Video and social advertising fuel online display’s return to growth. FMCG and Entertainment sectors ramp up investment to become two of the biggest spenders. The boom in online video, social and ‘performance’ marketing contributed to the 10% increase in online advertising spend during the first half of 2010, which saw UK marketers invest £1,968.6 million, lifting the medium to a record market share of 24.3%.

The return to double-digit growth for the internet mirrors the general recovery of the entire advertising industry, with total UK expenditure increasing 6.3% to £8.1 billion between January and June 2010.

According to the bi-annual online advertising expenditure study from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the trade body for digital marketing, collated in partnership with PwC and WARC, search, online display and classified advertising all saw significant increases in the first half of 2010.Display and classifieds return to growth as search continues to climbFollowing a small decline last year, online display bounced back with an above-forecast increase of 6.4%* to £381 million and a 19.3% share of the medium in H1 2010 (£334.6 million and 19% share in H1 2009). Standard ‘embedded’ formats such as banners still drive the bulk of display ad spend with £272 million, a 72% share (up from £238 million).Boosting the growth was pre- and post-roll video advertising, which increased by 82% to £20.7 million – a five-fold growth in two years (£11.4 million in H1 2009 and £3.9 million in H1 2008 when records for this began). Advertising on social media sites also made a significant contribution to display’s growth, accounting for an estimated 13% of all online display advertising.Recession-friendly paid-search marketing continued to be a critical mainstay of advertisers’ schedules with an increase of 8.9%* to £1,180.1 million, a share of 59.9% (up from £1,085.4 and a share of 61.7% in H1 2009).Despite the recession, classified advertising showed a strong performance increasing 11.4%* to £379 million (up from £335.8 million in H1 2009).

Housing, automotive, recruitment and B2B defied the economic downturn to retain classifieds’ share of 19.2% of advertising spend year on year.

Lead generation – a form of performance-based marketing where advertisers pay per lead rather than click through – was measured separately for the first time, and accounted for £21.6 million, or 1% share of all online advertising during H1 2010.Entertainment, Finance and FMCG categories leadThe study also breaks down the online display market by industry category, to identify who the top spenders are and how investment is spread across sectors.Entertainment & Media was the top category spender, accounting for 14.4% (up from 13.2% in H1 2009) and second was Finance at 13.3% (down from 14.9%). Once an insignificant spender online, the FMCG sector is now the third biggest spender, at 11.8% (up from 9.4%), having taken a while to be convinced of online’s brand-building capabilities. Retail was another star performer in online, accounting for 8.4% of all display spend (up from 7.1% in H1 2009).Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the Internet Advertising Bureau, said: “The return to double digit growth in UK online advertising is characterised by increased investment by major brands – particularly in FMCG and Entertainment. The effectiveness of social and video ads for classic brand building is reflected in these formats enjoying exponential growth. Add to that the clear accountability of performance marketing online, and we have a channel which now commands a quarter of total UK advertising spend.”Anna Bartz, Strategy Manager, PwC, said: “These figures reflect a sense of positivity in the advertising industry – at a time when many other media in the UK have also showed signs of a healthy recovery. As online advertising spend approaches the £2 billion mark – within just 6 months – confidence is returning with search, display and classified advertising all seeing an increase in the first half of 2010.”Key drivers for growth More people online.

According to data from the UK Online Measurement Company (UKOM) and Nielsen, the UK’s active online user base had grown from 36.8 million in April 2009 to 40.5 million in April 2010 (representing an increase of 3.7 million active internet users in just 12 months.)Older, maturing audience. An additional one million people aged 55+ are now online in the UK compared to 2009. Source: UKOM, April 2010.

Ubiquitous broadband. 92% of the UK online population now has broadband with 69% enjoying speeds of over 2MB.Social media fever. Social networks/blogs now account for around 23% of all time spent online in the UK, making online sessions more immersive, whilst offering huge opportunities for brands to exploit the social nature of the web.

Social media has injected even more life into online usage making it the perfect environment for entertaining and engaging ads.Devices and connectivity. 3G dongles, smartphones, iPads, netbooks and eReaders are driving always-on connectivity. As awareness of cheap connectivity increases with the flood of devices onto the market more people are online, for longerSummary of ad spend for January to June 2009.

