Search Engines

Compliance has always been an issue for pharma brands, and no brand wants to be called out for being unscrupulous or misleading. But isn’t the real issue here around clarity? If you are marketing prescription products to an audience of healthcare professionals, not patients, is it really necessary to make them jump through hoops to see the content on your site? We think not. In fact, we’re starting to see a strong movement away from traditional disclaimers to softer on-site disclaimers that clearly state the intended audience. Using plain language that everyone can understand, and providing options for visitors who have inadvertently clicked on an ad, a search result, or a shared link that isn’t intended for them, is quickly becoming the new trend for disclaimers.Let’s start with

It is well known that pharmaceutical brands are often reluctant to use social media channels due to heavy industry regulations and fear of engaging with consumers in an uncontrolled space. However, here is a new platform that pharma brands may end up adopting more rapidly due to it having a number of ‘pharma-friendly’ features - Google+. As of Tuesday, Google+ has launched branded pages. Given that they appear to be very similar to the ones on Facebook, numerous bloggers have criticised the new feature for being unoriginal. Nevertheless, a number of companies (including Nitro!) have decided to see for themselves how they could utilise this new social media channel. After using the page for a couple of days, we have spotted a number of advantages that Google+ has over Facebook that

Google has introduced the new Analytics back in March 2011. Although I still use the old version, the new GA has definitely improved user experience by adding in new features. Below, I am going to share a few of my favourite features of the new Analytics. Real-time (beta) This report gives you an idea of what is happening on your site right now. It gets interesting if you have a website that has high traffic volume. Also, you will easily benefit from this report if you are running a social media campaign or a TV campaign. You will be able to find out how quickly users react to your Facebook page update, a tweet, or a TV ad and get the first impression on how effective a campaign is to engage users.  This video by Darren from problogger has given a great demonstration on the Real-time

Nitro is a very international organisation; we speak 11 or so languages here, but that doesn’t really cut it. We do multi-lingual keyword research, occasionally we have to do stuff in languages we don’t have. I speak English, Japanese and enough Hebrew to order an ice cream and understand when someone needs their photo taken, but I have so far managed to avoid Russian.It just so happened that yesterday I was polishing off some work in Russian. I love keyword research, so I decided to play a game to make it even more interesting. Instead of batch translating all the keywords from the Google keyword tool using Google translate, I did them individually, and didn’t copy them over to my excel sheet, but typed the answers in manually. I can’t read the Cyrillic alphabet, but even so, the

In the style of the MTV celebrity death matches from a few years ago (are MTV still around?), Facebook and Google are one hell of a grudge match, whether they say so or not. They're two of the biggest hitters out there on the web , but I’m not sure that one will be submitting or tapping out anytime soon. For now they have sewn up one each of the two key elements of how we all spend our time online (let’s ignore email for now). Both definitely want 'in on' the others ‘domain’. Facebook want to integrate web searching and buying, and Google wants to integrate our social lives into the SERPs. If either succeed they will make a serious dent into the others market. Google will increasingly use social criteria to enhance the relevance of the results and therefore increase their

Imagine what you could do with your body is technology allowed you...well thanks to Google we can go back to using our bodies the way that they were meant to open mail and reply to messages. Gmail Motion allows you to move your body to perform certain actions, picked up by your computer's webcam. Imagine the possibilities! However, considering the date (April 1st) it may be worth considering that this is another Google April Fool's joke. Very clever guys...

In my last post I blogged a little about saying the right thing to get seen on the web. Today, I’ve written about keywords and search engine optimisation again, but from a different perspective. When I first discovered the internet, I was intrigued to find a world mostly made up of text and images. Finally, I had an outlet where my word would be appreciated. However, the web has not been ‛that“ kind of place for a long time. Anyone who has used Facebook or Twitter understands that these guys sort your newsfeed.The same is true of the rest of the web. When you Google something like ‛Angiogenesis“ there are 32,300,000+ results, and one of the main ways in which they are sorted is by PageRank. So, how are results sorted to increase the probability that a user clicking on links

Hey, we all know that! During the holiday season nobody wants to be thinking too much about how bad life can get or how annoying constipation (yeah that too!) can be. Even if this is a known fact, it has been quite interesting  finding data from search engines to corroborate that. Here is a chart for global search trends in Google for keywords that are categorised as 'health' search queries:

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The red line represents 2008 and the blue line 2009. It is quite clear that people do not search for health related keywords during the Christmas period. Even if this trend can be studied using many different categories and internet traffic in general, I have researched to see if that was common to all categories. Results show that December search volume is lower for categories that are

According to Mashable, last week's (exceptionally) fun logo by Google, celebrating the 30th anniversay of the cult 80s videogame, ending up costing the world's productivity $120,483,800 - or 82 million man-hours. Rescue Time crunched the numbers, but you have to admit that this is a scary yet-exciting use of the Google brand who were effectively able to stop the world from working!

As the title suggests Internet World 2010 is everything related to the web in a conference/expo format. Some of the big web hosts were there, Rackspace were pushing there new no more servers and had a huge stand as you walked in, Ukfast probably had the biggest stand and most appeal with a race car right in the middle of the expo floor, obviously a big win for the amount of men and suits who attended Earls Court 2 (yesterday) As you can imagine there were numerous businesses there talking about social media and the impact it is having on businesses. Many of the companies who presented actually in my humble opinion actually missed the point of social media, (this for me) is where the web is made fair more personal, where work is personalised via the internet and allows you to make personal