The past few days Google have been teasing us with various new animated logos and claiming that something big is coming, leaving the search industry waiting with bated breath. Would it really be something original and big, or rather would it be another Google Wave style failure? Yesterday they finally revealed Google Instant which immediately caused quite a stir. In their own words... "Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type." Read the rest of this entry...

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Go back 10 years and search results on Google were vastly different to what they are today. Gone are the days of page after page of bland text; instead searchers are now bombarded with an assortment of results - from news to maps, images and videos. Google refers to this as "universal search" as it combines their separate search tools to provide improved results for searches. However, universal search is just the tip of the iceberg with regards to maximising your brand’s exposure within the search results. Whilst not all options may be relevant to your brand, there are many which are easy to implement and allow you to increase visibility and traffic (whilst helping to bury your competitors further down the page). Read the rest of this entry...

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The past couple of weeks have been livelier than usual in the Propellernet offices thanks, in part, to the buzz caused by winning Best Use of Search at last month's New Age Media Effectiveness Awards, but also because of our hard working SEO-PR team. We’ve indulged in a bit of shameless self promotion and have been entertaining journalists, photographers and even a BBC film crew! Local paper, The Argus, was keen to do a business profile on us after we explained that we'd not only been winning awards for Search, but also for being the Best Employer and the Healthiest Workplace at last year's Sussex Business Awards. We therefore invited them down to the office to show them firsthand why Propellernet was such a great place to work, and why we firmly believe that a happy workplace means healthy profits. Read the rest of this entry...

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Last night the 2010 new media age Effectiveness Awards took place at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. With Claudia Winkleman presenting, and comedy from Milton Jones, it was billed as one of the biggest events in the interactive media industry calendar; as usual, bringing together some of the best people from the digital sector to recognise hard work in the industry and consume numerous bottles of champagne in the process! Read the rest of this entry...

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This week an Italian court surprisingly convicted three Google executives over the uploading of a video in which an autistic teenager was bullied. Despite removing it within a matter of hours after being notified by the Italian police, David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes were all found to be guilty of violating Italian privacy laws. This is not the first time the Google giant has had problems with privacy laws. Just last week Google's new social networking site Buzz came under fire from The Electronic Privacy Information Centre who lodged a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission claiming Google breaks consumer protection law. It will be interesting to watch how that develops. However, this latest development threatens to set a dangerous precedent in Italy in which sites can be held accountable for what's hosted on their servers. This could have major ramifications for sites which rely on user-generated content such as social networking sites. Read the...

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Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been causing quite a stir recently by threatening to block Google from News Corp sites. The reason for doing so is that he believes search engines are effectively stealing his content by displaying headlines in search results. However, according to Google they send news organisations “about 100,000 clicks every minute”, whilst Hitwise also claim that 25% of WSJ.com’s traffic is from Google, so can News Corp really afford to lose this huge source of traffic and revenue? According to Murdoch they can, and in a recent interview with Sky News he said: “What's the point of having someone come occasionally, who likes the headline they see in Google, come to us? Sure, we can go out and say we have so many millions of visitors, you'd better advertise, and so on. The fact is, there's not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the web sites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our web sites but paying.” Read the...

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It's a myth that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is ridiculously difficult and for the professionals only. Anyone who can build a website has the ability to implement basic SEO recommendations to make sure their site is optimised for both the search engines, as well as for site visitors from a usability point of view. Below are 10 recommendations which should be given some thought when building a website; however it's surprising how many of these basic recommendations are ignored despite many of them simply being best practice for making a website as user-friendly as possible. 1)    Title tags and meta descriptions Every page on the site should have its own unique title tag set which accurately describe the page's content using the most relevant keywords (ideally those that you want the page to rank for). The meta description tag also gives you the chance to write a longer summary, and while search engine ranking algorithms pay little attention to this, it is still shown...

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