Posts filed under 'SEO Industry'
I recently came across a “whitepaper” from Daryl Wilcox of Daryl Wilcox Publishing (associated with Sourcewire etc), which provided a very interesting overview of the future of traditional PR, which began with an interesting conjecture in 2017
However it soon returns to normality, and highlights what many PR organisations are starting to consider, namely whether to adapt to changing trends and behaviours as to how people read and gather news. To quote the whitepaper:
“The worst case scenario for PR, and this is real world and not fantasy, is that PR loses significant ground to an apparently more dynamic and imaginative profession - search marketing. The danger is this new discipline will take a bigger slice of the marketing budget at the expense of search marketing will start to take on communications roles which were previously part of the PR function”.
As the report goes onto state, there is already significant evidence of this. Many traditional offline publishers are now pouring money into online. Just look at the BBC. The cricket world cup has coverage from every angle including the widespread use of blogging in order to provide a more personalised overview of the world cup.
Search engines are also the weapon of choice when researching products or services, once the sole domain of offline publishers. Companies are getting wise to this, and the associated spend online is reflective of this trend. Added to this, is the ability of search marketing in order to drive traffic to the site.
Search marketing budgets are often similar to PR budgets nowadays - ranging from retainers for small clients of circa £500 per month to budgets of over circa £50000+ per month. However search marketing has one significant advantage over traditional PR in as far as it can demonstrate return on investment more effectively, easily and objectively. This is particularly important in many companies where every penny is accountable. As a result many search engine marketing companies are offering a range of online PR services such as PR syndication. This impacts PR as many organisations that would never have previously considered PR are now introduced to PR by search marketing agencies.
However the PR industry have been fairly slow in response. The report highlighted the CIPR conference in November 2006, where not one of the 14 sessions had any Online PR bias. As the report puts it - “The transformation of the media by the Internet was not a revolution, it was a slow burn. Now it as a raging fire”
However I am in danger of singing the whitepapers praises too highly. Whilst I fully agree with much of the report (particularly with my SEM hat firmly on), the reference to PR professionals being potentially better at SEO than search marketeers seems slightly of the mark. SEO is not all about numbers, numbers is merely a part of the fully equation, and it is this attention to the numbers along with the terminology and phrasology, that allows us search marketeers to leverage this ROI from online.
However Daryl’s document is written with the PR sector particularly in mind, and as such does an excellent job as such in advising PR of the potential of the Internet, whether or not they choose to utilise that information is another question. To be honest, there is no reason why Search Marketing and PR cannot cohabit side by side. I am currently working with a well respected PR agency, who are wholly embracing Online PR and the opportunities it can offer, and I am sure they want be the last.
To PR agencies. If you haven’t embraced the Internet, call us for a quick chat, to find out more on 01282 411170
To download the whitepaper go to http://www.dwpub.com/whitepapers.php?int=Public_Relations_Versus_Search_Marketing
April 11th, 2007
According to a recent report by Technorati, the increase in the popularity in blogging shows no sign of slowing down. The report stated that Technorati are now tracking over 70 million blogs worldwide, approximately 13 million more than the number detected by the last Technorati report in November 2006.
Blogging by its very nature is more informal than other forms of “content websites” and many build up a considerable fan base, which revisit the site on a frequent basis. These sites are often more respected and trusted by the general public and perceived as being a more reliable source of information than many editorial or official websites.
As blogs are become more mainstream and accepted by commerce as a way of interacting with customers, however there is a danger that this perception will change, and there have been some well documented cases as such, with the Walmart blog probably one of the more well known examples.
However, due to the growing popularity, there has also been the associated problems such as spam blogs, or “Splogs”. These are automated blogs that contain little or no unique content and instead use content lifted from an RSS feed, which is then republished with a link. These are of no real value to human readers and exist largely for black hat search engine optimisation, however these can often rank highly in SERPS or search engine results positions.
Blogs can be an effective tool to interact with potential clients, however it should always be considered
- Who is the potential audience - Ensure that a blog is suitable
- How are your potential audience likely to interact with the blog - If you have a very negative public perception, perhaps such an interactive forum may be inadvisable - however saying that it may be a master stroke if implemented strategically
- What is the tone of your blog - personal/corporate - is this right for your target audience
- How often are you likely to update your blog - the best blogs are updated very regularly and often for this reason alone perform well in the search engines, as well as build up large followings.
- Do you wish to “syndicate” your content - this is important when deciding what platform/software to use - this for example uses wordpress.
- Is search engine optimisation important - you may need some technical tweaks in order to make your blog more friendly
There are a number of blogging experts out there, who can help with a long term Online PR or blogging strategy. If you are in any doubt, contact an expert such as E-Gain to find out more.
