Who is in charge of your website? Probably, you think you are - but actually that's not true. In fact, if your website is successful your visitors are in charge. After all, if you don't provide what they want, they will not return, nor will they buy from you. That means to succeed you have to do what they want you to do - even if you don't always agree. But a new patent application from Google suggests that some of the control you do have could be removed by the internet giant.

Here's what Google wants to do. They want to read your web pages before they are delivered to your visitors. And then, once they have worked out what your site is about, Google wants to insert links they think will be useful to people, based upon the text of your pages. Clearly that's a clever bit of technology and no doubt the patent will be granted because it uses unique systems, largely based around the Google Toolbar.

But who should be in charge of the links YOUR pages deliver? One of the reasons comparatively few web pages actually contain Google AdSense is because of the lack of complete control over which adverts appear. True, you can minimise the risks by preventing certain advertisers from displaying their wares, but you do not have total control. So, include the following sentence and imagine what you might get in terms of advertising appearing on your page: hardcore railway enthusiasts have revealed that it doesn't matter what sex you are, trains are the best method of travelling. Er..get my drift? The brilliance of the Google system is not that discerning and many businesses have switched off the advertising - me included - because of the unwanted advertising that appears.

So why will "ordinary" links be any different? Your pages could carry links to sites that neither you nor your visitors actually want. Presumably the links you choose to include on your web pages are those which your visitors will find most useful. And which ones will Google think will be the most useful do you reckon? They will be the sites whose "title tags" closely match the most popular keywords which appear in the text of your page.

But look at this from a different point of view. Consider now someone else's web page with links added by Google. Wouldn't you want to be the link added automatically? And how do you think you are going to get it? By being NUMBER ONE on Google's search engine ranking for the keywords on the page. In other words, it is no longer going to be good enough to be on the front page of Google results - Google will not add a list of links to a web page, just one - perhaps two - for each keyword. That means your web pages are only going to get promoted via this new Google system if you are Numero Uno. Being in the top three is no longer good enough.

You have a choice. You can think this latest patent application from Google is a further attempt to control the internet. Or you can take advantage of it by ensuring you are at Number One for your keywords, thereby gaining links in websites you hadn't even heard of. I predict a whole new industry "Google Link Optimization" and people asking you how well you are GLOing...!

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Imagine for a moment your job is CEO of BP and you take a look at the latest share price for your company. This chart doesn't make you feel too good does it?

Then imagine doing a blog search on Google for your company name and discovering blog posts claiming you have produced a fake Twitter account, that your company shareholders are in deep water and that all across the web people are re-designing your logo to highlight your company's recent dramatic turn of events.

If you can still stomach it, head over to Facebook and simply search for your brand name. You'll find dozens of groups with thousands of members all claiming "No BP for me" and several "Boycott BP" pages with more than half a million people as "fans".

Dare you go to search on Twitter? If you do, you'll find thousands of tweets all saying your brand sucks.

So, you might head off to read some "traditional" news for a more balanced and sobering judgement on your company - only to find that they too are saying your company's brand is shot to pieces.

What is going on, you might think. True, we've had a mishap in the ocean,  but we're doing our best under difficult circumstances; come on, give us a break. You might then get your branding team, your PR people and your marketing gurus to fix the damage. But rather like a gushing geyser of oil on the ocean floor, the bad publicity keeps on pouring out on blogs, Facebook, Twiter, YouTube - you name it.

But you would not be surprised at all about this seemingly unpluggable barrage of bad publicity if you had been at Ascot Race Course this morning where you could have listened to Richard Robinson from Google speaking at a Business Insight event. He said: "It is no longer the case that you can control your brand; the users will do that for you." In other words, the interactive, open nature of the internet means you cannot be in charge of the brand your company wishes to project.

Does that mean that Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP should simply cave in and give up? Does it mean that any company should simply accept that the power is now in the hands of the consumer, rather than in yours? What was interesting in Richard Robinson's presentation was that in many Berkshire-based businesses that seems to be the case.

