Jonathan Celeste

Staying ahead of your competitors online can be tough, so your business needs to tap into every possible avenue and channel to market itself and improve its position in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

According to a recent article in The Observer by John Naughton, websites have been putting on weight recently. Naughton, who is professor of 'The public understanding of technology' at the Open University, says that in terms of file size, the average web page has grown from approximately 94KB in 2003, to 679KB in 2011.

New research carried out by the Boston Consulting Group and commissioned by Google has predicted that the value of the global Internet economy to G20 countries will double by the year 2016, from the equivalent of £1.5tn to £2.7tn. That's trillion. Yes, you read that right.

The start of a new year is a great time to take stock of how well your website is performing, and to see what you can do to further enhance it. Fortunately, those kind folks at Google have given webmasters some handy tips that they may wish to use to optimise the usability and design of their websites, "on the cheap."

According to Microsoft's new ad campaign, Bing is no longer the search engine for making decisions, it's the place for 'doing' things. "We thought now is a good time to evolve from decisions to doing," says Bing's director of advertising, Sean Carver.

There has been much talk recently about the fusion of social media and search, dubbed, imaginatively, 'Social Search'. Not since the first time cheese and pickle were put together between two slices of bread has there been such a stir in the advertising community.

Whatever the size, nature or scale of your business, maintaining a strong online presence can be a full-time job in itself. Without knowledge and utilisation of the right web design and online marketing techniques, your site can soon slide out of view.

Ensuring that a website is easy and intuitive to use should be the number one aim of any web design strategy. Heat maps are in essence a visual tool to enable you to more effectively achieve this aim.

This week Google unveiled its latest change, affecting both its flagship search engine and its social network, Google+.

With the New Year comes the chance to revamp your website. You may already be thinking about what you can do to get your website seen by more people over the next 12 months. Here we present for your consideration five effective search engine optimisation tips to help propel your site to success in 2012.