April 10th, 2007
I was personally going to blog about this myself this evening, having been in the process of evaluating a self catering holiday village in Blackpool, and noticed the distinct lack of meta information of the site. Whilst the effectiveness (or rather non-effectiveness) of meta tags as regards SEO is now well accepted, they are still useful (much like PPC) in enticing the user to enter your site (apart from other things) and as such should still be considered when optimising a site - particularly if like me you like to be judged by the ROI of the website rather than just the ‘number of 1st place terms’.
However Rand Fishkin or Randfish from SEOMoz has written a brilliant post regarding how meta description tags should be correctly used.
In particular he highlights their three main functions, namely
- To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
- To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results
- To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searcher
Rand also went on to say
“You shouldn’t always write a meta description. Although conventional logic would hold that it’s universally wiser to write a good meta description yourself, rather than let the engines scrape your page, this isn’t the case. I use the general rule that if the page is targeting 1-3 heavily-searched terms/phrases, go with a meta description that hits those users performing that search. However, if you’re targeting longer tail traffic, for example with hundreds of articles or blog entries or even a huge product catalog, it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines themselves extract the relevant text. The reason is simple - when engines pull, they always display the keywords (and surrounding phrases) that the user searched for. If you force a meta description, you can detract from the relevance the engines make naturally. In some cases, they’ll overrule your meta description anyway, but it’s not always wise to rely on that.”
To read the article in full, please click here to read Rands article on correct Meta Description usage
April 3rd, 2007
According to a recent report by the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB), only 19% of adult internet users have downloaded a podcast in the last six months (this is a rise of only 2% on the 2006 figure), this despite a surge in use of podcasts over the last year.
The study also stated that for those users who had ever downloaded a podcast, 72% weren’t interested in them, 38% didnt fully understand them and 18% wanted to know how to download them first.
Such figures, I feel do reflect the public perception of Podcasts/Vodcasts with many directly associating them directly with i-pods, which may in itself be reflected in the above figures. Whilst such technology is useful in tech-savvy environments, whether podcasting is suitable for mainstream marketing at this point is certainly up for debate.
March 23rd, 2007
According to a recent report by E-Consultancy in conjunction with Clash Media, 82% of digital marketers see online lead generation as a growth area in 2007. The results were published in the ‘Online Lead Genereation (B2C) Report’, which questioned a number of marketers about how the Internet is and could be utilised to interact with potential customers.
Nearly 75% of respondants working for across the line organisations said their organisations are generating leads online with the intention of then converting them offline. Suprisingly, only 44% of marketers believed their organisations were fully exploiting online lead generation as a means of growing their B2C business. This was in comparison to 47% of respondants stating that their business wasn’t effectively exploiting online lead generation.
The research was carried out in association with Clash Media, and was conducted with around 400 marketers throughout Q1 2007.
To read the full report please visit the e-consultancy website - or visit the Clash Media website
March 23rd, 2007
Google has released Manager Defined Spend or MDS, a pay per click campaign management tool that allows agencies to amend and update Google PPC campaigns instantaneously.
The main purpose behind MDS is to cut negotiation times and provide agencies with tigher budgetary control.
MDS is currently being released to agencies worldwide., and is designed to counter situations where cammpaigns need to be changed or launched immediately, but are restricted by the time it takes for checks to be carried out.
Source: New Media Age (22nd March 2007)
March 23rd, 2007
After hinting about it for a while now, Google has finally beta released a cost per action (CPA) platform for testing. The beta test is only currently restricted to Adsense for content in the US, and will run seperate from the usual auction model, and chances are most won’t even get a chance to play around with the system.
However it should be noted this is a significant expansion of Google’s current PPC model, with the premise being that advertisers would pay when a customer buys a product, signs up for a newsletter or completes any other actionable task on the website.
From the publishers perspective, Adsense publishers will be able to opt-in to display PPA adverts from Google and even whether they wish to display a single ad, a cluster of ads or match to a specific keyword that is relevant to their page content. Publishers also get to preview the ads, including company name, logo etc, before the ads go live.
Google here is effectively acting as a broker between the customer and the advertiser, and to a certain extent puts Google in competition with affiliate networks such as Commision Junction.
To read more about Google Pay per action (PPA), we have included some links below
March 22nd, 2007
The meta robots tag is a standard created over a decade ago, initially, to allow website authors to prevent page indexing by search engine spiders. Over the years this tag has evolved into a far more flexible meta tool.
Todays Robots Meta Tag Commands
- ALL - Sets all directives on. ALL = INDEX,FOLLOW
- NONE - Sets all directives off. NONE=NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW
- INDEX - An indexing robot should index the page.
