The lastest figures from Hitwise show the popularity of Google UK for UK based searches.

These figures are based on visits to Search Engines for the 4 weeks ending 19/06/2010.

This continues to highlight the importance of getting your website to appear high in the Google results. To find out how Solent Systems can help you to improve your website’s search engine rankings then fill out the form on the right to request a call-back.

Data temporarily released by AOL has revealed some interesting statistics regarding search engine usage.

The dataset contained information on just over 36million search queries, and 19million click-throughs.  The data reinforces the importance of the first position on a search engine results page (SERP), with 42.4% of all click-throughs.

The first 10 positions account for 89.9% of all the click-throughs, which means that if you don’t appear on the first page of the results, you shouldn’t expect large volumes of visitors clicking through to your website, unless the search term is extremely popular.

This knowledge enables website owners to decide what level of investment in Search Engine Optimisation is worthwhile.  An increase in their Search Engine index can be roughly translated into the number of additional visitors this is likely to produce.

The lastest figures from Hitwise show the popularity of Google UK for UK based searches.

These figures are based on visits to Search Engines for the week ending 13/03/2010.

This continues to highlight the importance that your website should appear high in the Google results.  To find out how Solent Systems can help you to improve your website’s search engine rankings then fill out the form on the right to request a call-back.

‘Ethics’ is a term used regularly in the SEO industry due to some SEO companies who behave in a way that only benefits themselves.  There are a number of strategies available when performing search engine optimisation, but what makes a paticular strategy ethical or unethical, and why shouldn’t particular strategies by implemented?

Normative ethics is the branch of ethics which investigates questions in the area of ‘how ought one act, morally speaking?’.

There are 3 main normative ethical theories, which we can apply to our SEO strategy to measure whether a particular approach can be considered ‘ethical’.

1. Virtue ethics which focuses on the character of a person, rather than their actions.
   • An ethical action is one that is considerate of the welfare of everyone, showing respect and compassion for all, promoting community.
   • An ethical action is one that is consistent with virtues that develop humanity; honesty, integrity, fairness, truth, etc.
2. Deontology argues that actions and decisions should be made considering one’s duties and others’ rights.
   • An ethical action is one that treats others fairly.
   • An ethical action is one that best protects the moral rights and dignity of those affected (searchers, search engines, site owners and their employees, and Web users in general).
3. Consequentialism (Teleology) argues that the ethics of an action are linked to that action’s result, or outcome.
   • An ethical action is one that provides the most good, or does the least harm.

We briefly mentioned the parties who can be affected by ethical/unethical Search Engine Optimisation practices, as we must know in order to consider their welfare, rights, equality, etc.

• Searches will benefit from ethical SEO strategy as search results will best matched to their queries.
• Search engines will benefit from ethical SEO stategy as relevant search results will help them to become more highly trusted by the searches, who will return to use the same search engine on other occasions.
• Site owners and their employees (including SEO agents) will benefit from ethical SEO strategy as they will attract relevant traffic to their website, hopefully converting a search into something meaningful to their website’s aim.
• Web users in general will benefit from ethical SEO strategy as relevant and trustworthy websites and search engine results will help to develop the structure and usability of the Web.

The SEO action that does most good, and least harm, that protects the rights of  those affected, that treats others fairly and promotes community, and that helps to develop humanity is the one that recognises why a website is not performing optimally in search engine results, fixes the problem by improving the website’s design and functionality, the search results and the Web in general.

The SEO action that does least good, and most harm, that fails to protect the rights of those affected, that ignores the equality of others, ignores community, and doesn’t demonstrate any characteristics that develop humanity is the one that uses deception to achieve search engine rankings that aren’t warranted.  This type of action cannot improve the website, makes search engine results less relevant and therefore degrades the entire Web in general.

Solent Systems only uses ethical SEO techniques, and never knowlingly breaches any laws, or guidelines set down by the search engines.  In a later post we will discuss some of the ethical and unethical techniques of SEO.

Steps to Install

1. Download plugin and unzip.
2. Upload the plugin file to your WordPress plugins directory inside of wp-content.
3. Activate it from the plugins menu inside of WordPress.
4. Type ‘[ word_count ]‘ in a page or post to display the plugin (without the spaces).

Enter some text in the plugin field and this SEO tool will let you know how many words are in the string.

This simple SEO tool gives some brief, but very effective, advice for when you’re creating a brief description of your website.

This tool has been created for the reason that when submitting your URL to directories there is often a strict character or word limit.

Steps to Install

1. Download plugin and unzip.
2. Upload the plugin file to your WordPress plugins directory inside of wp-content.
3. Activate it from the plugins menu inside of WordPress. 
4. Type ‘[ string_length ]‘ in a page or post to display the plugin (without the spaces).

Enter some text in the plugin field and this SEO tool will let you know how many characters are in the string.

Try not to exceed these string lengths when coding a website:

• Keywords – 200
• Description – 250
• Title – 90 (Google trims the title tag to 63).

This simple SEO tool gives some brief, but very effective, advice when writing text for your meta data tags.

Enter some text in the field below and this SEO tool will let you know how many words are in the string.

This simple SEO tool gives some brief, but very effective, advice for when creating a brief description of your website.

This tool has been created for the reason that when submitting your URL to directories there is often a strict character or word limit.

To install this plugin on your own WordPress site, download our SEO Tools Plugin here.

Enter some text in the field below and this SEO tool will let you know how many characters are in the string.

Try not to exceed these string lengths when coding a website:

• Keywords – 200
• Description – 250
• Title – 90 (Google trims the title tag to 63).

This simple SEO tool gives some brief, but very effective, advice when writing text for your meta data tags.

To install this plugin on your own WordPress site, download our SEO Tools Plugin here.

Before starting down the route of Search Engine Optimisation for your website, there are some initial criteria which should be met.

1. Your customers search for your industry/product/service using the Search Engines.
2. Your site doesn’t appear when searching on keywords that your customers may be using, or appears low in the Search Engine rankings – ie, not on the first page, or top ten results.
3. Your website targets a competitive market.

If these criteria are true then Solent Systems would like to help you.  Complete the form on the right to request a call-back from one of our team.

comScore have released the Search Engine analysis of U.S. searches for January 2010.

Google led the way with a 65.4% share of all the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Visit comScore‘s website to see a detailed breakdown of these figures.