Squidbyte Blog on SEO, Search and other Web Issues

It’s kind of late but Happy New Year to everyone….  Been very busy and, as a result, my life as a blogger has taken a back seat to everything else.  Not to worry, I do have something to crow about.

I’ve been working hard on a new price comparison website for the electronics market.  I already have a site running in Australia since the middle of last year and it’s going quite well.  Traffic is increasing and more and more online retailers are sending in data to be included.

The new year and 2008 has meant spreading my wings and….drum roll please….I’m pleased to announce the new addition of www.saveapound.co.uk - computers, notebooks, washing machines, digital cameras, it has it all.

Why do this? I hear you as.  Well, it’s all about helping consumers really.  Consumers want to find the best deal possible and don’t want to troll through all the different online stores to find the best price on the same item - SaveAPound does all of that for you.  Currently funded by Google AdSense there is no charge for users.  Nor is there is also no charge for retailers to submit their content either.  Everyone wins!

Not only is there a site for the UK, launched 25th February, on New Years Day itself we launched www.saveagreenback.com as a free service in the USA.

Both SaveAPound.co.uk and SaveAGreenback.com are currently in their early stages of development and we are adding data every day.   Hopefully both consumers of electronics goods and services and retailers will find this service to be a useful resource both now and in the future.

Blogging is cool.

I used to think that blogging was only for self-obsessed nerds that had nothing better to do with their time other than to write about themselves. I may have been wrong…

Funny as it may seem, if you actually have something decent to say then people may actually want to read that information. This is exactly the same principal that search engines use. Publish something worthwhile and if there is someone in the world who is looking for that exact same thing (it’s a big world so it’s quite possible) then the engines want your content to rank well and for your site to get found. Web users have little loyalty and if one search engine starts throwing up rubbish in the SERPS then users will jump ship in no time. The quality of the SERPS is at the top of Google’s mind.

Here’s a graph of the stats from Google Analytics to my entire site from both before and after I put up this blog. The main Squidbyte site has been around since about 2001 and is hardly ever updated - blogs are an easy way to add content to your site and let the world know something useful.

When I put the blog up the only thing I did was link to it from the menu on the Squidbyte site, nothing else. To be honest, I’m quite surprised that any of it is indexed in any of the engines yet at all (Google and Yahoo! have kindly done this already which is very kind). The biggest surprise of all is that I’m already receiving some traffic from Technorati even though I’ve not added any links anywhere…(they are fast those boys and girls).  Of course, I currently have ‘no authority yet’ in Technorati so I’ll have to work hard to keep them interested.

Reed Business Information and RBI Events are teaming up to host Search School, a one day crash course on Search Engine Optimisation aimed at small to medium business owners. The focus of the sessions will be to provide a check list so that businesses can take the information back to their developers and ensure they are following best practice and are aware of some of the specific issues to do with SEO….both what to do and what not to do.

Speakers include Barry Smyth from Search Strategies, Rod Jacka from Panalysis amongst others.

Sessions will be held in Melbourne on the 9th of October at Federation Square and in Sydney on the 1st of November at the Australian Technology Park.

In May Google unveiled it’s famed Universal Search. Much fanfare was made of this at the SES San Jose event and it was even commented on by several speakers as being the ‘biggest change in the search landscape’ in years.

This may well be the case but it’s yet to be rolled out globally in full.

An example of this can be seen when searching for ‘APEC’ (the biggest thing in the news around Sydney at the moment - here). This is how the results look on Google.com.

And, this is how it looks if you perform the same search on Google.com.au:

Google maps have been incorporated into the SERPs for a short while now in Australia but soon there is bound to be several new additions that will follow what is seen in the US version of Google. This not only has implications as to the way that people will be finding information online but will also have major implications with the search industry and the way people optimise their sites everywhere. No longer is it only the text on the page that you will need to SEO, but images, news feeds, videos (BTW, these must be uploaded to YouTube and other ‘trusted’ sites to be included in the SERPs) and other content as well.

How will this affect people trying to scratch together an income from publishing material on the web? Time to change your ways and adapt - either that or get left behind.

A quick heads-up to some people that I met in San Jose this year.

Emilio from Blogsvertise - thanks for the great dinner and wine.
Dave Mihm - Dave does some great work for small businesses and builds some killer websites.
Lucas Ng from Fairfax Digital (SMH, Drive, RealEstate.com.au).
Roger Montti - another wine buff, aka Martini Buster
Natasha Robinson from News (MySpace Video, American Idol).
Patrick Sexton - aka Feed The Bot and has some really insightful thoughts on the direction of the web and what it means to the average person (whomever that may be).

This Saturday, just gone, I returned from a whirlwind trip to San Jose, California where I attended the Search Engine Strategies 2007 conference. I attended the same event in 2004 and, probably as no surprise to most people, it just keep getting bigger with around 7000 people in attendance.

SES comprises all things internet but has a big focus on search engine optimisation as well as search engine marketing. If you want to play the SEO/SEM game, this is where you need to be.

In the next few days I’ll be giving more detailed updates on the goings-on and some insights into where things may be headed in the industry. So, watch this space.

Squidbyte finally becomes a blogger….God help us all.