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webRED Issue 19 - June 2006 |
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webRED Issue 19 - June 2006 |
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In this issue:
Hi readers, and welcome to our June issue of WebRed. The mid year has arrived and we are focusing our articles largely on the current growth of the search industry and internet consumer behaviour trends as a whole, as well as the growing need for online marketing and we offer some tactics to get your online business off the ground. The search engine optimization industry is one of the most exciting Information Technology fields to be involved with in today's business environment. With the economic downfall of many dot-coms now behind us, one could easily be led to believe that the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry is having some major problems. However with the universal and ongoing need for online representation for every type of business and the dedication and communication from those who offer these services, the SEO industry has quickly become a promising field. Within the past month alone, there have been stories published regarding the importance that SEO has within a corporate online presence and for promoting a growing business. These stories not only graced the pages of industry-specific publications - they have broken the headlines of major US publications like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. This is just a small illustrator of the importance of SEO in your general marketing toolbox, but this newsletter will also be covering other ways to promote your online business as well as some very interesting current research! Happy reading Until next month Back to top >> Being lucky enough to live in the Internet era, we all realise that this phenomenon brings us immense opportunities where advertising and positioning of our businesses are concerned - the opportunities that were unrealised and even unthinkable in the past. How to utilise these opportunities with the maximum of effectiveness? That is a question with many possible answers but none of them is absolutely true in all cases. Good advice never hurts, so here we will cover again the importance of the search engine optimisation factor in the process of marketing yourself on the web. Is it compulsory to optimise a site? Not necessarily. Many sites do well without any sort of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) done on them, and some of them have a huge amount of visitors daily, but this is for the simple reason that their addresses are known to the world. People just type their brand names in browsers. That might work for big guys - but not everyone is successful enough to have a worldwide marketed brand. This is where SEO comes in for the smaller fish, and how they can get ahead. Generally, a good web promotion strategy suggests SEO and paid advertising are used in flexible combination as well as good Return on Investment (ROI) monitoring and thorough tracking of visitor conversion ratios to ensure what you are paying for is paying off! SEO is not however, solely about search engine positions. When done professionally, SEO becomes a useful marketing tool and turns into an overall web presence optimisation. Search engines become just a part of the process, whereas your target audience (consisting of people rather than search engine spiders) is considered the most important element of the whole SEO promotion campaign. That's what the true positioning means. Of course it is important for your site to rank high in the search engines for your targeted search terms. This will certainly attract visitors to your site and most of them will be directly searching for your product or service. However this isn't an opportunity to become complacent, visitors may still not buy from you but instead head towards your competitors. Positioning your site high in the search engines is not the same thing as positioning your business on the market. An unskilled and perhaps unethical SEO company will get your site high SE rankings and be happy with it. A quality SEO will improve your sites marketing quality and attractiveness, advise you on your promotion strategies, and finally turn your web site into your most effective positioning tool. This is what Optymise strives to achieve with every campaign undertaken. Paid advertising should always be considered as a supplementary guarantee for your online marketing success but organic search engine positioning will still bring you benefits that can't be underestimated. With paid advertising, you just have to pay again and again to receive visitors. With SEO you invest once - and then only basic maintenance will be necessary to stay on top - if not for all targeted search terms, but at least for most of them. So… you have a great website, but where exactly can potential customers find the path leading up to it? Contact us for more information. Source: spiderfriendly.co.uk
Current SEO Research Reveals Promising Opportunities It's always been conventional wisdom that the fastest and most efficient way to research products and pricing is on the Web. Now Enquiro and Marketing Sherpa (Research sites) have documented surveys on the role of search engines in consumer and business to business transactions. As you know, the process of search and online purchasing can require a period of time between researching the product and actually placing the order (the conversion to a sale). It's an ongoing process rather than snap decision and it is important to understand the statistics and trends to make the most of this natural process. Enquiro and Marketing Sherpa have recently completed a study of approximately 1500 participants responding to a 40-question survey that was validated with pre-testing before implementation. Here are a few highlights:
The study is rich with too many details to cover in this article, but following are some important conclusions:
With all this qualified traffic originating from search engines, it is more important than ever for marketers, wholesalers, and business owners to ensure their Web sites are correctly optimized for good positioning in search results. There is great value in SEO or online marketing and paid advertising as a user-friendly integrated marketing tool. The advantage of promoting your business online is that traffic is highly targeted. That's because potential buyers who find your offerings through search engines are looking for your products and services on their own, so they are predisposed to hear your marketing message. You can't find a more qualified prospect than that! Here are some key points that distinguish search engine marketing from other types of advertising:
Source: trademarkseo.com Back to top >> Rambling thoughts - Additional ways to promote your site Merely having a website or running a company does not guarantee success. The demands of promotion, catering for conditions of your web site or brand recognition, popularity and attracting still more clients must be of prime importance. Additional promotion of your site can increase traffic and the number of potential clients your business has access to - nothing wrong with that! Here are some marketing ideas to help get your business off the ground: Pay-per-Click As an additional way to promote your site on the web, you may decide to use paid campaigns. Some search systems, for instance, Google or Overture, offer paid (or sponsored) listings that have priority over other web sites listed together with them (these form editorial or additional listings). The site owner in conjunction with Optymise compiles a list of the keywords and phrases that users are expected to type in to look for sites devoted to the subject in question. Then, bids are made for all phrases in the list. You pay for every click on your link on the search result page. The payment depends on your bid announced for each key phrase. The first site in the list is the one with the largest bid. This is followed by the second highest, and so on. Paid promotion campaigns should be thoroughly planned, and the key phrases chosen with the utmost care, to minimise costs while achieving the best results. Continuous monitoring of the intermediate results is absolutely necessary to ensure success. Paid Directories There are lots of directories that do not charge for being included. The only requirement is to place no hateful or offensive content on the pages. There are also paid directories intended for commercial resources. Directories are very popular in web communities, are often well linked to and have good ranks in the search engines. Numerous human visitors of web directories are quite likely to become your new customers if they come across your link on a directory page. What's more, all links that lead to your site from the directory pages are valued as good and increase your site ranking. So, the greater the number of directories agreeing to list your site, the more authority it gets. Offline Branding Promotion Both search engine optimisation and paid advertising can support any offline advertising and marketing material which promotes a brand or company name. Never forget that your website URL is a vital part of your company details and should never be left out at any chance to promote your business. Banner Advertising Banner Advertising is the online equivalent of billboard style advertising. It is often expensive and we recommend its use mainly to support brand promotion rather than as effective traffic generators. Also, research shows that consumers are five times more likely to purchase products after seeing listings rather than banners. (*NPD Group, Jan 2001) Network Websites Network websites are additional websites created through which to promote different aspects of your business. Network websites are effective for driving traffic to your core business website. Email Advertising and Email Marketing Email Advertising is a means of placing advertisements in relevant online publications to give your website exposure. This has been found to be five times more cost effective than direct mail marketing (Carolinanet.com 2006). Email Marketing is useful for establishing customer relationships and encouraging repeat purchasing. Optymise Ltd offer extensive services in all of these areas, and we are happy to help consult with you and undertake any promotion of your site you may be interested in. Back to top >> Question: Once you begin using SEO, how long until you see improvement in your search engine placement? Answer: The amount of time you will have to wait will depend on which techniques are employed in your efforts to optimize your website. Assuming you've rebuilt your site and loaded it onto your server, replacing the old files, you need to be prepared to wait anywhere from a few days (if you use a pay-for-inclusion service) to a few months. If your site has already been on the Web for some time, and is already listed in all of the major directories, then you will probably begin to see improvements in your search engine rankings within 4-6 weeks. If your site is not listed in the major directories, then adding it to the directories will have a significant positive impact. If you pay for expedited review of your site at Yahoo, LookSmart, JoeAnt, GoGuides, Business.com and others, than you will see improvement the next time Google, AllTheWeb, Inktomi and others update their spider-driven indices. You need to be prepared to wait for your site to be added to the Open Directory. Some sites have waited over a year to be added. In the end, a bottom-to-top rebuild of your website will result in an improvement in your search engine rankings rather quickly. You should continue to see improvements for 6-9 months, as the changes to your site are indexed throughout the databases that drive the major search engines. Some search engines will place your site in their radar a lot sooner than others, from a couple of months to much longer. Source: Seo Logic We hope you enjoyed webRED this month. If there are any topics or questions you'd particularly like us to cover or answer, why not CONTACT US and tell us. All views expressed are those of Optymise Ltd and articles/ features are written by Optymise staff unless otherwise stated.
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