In the first half of 2009 internet advertising grew by 4.6% to £1,752.1 million, accounting for 23.1% of all UK spend. This is despite the entire advertising sector contracting by 16.6% during the same period to an industry total of £7,614.4 million.Summary of ad spend for January to December 2009

For the full year 2009, the UK internet advertising sector increased revenues by 4.2% to £3.54 billion, up from £3.35 billion in 2008 – share was 22.9% for all 2009.

Source: Iabuk.net

Caffeine, instead of analyzing the entire web, breaks it into small pieces and updates the search indexes on a continual basis. This differs from layer based indexing – whereby some layers would get updated faster than the others as it would require searching the entire Web to find new updates, thus causing significant delay.The new search engine is possibly an attempt to take on Microsoft’s Bing, which was adopted by Yahoo!, catapulting it to second place among search engines. Bing uses the old indexing system, which was also employed by MSN search. Google said a new system of indexing was required as web pages have become complex and richer in content, with real-time information, news and multimedia updates. The new method is likely to give greater exposure to sites such as twitter and could boost traffic to information companies that depend on providing real-time proprietary data.

Specific examples of on-page black hat vs. white SEO may include keyword stuffing. A black hatter will build a useless Website, then stuff its pages with keywords, visible or hidden, while a white hatter will write high quality, relevant content, then sprinkle keywords into the text in a way that helps search engines correctly index the page without interfering with user experience.

Off-page white hat SEO may include article marketing – submitting articles, which contain a link to your Website, to reputable article directories such as EzineArticles. Black hate off-page SEO techniques may include, for example, blog comment spam.

The basic difference between black hat SEO and white hat SEO boils down to transparency. When we here at Shuffle work to improve your search engines rankings, we’re being very transparent about it. We’re not trying to “game the system” or to trick search engines. On the contrary, we believe that companies, users and search engines all have a shared goal of making the search process better and making sure that when someone searches for a keyword, only the best, most relevant sites come up in the search results.

White hat SEO, UK or international, contributes to a better user experience, leading users to legitimate, high-quality sites that are relevant to their search, while black hat SEO creates a frustrating experience for users, causing them to land on spam sites that do not contain the information they were looking for.

Which is why Google, in recent years, has been in an all-out war against black hat SEO companies, and the good news is, Google is winning. While in the past it was fairly easy to start a spam Website, stuff it with keywords and get it to the front page of search results, over the years Google has put mechanisms in place to make sure that new sites cannot climb to the top of the SERPs overnight. It takes months for a new Website to gain Google’s trust, and most black hat spammers simply cannot afford waiting for so long.

By forcing new Websites to have a wait period before they enter the search results (we call it the Google Sandbox), and by demanding that they have links from reputable sites pointing at them before they can gain Google’s trust, Google has made spammers’ lives much more difficult.

The result is that many black hat SEO companies have moved on to the next thing, and we were left with a better, cleaner Internet.

Black hat SEO is about short-term success in bringing one’s site to the top of the search results for highly profitable terms, making all the money you can make until Google bans you, then moving on to the next spam site. White hat SEO UK is about long-term business success, about building a reputable, high-quality site, and getting legitimate links to point at that site, slowly moving it up the search results, all the way to the front page.

Unlike black hat SEO, white hat SEO is long-lasting, because generally, once a Website has earned Google’s trust and has received high rankings, it will generally stay high, as long as it remains legitimate and especially if it keeps getting updated with fresh content and with new inbound links.

Having said that, the basics of SEO are actually quite easy to understand. The goal behind any type of SEO effort is simple, and is shared by SEO companies, by search engines and by users: we all want a better Internet, clean of spam sites, and we all want a better search experience. We want to make sure that when a user searches for certain information or for a particular product online, only the most relevant, high-quality sites would appear in the search results.

To achieve this goal of a better search experience, companies such as SEO UK work to help search engines correctly index Websites by building quality sites and optimising them, and search engines are working to get rid of spam sites.

As a Webmaster, even before you hire an SEO company, UK or international, there are several simple changes you can make to your site to help search engines figure out what it’s about and index it properly.

Ten SEO Tips:

1.You absolutely must start with good content. Yes, the old cliché is true – content is king. For long-term success, fill your Website with high-quality content that focuses on your main keywords.

