as a whole. Recent tests have shown that some search engines, such as Yahoo! and Ask, do still use the tag as an element of indexed website content, but it’s not likely to have a strong ranking factor. Google has also said that it’s possible they could use this information in the future, but this is also considered unlikely.

A more interesting aspect of the Google blog post is a brief comment about the description meta tag, which is often used to display the short snippet of information about a web page that appears below the link to the site in the search ranking results. This content is also usually hidden within the HTML code of a web page, but will be displayed in the search results if there isn’t relevant content that can be used from the visible page content. Google’s comment is that this tag is important and should be written in a way to accurately describe the content on the specific page, so as to encourage the clickthrough rate from the search results, but they say this content also has no impact of the search ranking results. This is more debatable however, and this tag does carry more importance as part of an SEO campaign, for both Google (with their guidelines on best usage here) and on other search engines.

If you’d like to know more about meta tags and the implications for your website’s optimisation strategy, please contact us now for a discussion.

The new Google Caffeine search engine can be viewed and tested here . There are no obvious differences to the look of the search interface because Google has been working on changes ‘under the hood’, targeting improvements in the size of the search database, the indexing speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness of the search experience.

Although Google makes almost constant changes to its search algorithms and infrastructure, it hasn’t made an update of this magnitude since 2006 and cynics note how this announcement of the new Caffeine search indexing tool has come so soon after Microsoft launched their new Bing search engine and combined with Yahoo!. However, Google say they have been working on these latest developments for many months and not surprisingly, such an announcement has generated much press interest and comment, as well as some initial good reviews about the performance of the new tool.

The impact of the new indexing infrastructure does seem to have increased the speed at which the results are generated for some searches, although of course the test site isn’t yet under the usage pressures of the main site, plus there doesn’t appear to be so much integration of the ‘universal’ results at this stage, such as videos, images and news stories. Tests of the results being generated are showing notable differences in some areas and very little ranking changes in others, depending on the type of searches made.

Of course the test site is still undergoing development and feedback, so Google will do a lot of fine tuning before making Caffeine mainstream, but there’s a suspicion that social media will be playing a bigger role in Google’s results. Those in the search engine optimisation industry are keeping a close eye on how this will affect ranking positions but the basic principles of SEO are still likely to apply in a significant way.

Once the developments from Google Caffeine are finalised and rolled out to the main search market, Google is hoping that the relevancy of results will be improved for the user and so maintain their dominant position in the search market, whatever attention and search enhancements Bing achieves. There may well be implications for the ranking visibility of some companies who depend on their Google rankings for their site visits, but this is an accepted risk of achieving natural rankings on search engines.

We will continue to review and assess what wider impact these changes at Google may have on the search and online business market, but if you would like any further information in the short term, please contact us now.

Using data from the past 7 days, the Bid Simulator tool re-calculates the number of impressions for which an advert could have shown had the advertiser chosen a different maximum CPC, as well as how many clicks the ad could have received for those impressions and how much those clicks could have cost.

According to Google, the new feature provides “increased transparency into the AdWords auction and provides the insight to make more informed bidding decisions about advertising objectives”. The figures are, of course, estimates based on expected behaviour and recent trends, and the initial feedback from professional PPC marketers has been mostly negative about this new tool’s real intentions.

The way in which the tool regularly indicates the benefits of an increase of bid levels has been treated with wide-spread scepticism. It often shows that raising bid levels by large amounts can increase the number of impressions (which doesn’t necessarily correspond to a rise in clickthrough rates). So it would seem to be more beneficial to focus upon improving quality scores to lower cost-per-clicks and improving advert copy, rather than just manipulating bids levels to increase impressions.

A Google spokesman stated, when questioned about the high frequency of raising bid levels within the tool, that “shown bids are not recommendations but are simulations for various bids to give insight to the advertiser. The feature aims to show missed opportunity”. Also that “past performances cannot guarantee future results so the simulations should not be taken as exact, they are simply predictions”.

It’s an important point that an advertiser should keep in mind when using the Bid Simulator so that the predictions need to be viewed with a pinch of salt, like most of Google’s PPC projections. In other words, rather than being recommendations, they are just projection models with a large frequency of incredibly high simulated bids.

Professional PPC marketers have the impression that Google created this tool to take advantage of ‘rookies’ and other irregular users of AdWords by encouraging advertisers to bid highly in order to simply make more money from their clicks - so not encouraging the creation of highly optimised campaigns, or the reduction of cost-per-clicks through improved quality scores.