For instance, when he asked how many people used the Google Wonder Wheel, only two people out of more than 170 put up their hands (see video below for an explanation of Wonder Wheel). Similarly, when the audience was asked if they used Google Alerts, less than 20 people put up their hands. And there were only 30 or so hands that went up for companies that use YouTube in their business.

In other words, there is a plethora of free online tools - many available for years - which can help companies counter the impact of the consumer-led web. Yet, most companies appear to be ignoring the very tools which can help them overcome the negativity of blogs, Facebook groups, Tweets or other damaging items online. So why is that?

The man from Google, Richard Robinson, revealed the answer in his opening comments. He said that the internet has moved on from a state where "just being online was enough". Now, the internet is an interactive, involved, user-led world where companies simply have to match the requirements of these users to what they supply and do. No longer can you simply have a website; you have to "live" online. Few companies - including BP - "get" that. Indeed, by the show of hands to the various questions in this morning's seminar it was clear that most businesses in the area were still thinking in the "old internet" ways.

If you haven't changed - and you have yet to focus you entire business activity around the user-led internet - there is a strong chance that those very users will bite you where it hurts and your business income will look very much like that BP share price chart. Ouch..! Getting the best out of the internet in the coming years is not about technology, or about design; it is, instead, about the attitude of mind of business owners. According to today's evidence, a massive change in thinking is needed by many businesses. They still appear to be where Richard Robinson said they should not be - thinking that simply being online is enough. It isn't - and actually hasn't been for around five years now.

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Google is not a search engine - at least it's not the way many people are using it. True, it can find you things - often unexpected and not always what you wanted. But, the latest information from Hitwise shows that most people are using Google merely as a "shorthand" way of getting to other websites they already know about.

The number one search phrase on Google (and Bing and Yahoo!) for the end of March was....wait for it...a single world. And that single word was....Facebook. Every day, more than a million people went to Google, typed in the word "Facebook" into the search box and then clicked on the first result to get to Facebook. They could have done that simply by typing the word Facebook into the address bar at the top of their browser, avoiding the second or two delay by going via Google - and the extra two clicks it takes.

If you look at the remaining Top 10 searches on Google in the month, you find they are all for websites that people could get to without going to Google, but simply by typing the name of the website into the address bar. Indeed, 273,000 people go to Google every day to "search" for...Yahoo! And the second most popular search on Microsoft's Bing was the word...Google....! Other Top 10 search terms include YouTube, Ebay and Gmail. According to the Hitwise results, one in every 20 "searches" on Google is for a website that can be typed directly into the address bar, without ever needing to go to Google itself. Every day, 4.5m people are using Google when they don't need to.

What it shows is that Google has become the "de facto" method of getting anywhere on the web. People type in a well known name, it is inevitably the Number One result which they then click on and get to where they want to be. It appears to be easy, but is actually marginally slower than going directly, via the address bar in the browser.

Of course, millions more searches are conducted with other search terms and phrases; but what is revealing is the way in which Google is being used. Rather than "searching" for things, the most popular use of Google is to reach stuff people already know about. As such it is being seen less as a "search engine" and more as a "convenience engine". And the same is true for both Yahoo! and Bing, it seems from these results.

It confirms that what you need to do to achieve success with Google is concentrate less on SEO and more on being known. For instance, in the world of insurance comparison, the phrase "compare insurance" gets 450,000 monthly searches in the UK and the second most popular search phrase in that field with 246,000 monthly searches is "GoCompare". In other words, almost a quarter of a million people must have heard the term "gocompare" in order to search for it - those dreadful TV adverts have a real impact. In the same way that people could arrive at any of the Top 10 searched for websites simply by typing in the name into the browser address bar, they could get to GoCompare.com doing that as well. Instead, they decide to go to Google, type the name into the search box and then click on the number one result.

This all suggests that if you spend all of your efforts in getting people to know your business name, if you concentrate on offline branding and associating words with your company, then people will use Google merely as a shorthand device to reach you. It is just further emphasis of the importance of offline branding and public relations. The more people know about your company offline, the more they will type in the right words in a search engine to reach you via the inevitable Number One result.

