All posts in search engine marketing

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.

robert-scoble-alex-de-carvalho

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.

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.

Cheese
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!

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 explaining the future of the internet

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

SEO:

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.

Very quick post, but on Sunday evening I was on LBC Radio talking to James Max and answering caller questions about search engine marketing.

Here’s a clip from the show:

Direct YouTube link: Kevin Gibbons (SEOptimise) – Online Marketing Interview on LBC Radio.

I’m also at a4uexpo in London today, so if you’re around let me know!

Females aged between 35 and 49 are the fastest-growing group within social networks and blogging sites, according to recent research by Neilson. So how can marketers ensure they are effectively selling to women?


Image Credit: Freyja, Flickr

Before I begin this post, let’s get a few things straight. I do not believe that women are completely different and need entirely separate promotional tactics. I recognise that many aspects of marketing relate to both genders and I think I could easily write a piece on tactics for selling specifically to men.

In case you haven’t signed up for our monthly newsletter yet, our first ever one has just been sent out for August.

You can view it online and sign-up here:

SEOptimise Newsletter - August 2009

We don’t always cover search industry news as we’d rather not just repeat what the other blogs are saying. Today’s a bit different though, the story of Microsoft and Yahoo!’s new 10-year search agreement deal is massive news!


Image credit: gnal

In case you’ve managed to miss it, here’s the latest news from around the blogosphere:

One of the key areas I’ve been trying to improve recently is my own time-management and productivity. In search engine marketing (SEM) it’s very common to have a wide-range of tasks and projects on-the-go simultaneously. Personally, I don’t have a project/account management background, but it is something I’ve been very keen on improving. And a large part of this is ensuring that I’m working productively towards key goals and targets – as opposed to being reactive and busy for the sake of being busy!

A great help to this recently has been by learning about GTD (Getting Things Done) by David Allen. If you don’t know anything about GTD or David Allen, when you get a spare 45 minutes I would strongly recommend watching this video presentation given to the Googleplex in 2007:

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