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theEweekly Wrap


theEword wrap of SEO newsMicrosoft announces new search engine

Microsoft revealed its newest weapon in the 'search race' this week, previewing their new search engine, Bing. The search website is described as a 'decision engine' and the company claim Bing will help more users find and - crucially - use more information on the internet. Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, explained that the search engine would help browsers manage the data they gather online more efficiently.

"Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they've found."

Bing is the latest instalment of Microsoft’s search engine. It has gone through a number of title changes in the past five years, having previously been called 'Search', 'Windows Live Search' and, most-recently, 'Live Search'.

Latest figures from market research group ComScore show that Microsoft holds just 3 per cent of the US search market, with Google maintaining a 64 per cent share. While Microsoft is hoping Bing will increase its cut of the market, many industry commentators have expressed doubt as to the ability of the site to tempt users away from Google.

Illegal download numbers revealed

Seven million Britons regularly download illegal content, according to a group of government advisors. The Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) discovered that, over the course of just one day, 1.3 million users downloaded content from a single file-sharing network.

The government group estimates over £12 billion worth of illegal material – such as music albums and feature films - is downloaded in the UK every year. In April, an unfinished copy of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine film was leaked onto file-sharing sites across the globe. The Hugh Jackman film was downloaded an estimated 100,000 times in a little over three days.

But probably not by these people

A survey by the BBC has revealed that three million homes in the United Kingdom have broadband speeds below two megabits per second. The report calculated the quality of broadband across the country by examining how far away properties were from telephone exchanges. Alex Slater, head of the group who conducted the research, said:

"In some cases people aren't able to shop online, aren't able to view certain websites or use social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter and they can't watch the BBC's iPlayer"


The government has pledged to provide all properties in the UK with broadband speeds of at least 2Mbps by 2012.

What's in a (domain) name?


One of the key factors in SEO success is choosing a good domain name. Here, theEword senior programmer Adrian Mursec shares some wise words on the subject of web addresses...

Getting indexed in first position on the search engines has never been easy, especially if you are trying to target specific keywords for your business. SEO is a slow-burn strategy that can take time to deliver a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) you are happy with.

One way in which you can get off to a flying start is by picking a good domain name. This can help greatly, especially as your choice could work as a keyword, which will carry more weight in search engines than any of the links or SEO techniques you will use in moderation.

Tips for finding the right domain name:
  • Think about who your target audience is. If you are only targeting people in the UK, why not buy the ‘.co.uk’ address, as this will also help cut out competition from the '.com' users and put a bit more weight behind your site on local searches.

  • Keep it short. This isn’t so much for the search engines but more for the users, as a short domain name will be easier to remember and potential visitors will have less chance of mistyping it.

  • Make the domain name as unique as possible. If half a dozen older sites have a similar name, you might find yourself starting in the deep end (even if the other sites have no relation to what you are selling). You could even try to make up a word to describe your site, to truly establish a unique brand. For example, would Twitter be as popular if it was called www.some-site-for-mini-blogging.org, or similar? Again, this technique works best if the name is some sort of play on a keyword.

  • Try to use only one domain. When purchasing a domain name it is easy to buy into deals on multiple domains for the '.com', '.co.uk' and abbreviations of the name. But if you do buy more than one, make sure the extra ones redirect to just one domain.

  • Why not try to buy an already established domain name? This will have age on its side and escape any kind of sandboxing which search engines could use.

  • Overall, don’t rush into buying a domain name. If your site is successful, it will be something you have to live with for a long time.

theEweekly Wrap


theEword wrap of the weekly SEO and internet newsMistaken identi-tweets

US musician Regina Spektor has been the victim of identity theft on social-site-of-the-hour Twitter. The up-and-coming singer exposed the imposter via her official MySpace blog this week. It is the latest in a number of high profile celebrity imposters on the social networking site.

“I found out that there has been a mystery person posing as me on Twitter for a while. Even my record label thought it was me. And it made it into the London Times top Twitters list. Somehow, I had no idea,” said Spektor.

The imposter, @ReginaSpektor, had amassed just under 30,000 followers. The account has since been deleted.

