Taken fron directnews,co.uk

A new report has revealed that Britons prefer natural search results to paid-for ads – potentially outlining why firms should engage in search engine optimisation.

The Search Attitudes survey conducted by YouGov for Tamar found that most consumers see organic listings as more trustworthy when researching products and brands than pay-per-click ads, with older web users the most likely to hold this belief.

It also indicated that almost half of 18 to 24-year-olds make use of real-time search results from social networks like Twitter, while mobile search is also on the rise.

When it comes to making purchases, reviews and images are becoming increasingly popular among consumers requiring more information about products and retailers.

“Consumers have matured in the past four years in their relationship with search and the one constant progression that the Search Attitudes Report series clearly identifies is the growth in awareness of the differences between natural and paid search,” said Tamar search director Neil Jackson.

Google is the most popular search engine in the UK, with the site accounting for about 91 per cent of the market through both google.co.uk and google.com, according to Experian Hitwise.

Bing is second with 3.25 per cent of searches, followed by Yahoo! on 2.83 per cent.

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Mobile Marketing

Anyone involved in on-line marketing would do well to consider establishing a seperate web site for use by mobile phones.

There are several reasons for this including the fact that Google now has a mobile content index which is distinct from standard SEO and also the fact that many standard web sites are difficult to read on mobile phones.

With an increasing number of potential customers using  mobile devices to view the web spend on mobile marketing is set to increase considerably over the next few years.

david@dlhvisualcommunications.co.uk

Keep your web site and blog content fresh

Real time search…

According to one industry expert, regularly updating a website with fresh, relevant content will become even more important in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO) as real-time search gets bigger.

Jaamit Durrani, SEO engineer at Fresh Egg, wrote on the Econsultancy blog of  how incorporating constantly updated web content onto a site can help give e-retailers “a competitive advantage”.

“If you have a blog on the site (and you should), categorise your blog  posts properly and have them feeding into category pages to include the first couple of lines,” he advised.

Also effective as a way of keeping a website fresh are User-generated content and reviews he added.

Mr Durrani went on to say that landing pages and content on product pages should also be regularly updated to show search engines that a website is “alive”.

Earlier in December, Google announced that it was introducing a real-time search feature to its offering. Live updates from relevant blogs, the latest news stories as well as social networks now appear on the search engine results page.