iknowthe.net | Internet and Ecommerce Consultant

Google are making google suggest, long available at google labs, the default on the main google search pages.

As the name implies, Google suggest brings up a list of possible phrases as you type, auto-completing your phrase for you.

There’s two great posts on this topic, from Jaan Kanellis and Michael Jensen, so I won’t go into to too much detail, but I think that the options that google offers are going to see more traffic, and people will stop typing after two or three words and pick and option from the suggestions. This is pretty significant for SEO, and I think moves the goalposts for keyword optimisation.

The venerable SEO by the SEA has blogged about a great organisation called the Taproot Foundation which links up Marketing and Strategic development experts with not-for-profits and charities who need them.
This is a great idea. I’m not sure if there’s anything like this in the UK, but I was talking about offering by services on this basis just the other day. If there are any UK based charities who need website /online marketing / SEO help, then do get in touch…

I mean, I know its a busy site, but can they really not fix this?

I came across two interesting and very different posts today.
The first
33 Website Success Metrics Instead of Rankings, Google PageRank and Traffic dismisses ranking as a KPI against a wide variety of other metrics, e.g bounce rate, backlinks, alexa rank, delicious bookmarks, tweets, and Technorati mentions.

The other is a great analysis of the 3 gigs or so of data that AOL released into the wild (briefly) a while back, showing the clickthrough rate per rank
Serp clickthrough rates.

In brief, the no. 1 site got 42% of the clicks, the no. 2 site got 12%, the no. 3 site got 8% – you get the picture.


Anything ranking below 10 gets the scraps.

Now I would never argue that a sites ranking is the be all and end of of success, but you’ve got to be at least in the game to get anywhere, and while I think that some social media activity is healthy for most sites, being found in Google is still up there with the top priorities for any serious website.

Google has released a new tool Google Insights for Search There’s not enough data to show some of the long tailed searches I looked at, but very interesting nontheless.
Take a look at this:

Look at the relative search volume – ouch!

And the interest over time

Amazon is SOO far ahead..