The Regina Spektor Twitter pageThe fake Regina Spektor on Twitter


Ms. Spektor is not the only celebrity to have had her identity stolen on Twitter. Angelina Jolie, David Tennant and Chris Moyles have all been impersonated on the social networking site. Twitter has become a popular way for celebrities to communicate with their fans and notable celebrity members include comic Stephen Fry, singer Lily Allen and actor Demi Moore.

Wolves at the door

Wolfram Alpha, the long-awaited search engine, has launched. Despite initial theories that the website would revolutionise the search industry, reaction to the ‘mathematical search engine’ has been mixed. A proportion of commentators have hailed the site – which answers specific queries directly rather than guiding users to a third party domain - as the next stage in the evolution of search. Meanwhile, critics expressed concerns over Wolfram Alpha’s limited success in returning queries. The site’s commercial viability has also come under scrutiny.

Yahoo! has requested to be your friend

The search engine giant Yahoo! is considering a move into the social networking market, according to its chief technology officer. Speaking to the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York, Ari Balogh confirmed that the company was lining up acquisitions and partnerships with several companies. “I can guarantee you there will be some acquisitions, and we will do some stuff in-house," he said.

Balogh’s announcement comes after a turbulent year for the company. A decrease in PPC sales and aggressive competition from other search engines, such as Google, have seen the fortunes of Yahoo! decline considerably, forcing the company to cut over 1,000 jobs in 2008.

While Balogh admitted that Google had “won the game” of search as it exists today, he said that Yahoo! would remain a major player in the search market.

“The thing I will tell you is that, core to great experiences for people online may not necessarily be this version of search. I believe search is going to be far richer...there’s a whole other round or two to go in the search game that’s where we intend on playing.”

Search cycle

Google has enlisted an armada of tricycles for the next stage of its ongoing Street View service. The humble fleet of bikes has been acquired in order to photograph streets too small for the Google car to drive through.

Google Street Maps bike The next phase of Google Street Maps

Social marketing - Twitter and theEword


SEO Manchester theEword Twitter blogAt theEword, we specialise in making social marketing work for our clients. Twitter is the latest stage in the evolution of social networking. The service has over 26 million visitors per day and the site offers unprecedented access to a number of potential consumers from a vast range of demographics. Here, theEword writer, Tom Mason offers a brief breakdown of what the site can offer.

Personal coverage

Twitter has become the ideal vehicle for celebrities to remain in the public eye. Famous faces such as Demi Moore and Oprah Winfrey regularly keep in touch with their loving public through the site. Famous first tweets from the celebrity circuit include:

  • "I am still alive" – British actor John Cleese
  • "Is Twittering" – Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps
  • "Rehearsing for my video just dance and am now at wmc to perform at the Armani and nervous records party. But I am no nervous record!" – US singer Lady Gaga

Getting news out quickly

Twitter is the ideal tool for sharing information fast. Users have tweeted breaking news and events long before the media has arrived at the scene. The power of Twitter as a news source was demonstrated during the crash of US Airways flight 1549 into the Hudson River, New York. Thousands of onlookers had tweeted or uploaded photographs onto the site mere seconds after the incident.

"There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy," tweeted one user.

Twitter image of the Hudson River plane crash

This image was uploaded by a Twitter user and featured on many of the news reports covering the event.

Offering a unique perspective on an event

Twitter has offered a personal insight into some of the most iconic events of the past five years. The inauguration of US president Barack Obama saw the numbers of tweets multiply by five per second as users posted their congratulations, opinions and experiences of the inauguration parade. This month also saw the first tweet from space as NASA astronaut, Mike Massimino, composed a message from the shuttle Atlantis orbiting the Earth.

Putting across a corporate message

Twitter can be an excellent tool for businesses and marketing campaigns if it is used correctly. However, many companies have discovered the dark side of the site. Skittles, the Mars-owned confectionary, became a victim of its own innovative web campaign after an unmoderated Twitter feed - displaying any reference to the confectionary - was integrated into its homepage. A proportion of Twitter users took this opportunity to spam the Skittles homepage with offensive remarks relating to the brand. One of the more printable comments read:

"Skittles got stuck in my mouth while I was driving, forced me to slam into orphanage, killing hundreds."



