The majority of businesses in the UK are set to up their digital marketing spend next year according to new research.

Data compiled by Econsultancy from a survey of 500 client-side digital marketers and agencies reveals 52 per cent of companies plan to increase their paid search (PPC) budgets next year, up from 45 per cent.

The proportion of companies looking to increase their search engine optimisation (SEO) budget over the same period has increased by 10 per cent, to hit a total of 60 per cent.

According to the report, almost half of all companies (49 per cent) are now spending at least £50,000 on PPC in a year – an increase from 39 per cent in 2008. In addition, the number of firms spending less than £5,000 has decreased significantly from 25 per cent last year to 14 per cent this year.

When it comes to SEO, the report said 22 per cent of firms are now investing at least £50,000 – up from 16 per cent in 2008.

Spending on social media ventures is still small in comparison, with 57 per cent of companies putting aside less than £5,000-a-year.

However, it seems the potential benefits of implementing a sound social media strategy are starting to become clear to business owners, with 65 per cent looking to increase spend during the next 12 months. Out of those companies, 15 per cent plan to double their budget.

In terms of potential stumbling blocks with regard to PPC spending, 41 per cent of companies cited a lack of internal resources while 30 per cent pointed to poorly converting websites. In terms of SEO, companies highlighted a lack of internal resources (49 per cent) followed by budget problems (26 per cent).

By Richard Morris

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Brazilian software company Handcase, a specialist in developing applications for the Palm hand-held computer, has unveiled a new search engine, optimised for use on small screen phones and smartphones. 

Called Gune, the new engine aggregates results from Google and Bing, and returns the top 10 results for any query on a single page. A query box is also shown at both the top and bottom of each page. 

Handcase has initially offered its new search capability in an English-language format, but it is promising to follow this with Spanish and Portuguese versions later this year.

“The goal was to optimise the time of the user, and to provide a superior experience with search,” said Handcase CEO Ricardo Garay.

Handcase is looking for potential submissions to be listed on Gune, and will use the criterion of useability with mobile devices to judge whether a site is suitable for inclusion.

“Gune is designed so everyone can contribute to the directory, so anyone who has, or knows a suitable mobile website is invited to submit their site for inclusion,” Garay added.

And the name? It means ‘site’ in Basque, Garay’s native language.

The revamped websites of UK newspapers The Times and The Sunday Times have gone live, ahead of moves to put all the two newspapers’ online content – apart from the sites’ front pages – behind a paywall.

Users can register for a one-month trial of the sites, after which not only will all deeper content only be accessible to paying customers, search engines will also be prevented from indexing it.

This is a step further than previous adopters of subscription-only online models have gone. The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal both allow users limited free access, and make their content searchable via Google and other search engines, meaning that people can read much of their content for free.

But the News International-owned Times and Sunday Times sites will be almost completely invisible behind their paywalls, meaning that the media industry will be paying close attention to the subscription figures the two papers achieve.

In order to access the sites, users will have to pay GBP1 a day, or GBP2 per week. While the daily subscription is non-recurring, the weekly option will recur unless it is cancelled by the subscriber.

The look of the new Times website mirrors heavily the daily newspaper’s appearance, and is largely more conservative than its previous free-access equivalent, which was branded Times Online, along with The Sunday Times equivalent.

While The Times is a well-known and respected online brand, the new launch marks the first time The Sunday Times has benefited from a dedicated website. The design of the latter is more visual and magazine-like in appearance than the newspaper site, whose content is laid out similarly to a printed page.

The Times’ editor, James Harding, said: “The site will include live interviews with the people who shape the news and exclusive video – giving readers the opportunity to get more from their favourite sections. 

He added: “This is just the start. We will continue to add new features to ensure that the innovation that has been central to The Times for 225 years, continues into the future.”

Google says it has penalised a major UK national newspaper publisher, after it was found to be offering online ‘SEO editorials’ at prices of GB£1,000 upwards.

A memo from Express Newspapers, which owns the Daily Express newspaper, offering the service to its advertising clients on its main website, was leaked in April, and Google investigated the offer.

The following month, Google issued an announcement that it had “taken action” and no longer trusted links from a major UK newspaper group. That group was not named in the announcement, but it was widely taken as referring to the Daily Express.

