As experts in the online marketing realm moot the growth of mobile campaigns as 2010 progresses, a move driven by newer devices and analytics tools, representatives for text message-based search engine ChaCha have revealed it is already making its mark on a landscape dominated by Google.

Going live in January 2008, the mobile search service is shown by Nielsen Mobile figures to have surpassed the Mountain View giant in mobile text traffic between July and September last year. The traffic came from web users predominantly under the age of 25.

"Many did not believe we could scale our business model," ChaCha chief executive Scott Jones remarked to reporters. "We now have over 15 million monthly unique visitors via mobile and online, and we're just now ready to stomp on the gas to achieve even higher traffic growth, both online and mobile."

To use ChaCha's service, users must text questions to 242-242 to receive an answer in minutes. In the era of the smartphone, analysts say this is attractive to non-users and possibly heralds a new opening for the world of search engine optimisation.

McDonald's and Coca-Cola are among hundreds of enterprises to avail of ChaCha's advertising opportunities so far.

As a growing number of people access the internet via their mobile phones rather than their computers, the launch of Google's own-brand handset, the Nexus One, is being heralded as "the next frontier" in the Mountain View giant's billion-pound core business: selling online advertising through search.

Marking the first time Google has designed and sold its own consumer hardware device, the Nexus One has just been unveiled at the company's California base. It runs version 2.1 of the Android operating system and incorporates applications including Google Maps Navigation and a "weather widget" which supplies immediate forecasts for a user's location.

"The Nexus One belongs in the emerging class of devices which we call 'superphones', with the 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset making it as powerful as your laptop computer of three to four years ago," remarked Andy Rubin, Google's vice-president of engineering. "It's our way to raise the bar on what's possible when it comes to creating the best mobile phone experience for consumers."

Although Google will profit from sales of the smartphone, Rubin has acknowledged that the main aim of its launch is to promote mobile web use and boost the company's online advertising business. This tallies with observations made by search analysts that the Nexus One marks a strategic move towards tapping into increasing direct web use by mobile phone owners.

As search giant Google prepares to roll out Caffeine – an algorithmic change focusing on more real-time search results and incorporating social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter – web designers are being urged to pay more attention than ever to the inclusion of regular, unique content on their sites.

The consequence for websites lacking fresh content, such as that provided via news feeds or other regular updates, will be a drop in search rankings, search engine optimisation (SEO) experts warn.

While an official release date for Caffeine has yet to be confirmed, Google search quality specialist Matt Cutts has suggested it will begin functioning this month. In any case, web users are unlikely to notice the under-the-hood upgrade but will experience an increase in search speeds, particularly when it comes to photos and video upload speeds.

Older web pages are likely to be moved further down rankings as the search engine allocates greater prominence to news and real-time information like social media updates and online video.

Another change set to be monitored by SEO analysts is the difference in outcome of long-tail search queries in contrast to those featuring generic terms, with the latter more likely to produce the aforementioned real-time results.

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Employ "every optimisation tactic" possible: that's the advice for enterprises keen to increase their brands' profitability through Google AdWords. Launching a campaign before it is completely optimised poses a risk to online marketing campaigns, according to Chris Crompton of Search Engine Land, because "first impressions can be hard to overcome".

"Your quality score will be hugely impacted by how Google predicts you will perform," he notes, pointing out that monitoring conversion rates as bids are raised is also a must, since more bids can lead to a drop in the quality of traffic.

"As you raise bids, keep an eye on your search query report," he continues, recommending the inclusion of "irrelevant non-converting keywords and sites as negatives" to clean up traffic: "If the profitability of your broad match keywords is becoming a problem, you may also consider bidding separately for broad matches."

Crompton identifies three dangers when it comes to selecting winning ads based on conversion rates:

• Webmasters who don't regularly pause losing ads may be better off letting Google optimising for them: "It is better to optimise based on a suboptimal factor than not optimise at all."

• Diligently optimising ads for conversion rate risks business owners missing out on profit from additional, click-through conversions.

• Choosing ads with lower click-through rates and a higher conversion rate will increase bid prices and could lower profitability. Pausing an ad with a higher click-through rate will see bid prices start to increase.

Boosted traffic, maintained visitor interest, increased conversions and "content harmony" are some of the benefits of optimising web images for search engines. According to one expert, high-quality images' "cool" factor also functions psychologically to make visitors stay on a webpage and remember it via associations.

SEO specialist Mihaela Lica reminds readers of the Everything PR site that search engines take the entire content of a webpage into consideration, so the image and sound files displayed must correlate with the overriding topic.

"The search engines want you to create harmonious content and not a soup of mismatches," she observes. Web masters are reminded that search engines need help to understand images and other collateral files, thus "the most basic SEO principles" should be applied.

Images files should, therefore, be named with keywords and coded with an alternative text (ALT) attribute and a title tag: "The ALT attribute describes your image to the search engine, and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match."

Title tags, which automatically appear in the tooltip when the mouse is over an image, act as "microcontent", describing webpage links to a search engine. Search engines like Google and Microsoft's Bing attribute greater significance to text content around images than content placed on images themselves.

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The so-called "next challenge" in internet search is being met by Google over the next few days as the Mountain View giant begins incorporating real-time data into its search results.

In addition to updates from microblogging site Twitter, Google's real-time search will feature up-to-the-second information from social networks MySpace and Facebook in its responses to web users' queries. Altogether, over a billion web pages will be harnessed to produce search results.

