If you sell products to teenagers, or have a website that is aimed at 12-15 year olds, then a new report from Ofcom indicates that its success depends on getting to the top of the search engines.

According to the report, 37% of 12 to 15 year olds believe that search engines rank results according to relevance. Another 32% think that the Search Engine Results Page is ‘truthful’. They believe that those websites ranking highly are truly the most relevant appropriate for the search query.

Just 14% think that companies pay money to get to the top.

Here’s the full graph.

It’s nice to think that at that age kids have not yet grown cynical about how the search engine results are ranked. It’s a shame there’s no corresponding research for an older age bracket, which I feel sure would be more aware of the manipulation of the SERPs by companies vying to get to number 1.

Of course, just because you want to boost your website up the search engine results page, and carry out a program of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to do so, doesn’t mean you are doing anything wrong or ‘manipulative’.

At the end of the day, Google wants to deliver the most relevant results for search queries, so if your SEO efforts prove to them that your website deserves to rank highly, then there’s no harm done.

Have you had any success or otherwise with SEO? Can you share your experience? Leave us a comment below.

In our ‘Google the innovator‘ series earlier this year, we showcased the new search options that Google was in the process of rolling out. This included a side panel that lets you filter your search results to those from specific types of websites (such as reviews sites), or even results added in a specific time frame.

You can reach this side panel by clicking ’show options’ just above the search results.

This is what it looks like:

Google have now added many more ways for you to refine your search results. These include:

• past hour

• specific date range

• more / fewer shopping sites

• visited / not visited pages

• blogs

• news

The past hour and specific date ranges can be very useful to find the latest information posted on a particular subject. This is all part of the search engines’ battle to deliver the best ‘real time’ results.

The shopping sites option lets you show additional pages from shopping sites, and display prices from those pages on the actual search results. This is going to save lots of time when hunting for a bargain online. Alternatively, if you’re just researching a topic and aren’t in the buying frame of mind, you can exclude shopping sites from the results.

The visited pages option usefully allows you to identify sites you’ve been on before, which you may be trying to find again. To use this option you need to be signed in to your Google Account and also have ‘Web History’ enabled.

Have a go with the new options and let us know what you find!

In wednesdays post we discussed the problem of negative comments and feedback featuring in the Search Engine Results page when people search for your company or website. Today we’ll show you how control the SERP so these comments are pushed to the bottom of the page, or even onto page 2.

You would expect your website to show up in the top position when people search for it. But what about the other 9 positions on the page, the ones where negative reviews or forum comments might show up? You can’t control them can you? Well actually you can.

Social Media pages

To start with, your social media pages have a good chance of being in the top positions. A search for WebEden will show our Twitter, Facebook and Youtube pages within these results. This means that not only can you have control of the top position, but you can probably show position 2 and 3 and maybe even 4. And since your social media pages should be full of the good will of your social networks, they show off your website in the best light possible.

Get good Reviews

As we’ve mentioned previously, It’s important for every small business to make sure they get good reviews, and to have a social media strategy. You first need to find the websites where reviews of your website are relevant. You can usually do this with a quick search in google for ‘your market + reviews’. Once you’ve compiled a list of websites where reviews could be posted, you need to start getting them! The easiest way to do this is when your website visitors or customers give you positive feedback, ask them to leave a review on one of the reviews website on your list.

Here’s a list of good, general reviews websites.

pricegrabber.co.uk
reviewcentre.com
shopzilla.co.uk
ciao.co.uk
dealtime.co.uk
truste-marketing.co.uk
webuser.co.uk
maxxsave.co.uk
dooyoo.co.uk
resellerratings.com

Respond to bad comments on Forums

OK, this won’t actually stop the bad comments show up in the Search Engine Results page. But if you take time to get involved in a forum where someone is moaning about you, it means that you are addressing their problems in a very public way. This shows great customer service, and anyone taking the time to read beyond the initial gripe will be impressed at your desire to solve problems. Other people on the forum might also give you respect, and let the original complainer know that they have been won over, It might well turn a bad situation into a good one.

Take control of your Google Local Business listing

As we’ve discussed before, a Google local business listing provides a great opportunity to be found for searches relevant to your business on Google maps. Google local business listings can also show up in the SERPs, particularly where a place name is specified. So this is another opportunity to control the SERPs.

Take control of your website profile pages

There are lots of websites out there that automatically create a static page that claims to ‘analyse’ your website. The page contains a small amount of information, usually obtained from the domain whois record, all about your website. This usually includes the website name, a small screen grab, the name on the whois register, and an assessment of the amount of traffic your website has.

