Google’s social rival, the massively popular micro blogging site Twitter, are on the forefront of the accusing camp. After the new search algorithm was launched by Google, Twitter accused Google of trying to drive traffic to their social network by manipulating search results. A Twitter representative made the following statement: “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the internet. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter, as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users”.

Personally, I think Twitter has a point. Twitter has had a massive social impact over the last few years (the “Twitter Revolutions” for example) and breaking news can often be found first on Twitter. If results from Twitter (or any other site for that matter) is the most relevant, the information should be available first in Google search results. This also ties in with the aforementioned Search Engine Optimisation. If you have to compete with only slightly relevant data from Google itself, you’re in for a losing battle. One option is to embrace the change from a social marketing perspective. But is this really best for the user?

In conclusion, it seems that many are worried that relevant results get pushed down in favour of Google + content. Fundamentally, relevancy is what it all boils down to. Google might not be in the wrong here, they are certainly entitled to promote their social network, but they should not compromise the quality of their search results in the process.

Twitter/Facebook - image credit - www.cbsnews.com

Having all the Personalised content from Google Plus mentioned above weaved into search result pages might not be welcomed by everyone. And at first glance it might seem to completely change the way we approach SEO. A lot of us in the field of Search Engine Optimization have been preparing for the day that search gets social. The option to switch between Global and Personalized results however, came as a surprise. Users can choose whether or not they want to use personalised search. This essentially means that current SEO practices still play the same role as always.

One cannot, however, predict the changes Google will make in the future, and tapping into the SEO potential of Personalised Search will play an increasingly important role in a Search Marketing campaign. Google might require us to be logged in at all times to use any of its features, including search. Even if this happens, I believe traditional SEO will remain alive and well. In its core, SEO is about optimization for the user, to optimize websites in order to facilitate and improve the search experience. This will always remain relevant.

The Next Step: Online Marketing

Blind Designs realised in 2009 that launching an online marketing strategy could have a magnificent impact on their business. They approached SAbest and we launched their Google Adwords (Pay per Click) Campaign in February 2009. Just 7 days after launching their campaigns, they had 192 visits and 20% of the visits were from Google Adwords and 6.67% from non-paid adverts. 72% were new clients visiting their website through Google.

We initially started only with Pay per Click advertising, but after a successful year of Pay per Click campaigns and remarkable return on investment, Blind Designs launched search engine optimisation on their website in conjunction with their Adwords campaign.

We started their search engine optimisation in February 2009. Within 8 months of optimisation, we managed to get them to the top listing on the first page of organic searches when searching their most competitive keyword: Blinds.
SEO especially, builds complete brand trust and awareness, as people perceive companies that rank on the first page of searches as the market leaders and the most trusted in the industry.
This meant optimum visibility online in all searches.

The Proof Is In The Pudding:

You will notice in the block below the difference in visits from 2009 when they started with Pay per Click right through to 2011 when they also added search engine optimisation to their online marketing plan. This also shows the impact the two products combined have on each other, and on customer trust and brand association.

Visits
Campaigns

PPC:Feb 2009 – Feb 2010: +20%
SEO:Feb 2009 – Feb 2010: +6.67%

PPC: Feb 2010 – Feb 2011: +20.58%
SEO: Feb 2010 – Feb 2011: +21.88%

PPC: Feb 2011 – Aug 2011: 24.37%
SEO: Feb 2011 – Aug 2011: 24.73%

This clearly states the value of doing Pay per Click and Search engine optimisation together. The performance of various keywords, and their conversion rates are closely monitored and adjusted according to the results achieved.
Focused landing pages were created for the Pay per Click campaigns, ensuring higher conversion rates as the captive audience got the information they were looking for immediately, with substantial call to action areas. Their average conversion rates from Feb 2011 – Aug 2011 was 12.07%. Other advertising campaigns expect an average of 1% conversion – and the trackability is minimal.