Knowing how to implement a social marketing strategy is a necessity if you want your business to take advantage of this market. Indeed, this example – as extreme as it is – offers a cautionary tale to any company thinking about using Twitter without proper guidance. Twitter can be a great public relations tool if used correctly. Indeed, in December 2008, Huw Gilbert, communications manager for PepsiCo International, personally apologised via Twitter for a controversial television spot advertising the cola. The apology was widely thought to have prevented a public backlash against the company.

Twitter has incredible potential for social marketers. It is a website which gives companies unrestricted access to millions of consumers. However, it is inadvisable for an inexperienced business to jump headfirst into a social networking scheme without proper preparation and guidance.

A/B testing - a direct route to increased conversions


Tom Glass Creative Director theEwordtheEword's creative director, Tom Glass, explains the importance of A/B testing

It can be easy to overlook the importance of design in website optimisation. Sadly, many digital companies focus all their attention on SEO and ignore the next stage of optimisation – what happens when a user clicks through to a landing page. A website needs to be optimised for design as well as Google’s spiders.

Good SEO can result in a page one ranking but it cannot reduce a high bounce rate. At theEword, we specialise in creating websites tailored for the user as well as the search engine. As creative director, it is my responsibility to ensure that a website's design increases conversion rates. A/B testing – creating two different designs and monitoring the conversion rate of each – is an important part of this.

A/B testing isn’t just a case of manufacturing two very different pages and putting them both live, but rather a complicated process which requires patience and restraint - adjusting a colour or moving a button in order to see which page elements and changes have a tangible effect on user experience. Even a small change can subtly increase click-through and conversion rates. For example:

Simple example of theEword AB test
The nuances of A/B testing

A/B testing is website design with a scalpel rather than a hatchet; incremental changes made over a set period of time. It is a procedure which subtly alters a single element in order to achieve a higher conversion rate. A/B testing isn’t for the impatient and a test needs to run for a minimum of two hundred clicks in order to produce substantial results. It is a softly-softly approach to website design.

At theEword we have a number of ways to ensure a website fulfils its potential. We invest time and resources into building and discovering tools in order to optimise the design of a client’s website. Our latest instrument includes a ‘heat-map’; a program which show where on a page users are clicking. This allows us to see which elements of a design are attracting attention and which are not.

A/B testing is not a quick process and, much like SEO, it is not a concrete science. There are no laws and there are no set rules to website design. My experience in the digital industry has taught me that A/B testing requires patience and expertise. It is not enough just to drive people to your site; your designs have to motive them into action while they’re there.

theEweekly Wrap


The weekly wrap from theEwordFrench foreign leechers

Internet users in France who illegally distribute copyrighted material on the internet are in danger of being banned from using the web.

A new law has been signed by the French government which promises to block any user sharing illegal content on the internet for a period of two to twelve months. The law has created a new government agency, the High Authority of Diffusion of the Art Works and Protection of Rights on the Internet, which is responsible for tracking and monitoring the illegal distribution of material in the country.

Users who are deemed to be sharing illegal content will be given two warnings via email. Any user found to be sharing copyrighted content after the second reprimand will have their IP address blacklisted and will be prevented from accessing the internet.

Google’s state of the union

Google has been showing off its latest wares at the 2009 Searchology Conference. The search engine giant revealed its plots and plans for the future as well as introducing a host of new search options for users. A collection of these included:

  • Google Search Options allow users to sort Google rankings according to time and type (videos, reviews, etc).
  • The Wonder Wheel software gives users the chance to see a graphical illustration of related search queries. A user searching for ‘Manchester’ is presented with the following ‘Wonder Wheel’:


  • Google Squared – A project which creates ad-hoc spreadsheets of information; users typing in ‘dogs’ are given a spreadsheet of different breeds which includes data like size and lifespan.
  • Google also plans to introduce ‘Rich Snippets’; search listings which return more detailed results. A search for a restaurant, for example, may also include reviews, directions and menu details.

Lego of email

We’d all be more productive without email, or at least that’s the opinion of Michael Keaton, the general manager at Lego, Australia. Keaton believes that employees could save up to eight days a year by cutting their email traffic by 20 per cent.

“Email is the biggest time-waster in business,” he is quoted as saying.

“People stop whatever they’re doing to see what it [an email] is. Folks get into work in the morning...and [their email] takes them in directions they didn’t expect to go. That’s when technology starts getting in people’s way.”

