For Online Advertising, Media Consolidation Is A Good Thing | Dailey Marketing Group

Much has been written about the “long-tail” concept since Wired’s Chris Anderson popularized the idea in 2004. But for all the discussion about how effective long-tail strategies are for search-engine optimization, viral marketing, web retailing and social-media marketing, it seems that many online advertisers — especially display advertisers — are missing the boat.

Media continues to consolidate, and increasingly the vast majority of online ad dollars go to just a handful of web publishers. By ignoring the rest of the web publishing world, online advertisers are avoiding a perfect opportunity to reach much larger audiences at a reduced cost.

From an advertiser’s perspective, the universe of websites can be divided into four groups.

 The Short Tail: The top 10 online ad-selling companies, which received 71% of 2009’s total internet ad revenues, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. These include Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL.

The Mid-Tail: Ad-selling companies 11 through 50, which received a sedate 18% of last year’s internet ad revenues.

The Long Tail: Ad-selling companies numbers 51 to 250, which received about 8% of last year’s internet ad revenues, according to eMarketer.

The Very Long Tail: Every other online ad-selling site — thousands of sites, number 251 and up — which received a mere 3% of all internet ad spending in 2009.

A closer look at those revenue figures shows how many major websites represent a small slice of the market. More than 82% of revenues from the total U.S. online advertising market go to just 25 web publishers. That means the 26th-through-50th-largest ad-selling web publishers — not small sites in terms of traffic — got a mere 7% of the total U.S. online ad spending in 2009.

While many marketers will want to put a sizable share of their ad budgets on the largest sites — the Googles, Facebooks and Yahoos of the world — finding the blend of less-huge but often still-prominent sites, which help reach their target audience, is equally important. And such a strategy might often be much more cost-effective.

The consolidation of the U.S. internet ad market is more extreme than the top 10 figures above indicate. In Q1 2010, marketers spent nearly 60% of the total U.S. internet ad dollars on just four web companies alone: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL.

While a large part of that acute spending consolidation comes from Google’s 38.3% share — mainly paid search ads — it also indicates that many advertisers could spread their ad budgets across even just the rest of the short tail and the mid-tail and get more bang for their buck.

Provided By: AdAge.com

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Get ready: Nielsen is once again trying to challenge one of the industry’s oldest chestnuts — that consumers over 50 aren’t worth the expense to target. The measurement-and-data giant is out to prove that it is advertisers’ continued focus on younger customers that’s out of date, thanks to a massive and aging population of baby boomers as well as changes in consumers’ lifestyle sparked by new technology.

Nielsen is in for a tough battle. Any number of parties have complained over the decades about marketers’ obsession with youth. Consumers over AARP age often have more money saved and can spend more on items other than food and groceries, but marketers maintain that reaching younger consumers, particularly those between the ages of 18 and 49, is more important. The logic? That group usually hasn’t committed to a favorite toothpaste or window cleaner, while older folks have — and won’t have their minds changed by a TV-ad blitz.

Nielsen wants to change those perceptions and it’s got numbers on its side. Its researchers believe consumers over the next decade will have fewer children, leading to smaller households and fewer young consumers to lure. A rough economy will lead to those smaller young families spending less, and smaller salaries for younger generations known today as “Generation Y” and “Millenials.” Indeed, as the baby-boom generation retires and grows old, America is likely to have a larger older population and a much slower-growing young one, suggested Doug Anderson, Nielsen’s senior VP-research and thought leadership.

“There will be a huge number of people over the age of 65, 75, and 85 over the coming decade. We’ve never had a population this big this old before,” he said. “This is not something that demographers and anthropologists have tons of models sitting around that they can talk about. We as a species have never had this many older people before. It’s new ground.”

There is some interest. In May, NBC Universal and Procter & Gamble launched a group of websites under the rubric “life goes strong” and aimed at catching boomers’ fancy. Topics include technology and health. “With this property in particular, we’re enabling advertisers and brands to reach a powerful demographic with an annual spending power of $1 trillion,” Rich DelCore, director-branded entertainment at P&G, said in a prepared statement at the time.