Thus, it is suspected that many full-time search marketers will find the Bid Simulator will only demonstrate the projection that they really don’t want to pay any more than they already are, and so the focus on bid management needs to be placed in different areas.

If you’d like to know more about this new bid management tool and the implications for your AdWords management, please contact us for further information.

The 10-year deal will mean that Microsoft’s new Bing search engine will now power the results on Yahoo!, although Yahoo! will retain control of how the search results are displayed. Microsoft will gain access to Yahoo!’s search technology and the PPC advertising platform will move to Microsoft’s AdCenter system, but Yahoo! will retain responsibility for selling the search advertising across both networks. Display advertising will remain under the control of each company.

Yahoo! will receive 88% of search ad revenues generated by Yahoo! sites and, together, the 2 companies hope that by combining their technologies they can make a greater dent into the search dominance of Google.

So what does all this mean? Probably very little in the short term as the deal needs to be approved by the authorities and also there will be a major logistical challenge to transfer Yahoo!’s PPC advertiser accounts across to the Microsoft service. However, in the long term this should benefit advertisers who have found the Yahoo! PPC service slow and hard to use, whilst Microsoft’s service has been praised, yet limited by market coverage.

In the long term the combination of these 2 search services will mean a further focusing of search through a few routes. The impact on the search market will be mostly felt in the US, where the combined strength of these companies will impact nearly 30% of the market, yet in many other countries, Google’s complete dominance of search activity will not be greatly affected.

The further reduction in search competition is a shame, but it should be a benefit for PPC advertisers to use the better AdCenter system for non-Google search services. It’s also a tragedy for Yahoo!, one of the pioneers of web search and directory services, that it now seems to have finally lost its once powerful position in this market and will need to rely on its other consumer portal services. Over the years Yahoo! acquired some of the original leading players in web search, such as Inktomi and AltaVista, but some of this technology - if it was developed over recent years - may now help to evolve the quality of the Bing search engine.

For Microsoft, this move is what it has been waiting for and gives it the best opportunity to take on Google for greater market share of search. Whether they can use the share that they will get from Yahoo! in the USA to their advantage and to innovate and grow their user base remains to be seen.

If you’d like to know more about the implications of this move for your search engine marketing strategy, please contact us now for a discussion.

Building a tailored custom report in Google Analytics is easy and means quicker access to the information you’re more interested in, with less data overload and easy exporting. It allows you to create, save, and edit reports that present the information you want to see organised in the way you want to see it. A drag and drop interface lets you select the metrics you want and define multiple levels of sub-reports. Once created, they can be exported in the usual way of clicking on the export button on the top of the dashboard and choosing the format in which to export it.

It’s easy to navigate to the custom reports by just clicking on the ‘Custom Reporting’ link in the menu on the left-hand side of the main dashboard. Then choose some of the Analytics data from the left hand side menu that can be classified in two simple ways: Metrics or Dimensions.

A metric is the horizontal column heading(s) in the report that is a quantitative measure of how visitors interact with your site. Metrics are always numerical and include things like page views, time on page and bounce rate (the percent of visitors that leave your site after only 1 page).

A dimension is the vertical row(s) in the report that is a characteristic of a visitor or a page on your website that you can use to organize your metrics. Dimensions are almost always text, such as “new” vs “returning” (visitor type) or “North America” vs “Europe” (region).

You can choose any metric to build your custom report with. You also don’t have to pair them with dimensions, which means there are no restrictions to which metrics you can use. However, when they are paired with dimensions, metrics are subject to certain restrictions.

By using custom reports, it is possible to drilldown to five levels deep into the data or to keep the reports more simplified than the ones displayed on the standard dashboard. So the choice of creating simple or complex reports is entirely yours with the flexible and extremely useful Analytics Custom Reporting Tool.

For more information or help on the Custom Reporting function in Google Analytics, please contact us now.

Bing incorporates some useful new functions, such as the new Explorer Pane. This includes Quick Tabs that break searches down into Web Groups relevant to the user’s search query. Although the Explorer Pane can be useful, the Quick Tabs often steers users to Microsoft services such as Bing Shopping, so it’s worth being suspicious of any search engine that habitually gives its own links precedence over others.

Bing’s results are also separately categorised, but this leads to a lot of scrolling down the page and seems redundant when there’s already the Explorer Pane to focus search results by categories. Both Bing and Yahoo! now display instant results in alternative formats to that favoured by Google’s “ten blue links” approach. Its Quick Preview feature gives you a text-based synopsis of the pages displayed in the search results and Instant Answers gives responses to questions such as currency conversion, weather forecasts and more. However, an issue with the Quick Preview feature is that it can take too long for boxes to pop up with text.

