Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

After a few months of wrangling, MSN has now officially abandoned its efforts in bidding for Yahoo. Yahoo shareholders are now bracing themselves for a share slump as a direct result of this news.  

MSN’s decision to officially bid for the world’s second largest search engine was made towards the end of January when it bid $45 Billion for Yahoo!.  This bid was swiftly rejected.

Yahoo went on to make a deal with Google allowing the search giant to take on the advertising platform by serving Google ads to its customers.  The deal was meant to add hundreds of millions of dollars to Yahoo!’s bottom line and fend of MSN from making a move to becoming a force to be reckoned with.

Yahoo!’s decision to reject the MSN offer has angered its shareholders and the pressure is now on Yahoo! management to prove that the decision was right.  This can only be done by improving financial results and adding value to the Yahoo shares over the next few months.

Last week I came across a tutorial and code for inline editing using Ajax.  The reason I was looking for this sort of application was to implement a project management solution for one of my clients.

What inline editing does is allow you to edit an online document on the fly using AJAX, PHP and MYSQL.  An example of this nifty solution found here: http://www.yvoschaap.com/instantedit/

Any of the fields can be edited and the editing is reflected right away in the MYSQL database.

If you have any questions about how to implement this please post here.

A special thanks to Yvo Schaap for supplying us with the code and example!

Google announced today that it will lift the protection it previously provided for brand owners on its PPC network (Adwords).  This was an unanticipated yet not very surprising move on the part of the search giant.

Adwords is Google’s advertising program that allows companies and individuals to bid on keywords in an auction-based system.  In the past Google protected advertisers from others bidding on their brand name but as of next month this will no longer be the case.

What does this mean?

For Google: More money… MUCH MORE

For the Advertisers: Higher budgets because now they have to compete against others for their own brand name.

For Agencies: Also more money as advertisers would need to shed a whole lot more dough for their ppc budgets

For Affiliates &  Affiliate Networks: Also more money, as now Google allow for brand bidding on broad match thereby the affiliates will get more targeted traffic, more conversion and therfore more commissions (Affiliate Networks get a cut from that).  

So all in all everybody wins but the advertisers!  well done Google thats how to win friends and influence people!

Its worth a note that Google never protected advertisers in the US and that MSN and Yahoo never protected advertisers in the US or UK.

Google Analytics is by far the most robust free site side analytics program out there.  Now owned by Google, Google Analytics started out its life as a small analytics company called Urchin.

Google Analytics is used by millions of sites (hobby as well as ecommerce) to measure the amount and quality of traffic to a website. 

Moreover, if configured properly, Google Analytics can also measure predefined KPIs and Goals such as purchases, downloads, subscriptions, thereby showing you which keywords convert to business.

Here are a few Google Analytics tips that I’ve gathered to help you get the most out of the package:

1. Use the filter at the bottom of the keywords list to include and exclude certain keywords.  For instance, you can exclude your own brand name thereby allowing you to see which generic keywords are driving traffic to your site.

2. Use the compare two dates/metrics at the top to be able to see trends across the same variable on two different dates.

3. Exclude your IP address so that your figures are not skewed

4. Configure site search measurement  in order to get valuable data on how users  search  within your site. 

5. Under “Content” use site overlay to see what links on you site are most popular.  This will give you a better idea of what content on your site is appealing to your users and  gives you the confidence to remove or  place “Nofollows” on non popular links.

The above are a few tips for using Google Analytics.  There are many more fantastic features including the ability to export and email reports as well as integrate with Adwords in order to measure the performance of your paid ads.

In a nutshell, if you haven’t used Google Analytics yet, you’re completely missing out on a fantastic free Analytics resource. 

Everybody knows that getting on the number one position in any of the search engines, and especially the big G, has its rewards in the form of lots and lots of (if you’ve done your keyword research correctly) very valuable and free targeted traffic.

Whats frustrating to most though is how much traffic?  Keyword estimation tools such as Keyword Discovery, and Wordtrackergive you a rough guesstimate of how much traffic a certain keyword generates overall but does not tell you how that figure is broken down.

Luckily, there are a few studies out there that have estimated the click through rates on the various positions in the search engines (mainly Google).  SEOmoz, estimates clickthrough rates for SERPS as follows:

While another study conducted by a group of students at New York’s Cornell University predicts the following clickthrough rates in the Google SERPS (search engine results pages):

• Position 1 receives 56.36% of the clicks

• Position 2 receives 13.45% 

• Position 3 receives 9.82%

• Position 4 receives 4.00%

• Position 5 receives 4.73%

• Position 6 receives 3.27%

• Position 7 receives 0.36%

• Position 8 receives 2.91%

• Position 9 receives 1.45%

• Position 10 receives 2.55%

As you can see, the above SERP clickthrough estimates show that ranking above the fold -and especially in the top 3 positions- generates between 60 to 80% of all possible clickthroughs for any keyword.

Lesson to take from this post..make sure you (or your seo agency) make efforts to rank above the fold (top 3 serp positions), anything less is just not good enough!