MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Choosing a consumer market to go after can be a difficult choice to make in business. This is especially challenging when the section of the market you are targeting has very specific needs. Ask.com has recently announced that they aim to target their search results around a more feminine market. As women can be particularly fussy, they’ll need a lot of oomph in their marketing strategy.

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Online reputation management can be a very hazardous job in its own right. A lot of companies are happy to hand over the reins to outsider management agencies in order to solve their reputation blunders. These days they’re spoilt for choice because there are many ‘qualified’ professionals who claim they can fix all your problems in a jiffy. Cheap, speedy services are easy to offer, but are they that easy to deliver on? When companies find themselves in a rather uncomfortable position with the public, they tend to want to take the quickest and least damaging route out of the limelight. Little do they know that this route could be more damaging than they can afford.

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So an online marketer makes up a story about a kid who hires prostitutes to play games and eat Oreos in a motel room. He writes it in a reportage style and includes witnesses, comments from motel staff and real locations. The story goes wild on Digg, appears on Fox News, on YouTube and in newspapers. After chinking champagne flutes, the author (Lyndon Antcliff) announces that the story was fabricated for a client who is in no way connected with comedy, journalism, children’s rights or sex work. And the world cries foul.

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Gord Hotchkiss (CEO of Enquiro) writes a fantastic column called Just Behave on Search Engine Land every Friday. He analyses search behaviour, often delving into the complexities of the human mind to get to the bottom of thorny issues. His most recent column dealt with the illusion of conscious will, which shows that even when we think that we are making conscious decisions, we are in fact acting subconsciously.

This has huge implications for all marketing-related activities, especially search, because it proves that people aren’t motivated by the factors that they think they are. We believe that we’re being honest when we answer survey questions or participate in market studies, but we’re actually not. Hotchkiss cites his first research study as proof of this phenomenon.

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Perhaps you’ve heard of siloing, which is a method of categorising content on your site, revolving around a central theme. You determine that theme and its sub-topics by looking at the target key/search phrases for your business and its relevant market. You then optimise your site’s internal PageRank by linking the “silos”, or as Microsoft would say, the “blocks”, together using rel=”nofollow” tags on pages that are unimportant in relation to the main theme. Ideally, this means that Google would crawl only the quality internal links to the site, and derive the PageRank successfully from the upper-tier pages. The thinking goes that on account of the nofollow tags, PageRank is siphoned off into the most “searchable” pages.

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Many say content is king, but I would like to take it a step further and say content is god. The line between content and advertising is blurring and one of the major ways to be recognised online is to have content that others seek. The days of advertising to create a buzz and receive hits on your site are decreasing, while Web 2.0 is becoming more popular.

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Barry Schwartz of searchengineland.com has written that Yahoo! now redirects those who use their search platform to their country’s version of the search engine by default. He relays information directly from his editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan, who at the time of the post was in the UK.

According to Danny, Yahoo! will now redirect someone searching within the UK to the “UK & Ireland” Website. The searcher will initially be allowed to opt out and return to the main Yahoo! domain, which will then return as their default page, unless they forego this option, in which case they remain “local”. A laymen, or average search engine user, can still easily reach a country site version by typing in the address URL into their browser address bar. The redirect only happens when someone from Germany, for example, tries to access Yahoo.com , and are automatically taken to their local version.

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“There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty!” This has has been said over and over again by people in the industry that really should know better. This silly statement is a fallacy; duplicate content is harmful and even if it is not penalised as per say, it’s just as bad.

As Enge mentions in his post, duplicate content does not help the user. If Google presents the same article consecutively in its SERPS, how would that benefit the searcher? It doesn’t, as it is irrelevant. That’s why Search engines apply a filter to prevent this from happening.

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In September last year Stoney deGeyter wrote a very entertaining post in which he claimed that content was dead, and that community has replaced it as king in the tired old cliché. It was nearly everything a good post should be, controversial, topical and witty. He even threw in some content-related statistics, which he claims don’t really make the appropriate connection between the importance of content and web marketing. The problem is that he’s trying to refute the irrefutable.

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When Google first began, no one knew quite what to make of it. They had a policy of “Do no evil”, they didn’t conform to traditional business practices, had unique hiring practices and took pride in their inherent quirkiness. For instance, they’re now famous for their dedication to staff satisfaction with their free lunches, massages and relaxation rooms. They also allow employees one day a week to work on whatever project they want.

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