The layout and look of Bing’s new image and video search is good and the search-refining tools are easy to access. Microsoft has also added advanced technology to search queries involving travel and buying, through the purchase of Farecast in 2008. It is a useful function that compares the best deals for airfares and hotel rooms, although its level of accuracy is, as yet, unknown.

Overall, Bing doesn’t offer a great leap forward in search technology and results but it does make some progress by focusing on improving the consumer areas of travel, shopping, products and health. The new search engine is a great start with some useful functions, but Microsoft still has work to do, as the results don’t seem to be as intuitive as with Google. For example, it doesn’t personalise your results according to your IP address, like Google does.

So, as usual with Microsoft releases, Bing has potential but isn’t fully completed yet and it will only manage to convert Google users once it performs its ongoing tweaks and improvements to demonstrate more relevant results, presented in a better way. The US version of Bing is currently slightly different to all the other regional versions, from the Home Page image through to some of the functionality, although this is expected to be rolled out to all versions at some point.

More details about Bing can be found here. If you’d like to know more about Bing and how your website can rank on this search engine, please contact us.

Once advertisers are logged into their Google AdWords management interface they can click on the “See Search Terms” button that now appears at the top of each keyword activity report. This opens up a pop-up screen containing data about the actual search queries that have been used by searchers on Google which then lead to a clickthrough from the relevant PPC advert.

Advertisers can therefore now view the search phrases that generated clicks to their site and assess whether they are relevant enough. The detailed breakdown by search phrase will show the usual data provided by Google, such as the total impressions, clickthrough rate and average ad position, as well as the cost and any conversions generated from the clicks.

The power of this report is that it enables advertisers to identify the relevancy or otherwise of their targeted search terms, particularly if these are set at the broad level. It can demonstrate the wide variety of search terms that users input into Google’s search panel and can either show high volume terms that should be specifically targeted – if not already – as well as phrases or individual words that should be excluded as a negative term to reduce impressions and clicks.

This data was previously available as a report within AdWords, but this new tool allows more immediate and flexible control of the keyword targeting within a campaign. It can sometimes mean that words or phrases are excluded after the click, but this can reduce future unnecessary spend. What it doesn’t do is indicate where high impressions may still be generated from terms where the advert is not clicked.

However, this tool is one of the good improvements added to the Google Adwords management interface and allows campaigns to become more tightly focussed upon the most effective keywords, which should help to improve clickthrough rates and conversions.

If you’d like to know more about this function and how it can be used to help improve your Google AdWords campaign, please contact us for details.

Communication within Wave is more like an IM conversation than email, as it intends to combine the older email methodology with the more recent trend in social communication systems, such as Facebook and Twitter. Social networks are designed around conversation ‘threads’ and Wave will enable multi-person conversations in real time through these conversations that Google calls a ‘wave.’ Lars Rasmussen, from the development team, explained that because it integrates email as well as a real-time workflow, Wave allows “Synchronous and asynchronous (communication) in the same conversation. And you can switch back and forth, depending who is online at any one time”.

The potential of Wave is huge. It has been designed to be an open standard platform, rather than just a standard Google product like Maps or Reader, which will allow users to contribute to the same Wave from computers and mobiles, regardless of their operating system. As it’s also developed using a group of development APIs, it will also allow developers to integrate gadgets and robots into Waves. There will be many people who will find this integrated functionality extremely useful and provide new opportunities to develop the service in the future.

Wave therefore has the potential to create massive workplace and communication efficiencies and could significantly change the way web users interact in the digital space over the coming years. The first Alpha version has been tested and the interface is slick and easy to use, giving users the ability to share maps, video images and documents with a simple, drag-and drop interface. Communication is intuitive and not cluttered at all and it works by far the best within Google’s Chrome browser, which is understandable at this stage!

Wave really seems to focus on contacts and people, which is the direction communication is taking. Email applications currently focus less on people and more on the content of the message, so this is where the evolution of Wave is a notable step forward and why the developer community is so excited about the launch and the possibilities that Wave now provides. It may take longer for the general web user community to accept and use this different style of communication but this may also herald the future style of online communication, which would be the most significant development for years, and one that Microsoft may be looking at with envy!

Wave will either massively boost the popularity of social networks, or it will devour them. Either way, the two-way conversations that are the hallmark of Web 2.0 are here to stay and they are only going to get more widespread through the development of communications platforms such as this. Wave was launched to widespread acclaim and hype, but with some great 3rd party apps and greater customisation, it could actually match this hype.

To find out more about how you can enhance your communication capabilities with Wave in the future, please contact us now for more information.