Most times senior citizens are still seen in ads selling life insurance or denture cream, yet the older person in the U.S. in the next decade is likely to be anything but helpless and in the market for more than just financial help and medications.

According to Nielsen, baby boomers in 2010 account for approximately 38.5% of all dollars spent on consumer package-goods such as diapers, toothpaste and laundry detergent. They account for 40% of customers paying for wireless services and 41% of customers paying for Apple personal computers. And while brand alliances are often thought to be established when a consumer is in his or her 20s, changing technology has unleashed a steady spate of new devices and gadgets that are new to all consumers.

With older folks having salted money away and younger consumers expected to find income shrinking over the next decade, “targeting older consumers makes sense because you might be reaching more of your consumers” with the pitch, said Pat McDonough, Nielsen’s senior VP-planning and policy analysis.

These aging boomers could also establish new behaviors, said Nielsen’s Mr. Anderson. Boomers are accustomed to advertisers meeting their demands, and have always been so, he suggested. As such, they may be less brand loyal than the elderly of the past. This generation also drinks more heavily than previous post-retirement consumers. “Alcohol is a bigger part of their lives,”he said. “They aren’t going to just stop.”

To be sure, there are business dynamics in place that make the pursuit of a generation of consumers previously thought useless to marketers more crucial than in eras past. TV advertising was founded on reaching the demographic of consumers between the ages of 18 and 49, yet the median age of viewers of prime-time broadcast TV is nearing 51 — two years above that age range. To maintain relevance to advertisers, the big networks need to find a way to establish the relevance of older consumers if they want to continue to draw the marketers that support TV so heavily.

“There isn’t a single media-content company that won’t face this, and the same is true for mass marketers,” said Alan Wurtzel, president-research and media development at NBC Universal.

The hope is that advertisers will grant new consideration to the older demographic as baby boomers, the generation that has set consumer attitudes by dint of its sheer mass, moves off the radar screen currently established in the advertising industry. While baby boomers are leaving the demographics that have been favored by advertisers for decades, said Mr. Wurtzel, “their value is actually increasing in many ways and no one has noticed it. For many years, we all got along with it. Now what everyone is seeing is that a very significant portion of the audience is leaving the group, the Nielsen group that is counted.”

Thanks to their wealth and the rise of new product categories, he added, the generation could maintain its importance. “These guys are changing. They are not behaving the way people would normally think” they should, he said.

Old dogs learning new tricks? If older consumers do act in this fashion — and continue to do so for the next decade — advertisers may have to adopt a few new methods as well.

by Brian Steinberg
Published: July 19, 2010
Advertising Age

SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the today’s most popular Internet marketing technique used in the industry. It mainly uses the capability of search engines to bring traffic to a website. And because search engines are heavily used by users, as a means for searching information across the World Wide Web (WWW), SEO quickly became a very powerful Internet marketing technique.

SEO techniques

According to a number of experts, such as those from SEO Philippines companies, SEO is very similar to that of SEM (search engine marketing), in terms of approach, which is the one-to-one approach, a technique popularly used for search engines. One misunderstanding between SEO and SEM is that SEO is not a type of SEM. SEO is a separate technique which is known to use a number of techniques and methods of its own.

The difference of SEO from SEM is its techniques. SEM mainly makes use of paid inclusion, such as PPC, while SEO makes use of natural and un-paid techniques and methods. However, compared to SEM, SEO involves many techniques and methods. These techniques and methods are then categorized between two different techniques, the on-page SEO which deals with techniques used in the website itself, and off-page SEO which involves techniques used outside the website.

On-page and off-page SEO

Techniques in SEO are categorized based on the nature of its method. On-page SEO are techniques which are used to make a website more search engine friendly. However, according to many SEO experts, the use of on-page SEO have significantly lost its effectiveness due to the number of techniques used to abuse the search engine result pages or SERPs.

Though it significantly lost its effectiveness, many SEO experts still use these techniques and methods not only to make their websites more “search engine friendly”, but also more “user-friendly”.

