MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

It’s no easy task to master and could take years and years. The search landscape is extremely dynamic, so if you don’t have passion, determination and a thirst for knowledge, there is no way you will ever reach the pinnacle of success.

Hard work is a given, high energy is a prerequisite. If you have all of the above and adequate resources and relationships to support your endeavour, there is no reason why you shouldn’t succeed.

According to Adam, the challenge is in getting clients to adopt SEO when they have never heard of it, don’t believe it is “really that important right now” (typically heard from startups), or still believe SEO is spamming.

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Navigating SEO waters can be perilous for old sea dogs as well as beginners trying to find their sea legs. The industry is in a constant state of ebb and flow. Nothing stands still and if it does, it’s quickly washed away, only to be replaced with the next trend riding the internet wave. Self-proclaimed industry experts jostle for position, sowing harmony as well as discontent whenever they choose to voice their opinions.

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Yahoo! hasn’t succeeded in the great PPC race nearly as much as Google, because they focused more on how much advertisers are spending to determine where to place their ads, rather than on sheer relevance. Is it no surprise then that they are running to Google to try a last resort and probably ineffectual boost to their overall share value? Yahoo! co-founder Yang is still too stubborn to go into a more substantial partnership with Google. The two week trial of placing AdSense into Yahoo! search results is set to take up only 3 percent of their ad space. It goes to show that sometimes following the leader (Google) is the more profitable venture.

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How do you stand out from the crowd as an SEM agency? The competition is getting tough and we have to up our tactics if we want to stay ahead of the masses. The best way to do that is high quality of work and service, service, service…

The customer or user in this case is, to be politically correct, king or queen. The trends show that SEO/SEM firms are gradually focusing their attention on the user, specifically offering website usability as a service. I feel that it is very important to acknowledge that usability requires its own skills set and shouldn’t be confused with SEO. Usability addresses human interaction with a web site while SEO addresses the search engine interaction with the web site. Saying that, all SEOs should have knowledge of usability and every SEM agency should look at adding SEO to its repertoire.

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Stats reveal that 1 in every 7 UK searchers chooses to use the “Pages from the UK” option within Google. This isn’t surprising considering that local search is becoming more popular and the main reason for this? When searching locally to find products or a service, there is more chance of you receiving results that are more relevant and accessible to you.

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It looks like Google have pulled out some contradictory rabbits from their own black hat. They accuse others of following ‘black hat’ tactics, while it appears they are following similar procedures themselves. Should we believe everything they say? It appears that soon, SEO specialists will have to change their job title just to stay under the radar of Google’s incongruent accusations.

They appear to have set these rules and guidelines for online marketers and the entire industry to follow, especially when gathering backlinks, and then left evidence of being the biggest culprits by not obeying their own rules. Google have been bartering off backlinks to their own blog, an act which they say is ‘not best practice’. So is the ground that they are setting for us all that trustworthy?

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Branding. We all know what it is, yet some still struggle with it. Building a brand for yourself or for your company can be daunting when starting from the ground up. However, to keep up with today’s larger brands like Coca Cola, Google and Paris Hilton, you’ve got to put in a huge amount of time, effort and money. For those of you clever people out there, don’t try and compete with them, unless you have budgets like theirs and are prepared to throw a lot of cash at your market. Sorry folks, but that is the only way you’re going to reach their level, unless of course you’re prepared to distribute explicit home videos and walk around saying “that’s hot” to everything. This route doesn’t come highly recommended.

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You may say that excellent content sells itself, but I say that well-written words are just not useful enough, especially if your client is selling non-tech, non-business and non-entertainment based products. One pagers of content distributed on e-zine and review sites are a shot in the dark for high volumes of traffic. Perhaps you can think of a viral idea that’s going to make a local hockey team fly out of the water. But can you think of ideas for window glazing, au pair services, locksmiths and Czech translation services, while you’re at? You may say I’m dreaming, and to that I say: you’re just asleep.

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During my daily trawl for interesting SEO/blogging news I came across a post by Deb at Network Blogging Tips that lauded the list. She proceeded to list five (because odd numbers tend to prompt readers to add to lists and encourage more interaction) reasons why she thought list posts were the bees knees.

Now, I have issues with list posts. I tend to skip lists when I come across them, usually with much rolling of eyes and questioning of the heavens (e.g. “Why, oh why, in the name of all that is holy, has someone written yet another list post?”) The only reason I read Deb’s post was because the views expressed so directly contradicted my own.

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Think of contemptuous boy-children fighting in the schoolyard. The biggest, most feared bully in the class, Microsoft, has been yanking up the undershorts of the other kids for some time, and has inspired some retaliation, in the form of a gang-up.

Microsoft stands to gain a lot by sponging up Yahoo! into its online makeup. They want the search and social media power that Yahoo! have built, and can offer an incommensurate wad of their cash, stock value and the power of its application development. They have the home PC software market, but they want it all; they want the online market as well, they want to be the biggest, toughest kid in the classroom and on the playground. Yahoo! have stood their ground up until now.

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