Posts filed under 'SEO Industry'
According to recent report by Hitwise, people visiting search engines accounted for 13.3% of the total UK web visits, nearly 2% greater than the number of visits to Adult websites for January 2007. The marke share of the UK’s internet visits to the search engines increased by nearly 21% year on year in January. This compares against a 14% decline for adult sites.
Whilst many organisations in the UK are taking their search engine marketing/advertising strategies very seriously, there is still some reluctance to embrace online. However as convergence technologies become more mainstream, the use as a maintream advertising source can only continue to increase significantly.
March 1st, 2007
In recent research conducted by compete.com, trends of various Google products were highlighted. The trend was interesting for us Google SEO specialists
Amongst the winners were Google Video, Google Blog, Google Scholar, Google Maps and Google Desktop, whilst the big losers in the report were Google Local, Google Alerts, Google Catalogs and Google’s product network Froogle.
To read the full report, go to the compete.com blog
February 21st, 2007
Over the last couple of months you have probably heard of link baiting or social media optimisation. If you haven’t time to get reading. Since then a number have posts have appeared regarding the subject, however none as good as “Andy Hagans Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing“.
In the guide Andy covers all aspects of Linkbaiting including why, how and what to linkbait. Of particular interest was his bit on linkbait hooks as covered below
“News Hook. The news hook is when you are the first to scoop a story; everyone who carries the story will then (theoretically) link to you as the original source. To get a scoop you don`t need to have insider information (though that doesn’t hurt); you can just be the first site to publicly predict something or to reach a controversial conclusion. Bonus points if your scoop is ‘true’ too then many later-proven-to-be-false scoops will make other bloggers and writers hesitant to reference you again.
Resource Hook. The resource hook occurs when you make an extremely helpful piece of content that everyone will naturally want to bookmark (like this one!). This may be my favorite hook, because as opposed to the news hook, it encourages people to link to and bookmark it for a long period of time. Content that sits there and naturally obtains trusted, relevant backlinks passively? Isn’t that the original white hat SEO wet dream?
Contrary Hook. The contrary hook is when you refute a common myth in your niche. Most little areas of the blogosphere hold certain beliefs to be self-evident; all SEOs know that META tags are dead; all Web2.0 designers know that writing validated code is the right thing to do. Calling these people wrong will usually incite them into talking about you, and linking to you.
Humor Hook. People love to laugh, especially at people in their industry or niche. And most niches have so little levity that almost anything will get you a chuckle and a link. You can even directly cite influential people, and if done in a gentle way, they’ll generally be flattered into linking to it.
Tool Hook. A good link bait tool has one of two characteristics: 1) It is actually useful; or 2) It feeds bloggers’ egos. (Very few examples can do both.) Firefox plugins, free design templates and financial calculators are all examples of tools that have received thousands of valuable backlinks. None of them are too hard for a decent programmer to create.
Award Hook. No official awards in your tiny niche? Why not host them yourself? You can either have a more legitimate award with significant organization and actual prize money like the Bloggies, or you can basically nominate everyone in your niche and hope that half link back to you out of enthusiasm for the community, as with the Search Awards. Both tactics work well. The reason is simply that people like positive recognition and they LOVE rankings. Awards get linked to because they help to legitimatize other people it helps the winners when they promote you. Ah, human nature
Giveaway Hook. Anyone who has been to an SEO conference recently (or any other conference for that matter) is stocked for life on pens, highlighters, key rings, and loads of over freebie junk. Companies fight to give trinkets away at certain events because, when directed towards the right audience, giveaways are a great way to drive sales and get a return far better than any ordinary advertising. The Internet is no different. Text Link Ads gets a lot of love around the blogosphere because they offer a free coupon for new clients. Aaron Wall seems to give away an AdWords coupon every other week how else can you get such branding, traffic and links with a $50 piece of paper?
Research/Statistic Hook. Sometimes just compiled numbers, or any kind of scientific survey, will get a lot of link love, especially in an under-studied area. And while a scientifically-conducted study with valid methodology will often get better links, the (sad?) truth is that almost anything can pass as ‘research’ on the Internet.”
Source:Andy Hagans Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing
Well worth a read…
February 20th, 2007
Google has introduced new functionality allowing Google Adwords pay-per-click administrators/managers more control including the ability to pause keywords, sites and ad creatives. As of the 15th of February 2007, all AdWords advertisers can pause and resume keywords (for keyword-targeted campaigns), sites (for site-targeted campaigns), and ad creatives.To read the post in full please visit the Google Adwords blog
February 20th, 2007
Google has recently announced a number of improvements to the Google Adwords “Quality Score”, both in terms of reporting and the Quality Score algorithm itself. This should have significant effects for Pay-per-click specialists.
