The Influence of Branding

I've mentioned before the importance of branding and creating an important idea of trust for your website users. Every company needs and depends on this - even the search engines. Google's huge market share as a preferred search engine in the US is around 70% and only slightly less in the UK - so it's important to keep the branding up, to keep the users coming back.


There is a premise that you will always return to a search engine - like a store - to find what you're looking for, even if the products (in this case the results) start to worsen. With the arrival of Bing and Microsoft's intention of winning back some of that huge market share, Microsoft employee Michael Kordahi has developed a Blind Search Page which I think is a great idea.

The page has a search bar at the top, for you to search for anything you like - kind of like any normal search engine. However, the results page will show you three columns of results, from Yahoo! Google and Bing, but without the branding. You need to review the results, compare and then vote for the column you think has fulfilled your enquiry. Once you click, the results are revealed.



I think it's a very fun tool to play with - to have all 3 results on the same page right next to each other, and have enjoyed playing around with it. I suggest you give it a go and see what you think. Feel free to leave a comment below.

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Track Your Company & Brand Online

The rise and rise of social media and user generated content (UGC) has been taking a big place in the world of search for most of 2009 now. I've recently blogged about the ease of finding real time answers to problems and Google this week has also introduced it's own way of trying to apply a time filter to your results, in keeping with sites like twitter.


However, another big move (that will obviously be gradually introduced) is the inclusion of Rich Snippets. We've already had longer snippets introduced, and this is now based on user reviews, possibly including prices, star ratings, etc. There is a html code you need to mark up pages like this so that google knows to include these rich snippets, and you can also opt in for this "experiment" which will be introduced slowly.

This also raises another issue, which is how to control what people are saying about you or your company. Or maybe not to control, but how to track it.

Social media is a big mover in reviews and comments (often unintentionally), but Twitter for example, recently removed @ replies, making it a little more difficult. I suggest you do a Twitter Search for the name of your company and subscribe to the results via RSS. Another great tool for Twitter is backtweet which can help you control the mentioning of any urls of your website - even if they've been bit.ly or tinyurl'd.

Another quality and usually relaiable source of tracking your company or personal name is to set up e-mail alerts. Google Alerts can send you details of News, Blogs, Videos, etc. on a daily, weekly, or even "as it happens" basis helping you keep right on top of things. I've been using this for over a year for my sites and some clients, and sometimes things slip though the net, but it's a great tool to combine with other things, too.

Other things such as BackType Alerts which works in the same way as Google Alerts, but seems to pick up much more on sites like digg, reddit, etc. Yahoo! alerts is another you may want to consider. All in all, it pays to keep abreast of what people are saying or tweeting about you or your company, and it's free, too.

Like what you're reading? Feel free to leave a comment and broaden the discussion.

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