Techniques in on-page SEO

Content optimization: Content, meaning the image as well as its text content. This is where the bulk of on-page SEO is popularly used. Many of the researched keywords are found in the content, as well as the file name used for images.

Meta Tag and alt tag optimization: The use of Meta tags and Alt tags became very popular in on-page SEO. Other than in the content as well as file names for the images, meta tags and alt tags are used as additional places for keywords.

URL optimization: Optimizing the URL is also very important. According to many experts, URL are also used to contain keywords that clearly defines a page. It both works for the users and search engine crawlers.

Cross-linking: A very important part of on-page SEO. Though some of its techniques have lost its effectiveness, crosslinking and URL optimization are still a very important part of on-page SEO. Crosslinking examples include sitemaps as well as navigation bars. Other than allowing their users easy access to their website, it also allowed search engine crawlers to easily navigate through the website.

Popular SEO tool for on-page SEO

One software used by SEO experts and professionals in on-page SEO are content management systems or CMS. These online applications became popular among many SEO experts because it allowed them to optimize a website without asking for assistance with web professionals such as designers and developers.

According to many Web design Philippines experts, CMS softwares such as Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla!, were designed to allow users with little knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease. Because of this, SEO experts can freely optimize a website for search engines.

Off-page SEO and techniques

According to many SEO Philippines experts, off-page factors are considered as the most important part of SEO for it doesn’t only increases the chances for a website to be indexed by search engines at the first, but to also make their website more visible across the Internet. However, compared to on-page SEO, off-page factors only involves one method with multiple techniques. This is link building.

Link building is a technique widely used in off-page SEO. Its popularity is based on its number of techniques, which are used to naturally induce results in search engines compared to SEM. Link building techniques involve the use of:

Reciprocal linking: The first technique used in SEO, it involves creating mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites to ensure mutual traffic. This technique, however, is now widely replaced by one-way linking.

Three-way linking: A technique which have grown from reciprocal linking. This involves a link building to create more “natural” links in the eyes of search engines. The value of links by three-way linking can then be better than normal reciprocal links.

One-way linking: The most widely used technique in SEO, it involves a number of methods and techniques which results in one-way links. According to a number of experts, this type of link would be considered more natural in the eyes of search engines. Part of its techniques include:

Blog comments: Blog comments are popular ways to get one-way links from other websites such as blogs. Other than blogs, other websites that allows comments from visitors may also be used to get one-way links.

Forum signatures: Forum signatures involve he process of using forum communities that allow outbound hyperlinks in their member’s signature. This can be a fast method to build up inbound links to a website; it can also produce some targeted traffic if the website is relevant to the forum topic.

Link bait: One of the most powerful link building technique used SEO, it involves any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites.

Provided By: ArticleCity

Last week, I had the chance to attend a keynote on mobile – and even more broadly, the notion of connectedness – given by Emily Nagle Green, president and CEO of Yankee Group and author of “Anywhere.”

I found myself furiously taking notes because the themes and questions that Emily shared struck me as absolutely essential for developing a winning mobile strategy.

Below are 10 of the nuggets I took away, along with my take on their implications. I hope you find this as useful as I did.