Offering to post paid content on a website with the aim of boosting a third party’s rankings in the search engine results is against Google’s terms of service.

Google initially imposed a blanket page rank penalty on Express Newspapers content, but an interview with members of Google’s search quality experts on the Digital Inspiration website was later reinforced by a comment from the company’s head of Webspam, Matt Cutts.

He admitted that Google had been made aware of the Daily Express’s move, and added: “Google’s quality guidelines are clear on this point: paid links shouldn’t pass PageRank.”

Cutts added: Whether the paid links are in an “advertorial” or somewhere else on the page, that would violate our quality guidelines and Google would take action on those violations, both so that the link buyers wouldn’t benefit and so that the link sellers wouldn’t be trusted in the future by Google.”

Google itself does sell such links, but they are clearly differentiated in the listings, by being displayed under a ‘Sponsored link’ heading against a shaded background, and do not appear in the main rankings lists.

The last time any self-respecting best man, groom or father of the bride would want to be speechless would be when it comes to getting up at the reception and saying a few words.

Sadly though, it’s an experience which has rapidly made a buzzing wedding reception fall flat on its face.

For members of any groom’s party in the UK, however, the internet can now come to the rescue, in the shape of online advice from one of the country’s best-known stand-up comedians – and a BAFTA award winner into the bargain.

Lancashire-born Dave Spikey, star of Phoenix Nights and comedy quiz show 8 Out Of 10 Cats, is ready to come to the aid of any groom lacking inspiration, and suggest a few tips for a memorable speech.

Spikey suggests that the most difficult part of preparing a speech in advance lies in achieving the right balance between sincerity and humour, as going too far in either direction risks the speech-giver being ostracised by the offended party.

His tips are available now on iamstaggered.com, and they include, first and foremost, being sure to thank all the right people.

Dave will be adding to his tips each month on the site.

It was billed as a new form of politics, the leadership debate that the UK has been calling out for in a somewhat vain attempt to tap into some of the political energy emanating from Capitol Hill and the Obama presidency.

The idea for a UK version of these debates pre-dates the current hoopla surrounding last night’s event. Harold Wilson was among the first to challenge an incumbent Prime Minister, Alec Douglas Home, to a debate, only to see his request rejected by Home on the grounds of turning the General Election into a ‘Top of the Pops’ contest. Latterly, Jim Callaghan broached the topic with a young Margaret Thatcher, only for the Iron Lady to reject his request through fear that a confrontation would eat into her already sizeable advantage in the polls.

Well, last night saw the idea become reality – and the reality proved somewhat disappointing. Nonetheless, it would be fair to conclude that the real winner of the night was the man who many had, to this point at least, written off in the General Election – Liberal Democrat Party leader Nick Clegg.

Within five minutes of the debate closing, the now legendary tag line ‘I agree with Nick’ – which came out of the mouths of both Labour leader Gordon Brown, and Conservative top man David Cameron during the debate – began reverberating around the modern-day political talking shop otherwise known as Twitter.

The SERPs became awash with real-time proclamations of support for the young upstart Liberal hopeful. SEO hopefuls began registering every conceivable domain extension in the hope that they might ride this wave of activity. Google Insights for Search registered a sizeable spike in search volume. Yahoo identified the furore as the buzz term of the moment. The SERPs were, and the following morning still are, awash with activity.

Just how big a part will the channels of the internet play in determining the next resident of Number 10 Downing Street? Has the internet redefined the way in which political parties must channel their propaganda? Have the main parties been active enough in their online marketing efforts?

The Conservatives have taken the lead, establishing paid search campaigns in Google and bidding on their competitors’ terms. Labour has failed miserably in its attempts to generalise Dave as a Gene Hunt figure, much to the amusement of its rivals. The Liberal Democrats, to this point at least, have neglected their online marketing strategy, to the point where we can say with some conviction that Vince Cable has forgotten to budget for it.

However, with a new range of ‘I agree with Nick’ t-shirts making their way on to Spreadshirt.net, and with the SERPs literally awash with support for Clegg, this year may see the Liberal Democrats demonstrate, albeit unwittingly, the power of the social media driven political campaign.