The Future Of Blind Designs:

Due to their online visibility, Blind Designs maintained a steady growth of 5% annually, even through the recession period.
The brand has become trusted as word of mouth is backed up by online presence – and will always be viewed as one of the market leaders for blinds in South Africa.
One last word from Paul O’ Brien is that Google Adwords should form part of every company’s strategy to some agree.

With Search engine optimisation (SEO) you not only build brand awareness, but more importantly, you gain trust within your industry. The higher the ranking of your site in the search results, and the more frequently your page appears on the results pages, the more visitors and sales you’ll have, because you are targeting people who are looking for your product. Being listed on top of search engine results also almost automatically cements your company as a market leader.

Trust + brand awareness + more visitors = more sales.

So what is SEO? SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of structuring a web page so that it is found, read, and indexed by search engines as effectively as possible. It improves the visibility of your website in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

These search engines use crawlers to follow links from one page to another and retrieve the contents. This is indexed and added to their databases. Search engines’ web crawlers rank sites according to their relevance to search terms, which is calculated using criteria such as the extent of keyword matches and the number of sites linked to a website. Done properly, SEO ensures that, when users search for terms relevant to your business, they will find your website every time.

Unique content counts. Having professionally written, relevant copy on your site (different from the content on other sites in wording, structure and topics) can provide a big boost for your site’s rankings. Frequency of content change is also a must – not small changes to existing content, but new content which shows that your website is active and dynamic.

Two prevalent methods have given you the tools to do just that – get yourself known.

The first of these is similar to an online banner marketing campaign, except you can splash your adverts across many websites at the same time.  This we call Google Display Networks (GDN), and the adverts run across all the sites that have opened themselves up to this kind of marketing.  The beauty of GDN is that it creates awareness before people necessarily know about you and actively go looking for you or your products.

Furthermore, Google almost ‘tracks’ the user’s general application of the web, so if they are on certain websites often, and your advert is relevant to them, it will show to them when they go to other sites.  Kind of eerie, but from a marketing point of view phenomenal!

Having had said that, Display Network allows for a lot of awareness and positioning, but not necessarily a conversion to a sale or direct response.  People often see something, and then go in search of it later, which is why the second method is absolutely vital, we believe.

This second method is Search Engine Marketing.  This is also the most effective way of advertising online, as you have a captive audience that are ready to engage and interact with you.  The quickest way to get your product, brand or service ‘out there’ on Search Engine Marketing is by making use of Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising as it is immediate and guaranteed when managed correctly.  Besides this, Pay Per Click is flexible and can be changed and optimized real-time.

That said, however, to have a complete online visibility and presence, and to ‘dominate’ search engines cost effectively in the long run, is by optimizing your website and website content in such a way that your brand will be on the top of all major search engine listings.  This is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  Search Engine Optimisation is done over a period of time, and thus does not necessarily yield immediate success, but in the long run is the most cost effective way to market yourself online.

Our advice, then, would be to start with GDN en PPC, get results and increase the proverbial bottom line, and then proceed to SEO – and eventual online success!

According to Wikipedia black hat SEO’s are classified as follows – Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. White Hat SEO’s are then defined by Wikipedia as follows – White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm.

Now as you can probably see from this there are flaws in these statements because what do you construed as an action to game the algorithm. Isn’t including your keywords in your page titles an attempt to game the algorithm? Who defines what is seen as white hat and black hat. Because of this obscure divide between “good and evil” it is really something SEO have a pet peeve with.

I do however think because of the nature the only way to clearly define black hat and white hat is by having a real person review it. Link buying is something that is considered black hat if it is only done to increase search engine rankings. Now this is a really interesting topic and we could debate it for hours but top SEO’s have all admitted that if you look at some of the most competitive search queries you would find that all the ranking websites have bought links in the past.

So now when you buy links for your company are you trying to game the algorithm or are you just trying to catch up? Well this really is a difficult question to answer and I won’t even try to but this just shows the obscurity of these classifications. I do however believe there are cases where you can clearly see a tactic that is trying to game the algorithm for “evil”.