1. Mobile increases consumer expectations of connectedness. We tend to evaluate new opportunities with a tipping point mentality, asking ourselves “when is the opportunity big enough to take seriously?” The statistics already tell us that mobile has reached that point, but I loved how Emily reframed the issue away from hard facts and toward a very clear picture of the way behavior has changed as a result of the powerful computers we carry with us in our pockets and purses. Simply put, we expect more, all the time. Instead of thinking about whether mobile is big enough, we should be thinking about what expectations we’d actually be failing to meet without a thoughtful approach to mobile in place.
2. Connectivity makes things more useful. When thinking about the expectations consumers have, start here. What useful thing could we do if we added connectivity to existing experiences? Take an inventory of all the places your brand exists and insert a connected experience wherever it adds value.
3. Presence at the point of need. Every product or service exists to serve a consumer need. Think about the time or place that the need manifests itself, and how mobile can play a helpful role. Whether it’s in a store, at an airport, in the home, or anyplace else, it’s a good bet that mobile could enhance the experience. What better place for the brand to exist than at the point where the need for it becomes apparent?
4. It’s not a screen, it’s a partner. Mobile is certainly a media channel – and one that’s about to get a lot more interesting with the launch of the iAd platform – but thinking of mobile predominantly as another screen to deliver messages misses the real benefit. Instead, think of mobile as an extension of your team.
5. Create apps that deliver persistent value. Apps are fickle things. They’re hard to find and easily forgotten once downloaded. Creating sticky apps is as difficult as creating a video you hope goes viral. How do you create something that maintains relevance? Read on to number 6…
6. Think about problem solving. As opposed to messaging, or branding, or anything else that’s primarily driven by your brand’s objectives. If you want to be a go-to app that stays on the first screen, solve a problem for consumers in a way that makes sense for your brand.
7. The mobile Web isn’t the mini-Internet. Ten years ago, the mantra was: “a website is not an online version of your brochure.” Today, we similarly need to remind ourselves that the mobile Web experience shouldn’t be a pocket-sized version of the desktop. Mobile sites should be created ground-up, prioritizing the information mobile consumers need. A useful (and maybe unflattering) exercise to go through is to access your company’s Web content on a mobile device. If you find a same-but-smaller version of the desktop site, you’ll know you’re not giving consumers what they need.
8. Use mobile’s embedded tools. To differentiate from the desktop experience and develop something mobile-worthy, think about how you can use the tools that mobile devices increasingly come equipped with, including GPS, accelerometer, camera, video, speakers, etc. For thought starters, read this insanely long but very useful post by mobile guru Tomi Ahonen about the eight unique properties of the mobile device and how they can be put to good use.
9. Don’t rely on your brand name. Brands shouldn’t assume that their heritage or prior success will lead to more of the same within mobile. Your brand can’t do the work for you; you have to provide an enriching experience…or someone else will. If the brand name was all that mattered, Zagat would be the leading source for mobile restaurant reviews, but that space has now been claimed by players like Yelp.
10. Become an anywhere brand. Emily closed her presentation with a compelling, aspirational definition of the “anywhere brand.” She described an anywhere brand as one that appears in meaningful ways, on appropriate devices, wherever the consumers needs it.What would it take to transform your brand into an “anywhere brand”?

Provided By: Clickz

If you asked someone “What is it that anchors a brand, product, or service-oriented online community, or other social application?” what would they say? If they answered, “the brand, product, or service…” you’d be right to question it further.

It’s not a trick. It’s a realization that brands, products, and services – and the things related to them that you want your customers to know about may not be the same things that they are interested in socializing around. Product spots on TV aren’t “social”; they’re an interruption to the things that are themselves social. That they feature a product and make the case for why someone might consider it further is the entire point of the interruption.

Social interaction is different: it starts with the interest of the participant, not an interruption. Social interaction is built around social objects, defined by Glenn Assheton-Smith as “some ‘thing’ we share with others as part of our social media experience on the social web.” That “thing” might be a photo or conversation or a concern for the environment. Take a look at Assheton-Smith’s work and the work of Jaiku co-founder and Google product manager Jyri Engeström. Engeström coined the term “social object” as a label for the things that people socialize around, something he discusses in this video.

A lot of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands still place the product at the center of their social efforts, just as they do (correctly) in traditional media. They spend heavily and attract participants to brand-skinned “social” games that feature appearances from associated athletes and celebrities or create social microsites that include “discussions” of deodorant, for example. As awareness tools, these programs may work. But they’re not social applications. For a social application to be effective over the long run, the interests of the participants – and not those of the brand – must sit at the center. Smart brands are taking notice.

Coke has switched up its strategy. For example, moving from branded microsites built around products to participation in the larger social activities of its customers in places like Facebook, where the lifestyle associations of Coke are evident in the expressed passions for the brand – Coke has over 4 million members connected with its Facebook page. Pepsi’s “Refresh” project moves the brand out of the spotlight and replaces it with the interests and causes of Pepsi drinkers, who vote on participant-generated ideas that Pepsi then finds. In both of these, the social object is a passion, lifestyle, or cause. There are smaller social objects too: social sites like Flickr or Twitter are built around the actual content – photos and tweets, respectively. In none of these is the brand or product itself the center of the social activity.