Keaton has launched a new initiative in order to combat the rise of email within the Lego house. This programme asks employees to give feedback on the emails they receive. No information has yet been revealed on whether this feedback will be filtered for adult language.

theEword's favourite viral videos


A viral marketing campaign requires a certain X Factor in order to be successful. Creating a popular promotion is an art and millions of companies launch advertisements in the hope of additional exposure though social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook. There have been many memorable viral promotions. Here, we ask some of theEword staff to pick their favourites.


Stephen Dixon, Designer
Gorilla, Cadbury, 2007

The Cadbury’s Gorilla advert is a great example of viral marketing done right. This 90-second clip of a gorilla playing the drums to Phil Collins’ seminal classic, In The Air Tonight, ticked all the right boxes – it is entertaining, humorous and peculiar; a perfect recipe for viral success. It has just under four million views on YouTube.





Adrian Mursec, Senior Developer
The Dark Knight, Warner Brothers, 2007

The second film in the rebooted Batman franchise set a benchmark for what viral marketing could achieve. Whysoserious.com masqueraded as a website created by the film’s antagonist, The Joker. The site asked visitors to undertake a series of scavenger hunts - the final task asked fans to dress up in their own ‘Joker’ costumes, complete with face paints – in reward for preview clips and stills for the film. It has been one of the most successful user-driven marketing campaigns to date.





Tom Mason, Journalist
The Best Job In The World, Tourism Queensland, 2009

The tourist board for Queensland, Australia, produced an ingenious marketing campaign when it advertised a ‘caretaker’ postion for the Hamilton Island, just off the Queensland coast. The job required the successful applicant to work just 12 hours a month and offered a six –month contract worth Aus $150,000 (£70,000). Not surprisingly, the website had over 7,500 online applications and over 200,000 hits in the first 48 hours. 34,000 applicants from over 200 countries had entered by the time the competition closed. It is thought the campaign generated over US$70m of global publicity. The competition was eventually won by British entrant, Ben Southall.




Dan Nolan, Managing Editor
J’aime la Tour, VisitBlackpool, 2009

SKV’s recent commission for VisitBlackpool is clearly intended to catch people’s imaginations, presumably in the hope of the advert being shared around sites such as Facebook or Digg. Whether that will happen remains to be seen, but the campaign does succeed in both playing on and dismantling preconceptions of the destination in question – a common theme in recent tourism advertising – and juxtaposing French cinema with the Fylde coastline to comic effect.

The demise of MIVA


Manchester SEO theEword's Mark BakertheEword’s online marketing manager, Mark Baker, offers a eulogy for the Pay-Per-Click service

MIVA, once a giant in the Pay-Per-Click world, has closed down its UK operation. All PPC campaigns on the service have been terminated and any users wishing to continue their relationship with the company are required to sign up for an account with MIVA AK inc, the US-arm of the company, now under the ownership of Adknowledge. It is a sad end for a provider which, over eight years ago, set the benchmark for what a paid search could provide.

Admittedly, MIVA’s role in our PPC campaigns declined over time. The service offered a relatively profitable channel although it never matched the success and conversion rates of Yahoo! or Google. theEword had significantly reduced its use of MIVA at the time of its closure.

Still, I will be interested to learn what the reborn MIVA can offer and theEword will be trialling the latest incarnation of the service. As a company, we pride ourselves on exploring every possible way to drive traffic to our client’s websites. Our philosophy is to leave no paths unexplored and MIVA may well become a major part of our PPC strategy over the coming weeks and months.

One issue I heard repeatedly from employees and industry peers about MIVA was its lack of transparency. MIVA never released information relating to its coverage and MIVA never offered the transparency of Yahoo! or Google’s content network. As an online marketing manager, it is my responsibility to ensure a client’s money goes to the appropriate places. I want to know which websites are running a campaign. I want to know which demographic is responding and I want to know who is clicking through.

I intend to trial the new version of MIVA for a short period of time and already I am impressed by the addition of scheduling and analytics tracking – two features that were previously unavailable. Google and their ilk have long since surpassed the early benchmarks set by MIVA. In order to reassert itself, MIVA needs to be flexible and it should be focused on providing transparent results. Maybe then, it may start to make up some of its lost ground.

theEweekly News Wrap


Webby Awards announced

The Webby Awards, the digital industry’s version of The Oscars, were announced on Tuesday. British talent triumphed in the competition: the BBC News website was given two awards, while national broadsheet The Guardian scooped three prizes, including the coveted best newspaper website honour. Other notable winners were The New York Times and Twitter.