The two revised changes that Google will be introducing are as follows:
- Greater transparency - via the introduction of a new Quality Score column within the Adwords interface. This will include showing a minimum bid and as well as a Good, OK or poor label for the applicable keyphrase. You can select this column by clicking the ‘Customize Columns’ option in one of your ad groups (selecting this will also automatically populate the column for all other ad groups within that campaign).
The quality label will provide a quick overview of the quality of your keywords, or alternatively provide you with the minimum bid for a granular understanding of your Quality Score.
Remember, the lower the minimum bid is for a keyword, the higher the Quality Score, and vice versa.
- Quality - will also be improved as part of the new improvements to the quality score algorithm. Google have introduced minimum bids for keywords to improve the quality of the ads. This should in theory make it easier for high quality ads to enter the auction while also discouraging low quality ads.
“First, we’re improving the way that we set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data. For example, if the system does not have any data on a keyword, we’ll try to assign that keyword a lower initial minimum bid until we have enough data to make a more accurate assessment of the Quality Score for that keyword in your account. Second, we’re improving the Quality Score algorithm to make it more accurate in predicting the quality of all ads. This will improve the overall quality of ads that we serve by lowering minimum bids for high quality ads and raising minimum bids for low quality ads. We expect that the higher minimum bids for low quality ads will reduce the number of low quality ads we show to our users.” - Google Adwords blog
To read the full post go to http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/02/quality-score-updates.html or the Search engine land post
February 20th, 2007
I had some time for the Did-it/SEO isn’t rocket science/is dead argument being argued in the online marketing arena over the last couple of weeks, in no small part due to Dave Pasternack’s recent article, however Mark Simon’s (Did-it’s Vice President of industry relations - Crisis Manager perhaps) recent foray into the domain, only serves to enflame the situation and highlight every aspect they are trying to argue against. I will however state that the response of the SEO community as a whole hasn’t been that well handled, and if the industry is to be as well respected as more traditional sectors such as Offline then really such character assassinations should be very few and far between.
Mark Simon’s recent post on Mediapost merely served to highlight why Did-its recent campaign is nothing more than a PR stunt, and in my personal opinion merely highlighting the changing trends of online marketing from merely search engine focussed to offerings including Online PR & Social Media.
To read the Mark Simons article click here
And the fuss it`s caused - http://www.threadwatch.org/node/11507
However his post did raise a couple of interesting and valid points most notably
“That doesn’t mean that it’s curtains for SEO firms. They’ll still be in high demand as experts on information architecture and site usability. They’ll help clients build sites that their searchers are really looking for, and that their searchers can use. They’ll cease to have value in reverse-engineering the engine algorithms, but they’ll still have value in helping clients create truly relevant Web sites. “
I can’t help but agree to certain parts of that comment, however whilst the algorithm is still manipulatable, the services for “optimisers” will still be required, and until search engines can factor in something that is not in any way open to “abuse” or the general public change the way they use the web, the market will always be “buoyant”
The overriding factor that will determine whether or not the benefit outweighs the investment. Whilst traffic from search engines such as Google remain the primary source of traffic and the ROI from organic search high, the value an SEO’er will remain at a premium.
February 13th, 2007
Looking at Google Webmaster Tools, there appears to be a new function added to the system providing us search engine optimisation specialists, with not only a new plaything but a useful tool in order to analyse inbound external linkage to a website.The post on Google Webmaster Central, highlighted that “Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information.”
When in this summary view, click the linked number and go to the detailed list of links to that page.
When in the detailed view, you’ll see the list of all the pages that link to specific page on your site, and the time we last crawled that link. Since you are on the External Links tab on the left, this list is the external pages that point to the page.”
Whilst it still doesnt give a totally comprehensive figure to work of (when comparing it to Yahoo Site Explorer and link:) it does at least present useful analysis over the effect/structure of inbound link activity something all us search engine optimisation experts find useful
To read the full post click here
February 6th, 2007
Matt Cutts has a very good post on his blog about PPC tracking and the discrepancies that can arise as a result of third party web log analysis. In particular with reference to a document by Shuman Ghosemajumder (links as follows):
In the article Shuman says:
“Here`s the problem: web logs, whether generated by an advertisers, or by third-party code on an advertiser`s site, cannot directly track ad clicks. Instead, they track visits to a special landing page URL on the advertiser`s site (e.g. http://example.com/?adwords ) as a proxy for how many ad clicks occurred. The assumption they`re relying upon is that each visit to that URL corresponds to a unique click, and vice versa. But in practice this is not the case. Once a user visits that page, they often browse through the site, navigating through sub pages, and then return to the original landing page by hitting the back button. When the landing page is reloaded in the browser, it appears in the web log as though additional ad clicks are occurring. Google can count ad clicks reliably as a click on a Google ad will cause the web browser to contact Google and then we redirect it to the advertiser`s landing page. A reload of the advertiser`s landing does not contact Google again. In addition, the referrer URL which is passed by the browser when users hit the back button is actually the original referrer URL (which says the page came from an ad click) which gets cached, so there is no analysis which can be done based on logs alone which can resolve this. This is where the fictitious clicks come from.
