Some research by Comscore, an online traffic measurement company, came out last week. It was covered in some depth over on Techcrunch.

The research is based on US traffic, but it applies here too.

Comscore have basically found that whilst the number of searches rose last year by 68%, the number of clicks on search advertisements went up by just 18%.

Here’s a graph that shows it all:

Comscore are attributing the relative decline in clicks compared to searches to the increasing length of search queries. They say that as the number of 3, 4 or 5 word searches increases, (something we’ve discussed before) adverts are less likely to appear because advertisers are less like to have those word combinations in their AdWords account.

Comscore say: “And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.”

Techcrunch think that this doesn’t explain it enough. They reckon that clicks on adverts have declined because many US advertisers have reduced or stopped their AdWords campaigns.

They say: “Sharper Image, Wickes Furniture, Levitz, Foot Locker, Wilson’s Leather, Ann Taylor, Zales, Mervyn’s, Macy’s, Circuit City and a ton of other retailers are either shutting down entirely or closing lots of stores… All of these companies used to spend tons of money on paid search ads. Those budgets don’t exist any more.”

Another idea is that as Google gets better at displaying more relevant results pages (SERPs), maybe users are less drawn to the sponsored AdWords ads because they find what they want in the organic listings. I haven’t got any evidence for that, it just seems like logical conclusion.

Whatever the reason, once again its a good opportunity for your to get your website to the top of the SERPs. Make sure you are ranking highly for the specific search phrases that people will use that are relevant to your website. Follow our Search Engine Optimisation guide (SEO) to help you achieve that.

Do you find yourself clicking less on ads these days? Or have you never done so? Leave us a comment below.

With a bank holiday approaching, there’s a lot of weather related chatter going on.  In the office we’ve been talking about stuff like how busy the campsites are, and how choked the roads will become. But as we’ve mentioned before, the weather has a big impact on the sort of things people search for online.

There is of course the obvious stuff: bad weather brings about a surge in searches for weather websites, as Brits look for a break in the clouds.

But also there is the range of activities that warmer weather brings with it. If search engines are anything to go by, the first thing on people’s minds when the sun comes out is the garden. The Hitwise ‘Hot Consumer Electronics List’ shows that garden related search queries have trebled over the last few weeks.

Here’s the top 10:

1  black and decker
2. lawn mowers
3. flymo
4. black & decker
5. petrol lawn mowers
6. petrol lawnmowers
7. petrol lawn mower
8. cheap garden furniture
9. lawnmower
10. lawnmowers

Of course the take away point if you’re selling any garden or weather related equipment is to have a list of keywords sorted out well in advance of this surge. You need to make sure your website is ranking well in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS) for your important keywords - follow our search engine optimisation guide for the best advice. But owing to the length of time Google takes to crawl changes on your site, its best to make sure you’ re working on your SEO programme through the winter, so that come springtime you’re ready to take advantage.

For those of us not selling this stuff; is there a weather or summer related angle you could give to your site? For example, if you run a B&B take the opportunity to add in a page about the weather in the local area, and optimise that page for local weather keywords. You might well be able to pick up some extra traffic.

Have any of you taken advantage of weather related searches to boost traffic to your site? Leave us a comment below.

More research from HitWise this week reveals the subjects that we, as a nation, are most interested in.

Hitwise analysed the top 1,500 search terms from Google, Yahoo and MSN for the last three months of 2008. They then placed each search term in a category. For example, the search term ‘the apprentice’ was placed in the category ‘TV’; and ‘Coldplay’ was in ‘Music’.

And the result? It seems that as a nation we’re obsessed with TV and online gaming. If you take out non-brand searches, over 14% of searches are related to TV, and just under 14% are related to Online Gaming (such as World of Warcraft). The next three categories are Travel, Sport and Finance.

Breaking it down further, the most popular search terms in the TV category were ’strictly come dancing’, ‘eastenders’, ‘x factor’ and TV listings. So as we mentioned in our blog post about the UK’s most searched for celebrity, we haven’t completely lost our interest in pop, soaps and that sort of thing.

