In a recent article from the Independent, Google attempts to emphasise its non-partisan status by pointing out that it isn’t the first result when you search for ‘Search Engines’. Does that make you feel a little better about your own positioning for crucial keywords in your business?

Perhaps not – and, if that’s the case, you need to come and have a word with us. Meanwhile, something else I found interesting about this article was the quote:

Google makes one or two changes to its algorithm every day, on average.

That adds up to a lot of changes every year. Indeed, this Financial Times article further clarifies:

Google’s algorithm draws on 200 factors and is tweaked 400 times a year by an army of engineers.

To me, it’s just one more compelling reason why it makes sense to outsource SEO: if you’ve got time to keep up with that level of change, then who’s running your business?!

Now, some of us have only just got used to the whole concept of internet via mobile phones – now we also have to get to grips with the increasing access through internet-enabled TVs and games consoles, such as the Wii, which can turn your TV screen into a monitor.

This week, Yahoo! announced a further rolling out of its TV widget, plus a developer kit to allow enterprising developers and publishers to work it into their own applications. Many TVs across the world will now come to the consumer with the internet as a feature, and with Yahoo!’s widget pre-installed.

Thus far, we haven’t seen many adapting their websites to appear better on a TV screen, as they do for the smaller mobile screen. Although resolution is lower, the large screen means that few changes are vital. At this point, the developing use of internet via the TV is simply proof, if it were still needed, that the web is becoming ever more pervasive. If you don’t have a website, or you have a substandard one, your business really is going to be left behind.

Google really is constantly refining its search results, on a never-ending quest to make them perfect. That’s great news for end-users, and slightly more perturbing for small-business owners who may feel that they just don’t have the time to make the refinements to their websites that will take advantage of the new algorithms.

Just this week, for example, Google announced three new features. First, add ‘hours’ or ‘menu’ to a search for say, a restaurant or museum, and where available, Google will display them right in the results.

Second, “rich snippets”: add these brief summaries to upcoming events pages or reviews, and Google will show them. The example it gives is concerts in San Jose, which currently displays three upcoming events right below the map.

And thirdly, “answer highlighting”. A large proportion of search queries are questions, or based on the desire to find out a fact. Now, queries such as ‘author War and Peace’ will return results where the answer is highlighted in the snippet of text below the title.

All small tweaks which ought to enhance our search experience while we hardly notice it – but is your business website primed to take advantage of them? Having hours and menus appear in the search results could be a massive boon to your business, saving your customers the hassle of clicking around your site. Others will see the potential of the rich snippets feature.

If you’re not sure how to ensure your site will benefit from these – and the countless changes that Google makes every single month – there is a good case for coming to us. After all, it is our business to keep up with the latest search engine innovation, and we can pass that on to you.

One of the things I love best about the Internet and its many innovations is how it makes you feel as if the future has arrived now – and that’s a feeling that seems to occur every week or so. Just when we’ve become complacent about all the little things that make our life easier – search engines, cloud computing, wifi, and online shopping to name but a few – something new comes along and reawakens our sense of wonder.

Google’s Goggles is a prime example. At first, it seems like a novelty. Then, you start to understand its potential. At the same time, you wonder if, as with so many Internet phenomena, the full power of the application may not be understood until it’s been around for some time.

The idea is simple: take a picture of almost anything with your phone, and use the Goggles app to identify it. If it’s a well-known landmark, it will deliver tourist information; a book and it will tell you its publication details; an address (say on a letterhead) and it’ll invite you to add it to your phone’s contacts. Amazing – and, maybe, the future of how we will search?

While everyone seems to be intent on looking back over the past decade, the near future is looking very exciting, too. Rumours abound that Apple will be unveiling their next big technological product – will it set the world on fire like the iPhone did? Newspapers are carrying headlines such as ‘Google phone could arrive next week’, indicating that the rise of mobile internet has really only just begun. Commentary abounds on the possibilities of marketing within virtual worlds. It’s all stuff we could barely have imagined ten years ago, and it’s on the verge of happening right now.

If your personal New Year’s resolutions are safely decided, now would be a good time to look to your online business. It, too, will benefit from a little foresight and some solid commitments. Here are Notting Hill Internet Services’ suggestions:

1. Take a step into social media. Last year was the year everyone was abuzz with the new marketing possibilities of Twitter; in 2008 it was Facebook and blogging. This year it may well be some new contender we’ve barely heard of yet. One thing is for sure: things move fast in social media. You need to get a grip on it now, before it – and your competitors – leave you behind. It’s not hard, and a little time will yield enormous benefits in customer loyalty, visibility, and potentially, sales – but you need to establish your presence now.

Don’t forget, social media is eminently outsourcable, so give us a call if you’d like some direction there.

2. Give your website a little love. How long is it since you last updated your website? If there’s one thing that the new year hammers home, it’s that time flies, and before you know it, your site could be looking old-fashioned and untended. Take a long hard look at your competitors, and then try to look at your own site as if seeing it for the first time (ask a friend if you don’t find it easy). Does it look dated? Hard to navigate? Remember, too, that you’ll get great benefit from the search engines for updating your site regularly, so if the content has remained the same for ages, do yourself a favour and update it.

We can give your site a whole new look at a very economical price. We can also advise on usability, and provide new copy if required.

3. Make 2010 the year of the new customer. Every online business can benefit from new customers. The great thing is, with structures such as Google AdWords, you can find them, and at minimal outlay. No matter how specialised your product, you can tailor your Adword ads to display on searches that will bring only qualified traffic to your site.

