The politician is also planning to use social networking sites to try to get people involved in a global deal on climate change.

In his new role, Prescott is responsible for finding out the opinion of the public and reporting back to the Council before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

The Copenhagen meeting will bring together more than 90 countries to find a way to keep global warming below two degrees C by 2050.

Mr Prescott is also launching a new website, New Earth Deal, designed to promote the idea of a fairer settlement on climate change by requiring bigger cuts in emissions by rich countries and financial help for developing countries.

Online Marketing is fast becoming the most effective way of promoting any kind of business or event and with the help of blogs and social media yours can now be found easier.

For more information on all of our online marketing services including blogging, website development and search engine optimisation please visit the THUK website.

With this in mind Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone believes it will lead new users to more compelling questions like “How do I get Involved?” which theoretically will lead to more users joining the service.

Biz Stones own words:

“Defining a ‘tweet’ for the uninitiated and explaining how to create an account doesn’t resonate with everyone. ‘Why would I want to do that?’ is a common reaction. However, demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, ‘How do I get involved?’”

What’s New?

Besides the new look, Twitter’s home page now has a search box where non-registered users can search for a term of their choice and see what the twitter community is saying about it.

On the same lines as the search box, Twitter’s home page is also showing popular topics by minute, day and week, which highlights even further Twitter’s power for real time search results; again you don’t need to be a registered user to see what’s hot.

We want to hear from you now, what do you think of Twitter revamped home page? Will this incite more users to join the service?

P.S: If you already have an account you need to logout to see the new front page.

In the beginning of the month, Digg surprised its community by removing its shouts systems, this action divided Digg’s community and raised the question: Is Digg a Better Place without Shouts?

Straight after that came one of the most exciting news of the whole month, Microsoft launched Bing with a record breaking marketing campaign of $100 million.

To outshine Bing, Google announced on the same day two new products to revolutionise customised search, real time communication and file sharing. The first is Google Squared, a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify and it is already available for users.

The second is due to make its day view later this year, its name, Google Wave, a real time communication platform that combines aspects of email, wikis, web chat, social networking, project management and file sharing all in one powerful in-browser communication client.

After two weeks from its launch, Bing’s first statistics showed an increase in its market share by 2% and that was enough to raise Sergey Brin eyebrows, Google’s co-founder himself will be leading a team of search engineers that will study Bing’s algorithm to determine where it differs from the one he created together with his classmate Larry Page back in 1998, more about it here: “Fear Grips Google” says the NY Post.

And last but least the announcement by Matt Cutts that PageRank Sculpting could no longer be performed using the nofollow tag in links, this sent a shockwave over SEO community with the proportions of a tsunami, for detailed information about this announcement you can read: Tofollow or Nofollow: That is the Question.

That is all the action from the search engine optimisation world, hope you enjoyed and stay tuned for more.

First thing you need to know about a keyword is its search volume, the higher the better, Google Keywords Tool is showing local search volume now which is very useful for geo-targeted sites. Once you have the search volume you need to compare against the competition on that given keyword, here is a simple rule of thumb, higher search volume against low competition.

Ok, now you have the search volume and the competition of your keywords, but what if you wanted to know more about it, like how many sites are using your keywords on their title tags? For that you will need a special command when you perform a search just type intitle:keywordname to refine it use intitle:”keywordname” that will give an exact match.

What about how many sites have my keywords in their URLS? To find that out use inurl:keywordname again to refine it inurl:”keywordname”.

Want to know how many sites have your keywords in the anchor text of links point back to them? Use inanchor:keywordname and to find out how many sites use your keywords in their description tags use intext:keywordname

Always remember to refine results to an exact match just quote the term, this also works for a normal search query.

All these commands are very useful to tell how much competition a certain keyword has and to determine how hard it will be to rank for them.

Google Wave is a real time communication platform that combines aspects of email, wikis, web chat, social networking, project management and file sharing all in one powerful in-browser communication client.

Since Google announced this super communication platform, the buzz around it has been so huge that it outshone Microsoft’s Bing, coincidence or not Google announced Google Wave on the same day Microsoft confirmed Bing would be the name of its new search engine.

Unfortunately, our SEO team here at THUK haven’t had the pleasure to test Google’s new toy yet, Google Wave is only available for a few lucky developers as an alpha version so we have to rely on reviews we found over the internet to talk about it.