So is there a solution to this? Yes. Third-party analytics (not click fraud) firms have been aware of the page reload issue for many years, and generally use redirects (rather than web log based tracking) to avoid it. If one is tied to using web site logs (or landing page code generating logs) however, the only solution is to use the AdWords auto-tagging feature. Auto-tagging has been available since 2005, and is a feature which appends a unique ID to the landing page URL for every click, so that the cases of (a) multiple clicks and (b) multiple reloads of the landing page can be easily distinguished.”
However having hyper-analysed the performance of one of our major clients, a debt management company here in the UK, I have to question some of the points made. At some points today, the click:impressions ratio was 2:1 in the clicks favour, all chargeable by Google. Surely this is something that could be very easily sorted by a quick cookie reference prior to forwarding to the site, instead of recharging the advertiser.
This is something that Google really should be looking at, whilst no other online medium flexibility that PPC on the whole does, no other channel online is as easily manipulated as PPC, not just Google (we have had even worse problems with the current Yahoo platform on certain terms.
To see Matt Cutts full blog post, click here
February 5th, 2007
Graywolf has posted a brilliant response to the the “is SEO rocket science”, which unfortunately continues ahead full steam
To read the full post click here
January 29th, 2007
Recent articles by both Gord Hotchkiss and Andrew Goodman both investigated the reasons why Search Engine Marketing firms werent being acquired for large sums. Gord argued that much of this could be attributed to the fact that SEM firms were deemed too tactical and lacked the skills to segment and profile applicable demographics. Andrew Goodman went on to say he agreed with Gord assessment however his analysis of the “current reality” was incorrect.
To a certain degree I have to agree with much of what Andrew Goodman had to say. For example:
True, a big law firm that serves big corporate clients almost never acquires a small firm that has some specialty they’d like to add. And that’s the closest analogy with the notion of, say, the world’s largest ad agency acquiring my very small SEM agency. The law firm just hires new associates or recruits partners with different skill sets. Is that because the small firm is “too tactical”? Or just too narrow/small to have the marketplace leverage to *force* a buyout? If the little guy starts actually taking the big guy’s customers, that’s when the big guy takes notice.
So that leaves us a little closer to the answer: if ad agencies are the likely acquirers in the scenario where the target client is mostly larger enterprises, the only leverage a boutique agency has is either in their client list and growing cachet in their own right, or some expertise that the agency will take too long to develop in-house.”
From my own perspective, Andrews comparison there was spot on. From my own personal experience, traditional advertising organisations have been painfully slow on the uptake in terms of Search Engine Marketing, focussing on the potential challenges it presents rather than any long term benefits it can bring, as part of an integrated campaign. Much of this leads to an “ignorance” of search engine marketing, what it entails, and exactly how it fits in with both offline and direct activity.
Such organisations only start taking notice, once the figures become too difficult to argue against. Over the last year or so the number of organisations entering the online marketing arena has increased substantially, as a result of new startups, web development agencies moving into the search arena and offline agencies starting to take notice. One of the bigger acquisitions in the UK Search marketing arena this year saw Global Media buy BigMouthMedia for around £50 Million. However these acquisitions are few and far between at the current time.
However many of these acquisitons are still taking place between organisations within the Online marketing arena itself, and whilst there are a number of integrated agencies such as i-level and Connectpoint offering a full integrated marketing solution, these still tend to be the exception rather than the norm. Much of this IMO opinion is still down to some pessimism of an integrated approach and much has been said of who is better placed to deal with online marketing, ie is it the integrated agency or the boutique agency.
Much is made of search marketing and its fit in the marketing arena. It should however be considered that in comparison to traditional offline advertising, online (search) marketing is still very much in its infancy (Google only started in the nineties for example), and thus has still a considerable amount of evolving to do. It should also be considered that search IS evolving at break neck speed, with personalised search, online PR, convergance technologies (mobile/voip) and social media all having entered (to a certain degree) the mainstream over the last couple of years.
One thing is for sure, it is only a matter of time….
January 29th, 2007
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