The Adido Digital Blog

This is going to be a regular feature on this blog. Google as we all know, is the best biggest search engine in the world (up to 77% search market share in 2006). But what alot of people don't know, is that Google also produce a wide (and growing) range of product and services which fulfil a wide range of needs for it's users. These products aren't all very well known, so we're going to look at each of them one by one, to raise awareness of what they do and how they can be used by 'normal' website users.

Where to begin? Ok, let's start with Google Trends. Why? Well, I can't think of anything else at the moment :) But also Google trends is very, very useful tool to help users identify how popular given search phrases and words are, as well as when they are popular.

Google trends allows users to compare up to five key phrases against each other to see which one is more popular. It does this by drawing nice looking graphs so you can see instantly which one is the best.

Let's have an example. Below shows an example of 'web design' vs 'online marketing'


What does the screen show? First, it shows the nice graph. What you can see is that 'web design' alot more popular than 'online marketing'. However, web design has been on the decline over the last few years, while online marketing is very gradually improving. Underneath the main graph si the graph which show the trends of news items. This is a rough figure of how many times the phrase entered has been used in Google News items. You'll see that the most important or 'relevant' (this is Google remember - relevancy!) news items are shown on the main Google trend graph along the time line and listed to the right of the graph, which can then be clicked on to to go the story.

Underneath the graph are the countries and towns which are have done the most searches on Google, for the phrases you entered. So, in this example, the Google users in Indonesia have made the most searches for web design. It is important to note, that Google 'normalizes' the search data from the towns and countries. What is normalization? It basically means that a calculation is made to reduce the amount of searches overall and shows which places have a higher propotion of searches. For example, London would nearly always have the most searches, as it has the most amount of people. But proportionally, for some phrases, other parts of the country might have comparatively more.

Why is Google trends important then? Well, prior to this tool, we had know way of knowing which phrases were more popular on Google. We had no idea of when the phrases we popular. We had no idea which places made the most searches. Google trends allows us to peak into the head of searchers across the world to help us better understand their habits. Using this information, we can now put together better and more efficient online marketing strategies and gain better results for our clients. And all this for free!

Even, if you are not bothered about search marketing, it's just fun to play with. Who's more popular? He-man or She-ra? Star Wars or Star Trek? Man Utd or Liverpool? Beatles or Rolling Stones? The list is endless.

Have fun!

A meeting today with a potential client for some online marketing work (more of which, hopefully in the coming weeks) made me think about the real change that the Internet has made to the way that we do business. After discussing how much a website cost the client, the comparison to the alternatives, is massive.

Many companies, be they hotels or manufacturing companies or whatever the industry, do not balk at paying £10,000 for new machinery, or £50,000 to have a complete shop refit, it's a necessary evil. Yet many companies wouldn't contemplate spending a similar or even bigger amount on their website with a reputable web design company? Obviously this is not always the case, and many companies spend vast somes on money, not only on web design but increasingly on online marketing.

So what stops business owners from spending on their online presence, when they're more than happy to spend big on bricks and mortar? I might seem obvious but it's the tangibility (is that a word) of the bricks and mortar. You can see that you've spent money on something that you can hold. But a website? There are still many misconceptions about what works online and what doesn't and how to build a website which ranks well on search engines. The fact that you can't 'touch' it just adds to the issue.

As time ticks and more people go online, and spend money online, the role the web design company plays in making or breaking all types of business, is only going to increase. It is therefore important that companies understand more about online activities and are better informed when choosing their web designers.


P.S. I mentioned about Etsy recently. Turns out that they're getting one million visitors a month and are looking to improve their service with additional funding from VC's.

While trying to put together some screenshots for a potential client, proving our SEO capabillities, we stumbled upon a (very) rare occurance in Google. There has been much made about the great Google Datacentres in the sky, and in the old days, they used to be watched like hawks to see if any new pagerank updates were on their way. However, since the Jagger (or Big Daddy) update a year or so ago, I thought that most Google Datacenters showed the same results. I was wrong...

It still seems that the results you get from Google depend on where you are in the country. While I was sat in my Southampton office and seeing the great SEO positions we've got, in Surrey something strange was afoot. Not only were we not on top of the listings, sometimes we weren't even on the ten pages! It was like Google was being geographically biased!

After some research on datacentre issues, it turned out that our problem was indeed down to Google being different. How did we know? Are you ready to get techy?

If you go to Start > Control Panel > Accessories > Command Prompt (or for the dextrous of you Windows Key & R) you'll see the Command Prompt (surprise, surprise). If you type in;

ping www.google.co.uk

you'll get a number which looks like this;

216.239.59.99

This is the IP address of the Google.co.uk domain. If you try this somewhere else in the country, or perhaps at a different time of the day, the number could be very different. If the numbers are different, it means that you're going to a different data centre, and so could get a completely different set of results. In theory, they should all have the same results. But a word of warning, they may not, so if you're SEO rankings appear to have vanished, then this could be one of the reasons why...

Update: Hmmm, the plot thickens. I've just watched the whole video by Matt Cutts (top Google Geek blogger) and he said that even if the IP addresses are different, they can still show different results! Arrrghhhhhh!!!

And so it begins...

This is the first posting in the Adido web design blog. Here we will discuss many of the happenings in the online marketing, web design and online world. We hope you enjoy reading