MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

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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To understand the semantic web is to understand the future. I’ve attempted to begin this knowledge quest practically in reading about Yahoo!’s latest developments in what they call their contribution to the semantic web. ”Open Search” is Yahoo!’s endeavour to enrich search results with deeper information, where integrating the support of semantic web standards such as microformats and Resource Description Framework (RDF) into search results, is the way to do so.

Standardising these meta data formats will allow website owners and developers the means to make better detailed site topic or subject matter available to the search engine to include in search results. In this way, the semantic web will “open” search (giving site authors more control over what to include in the results).

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Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Wentworth Miller, you might remember me from such TV classics as ‘prison break’, ‘Prison break season 2’ and ‘Prison break season 3’. I have recently had ear-enlargement surgery. My one true vocation or calling is getting myself wrongfully thrown into high level security prisons and then taking on the gruelling, challenging task of breaking out. Well, actually I have slight interest in some other more sensible activity: I do find search technology quite fascinating, and I’d like to learn more about mass parallel computing and how it enhances the effectiveness and accuracy of information retrieval. In short, is the internet one day going to wake up and become sentient, and automatically inherit the personality of Tim Burners-lee, its father, or worse, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo?

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Are you finding that the search terms you have selected for your campaign are not performing as well as expected or that your competitor’s performance is far superior to yours?

Then make sure you have at the very least considered all of the following possible variations of your key terms:-

* Plurals
* Hyphenated words
* Synonyms
* Acronyms
* Misspellings
* Variations of the associated verbs (Flats to Rent, Flats to Let)
* One word vs. two word spellings (AdText vs. Ad Text)

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As SEM becomes more of an increasingly prominent entity in the marketing arena, so do “experimental tactics”. As Jane Copland mentions in a very thoughtful post, Google doesn’t like tricks, but without some kind of tactic, where would that leave our industry? It’s just about being clever with your “tactics” and ensuring that you don’t use them in any kind of manipulative and malicious manner.

Keep under Google’s radar and you will be ok, but what exactly is under the radar and how far can you go before you get whacked over the head by Matt Cutts?

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All in the SEO business know the importance of rankings. We sweat blood and cry actual tears to get clients as high up the ranking ladder as we can. No one is really satisfied until the top of Google’s head page is reached and held for time immemorial. So it may come as a shock to hear that in the grand scheme of SEO marketing strategies, the value attached to rankings could be misplaced.

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In the world of literature the saying. “An apple does not fall far from the tree”, can be said when it comes to link building. Links are a crucial part of attaining high search rankings, but you must be very careful about whom you link. The links that surround your website must be relevant to the content that actually exists on the site itself. Carefully acquired links earn you points and boost your site ranking in the search engines.

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There is a general air of question around what Yahoo has up their marketing sleeve. Looking at some recent blogging around the subject. There are some varied ideas on what Yahoo has planned to generate profits from all their vested interests.

Aaron Wall mentions the recent lay-offs – 30 people fired with a rumoured 2000 to follow, in his post about branding ideas. What is this about? There has to be something to the plans laid out for the brand by co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang. Are they trying to raise the half a billion to purchase social media giant Facebook, by shedding employees? Search Engine Journal say that Yang has suppressed any plans for what they call the “Yahoo Branded universe”, and the long-time highly popular search engine brand will focus their efforts on the revenue generating ‘in-search’ advertising platform.

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We’ve all made our personal resolutions to live healthier, lose the weight, drop the smoking and eat at least five different fruits a day. But now it is time for all business- to-business (b2b) SEO marketers to make resolutions for their marketing campaigns.

SEO marketers should make their first resolution this year to ensure that communication between their client and their customers is top notch. Open those channels with blogs, articles, and viral campaigns with feedback opportunities. It’s time to finally do the hard work and commit to creating good user experiences for your client’s SEO platform. Blogs need to be updated and content needs to written.

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