If you remember that the principal use of Google is NOT as a search engine, but as a shorthand device to reach things already known about, that could change your attitude and thinking as to where you should spend those precious marketing pounds and dollars. All of the world's most successful online companies spend most of their marketing budget in offline activities. These latest figures from Hitwise confirm those dollars were spent wisely.

This doesn't mean that SEO is completely unnecessary; it just should put it into perspective. Priority should be given to creating your offline presence so that people use Google in the way it is mostly being used - as a convenience engine, not a search engine. SEO helps, of course, but only for those people who don't already know about you. Concentrate on getting people to know about you and search takes a secondary importance.

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Eric Schmidt, the Chief Executive Officer of Google disappointed investors yesterday as the company announced a dramatic rise in income. In the past three months, Google's revenues have risen by a whopping 23% compared with the same period last year. But it wasn't the CEO who announced it. In an attempt to "streamline" reporting, Google has decided that the CEO will no longer announce their financial results. What? That's right, a company with a share price approaching $600 has decided that investors don't need to hear from the boss.

Analysts are struggling for reasons today to explain why the share price fell, in spit of the unexpectedly positive results. The truth is, they feel snubbed. Wouldn't you? What would your investors think if you decided that someone else would tell them about your financial results? The chances are they'd express their dislike in some way.

Google tells us we should not "read anything" into Mr Schmidt's departure from the financial reporting system; they say he is "everywhere" anyway, so we shouldn't worry about it. No, analysts aren't worried, they just expect the boss to talk to them about their investment. That's not such a difficult requirement is it?

When companies get really big they often forget, or lose, the emotional connection they have with their stakeholders. For instance, the company has had an increase of 7% in the average cost of each click made on the sponsored links listings. Many of those clicks, of course, are not on Google itself, but on its "AdSense" sites - websites that carry Google AdWords sponsored links. Your website can carry them if you wish. So, the AdSense partners are effectively sales people for Google; they publish their adverts. So how did Google reward this group of stakeholders for their contribution to this 7% rise? Well they gave them an increase of only 2%. In other words, Google increased its margin.

So, they've already upset analysts and now they appear to be upsetting their AdSense partners too. The company has also upset China, it has upset authors and photographers, annoyed the Italians and caused Rupert Murdoch to limit what Google can do with his company's content. The company is also potentially upsetting the advertisers themselves - that's the likes of you and me. Why? Because of the increase in the average price we are paying - almost four times the level of inflation.

Of course, none of this is to be unexpected. Google is a massive company that dominates its market. It will therefore be in pivotal position to upset all sorts of people and to get considerable criticism. The real issue is much the same as any big business. The bigger you get, the more distant you become from each of your stakeholders. And that means you start to lose the important emotional connections which have helped you achieve your greatness.

Like most large corporations, Google only achieves its financial success because of dominance. That comes from a combination of good ideas and excellent marketing. There are better operating systems than Windows, for instance, but Microsoft has the best marketing. There are better search engines which help you search for specific information, but Google has market dominance. And like Microsoft, its size and its resulting income means it can simply drown out the marketing from competitors.

So is there anything to learn from all this? Absolutely. If you want to succeed and do really well you need to to dominate your market - and that comes about initially with brilliant marketing. Remember that when Google started it had no income and had to do loads and loads and loads of free marketing in order to get a foothold against the dominance of Yahoo!. But more importantly, perhaps, the Google situation tells us that if you want to retain your leadership status you need to maintain an emotional connection with all of your stakeholders. Losing contact with your investors, your customers, your staff and everyone else who brings you success is why many companies - big and small - fail. Retaining those emotional connections is fundamentel and it's the mistake that big companies make time and time again. Google is behaving no differently to other sizeable corporations.

The reaction of the stock markets to quite brilliant financial results suggests that Google is potentially in danger of reducing their emotional connections to an important group of stakeholders. And if that happens one way of getting it back will be for the next quarter's results to be even better than the latest excellent figures. And guess who will pay for that? That's right...you will...!