Clocking for instance is something that has been extensively used in the past to game search engine algorithms and most search engines are really good at detecting this. But what about cases where there is a justified reason for using clocking? Clocking is basically when the page that a crawler sees and the page an actual visitor sees differs. What about situations where the website needs to first confirm information before it can show you it’s content? Is it then okay to serve different content to a crawler than to a real visitor?

In my opinion there is definitely cases where these tactics are negative and the aim is to make irrelevant content relevant to search queries but for the most part SEO’s are simply trying to have their clients rank for search queries that are relevant to their products or services. I believe this is where we should look for right and wrong rather than in the tactics that are used.

Search engine optimization in essence is the practice of altering and tweaking a website and factors outside of your website to gain higher rankings in organic listings for targeted search terms. Organic listings are also referred to as natural listings these are the results that are not “paid for” (Payments to search engines that is).

Now a big misconception which people quite often make is that SEO is firstly an once off thing and secondly is something cheap. Now back when search engine’s started to become popular it might have been cheaper to rank well but since the benefit of ranking well in search engine result pages has been noticed it has become quite competitive. Thus it takes experts to analyze competitors to make sure you do more than your competitors to out rank them.

It also definitely isn’t a once off thing. Once you reach your rankings you will need to ensure you keep one step ahead of your competitors. Thus there are definitely costs associated with SEO which is determined by the vertical your company is classed in, the state of your website and what your current rankings are. SEO is also definitely a bespoke service and as such this adds to the cost and time needed to work out an effective strategy.

We have achieved some amazing results for our clients by using SEO. I’m going to look at 3 of our clients who have reached great results since signing up for SEO.

In our first example above (Company One) you can see we have done an comparison of their organic traffic compared from July 2007 to July 2010. We started this campaign off 3 years ago and have been constantly working with this company advising them on every step they take. They compete in quite a competitive vertical so it is important to be involved every step of the way. They did initially have some organic traffic before we started as indicated by the green line on the graph above but from the graph above you can see that this was nothing compared to what we have helped them achieve by utilizing SEO. We trebled their organic traffic in the last three years, which was a phenomenal feat. This has lead to our client becoming leaders in their relative industry.

Our second example is Company Two, who competes on a less competitive vertical. They started out with very limited organic traffic and no SEO strategy as well as website that was not search engine friendly at all. We helped them transform their website and define a SEO strategy both of which has helped them achieve the amazing results you see on the graph above. Their organic results have grown by a 613%.

Our last example is of side project we started in our company with the goal of turning it into a business. We thus had the opportunity to work with it from start to end. We created a website which would target our audience and use a very clearly defined SEO strategy. This meant me could develop the website with this strategy in mind. This resulted in us completely overshooting all our targets and building an extremely profitable on-line business driven by only organic traffic. The traffic in this comparison shows a growth of 890%.

So now that you have a few examples of what SEO can do for a company, do you really think you can compete without it? Feel free to drop us a line to find out how SEO could be helping your company. Have a great week and check in again for our case studies on social media and it’s benefits.

Now in today’s world and with the emergence of web 2.0 it has become vitally important for us to control our personal brand. Why you may ask? Well you quite often attend conferences and networking session to promote yourself and build up contacts. This is a way of advertising your personal brand. Now in today’s age the online world has become so entwined in our lives that it is almost impossible to separate the two. Now what does that mean for your personal brand? Well in whichever stage of your life you may find yourself, you need to make sure you control what people find when the search for you online. Thus if you search for your name you should find your own web properties. For instance if you search for “Chris Calitz” you will find my personal blog with contact information for me and links to my social presence online ie. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin.

Thus I have made sure people find info about me, which I control. This means I can then further advertise myself by simply making changes to the web properties I own. Now Emil gave you a quite detailed explanation of how to setup a Wordpress site but you need to take this a step further. You need to do some SEO on your website to ensure you are the first result in search engines for your branded terms.

Now luckily most of our branded terms are not qualified as very competitive keywords for instance “Chris Calitz” is not a very competitive term so the SEO I needed to do was not that extensive. If you do however have a name such as Richard Branson you might have a problem.