Again, it’s not hard (though it can be fiddly and time-consuming), and again, it’s something that we’ll be more than delighted to help you with.

We hope that all our readers have a happy, and prosperous new year. Here’s to multiplying your online success in 2010.

We’re so used to thinking of Google as the number one search engine, that it can be hard to remember that this isn’t the case everywhere. In the USA, for example, Google’s market share stands at about 71.5%. In the UK, it’s more like 90%, which explains the way we talk of ‘Googling’ something as easily as we talk about ‘Hoovering’: both brand names have come to stand for their generic actions.

In Japan, Google really hasn’t gripped the market with anything like as much success as either of these countries: a mere 33.7% turn to Google, with Yahoo! being the preferred search engine. The news is that Google, famous and praised for its iconic almost-blank homepage, is looking at adding a multitude of links to its interface, all the better to fit in with Japanese cultural expectations.

It’s a salutory lesson for us all, on a number of fronts: number one, localisation is important. If you hope to sell to foreign markets, never underestimate the value of a little research. Number two, optimise for all search engines, not just Google. You’ll reap the benefits of potential visits from 10% of UK users, 30% of US ones and 70% of Japanese!  And finally, well, it is sometimes nice to think that Google hasn’t got quite everything right.

The big news this week is ‘real time search’ from Google, which, in a nutshell, means the inclusion of the very latest news stories, blog posts, tweets and other social media activity in their main search results.

Now, more than ever, every business needs to consider its social media activity when building an online marketing or SEO strategy. Where the two strands may have been quite distinct, the lines are now blurring.

Matt Kelly from the Daily Mirror has made a fascinating speech on the importance of content and character over SEO, as reported in The Guardian today.

His basic point is that newspapers have been too keen to optimise their sites, putting more importance on visitor numbers than on loyal readership.

It’s fascinating reading, which flies against many of the myths the average SEO company will try to sell you. The lesson for all of us out there, from huge news corporations to small businesses, is that the tide is turning. We need to be looking at all-round strategies that also include meaningful content, social media marketing and a sense of individual character.

It means building sites that perform well for humans, not search engines, says Kelly.

We believe you can do both: indeed, we start with the principle that if you do the former, the latter will come to you naturally, over time. We also believe that Notting Hill Internet Services has been ahead of the wave on this one – because these are things we’ve been saying for a long time.

To the cynic, Twitter can seem like little more than an arena for self-promotion. In the space of those 140 characters, we’re all trying to find new ways to ‘big ourselves up’.

One way to gain Twitter brownie points is by being among the first to ‘retweet’ emerging or interesting news. The temptation may be to do so without checking its veracity, and so it is that we saw, last week, the spread of a pervasive rumour that rapper Kanye West had died in a car crash.

When rumours can flash across the globe like wildfire, it’s perhaps easy to see what the attraction is in starting them, standing back, and laughing at people’s credulity.

On this occasion, however, it didn’t stop at a few thousand people being suckered. Within hours, those Twitter users who were bothering to check the truth of the story before retweeting, found that a search for ‘Kanye West death’ on Google was actually returning pages apparently corroborating the story.

What’s more, clicking one of the links would have led the user to that time-old PC-infecting chancer, the fake anti-virus page.

It seems that the originators of malicious viruses are opportunistically exploiting rumours such as these (or worse – creating the rumours in the first place?) to create new channels for the unwary to fall into their traps. How are they doing it? With the same SEO practices that we all use to try to get legitimate websites ranking highly on Google.

It is a sad day when hackers manipulate a trusted arena like the Google search results page – and it just shows how we have all become complacent thanks to Google’s usually excellent anti-virus safeguards.

Our advice? Check a verified news source such as the BBC before you retweet – and cross your fingers that the hackers don’t find their way onto those sites any time soon.

We’re always talking about the many benefits the social media revolution has brought us. But remember that, just as in real life, the virtual world is an environment in which it pays to be wary.

It is the lot of a small business person, unfortunately, that one never has time to concentrate on absolutely everything. Something always has to give while you deal with, well, the realities of life: customers, tax returns, stock control…

Which is why it might be tempting to sort out the basics for your website and leave it at that. Most business owners these days understand the importance of SEO, and how it can be a valuable tool in bringing you more customers – but many will draw a line there. Social media? That sounds like a step too far, a lot of faff and a sharp learning curve.

Well, the time may have come that SEO and social media are merging. Google is said to be in talks with Twitter over the inclusion of ‘tweets’ in their search results. For Google, it’s a relatively quick and easy way to ensure that their Search product is practically in ‘real time’. For you, and your business, it’s a move that means you really can no longer afford to ignore social media.

This has been the week in which we have seen journalist Jan Moir castigated by thousands via Twitter, when a story she filed happened to light the incendiary rage of Twitter users. Now imagine that, instead of her name, a complaint about your company ‘goes viral’ on Twitter – and that, as a result, the top Google result for your company name is not your own website, but a representative sample of tweets criticising you.

If that sounds like a nightmare, be aware that the flip side of the coin is not only a happier one, but a more likely scenario, too. The chances are that the mundane daily tweets mentioning your business are, at worst, tangential, and at best, offering praise. Even the former could boost your trade (”Just got a coffee from Jenson’s” can have a knock-on effect. People are very suggestible).

If you haven’t had the time yet, now would be a good moment to search Twitter and see what your customers are actually saying about you. If you don’t like what you see, it’s looking like you have a short period of grace to put it right before Google and Twitter seal their deal. And if you’re too busy with customers, tax returns and stock control, come to Notting Hill Internet Services, where we’ll happily turn things around for you.