According to the online ad network Chitika, three-word search queries drive the most traffic from search engines, at least for organic search traffic.

When it comes to paid clicks, however, “the highest ad click rates were for queries of 5, 6 and 4 words.”

Yet there is no further segmentation of the data. So the results will include commercial and non-commercial data, different user types and more – all merged into one.

Advanced searchers usually use more words in their query, so as to avoid having to drill-down further into their results. So if I was looking for my local Staples store, I might search for “Staples store locator UK“, rather than “find Staples store“.

Yet some basic users might ask longer questions like “how do I find my nearest Staples store“.

While the fact that there are longer queries for the ads is of some interest, I don’t think the study scratches the surface when it comes to establishing why. I wouldn’t recommend changing your PPC or SEO tactics as a result.

There are those who believe that paying for Google AdWords ads will result in their previously invisible website shooting up the ‘regular’ rankings.

Sadly that simply isn’t the case. AdWords ads are completely separate from the organic listings.

However there is a very real possibility that ads may impact the CTR of organic listings, or, for that matter, vice-versa.

An article on search engine land details an experiment carried out by David Roth, whereby he attempted to prove that AdWords ads boost clicks to your organic listings:

“So in our case I ran around the building, loudly declaring victory. I mean, what could be better than buying paid search traffic knowing that you’re driving more clicks to your organic listings? Believe me, I’m not saying that it will turn out this way in every case. I’m just here to share my story with you, and mine happens to have a very, very happy ending.”

I’m not certain of his statistical accuracy, as I think far more data is required. But it’s certainly food for thought.

After all, the more we dominate Google’s results, the more clicks we’re guaranteed to generate. Simple really.

Practical eCommerce have produced the results of their SEO Survey.

Aside from the fact that they made no mention of how many people took part, let’s consider the highlights of each question and answer combination:

More than 95% of respondents though that SEO is important for their business.

Nearly all respondents claim to have a fair or good understanding of how SEO works, and 83% of them think that their website is optimised.

However, all opinions are built on the assumption that the respondent really does understand how SEO works. If you’ve spent any time at all on the various SEO forums, groups and mailing lists, you’ll already appreciate the difference between ‘understanding‘ and ‘thinking you understand‘.

Illusory superiority, as defined by Wikipedia, “causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others. This is evident in a variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or tests and the possession of desirable characteristics or personality traits.”

For example, as proven by extensive research, most people with below-average intelligence overestimate their intelligence.

And according to the Wikipedia entry:

A survey of faculty at the University of Nebraska found that 68% rated themselves in the top 25% for teaching ability.

A similar survey revealed that 87% of MBA students at Stanford University rated their academic performance as above the median.

And a survey of students in Sweden and the United States asked them to compare their driving safety to the other people in the experiment. 88% of the US group and 77% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%.

Enough said.

The just-launched Bing Twitter, aside from being an odd idea, is broken:

Marketing Pilgrim are reporting that the days of PageRank sculpting are over.

You mean you don’t know what PageRank sculpting is?

“PageRank sculpting is an advanced SEO technique that gained popularity in 2007, when Matt Cutts pointed out Google was using rel=”nofollow” to control which videos YouTube passed PageRank value (commonly referred to as “link juice”) to. SEOs liked the technique as something site owners could do to direct more link juice to more important pages, and not waste a page’s link authority on navigational links—but not anymore.”

Sigh, sigh, sigh.

The idea of PageRank is a simple one. From the article Introducing PageRank – shattering the myth:

“PageRank is undoubtedly an important factor in how much traffic you will receive from Google. It is, however, merely one component in your arsenal of tools to win the battle for one particular search engine. Even with the constantly evolving web, and the ever-tightening systems employed by the search engines to quantify the usefulness of a website, content is still by far the most important factor, and will invariably form the base on which everything else is built.”

So far so good, yet an astonishing number of people spend an incredible amount of time and energy chasing the elusive PageRank ghost.

Every single time there’s a Google Dance, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people all over the world panic, and hundreds of forums and newsgroups are full of panic-driven postings:

“Help! My PageRank has fallen from 6 to 5! What can I do?”

“My PageRank is down but I’ve done nothing wrong! What should I do to get it back?”

“I need help restoring my PageRank. Does anyone have a good contact in Google?”

If you’re planning on attending the Software Industry Conference next month, myself and Sharon Housley are co-presenting a session on “SEO – Tapping Into Google for Free” on Friday July 17th.

If you’re not going to be there, here’s the nutshell explanation:

Stop freaking out about PageRank. Build your website’s content instead.

There. That’s better.

I just came across a very useful tool from Microsoft, that allows you to see the URL of your choosing in IE6, 7 and 8. The final release will apparently include support for Firefox and Safari too.

“How many times have you had to debug your web pages on multiple machines running different versions of Internet Explorer? Or had to wait for a slow web service to return renderings of your pages?

You don’t have to do that anymore. Now you can debug your pages on multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the same machine that you use for development.”

Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer

Software developers, product designers and manufactures can learn a lot from Google.

They churn out new features at an incredible rate. Their new ideas are (mostly) useful. They don’t wait too long before releasing their offerings to the world (Gmail is still in beta). And they don’t dilute a great product with superfluous features.