These pages are usually created to attract traffic from search engines, since they are usually covered with Google ads. But they also give you the opportunity to take control and edit the information they hold about you, to keep it up to date. Due to the structure of these websites, they often appear in the SERPs for your brand searches. By taking control and editing yours, you are again controlling another result in the SERP.

Here are the best known of these directory pages

aboutus.org
valuatemysite.com
quantcast.com
websiteoutlook.com
weeviews.com
statbrain.com

Could you get a Wikipedia page?

Due to the power of the Wikipedia website, a Wikipedia page all about your business might be an option. This isn’t an easy one though. To start with, in order to qualify your business needs to pass the notability guidelines

And since a Wikipedia article can be edited by anyone, the page needs constant monitoring  to check that no-one as added anything negative.

So a Wikipedia page might be an option for some but not all.

Finally

The worst thing that can happen when people search for you is for them to read a bad review, before they’ve even visited your website. By taking control of the whole SERPs for your brand you can push these reviews to the bottom of the page, or even page 2, where no-one is going to see them.

Of course there’s a positive side too. By controlling lots of the SERPs for your brand searches, you have a real opportunity to show your website and company off in the best light possible.

Try setting up a few of these options and see how they get into the SERP. And then leave us a comment below.

We’ve talked quite a lot on this blog about Online Reputation Management. Before the Internet and Social media, if someone had a bad experience with your company then they would have few avenues to pursue.

To start with, they’d probably moan about how awful you were to their friends. This would probably mean that their friends would never buy from you. Unless you run a local business, shop or restaurant, this probably wouldn’t affect you too much.

If you were lucky, they’d call you up and tell you about why they were unhappy. This would at least give you the opportunity to respond to them, and you could change your service to take on board what they said.

Thanks to the Internet, however, a complainer has an array of tools to make their complaints heard.

To start with, they can tell everyone in the social networks about you. The average Facebook user has over 50 friends, so this means their gripes are heard by a lot more people.

Second, they can start giving feedback about you on reviews websites. Anyone going directly to a read a review about your product tend to gravitate towards the negative ones. Even if you’ve got 10 good reviews and just 1 bad one, it’s the latter that will be read the most, and is most likely to stick in the mind.

The third weapon at their disposal is a forum. It’s relatively easy to find a forum relevant to your product and service, and get in there with a few moans. Forums are incredibly popular places for people to hang out online, and posts can be read by thousands. Once again, it’s the negative ones that stand out.

The Power of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

Anyone browsing their social network, looking on a review site, or spending time in a forum, will be directly affected by these negative comments. But there is a secondary effect, and a much more important one.

This secondary effect has to do with the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).The big downside of all these avenues of complaints is that they will show up in the search engine results page when people search for your company or website. As we stated recently, thanks to the ‘Real Time’ arms race the search engines are currently engaged in, comments on social networks are getting indexed by Google to an increasing extent. And as we stated in our Google the innovator series, Google is also giving increased prominence to reviews in their index, Lastly, Google announced just recently that they are giving increased prominence to forum postings in the SERPs.

All these factors are combining with the result that a poor review, comment or negative post has a significant chance of showing up in the SERPs when people look for your company.

If someone is searching on Google for your company name or your website, the worst possible thing for them to see is a page full of results that show your company or website in a bad light. People who are searching for your company have already made a positive decision to buy from you – they are the people that you should find it easiest to sell to. It’s almost as though they are at the check out of your shop. And when they see a bad review, its like someone else in the shop tapping them on the shoulder and saying ‘Excuse me, I wouldn’t buy from these people, they’re terrible!’

The ideal scenario when someone searches for your company or business or website, is the information that they find on the SERP is positive, and will encourage them to trust you.

Having let you know about all the downsides of getting negative feedback, comments and reviews in the SERPs, tomorrow we’ll show you how you can take control the Search Engine Results Page to make sure that those negative comments are pushed to the bottom of the page, and don’t stop people visiting your website.

Did you know that ‘best practice’ web design is that almost every website needs to include a privacy policy? In fact, UK law also indicates that if you are collecting information about people then it is a legal requirement to let them know that you are doing it.

A privacy policy is a single page on your website that explains to users what information you are collecting about them as they arrive and move through your website.

If you have installed Google analytics then you will automatically be accumulating information about your users in huge detail. Aside from all the usual analytics stuff such as how they found your site; how long they spent on it; and what pages they looked at; you also find out other more personal data. This includes where they are; what ISP they’re using; what browser they’re using and their screen size.

