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.

Got your website looking just the way you like it? Great news – but has it ever occurred to you that not every visitor might be seeing it the same way you do?

I’m not talking about human visitors (although that’s a whole issue in itself, when you consider they may be viewing on a variety of screen resolutions, operating systems and browser combinations). I’m talking about the bots.

They may sound like characters from some science fiction dystopia, but bots are simply the name given to the automated ‘crawlers’ that visit your website every now and again in order to index it for the search engines.

They will ’see’ your site very differently to your human visitors, caring only about the prominence given to various words and phrases, internal and outbound links, and your site structure. It might surprise you to see which keywords, seen through the ‘eyes’ of a bot, are given prominence.

Now you can, indeed, do just that. Google recently launched a Fetch as Googlebot application for webmasters, where you type in your url, and can see just how your page appears to Google.

With Fetch as Googlebot, you might finally get the data you need to fully understand just why your site doesn’t rank well for your desired keywords. But if it all seems a bit complicated, we at Notting Hill Internet Services would be happy to take a look for you.

Suppose you went shopping for a designer bag on the High Street one day. You head towards the Louis Vuitton shop, but before you go in, you see another bag shop next door. Something catches your eye, and you go home not with the Vuitton bag you had planned to, but with a cheaper alternative.

There’s not much Louise Vuitton can complain about there – you would have exercised your consumer choice as you saw fit. This is the analogy I keep coming back to when I consider the current legal tussle between Louis Vuitton and Google.

Briefly put, Louis Vuitton want Google to stop returning sponsored AdWords from other companies when users search for their brand name. We’ve all been there, if not when designer bag shopping, then in similar situations: you search for ‘Fox & Sons’, and a number of other estate agents’ ads appear. Search for ‘Interflora’ and the price-undercutting M&S flower service is offered (and that’s another case that has been taken to the courts, as well).

I try to look at every online situation from the user’s point of view, and here is where I think we see the kernel of the issue. If I am looking for, let’s say, Nike shoes, there is nothing more frustrating than clicking on a sponsored link that promises them at greatly reduced prices, only to find myself on a website with no Nike on offer.

For me, the real key is the wording. Offer the consumer some choice, sure – but make it clear exactly what is available, be it bags similar to Louis Vuitton’s ones, or shoes that are nothing like Nike’s, but which I might like anyway. If I click on a Google Adword and leave the site with no purchase, Google’s PPC model means that the site loses financially, and I lose my time. The only winner is Google.

That’s why, in my opinion, Google needs to refine its rules a little: not to crack down on bids for trademark keywords, but to insist on precise descriptions of what the user will find when they click through. Not easy in the small space available, but surely the way forward.

Have you ever needed to convince stakeholders of the value of your website? Possibly you’re not even 100% convinced yourself. In either case, Google’s Internet Stats page is the place to visit for nifty soundbites. Next time you have to present to your investors, get colleagues “on side”, or even explain to Auntie Majorie why you’re putting money into your online presence, you’ll be able to pull out facts like these:

• Online spending in the UK grew 25% to £18.4 bn in 2008, outperforming the 2.1% increase in total retail.
• Over half (51.0%) of consumers are using the Internet before making a purchase in shops, educating themselves on the best deals available.
• Social networks have a penetration of nearly 75% among European Internet users.

Each of these little nuggets of insight speaks volumes, and should provoke useful debate in your own workplace. If you prefer a surprise, just hit the ‘random statistic’ button, and see what you learn.

It’s a small change – but Google’s making a big thing out of it.

You may have noticed, last time you visited Google, that the size of the search box has increased. There again, you may not have noticed: it’s quite a subliminal tweak, and, as search is, by its very nature, a means to an end, you may have had something else on your mind.

There was never any limit to how many words you could fit into that little Google search box, but it’s longer now, so you can see more at once.

So what is the point? Well, Google is trying to sell it as a way of emphasising that Search is their primary and most important product, despite their diversification into so many other areas.

Champions of accessibility and usability might hail it as a welcome step too: larger fields and larger buttons are easier to see, locate, and use.

Ultimately, I suppose, it’s a design tweak, and one we’ll all get used to. Where Google leads, others often follow, so watch this space for larger search fields across the other major search engines – and other websites.