When planning a social media program that includes a community or other activity center, consider the perspective of your expected participants. Here are some questions you can think about as you develop your plans:

• What might participants have in common with each other?
• How does your firm or organization fit into the above?
• How can you improve the experience for them?

That last bullet is a big one: successful social media programs make stars of the participants, not the brands, products, and services. My colleague Kaushal Sarda referenced Kathy Sierra’s “Word of Obvious” in a recent post. At the core of the ideas expressed is the notion that when the participants in social settings – and by extension, customers in a social application relating to a business interest – are themselves the center of the action, their own engagement in that activity goes up. Way up. This is great for savvy marketers: on the social Web, significantly higher levels of engagement are possible as compared to traditional media. Instead of basic engagement (e.g., exposure or clicking), well-built social applications offer participative activities like rating and reviewing (curation), uploading content (creation), and direct participation (collaboration) in the design of the associated products and services.

Examples of strong social media programs include the ones you’ve probably read about – Dell and its “Digital Nomads” or “Take Your Own Path” communities, built around the lifestyles of specific customer segments. (Disclosure: My company has worked with Dell in the past.) AARP’s online community is likewise less about AARP, and more about the interests, needs, and desires of baby boomers and their parents. Pampers offers a great experience for new parents through Pampers Village. There’s plenty of information about the product and its use, combined with a community section that places new parents and their joys, concerns, and cares squarely at the center of the conversation.

Los Angeles-based Found Animals is building its social presence around the concern for pet adoption and the responsible practices of pet owners to define the services it provides in a way that’s aligned with the needs and interests of pet owners, associated agencies, and pets themselves. In all of these cases, the brands involved benefit by placing the interests of their customers and stakeholders – rather than themselves – at the center of the conversation.

When thinking through your social strategy, take the time to get the social objects right. Here are three easy steps to follow when building a community that features your brand, product, or service:

1. Start by identifying a social object that connects to a unique aspect of your brand, product, or service.
2. Identify social needs from the perspective of your customers that are met by or through this aspect of your chosen social object.
3. Create a connection to these participants, and reinforce their place as the “center” of the activities that ensue.

By identifying the social objects that exist around your brand, and creating connections to your customers through these social objects, your products and services become natural elements of the conversations that follow.

Provided By: Clickz.com

After Andrew Brining took the bar exam two years ago, he had plenty of time on his hands, and he made a habit of perusing sports news online as he awaited the results. The 31-year-old San Francisco Giants fan, however, found the predictably captious nature of sports coverage frustrating. “It’s perversely counterintuitive,” he said. “You’re interested in this to be entertained, right?”

On the hunt for more positive fare he stumbled onto BleacherReport.com, where anybody can apply to post an original sports article. So he contributed a post. Then another. And another. In the past two years, Mr. Brining has written more than 500 articles for Bleacher, a prolific output that is more stunning for another fact: He wrote them all for free.

He is one of more than 3,600 Bleacher authors who willingly write without remuneration, and their gratis efforts suggest there’s a major adjustment going on in the economics of content. Despite the attention around search specialists such as Demand Media, Associated Content and Examiner, a growing group of sites is betting on something better than cheap content: free content.

Huffington Post is, perhaps, the mother of the model now with more than 6,000 unpaid bloggers bringing in an audience of 23 million people each month, according to ComScore. Not all of Huffington’s content is produced without cost, of course. The company employs around 53 editorial staffers who edit and produce original writing. (The company employs a total of 124 people.) But its overwhelming army of bloggers renders a bulk of the pages, thus lightening the cost. After five years in operation, CEO Eric Hippeau said the company will make profit this year. “We’re very confident that online news can be a profitable business,” he said. “Advertisers are very interested in reaching our audience — a very high-level, educated audience.”

