We always like to help, so check out our new search marketing events page to keep up to date with the latest conferences, expos, parties and showcases in the industry. We’re always out and about at events all over the UK.

Catch us at the e-consultancy SEO Supplier Showcase and other events like SES London and SMX London to name a few.

For starters let me say i found this quite amusing this morning. No, not the minimum bid thing but the glaring headline typo in Yahoo’s search marketing ‘News and Tips’ newsletter they sent me. Oh dear.

Moving swiftly on to the subject of this post, Yahoo! actually introduced the change in the standard minimum bid in the US back in February. So now they’ve introduced it into the UK what does it mean for advertisers?

Well, it would be quite easy to just expect the same campaign adjustments for minimum bids as you do with Google but I would be more inclined to keep a close eye on your accounts during the change period. Why? well Yahoo! state there are two factors that will determine your minimum bid now:

• The relevance of your keywords (as measured by the quality of the ads associated with them).
• The number of bidders and bid amounts in the particular keyword market.

Sound familiar?

If you’re running your search campaign right, the first factor shouldn’t really have any negative impact, moreover it may offer reduced costs. However, the second factor is pretty much a free reign for Yahoo! to run wild on your minimum bid prices, bearing in mind the opaque nature of the bid marketplace, only Yahoo! can see this information. Potentially, there could be some crazy minimum bid increases which could really affect campaign costs. Anyone for a £10 minimum bid?

I love the iPhone app store, but it’s a victim of it’s own success as more developers submit apps. Thinking way back (about 2 months ago) it was easy to find an app you wanted because there wasn’t that many. But now, it’s life-draining to wade through all of the apps to find a hidden gem you may have missed, so i now only check the recent and what’s hot pages.

With many apps being added constantly, how do you ensure as a developer you don’t get buried?

Well, you may have noticed that there is a ridiculous amount of updates for the apps you have downloaded (i’ve got 10 waiting right now), which seems fine if it has just been released to iron out bugs, but how many problems can these apps really have on an on-going basis? So i thought maybe they were giving me more cool stuff to add to the apps, unfortunately not.

What is actually happening is they have been taking advantage of the way the app store is categorising new applications. Every new app update release meant that the app store thought it was a new release which meant a front page slot. Timing of pushed updates became critical in order to maximise front page position and downloads. Easy SEO or what?

Unfortunately, the latest release means that apps are no longer categorised in this way but are solely based on the first date of release, which Apple say should aid more innovation within app development. Short-lived but brilliant.

We raved previously about how much we love Google Suggest, which got us thinking is there anything else that this could have a big effect on?

Yes! An increase in 2-3 word keyword searches

If we anticipate to see an increase in short-tail (2-3 word) keywords as searchers who would previously use one word keywords opt for longer Suggestions instead, surely this will change the dynamic of your campaign spend, but how?

Let’s think about this logically - there hasn’t been an increase in search traffic, it’s only being redistributed from other keywords. Currently your account pricing works like this; you have expensive header keywords, less expensive short–tail keywords and even less expensive long-tail keywords.

So how can you expect your campaign pricing structure to change?

1. An increase in bid prices of (2-3 word) keywords
2. A decrease in bid prices of 1 word header keywords
3. A decrease in bid prices of long-tail keywords

It’s probably too early to tell, but my prediction is there wont be an overall increase in your campaign spend and the increase in short-tail keywords will be offset by decreases in header and long-tail keywords.

The good news overall is potentially traffic should be more qualified and click to action should improve. We’ll be monitoring the campaign structure shifts closely to see if this is the case!

Google has recently unveiled its newest feature, Google Suggest, which will provide real time keyword suggestions for searchers. We know how it works, but what should we be excited about?

More qualified searches

Personally, I think a great advantage is you can expect more qualified leads to your site because Suggest is really a search funnel, narrowing down peoples search with every keystroke until they find what they’re looking for. Let’s face it, not everyone is tech savvy enough to know how to search efficiently. Thankfully, Google Suggest can now take the guesswork out of it.

Take this example, I can’t remember what David Beckham’s team in LA is called, so I type in “LA soccer” and look “la soccer galaxy” appears as a suggestion - problem solved!

Make it work for you

Okay, so now that you know your audience can find you more efficiently, how do you make Google Suggest work for you?

