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29 May 2009
SEO Roundup
We are starting a new initiative here at Bruce Clay Australia. Each of our analysts is assigned a few different SEO, SEM or some other related industry blog/site to cover. Every fortnight on a Friday afternoon we sit around (over beer and gluten free products - thanks Kate ) to discuss the various developments that have been covered during the past two weeks. Now I am going to share these previously hidden gems from the Bruce Clay Australia team with you. The sharing session notes from last week were a whopping 36 pages long so I will endeavour to shorten this, make it more succinct and easy to read and highlight some of the key points.
Yahoo Search, Over ?
Yahoo is still losing search share. As it slips closer to 20 percent in the U.S., Google keeps gaining share, up to 64.2% in April, according to comScore. Even if it does merge its search business with Microsoft's search business, the two combined will only have about 28% of the search market in the U.S. -- well below half of Google's share.
11 Striking Findings From an Eye Tracking Study
The Best of Eyetrack III study released by The Poynter Institute:
1. "Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page"
2. "Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior.... larger type promotes lighter scanning"
3. "a headline has less than a second of a site visitor's attention"
4. "For headlines -- especially longer ones -- it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers"
5. "Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best"
6. "Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones."
7. "We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations"
8. "Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen"
9. "Text ads were viewed most intently, of all the types we tested"
10. "the bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it."
11. "The research also shows that clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages"
Twitter mania
Twitter Surges Past Digg, LinkedIn, And NYTimes.com With 32 Million Global Visitors
• Twitter's global unique visitors in April, 2009 was a whopping 32 million
• Twitter has just passed Digg (23 million), LinkedIn (16 million), and the NYTimes.com (17.5 million) in monthly unique visitors
How quickly they grow. Remember when Twitter was just a little pipsqueak, with less than 10 million monthly unique visitors to its site worldwide? That was back in February, 2009. Fast-forward to April, and Twitter's U.S. visitors alone reached 17 million. Now comScore has released its worldwide numbers and it estimates Twitter's global unique visitors in April, 2009 was a whopping 32 million, up from 19 million in March, 2009.
To put that in growth into perspective, Twitter has just passed Digg (23 million), LinkedIn (16 million), and the NYTimes.com (17.5 million) in monthly unique visitors, as counted by comScore. And comScore only measures the number of people who visit Twitter's Website, not the millions more who send and read tweets via their phones, desktop apps, or other Websites. Twitter.com is also now bigger than Bebo and Freindster, for what it is worth. Who will it pass next?
Its getting so big that its growth rate is beginning to temper. In April, Twitter added 13 million visitors, which is more than the 9 million it added in March. Its month-over-month growth rate, however, slowed to 68 percent from 95 percent the month before. Still, if it can keep adding 10 million global visitors a month, it will easily pass 50 million this summer and 100 million by the end of the year. No wonder everyone from Facebook to Google is looking over their shoulders.
Microsoft Expected to Show New SearchEngine Next Week
• Microsoft Corp. is expected to show a new version of its Internet search engine next week
• Microsoft has been testing a prototype of the new search engine, code-named Kumo,
• The technology is designed to cut down on the length of typical Web searches by grouping the results of a search for, say, a particular model of car into helpful categories like parts, used car listings...
• Microsoft and Yahoo executives are still pursuing a potential partnership
• The two companies have been discussing a complex deal in which Yahoo would sell its Web search and search advertising technology to Microsoft, in exchange for an upfront payment and some share of the revenue of the search ads it shows on Yahoo
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124277247382836561.html
Do you know that ...
- Every single minute, over 20 hours (becoming 24) of video are now uploaded to YouTube
- The new iPhone will feature a processor that will be more than 1.5 times faster than the current iPhone and will have a 600 MHz processor.
- Gmail has 146 million users worldwide
- Windows 7 will be released this year
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/21/the-next-iphone-warp-speed-mr-sulu/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/20/every-minute-just-about-a-days-worth-of-video-is-uploaded-to-youtube
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/20/googles-beta-love-may-die-in-fight-for-enterprise-customers/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10236483-56.html
Headsmacking Tip #13: Don't Accidentally Block Link Juice with Robots.txt
This post delves into the fact that a number of websites seeking to block bot access to pages on their domain have been employing robots.txt to do so. It goes into different ways of doing it and what it actually means :
• Block with Robots.txt - do not attempt to visit the URL, but feel free to keep it in the index & display in the SERPs (see below if this confuses you)
• Block with Meta NoIndex - feel free to visit, but don't put the URL in the index or display in the results
• Block by Nofollowing Links - not a smart move, as other followed links can still put them in the index (it's fine if you don't want to "waste juice" on the page, but don't think it will keep bots away or prevent it from appearing in the SERPs)
There's two real takeaways here:
1. Conserve link juice by using nofollow when linking to a URL that is robots.txt disallowed
2. If you know that disallowed pages have acquired link juice (particularly from external links), consider using meta noindex, follow instead so they can pass their link juice on to places on your site that need it.