The Webby Awards are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a body made up of 550 leading web experts, business individuals and celebrities. The actual ceremony will take place in New York on 8 June, 2009.

Blocked bloggers

Online restrictions are tightest in Burma, a new report has revealed. A survey by the Committee to Protect Journalists has compiled a list of the 10 worst countries in which to be a blogger.

The report focused on the restrictions enforced on bloggers in a number of countries. It also highlighted numerous cases of censorship, internet monitoring and repression. Iran, Saudi Arabia and China were also featured on the list.

The heart of MySpace

The University of Wolverhampton has conducted a study investigating the use emotion on social networking sites such as Facebook. The study analysed thousands of MySpace comments in order to examine how users convey feelings online.

Early findings from the study suggested that women may be more in touch with their online feelings – the majority of female members send and receive more emotional comments than men.

The study also found that over 41 per cent of users used typographic slang or abbreviations such as ‘lol’ (laugh out loud), ‘bbs’ (be back soon), or ‘nsfw’ (not safe for work).

SEO In Translation


SEO featured in film?I imagine film posters are one of the most difficult forms of advertising. Indeed, when you consider what a movie poster needs to accomplish, it can be a daunting prospect.

A movie one-sheet needs to capture the imagination. It is a 27" x 40" piece of paper which has to grab the attention of everyone passing. It needs to convince individuals that the film it is advertising is worth two and a bit hours of their life.

There are many traditional ways to achieve this: a big name movie star in the centre of the page, an explosion in the background and some form of exciting slogan (‘This time, it’s war’ etc) being just three. Recently though, more and more film advertisements have been using SEO in an attempt to drive traffic onto their website and more film fans into the cinema.

As an SEO copywriter in Manchester, I’m always interested to see examples of the digital world flowing into the real one; the ways companies use television or print advertising to influence hits and conversions.

This bus advertisement for the upcoming Ron Howard film, Angels and Demons is a striking example of how SEO advertising can influence traffic.

Manchester SEO bus poster

What struck me is how this advertisement can obviously be broken into four key search terms.


  • Tom Hanks
  • Robert Langdon
  • Da Vinci Code
  • Angels and Demons


Predictably, any one of these search terms leads users to the Angels and Demons homepage. Just for good measure, the website is also included at the foot of the advertisement.

This poster shows a fundamental change in the way advertisers approach their audience. There’s a trend towards promotional materials stuffed with keywords – even if individuals do not remember the exact web address of the film, they are offered several memorable phrases to use as keywords when they return home to their desktop computers.

It is not just film advertising which is taking this approach to SEO advertisement - many companies are now solely advertising search terms in order to direct traffic to their websites; the Orange Wednesdays promotion and The British Army recruitment drive being just two examples.

While it is interesting to see the growing domination of natural SEO, it also gives us an indication on how users are moving away from the traditional address bar; relying on Google and their ilk to provide them with links to official sites and resources. More and more emphasis is being placed on natural SEO, both by the user and the industry.

Perhaps one day we will see a film poster with the tag line:

‘This must-see film is a great film with Tom Hanks in the latest Oscar-winning film.'

Or maybe not.

Facebook to ‘clean up’ links?


Cleaning up SEO URLsHere at theEword, we’re keen social networkers. We also love clean links (URLs). Sometimes, the two go hand in hand; social networking site MySpace, for example, offers users the chance to create clean and personalised URLs free of charge.

What exactly is a ‘clean’ link?

A clean link is simply a URL that is mainly lexical, and free of numbers, symbols and other such clutter. Let’s use theEword as an example. If we decided to create a MySpace page, a suitably clean link would be myspace.com/theEword.

Facebook and the clean URL debate

Currently, MySpace’s rival Facebook doesn’t offer these neat and tidy URLs. Links on the site comprise a series of numbers and symbols, making them messy and SEO-unfriendly.

The AllFacebook blog, however, has reported that the most popular social networking site in the world is asking users whether they would be prepared to pay for their own clean URLs.

