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The Holiday's hidden gems

For those of you who haven't been dragged along to see "The Holiday", the film centres on Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet's house swap between sun-soaked LA and snow-soaked Surrey.

They both decide to take a holiday to chase away their broken hearts and turn to Google for help. A forlorn Cameron Diaz fires up her laptop and types into Google:

"vacation rentals"

The interesting thing to note (how geeky am I that I spotted this!) is that she puts inverted commas around the text. This clever way of searching means that only websites containing the exact phrase "vacation rentals" are displayed - that way the character of Amanda finds exactly what she is looking for.

I am also wondering if the film will spawn a trend of searching using quotes! If so then it could have an immense impact on search behaviour and I'll be keeping my eye out for any developments.

Using the best keyphrases
The film highlights how important it is to ensure that you are making the best use of keyphrases for each page of your own website. Contact us to find out more about targeting specific keyphrases.

People increasingly use the Internet to help with lifestyle decisions and are faced with masses of information each day. Any tool that helps them filter out insignificant results will be attractive and making your website accessible despite these search shortcuts is in your interests.

Search engine optimisation can help your site be found by the likes of those clever people who search the Internet using refined techniques. Even if your site is already optimised for certain phrases it might be worth revisiting the phrases you have targeted.

Contact us to analyse gaps in your keyphrases

Other interesting inter-spin offs from the film
The film highlights the HomeExchange.com site as that's where both characters end up before deciding to travel 6000 miles to the other side of the world. I wonder if visits to this site have increased since the film!

I don't know about you but I think Kate Winslet got the better deal escaping this weather!!

The website for "The Holiday" is encouraging fans of the movie to interact and upload a movie trailer of their life to the site. This means that the film is attempting to harness the popularity of video-sites like YouTube and create a buzz around the film online.

If you are looking for unique ways to create a buzz around your website then contact MediaCo's creative experts for advice.

LUCY'S SEARCH SECRETS - for better surfing!

Now some of you may already know the benefits of searching using special characters such as quotes "" or the + or - sign. For those that don't, take a look at the different ways to manipulate search engine results below:

" " Only results based on the specific words are included. So the results are more meaningful as websites that simply make reference to something are filtered out. For instance if you are looking for a specific person, item or even a famous quote:

"of all the bars in all the towns" (Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca)

+ Adding this sign between phrases means that the word is definitely included. It's especially useful if you need to use a common word in a search that Google might otherwise ignore such as "and".

- The minus sign omits phrases from your search. So if you are looking for websites related to cocktails without gin then type "cocktails -gin"

~ The tilde sign searches your keyphrases alongside their synonyms.

The query [link:] then a URL will give you a list of all the sites linking to a particular website.

[define:] and then a list of words will give you definitions for that word from various sources.

[allintitle:] Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. Similarly [allinurl:]

Contact us to learn more about the secrets of search