Though such a claim may draw its detractors — where would the site be without source material for example — there’s little question an article on Huffington outshines an article from a low-cost purveyor like Demand, which does pay its writers. The average time a reader spends on Huffington is almost 15 minutes each month, according to ComScore. By comparison, the average time on a Demand property is just under six minutes.

Christopher N. Curtin, VP-digital strategy for Hewlett-Packard, says Huffington is considered a higher-end buy among marketers. “Their audience is a pretty attractive one,” he said, “and it’s the content that’s drawing that audience.”

It also underscores an emerging but difficult truth for professional writers. Free content can just as easily draw a higher-profile readership as expensive content, as well as high-end advertisers. Wikia, Jimmy Wales’ for-profit venture, also harvests page views from freely contributing members, and the company has already proclaimed its profitability. The site functions much like Wikipedia but centers on entertainment — for example, the “Twilight” Wiki. Mr. Wales said the site will continue to be profitable this quarter. Wikia has a monthly audience of 11 million, according to ComScore, who on average spend roughly 25 minutes on the site.

Despite a widespread jingoism among media watchers favoring new forms of journalism, some observers say no-cost writing is a disquieting trend. “I wonder whether we’re seeing the ‘Craigslist effect,’ but for content,” Newsonomics author Ken Doctor said, referring to how the free-listings site has vitiated the classifieds business. “You make the cost of content creation so much cheaper, but in so doing you are ruining the economics of traditional news publishing.”

Indeed, publishers have caught on to this changing tide. Bleacher Report has inked content deals with major media companies, including Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, SI.com, CBSSports.com, FoxSports.com and the ailing Philly.com, a property of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which, along with Philadelphia Daily News, was bought out of bankruptcy in April for $135 million. Bleacher publishes a page for each partner, which has the look and feel of the publisher’s content but which entirely features Bleacher writers. The site splits ad revenue. An insider says Bleacher will be profitable this year. The company just appointed a new CEO, Brian Grey of Polaris Venture Partners and the former senior VP of Fox Sports Interactive.

“I’m sensitive to writers who say, ‘What are you doing giving your writing away for free?’” said Mr. Brining, who after failing the bar three times decided writing was more than a hobby. He is supported by his family. “Yes, Bleacher Report is reaping the financial rewards of my work, but it’s also helping me achieve my career. If I am good at this, the compensation will come.”

Provided By: AdAge.com

Search marketing isn’t all about Google these days.

Marketers are starting to get savvy about using Twitter search to promote their Web sites and brands, experts at the Search Engine Expo in Seattle said on Monday.

They aren’t simply searching Twitter for users that mention their company and then responding to them. “That’s easy to do and very effective,” but it misses out on some greater opportunities, said Danny Sullivan, editor of the blog Search Engine Land.

The smart way to use Twitter is to search for more generic words or phrases, he said. For instance, a company such as Domino’s could search for “anyone know pizza” and find queries from people asking their friends for pizza recommendations in their area. The company could reply to that customer with a nearby shop and include a coupon code, potentially winning a new customer.

Sullivan conducted a small experiment and found that people respond well to such replies on Twitter. He searched for people who were asking questions about Google and Bing. Using a new Twitter account rather than his “dannysullivan” account, he responded with links to articles on his blog that could address their questions.

He answered 42 questions. “Not a single person complained. Ten came back to say thanks,” he said. “Can you imagine someone coming to you from Google and saying thank you when they clicked on your ad?”

That process doesn’t have to be totally manual. A new service called Replyz, still in beta, aims to make it easy for marketers to find relevant questions that Twitter users are asking. With Replyz, a company doesn’t have to think of the exact questions that people might be asking, Sullivan said.

Marketers can use other tools as well, said Chris Silver Smith, director of optimization strategy at Key Relevance. Using Twitter APIs (application programming interfaces), marketers can build tools to monitor Twitter queries and automatically send direct responses to people, he said. “A human doesn’t have to have a hand in it, but it’s still a good idea to monitor it in case someone sends back a question,” he said.

There are other ways to leverage Twitter search too. Mint.com, a personal finance service, constantly monitors trending topics, looking for matches with keywords important to the company, said Stew Langille, vice president of marketing at Mint.com.