Others of you might not have installed Google analytics, but may well have a feedback form that asks for email addresses.

And finally, the WebEden website building system itself uses cookies to identify individual users. For example, if someone becomes a member of your website, the system attaches a cookie to them which makes it more straight forward for them to log back in again the next time they visit.

All these mean that it’s a good idea to have a privacy policy. Aside from fulfilling your ‘best practice’ obligations, having a privacy policy is looked upon favourably by the search engines. When the Google spiders crawl your website, a privacy policy is one of the things they look for. It can help you – albeit in a very small way – get your website boosted up the Search Engine Results Pages.

If you’d like to put a privacy policy on your website, below is a template that you can use. Make sure you fill in and adapt the bits that are appropriate for your website.

privacy-policy-template

You don’t need to make your privacy policy a major part of your website, just include a small link to it on the footer of your site, or from your ‘about us’ page. It doesn’t need to be part of the main menu.

Good luck finding and using one – let us know how you get on using the feedback form below.

Another day, another statistic about how big and popular Google is. This time its ComScore, who have just released the research that total internet searches are up by a colossal 41%.

And you’ve guessed it: Google is the search engine that has driven most of that growth.

What’s amazing about this statistic however is that the change is so huge in what is considered to be a fairly mature market.

Its one thing to grow massively in your early stages, when any change represents a big percentage. But when you’re already very big, which search engines are (using search engines is by far the most popular online activity), then even significant absolute growth is usually just a few percentage points.

Here are the specifics: Global searches went up from 80 billion to 114 billion between July 2008 and July 2009. And Google grew from 49 billion searches to 77 billion. That means Google has hovered up 67% of the global search market.

Elsewhere, Yahoo grew just 2% with searches rising from 8.7 billion to 8.9 billion. That gives it 7.8% of the global search market. Chinese search engine Baidu went up 8% from 7.4 billion to just under 8 billion. Even though Baidu draws it user base from just one country, that still means it has 7% of the global market.

Microsoft, by contrast, saw very healthy growth of 41%, but this was from a fairly modest base of 2.35 billion searches.

In terms of a global break down, most searches happen in Europe, which produced 32% of searches. This was followed by Asia Pacific (31%), North America (22%) and Latin America (9%).

Where will it all end? Is this just the tip of the iceberg, or the top of the hill? No wonder new entrants want to grab a piece of this market. Leave us a comment below.

Although most of us only have eyes for Google, there’s a new search engine that launches almost every month. The recent high profile launches were WolframAlpha – not strictly a search engine but a ‘knowledge engine’ – and of course Microsoft’s ‘Bing’.

Most of these search engines come and go. And that’s not because they aren’t always good; but because it’s not easy to convert people from their tried and tested brands (Google). It takes not just a good product, but a much better product. And a lot of marketing money too.

So it was with some excitement that last July the market greeted ‘Cuil’. Here was a new search engine built by some ex-Google employees that had all the promise of a giant killer. It had a cool, leftfield name, the right backers, and the kind of buzz that only Silicon Valley can produce.

So it was disappointing to find that Cuil went off with more of a whimper than a bang. Despite the huge level publicity, a year later search traffic has fallen to just 90,000 unique users.

But now Cuil is now back, and trumpeting a real-time search feature that it hopes will help to catapult it into the search big-league. As we discussed recently, real time is becoming a major battle ground for search engines. And with the acquisition of FriendFeed, even Facebook is muscling in on the act.

On Cuil, when you search for keywords that also have real time results, Cuil automatically creates a mini-toolbar that shows how many real time results it has found.

You can then expand the toolbar to show just a sample of results both blogs and news websites, which gives an indication of how ‘hot’ that topic is.

As a user, you can then choose to open the toolbar in a pop up, which allows you to monitor the topic on an ongoing basis.

What not take a look at Cuil and let us know what you think. Can Cuil’s Real Time features save it from the search engine scrap heap? Has the real-time SERPs been over-hyped? Leave us a comment below

When you think ’search engine’ what brand springs to mind? For almost all of us it’s Google. This is especially so in the UK, where Google powers around 90% of all Internet searches. Some of you may still think ‘Yahoo’. And a few pioneers might think ‘Bing’.

But according to the ComScore monthly search report, its Facebook that is experiencing the fastest growth as a search engine. Search volumes on Facebook grew by a massive 35% in July alone.

Other brands experiencing strong growth in search were Craigslist (8%), eBay and Bing (5%), Flickr and Delicious (4%) and YouTube (1%).