Delving further into the other top categories, here’s the top search terms for each sector:

Online gaming:
games
free online games
car games
free games
cooking games (really!)

Travel:
train times
cheap flights
cheap holidays

9 out of the top 10 sport related terms were football related, with ‘arsenal’ topping the list. ‘F1′ was the only one from any other sport.

And when it comes to finance, the list was headed by ‘currency converter’. The words ‘exchange rate’ were right up there too. So it seems the weakness of the pound is on lots of people’s minds.

What does this mean if you’re a website builder? Well one thing to take from it is that if your business or hobby falls into one of the popular search areas, you have the potential to get lots of visitors to your website. Follow our search engine optimisation guide (SEO) to maximise your chances. Of course what also might be true is that since these are the most popular search terms, they might be the most competitive too. Therefore work out which niche you are best catering for, and concentrate your SEO in that area. For example, if you run a B&B in Somerset, near Exmoor and you specialise in horse riding too, then make sure you’re optimising not just for ‘B&B’ and ‘Somerset’, but also ‘Exmoor’, the local town, and possibly horse riding in Somerset, Exmoor, and the local town.

What are you searching for right now? Leave a comment below.

More research from HitWise, the website traffic measurement company, was out this week. This time it revealed the most searched for celebrities in the UK. This is a top ten long dominated by the stars of pop and soap, and closely mirrors the amount of coverage they generate in the red tops.

So who is the top this year then? Paris Hilton? Jordan? It’s perhaps an indication of these austere times, or maybe a drop in the intensity of our celebrity obsession, but these year’s list topper isn’t a star of screen or stage, but a hero of frugality instead. Martin Lewis, the person behind ‘consumer revenge’ website Money Saving Expert was the most searched for personality in the three months ending January 2009. On top of that, Martin’s website moneysavingexpert.com was the 100th most visited site in the last 3 months.

Second in the list was Barack Obama, another sensible persons’ search term. Barack received 11% less searches than Martin.

The presence in the top ten of a couple of WAGs and some other tabloid fodder shows we haven’t completely turned our backs on ‘traditional’ celebrities.

Here’s the full list:

1. Martin Lewis
2. Barack Obama
3. Diana Vickers
4. Britney Spears
5. Leona Lewis
6. Cheryl Cole
7. Georgina Baillie
8. Miley Cyrus
9. Nicola Mclean
10. Katy Perry

Well I suppose a straw poll of us website builders might reveal a different list again. We’re all searching for heroes of the web, aren’t we? Like Tim Berners-Lee- the ‘founder of the Internet? Another might be Bill Gates? Eric Schmidt (Google CEO)? Or maybe Jakob Nielsen (the website usability guru)?

Who is in your top 10? Leave us a comment below.

You might think that here at WebEden we bang on too much about search engines. But as the recent Hitwise data shows, if you’re building a website then you need to know about search engines too. Search engines will probably be the biggest single source of traffic to your website. So they are a fundamental part of any website project.

We’ve previously talked about the Google keyword tool, where you can enter a keyword and find all the other words that are similar to that keyword. It will also give you a rough idea of how many searches per month there are for that keyword. This is a really useful tool to use when deciding what keywords you want to use for your Search Engine Optimisation programme.

A few months ago Google released another tool which has been seen as an enhancement of the keyword tool above. Google Insights for Search is designed to help website owners understand even more about which keywords are right for their website.

It calculates total searches for keywords, looks at the data historically, and produces graphs to show how a particular search term has trended over the last few years.

It then allows you to categorise the search trend by industry sector (called ‘verticals’) and geographical region.

Here’s a good illustration of how useful that can be, by looking at the search term ‘apple’. The vast majority of searches using the word ‘apple’ will be related to the computing brand ‘Apple’, as in ‘apple mac’. Lets say you’re a fruit seller, you obviously don’t want your website to appear high up for searches related to ‘apple mac’, but you still want a clear idea of the number of searches that are relevant to apples the fruit. You can use Google insights allows you to filter the results to just those that fall within the Food & Drink category. The result is the search trends, and related search terms, for just those searches about apple the fruit.

