The captioning makes it easier for deaf people to enjoy online video content but also means that the keywords in the script will be searchable and can help to boost a website’s placing in the search engine results.

The captioning has been made possible using Google Voice technology, which automatically generates captions based on text-to-speech algorithms.

The captioning technology is expected to be able to support 50 languages eventually. Experts claim that optimising videos for search is a good idea. They claim that including original, keyword-rich video content will now help to boost a website’s SEO capabilities.

Videos with clear speech are thought to be the easiest to caption, according to search experts so marketers would also be wise to bear this in mind when creating or commissioning videos. Video news is now an even greater way to boost the presence of a website on the search engine results.

This article was brought to you by Newsvend – delivering online news, videos and other unique content.

Conducted between 28th December and 19th January, the survey showed that only local and national TV news sources surpass online news as the favoured choice for Americans.

Of those questioned, 61 per cent said that they usually get their news online, 78 per cent refer to local news channels and 71 per cent get their news from a national TV network, such as ABC or CBS or from a cable channel such as CNN.

Some 54 per cent of people said that they get their news from the radio, 50 per cent from a local newspaper and a mere 17 people of people questioned said they regularly read a national newspaper.

The survey showed that 90 per cent of Americans refer to more than one source for their news, and 57 per cent access news from two to five websites per day.

Also interesting to note is the advance of mobile online news, with 33 per cent of respondents saying that they get news on their handsets.

This article was brought to you by Newsvend – delivering online news, blogs and other unique content.

Researchers also uncovered trends towards poorly formatted internal linking, no social media involvement or bookmark-sharing icons where applicable and serious issues with page/site download times.

The goal of Google Caffeine is to enhance the user search experience by providing more accurate and relevant results pages, combined with a real-time search feature.

Scott Moir says 85 per cent of firms studied by his SEO research team were not optimised to benefit from the update to Google's search architecture.

"It's apparent that businesses and individuals that depend on the internet for their prosperity have yet to take advantage of the multitude of opportunities that Caffeine presents," he comments. "Opportunities that, if properly applied, will immediately help them gain a marketing advantage over their competition."

Caffeine has been summed up by experts as "an algorithmic change" focusing on more real-time search results and incorporating social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Greater prominence is therefore given to news and real-time information like social media updates and online video.

This article was brought to you by Newsvend – delivering online news and unique website content.

The change means anyone with a Google account will notice that their search results feature information gathered from their social networks, including photos and blog content connected to queries.

As Google search vice-president Marissa Mayer revealed at last year's Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, the aim is to make the search experience more personal and relevant with the inclusion of web content from individuals' friends and online contacts.

Social Search's arrival also follows the integration of real-time Twitter posts into results, wherever the search engine considers them to be relevant, to make the search experience as thorough and speedy as possible. News headlines, blogs and Facebook/MySpace feeds also feature in real-time search results.

"We think there's tremendous potential for social information to improve search, and we're just beginning to scratch the surface," the search team explain on the Google blog, adding: "We're leaving a 'beta' label on social results because we know there's a lot more we can do."

In it, he responds to a user query centred on the importance of page load time and "recentness" compared to a website's content relevancy. Cutts emphasises that the latter remains the most important factor in Google's search results, though he acknowledges the pertinence of a given website's load time.

"If you have two sites that are equally relevant (same backlinks … everything else is the same), you'd probably prefer the one that's a little bit faster, so page speed can be an interesting theory to try out for a factor in scoring different websites," he remarks.

"But absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search result that we can find. That's not going to change," he continues.

Caffeine, the updated version of Google's "search architecture", increases the speed at which the engine can index website content, which is what led analysts to suggest webmasters "help their sites along" by making them as fast and user-friendly as possible – within reason – while maintaining content relevance.

At the end of last year, Cutts also hinted in a video interview for WebProNews that speed could make its way into the engine's natural search algorithms: "It's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."

This article was brought to you by Newsvend – delivering online news and unique website content.