The growth in these brands not normally associated with search queries was very much at the cost of the traditional search engines. Google fell 2%, AskJeeves 4%, and Yahoo and AOL dropped 5% each.

In terms of absolute numbers, the traditional search engines still rule the roost. In July there were 12.9 billion searches on Google; 2.8 billion on Yahoo; and Microsoft sites accumulated 1.3 billion searches.

Google of course is fiercely protecting its users’ ‘eye-time’. They have recognised the huge revenue potential of social networking, by adding lots of sticky and social features to their web properties. The most recent defensive move was their shift to feature ‘real time‘ entries in the search engine results page. But if Facebook search continues to grow at this rate, it might be that Google will have to start to defend its pure search homeland.

And it seems that Facebook has real ambition when it comes to search. Facebook recently bought FriendFeed and also expanded its own services, which has boosted its ability to provide real-time search.

A few weeks ago Facebook unveiled a new search service that allows members to search for status updates, links, photos and videos. Whilst previously users could find entries for other users’ profiles, the new Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) serve them in categories depending on the search query.

Have you tried searching on Facebook? Do you think that Facebook could be a serious rival to Google when it comes to search? Do you think Facebook will be able to monetise their new services? Leave us a comment below.

Lots of the time on this blog we go on about Google. We’ve extolled its virtues as a search engine, and waxed lyrical about its rate of innovation. And when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, the advice we give you is how to boost your website up the Search Engine Results page for Google, and not Yahoo or Bing.

All this of course is because Google is the most popular search engine. In the US 65% of web users prefer Google. In the UK it’s closer to 90%.

But how do you know that you prefer Google? Oh sure, at some point in the past you tried it, liked it, and found the results the most accurate search could offer. You made the psychological decision to stick with it and be loyal. If you have tried another search engine since, such as Bing, how many of you had already decided to give it a go in the full knowledge that you’d still stick to Google no matter how good the results?

And that’s typical of how, as consumers, we choose one brand over another. The first time you try similar products from different companies, it’s difficult to make up your mind. But once the mind is made up, most of us tend to keep to that decision. Apart from requiring no further effort, it constantly reaffirms to each of us that we made the right choice.

And that’s where blind search testing comes in. The website http://blindsearch.fejus.com allows you to compare the results for Google, Yahoo and Bing. The results are stripped bare of any branding, design, or clues to which search engine is delivering which result. Users can than vote for the result that they think is most relevant to their search query

And the interesting thing is that once all that branding is stripped away, we can make an honest decision about which SERP is most relevant to our search query. Once again we can evaluate the quality of the results without any preconceptions of that search engine’s brand.

Here’s the surprising bit. After around a month of testing, this blind search tool found that users preferred Google 41% of the time, Bing 31% and Yahoo 28%. That’s a huge discrepancy each search engine’s actual market share.

Aside from showing that we’re making the decision to stick with Google for reasons other than its accurate results, it also shows what an uphill battle the other search engines have. Even if they make their product much, much better than Google, in all likelihood people are going to be reluctant to switch.

Have a go on the blind search tool and let us know which result you prefer best.

We reported previously that Microsoft’s newest search engine Bing had had a strong entry into the US market. And early data from Hitwise indicated that in the UK too it was do(b)ing pretty well, despite that lack of advertising support.

But more comprehensive data from Neilsen out this week shows that far from taking the UK market by storm, Bing is making little headway this side of the pond.

Whilst Bing reached 7 million unique visitors in May, that figure had dropped to just 6.4 million in June, down 7.7%. This decline reflects research published earlier this month by JP Morgan indicating that whilst users were prepared to try Bing out, they were far less likely to make a permanent switch away from Google.

In terms of ranking by unique users, this puts Bing 5th in the UK market behind Google, Google Image Search, Yahoo and Ask.com.

“While it’s very early days, Bing has no impact on the UK search results and hasn’t caused a ripple effect. The market remains very stable and hasn’t changed much in the past couple of years” said Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at The Nielsen Company,.

Google continued to dominate, increasing its user base by 2.2% in June, with 31.6 million unique visitors.

In the UK we are yet to see the impact of Microsoft’s’ planned marketing activity for Bing, due here in the new year. Whilst it feels like we’re been talking about Bing for a while, ask your non-techie friends if they’ve ever heard of it - I bet you the answer would be no. And now of course with Microsoft and Yahoo combining their search business in the next few months, maybe Microsoft is less concerned about Bing standing on its own two feet, since it will become the default search engine on Yahoo too.

Have you been tempted away from Google? Does Bing have a feature you particularly like? Leave us a comment below.