New figures from a leading retail consultancy have found the Brits spent a record amount with online retailers in 2011. 16 per cent more was spent online in 2011 than in 2010 as increased numbers of shoppers bought goods and services on the web.
So, can you afford not to sell your goods and services online?
Online sales expected to increase by 13% in 2012
According to the research by Capgemini, a record £68 billion was spent online in 2011, up 16 per cent on the previous year with online shopping now accounting for 17 per cent of the British retail market.
The Guardian reports that ‘growing numbers of retailers are launching or expanding online businesses, leading Capgemini to predict that total online retail sales will jump by 13 per cent in 2012 to reach £77 billion.’
One analyst said: “Online is such an integral part of the shopping experience now that it generally plays at least some role in most purchases, whether through research and comparison or social media and product reviews.”
Increasingly important to market yourself online
Nick Marr “It seems that only the very rich do not need to sell online , its a low cost method to maximising your returns. Those who who can get free search engine traffic are making huge returns on investment”
If you want to ensure your business is a success it is becoming increasingly important that you market yourself online. This may be through your own website although portals which allow shoppers to access a wide number of independent sellers on one website are becoming increasingly popular.
Sites such as Etsy and Not on the High Street now offer a range of handmade gifts and goods from thousands of sellers in one place whilst you can buy services from professional websites such as Elance and People per Hour.
Another excellent place for you to market your services is on Five Quid Expert. This new site offers a unique service where you can market anything from IT help to translation services to buyers at a price of £5. Five Quid Expert is a ‘one stop shop’ for buyers looking for inexpensive goods and services and offers you a great opportunity to be part of the online shopping boom.
Too many adverts will lead to loss of search engine rankings
Beware! having too many adverts displayed above the fold could mean a stiff penalty as Google tweaks its algorithm. Is this move contradictory to its own recommendations? Will this move see loss of profits for Google as advertisers adjust how their ads and how they are displayed on a page.
We have yet another change in how Google selects which sites rise to the top in SERPS (search engine result pages) . Publishers who rely on search engine traffic to make money will have to stand up and take notice. Google calls the recent change a page layout algorithm improvement
The company wants to make sure that when searchers click on Google search results, they won’t be taken to a page where the content is hard to find. It appears this move is all about Googles determination to provide search engine users with the best sites.
I have always advised my clients that when creating a site or adding content you need to think like a search engine. Search engines think ” is this the best place to send my user? Search engines need to know its a quality page with lots of information this includes external links to more resources , video , images etc. The page payout algorithm will put into line those sites that use top heavy advertising before content read What makes great content
Google ad layout for adsense
Google May Lose Money!
I am wondering if this change will reduce the revenue of Google as publishers change how they display advertising? Google can afford to experiment but the cost to the company could end up being millions. Share holders must be nervous about the move , will the average website lose revenue from this? I am not sure it all remains to be seen.
At small screen resolutions, Google’s own search results page is one of the worst offenders when it comes to advertising clutter obscuring content. That seeming hypocrisy may leave some webmasters wondering what constitutes “a normal degree of ads” and how screen size affects what is defined as “normal.” Sticking simply with what Google has written about the change, copying Google’s search results page is probably not a good idea in this case.
The Change Means Ad Sensibly
Matt Cutts Google
Googles man Mr Matt Cutts said the algorithm tweak looks at the layout of a Web page and the amount of content a user sees on the page once they’ve clicked on a search result.
“If you click on a Website and the part of the Website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience,”
“Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”
Cutts was careful to note that Google recognizes ads placed above the fold perform well for Websites. Accordingly, Google isn’t punishing Websites that place ads at the top of Web pages “to a normal degree.”
Rather, he and his team are penalizing Websites that put what they deem an “excessive” amount of ads up top, or simply make it hard to find content on the page.
Is This A Big Change?
This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally. That means that in less than one in 100 searches, a typical user might notice a reordering of results on the search page.The algorithm analyzes adverts in fixed positions; the Pagerank for sites using pop-ups, pop-unders or overlays will not be affected. If you believe that your website has been affected by the page layout algorithm change, consider how your web pages use the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or otherwise hard for users to discern quickly.
Google Page Layout Video
I found this video which also explains the changes hope it helps
You may have heard about Google PageRank (PR) and wondered what this has to do with your property websites performance. The official explanation is that PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to webpages found on the internet with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.
In practical terms Google page rank is a measure from 0 -10 of how important Google thinks a webpage is. So a webpage with a PageRank of 10/10 is very important and a web page with a PageRank of 0/10 is not very important.
To receive the traffic you need for a successful real estate website a good PageRank may help your web pages performance in the search engines results pages. It is important to note however that this is just one factor in how Google ranks your site.
It’s easy to find out your real estate websites ranking and that of your competitors by installing the toolbar on your browser. This will automatically tell you the PageRank of any webpage you are looking at with a green barometer
So what does all this mean for those trying to promote a property website? It can literally mean that websites with a higher page rank will get better rankings in Google’s search results.
Trying to increase your page ranking is not a short term task it can take years depending upon how active you are or the company you employ to help you. Google has a publicly available algorithm which indicates that they take in many factors when calculate PageRank. One of the most important factors is what sites link to yours. Sites that are deemed good quality by age, content and reputation in the eyes of Google will help raise your page rank.
Page rank is fluid and it changes about every 3 months, recently Page rank has been deemed not so important in the ranking of websites. You can see examples of property websites that have pages ranked higher than those with a lower page rank.
Warning
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to.
Don’t leave your search engine optimisation to chance Marr International can design implement and manage all aspects of SEO. Please contact us for more details
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