MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

There are many companies who outsource their SEO (search engine optimisation) requirements; sometimes fully or sometimes partially, but some may not fully understand the benefits of hiring an SEO company to take care of things versus having a dedicated, internal SEO division or person. There are many fly-by-night SEO companies offering discounts and specials and fringe benefits, while the real cost of an SEO campaign all really depends on the clients being involved and the agreement between them and the respective SEO companies. Project scope, website technology, market competition, client-side resources and billable hours are all factors that could influence the cost and efficacy of an SEO campaign.

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I’ve recently been browsing the odd webmasterworld forum discussion and formulating some idea of what the occasional disgruntled webmaster has observed around their sites, regarding the alleged and illusive minus 950 and minus 30 penalties.

The rough definition I’ve derived for each is as follows:

-950: The penalty applied to a page for some or other contravention of Google’s rules, that forces that page to rank somewhere around the last pages in the search results, for a given keyword.

-30: The penalty applied to an entire site when it violates some crucial rule, where the home page does not even rank highly for the website/company name.

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The future is an unpredictable element of everyday life, attempting to predict it is nearly impossible. The same goes for trying to predict the future of an industry such as SEO. There are, however, ways in which to gauge the direction in which it is headed by observing where it started, its current position, and the expectations it has for the near future. SEO is still a relatively new industry (considering that it has been in the public eye for less than 10 years), and it’s more than likely that there are still some undiscovered areas of search engine marketing that exist.

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Competition is healthy, it keeps people and companies on their toes, and without it there would be nothing new and innovative in the world. The same theory applies to search, and despite what many people in the industry think, search is not going anywhere. In fact, it’s still in its infancy and has yet to reach its full potential. It’s all very exciting!

The other day, I read a blog post on Tech Crunch where Michael Arrington discussed why he thought that search innovation had just began, and how wrong Mr O`Reilly was when he stated that eventually all the search engines would just give up on search and outsource to Google.

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SEO is technically still considered as a rather new niche market. This has resulted in many scammers trying their hardest to pocket as much cash as they can while SEO is still crawling its way through infancy. Unfortunately, because it’s quite a young market, the public are largely unaware that it exists, let alone what it can do for websites. Its relative youth and inexperience also make it difficult to determine which agency’s promises are actually reasonable, or at least believable.

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Many people believe that their results drop in rankings because Google has penalised them, others believe that these penalties don’t exist and that a drop in rankings can be attributed to Google’s re-indexing. Both sides have valid points, as well as some arguable flaws in their arguments, however, it’s better to be safe than sorry so let’s just consider the possibility of Google penalties.

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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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Many SEO specialists have, over time, put their own twist on the fascinating events that make up the lifecycle of their niche market – Search Engine Optimisation. Jessica Bowman of Business.com continually compares the SEO lifecycle to the stages that make up a marriage.

According to Bowman’s marriage analogy, there are four phases that form the framework of a company’s SEO lifecycle. Firstly, there is the Courtship phase, which requires that the right SEO specialist be sourced from the ocean of SEO fish to lead your company’s website to the very top of the SERPs. This can be a daunting task and may take a few attempts to find the right one for you. This is similar to the process of finding a life-time partner, but the difference here is that you pay financially for each failed attempt.

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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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