Impact Media's SEO Blog

As Social Media continues to expand and lure in vast volumes of Internet traffic, where does its fustier, slower (methodical if you will) and more derided website marketing compadre, SEO, now fit in?

Search Engine Optimisation has been saddled with a reputation for being something of a shadowy practice; online alchemy, created to appease the search engine gods. The thing is though, it works. Better still, it continues to work to this day.

Social Media has emerged from the Friends Reunited Petri dish and exploded into a full-grown living organism, consuming everything in its path; or, at least, nearly everything. Facebook has experienced the most meteoric of rises, propelled by the slipstream of fading stars like MySpace, it has slipped seamlessly into the top 3 sites in the world (2nd by some metrics, 3rd in others) and gained itself over 350 million users.

Thanks to Facebook, along with Twitter, YouTube and a whole multitude of bookmarking cohorts, Social Media has got the world communicating in real-time. This free network of conversations has engulfed the Internet and opened the door of opportunity to marketers. Inevitably, when something huge comes to dominate an entity as the Internet, something has to make way; but is that thing SEO?
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The polka dot adorned King of the Mountains jersey in Le Tour de France might be one of the toughest sporting challenges that nature and mankind have conjured, but online it is the summit of the SERPs that is the beguiling and often impossible goal faces a peloton of websites.

For every keyword there can be only one website at the top of the search engine rankings. Invariably there tend to be a fair number of sites jostling for position, attempting to break away from the pack and take first place for themselves. Just as with our analogical cycling counterparts, it takes a great deal of effort, strategy and knowledge to achieve the ultimate prize.

Getting to number one in Google is the ultimate goal of any SEO; but due to the diversity of SERPs, there are other ways to get noticed. Sometimes getting a spread of good performances within search engine rankings, video marketing, social media, PPC and local search results can gain you the fullest exposure, without even necessarily topping the rankings. Consistently exceptional performances will earn you the Search Engine Marketers yellow jersey, opening the floodgates to highly targeted traffic.
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As the search engines develop, so too do the potential avenues for effective marketing. So what exactly is the most effective Search Engine Marketing strategy?

Traditionally, the two ways in which you could improve your website’s visibility on search engines was through SEO and Pay per Click (PPC) advertising. Whilst they may remain at the forefront of most strategies, SEO and PPC are by no means the only way to get your name where it matters.

As the search engine results pages (SERPs) have diversified, including new facets and restructuring their layout, marketing methods have been quick to follow suit. With Twitter updates, local search results and news items infiltrating the SERPs, the realms of possibilities are more diverse and in greater supply than ever before.
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Still in the formative days of this new year, we look ahead at the 7 ways you can help your website get the level of attention you deserve in 2010.

Making bold predictions to cover a 365 day period, you can easily set yourself up for a fairly monumental fall. However, with this very much in mind, I have put together a straightforward guide to promoting your website in 2010.

As anybody who has spent a day or more working amongst websites will no doubt already understand, there are a fair few avenues for you to explore when it comes to promoting your site, brand and company. As any company with limited resources will have no doubt also have discovered, targeting the most effective techniques in the efficient fashion is not always straightforward.
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Christmas is the time of year where retailers, etailers and marketers go into overdrive. A surplus of consumers means that opportunities for good sales figures are abound.

But it would be churlish to suggest that preparations start as we peel back the first door in our advent calendars; in truth, it goes back to the time where summer is turning to autumn, when ice, snow and Christmas Eve panic buys are the furthest things from most people’s minds. Or at least it should.

Despite still being in the grips of a recession, UK consumers aren’t shy when it comes to parting with their cash at Christmas time; as evidenced by this year’s typically frenzied rush for gifts. More and more consumers are turning to the Internet too when buying goods; with recent reports showing that online shopping in November increased by 11% compared with the same period in 2008 and 25% more than the preceding month of October. So the need for ecommerce websites to be fully optimised as the rush begins has never been more evident.
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As we approach the end of the year, there will inevitably be lots of articles and blog posts predicting what’s going to be happening in the world of search engine marketing for 2010.

Our own SEO Copywriter, Stephen Logan, has already posted his ‘What to look out for in the world of search in 2010‘ which gives his summary of some of the stories he expects to be covering in the New Year.

Now Rand Fishkin, of SEOmoz, has posted his ‘8 predictions for SEO in 2010‘ which takes a look at some of the trends that have already started taking shape this year. Rand expands on these and explores how some of these developments could affect anyone interested in SEO or site owners just looking for more traffic from natural search.

Probably the most ‘controversial’ of his points would be the first regarding real-time search but the argument is well made and highlights how Google seem to have got it wrong in their desperation to beat the competition.

Whatever actually happens in 2010, the Internet and search engine marketing in general, is bound to remain a fast moving sector and one that will keep SEO experts and site owners alike on their toes.

Without doubt, the Internet is a great place to be for anyone looking to sell products or services online.

Buying online is now very firmly in the mainstream and there are many businesses operating profitably online. Some of these have taken care of their own search engine marketing, whilst others have elected to use a specialist agency such as Impact Media.

Whichever direction a business takes, it is vital that they recognise the marketing of their website is just one part of a complex model. With Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you can improve your online visibility in the natural search results and using Pay per Click (PPC), you can complement SEO by having your adverts shown when users perform a search.

