Facebook was the most searched for item on the internet in 2011.

According to research by Experian Hitwise, the social networking giant now accounts for just over three per cent of all searches.

This represents a huge 46% increase from 2010’s figures.

Four variations of the term ‘Facebook’ also appear throughout the list of the top ten most searched-for items in the US. Altogether, these terms account for just under five per cent of overall searches, marking a 24% increase from 2010.

The second most searched-for item in 2011 was YouTube, which has moved up one space from last year’s third place on the list.

Third is ‘Facebook login’, which is followed by ‘craigslist’ and ‘facebook.com’.

A host of new terms also appeared throughout the list of the top 50 most searched-for items. These included ‘addicting games’, ‘amazon.com’, ‘cnn’, ‘chase online’, ‘face’, ‘facebook sign up’, ‘hotmail’, ‘pandora’ and ‘twitter’.

Simon Bradstock, general manager of Experian Hitwise, said: “Navigational searches dominated the top search results as users typed in terms versus typing in the URL in the browser bar.

“Hitwise saw 11 percent growth of single-word searches in 2011 as terms like ‘face’ and ‘you’ made the top 50 searches. Marketers need to be particularly brand-savvy when managing their search engine optimization campaigns because of this behaviour, which is a result of predictive search functionality across major search engines.

Keywords are the lifeblood of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Although search engines no longer place as much importance on them for rankings as they used to, they are still crucial to setting up your SEO campaign for two reasons.

Firstly, it can help focus your mind when generating content and choosing your website’s domain name to have a full list of words which are important to your business, and sales aims. Second, and most importantly, the person searching for you will be using keywords and they will want to find a site that matches their enquiry.

As well as standard terms connected to your business and industry, you need to widen the keyword net to include all possible angles from which someone may approach your company. These include:

Your people: If any of your staff have a strong reputation in the industry, then they will probably attract attention based on this alone. By connecting that reputation openly to your company through keywords, you can achieve the maximum number of hits via personal contacts and recommendations.

Your place: There have always been services for which people wish to stay local, and the advent of green issues has popularised ‘buying local’ even further. Make the most of this by including geographical keywords in your list.

Your business: What questions would you expect someone to ask about your business? These should all be included in your keyword list, whether who, what, where, why, when and how.

If you are looking to instigate an SEO campaign for your business, contact NSDesign for a free no-obligation quote.

Google’s so-called ‘sandbox’ is one of the search engine giant’s many tricks to ensure their results remain relevant and of good quality. While this is excellent news for those searching, it does present a potential pitfall for new sites. Newly hosted sites can be placed temporarily by Google in a ‘sandbox’ while their quality is ascertained. Release can take anything from a few days to a couple of months, causing a major loss of traffic to new sites. So how can you avoid the sandbox becoming a sandtrap?

Run a soft launch: Putting your website live a few pages at a time can help avoid the sandbox. Pages are indexed as they appear, so by the time the whole site goes live Google is familiar with much of the content and less likely to sandbox the site.

Use an existing domain: Using a domain name which is already familiar to Google can help you avoid the sandbox, meaning your site is available to your market far quicker. However, using an existing domain for a new business will greatly limit the addresses available and your branding opportunities. It is also potentially very expensive to acquire.

Choose your keywords carefully: It’s great to compete on popular keywords, but very difficult to make a high-rank. Competing on less popular keywords will secure you a higher ranking and make the site appear more relevant.

Content is king: As with so many parts of Google, if you provide what they’re looking for – excellent, relevant content – you’ll be left alone. Make sure your site contains high-quality, original content and it is likely to be released quicker, or avoid the sandbox altogether.

When you’re starting up a website, the first hurdle you’ll have to clear is choosing a domain name. It’s an important decision and one that will have long-term effects on how you market your business and the amount of traffic you attract to your site. So what should you consider when making the choice?

The most important thing is to be memorable, so people can find without difficulty. Domain names can be up to 63 characters long, which gives you flexibility to create a name which spells out exactly what you do, rather than relying on difficult abbreviations. For example www.CheapBooksForSchools.com is more likely to be remembered than www.CBFS.com; the latter could relate to anything.

Spelling mistakes when entering a URL into a browser are common and can often result in your customer ending up on a competitor’s site. For this reason, hyphens and numbers should be avoided. They are difficult to ‘spell’ out when verbally passing on the email address and very easy to misplace. Addresses which are simply variations of an existing site should also be avoided as they can easily drive traffic away from your site and onto the ‘original’.

In an ideal world, your domain name should reflect your brand. If you are setting up a business, it’s almost worth putting the cart before the horse and choosing your domain name before christening your company. By linking your domain name and brand you create a reciprocal relationship that makes your domain name easier to remember and increases brand recognition.

Keeping these simple points in mind when choosing your domain name will give your website the best chances of long-term success, attracting search engine and customer attention; so choose wisely!

If you are maintaining a website, you will have come across the term Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is a fairly complicated and complex process of improving your website ranking (in search engines such as Google) and therefore increasing the number of visitors to your site. SEO may completely overwhelm you at first, but when broken down into sections you will find that the techniques are simple, easy to manage and produce excellent results.

Link building is a very important technique and one which will be sure to improve your ranking. It is the main process when you are looking to attract like-minded visitors in large numbers.  The rewards are tenfold; not only improving your ranking, but also ensuring your site becomes visible, recognised and credible to potential customers.

Basically, link building is a form of internet marketing, whereby you generate inbound links to your own website (from other sites). There are a number of ways to do this with the most popular being:

•    Reciprocal links with other sites, where two webmasters agree to show the other’s link on their website

•    Listing your site in online directories: a task which needs to be completed manually at first, but after a while, you will find that you are automatically listed in many online directories)

•    Placing content on blogs, forums and e-zines (either your own or other people’s)

Remember, that while link building can be time-consuming, it is a very easy technique which is still the most popular and efficient way to improve your website’s traffic and ranking in the search engines.