Well for starters, you need to determine if your customers search patterns will be affected? The major change will come from the less advanced searchers. These people will type in one word and scroll down the list until they see something related to their term. We could generalize that B2C products and services could benefit from Suggests funnel action.

Once you’ve figured that out, play around with the tool by entering words you think your customers might enter and see what comes up. This should give you an idea of how your funnel works.

Also worth thinking about is if Google will make this more advanced by taking the data from search patterns and optimizing by user search behaviour for future results they receive.

A new satellite is well on it’s way to being in live orbit right now after it launched on Monday 8th September. It’s a joint venture between a commercial satellite imaging provider, Geoeye, the American Defence Department and Google.

Usually an imaging satellite like this is shared commercially with companies who buy imaging time from the satelllite provider such as news corporations to cover events, but this one is different as Google gets exclusive use of the mapping images from the satellite.

So what’s different to what they already have for products like Google Earth? Well this satellite gives them much sharper images down to a resolution of less than half a metre, compared to a metre at best previously. It won’t be as sharp as street view, but i’m sure there’s a great chance of an Earth/street view mashup!

It’s kind of scary as to what Google actually want to do with this especially as the Defence Department are heavily involved, it reminds me of the conspiracy theories between facebook and the CIA.

Is there also a possibility they’re going to overlay the data with their user search histories to provide the ultimate in geo-targeting for companies?

Another new service launch officially happened yesterday with Ping.

With so many social network channels it can be difficult to keep track of or login and update each one. So Ping decided to make that easy.

Just setup all your accounts with Ping then you can update them all from one login wherever you are via AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS, E-mail or facebook.

Signup for the official release at ping.fm and start saving on your networks eating into your ‘real’ social time!

As homage to one of our favourite pop artists, we decided to brighten up the office with a take on the iconic 4-block. We seem to like it a lot, now what else can we ‘Warholize’?

Google announced yesterday they were entering into the browser wars with Microsoft and Firefox with Google Chrome. Why? They think that web browsers can be even better than they are. The basic premise is that the new Chrome browser will be more stable, faster and deal with the way we interact with the web now, by incorporating multi-process technology similar to the latest operating systems to deal with the many multimedia channels users are now accustomed too. By doing this, it means if one tab crashes with a javascript problem on the page it won’t take down the whole browser, only the tab.

The best thing is it’s open-source. Good news, in the same way i’m a big fan of Flock (based on the firefox platform) i’m looking forward to what can be done with Chrome. It will make a big difference if it does what Google says as we have all experienced the slowdown of firefox when you bloat it up with all the cool plugins.

The Beta has just been released today for Windows, unfortunately us Mac users will have to wait! So go try it and let me know what you think.

I saw some interesting graphs being pushed around on various sites this week, and discussions around Google’s increasing market share, most interestingly I picked up the two graphs below, one being for US market share and the other for worldwide share:

Data Source: Hitwise

In the graph above, which relates solely to the US market, there’s a consistent rise in Google’s market share from September 2007, resulting in roughly a 5% increase in less than 9 months to June 2008. By comparison, MSN has lost market share by nearly 50% in the 12 months from June 2007-2008. Awful news for MSN which is made even worse when you consider they launched a ‘cashback for searching’ scheme recently.

Personally i’m not keen on such a heavy reliance on one search engine, it’s not good for clients and agencies alike, due to having a monopoly-like stranglehold on the prices being paid for PPC campaigns and there’s no choice but to use them. This dominance is seen further by the removal of Google’s Best Practice Funding (read: agency kickback) in Q1 of 2009.

Data Source: Net Applications

By comparison, the above graph shows the worldwide market share for search engines. The most important thing to note here is that from Net Applications research, the reliance on Google as the only search engine of choice is even higher outside the US by nearly 10%. This certainly feels right in the UK market right now, however the research only covers the usual search engine suspects.

Now In China for instance Baidu is a hugely dominant search engine, to the same extent that we see Google. And with a population of 1.3 billion that’s a lot of searches!

With a very familiar interface and years of search engine dominance with some of the first vertical and universal search components to be released, i would really love to see a roll-out of Baidu into the European and US markets, as right now i think this is the only chance we have of a real contender. Maybe 2012 will be the year for change.