Over the last 5 years Yahoo has been on the downfall and left in the shadow of market leaders Google. Every Search Engine Optimisation enquiry we receive is to appear in Google, rarely Yahoo. In this article we will look over Yahoo raise and fall and why now it only own 19% of the market they innovated.

Yahoo is widely considered the original big time search engine and reasoning behind what is now the search engine phenomenon. They originally launched in 1994 on a sub domain of the founders (Jerry Yang and David Filo) University website, was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. In least than one year Yahoo (was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo) had a million hits under their belts and the founders realised the potential behind their site. They later released on its new domain www.yahoo.com and surfed the Internet boom during the late 90’s early 00’s. During that time Yahoo released a range of Internet services including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Games, GEO Sites and Yahoo Groups.

They remain pretty much unrivaled apart from some minor competition from sites like Lycos and Excite. However, it wasn’t until Google’s quick growth that Yahoo faced serious competition. In 2007 it was reported that Yahoo now only own 19% of the market share, compared to Google’s massive 53%. It is still the second biggest search engine with MSN falling behind with a 12% share. However with such fierce competition from Google does Yahoo still stand a chance?

As of today there have been numerous of failed acquisition attempt by Microsoft, ranging from 2005 till present the most recent being the start of this year, all of which have been unsuccessful. Now the future of Yahoo is hanging in the balance with suggestions of a merger with Google. In my opinion the days of Yahoo being a market leader are over and the chance of a possible merger with Google or MSN is the only solution left for the previous giants.

Google judges each site based on a scale from 1 to 10. This is called Google Page Rank often abbreviated to PR.

Whats a good PR?

Its hard to say whats a good or bad page rank it depends on many factors like the age of the site, quality of content, amount of pages and sites linking back your site. On average for a well established site anything from a PR 2 or above is considered a good PR.

I have a PR 0 does this mean I have a bad site?

No a Page Rank 0 doesn’t mean you have a poor site at all. If the site is new you will have to be patient as the Page Rank update comes around quarterly, so you may have to wait for months before your PR changes. If your site is on an old domain and you have a PR 0 it could be due to a number of reasons, either your site hasn’t got relevant content on it or hasn’t got any other sites linking back to it. Having good Search Engine Optimisation practices implemented into your site can help build a PR.

PR the be all and end all?

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when browsing the web is too judge sites based up on their PR. Just because Google PR doesn’t rate the site high doesn’t mean it doesn’t offer a quality service or information relative to what you are searching for.

How do I find out my PR?

There are many sites that offer a Page Rank checker tool, however you can download the Google toolbar for here, which offer a integrated PR Checker.

I was currently reading an article on searchengineland.com to do with social media marketing ROI, One of the points they discussed was relative to using social media sites to promote your compnay and therefore increase your search engine listings through direct link building from users.

“Content that would otherwise not be seen by high-profile sites, can get on their radar by being ‘hot’ on popular social media sites, and is much more likely to gain 100’s of links, 1000’s of additional unique visitors from these secondary (referral) sites.”

http://searchengineland.com/080826-123600.php

They also mention that due to these long term links it guarrantees your future listing:

“Because you develop these high-value links, you can easily rank prominently for targeted terms in search engines and increase your long-tail traffic which will stabilize at a much higher number than the pre-social marketing campaign numbers.”

So these high traffic websites encourage users to link to your site if you offer a service. Now it is highly important that you hit your target audience, as you can imagine a social site about fashion is not going to be interested in search engine optimisation.

A successful social media marketing campaign should consist of relevant content on relevant sites that users want to read. And if your lucky then people just might link to you, the listings will follow.

Time Scales in SEO

I often get customers asking me to forecast the time scale for a search engine optimisation project and its the one question that is the most difficult to answer. As you know the industry is constantly changing its standards as are we, meaning the time scale for a customer to see results can vary from one cache to months of hard work.

So what are the factors which effect time scales?

• Existing Domain Strength - If you have an old domain with a strong backward link campaign, this is a great starting point for any SEO company meaning the time scales can be reduced.
• Phrase Competitiveness - If you are optimising for extremely competitive phrase then its obviously going to take more human resource, time and money to reach your target.
• Competitors - If you are optimising for a competitive phrase is may be that other businesses are also optimising for the same thing, increasing the difficultly of performance therefore prolonging the time scale.

We understand that SEO can hold the future of your business in its hands, so its important that all the key phrases perform and convert to enquiries. The successfulness of your business is the main importance and it is hard to put a time scale on when it will reach your target. We will ensure that we give your site the resource and time it deserves in order to get in the desired search engine placement.

Search Engine Optimisation can offer a huge increase in potential customers visiting your site. It offers three key advantags to set you ahead from your competition.

