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 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.

Having previously relied quite heavily on pay-per-click advertising, which any business which has used or is using it can tell you can be an expensive way of generating visitor traffic and sales/enquiries, the search strategy for Palicomp will seek to attract more visitors in the natural listings of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Through placing the company on the first page for relevant, high traffic search terms, our work with Palicomp aims to not only bring more visitor traffic, but also a greater amount of high quality visits which can be successfully converted into actual enquiries.

As well as offering excellent value and a top quality product, a big part of Palicomp’s modus operandi is providing first class customer service - as well as a customer service after-sales line the company also runs a priority Q-Jump service for people who just can’t wait for their system. While at Backbone we aren’t able to offer immediate results for SEO (getting results in the natural listings does take a little time - unlike pay-per-click it isn’t something that you can switch on overnight) we do aim to offer top class customer service, with constant liaison with our clients and frequent progress reports.

So we would like to take this opportunity to welcome Palicomp to our service and assure them, as with all of our search engine optimisation clients, the best of our attention throughout their campaign.

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.

The move was due to a ruling by the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) which stated that financial institions such as Alipay must be wholly-owned by Chinese companies to ensure the security of domestic financial data.

Yahoo! purchased a £1 billion stake in Alibaba Group in 2005, and it has proven to be one of the beleagured internet company’s best investments. The holding hasn’t been without problems though; Alibaba has repeatedly tried to secure its indepedence by buying out Yahoo!’s stake but this has been refused, leading to some degree of friction between the two companies.

“It’s not a secret that Jack Ma has been trying to negotiate a way to reduce Yahoo’s stake. I would anticipate a lot of feverish discussions in the background between these parties.” commented Eric Jackson of Ironfire Capital.

Alibaba also owns Taobao, China’s biggest online shopping site, and the loss of Alipay will raise fears with Yahoo! shareholders that Mr Ma will also attempt to spin off this lucrative business and away from Yahoo!’s ownership.

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.

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.

Icon’s specialism is in relocating employees for companies in the UK and worldwide, providing everything from moving vans, serviced apartments, language training, arranging visas, helping to sort out schools (an invaluable touch for families!) and generally taking care of everything that needs to done.

As Icon say of their service, what they offer is not “off-the-shelf” - everything is tailored to the client and their needs, which is similar to our philosophy at Backbone. The same optimisation strategy isn’t right for every business and will invariably be adapted and adjusted as it progresses, reacting to changes in the company, the competition and even the search engines themselves to stay on top and ensure the site stays as well placed as possible.

If you’re in need of a corporate relocation service we recommend giving Icon a call; on the other hand, if you require personalised, guarantee-backed search engine optimisation then please get in touch.

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.

Getting started with Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics on your site is simple; once you have registered with the service you will be given some tracking code that is unique to your website. Add this tracking code to the source HTML code of the pages you want to monitor (adding it to all of your pages is recommended to get a full picture) and you’re all set to start collecting data. Full instructions on exactly where the tracking code should be placed is given when you register.

Despite being free, Google Analytics is surprisingly powerful, with several features that were only previously seen on expensive enterprise-level packages. As the service relies on JavaScript tracking code it isn’t quite as accurate as packages running from server logs, though it is good enough to give a clear overview of user activity.

What can I do with Analytics?

Think of your web analytics service as being a bit like a CCTV control room at a shopping centre. Everything that happens within your site can be monitored with analytics, and knowing what visitors are doing and where they are going will help you make the decisions that make everything run more smoothly.

For example, analytics can tell you the keyword searches that visitors have used to arrive at your site. If 80% of arrivals searched for “blue widgets” but the site is currently concentrating on red widgets, a change of focus might be advisable.

Analytics can also show where visitors are coming from – are they from search engines (and if so which ones?) or are they being referred from other websites. If a lot of visitors suddenly begin to arrive from another website it’s usually worth checking out; they might have been recommended or there might be a negative review, in which case there might be an opportunity to put your side of the argument and limit damage to your brand.

What visitors do once they are on your website can give clues to what they are really looking for, what they dislike and problems they are having using the site. A common indication that there is a problem with a page is a high bounce rate – where visitors only look at that page and then leave without viewing any more pages.

Likewise, navigation summaries show the paths most visitors are taking through the site. Are there important pages that are being missed by visitors? If there are pages that are surprisingly popular, why might this be?

From a technical point of view, knowing visitor information like which internet browsers they are using, what are the most common screen resolutions and what connection speeds they have mean you can be sure you’re catering to the majority of your users.

Conversion tracking

To really measure the success of your website, consider tracking conversions. A conversion is when a website visitor takes a certain action, like placing an order or making an enquiry. Analytics can show you how many conversions are taking place and help you monitor any differences in conversions when you make website changes.

Not only can you measure conversions, it is also possible to see the paths taken to the conversion goal (which pages people have visited before buying or enquiry). This often gives webmasters a more complete understanding of the buying process of their visitors.

What else can I do?

