Last weekend I finally convinced myself to buy an iPad, after a few weeks of trying to figure out if I actually needed one.

I know I’m not the only one – and there’s probably a lot of people in the search industry who are currently contemplating the same decision, so I’m sure you’ll appreciate a few extra reasons you convince yourself that an iPad is essential!

1) How do you advertise on an iPad?

This is a question I was asked last week. The right answer may be that they don’t need an iPad app and they don’t need to think about marketing any differently just yet. But as a search marketer you should be aware and able to respond to your client, letting them know how the iPad may potentially change the game.

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Use Google Analytics custom segments to audit and improve search marketing

Anyone who has ever reviewed the keywords attracting visitors to a site will have seen that brand search terms usually dominate, often accounting for more than 50% of search related visits for well-known brands.

Every site has associated brands, but to paraphrase Morrisey, some brands are biggger than others. For these, isolating brand search is essential if you’re serious about using search to create incremental business i.e. create awareness and sales from new customers.

It follows that it’s futile to try to review and improve search engine marketing without taking brand phrases into account, but that’s the default for the less than savvy. For marketers, reviewing their analytics it’s easy to understand since the analytics tool doesn’t readily isolate brand and non-brand phrases.

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When it comes to travel SEO, competition is often fierce. Huge authority travel sites, luxury hotels and millions of apartments all fight for attention. Both SEOptimise in the UK and myself in Germany have been working with many SEO clients from the travel sector. Kevin Gibbons has already provided a must read resource on travel SEO back in 2008.

I’d like to list here 10 travel SEO strategies for those who have to compete in this tough niche.

Due to the high competitiveness of this market, travel SEO should be approached in manifold ways.

You can’t always compete with the big guys and age-old leaders in the good old organic results of Google. Thanks to universal search we have plenty of ways to get found. Also travel is about car rentals and flights. You have specialized “vertical” search engines for those.

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The full agenda for SMX London is now almost complete, this was a great conference last year and is expected to be a must-attend event again this year – especially as this is now an advanced conference.

There’s lots of great tracks, but if you’re attending make sure you come and see us on the following panels:
Day 1) Search Ad Quality, Under The Microscope – Richard Fergie
Day 2) Social Media, Search & Reputation Management – Kevin Gibbons

And if you haven’t signed up yet, make sure you use our 15% discount code: KEVING010.

To our American readers not making the journey across the pond, we are also attending SMX Advanced in Seattle this June so we should get to see you there instead! ;)

Creative Commons image by ahisgett

No matter if you like it or not when the old year fades away and the new year arrives most of us think about the past and the future.

• Was it a successful year?
• Where did we succeed, where did we fail?
• Which of the mistakes do we want to overcome next year?

Most people tend to plan for the upcoming year. Plenty like to be very specific about these plans so they come up with new year’s resolutions they want to fulfill. We’re in the SEO industry are not exempt from it. Continue Reading »

Robert Scoble by Alex de Carvalho

In the attention economy the attention rich win over those who get less attention. As controversy and ignorance creates more attention than common sense and boring expertise we have to deal with the phenomenon of SEO bashing every now and then. People pointing fingers saying “look at that, how stupid they are bashing SEO again” create even more buzz.

Web 2.0 celebrities can use this attention gap in order to push their own interests. Failed entrepreneurs like Jason Calacanis have done that in the past repeatedly to ride the wave of negative hype. So this time I was a little bit astounded to hear it from Robert Scoble the web pundit everybody seems to listen to.
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Once again, we are proud to be a blog partner for the SMX London 2010 event next May.

In order to receive a 15% discount, just enter the code KEVING010 when signing up online.

If you attended the conference last year you probably won’t be surprised to see it has now become an advanced event, which is great news for those looking to pick up as many useful and new tips as possible. If you didn’t attend last year, make sure you read my recap from SMX London 2009.

Around 5 years ago I read the book Who Moved my Cheese. It’s a very simple, short story about the different methods of dealing with change. I’ve recently re-read this, (it only takes about an hour so I’d definitely recommend reading if you haven’t already) – but I realised that there’s a lot which can be applied to day-to-day life in search marketing.

Image Credit: Flickr

They say an internet year is the equalivent to 7 normal years, I’m sure a search engine marketing year may be more! So basically if you don’t like change – you’re probably in the wrong job! Continue Reading »

It’s been an eventful week in the SEO blogosphere, from Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicting the future of real time search engine indexing, to Yahoo flushing millions of dollars of Geocities PageRank down the drain!  Here’s a collection of this weeks top search marketing and social media links from around the blogosphere:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking about 'the biggest challenge of the age'

SEO:

• Google Web In Five Years – Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking about how ranking real time social media content is ‘the biggest challenge of the age’.
• Pitfalls to avoid when carrying out international SEO – Some great tips to keep in mind when carrying out SEO work for an international client.
• Google’s additional discovery method – Search Engine Land talks about how Google has a updated it’s web page discovery method using RSS and Atom feeds
• Yahoo Flushes Geocities down the drain – With the deletion of Yahoo’s Geocities, 7.45 million Geocities URLs now produce 404 error message, this blog post by Local SEO Guide suggests an alternative approach that would have had significant SEO benefits for Yahoo. Continue Reading »

If you’re about to embark on an online marketing campaign, have you actually thought about what you want to achieve?

Last week, I was reading Patricio Robles’ excellent article 10 reasons people criticise SEO. Among the many comments left on the post was one suggesting that many clients don’t really know what it is they want to achieve from search engine optimisation before they start.

I think this is surprisingly true. At SEOptimise, we always encourage our clients to outline what they would consider to be success, to make sure we’re targeting our efforts. Not everyone’s goal is a straightforward commercial one.

Surprisingly often, they don’t really know and SEO is now just one more aspect of online marketing. Many organisations dutifully sign up and spend a great deal of cash of an array of web-based promotional efforts without a clear picture of what they want to achieve.

Considering how easy it is to analyse and measure online marketing success, this is an inexplicable waste of money.

More sales

This is the most obvious reason for any online marketing effort – to increase traffic to a commercial website in order to increase sales; to boost a brand’s reputation and mindshare in order to increase sales; and to encourage customers to return and make further purchases.

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