Lets say too that you’re hoping to sell apples online, but just to your local area or region. You can filter by geography to get just those apple related searches that are specifically about apples the fruit, in your area.

Seeing search volume trends can be really useful if you sell a seasonal product. If you sell valentines cards, then type ‘valentines cards’ into Google Insights and you can get a historical guide to the peaks and troughs of that search term. As you can see from the screen grab below, searches for valentines cards actually peak on the 11th February, so anyone looking to maximise sales of valentines cards need to make sure they’re maximising their marketing efforts before this time, and holding plenty of stock on this day.

Google Insights is also really useful if you’re thinking about stocking a new product on your website, or choosing to no longer sell another. Before you make any decisions, type the product name into Google Insights and see whether searches for it are going up or down. Anything that is climbing fast is clearly rising in demand, so its probably a good idea to sell it. If the trend is downward, then you might not want to restock that item when your current stock runs down.

The draw back of this product is that Google won’t actually put a figure on the number of searches for each term, but rather expresses the trend line as a percentage of the total number of searches. And bear in mind, search volumes are gong ever upwards, so if the number of searches for a using a particular keyword is remaining static, this is actually represented as a decreasing trend line.

Despite this, Google Insights will still show you a clear and accurate guide to the level of interest in your products, and the related search terms. You get all this data historically, and it’s all free.

Have a go at using the tool, and then leave your feedback below.

On average, almost half of all traffic that arrives on a website comes through search engines. This is according to recent research published by Internet traffic measurement company Hitwise UK.

Whilst in January 2008 search engines contributed 37.1% of total traffic to websites, by January 2009 this had climbed to a whopping 40.5%.

Here’s a graph from HitWise:

Apart from anything, this shows that if you want more visitors to your website, you need to make sure that your website appears high up in the search engine results page (SERPs). Read our guide to search engine optimisation to boost your website up the SERPs.

The dominance of search engines in website traffic is a huge opportunity for small businesses. Big brands used to be able to dominate the media landscape. What small company has the money to buy advertising on television, in national newspapers or in glossy magazines? But when it comes to search engines the game has changed. You don’t need big  budgets to reach out to potential customers, just an understanding of how search works, and a product or service that people want.

The flip side is that search has made it harder for large companies to ‘own’ consumer interest. Just because you’re a big brand it doesn’t mean you’re going to appear high in the search results. And spending lots of money on search doesn’t necessarily mean lots of traffic. A well optimised website of a small business or an individual will beat a poorly optimised big company website every time.

Just search for a common household product and you’ll see that the results page is full of unknown websites and unknown brands. None of these could afford to buy airtime of on TV. Before search engines, how would these brands have been able to reach potential customers?

The other interesting information arising from this research is the way in which we are now using search engines. 90% of the top 1,500 terms were brand specific. This means that people are using search engines to navigate the web, rather than typing a website’s address directly into the address bar. That’s the same sort of user behviour as seen in Japan, where people almost always use search engines rather than type in a domain name.

Do you a have a big budget competitor that you’ve managed to beat in the SERPs, using the WebEden website making tool? Leave us a comment below.

This article first appeared over on Computer World last week.

If you’re an online marketer and you use AdWords to drive traffic to your website, it can be frustrating (and expensive) when your current customers click on your sponsored listing just to navigate to your website.

For example, lets say that you want to buy something from John Lewis, and you’re previously bought stuff from John Lewis before.

Do you go to your address bar and type in ‘http://www.johnlewis.com’ or do you go to Google and search for ‘john lewis’? If you do the latter, and you click on the ’sponsored listing’ at the top of the page, then you’re costing John Lewis money. They have to pay Google a few pence each time someone clicks on their sponsored listing. These costs really mount up! A well known brand like John Lewis might get more than 10,000 clicks per day on their sponsored link from people who are just clicking as an easy way to navigate to the website, rather than genuinely searching for a product that John Lewis might stock.

In an ideal world, online marketers spend money on advertising to drive new customers to their websites, not current customers.