Ben Parr from Mashable is one of the lucky users who had the chance to test it and posted a guide to Google Wave, even though the product is not even out yet.

Danny Sullivan from SEL was at the official announcement at Google I/O and live blogged about it.

When it is ready, Google Wave will be a live flexible stream of conversation to best suit users needs, a full integration with Google Docs is already confirmed plus the ability to handle any kind of data inside a wave.

To finish things of here is a video of Google Wave official announcement at this years Google I/O.

The only way to share your submissions now is via email, Facebook, Twitter or IM. I’m not sure what Digg’s intentions were when they decided to remove shouts, for me that was the best way to keep up to date with my friends’ submissions and share my submissions with them.

No more shouts means it will be even harder for average Digg users to try and get their stories promoted to the first page. Some might say, write good and appealing content and your stories will receive diggs and eventually become popular, well, now more than ever I can agree with that and thanks to the recommendation engine stories could reach a broader audience.

I am divided about these changes implemented by Digg, from one side it will be harder for me to track my likeminded friends activities, whose stories I enjoy, and without shouting my stories to my friends, I believe the numbers of diggs on my submission will drop drastically. But on the other hand, this could make Digg’s home page a bit more democratic with good content writers managing to break through what is dominated by a dozen or so called Power Diggers.

Besides from not making my mind up yet on Digg being a better place with or without shouts, I have some questions that hopefully I find the answers in the weeks to come.

1 – Has Digg’s Algorithm changed?

2 – Will the numbers of submissions of average Digg users drop without shouts?

3 – Is Digg protecting its “Power” users by removing shouts and reducing the chances of average users getting their stories promoted to the first page?

Are you a Digger? If so what you have to say about Digg removing the shouts the button?

Feel free to express your feeling and thoughts in our comments section.

According to a stat tracking company, Twitter’s retention is at the 60% mark, which means that 60% of users who sign fail to return the next month. A few factors could be related to these low retention rate like the fact that most people are using Twitter via desktop applications like Twhirl and continue Tweeting and never return to Twitter.com.

Why don’t people stick around is the million dollar question, more importantly, what improvements are required to make users stick around? Have your say in our comments section.

• Their picture
• Their first and/or last name
• Your nickname
• Where you grew up
• Where you live
• Where you work
• Schools you’ve attended
• A biography
• Links to web sites you wish to list
• Pictures from your Picasa, Flickr or other online photo albums
• Contact information, which can be shared selectively with people

All these new features were added to improve people search, have you ever Googled your name or a friend’s name and was disappointed with the results? With these updates Google hopes to solve these issues.

Your profile is a web page, so far all the links in there don’t have the nofollow tag, so it is a good place to add personal links, for example from your blog or your website, you can also personalise the URL of your profile mine is http://www.google.com/profiles/felipesplinter.

Do we really need to expose ourselves by adding as much information as possible on our Google Profile and could it go against us in a future situation?

Digg promised to release an update to the DiggBar that would solve all the problems regarding link juice, link credits and indexing of the shortened URLs, so far nothing happened, what a surprise.

The post on Digg’s official blog says that the DiggBar was created to improve user experience and that the vast majority of Digg users find it valuable but if you look at the comments on the same subject posted on Digg you will see that Digg users have a totally different opinion to it.

I’m one those users who don’t approve of this framed content format that Digg is using, this weekend I came across a very interesting post about how to block the DiggBar and here it is, check it out and tell me what you think, will Digg really update the DiggBar?

Last year Volvo spent £19.75m on advertising, excluding paid search and internet accounted for just 3% of this, or £695,500.

Volvo UK’s head of marketing communications, Anita Fox said that while the car company has reduced its overall marketing spend, channels such as natural search and social media have seen their budgets increased.

‘While we’ve always focused on SEO, as we revise budgets we’re putting more focus on the digital area, including natural search and social media.’

Fox said the success of last year’s Creative 30 campaign, in which it partnered with The Independent and Yahoo to look for creative stars of the future and get involved with a younger audience, had convinced Volvo of the effectiveness of a social-media focused marketing approach.

‘This is an area that’s growing rapidly. You can’t get the same reach for the same budgets now as you would this time last year. This year we’re taking what we’ve learned from the C30 campaign and going much wider.’

Volvo’s focus on social media reflects the car brand’s new ‘Life is better lived together’ slogan.

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