Archive: May, 2007

It has been about ten days since the rollout of Google Universal and the early analysis is starting to come in. Trying to put it all together and make coherent written statements about Google Universal is difficult as there are so many unique pieces of information to assimilate. For a deadline driven writer, that sort of situation is problematic. Perhaps however, the problem itself helps explain the subject.

I do a lot of searching. As a writer, I pull information from an enormous number of sources. While researching, I need to read a lot of material and extract nuggets of information, sort each nugget for relevancy and importance and pull together an A – Z story line. In short, I need to produce complex information sets in a format viewers are comfy seeing.

My primary source is my own experience, the stuff I can see with my own two eyes and filter through the scatterings of search marketing knowledge I’ve gleaned. My secondary sources tend to be my colleagues, the hundred or so other bloggers, broadcasters, analysts and writers toiling away around the world. My supplemental sources tend to come from other webmasters’ experiences often found in forums such as WebmasterWorld, Searchenginewatch, or Cre8asite. As I am my own primary source, the interpretation of all incoming data is likely going to be fairly subjective or rather, personal.

When most Internet users think search they think Google. By far the most popular search engine in the world, Google is actually much bigger than most of its users might think.

According to data compiled by Enquisite, 92.19% of all Google search referrals conducted during Q1 in the United States were conducted using Google’s general search engine (google.com) as opposed to images.google.com, local.google.com, news.google.com, or maps.google.com/. That means that out of every 100 search referrals from the Google domain fewer than 8 visitors come from one of the dozen vertical search tools Google operates. (source: Search Engine Market Shares – Google in the U.S. & Canada – Jan-Mar07 – Enquiste)

Though most Google users know that Google has a remarkable sub-set of vertical search tools the numbers provided by Enquisite show that for search marketing purposes those verticals rarely become referrers.

Running approximately 100 million search queries it recorded between January and March 2007, Enquisite noted that in the US, Google Images referred only 4.19% of aggregate site traffic. Google Local referred 1.8% and Google News only sent .39% of site visitors, slightly ahead of the Google’s Canadian portal, Google.ca which sent .32%.

Good SEOs need to be good webmasters. That doesn’t necessarily mean that SEOs think like webmasters. The goals of webmasters and SEOs are different as are their job requirements and responsibilities. While webmasters need to know everything about the technologies used on the websites they are responsible for, SEOs need to be conversant in virtually every form of web-document. Though all SEOs need to be good webmasters, relatively few actually consider themselves to be webmasters.

I had a sudden revelation that I have been acting as a webmaster more than an SEO recently. For the past two months, I’ve been responsible for preparing and publishing the daily edition of SiteProNews.com. My priorities have changed somewhat and I find myself looking at the industry from a different point of view than I did as a fulltime SEO. Having taken charge of a daily webmaster news site, I find myself in the role of primary webmaster for the first time in several years.

Much gets written about how webmasters need to understand and adjust to changes suggested or made in the process of website and document optimization.  Relatively little is written about how SEOs should work with webmasters.

An interesting stat was released by the B.C. Regional Science and Technology Network yesterday. A report it commissioned revealed that revenues generated by the south-island tech community surpassed those of the tourism industry making high-tech the leading economic driver in Greater Victoria in 2006.

Last year, Victoria’s cutting edge tech sector saw revenues of more than $1.67billion, bringing almost $500million more into the regional economy than the tourism sector at $1.19billion.

According to a report in the Victoria Times Colonist, the survey was completed by 340 of the 878 high-tech firms in the region. 333 of those who completed the survey entered revenue figures totally $1.1billion. The survey extrapolated results for the remaining 545 businesses on the island.

Though the survey suggests average revenues for tech firms on the south-island run towards the $1.3million mark, it should be noted that the top 25 tech firms on the island account for nearly 50% of overall revenues. The 25 largest tech firms on Vancouver Island collectively saw $794,473,278 in 2006, according to the Vancouver Island Technology Centre’s (VIATeC) list of Vancouver Island’s Top25 tech companies.

Quoted in the Times Colonist article, VIATeC executive director, Dan Gunn said,