But if that’s a frustration here in the UK, just imagine how annoying it is in Japan. Over there, hardly anyone makes use of the address bar when navigating to a website, and almost always use a search engine, even when they know the exact web address of the site that they’re going to.

They continue to do this even when its a site that they use all the time. For example, many people in Japan have Yahoo as their homepage, and they like using Google to search for things. Rather than deleting ‘Yahoo.com’ out of their  address bar and writing ‘Google.com’, they search for ‘Google’ in the Yahoo search engine.

Last year there were so many people searching for Google in the Yahoo search  engine that the word ‘Google’ was the 4th most searched for term in Yahoo!

This preference for the search box rather than address bar is used by advertisers in Japan, At the end of TV or radio adverts, the user is invited to  search for their product using particular keywords. For print and outdoor adverts, a small picture of a search box with the keywords already inside it is usually printed on the bottom right hand corner, as a call to action.

The only time we’ve seen anything like that in the UK is in a recent advertising campaign by Orange, who invited users to search for ‘i am’.

The reason this is so common in Japan originates from the relative rarity of domain names (the bit that goes in the address bar) using Japanese characters. Early Japanese sites used English (Latin) letters instead. Its obviously a really long winded process for broadcasters to phonetically spell out the Latin characters of a domain name at the end of every advert. Just imagine a call to action for Webeden.co.uk. It would go something like this: ‘Visit duh-bul-yoo-ee-bee-ee-dee-ee-en-dot-coa-dot-yoo-kay’.

Thanks to this preference for using search engines to navigate the web, rather than the address bar, just imagine how much money the major search engines are making from people clicking on sponsored links for websites that they use every day!

Its not going be long however until domain names in Japanese characters become much more common. But now the search habit is so ingrained, will it ever change?

If you’re not clear yourself on the difference between a domain name, an address bar and a search engine then we’ll shortly be producing a ‘what is tutorial’ for browser basics.

In the meantime, feel free to search for a domain name to go with your Webeden website!

This story has been picked up in lots of places including the BBC. For about 40 minutes on Saturday, anyone doing a search on Google would have found the warning ‘this site may harm your computer’ alongside every link in the search engine results page.

How alarming is that! We already know that Google want us to spend more time on their website, and less time on any elses’. And we all trust Google as though it IS the Internet. Then then they tell us that every other website is potentially harmful?! That’s going a bit far isn’t it? (Mock shock)

Apparently this was not what they meant to say, and was merely the result of ‘human error’. It was all to do with uploading a list of problem websites into their directory. The problem was quickly rectified, but as Google makes about $1bn a month from sponsored links, we reckon this little error probably cost them close to $1m in lost advertising clicks. 

That makes me feel a bit better about the odd spelling mistake I make here. And its nice to know Google is human too, isn’t it?

As a website builder too, have you dropped any clangers with your site?

Earlier this week I posted some news about Microsoft and the EU coming head to head over anti-competition issues. I also made reference to the question of whether or not Microsoft products are all that good anyway.

Nowhere more so than in online, websites and Search Engines can we see how far Microsoft lags behind. With a measly 4% share of the UK search market, people are voting with their mouse in opting (mostly) for Google instead.

What’s interesting is that Microsoft have just released their trading figures, which have been analysed a great deal in lots of places.

And it appears that not only do we, the users, not like Microsoft’s search products. They’re also costing the company money. Lots of it. In fact, Microsoft have lost $500m in their online business in the last 3 months, and that’s off the back of revenues of more than $850m.

Do you think that they should cut their losses and stick to desktop software? Or do they need to make online work because the next generation of software will be ‘in the cloud’, just like this website builder?

Update 23.01.09: Interestingly, Google have just released their trading figures too. Their revenue is up 18% year on year, at $5.7bn for the quarter. Now there’s a company who knows how to make money online! 

Leave us a comment and let us know.

Getting to the top of the search engines is one of the most cost effective ways to market your website. The ‘organic listings’  or the left and side of the the search engine results page can drive thousands of visitors to your site. However, getting your website listed there has always thought to have been somthing of a ‘dark art’. But it doesn’t have to be a mystery! We’ve put together a 5 part guide to show you how to do it with your webeden.co.uk website builder.