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If 7m individuals visited your website each month would you be happy? Maybe; I guess it rather depends on who you are and how many people already visit. For the Daily Telegraph, however, this was seen as too small an audience. That's a remarkable thought, considering the newspaper itself only sells 700,000 copies a day. The website for the Telegraph was clearly much more successful than the newspaper itself, yet that massive audience was not enough. So, The Telegraph installed Julian Sambles as "Head of Audience Development" and over a two-year period he helped take The Telegraph from 7m unique visitors a month to a whopping 31m visitors each month. And he cut the company's marketing spend at the same time. Many, many more people visiting the website AND much lower costs in getting them there. So what's his "secret"?

It's actually rather simple. In an interview at the recent Search Engine Strategies meeting in London, Julian revealed that it is training the journalists that is key to the dramatic shift in online readership. They have received video and audio training, as well as being guided on writing for the web so that their content is picked up by search engines.

In other words, merely focusing on producing content in a way that makes it easy for people to find it, has been key to the success of The Telegraph. Getting journalists to write for the web first and the newspaper second has enabled The Telegraph to produce content that is easily indexed by the search engines, thus boosting the online circulation of the newspaper.

It's a simple strategy that can work for any website. Produce content - written, audio and video - and make it findable by the search engines by concentrating on writing "for the web", rather than writing as you might for a printed document.

Crucial to the success of The Telegraph has been ensuring that their headlines are search engine friendly. Their journalists have been trained in writing headlines that are keyword rich and easy for the search engines to index. Indeed, like many newspapers, the headlines get serious attention. The Telegraph has shown that by putting effort into their headings, as well as to all the other content production, they can be more easily found by the search engines and therefore have more traffic.

It's a simple lesson - but one which few businesses appear to take. Produce content, lots of it - and then spend time and effort in producing the headlines that will attract readers and which will also be indexed by the search engines. Headline writing cannot be downplayed as a skill - and if you don't know how to write good, keyword rich headlines, then it's time to learn. The Telegraph has shown that with training on things like headline writing and producing good, keyword rich content, online traffic can be boosted significantly.

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Fifteen hundred search engine fanatics are currently gathering in London in the midst of a three-day conference, Search Engine Strategies (SES). As the digital marketing expert, Guy Levine, put it on Twitter they are all in "Geek Heaven". They are devouring the nitty-gritty of search and how the finest changes to your website can bring about better ranking, more links and thereby more money.

 

That's all noble stuff, of course. Many of the delegates at SES are businesses themselves; quite a few are in the search marketing world who sell  their services to the rest of the business world who are not interested in the geeky stuff. SES performs a valuable service, of course, by sharing knowledge and updating the experts. But therein lies the problem.

When you gather together a group of experts and focus on a topic a psychological phenomenon called "social acceptance theory" comes in to play. What that means is that everyone will agree on the importance of their industry, the fundamental value of search and that the whole arena of search is just brilliant. Yes, they will argue and debate the tiny fragments of detail; but no-one will step out of line and say that search is nonsense.

So I'll do it for them; search is nonsense. There, I've said it. Of course, I'm using the word in its most literal sense, suggesting that the search industry has "no intelligible meaning". It all makes sense to those geeks in London this week, but to the rest of us it may as well be in Ancient Greek for the sense it makes. It's rather like a bunch of doctors getting together at a conference. They would be chatting away about the importance of "probiotics in the prevention of rhinoviral URTI". Got that? Er? OK, I'll get my doctor friend to translate...! What that means is if you give your kids a balanced diet they are less likely to get a cold.

It's the same at SES. Put a bunch of experts together, bung in some social acceptance theory and within minutes they are all talking in lingo the rest of the world doesn't understand. The point of doctors, for example, is to help us maintain our health. So talking in language that separates them fails to do that. The point of search is to enable people to find our online offering. The point of search is not to make it into some great big mystery. And that's what happens when you "expert-ize" it. The result is language that doesn't connect with the rest of us - "SSIs for information architecture" is up for grabs today at SES London, for instance.

What we need are search specialists who don't get too hung up on the nitty-gritty, but tell it to us like it is. In fact, search is so much simpler than the experts might like us to think it is. In just the same way, medicine is much more straightforward than people on £150,000 a year as a GP might like us to believe; most people who visit their doctor get better naturally, with no intervention by their GP other than "let's keep an eye on it and come back to me in a couple of weeks". Search is similar; do the right thing and people will find you.