For instance, it recently found the term “one trillion” trending up. “We’re not out there saying ‘Oh, well, one trillion is trending, let’s go out and tweet about it,’” he said. “But we’ll go out and make great content about it and put it out there, and the community grabs it and becomes an advocate for us.”

“One trillion” was trending up because of news coverage about the government bailouts. Mint.com developed articles and a video using the term “one trillion” and posted them to its finance publication. The content drove several thousand visitors to its site over a couple months, he said.

Twitter search offers a unique opportunity for marketers, Sullivan said. “You know exactly who’s asking,” he said. That’s compared to search engines. “Imagine if everyone who clicked on a link, you got a picture of them and their name as well. That doesn’t happen on Google but it happens all the time on Twitter.”

While it’s hard to quantify how important it is to target Twitter, Sullivan says marketers should pay attention to it. Twitter recently reported that it fields 18 billion searches per month. “That’s a huge market you should pay attention to,” he said, although he noted that a significant portion of those searches could be automated or done by people monitoring retweets. “My advice remains that you should participate on Twitter and build a reputation, and that should pay off for you as relevancy starts to change down the line,” he said.

Provided By: PCWorld

In my years in the search engine optimization industry, I have heard so many tales of Web design firms that claim to do SEO (define). Or, there are stories about programmers/IT folks who tell their superiors, “I’ve got search engine optimization handled.” All too often, these folks really don’t have a clue.

This is not the case 100 percent of the time, but many times people will build what amounts to a “search engine friendly” website, without truly understanding how to build a search engine “optimized” website.

What’s the difference?

OK, so here’s the deal…

Not every website that has a good URL structure is search engine “optimized.” A good URL structure might be defined as something that resembles this:

www.sitename.com/category/product-name/

A poor URL structure (for search engine “friendliness”) would be something like:

www.sitename.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=1&Section_Id=691&Product_Id=1439522&Parent_Id=302&default_color=BLACK&sort_by=§ioncolor=§ionsize=

Yes, the above example of “bad” comes from an actual top Internet retailer’s website.

Creating a better URL structure certainly does help. But, does that make the site “optimized” or does it merely mean that the site is one step closer to being search engine “friendly”?

There are many technicalities to developing a search engine “friendly” website. For the purposes of this column, I’ll speak pretty high level on the search engine “friendly” factor, then get down a little deeper into how it can become search engine optimized.

How do we make sure that the website is actually search engine optimized, as well as friendly?

When you commit yourself to building a website that can do well in the search engines, you must first ensure that the website’s foundation is sound…that it’s search engine “friendly.” Many enterprise level content management systems are a horror when it comes to SEO. Some content management systems churn out URLs like the one mentioned previously. Some are so locked down that you can’t gain access to the structure to modify to make it more search engine friendly. Some items that come to mind are the ability to handle canonicalization issues, URL rewriting, adding breadcrumbs, changing headers, optimizing images, and so on. So, do some research on the platform. See if other websites are able to do well in the search engines, running on a similar solution. Make sure that you understand the details of the platform (do you have to pay extra to get the exact same solution that the websites which are ranking are running on?). Make sure that the websites running on the solution aren’t using one of the cloaking systems, which are somewhat popular with large e-commerce websites.

Note on that: If the URL showing up in the SERP (define) is different than that if you were to navigate – directly – through the website, there’s a good chance that the website is utilizing “good” cloaking. Another good way to check is to check the website’s robots.txt file. You would check this by typing in the website domain, followed by robots.txt (www.sitename.com/robots.txt). If you see that they are disallowing (from the search engines) basically “everything” on the domain, there’s a good chance that they are doing “good” cloaking, and using one of these systems.

Once you get past that, in order for you to ensure that you are actually building a search engine optimized website, you must make sure that you’ve done some keyword research, competitive analysis, link analysis, and, yes, checked the overall structure of the website. My bet is that the Web designer/IT guy has not done any of this.

Content Is King

When you do keyword research, especially for a website that you are in the midst of building, you want to determine the keywords that are relevant to your business, searched often, and – here’s the kicker – that you have some degree of authority on, or a reason why the search engines might think that you’re a quality result to show in the rankings.

