About three weeks before the U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama and John McCain crossed swords for the last time in a TV debate.

As you probably already know the current poll results favour Obama. But what interests me the most: how are they doing online?

In October 2007 Hubspot released a report on presidential campaign websites. With only two candidates in the running, I thought it was fun to give a quick status report:

• How good is the SEO of their official campaign websites?
• Do they rank in search engines on relevant keywords?
• Do they make use of online social media?

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About a month ago Google announced further improvements to their Google AdWords algorithm, including the replacement of minimum bid with first page bid in your account.

More about these recent chances can be read on Inside AdWords.

Googles organic search ranking factors are also frequently updated. How often? And when? Hard to tell. Google does not send press releases regarding this matter. Honestly, SEOs have a hard time to predict important algorithm shifts. Most of the time we try to anticipate on changes that are highly probable, that’s what makes our job so exciting. Although we keep a close eye on possible changes, sometimes we are obliged to act post factum.

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Think Eyetracking has pubished a new study on click behaviour and compared it with the results from 2005.

The results show a greater focus on the top 3, maybe 4, results.

In a 2005 study we found that people looked through many of the search results before clicking on one. The distribution of attention using Google can be seen in the heatmap below.

In our most recent study, we had 30 participants search for the broad term, Oasis. PEEP methodology was employed; participants were eyetracked while completing the task and later asked about their usual behaviour.

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BRAVE NEW WORLD: Maximizing integrated digital marketing and web 2.0 opportunities for pharmaceutical and other life science companies.

The pharmaceutical market is changing fast and so is the marketing mix. Most of us are familiar with digital marketing and terms like “Web 2.0” and “Social Networking”. However, very few companies truly understand AND integrate these trends profitably into their product strategy.
This is where Across Health BV, a newly established Dutch affiliate of Across Health, a rapidly growing international CRM and e-business player in the healthcare industry, is focusing its full-services offerings.
BRAVE NEW WORLD, the first Across Innovation Seminar, is the platform where you will meet renowned digital marketing and Web 2.0 guru’s, industry thought leaders, and peers from other life science companies who have successfully implemented integrated internet marketing and Web 2.0 elements into their sales & marketing strategies.
Keynote speakers will be Peter Hinssen, an international thought leader on web 2.0 strategies, and Fonny Schenck, a digital marketing strategy expert with over 10 years of experience in the healthcare industry. In addition, several pharmaceutical companies will present their best practices to you, and ample time is made for peer-to-peer discussion.

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In June, Google Trends, underwent quite a few updates such as actual numeric results and the ability to download them to a spreadsheet. Today, Google launches a completely new version of Google trends, called Google Insights for search. New features include related keywords and the ability the narrow your ‘insight’-search to a specific sector, all very useful for search marketeers who want to optimize their AdWords campaigns and/or expand to other markets.

Google explains:

Today, we’re launching Google Insights for Search, a new product designed with the advertiser in mind. It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.

Like Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges.

Source: Inside Adwords

Yesterday 4 former Google employees launched an alternative search engine, called Cuil (:pronounced Cool). The Cuil founders claim to have indexed over 120 billion webpages (>< Google knows of 1 trillion URL’s) and that their search results are ranked on content and relevance instead of popularity. Noble ideas, but after running some test search queries and coming up with some rather questionable results, I have yet to be convinced about Cuil’s capabilities. Cool design though?

Last friday Google announced that they have indexed over 1 trillion (!) URL’s. A huge leap from the 26 million web pages in the very first Google Index of 1998. How did they manage to find all those pages in just ten years time? Two Google software engineers explain:

We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.

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It appears the rumor mill is reporting that Google will buy Digg for $200 million or so.

Rumor has it the two companies have signed a letter of intent and are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property.

Microsoft has an advertising deal with Digg so the deal would be a competitive blow to the Redmond giant.

This is the third time the buyout rumor has surfaced.

Is it “three strikes and you’re out” or the “third time’s the charm?”

Digg has yet to publicly disavow the rumor but it’s still early on the West Coast.

Across Health is a fast-growing division of Across Group but already has a proven track record in the health industry. With a focus on CRM and SEM solutions, Across Health is the strategic partner of many high-profile healthcare companies in Europe and the US – from pharmaceuticals and consumer health to medical devices, hospitals and other key stakeholders in healthcare.

Currently we are looking for a highly skilled SEO consultant with proven experience in search engine optimization, who is able to start immediately. As a SEO specialist, you will operate on the exciting brink between ICT and marketing. Your main activities will include detailed search engine optimization consultancy on behalf of your high-profile customers, in healthcare and beyond. Ideally, you are also interested in web analytics and usability. You will need both practical skills and a talent for coordination in order to succeed in this challenging opportunity. Our perfect candidate is combines a sound technical background with a commercial sense, or vice versa.

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