There are lots more things you can monitor with analytics, and more advanced ways of interpreting your website data. For instance, one of the more useful analytic tactics is to segment your visitors so that you can focus sharply on particular user groups; if you want to know about only first time visitors arriving from Google who visited certain pages, just modify your visitor segmentation. There are lots of analytics tutorials available online; experiment with your analytics package so that it gives you the data you need to make decisions.

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.

Despite this, appetite for consumption via the internet remains high, and could represent profitable business for those who choose to take advantage of the market. Even in the depths of the global economic slowdown, the number of online shoppers grew 46% in China to $108 million, with online sales doubling to $36.6 billion.

Optimism has been dampened recently as, in an effort to control the sale of illegal and counterfeit goods online, the “Interim Measures for online commodity trading and related services” came into being on July 1. China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) now require internet businesses to register “real” personal details, addresses, possession of a National Citizen’s Identify Card and genuine business licenses. Many Chinese online market places are well known for fake and illegal products.

Even though consumer goods traded on the internet are now subject to these new laws this month, an opportunity exists for genuine products which command authenticity. Western retails that manage to access online markets and deliver credibility in the authenticity of their products could have a bright future.

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.

Google has had more-or-less the same layout for years; people can use it without even having to think, in just the same way you make that first morning cup of  coffee on autopilot. When something is so familiar, so habitual, even minor changes can be enough to throw people off.

But is it a problem?

Maybe, maybe not. It’s no secret that Google UK (and a lot of Google’s localised search engines) have been pretty screwed up lately, with irrelevant results from other countries creeping into the SERPs. A quick straw poll at Backbone has found that we’ve been more reliant on the “pages from the UK” option to filter out some of the unwanted results as we go about our daily search business.

Various bits of research around the net reckon the number of people using the “pages from…” option ranges from anywhere between 15-50% - quite a significant number then (and these were undertaken before Google decided that what Brits *really* wanted was to buy things in Dollars from American websites).

However much of an early-morning head-slapping moment missing the fairly obvious option was, it’s a safe bet that many more people will miss it if (or more likely when) the Blue Jazz update rolls out to everyone.

US-centric design

Some might say that if Google really values its customers based outside of the US it has a funny way of showing it. The UK serps fiasco dragged on interminably, with little apparent effort to get to the bottom of the problem - it’s still not really sorted out even now.

A look at the US version of the Blue Jazz UI (screenshot from Barry Schwartz @ SER) shows the option to search for local results by state directly beneath the search bar (where “pages from the UK” sits now).

Why the difference and what are the implications? That it’s more important for US-based users to be able to search for websites nearer their part of the country than it is for UK users to avoid seeing irrelevant pages from a different continent, or in a different language?

The layout may change before launch, but there’s a strong likelihood it will launch as it is. Just be thankful that, for the time being, you don’t need to use a special “ukresults:” operator to get country-specific results.

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.

The residents thought they had won the battle when “This image is no longer available” appeared for their corner of Bucks yesterday, but the car must have returned when they weren’t looking because pictures of the cul-de-sac were added later that day.

It could have been worse. The city of Windsor, Ontario is asking Google to come back and reshoot their city to show it in a more favourable light; not only were the garbage men on strike at the time, the cameras also picked up a murder scene complete with police cars and bloody bandages.

Privacy issues and murder scenes aside, Street View is an easy to use and fun tool, but it’s very dependent on what can be seen on the day the Google cameras come to visit.

For example, the images above and below are of the same lighthouse monument viewed from different angles on different days. The first shows the monument how it would normally look; the second was taken during refurbishment of the building, and to the uninitiated appears to show a giant Dalek looming above the town.

Expect to see more bizarre images surface as people start to explore the millions of newly available photographs…

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).

There has certainly been a lot of debate on whether the “enhancements” of unpaid listings make them fully-fledged adverts or not, and we would tend to come down on the side saying ‘yes’. Although the listings would be present regardless, the enhancement give them a lot more “eyeball appeal” and divert attention away from the standard listings.

Google’s policy of increasing its monetisation potential wherever it sees the opportunity seems likely to produce lots more cases of paid listings popping up in expected places.

Aside from catching the user’s attention the “enhancements” seem to serve no purpose other than making Google money - you can already click through to the relevant website using the standard listing. This is a pretty fundamental difference to the normal sponsored listings, where a potentially relevant link is being shown where otherwise it might not have been found.

Google has always claimed that improving user experience is its guiding mantra; historically this has meant decluttering and simplifying pages to make them easier to decypher (to the extent where the number of words on the homepage is strictly limited). Can they use the same argument for these changes? If their statement is anything to go by, it seems they can:

“This experiment is intended to help us understand whether this is a useful experience for our users. This feature is currently in a limited trial, and as with all tests, we may make changes to our current experiment in the future.”

How a yellow box and a duplicate link on the listing for a website, assigned purely on the basis that they have paid for it, could potentially be useful for searchers is anyone’s guess.