The first question to ask yourself is, do I have a page on my website that’s actually focused on the keywords that I think are important to my business? Amazingly enough, a lot of websites fall short here. You simply don’t have the content (sometimes not even so much as a mention of the keyword) on a page.

I typically like to see keyword research and competitive analysis done in tandem. You find keywords that have popularity/search volume, and then you determine if you have any chance at all for ranking for that keyword. If the answer to both questions is “yes,” then you need to determine a strategy for that keyword.

Information Architecture/Keyword Mapping

Once you’ve developed a list of keywords to target, find a place for the content/pages to exist. Remember, usability is very much an important part of this process. Don’t just build a bunch of pages, link to these (I would call them) “doorway” pages in the footer of the website, and think this adds value to the user experience. You want to add value to the user experience, as much as you want to add value to the search engines. Both usability and SEO can work towards common goals.

Blog Posts/Tips and Advice

A lot of times, the best way to create the content (especially for those websites in which your target audience is doing a lot of research) is to create a blog. You can take advantage of industry news, by writing quick blog posts against “new” news, you can ask questions, and then provide answers (”what to do about a broken air conditioner”). Case in point: Service Experts, our client that provides helpful information through its website. It has received quite a few visits recently from people searching for HVAC Maintenance Checklist.

This type of helpful content doesn’t really make a lot of sense for a corporate website, so you have to find areas of your website in which you can be a little bit more human in your use of the English language. Find out how people are searching, and develop content for those searches.

There’s a lot that goes into the process of search engine optimization. It’s not possible to get into everything that you should be doing for your particular website in one single column. The purpose here is to illustrate some things that you might be lacking by solely believing that a search engine “friendly” website structure is going to equate to a search engine “optimized” presence.

Provided By: ClickZExperts

You have your own website, now what? In order to succeed online, you will need website promotion so your site would be visible to everyone connected to the Internet. It is a common belief that all websites are searchable by search engines. It’s not as simple as it seems. Website promotion entails a lot of work.

Website promotion suggests that submitting your site to directories first is more important than submitting to search engines. These two are different in such a way that sites submitted to directories are only approved if it has high quality and useful content, whereas search engines just simply accept submissions of sites or pages. In submitting a website to the directory, make sure that you read and follow the directory’s rules and instructions. Keep in mind that the editors will be very discerning of your web content.

Submitting to search engines definitely helps in website promotion but this takes quite a while, usually around 3-6 months. There are things to consider when submitting to search engines, you must prepare your website. Also, you will need to learn SEO or search engine optimization. You may do this by optimizing your website by improving the elements of web design like loading time, browser compatibility, etc. Another is keyword optimization wherein you make use of appropriate keywords; these would greatly help in your website.

Other website promotion techniques are:

• Link popularity – wherein you let people link your site to theirs. In this way, you can generate more new visitors and at the same time improve your ranking in search engines.

• Write articles – that are useful to your website and let other people publish these like in article directories. You may also opt for email newsletters that include a link to your website. In this way, your subscribers are informed and updated on what’s going on in your website promotion.

• Post to a forum or discussion boards. Forums are greatly increasing their popularity and this is a good way to spread the word about your website promotion.

• In line with posting a forum, you may also want to use a signature file, a text that is appended at the end of your every post.

• Improve website promotion through banner ads displayed in other websites related to your content. But be sure that your ad is well-designed.

• Write a press release – this can definitely help in website promotion. You have to write an article about your website and submit it to different publications and you’ll get new visitors in no time at all!

Now you know what to do, know what you have to avoid as well. One of the common mistakes made is relying on free web hosting service. It’s harder for search engines to detect your website if it is hosted on a free host. If you mean serious business and eyeing it as long-term, then paid web hosting is the way to go. There are some companies that promise to submit your website to thousands of search engines at a very low price, do not be fooled. Majority of these directories and engines have very minimal traffic. Website promotion can be tricky but with good research, you and your business will succeed before you know it.

Provided By: ArticleCircle