- FOLLOW - A robot is to follow links on the page.
- NOINDEX - An indexing robot should not index the page.
- NOFOLLOW - Prevents an indexing robot from following any links on the page.
- NOARCHIVE - Prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results.
- NOSNIPPET - Google only command that prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results. Also enforces NOARCHIVE.
- NOODP - Stops the Open Directory Project description of the page from being used in the description in the search results and instead forces the search listing to use the DESCRIPTION meta data of the indexed page.
- NOYDIR - This tag works in a similar way to the NOODP tag and ensures that Yahoo will not use the title and description from your Yahoo Directory listing but instead is forced to display the meta TITLE and DESCRIPTION of the indexed page.
These commands can be issued using the robots meta tag, placed anywhere inside the head of your individual web page. Eg: <meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX”>
Multiple commands can be enforced by adding a comma seperated list to the content field of the robots meta tag. Eg: <meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW,NOODP”>
The commands in the content fields MUST be comma seperated for your robots tag to be valid according to Google. These tags are also NOT case-sensitive.
Making the distinction between robots
All of the commands above can be targetted globally by using the command ROBOTS in the name field of the meta tag, but what if you want to tell each search engine something different?
You need to have a robots tag for each particular search engine you want to target. Each tag must identify the robot by name and list the command or commands pertinent to that particular robot. Eg:
<meta name=”GOOGLEBOT” content=”NOODP”>
<meta name=”MSNBOT” content=”NOFOLLOW”>
<meta name=”SLURP” content=”NOARCHIVE, NOYDIR”>
But what if I wanted to tell all the search engines one thing and just one search engine another thing?
You can have multiple tags in your page that target ROBOTS globally and individual robots by name. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo say that thier robots will honor both of these declarations. Eg:
<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOARCHIVE”>
<meta name=”GOOGLEBOT” content=”NOODP”>
March 7th, 2007
I have read a lot recently regarding personalisation in particular from Google, and much has been debated within the SEO community itself on various forums such as SEW, Threadwatch and Cre8asite as to the ongoing effects of introducing personalisation.
In general, whilst the delivery mechanism of such a drastic change in focus will remain the overiding factor in determining whether such a change works to Google’s benefit (and delivers us consumers the results we expect), the effects of such change will provide us Search Engine Marketeers with new challenges.
However in my opinion such a change can only be good for the industry. Gone are going to be the days where results were based on the number of “number 1 terms” and campaigns will be judged by what they physically deliver to a client in terms of ROI, bringing it inline with other forms of advertising both off and online.
This should in turn make us search engine marketeers/engineers start thinking like more traditional marketeers, and rely on a variety of marketing techniques in order to ensure ROI on the websites. In my opinion not a bad thing, and I doubt that other forms of advertising will ignore those that can deliver such results. That and the use of PPC will probably increase in popularity as advertisers endeavour to ensure constant visibility in key areas.
March 6th, 2007
Gord Hotchkiss featured a very good interview with Google spokesman Matt Cutts regarding a multitude of SEO issues including localised search, personalised search and the future of SEO, and in particular Matt’s perspective on how he sees personalisation of Search affecting SEO in general.
One comment in particular stood out
“Matt: I think that it’s natural that some people would be worried about change, but some of the best SEO’s are the SEO’s that are able to adapt, that are able to look down the road 4 or 5 years and say, “What are the big trends going to be?” and adjust for those trends in advance, so that when a search engine does make a change which you think is inevitable or will eventually happen, they’ll be in a good position. Personalization is one of those things where, if you look down the road a few years, having a search engine that is willing to give you better results because it can know a little bit more about what your interests are, that’s a clear win for users, and so it’s something that SEO’s can probably predict that they’ll need to prepare for. At the same time, any time there’s a change, I understand that people need some time to adjust to that and need some time to think, “How is this going to affect me? How is this going to affect the industry? And what can I do to benefit from it?”
Of course, the big question is how the lack of a monolithic set of search results will impact the reverse engineering that is typical in SEO. How do you reverse engineer something that’s different for everyone who sees it? Which begs the question, “does personalization mark the end of black hat SEO?
I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily the nail in the coffin, but it’s clearly a call to action where there’s a fork in the road and people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines. And the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward. At the same time, if you do choose to go to the other fork, towards the black hat side of things, you know you’re going to be working harder and the return is going to be a little less. And so over time, I think, the balance of what to work on does shift toward working for the user, taking these white hat techniques and looking for the sites and changes you can implement that will be to the most benefit to your user.”
Source: Gord Hotchkiss - Search Engine Land
Certainly worth a read - the full interview can be found on Gord Hotchkiss’ blog and the SearchEngineLand website
March 5th, 2007
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