Since both Bing and rival search engine Google weigh up a wide range of website content when it comes to ranking sites, businesses should factor web pages, documents, mash-ups, videos and images into their search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns, digital marketing and SEO specialist Mike Dobbs tells Search Engine Land.

"These are just a few avenues marketers can leverage to more proactively communicate with search engines to increase visibility, relevance and search display," he observes. He also recommends utilising Google and Bing's webmaster tools and investing in website analytics to track the success of a given online marketing campaign.

The roll-out of Google Caffeine has been cited as further reason for prioritising the inclusion of regular, unique website content as the wider search market evolves.

An algorithmic change focusing on more real-time search results and incorporating social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, Caffeine is expected to push older web pages down rankings as the search engine allocates greater prominence to news and real-time information like social media updates and online video.

This article was brought to you by Newsvend – delivering online news and unique website content.

According to Singhal, the relevance of content from the site is determined in a similar way to how the Mountain View giant's PageRank function works.

With PageRank, which helps locate relevant web pages with traditional search, Google assesses the importance of pages containing a given keyword partly by looking at the pages' link structure: the more pages that link to a page, the more relevant it is.

Regarding tweets, the 140-character microblog posts created by members of Twitter, Singhal tells the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review that the key when compiling search results identifying "reputed followers".

"You earn reputation, and then you give reputation," he observes. "One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the web. Both are a form of recommendation."

As high-quality pages link to another page on the web, he explains, the quality of the linked-to page rises. With social media, as established users follow other users then the quality of the followed user goes up.

In addition to Twitter, Google scans news headlines, blogs and feeds from Facebook and MySpace to compile its real-time search results.

Outlining his "organic search marketing goals" for the year ahead, search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist Jeffrey Cleary points out to business owners that 90 per cent of organic search marketing happens off-site.

"It's important to remember that the key to getting great search engine rankings has more to do with online reputation and other sites linking to yours instead of what the site itself says," he confirms. "A perfectly SEO-optimised site can still be out-performed by a poorly optimised site with higher quality in-bound links."

Cleary points out that, when ranking websites and web pages in search results, Google "looks" at a site to see what it has to say about itself, analysing its content and links and cataloguing its topics. But the search engine also looks at where the site links to, on what anchor text it links and the number of times it comes across links to the site.

"In short, the quality and sometimes quantity of links to a site tells Google more information about a site than what the site itself has to say," he concludes.

This article was brought to you by Newsvend – delivering online news and unique website content.

Results on the toolbar are evaluated from 0 to 10, the latter being an indicator for the most popular website pages and 0 indicating poor ranking behaviour.

One SEO analyst, Matt Bullas, deemed it "surprising" that the Mountain View giant opted to update the PageRank toolbar on the last day of 2009 – a day when many SEO firms are closed.

He added: "The PageRank toolbar is a handy piece of website optimisation instrument and can help clients and corporations alike to keep an eye on the current ranking trends of the website they are visiting."

Webmasters are urged not to "become spellbound" by the numbers represented by the toolbar at any given time, however, instead focusing on a well-implemented SEO strategy, high-quality website content and regular content updates containing strong keywords. Content should also be kept unique and relevant to a site's target audience.

This article was brought to you by Newsvend – delivering online news and unique website content.

Nonetheless, below are the considerations website editors should bear in mind when optimising content for any engine – search, "decision" or otherwise:

• Plenty of high-quality, original content is a must. It should be regularly updated, kept unique and relevant to the target audience.

• As well as sufficient good-quality inbound links, Bing favours sites which link to other destinations so include plenty of outbound links as well.

• Consider buying old, established domains as older, trusted websites filled with fresh content stand to fare best.

• Impeccable title tags are another Bing preference – check and double-check that they (and the pages they link to) are correct.

• Bing favours web pages featuring at least 300 words of content but appears not to appreciate blogs in the same way, or at least as much, as its Mountain View rival.

This article was brought to you by Newsvend – delivering online news and unique website content.