Unveiling the search engine's latest development at California's Computer History Museum, Google fellow Amit Singhal remarked: "Information is being created at a pace I have never seen before and, in this environment, seconds matter."

He continued: "There is so much information being generated out there that getting you relevant information is the key to the success of a product like this. It's all about relevance, relevance, relevance." At the launch, details of Google Goggles were also unveiled. It's a visual search feature that lets individuals use images instead of keywords as their search queries.

Forrester Research's recent affiliate marketing forecast suggested that "transaction-generating activity" on affiliate sites will continue to be driven by paid or natural search results in the years ahead.

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Webmasters considering using unique online news stories as part of their search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy need not compromise the quality of their website content. That's the assertion coming from SEO experts in the wake of the BBC's decision to feature optimised headlines on its news website.

In a blog post breaking SEO down to its basics for the BBC News audience, website editor Steve Hermann explains that, with an estimated 29 per cent of the site's UK traffic coming from search engines like Google and Bing, the new approach will enable search engine users to look for stories and find them more easily.

Rather than diminish the quality of news stories, he suggests, featuring longer, optimised headlines will mean BBC journalists "spell out in more detail what and who" a given article is about. He gives the example of "Possible counter-bid for Cadbury", which became "Ferrero and Hershey in possible counter-bid for Cadbury", highlighting the optimised headline's inclusion of the keywords a web user might type into a search engine while looking for a topic.

From now on, BBC News journalists will put together two headlines to optimise their copy. One, featuring around 33 characters, appears on the site's front page and other website indexes, while another – of up to 55 characters – includes keywords and will be seen in search engine results and on the story page itself.

As experts in SEO copywriting regularly point out, however, "stuffing" headlines with too many keywords could not only damage a website's brand and reputation, it could lead to a Google penalty that causes its search rankings to plummet.

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Depending on whether you're in a niche sector, a keyword-rich domain name will be a better way than a brand name to get your website ranked within search engines like Google.

That's one of the tips to emerge from this week's A4UExpo London, where the audience comprised of affiliate marketing, social media and search engine optimisation (SEO) specialists.

During the Affiliate Doctors Live session of the event, leading affiliates and industry observers offered insights into start-up strategies and conversion as well as affiliate marketing, blogging and SEO.

On the subject of keyword-rich domain names versus brand names when it comes to setting up a site, all the panellists present agreed that, in a niche sector, a keyword-rich domain name could help you dominate search engine results pages if it is accompanied by a strong SEO campaign.

"A brand name is only important at a certain point," report the SEO experts behind the Search Cowboys blog. "[It] is when you have put all your hard work in and you are beginning to get noticed that a brand can take you to the next level."

Other insights from the panel include:

• Obtaining a steady stream of returning visitors is a significant success factor in terms of affiliate sites

• As many affiliate sites have thousands of pages of content, ensuring the content is unique is imperative to obtain traffic from search engines

• Duplicating content from similar affiliate sites will affect your ability to rank effectively – the need to create "sticky content" is crucial

• Making content topical and relevant to your audience will boost your return visits

• Featuring images, price comparisons or product reviews on your landing page will grab visitors' attention

• Making display ads look part of your site will boost click-through rates

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Thinking of web pages as properties is one way to optimise a site, with each piece of "real estate" comprising a title tag, meta description, body content, link text and other search engine optimisation (SEO) elements.

According to the Actionable Insights blog, webmasters must be willing to "swap out keywords" and other critical elements that are not performing to ensure their "properties" rank highly in the Google Search Engine Results Page, or SERP – just as they would in a paid search campaign.

This first step is to use website analytics to identify which pages are most popular with the search engines, then focus efforts on them by ascertaining which keywords are generating the most valuable conversions.

"If you can leverage the character limits in your title and description to optimise for both, then do it," the blog advises.

"But if this is not possible then it's time to swap out the keyword that is driving the high volume traffic with the term that is driving actions."

Following this, remaining on-page elements should be optimised to help increase visibility and ranking, bearing in mind that additional optimised back links may be required to further improve second or third-page rankings.

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It was the American media mogul Sumner Redstone who coined the phrase "content is king", but search engine optimisation experts have this month suggested it should be tweaked to "unique content is king" in the age of search engine marketing.

Filling a website with syndicated content may seem like a straightforward, short-term solution, suggest copywriting specialists at online news service Newsvend Ltd, but Google can be guaranteed to get wise to your ploy sooner than you can utter "organic keyword density".

Earlier this year, Mat Cutts – Google software engineer and technical spokesperson – affirmed that great content must be the basis for any great website.

He was asked, via Google Moderator (the free tool that lets people ask and rank questions or opinions on any topic), if it is preferable to have "exceptional content and mediocre links" or "mediocre content with widespread links" as Google's algorithm evolves.

Mediocre content tends not to attract exceptional links by itself, he acknowledged, but "great content" will get the links naturally.

"You do want authority – you want the sites that are trustworthy [and] reputable, but you also want topicality," he added, pointing out that sites' content should be "about" whatever people are searching for.

A "well-rounded site" is the ultimate aim, he concluded, with great content looking more natural.

Newsvend's Chris St Cartmail confirms that his organisation witnesses the biggest jumps in search engine rankings "after webmasters increase the amount of relevant content on their sites".

"There is no doubt in our minds that work done in the content-building area is many times more valuable than work on superficial link-building campaigns," he concludes.

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