In order for your website or blog to increase its rankings in the search engines, you need to make sure that the words you use are what people are searching for; otherwise known as keywords.

While the design of your website may be impressive, it is useless unless traffic is driven to it. Unless people are actively looking for your company, it will be very hard to find without a good Google ranking. Words play an important part in achieving this.

There are tools to help you decide which keywords to use; the Google Adwords keyword tool, for example, will help you to find the most popular keywords used in relation to searches for your business category. Take these words and insert them into your text. However, don’t simply fill a paragraph with keywords as this will have a negative effect and your website could be classed as spam and therefore ignored by search engines.

The best advice is to use the keywords in your titles and weave them into your text in a natural way. Ultimately, the more pages or blogs you have, the more chance there is of one or more of them getting picked up by the major search engines.

This is a major element of on-site Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), alongside your meta data. SEO can be a minefield if you are unfamiliar with the techniques, but even tackling small tasks at a time will increase the overall ranking of your website.

One of the important concerns to web designers is striking a balance between the creative aspect of a website in terms of style and media and being able to implement the design into an accessible and standards compliant site which can be read by search engines. Web technologies have come a long way in a short time in helping to achieve this with xhtml, css and javascript providing a more flexible way of realising ideas while maintaining clean, structured code and accessibility standards. More recently newer developments are becoming available which are pushing the possibilities of the web and raising the bar in the flexibility designers and developers have. As long as the ideas keep flowing on what we would like to achieve on the web, the technology will continue to advance inorder to match this.

CSS3

Css3 has been in development for a few years but is now beginning have some of its features supported better. There a number of interesting features which have been developed to meet design trends, so as to make the implementation of these stylings easier, though many of them are still currently unsupported by browsers, especially Internet Explorer. Some of the features include:

- Multi column allows the developer to position blocks of text in several columns similar to print.

- Rounded corners can be achieved on elements by setting a radius on the corner.

- Border images allow the developer to create custom shaped elements by setting graphics for each corner and sides of an element.These 3 features are only currently supported in Firefox and Safari 3.

- Border color allows gradient borders to be used though are currently only supported by Firefox.

- HSL colors have been introduced, which aswell as setting the colour also allows you to set the hue, saturation and lightness of colours, providing a lot more flexibility in colour schemes. So far this is supported by Opera 9.5, Safari 3, Konqueror and Mozilla.

- One of the most popular features of css3 is opacity. This can be set on different elements allowing a gradient effect to be achieved. This is supported by most browsers except Internet Explorer.

- Box sizing is an interesting one as previously padding and borders were always added to the width of an element but now can be added inside a div. Firefox and Safari support this with the prefix -moz- and -webkit- respectively though Opera simply works with box-sizing.

- Font-face was included in css2 but was only supported by Internet Explorer if an .eot font format was used but Safari 3.1 now allows Truetype or Opentype font to be implemented in designs.

Flash accessibility.

Flash has always been a blessing and curse to both developers and users. It can achieve unique interactive experiences for users and bring a site to life but with search engines unable to extract text or links from the file, it has made flash sites often inaccessible and difficult to index. In the last 6 months it was announced by Google and Adobe that the algorithm Google uses is dramatically changing which will allow text and links from flash files to be read and allow sites to be indexed better in search results. Adobe is developing a flash reader for search engines which will allows the files to be read. Another technology which employs Flash and provides developers with more flexibility in terms of typefaces on the web in Sifr. This is a type replacement technology which allows any typeface to be employed in a website. Its fully accessible with all major browsers and can be read by screen readers.

A major factor in achieving high search rankings is of course relevant inbound linking. Google analyses not only the quantity but the quality and relevance of the inbound links to your site to determine how important a result it is. This method, alongside keyword optimisation techniques has improved the relevance of search results greatly. Though as is the case with many aspects of the web, this system has in recent times been abused.

There are many websites which buy and sell inbound links to sites which disregard link quality and pass page rank, which has allowed the search results to be manipulated. However in 2007 Google made significant efforts to stamp down on this paid linking practice, enforcing penalties in terms of search ranking and page rank passing ability to the sites carrying it out. The result of this ongoing campaign by Google will be felt in 2008 as the websites who have worked to optimise their sites and legitimately gain quality, relevant links will begin to rise in the ranking and the sites which relied on paid links will begin to slip.

Quick Linking Tips

1. A good way to gain relevant links to your site is to get registered in appropriate online directories which are related to your business. Many of these directories request much the same information although have different limits on the number of characters available etc and registering can be a tedious process. An idea is to create a basic “submission kit” text file with brief promotional copy for your site in a few different formats including a one sentence description and 25, 30 and 70 word descriptions containing your keywords aswell as contact details and prewritten hyper links which can be pasted in quickly. A good directory to be on is Google’s Business Listings: http://www.google.com/local/add
2. Try writing informative and interesting articles which relate to your field of expertise and submit them regularly online. There are several quality article and blog sites where you can submit free articles. Be sure to include your necessary keywords in the article and make use of the hyperlinks the sites allow you to put in at the bottom. Use your keywords here aswell to link back to your site. Articles are especially useful for new sites looking to get spidered quickly. A good article submission site is : http://www.ezinearticles.com
3. Yahoo offers a reliable service which analyses which sites are providing inbound links to other sites. To look at this type “link:domain” into Yahoo’s search engine to get an idea who your competitors are being linked to by. This should provide ideas on where to look for acquiring quality inbound links which are relevant to your business. Yahoo’s version of this tool is more accurate than Google’s.