2. Optimise your title tags. They should all have your keywords in them, on each page. Never allow your homepage’s title tag, for example, to just say “Home” or your About page’s title tag to just say “About.”

3. Obtain legitimate backlinks to your Website by submitting articles to reputable article directories such as EzineArticles. Each article should focus on your Website’s subject matter, include your keyword, and at least one link (depending on the article directory’s rules) pointing back at your site with your main keyword in the link’s anchor text.

4. Add fresh content to your site regularly, whether directly to the site in the form of articles, or by adding a blog to your site. Fresh, relevant, optimised content that’s added regularly to your site will help with earning search engines’ trust and will generally cause them to crawl your site more often and to give you better rankings.

5. Use long-tail keywords, or search phrases, instead of single keywords, and use specific rather than general search phrases. Most people search for phrases rather than for keywords. In addition, usually people who are ready to buy will use specific phrases, while people who are just looking for info will use general keywords. For example, if I want to buy camping gear, I will likely search for the specific item I need and enter, perhaps, “buy large family tent.” If I’m just doing research, I might type “camping gear.”

6. Use location-specific keywords to help local searchers find your site. For example, we like to add “UK” to the keywords we use on this site, because we are based in the UK and would like to help local people who need SEO services to find us.

7. When designing a Website, make sure it is SEO-friendly. Any web designer you hire must be familiar with SEO principles. You want a fast-loading, clean-looking Website, rich in content, that’s easy to update and add fresh content to. You want it to be user-friendly, meaning that users will have a very easy time navigating your Website and finding what they’re looking for. Avoid a flash-based Website at all costs – search engine crawlers can’t crawl these Websites.

8. If you can get a domain name that includes your main keywords, do it. Our own domain name, for example, includes our main keywords, which are “SEO UK,” since we are a UK-based SEO company.

9. Stay away from black hat SEO. It will only hurt you in the long term and is completely unnecessary (Link to previous blog post).

10. Be patient. Building your site’s rankings is a long process. Unlike SEM, SEO results take time – several months at least – to become apparent, but once you’ve reached a high ranking, you can usually stay there long-term.

There are of course many more seo hints and tips, but the above are the most basic, and arguably the most important ones.

The idea is that SEM includes everything you can do to promote and market your Website in search engines. This includes paid inclusion in search engine directories (Yahoo, for example, mixes paid inclusion with organic results from web crawling), traditional advertising, where you advertise on the search engine results pages and pay for page views, and pay-per-click advertising (PPC), where you only pay if someone clicked on your ad. Google Adsense, for example, is a PPC ad network.

The best thing about SEM is the immediacy of its results, although this largely depends on your budget. Google Adsense, for example, can become quite costly for advertisers, especially if you’re trying to target highly competitive keywords. When we say “costly,” we mean both in terms of your monthly advertising budget, and in terms of the time you, an employee or a consultant will need to spend monitoring and fine-tuning the ads.

Having said that, if you are willing to spend, and have the budget for it, SEM brings your site immediate traffic. Now the question is, after you’ve spent all that money advertising your site, how well is that traffic going to convert?

Needless to say, before you even think about starting an SEM campaign, you need to make sure that your site is ready for the traffic that campaign will send you. Here at SEO UK we specialise in building high quality, user-friendly Websites and we can’t stress enough the importance of having such a site. The last thing you want is to pay for clicks that brings people to your Website, only to have them immediately bounce off because they can’t find what they were looking for.

Your Website needs to have a clean design, be uncluttered and inviting. It needs to load fast, and above all, you need to make sure that your landing pages – the pages people land on after clicking on a PPC ad – are VERY easy to navigate and include a clear call for action.

Paying for an SEM campaign that send visitors to a cluttered, poorly designed site is like throwing money in the trash.

Which brings us to SEO. Unlike SEM, which does nothing on your site and just places an ad that leads to your site (unless of course you design specific landing pages for each ad, which ideally you should be doing), SEO is all about making the site itself better.

SEO takes a long hard look at your site and improves it. As part of preparing your site and making sure it is user-friendly, you will no doubt hire as SEO Company. SEO services include many aspects, but the most important aspect for our current discussion is that a good SEO Company, UK or international, will make sure that your site is not just search engine friendly, but also user-friendly. For example, Google recently announced that it is now considering a site’s speed in its ranking system. A good SEO company will make sure that your site loads reasonably fast, and this will also help with conversion and stickiness.