1. Choosing a domain name

Now the first step I would recommend is that you buy a domain name that contains your branded terms. So if your brand online and offline is based on your name try to buy a domain containing your name. For instance John Doe or Joe Bloggs would buy johndoe.com or joebloggs.com. Choosing a domain extension isn’t as important if your brand doesn’t compete with a competitive keyword phrases but if you are competing with Richard Branson you might need to make smart decisions. For instance if you are based in South Africa you could buy the local extension richardbranson.co.za, which is available I checked. This could give you a bit of a head start as you will be able to rank higher in South Africa but this isn’t a guarantee.

2. Finding inexpensive links

Now in SEO links are probably the most important ranking factor at the moment. Thus you need to build some links for your site. Now as this is not a difficult vertical to rank for you will only need a few inexpensive ones. You could search online for a few free directories to submit your site to which should ensure you have enough links. Some examples are www.sabest.co.za, www.dmoz.org, www.ananzi.co.za etc.

3. Deciding on anchor text and description

Now before you submit your sites you need to ensure you have decided on anchor text you want to use. These should be branded terms and should vary. For instance “Chris Calitz” and “chriscalitz”. These will be used for the text of the links you receive and they will be important in determining for which keywords you rank.

4. Lastly have content related to your branded terms

You need to ensure that you at least have a page with content or that your homepage has content where the branded phrases you want to rank for is mentioned.

This should put you well on your way to controlling your online brand. Feel free to leave some questions below and check in tomorrow as we will discuss how PPC could help you market your brand.

Every one wants to know how long it will take before they will move up on Google’s Search Results Pages. First you need to do proper research about the keywords. Your site might be optimized for specific search phrases, but is it optimized for the words that people actually search for. SEO will mean nothing if you rank high for search terms that people never use. That is why the research is so important to make sure you select keywords that people use to search for your products or services.   It can take anywhere from 3 – 6 months for search engines to see any changes on your website before you will move up on the search pages.

SEO will not work for you if the SEO Company says that they guarantee page rank of XX, or top ranking in XX time or page ranking at all in a short time frame. Ranking is done periodically by Google, not on a daily basis, and nothing you can do will speed up the process. It can take weeks or months to get a page ranked and your ranking is also dependent upon other sites rankings.

Your site will be compared to other similar sites to determine relevancy and popularity. (By the way, page ranks are dynamic and not assigned one time and never adjusted. They do change. And, low-ranking pages can still appear high in search engine results, and high-ranking pages may not appear at all.)

SEO is all about content, relevancy and language of your website. It is behind the scene which one cannot see. We only see the website. If the language of your website is wrong, your website will not be visible on search engines and potential client will not be able to find you.  The language can also refer to the “meta tags” of the website.  The language of the website must be 100% correct.

There can be a various of reasons why your SEO did not work, but I cannot state this strongly enough: SEO cannot be done quickly unless it is done poorly. So be wary of those SEO companies that promise you quick results. If propper research is not done before work is done on your website, the chances are good that you might not rank well for keywords that perform well.

This week we will have a look at why you need to get professional help for your website, from the management of the website to all types of online marketing that can be utilised. The online marketing industry is an ever changing environment and if you are running your own company and still need to keep track of all the best practices needed to stay ahead something will get left behind.

Online marketing professionals work with websites and the marketing thereof everyday and trusting a company to handle your website might be worth a lot more than just the extra money that you will spend for their services.

People that I’ve met that ran their own PPC campaigns for example, realized that it was getting too involved for them to manage it properly. After handing it over to us they could focus more on their business and performance of the PPC campaigns also improved. Trying to do SEO yourself might be a bit more tricky because SEO is a lot more technical. You need someone that understands the technical side of how websites and search engines work to do that properly. Managing your social media marketing by yourself might work for a while but you will soon realize that as it grows that it will become time consuming, and you will never get to everything that you have to and do proper management of your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Do check back here the rest of the week for more reasons why you should use an online marketing expert.