The internet agrees with Nick – do you?

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With Google comfortably filling top spot month after month in the battle for search traffic, it might be easy to conclude that achieving high rankings with ‘the big G’ is the most certain way of getting your website noticed, and luring new visitors.

But search marketers don’t simply talk in terms of Google when measuring the success of their campaigns – there is a more immediate competitor which is shaping up to take on its might which, in doing so, may well break out beyond the boundaries of its current audience profile, and into the mainstream.

And that competitor is Twitter.

Writing on the Searchenginewatch blog, Bas van den Beld recalls that he was asked a few years ago at a search conference whether he “saw a ‘Google killer’ on the horizon”.

He replied at the time that the only thing which would kill Google was Google itself. “That still seems to hold true today,” he added. “Google might still kill itself, but no one is about to kill Google’s stranglehold on market share.”

Widely regarded as an important measure of a site’s SEO-friendliness, the loading speed of pages is now officially being taken into account by Google when calculating its page rankings.

The development was first mooted last December, but now details of how it will be implemented have been unveiled by Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal on the Google Webmaster Central blog.

Mr Singhal and Mr Cutts commented: “Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.

They also emphasised the other benefits of ensuring a website runs as quickly as possible, such as better usability.

“But”, they continued, “faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.

“Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

At the same time, however, they re-asserted that relevance will remain the number one factor when Google’s algorithms are considering how to rank a page. “Currently, fewer than one per cent of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point,” Cutts and Singhal added.

 “We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.”

A survey commissioned by US industry group The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organisation (SEMPO), believes the American SEM sector will have experienced 14 per cent year-on-year growth by the end of the year.

The prediction forms part of the non-profit group’s annual report which includes the results of an online survey of around 1,500 client-side marketers across North America.

The body says more firms will increase their social media marketing budgets before the end of 2010, helping to increase US companies’ total digital marketing spend from $14.6 billion in 2009 to $16.6 billion by the end of the year.

Digital looks set to continue to benefit from the decline of print advertising in America, with 49 per cent of the survey’s respondents saying they are reallocating budgets to search engine marketing from print advertising.

Sara Holoubek, outgoing SEMPO President for 2009-2010, said: “Difficult market conditions caused by the recession resulted in a relatively slow year for the industry in 2009, which was improved by a significant upturn in the fourth quarter.

“This momentum has continued into 2010, and we are expecting a return to double-digit percentage market growth in 2010.”

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Members of the search engine optimisation community have come together to praise the work of Rhea Drysdale, who won her battle to prevent the term SEO from being trademarked earlier this month.

Drysdale spent two years fighting a trademark application by Jason Gambert for the term SEO. In a blog post, Drysdale recounts her battle which began with a notice of opposition to Gambert’s application on April 24, 2008 and ended on March 11, 2010 when the application was terminated by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, added a link to the story from his own blog and suggested making donations to help cover Drysdale’s legal costs which totalled $17,004.

Over 150 people have now written on Drysdale’s blog to show their appreciation. PayPal donations have also flooded in and $17,000 has now been raised by the industry.

Cutts said: “Rhea took on a big fight for the benefit of the SEO industry, saw it through to the end — and won! In the process, she earned the sort of credibility that you just can’t buy.”

In a message of thanks on her website, Drysdale said: “After an overwhelming show of support from the community, I wanted to take a minute to thank you.

“When I originally discussed the SEO trademark news with Search Engine Land, it was suggested that readers may want to donate to my legal funds. I tried to brush this off and we published the articles.

“I thought I was just telling the story of the past two years and this case, which took so much from me and the other opposers. Within minutes people were asking how they could send donations and I had to accept the fact that this was no longer just my fight.”

Drysdale has come in for a significant amount of praise from SEO professionals across the world, many leaving messages of thanks and congratulations on her website.

“Thank you for your courage and your fight to save our industry and its rights,” said one.

Many posters admitted they were unaware of the application to trademark the term SEO in the first place.

Another well-wisher said: “I applaud you for catching that this mark was even up for a Trademark, much less going to bat and putting money on the line to oppose its registration. Congrats, cheers, and thanks.”

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