In fact, if you start with SEO – as you should – and hold off on SEM, in many cases you will find that you don’t need SEM at all, because while SEO results take several months to become apparent, once they do become apparent, they are very powerful – especially because users tend to trust organic search results more than they trust paid advertising.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO means optimising your Web pages. We want to let search engines know exactly what your site is about, so they can index it under the correct keywords. For example, if you sell personalised gifts on your site, we will find all the keywords that people might enter into the search engine search box as they look for a site that sells personalised gifts. We will then pick the best keywords out of this list – the keywords that have the most searches and the least competition (not an easy task but hey, we specialise in SEO services) and sprinkle them throughout your site, in your meta tags and in your site copy.

Without on-page optimisation, your personalised gifts site will probably not include enough keywords to let search engines know what it’s about. Most e-Commerce sites, unless optimised, contain very little text, which doesn’t give search engines much to work with. And even the text that they do contain is often not optimised – so your main keywords could appear very few times on your pages, and as a result search engines will not index them correctly – they will index them for random words. The result: when someone will search for “personalised gifts,” your Website will not be included in the search results.

Just a decade or so ago, on-page SEO was all you needed to convince search engines to rank you well for your main keywords. But then the trouble started. Shady SEO companies and Webmasters discovered that they can stuff their pages with keywords – the more the better – and get search engines to index them and to rank them high for those keywords. Suddenly, there was an explosion of low-quality sites that were able to get to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) simply by filling their pages with a ridiculous amount of keywords.

Of course, Google didn’t like that. Google has achieved its huge success because it was the best search engine – you knew that when you searched for something on Google you were going to get the best, most accurate and most relevant results. Google could not possibly allow shady SEO companies to game the system and bring low-quality sites to the top.

Off-Page SEO

That’s how off-site SEO was born. Not just that, of course – Google kept changing and refining its algorithm throughout the years, and today there are many different components that join together in determining your Website’s rankings. But generally speaking, the more people abused on-page SEO, the more off-page SEO became important.

Off-page SEO means building your site’s reputation. These days, search engines, especially Google, won’t rank your site high unless they are convinced that it can be trusted – and that trust is built by having links from other sites point at your site. The more links the better, but more than the number of links, you want to get links from reputable sites, and if those links contain your keywords in their anchor text, then you’ve really went a long way in convincing search engines that your site deserves high rankings.

Needless to say, getting those inbound links isn’t easy. You absolutely have to have a good Website with great content – which is the basis of it all. After that, an important part of our SEO services is to help you get those links.

So, which is more important, on-page SEO or off-page SEO? While there are plenty of SEO articles asserting that these days your main focus should be off-page SEO, we don’t fully agree. Our experience as a UK SEO company has taught us that both are very important. It all starts with building a Website that is not just user-friendly but also search engine friendly. Then, over the course of several months (this does NOT happen overnight), you slowly build those inbound links that point at your Website, build your site’s reputation and enable search engines to trust you and to send visitors your way.

Why do I need Website SEO?

More and more people and businesses today are searching for products and services online. Whether it’s a consumer searching for a consumer product, potential homebuyers searching for a home or a company looking for a service provider, in the vast majority of cases people start their research by typing a keyword into the search engine search box. In most cases, they will only click through to the Websites that appear on the first and second pages of results.

While most companies still invest in a mix of marketing campaigns, including brochures, seminars and Webinars, and traditional advertising (TV, radio or print), more and more companies today are realising that they should focus on search engine marketing, whether organic (SEO) or paid (SEM).

In fact, in many cases, Website SEO is the only form of marketing you will ever need. If your Website appears on the first page of results for your main keywords, the people who find your site after searching for those keywords are high-conversion. They have actively searched for your solution and are in a buying mode, or at the very least are in the process of researching before a purchase.

Instead of spending a fortune on blanket advertising, hoping to catch the eyes of a potential customer, you can use Website SEO to specifically target the customers who are already searching for your solution – those who are ready to buy.

To save money, maybe I should optimise my site by myself?

