MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

The landscape in the virtual world is prone to sudden and unannounced shifts and changes. You have to be on the ball to face and conquer new challenges in the most creative and innovative ways possible. Problems are compounded, however, when the law and legal concerns step into the fray, then the matter becomes more than mere debate and concrete solutions become necessary. But concrete solutions are not always that easy to come by. Consider the recent issue regarding who owns blog comments, as raised by Jason Lee Miller of WebProNews.

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Over the past three weeks I’ve been thinking about how print journalists, advertisers and PRs have made the cross into cyberspace, and wondered about the problems they’re encountering. I read this article (I wish I could say stumbled upon this article, but I think that the phrase is taken), which explores various women’s presence on the Internet. It implies that the online communities run by women resemble their print glossies, with mommy bloggers and weight-loss bloggers and Sex and the City-type chicks attracting generous traffic volumes, and both representing and dictating what women read and think about online. I’d add that in response to these communities, bloggers like Violent Acres, Greta Christina and College Call Girl also attract large volumes of readers who react with antipathy to the latest hairdos-type discourses.

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My mom always told me that if you really want something done, “you have to do it yourself”. No where is this more true than in the world of SEO, where there is so much one can do to promote a website or blog. The principle also applies SEO’s new best friend, social media. Social media has a large platform so that you can market your website or blog in a number of different ways. For a start, social media marketing allows you to promote your site or business through social media channels. It’s a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic. In my opinion, there are several methods that you can use to optimise social media from the comfort of your PC.

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Building social networks and establishing relationships with your consumers is often touted as a holy grail of online marketing. Open and honest communication and interaction are supposed to be chief among the goals of modern companies so that they don’t alienate their customers or clients. Alienation is the devil and social marketing your saviour. But social networking and nursing fledgling contacts takes time, and time, as we all know, is generally in short supply.

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Wikia Search, an open-sourced search engine, was released in January 2008 and made public by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, even though it has no association with the collective knowledge leaders. The recent update, alpha version 2, now allows users to add, remove, or change organic search rankings. Ratings, highlighting, and annotation are also available for users to edit results.

Wales says the project is a year in the making and that the ethos behind Wikia Search is to ”…build a freely licensed, completely open and transparent, community-driven search engine.” In Wales’ estimation, Wikia Search will take a minimum of 2 years to reach industry standard quality. He admitted that there will still be some “glitches and bugs” that will need to be addressed along the way.

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A corporate blog can be a potent business tool for many companies, as long as effort is made to keep it up to date and relevant. A corporate blog can act as that vital connection between the organisation and the public (especially if it is an international org.), as well as a portal of views and advice on the particular industry or services offered.

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We all know what YouTube is and we have all watched a video clip of some sort on it. It’s undoubtedly one of the most popular sites on the net, and has a strong following that grows daily in all of the demographic sectors in every country in the world.

There is a lot happening over at YouTube, innovation is alive and kicking as they keep launching better additions to their service.

A while back, You Tube launched search suggestions internationally. It’s easy to activate and deactivate and comes in really handy when you not 100% certain of what it is that you’re looking for.

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Images are becoming an increasingly prevalent method to source visits to your website. Google’s Universal Search is one of the tools that make this possible. With a fair amount of images present in multimedia, including books, news articles and reviews, showing up in SERPs, will they replace traditional search results or simply supplement them?

Jack Menzel, director of the universal search program, says that Google has not yet made a decision on this and that only a limited number of Universal search results get shown. Susan Moskwa, also from Google, shared the sentiment. She says constant testing is being done on how to implement universal search results effectively and that we should “stay tuned”.

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Just as Paris Hilton is a brand, so are you. Paris is associated with certain things, shoes, cars, money, clothing, nightclubs… you get the drift. How she conducts herself and what she does affects her reputation and the way outsiders see her as a brand.

Personal and corporate branding are very different but equally important. Corporate branding is a lot easier as you can have a group of brand ambassadors looking after one brand. Personal branding is a little trickier . You should always pay attention to personal branding. At the very least, you want to make yourself easy to be found via Search. People used to call and check references. Nowadays, you get Googled.

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There’s no hiding from the fact that search is evolving. It happens every day right in front of our eyes, yet we seem so slow to acknowledge this process. Search engines need to evolve accordingly so that they can stay profitable and relevant. Since 2007, when Google launched its Universal Search, they have been including image and video results in their SERPs. So, is this the nudge that small businesses need to compete with industry big-wigs?

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