But what is the "right thing"? What you need to find out are the terms people associate with your company or organisation. Then you create web content that matches exactly what they are looking for. That's it. Google, Bing and Yahoo! do the rest for you.

No doubt SES London will help the specialists find extra ways of helping you; but they will focus on the nitty gritty when all you need to do is concentrate on the big picture. And whatever happens at the Business Design Centre in Islington before the end of the week, one thing is for sure, if you were to produce a one-line summary of the whole event it would be "create exactly the right content for your users".The SES delegates will "dress that up" as "information architecture", "keyword analysis" and "analytics", but it all boils down to the simple fact - EXACTLY the right content is what you need to produce.

As the psychologist Edward de Bono said:

Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.

Those nitty-gritty details being discussed in London are not the problem. The search engine "problem" of being ranked highly and found by potential customers only arises because so many businesses fail to create the content that people are actually looking for. Do that and the search "problem" disappears. Unless, of course, you're a search geek, influenced by social acceptance who uses language that separates you from the rest of us. To you it's much more complicated; personally, I prefer simplicity.

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In a blaze of headlines Google has launched Buzz, its much-hyped "status" application. Let us set aside, for the moment, that Yahoo also has a service called Buzz and consider what the Google service is all about. It is no more than an "integrator". And it is only doing that if you have a Google Mail account. If you don't have a Google Mail account or don't want one, you can't use Google Buzz. And therein lies Google's first problem.

Corporates don't like Google Mail. For a start there are security issues. Then there are legal issues; companies need an auditable trail of emails and that's much easier when everything is on your own servers. Microsoft Exchange and other similar email platforms rule in the corporate world. If corporates want to use status updates or quickly share information they will continue to use either Twitter, or in-house status sharing applications, such as the market leader, Yammer.

In other businesses the simplicity of having computer-based email applications or CRM programs like ACT mean that Google Mail ends up being restricted to personal email, or other non-business stuff. Many Google Mail accounts are secondary accounts - there for backup or for use when dealing with online services your are not sure about when signing up. Google Mail is a perfect way of diverting those non-core emails away from busy inboxes. That means for many people they'll need to use Twitter to keep up-to-date with their business colleagues and then Google is hoping they will also use Buzz to keep up to date with their Google Mail contacts. It won't happen; simplicity is what people want.

Google, of course, is betting on the fact that its application is simple; that it puts in one place everything people will need - microblogging, email, link sharing and so on. That's a great idea, but fails to take into account the way people actually use Google Mail now and the way people are currently behaving online. Remember, the heaviest users of Google Mail are technophiles; they are online geeks who just love using the technology. The rest of the world - most of us- behave very differently. Don't judge the likely success of Google Buzz on the technophiles.

Google is admitting that they can't compete with Twitter anyway. Google search results now include the latest Tweets; and Google Buzz allows you to use Twitter as well. The result of Google Buzz will be that those people who are fans of Google Mail (and most internet users are not) will be Tweeting inside Google. Round one to Twitter.

On top of all this, Microsoft's webmail service, Windows Live, has twice as many visits as Gmail. Google's webmail system is not as popular as they would like you to believe. Indeed, Yahoo Mail gets almost five times as much traffic. Google may have created a lot of buzz about its service, but the reality is that it will only affect a small proportion of the online world. For it to truly succeed , Google will need millions of people to give up Yahoo Mail and Windows Live. It will also need corporate America to change policy and switch to external webmail applications instead of legally secure internal servers. And it will need millions of people to accept an increasingly complex online life - using Twitter for some things and Google Buzz for others.

There is no doubt that Google Buzz will be a success, but not as big as Google would like us to think. And even if it does achieve multimillion levels of usage, much of it will be Tweets anyway.

One other thing; how do you think Google will pay for it? Yes; that's right. It will load it with adverts. And that's precisely what people do not like in social networking sites. Ask Facebook, where almost no adverts get clicked on at all. Ask Twitter users who balk at the advertising Tweets in their droves. Google Buzz will undoubtedly be big, but that's simply because of Google's size and impact. In reality, Buzz will be an also-ran.

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