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Business is all about communication. The interaction between a company and their clients, providers and customers is key to building a successful and profitable infrastructure. Online the principle remains the same, however the mode of communication is markedly changed.

Rather than being able to talk to visitors face-to-face in your store or offices, websites have to rely on a whole new method of convincing passing trade that they’re the site for them. Without the opportunity to talk directly to customers, you are instead reliant on copy to do the talking for you.
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An article appeared today on TechCrunch pouring scorn on the domination of Google as well as the world of SEO and Search Engine Marketing; suggesting the time may have come to have Government regulation to oversee the entire industry.

Would this work? No. Would this be possible? Probably not. Google and their search compatriots wield a lot of power. They can wipe a website off their pages for the merest breach of regulation. There are also many SEO companies that still inexplicably espouse the idea of guaranteeing top spot.

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SEO and Internet marketing agencies are often given a bit of a rough ride. As an industry, it is not without its charlatans and is still tarnished by the bad old days of black hat upstarts propelling websites up the search rankings through the shadiest of methods.

Search engines have made it increasingly difficult for websites to cheat the system. Their complex set of rules and finely tuned algorithms ensure a far higher level of quality from any SERP (search engine results page). Modern-day SEO is all about adding quality through a series of multi-faceted processes; not simply spamming select pages full of white text or keywords. It can take time and exhaustive effort to make up a few places in the rankings.
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Firefox have now started allowing “Add-on Collections” which is a great way for users of Firefox to share, or make public, their favourite plugins (add-ons) for a give topic.

One of those to already be made available is a “Best of Breed Firefox Collection for SEO and Internet Marketers” from Andy Beard. Andy’s assembled some very useful plugins here in one collection so you could add them all or just view the list and add individually. Enjoy!

We hope that you enjoy reading the information in our blog. It’s intended to be a mix of information for anyone interested in search engine marketing, together with observations and news stories related to the Internet and “search” in particular. We also use it, of course, to announce news related to Impact Media such as when a new client chooses us for their SEO or PPC management.

However, if you’ve read through the information in our blog and are still hungry for more, you really should pay a visit to the BIGLIST of Search Marketing Blogs.

BIGLIST of Search Marketing Blogs

This is a comprehensive resource listing some of the most popular blogs related to the search engine marketing industry and has over 400 entries at the time of writing this post.

Yahoo has recently updated the terms and conditions of its pay per click (PPC) advertising program to allow it to optimise your account.

I’m not going to repeat what has already been written on this topic but if you’re a Yahoo Search Marketing PPC client, it would be in your interest to read this summary from Econsultancy:

Is Yahoo’s proactive account ‘optimization’ legal?

Search engine marketing is the process of marketing a website via the search engines by use of SEO and PPC.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of making your website (and therefore your product or service) appear in a prime position on search engine pages.  Of course, this is a highly competitive business, with thousand of businesses not only competing for primary positions on web SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but also thousands of businesses competing for the job to achieve these positions for businesses in the UK.

As a Marketing Manager, you can’t ignore the massive power of the Internet as a marketing tool.  E-Marketing has taken the basic traditional marketing strategies and exploded them.  Now, without SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Paid Inclusion and Paid Placement, your product or service will have zero product positioning on the Internet. So what should you do?

Let’s look at the three different areas of SEM:

SEO
Search Engine Optimisation involves optimising a website and its content for the best search engine results when the search engine’s spiders crawl the website each month.

This involves hundreds of potential tweaks and techniques that can be used to increase or improve your results positioning.  You should only use techniques that are approved by Google and the other search engines, otherwise you run the risk of having your website banned from them altogether!

The use of keywords and phrases within the content of the website and within meta-tag areas help the spiders to work out what your website is about and where it should fall in the rankings.

Paid Inclusion
You can pay the search engines to include your website in particular indexes of result listings.  This is essentially buying your ranking for a yearly fee, although you only usually get a single page for that fee and then there may still be charges per click.  There is a thin line between Paid Inclusion and PPC.  Paid Inclusion is particularly useful where traditional SEO techniques might not be able to help the website, such as when the advertiser wants to use dynamic pages that do not show up well on Google spider crawls.

Paid Placement (PPC)
Pay per Click, or PPC as it is known, is a marketing method whereby the advertiser only pays when a user clicks on an online advertisement.  This click takes the user to the advertiser’s website.  PPC Ads can be placed on websites, within search engine results pages, on company blogs and social media sites.  Google AdWords is the most successful example of this type of advertising although these days, many other companies use this method of advertising.

Advertisers using PPC generally bid for the most frequently used keywords for their product.  These keywords are used within the search terms that a user might type into a search engine.  The highest bidder for the chosen terms gets the best position or placement.  On Google, these ads appear above the normal SERPs listings and down the right hand side of the page too.   This method of advertising is referred to as ‘Sponsored Links’.

No one SEM method will work above the other.  To get the best results, a combination of all three methods is advised by SEM experts.

At Impact Media, we can create a tailored package of combined SEM methods that would increase your web visibility and give you the kind of presence on the web that would cost thousands more in the traditional off-line marketing arena. Review our search engine marketing services page for details of how we could help your business grow online.