SEO, Website Content Optimization
& Software Development

Backbone IT Group will speaking at the China-Britain Business Council event ‘The Chinese Growth Opportunity: Practical advice for UK firms on how to access the Chinese market‘ on 28th November.

Presenting a talk on online branding and marketing in China will be Backbone Director, Richard Unwin, who will be giving the benefit of his experience setting up in China and targeting consumers online, with all of the technical, legal and logistical challenges this creates.

Also speaking at the event will be Jessica Zhang from the China-Britain Business Council, Dan Margo from Merchant Clipper and Mark Taylor from the Britannia Bureau.

For more information on the event and for booking details (the event is free to attend) please refer to the event flyer (PDF document).

Palicomp, the award-winning performance and gaming PC assemblers and web-based computing retailer, will be working with Backbone IT Group on their search strategy following a recent agreement between the two companies.

Palicomp have now been working in the performance computing industry for a decade, and have earned accolades for the value and speed of their systems, with glowing reviews from magazines such as PC Pro, PC Format, Computer Shopper and Computer Active, and we are delighted to have them on board. (more…)

The share price of Yahoo! has fallen by 7 percent on the news that the search giant no longer holds an interest in Chinese payment provider Alipay.

Until recently Alipay was part of the Alibaba Group, in which Yahoo! owns a 43 percent stake, but due to licensing restrictions in China owership has had to be moved to a separate company. Alibaba Group’s founder and CEO, Jack Ma, confirmed that 100% of Alipay was now owned by Zhejiang Alibaba E-Commerce Co., Ltd, a Chinese company in which Mr Ma has majority ownership. (more…)

Google are constantly messing about with how they display their AdWords - changing the fonts, colours etc to see how it affects conversion rates (and by extension how much money they can make). This love of testing shouldn’t come as any surprise as they are the company behind the Website Optimizer software.

Today I saw this SERP which actually included a clickable button:

The link goes through to a Google.com Coupon page - the kind which have been used in Adsense for quite a while, so it’s definitely not unprecedented or massively out of the ordinary.

My opinion is that it makes the page look a bit cluttered, but if it does the job conversion-wise we might be seeing more of them in the future.

At Backbone we’re fairly choosy over who we take on as clients; we only take on a limited number of companies in any given field to ensure we can give them the best possible service and without any conflicts of interest. Similarly, we have to know that our clients are willing to work with us to achieve our goals.

With this in mind, we’re pleased to announce that we’re now working with relocation services experts Icon Relocation to develop their online visibility and bring new visitor traffic to their website, in what we’re sure will be a long and successful partnership. (more…)

If you aren’t already using analytics to monitor what your website traffic is doing, now is the time to start. Web analytics will help you better understand how visitors are using your site and enable you to make changes that will improve performance.

Analytics services have come a long way since the days of practically useless ‘hit’ counters and endless reams of dry, impenetrable statistics. Most modern analytics packages are visually slick, easy-to-use and in many cases completely free.

There are plenty of good services to choose from, but the most popular and easiest to get started with is the free Google Analytics. (more…)

Exports to Europe from China this June increased to 43 per cent year-on-year with an increase of 44% to the U.S as the widely anticipated slowing of growth globally leaves China unaffected. China have recorded another increase in their exports last month in comparison to the same period last year. Already achieving a surplus of $19.5bn in May, June has stacked up an additional $20bn.

The Chinese central bank issued a statement on June 19 signalling the end of the peg to the US dollar. The RMB value has increased 0.77 per cent against the dollar since then, however many global economist see the Chinese currency as undervalued. Last week’s U.S governmental report states that the Chinese renminbi currency  “remains undervalued”.

Imports however fell from May’s level of $48.3 to $34.1 in June. Experts believe this could be as a result of intervention domestically to reign back the property market. This affects the demand for raw materials as property and infrastructure development slows. (more…)

Google’s new “Blue Jazz” user interface (as reported over at Search engine roundtable) has made at least one appearance on this side of the Atlantic.

One of our technical team was served the new layout when searching Google this morning and immediately spotted (or rather didn’t spot) a potential usability issue - the “pages from the UK” search option seemed to have vanished!

After some initial surprise, consternation and a few new conspiracy theories it was noticed the UK option wasn’t gone; it had been moved over to the Search Options panel (home of the Wonder wheel and other oddities)…

Pages from the UK: Hidden in plain sight?

OK, the techie in question may not be at his most alert before he’s had his first coffee of the day, but this kind of reaction is often a problem when making UI changes - however much they might make sense, you are still likely to cause temporary confusion amongst existing users. (more…)

Coverage of Google Street View, the 360° street-level photography service incorporated into Google Maps, has just been massively extended and now includes images of over 96 percent of the UK’s roads, adding another 210,000 miles of our streets to the 28,000 already available.

Most of the areas already mapped by Street View’s cameras were the areas in and around the major cities; now it’s the turn of our small towns, villages and little-used back roads to step into the limelight.

Predictably, some people are up in arms at the intrusion into their privacy; residents of London Road, a cul-de-sac located outside Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, were miffed that Google’s cameras would allow tech-savvy burglars to see over their walls and prevented the camera car from driving up their road. (more…)

Google is best known for the integrity of its search results. Before it got a name for spitting out endless new services, each more hyped (Knol, Wave, Buzz - I’m looking at you) and broken than the last, what brought people to Google was clean, spam-free search results. You didn’t need to wade through a sea of crap to find relevant content, and (in the early days at least) you could be fairly sure the websites at the top were there on merit.

As highlighted in recent posts from SearchEngineLand and SERoundTable, the distinction between natural and paid results on Google has gotten a little less clear recently as sponsored listings have started to appear on Google.com’s local business results.

Screenshot © Rustybrick

In a statement to SearchEngineLand, Google confirmed that although the listings were enhanced, they did not affect the ranking of listings (as frequently happens on some other search engines, such as China’s Baidu.com). (more…)