Their latest most visible development has been the addition of a discrete link at the top of the search results:

Click it and you’re offered a number of options to refine your search:

However it’s the options themselves that are most interesting.

Videos already exists on the top navigation, yet they’ve seen fit to include this in the new options too. Stranger still is that clicking the top link gives slightly different results than the options.

Forums and Reviews also strikes me as an interesting development, as they suggest that an increasing number of people are searching for people’s experiences of a product, as opposed to the manufacturer and people selling it.

And the Any time options suggest that searchers are more interested in what’s being said now – as opposed to what was last indexed. Google will of course be monitoring which of these options are popular, and my guess would be that if recent results are in high demand, Google will be looking at indexing and displaying new content more quickly than at present. Three cheers for that idea.

And while I can see how Images from the page may be useful for recognising a site, I’m very intrigued by the More text option, which simply displays more text for each of the results.

Compare the two:

It’s worth noting that Google strive to stay ahead of their competition, and don’t simply try to copy and improve their better ideas. They also use the vast amounts of data that they have access to for their own ends. The canny online business won’t just be looking at Google’s new features and smiling or grimacing at them. They’ll be working out how to use them to their own advantage.

Read the signs.

I like to indulge myself a little on a Friday morning, and look for emerging trends across all of our client accounts. I did say a little.

When looking at which search engines send traffic to our clients, like Olympic events, the three medal winners stand on a podium. Unlike the Olympic podiums, the Gold medal winner stands several kilometres higher than the Silver medal winner, while the Bronze athlete is barely off the ground.

What I find particularly strange is that this has changed very little over the last five years or so. While we’ve seen Windows Live slide into third place, many websites find the traffic to be incredibly poorly targeted. So in terms of quality, Google are in first place, Yahoo in second place and in third place… Ask? AOL?

As in many things technology related, it’s effectively a two-horse race:

And even though Yahoo are trailing far behind Google in pretty much any metric you care to choose, they are still in second place. And in a world where so many people are getting annoyed with Google, one of the Yahoo’s greatest strengths, perversely, may simply be not being Google. For now at least.

If we were to draw up a pie chart of all the search engines with an approximation of their market share, we’d see Google dominating the vast majority of the market, Yahoo taking a very small piece of the pie, and all the others barely registering as crumbs.

And while markets changes with time, realistically, the likes of AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Go.com aren’t competing with Yahoo and Google, they’re competing with each other. The only engine competing with Google is Yahoo.

Most, if not all, technology markets show similar patterns, and the software market is no exception to the rule.

Whether it’s email clients, image editors, database software, financial management, Twitter clients, newsreaders, security suites and so on, there is always the dominant leader, the #2 choice, and then all the others.

If you’re one of the others, or one of the crumbs in the pie, you can’t possibly hope to compete with the #1 slot. Yet if your product and marketing are good enough, you do have a chance of climbing above the other crumbs, and giving #2 something to worry about. And if you can eventually take over his position, then (and only then) are you in a position to start posing a threat to the person on the top.

The much-respected Rand Fishkin has written a fascinating post on how some of the key factors in Google’s ranking system have changed over time.

How Google’s Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time

Rand believes that the so-called “Raw PageRank / Link Juice” has fallen quite dramatically over the years, while the “Trust / Authority of Host Domain” has risen dramatically.

He has a nice chart in his posting that clearly communicates his theories on the rise and fall of four different SEO factors.

Yet read the comments below his post, and you start to see the inevitable dissection, over-analysis and uber-theorising.

“If there’s less reliance on anchor text, would you say there’s also been an increased reliance on the context of the link, ie the keywords around the link itself?”

“I no longer think about writing those pages with a 3/4% keyword ratio or to please anyone other than the visitor.”

“Raw PageRank/ Linkjuice + Anchor Text Links = Trust/Authority.”

Here’s the problem. Too many people are unhealthily obsessed with factors that they can’t control, understand or really use to their advantage.

We all know that the original PageRank concept was inspired, but there are people out there who check and record their “pagerank” on a daily basis. It’s like taking your blood pressure on an hourly basis, and wondering if a sudden spike is because of what you ate for breakfast.

The fact is that if your website has history, and if you’ve always optimised it using content and common-sense, you’ll do well in the search engines. It really is (usually) that simple.

If, on the other hand, you follow people’s theories and interpretations on how to ‘get around’ the latest Google dance, frantically applying new techniques and strategies across your website/s, sooner or later you’ll trip over your own feet.

A good dancer can dance well to any type of music. And a well setup website with good content will perform well in the search engines. Usually.

In what I can only describe as a somewhat surprising move, Google has penalized yet another website for buying links:  Google Japan.  Matt Cutts was the first to mention it when he Twittered that Google.co.jp  has seen a significant drop in PageRank, and it was later discussed in more detail over at Google Blogoscoped.

Apparently, the specific mistake that Google Japan made was to pay bloggers to review a new Google Widget.  They have since apologized, and ended that particular promotion.

Of course, it’s not a penalty that’s likely to harm Google Japan.  Google still shows up at #1 when you search for Google – and you’re not likely to search Google for Google anyway, are you? (My head is spinning a little at the thought, actually).

What it does seem to have achieved is to serve as a reminder that no, you are not supposed to buy or sell links. And, unsurprisingly, reignited the old arguments about that particular issue.