• It is a highly cost effective way of marketing your site
• It offers targetted traffic straight to your products/services
• Ensures long term high positioning

If you currently have a website and your conversion rates are low, Search Engine Optimisation could be the best way to get your site noticed by customers or clients. There is no point in having a well designed website if nobody knows it exists.

Creare Communications are Search Engine Optimisation specialists with years of experience and a highly successful portfolio to offer. Feel free to contact us today to find out the best solution for your company.

In this article I aim to express 5 reasons why organic (the left side of Google) search engine optimisation is worth the time and effort.

• It’s what Google was made for, and its what people generally use Google for. Good positioning in the organic listing of Google is much more likely to increase traffic to your site over pay per click (right side of Google) campaign.
• You have no budgets; your site won’t disappear from the listings after being clicked 20 times.
• The coding used in your site will be clean, modern and W3C compliant.
• The addition of a good navigation, with your keyword phrases throughout the pages and topical sites pointing links back to your website equals long term success.
• You would have nothing to show for months of pay per click marketing if you were to stop, with organic search engine optimisation your site would have built a page rank and would be starting to appear in organic listings.

Overall, I feel people are generally put off by the timescale of organic search engine optimisation over the instant results of pay per click. However, pay per click offers no long-term benefits and will not generate as much traffic to your site as organic SEO. For these reasons I recommend each client to opt for organic SEO over PPC.

When you are approached by a search engine optimisation company they will ask you what phrases you would like to appear for, then guarranty that this can be done, but what if the phrases are not right?

At Creare we ensure that the keyphrases suit your business needs, Our consultants ensure that the we discuss and understand the areas of your business. This then enables us to use our expertise to advise you on keyphrases that will not only generate you traffic, but also conversions.

By conversions i mean the amount of people that visit your site and actually make an enquiry or buy something.  It can sometimes be the less competitive phrases that are more specific which will make you money, rather than the general ones and of course internet marketing is all about making your business money.

This takes an understanding of SEO and experience in optimising for various industries. We have clients that range from Inflatables to Disabled Showers all of which have given us an understanding of what converts and what makes money.

Bounce rates also known, as exit rates can be a crucial part of analysing how well your site is performing in the online arena. Bounce rates indicate what pages are either letting your site down or leading it to successful conversions. However, it seems to be a touch and go subject, with many people unsure what they exactly mean.

What is a bounce rate?

Put simply, it is the rate of which people leave your site without visiting any other pages. The lower your bounce rate the better your site is performing.

Analysing bounce rates

So what is a good bounce rate, Avinash Kaushik a Google Analytics specialist quoted “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

Help is at hand

If you find your site has a high bounce rate, there are many ways to improve it. First is finding out what the possible causes may be, usually its from either poor design or bad usability. Other than these it could be due to poor content on the site, or that you are being found on Google for unrelated terms to your company. Resulting in users leaving the site on entry. Second, is correcting these potential problems, at Creare Communication we offer a range of search engine optimisation services to improve your sites bounce rate and higher conversion rates.

Wait how do I find out my bounce rates?

There are many applications that you can use to track your websites analytics. At Creare Communications we implement Google Analytics into each of our sites, which offer monthly detailed reports including bounce rates, conversion rates, average time people spend on your site and much more.
To find out more about these services click here.

Wikia search engine was marketed as the new alternative to Google, With the different algorithm promising to provide better results therefore being more user friendly. Any new search engine provides a threat to a search engine optimisation company.

Wikia have now introduced an evolution on their existing search engine facilities, It is called Wikia Evolution. It allows users to add keyword tags to URL s that a user is vistin, which is then placed in the wikia index.

A good idea right? Well not really, if a user wanted to self promote a site they could place relevant keywords etc, excellent, but what if a competitor could adjust your keywords in the index, meaning a seo competitor could suggest that your site is relevant to ‘dog food’ therefore effecting your search position.

Still no competitor to Google, but the day nears when someone revolutionizes search results.

We at the Creare Group practice what we preach.  We are very proud to be the only company in the UK that lists page 1 for the much sought after phrases ‘Web Design’ and ‘Search Engine Optimisation’.

We don’t know why Search Engine Optimisation companies do not do web design and claim that you cannot be good at both.  I mean can a bank only do one part of banking?  Of course a company can specialise in more than one area of expertise to give the customer a more complete service. 

We at Creare want to provide you with a complete internet marketing service to fulfil all you internet marketing needs.  We want to give you a site that look great, that attracts enquiries and can be found on the search engines. 

Basically do you want a professional looking website, with great design at the top of Google?  If you do then please give us a call and you too can receive the complete web service.