Part 1 – The ground rules

Search Engine Optimisation with SiteMaker is much like Search Engine Optimisation with any website. The key is to make sure that your site contents are focused and relevant to the keywords that you wish to rank highly on. This means making a real effort in a number of places to make sure the terms you use are consistent. And don’t be too ambitious, you’re never going to beat the big guys if your words are too general and competitive.

This guide is based on our experience and generally accepted guidelines on how to improve website search rankings. It doesn’t guarantee results, but will point you in the right direction ;-). If you want more specialist help, employ an SEO consultant, or read the huge range of SEO articles available online.

Throughout this guide we make reference to a website www.joeslondontaxis.com which was built using SiteMaker to test the theories in the articles and show how to get practical results. All results were correct at the time this guide was written.

Ground rules!

Firstly nobody can guarantee you positions in the search rankings. Search engines keep their search algorithms very secret and update them regularly to make sure they produce true and accurate results.

The second thing to know is that SEO takes real work. You’re going to have to give it some thought and make changes to all the pages in your site. This will take time and you may want to adjust things after a few months as you start to see results. The Internet is a great potential market but you need to invest time and effort in marketing your site if you want it to be successful. SEO is a good way of doing this but like most things it doesn’t always come easy.

Next, it’s going to take time for your rankings to improve. Search engines can take months to even list your site and then further time to assign you a rank. They will then review your site periodically and check for updates but the frequency of this can vary. So don’t expect too much too soon. Be patient, build your credibility and presence, and good things will come. Many sites that rank highly have been around a long, long time.

And finally, SEO isn’t everything. There’s never an excuse for not marketing your site in other ways if you’re serious about getting it noticed. Traditional offline marketing, online marketing (banners or AdWords), putting your URL on letterheads, posting it on industry specific directories/message boards, etc., can all help and these actions will also support your SEO efforts too. So don’t forget to look at other forms of marketing too.

First things first

So now the ground rules are out of the way, here are the basics. If you are building a new site, you have two challenges: getting your site listed, and improving its rankings. Even getting your site listed is a subject surrounded in controversy but it also closely relates to how you get it optimised.

In terms of optimisation it’s important to know that search engines look for consistency and relevancy within a number of different areas of your in-page content and within your referral links. These include:

1.    The URL (or web address) of your page, e.g. www.joeslondontaxis.com, or www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking, etc.

2.    Your Page title in the HTML, e.g. “London taxi company”, or “London taxi bookings page”

3.    Your Keywords metadata in the HTML, e.g. “London taxis, London taxi, Joes taxis, West London taxi, etc.”

4.    Your Description metadata in the HTML, e.g. “London taxi company provides taxi services…”

5.    Your page content, e.g. the text that is on your page, including headings (or section titles) which are treated differently from body text

6.    Links on your page, including the anchor text, e.g. the text on which the link is set

7.    Images on your page, including the name of the image file, and the link (if any) set on the image

8.    Referral links to your pages, including the anchor text of the referral link, e.g. a link on another site referring to your site

9.    Points 1-7 are easily within your control as they all relate to the contents of your site. Point 8 requires linking to your site from other external sites, which is less easy to achieve, though there are a number of ways in which you can go about doing this.

Remember, while search engines are mechanical they are not stupid! They are in a constant battle with link spammers who attempt to manipulate ranking results for profit. Optimising your pages and encouraging genuine link backs from other relevant sites will help but getting involved in link spamming and other dodgy techniques such as spamming keywords or content can get your site black listed. So more isn’t always best, make sure links, content and keywords are all genuine.

This guide will go through each of these points in turn and discuss how they are relevant to SiteMaker as well as how to go about achieving each one of them.

Like I said, none of this is solid fact, but it is based on perceived wisdom and what little guidance search engines give out. However, we also want to encourage debate. So if you know something useful or have found a good resource please let us know using the form below.

What’s next? Here’s a link to our Search Engine Optimisation Guide Part 2, which is all about choosing keywords.