As a small business owner, you might be tempted to just do the optimisation yourself in an attempt to cut costs – but these days, this is not a very good idea. A few years ago, Website SEO was simple – all you had to do was repeat a keyword several times on the Web page to achieve high rankings – but things have changed dramatically and today the SEO scene is much more competitive.

The key principles of Website SEO are still simple – in essence your goal is to make it crystal clear for search engines what your page is about and to convince them that your Website is reputable and trustworthy. But Website SEO is now about more than just repeating a keyword, and it’s certainly not about repeating it too often – there’s a balance to strike, and finding that balance is a delicate task that requires expertise.

You also need an SEO expert to recommend the best keywords for your site, analyze the competition, continually build links that point to your site (a very important aspect of SEO, at least as important as optimising your pages), regularly monitor your rankings and respond to any unwanted changes.

Yes, Website SEO is complex, but it is still a very cost-effective marketing method. Unlike traditional advertising, conversion rates for sites that were properly optimised are very high, because they attract the people who are actively looking for the solutions these sites offer. So as tight as your marketing budget is, you should definitely allocate part of it to Website SEO.

Mr. Dvorak is not the only one who feels that SEO is no more than empty promises. I’ve heard it plenty of times before: hire an SEO company and you’re wasting your money; you should just focus on creating great, high-quality content and the rest will follow; “SEO experts” are modern snake oil salesmen, stay away from them.

My short answer to the question “Does SEO work?” is “Yes, SEO works.” Mr. Dvorak was wrong. Yes, when he changed his blog’s URLs from the default WordPress numbered links to “pretty” permalinks containing keywords, he saw a decline in traffic. That’s because when you change a large number of old URLs, you lose your existing rankings and any links pointing to those URL and need to rebuild them. So if there was a SEO fiasco, it was created by Mr. Dvorkin’s actions rather than by SEO principles.

SEO works because it enables search engine spiders to effectively crawl your content and index it correctly. High quality content is an important part of your Web marketing – but if you don’t adhere to simple SEO principles, you won’t reach your full potential in terms of traffic and audience.

SEO is not about cheating or playing tricks on readers and on search engines. On the contrary, SEO – white hat, ethical SEO done by a reputable SEO company is about making sure that the right content is delivered to the right audience. When you optimise your pages for search engines, you are helping search engine companies to reach their most important goal of serving the most relevant content to their users, and you are helping users to find the content they are looking for. SEO is a good thing – for your company, for Internet users and for search engine companies.

Let me give you an example. Let’s assume your company sells baby gifts. Obviously, your goal is that when someone enters the term, or the keyword, “baby gifts” into the search engine search box, your company’s Web site will come up as one of the first results, so that people can click over and check your products out.

But if you don’t hire a quality SEO company to help you implement basic search engine optimisation techniques, there’s a good chance that search engine bots will have no way of knowing that your site sells baby gifts. You need to tell them what your site is about through the text on your pages, through your Web site tags (especially the title tags) and – hopefully – via links sent to your site from external sites using “baby gifts” as their anchor text. But if you don’t optimise, and your homepage’s title tag simply says “home” and there’s very little text on your site’s pages, as is the case with many e-commerce sites, then your site will NOT rank well for the keyword “baby gifts” and no one will find it through search.

You will still have other ways of marketing your Web site, of course, including SEM (paid search engine marketing, also known as PPC) and traditional advertising, but those are typically much more expensive than SEO.

So yes, SEO works. Its basic principles are easy to understand and to apply, and not optimising simply doesn’t make sense – why would you not use this wonderful, cost-effective marketing technique? Just remember that you need to consult with a reputable SEO company before making any drastic changes to your Website, and that SEO results are not instantaneous and take time – at least six months or even longer – to become apparent.

Google users are waking to a new-look Google after the search supremo gave the local site a major makeover.

The initial ‘home page’ for Google looks the same but the search results page now displays a menu of related search options ranked down the left side of the screen.

Previously tucked away under a ‘Show options’ link at the top of the page they’re now in full view, full time. This is similar to the way that options are already displayed using Google image search, but with large colourful icons labelling the linked buttons plus a collapsing set of ‘search tools’.

If you need a Facebook Like Button for WordPress Plugin version, you can get it here. Once implemented, plugin will generate “Like” button for each post. You can customize the position (top-right, top-left, bottom-right, bottom-left…etc).