Key rules of creating a good URL

One of the first rules when creating a good URL structure is to take search engine optimisation (SEO) into account. Good SEO enables a site to appear higher up in search rankings – this is great for getting a site noticed.

Including the subject matter of a page in the URL is excellent SEO practice. For example, the content team at theEword write copy for a laptop comparison site, ShopLaptop. A page comparing pink laptops can be found here. It’s smart to include ‘pink laptops’ in the URL, because once a user types in the search term ‘pink laptops’, Google recognises the page’s relevance and ranks it higher in the results. The URL should relate exactly to the content on the page too. It would be bad practice to use ‘toshiba-laptops’ in a link when the content is about Dell laptops.

Benefits of a good URL structure

It makes sense for business to consider URL structure when setting up websites. Good, clean URLs are not only easier for search engines to see and list, they are also far more user-friendly than their older alphanumeric counterparts. Enabling a user to see what content is on the page just by looking at the URL fosters a more intuitive browsing experience, which could aid conversions.

Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook seems to agree: “Facebook could theoretically make millions if people were willing to pay for short URLs. I know that every business would be dying to get their own clean URL.”

Writing SEO content for mobile phone sites

SEO mobile guide

As an SEO copywriter for theEword, I produce content for a variety of clients’ websites. Each of these sites has a unique target audience and at theEword we invest valuable time in understanding the readership of a specific client. We only develop content after we fully understand the desires and motivations of users.

This research is vital when writing web content which will be read using a mobile phone. Mobile content needs to be written with a specific audience in mind. Mobile users are different beasts to online browsers and there are a number of factors to take into consideration when writing mobile copy.

SEO content for the mobile user

Many users have to pay for internet access from their mobile phone. This is a huge factor in their online behaviour. Few want to spend money on mobile internet access, particularly when they may already pay for home broadband. Users want information. They want to know train times, bus schedules and answers to particularly difficult quiz questions. Unlike online browsers – who tend to graze online – mobile users are highly focused. They are hunting out specific nuggets of information.

Content should accommodate this browsing behaviour. Conveying information quickly is essential in writing for mobile sites and copy should be as clear and as concise as possible. Imagine what they want from the website. A mobile user searching for an Italian restaurant in Manchester is not going to be interested in the history of a venue. Likewise, an individual looking for film times at their local cinema doesn’t want to read about movies coming out in two months. Information needs to be ranked in order of relevance. Take the aforementioned restaurant browser. They’re going to want information such as:

  • Location
  • Contact details
  • Testimonials – Press/Individual reviews
  • Price range


Mobile copy needs to take into account these factors. Copywriting for mobile sites should be succinct and information should be presented in a logical way.

‘Top-down’ writing is one of the first skills taught in journalism and it comes into good use in the SEO copywriting arena; this means providing the reader with the basic information in the first few lines. Similarly, there is no place for literary flourishes in mobile copy. Sentences should be short and direct. Remember that a mobile user is viewing text on a screen the size of a credit card. There's no room for prose in mobile website SEO content.

theEweekly News Wrap


Parting is such Tweet sorrow

The recent explosion in the popularity of social networking giant Twitter may be temporary according to a new report. A survey from Nielsen Online has suggested that only 40 per cent of users who sign up for Twitter regularly will return to the site a month later. The survey comes amid the news that Twitter saw its users increase by an incredible 95 per cent in March this year.

Twitter has enjoyed a glut of publicity in recent months and coverage in national and regional publications is thought to have been responsible for the 10 million new users who signed up during March.

David Martin, Vice President of Primary Research at Nielson Online compared Twitter to rival networking sites Facebook and Myspace. He did not ‘tweet’ his analysis.

“Their [Facebook and Myspace] retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 per cent today.”

Google Swines

Google is helping medical officials track the recent outbreak of Swine Flu. The search engine company has created estimates of flu activity in Mexico based on the number of Google searches in each district of the country. This data is useful as it shows real-time interest in a topic; the number of people searching for specific phrases at a certain period. This process allows officials to track the spread of a virus based on internet searches.

Growth is good

This week saw the release of the brand new theEword website. The new site is designed to showcase the SEO and PPC services theEword provides. It also features a Twitter feed so you can keep in touch with all the news for theEworld. A big congratulations to all the team members who worked on the site. It looks cracking.