Web Design Adelaide

Google has always been a company pushing the limits of development and innovation and recently a new project codenamed “Caffeine”, has been getting a bit of attention.

Caffeine isn’t a new search engine but instead, is the next evolvement of the current Google search engine. Caffeine has been best described as making some modifications “under the hood”.

Google’s Matt Cutts mentions in a video interview with Web Pro News that engineers were working hard to ensure that the user experience would remain largely the same, but as with any upgrades and modifications there were bound to be some instances where rankings appear a little differently.  It’s expected that the interface will remain the same but that some power users would probably notice some differences in search results where regular users would remain largely unaffected.

As for whether this is a response to the release of Bing, Matt mentions that Google have had a team of engineers working on Caffeine for months and that this update was in the works long before Bing was announced.

Google “Caffeine” is technically a re-writing of the indexing system that creates the large database of web pages from around the globe. Basically it means Google will find, index and rank data much faster and allow real time and semantic indexing to be a lot more powerful. To make sure that everyone is happy with the updates Google have released a version of Caffeine in the Google sandbox and are asking searchers to provide feedback on their observations, you can test it out here.

As Google is accepting feedback on the changes, they expect a slow, incremental deployment of Google “Caffeine” over the coming months to make sure it’s a win / win for everyone involved.

We guess only time will tell how the updates are received and will be interesting to keep an eye on searcher activity on Bing as these two internet giants battle to be the King of Search. However for now that crown remains firmly placed upon Google’s head!

It was that time of year again and DBG made the journey over to Sydney for the annual Search Marketing Expo Conference trip, our third year in a row and I’m now starting to feel like I know Milson’s Point better than my own back yard!

This year’s international speakers included:

Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz), Bruce Clay (Bruce Clay Inc), Greg Boser (3 Dog Media), Jane Copland & Rob Kerry (Ayima) & Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Rate Experts)

Day One:

Day one started with coffee and eggs Benedict at Ripples Café by Sydney Harbour, nice view of the harbour and that big bridge. After registration and collecting my whiz bang, limited edition, SMX Sydney laptop bag I made my way to the crystal ballroom for the first day of search marketing goodness.

Things that were spoken about:

Blended Search (Video, News, Books, Images etc all in the Google results together) and Mobile search (optimising for portable hand held devices and mobile phones).

After a delicious lunch I sat down for the second half of day 1 and listen to presentations on:

How to get the best out of your page rank by structuring your internal page links correctly and setting up the correct 301 re-directs to preserve back links.

After some quick coffee and cake and a chat to the gang from Advantate I moved on to session 2:

CSS, AJAX and Web 2.0, the ranking issues and what to consider when designing a site with these technologies. Then bruches up on Ad Group Management for your Adwords account and International SEO – Optimisation your site for different audiences around the world. Finished the day off with some drinks at The Deck and made my way back to the hotel.

Day two…

Day two included sessions on what you should be measuring in your Analytics but aren’t, followed by probably the most interesting session I have ever attended on Conversion Rate Optimisation presented by Stephen Pavlovich. If you are ever wondering why your site is not converting , get in touch with this man.

After lunch we looked at Quality Score with Google and how to get the cheapest Cost Per Click and most relevant Landing Pages and Ads and learnt some nifty paid search tactics to save clients money.

I then sat in on an interesting session on SPAM, the junk mail variety, not the ham.

The end of conference Site Clinic is always a good laugh with the who’s who of SEO battling it out over who’s got the biggest ego and providing some handy advice on what to do and what not to do with your site, more often than not, to the embarrassment of those brave enough to put their site up for critique.

The two days were topped of nicely with a  networking boat cruise around Sydney Harbour - networking on a boat – what a brilliant idea! The barbequed prawns weren’t bad either. Got to catch up with my old mate Philip Shaw from Clever Clicks and kicked on well into the night. Made many new friends and thoroughly enjoyed some boating and fishing banter with the legendary Bruce Clay – what a champ. Till next time…

Picture below courtesy of Andrew Ballard @ rebusiness.com.au

SMX Sydney: Bruce Clay, Luke Jamieson, Kate Gamble & Philip Shaw

It has been talked about for a while but finally Microsoft through its newly released search engine Bing and Yahoo! have struck a deal which will see them have enough market share to begin to tackle the Google dominance.

What does that mean for the average Internet user? According to the official Microsoft Press Release it will mean the following:

For Web users and advertisers, this deal will accelerate the pace and breadth of innovation by combining both companies’ complementary strengths and search platforms into a market competitor with the scale to fuel sustained development in search and search advertising. Users will find what they care about faster and with more personal relevance. Microsoft’s competitive search platforms will lead to more value for advertisers, better results for web publishers, and increased innovation and efficiency across the Internet.

Ultimately it will mean more competition and better search platforms for users. Bing, since its release has turned heads and made small in roads, particularly with its simplicity and usual Microsoft flair. Yahoo! has a big community of users (although not necessarily search) and many great tools to use. So it would seem the deal to join forces should give Google something to worry about and it will be very interesting to see how they respond.

To read more about the deal visit the official Microsoft Press Release or the Mini Site.