According to W3Counter (as of June 2010), Internet Explorer 8 holds the lead in the market with 26.17% of the market, followed closely by Firefox 3.6 at 23.11%.

The surprise comes from the next 2 browsers in line.  Showing their very poor system of providing upgrades (as compared to Firefox), the bug ridden Internet Explorer 7 sits at #3 with 11.41% of the market…and the fourth most popular browser is Google Chrome 5 at 9.45% of the market.

Amazingly, for all the hype around Mac’s, Apple’s Safari 4 is the 8th most popular browser at less than 2% of the market.

As for Internet Explorer 6, it still hangs on at #5 with 6.79% of the market.  Hannush Enterprises has finally decided to put IE6 out to pasture as of the end of calendar year 2010.  Meanwhile we will now change our focus from Safari to Google Chrome as a 10% market share makes it a viable player in the market.

This does not mean you should give up completely on Safari.  If your business targets people who use Mac’s or your server stats show a large group of Safari users, you may still want to pay attention to it.  But for the average site, it looks like IE8, Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome should be your main focus.

Today two of those companies combined their results.  Yahoo! now is supplied search results from Bing and low and behold…when searching “Web Design Greenville” in both Bing and Yahoo! we finally cracked #1.  Persistence pays off (along with a helpful merger)!

It will be a couple of weeks until we get a real handle on how Yahoo and Bing are going to handle search results, but this shows that if you design a website with good clean code, a strong SEO based content management system and you get yourself established, it will all pay off.

But notice the screenshot of Google below. By announcing the new site launch in our blog, within two hours after the announcement, we were able to get the announcement indexed by Google under a search for “Gianni Panini, Biltmore.”

Of course, our ultimate goal is to get the Gianni Panini site winning under searches for Biltmore and Asheville. But it is unrealistic to expect instant Google results, without a lot of money and work.  Results in 2 hours is even more unrealistic…but now the company can get some recognition and there is a better chance someone can stumble into the site.

So keep on coming up with things to talk about and get those keywords out there.  Your blog can be an extra lifeline to product launches, events, and other timely updates.

Reid and Reid Pediatric Dentistry and Orthodontics in Hendersonville, NC was just one such client.  They had just launched their website in mid-June and they weren’t showing up at all in searches.

The first thing we have to do is educate the customer on how search engines like Google penalize new websites to protect the quality of their search results.  The expectation is, for the first six months to a year, your website will only have its home page (and maybe a couple extra pages) spidered by the search engines.  This greatly lowers your chance of being stumbled upon. In addition, because you don’t have many, if any relative links coming to your site from reputable sources, Google still doesn’t know if you are a real website or a spamming website.

Then once the expectation has been set, we then look at the variety of solutions that will get the customer’s site in front of the public the fastest (without using blackhat techniques) via the search engines.

With Reid and Reid it took a little review of the code of the website, looking at who would be searching for them and what they would be searching for, and then building their strength in both organic and local searches.

We are in the early days, but we already have the site moving quickly up the ladder.  For searches in Hendersonville, NC they come up in the Local Business Center at #1 or #2 and in many organic searches Reid and Reid can be found on page two of searches, where they weren’t found at all before we began our campaign.  There are ways to gain quicker results, but in this case, the client wanted to stay within budget.  They can expect results in 2-3 months rather than 6-12 months through this lower cost solution.

If you have a new website or are planning a new site, talk to us about how we can help you get listed in the search engines faster and Search Engine Marketing plans that could have you beating your competition in a fraction of the time.

The rebranded Hannush Web is now online.

The first thing you’ll notice is our new logo.  A variation on the previous logo, this one establishes a bolder presence.  This is to coincide with our evolution into a bolder arena of web programming and development.

The next thing you’ll notice is a more simplistic design.  Gone are the long drawn out explanations of our services. We believe the best way to understand if our services are right for our potential customers is for them to talk with us about their projects and to see and experience our portfolio of work.

In addition, the black color of our site helps our designs pop more on the pages of our portfolio.  It is that work, after all, that is the important part of a web design company’s web site.

Over the last eight years we have moved from developing simply designed, easy-to-navigate websites to greatly enhanced customized projects.  And while we continue to grow our talents and focus in the world of programming, search engine marketing, and social media, we still hold on to our tradition of creating attractive, simple to use websites.

We look forward to introducing our new look over the next few months and engaging new customers with our same level of professional, timely customer service and communication.  We hope you enjoy the new website and we would love to have your feedback.

Sincerely,
Drew Hannush and the Hannush team.

Time to retool your website for Bing results?  Probably not yet, but as long as the advertising budget of Microsoft stays attuned, it continues to be something to watch.

eWeek article

For comedy, these were great:

And the best one…

And looking at the statistics for bit.ly isn’t much help, because bit.ly uses the same URL for others as well and counts them as the same.

I tried an experiment, using Twitterfeed.com and my WordPress blog. I placed the italic code into my feed link…then provided this as my feed link for Twitter to Twitterfeed.com:

http://www.hannush.com/blog/feed/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=twitterfeed.com&utm_campaign=Social+Media?rss

That did not work.

I post using TweetDeck mostly…and it adds in a URL shortener automatically, but doesn’t track automatically.

So, it looks like I will continue to manually make my links.  At least there is one URL shortening company that lets you add the tracking for Twitter as part of making the link.  Check it out: http://kl.am (click “kustomize” to get it to work).

Also, there are some more difficult ways to achieve it:

RavenSEOtools.com

Avengate Blog

Yoast

But I will warn you, these are not for the faint of heart. They require server access and a little HTML.

Twitterfeed.com says it has UTM code, but I haven’t seen it yet.  I’ll keep looking, because while its nice to get the extra traffic, it would be nice to measure it.

If you know of any simple methods for getting this tracking into Google Analytics, I’d love to hear it

When you write an article, you place it in a category.  A category is a general concept that the post fits, such as healthcare or IT.  A tag is more specific and helps people find hot or popular topics…such as Apple iPad, hospital care, influenza…etc.  In programs like WordPress your tags will actually create pages titled with this tag keyword…and showing only stories related to that keyword…great for search engines and for giving people a way to scout hot topics.

Check out the tags I used on this article and see how this could be useful for you and your readers.

UPDATE: What once was, is no more. Apparently the organization that owned this content has decided to block it off to membership only. Our apologies.

This form is quite handy and can get you off to a good start. Remember though, an air tight privacy policy is best reviewed by your attorney. This might be a good way to get him or her started, so you can save some money.