URL Rewrites and 301 Redirects - How Does It All Work?
This articles goes into the nuts and bolts of URL rewrites and 301 re-directs and how they benefit the SEO process as a whole.
URL Rewrite Process:
1. User lands on new SEO'd URL
2. Using mod_rewrite, ISAPI_Rewrite, etc. new URL points to old URL on the server
3. Server calls the code from the old URL
4. Page is displayed in browser, displaying the new URL
301 Redirect Process:
1. User lands on original URL
2. Using code, mode_rewrite, etc. the 301 redirects URL to the new one, literally changing the URL that is displayed in the browser from the old to the new
3. URL Rewrite process begins again
Things you should know
• Every single minute, over 20 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube, this is up from January when it was 15 hours
• Twitter's global unique visitors in April, 2009 was a whopping 32 million, up from 19 million in March, 2009. To put that in growth into perspective, Twitter has just passed Digg (23 million), LinkedIn (16 million), and the NYTimes.com (17.5 million) in monthly unique visitors.
• Yahoo! Chases After Google, Adds Voice Search To iPhone App
• Blog anyone who wants to know about Google analytics should read Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Microsoft adcentre improved
• Live From Yahoo's "End of the 10 Blue Links" Talk live blogged from techcrunch
• YouTube Offers Brand Partners Another Carrot: Google Analytics For Their Channels
Part 2 will follow on Monday ....
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/29/09 at 1:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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26 May 2009
Wolfram- The Alpha and Omega ?
Wolfram Alpha has been the hot topic in the web and the SEO world at the moment, for those of you not involved in search engine optimisation or particularly web-savvy , Wolfram Alpha is the new search engine on the block.
However it doesn't position itself as a search engine but as an "answer engine". Steven Wolfram creator of Wolfram Alpha calls Wolfram a "computational knowledge engine". Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you. To do this Wolfram uses models of current knowledge, complete with formulas and algorithms that represent real-world knowledge; it models much of what we know about science - massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world. It then analyses the query and produces results based on its massive compendium of knowledge.
Unfortunately, as with every new each search engine, Wolfram Alpha will have to stack up against its competition AKA Google. It is at an advantage in that its quite different to Google; Google acts as a lookup tool, helping you find information most relevant to you from the billions of pages out there, while Wolfram is for calculating, not finding. Wolfram's main competitive advantage over current or future projects (for example Google Squared) is that it is built on Steven Wolfram's Mathmatica Engine ( from Wikipedia : Mathematica is a computational software program used in scientific, engineering, and mathematical fields of technical computing) and is one of the most powerful computing engines ever built.
I tried a few Australian specific queries and this is what I got:
ANZ vs NAB
This gave some pretty good in-depth analysis of the two companies, their share prices and historical data regarding the two publicly traded entities. However when I tried to search "Tall Poppy syndrome", Wolfram replied with "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input" .
john howard didn't come back with anything relevant either
In another dent for my ego when I tried "Marc Elison" no results were found : (
Its target market is also very different from Google. While the big G is targeting the population of the world (6.53 billion according to Wolfram- only a 2006 estimate mind you), Wolfram Alpha is targeted towards all us techies, those who want to dig into the data and convert raw telemetry into intelligible actionable information. For a layman user it's too picky about syntax and not intuitive enough, furthermore once you actually get the answer some guidance would be needed to interpret the data. I would imagine, however that home pages through research universities throughout the world are being set to Wolfram at a pretty rapid rate.
How will Wolfram make money then? Especially if it is a niche product that can't deliver the kind of impressions or clicks that Google can supply. Well rumours of a subscription service abound. Apparently for a small monthly charge more detailed data and blended data searches will be made available. Already some advertising is taking place for Lenovo and other blue chip products.
With regard to SEO it is not just another search engine that we can try to optimise for, it has its own internal database that is not really susceptible to interference. Where it can help search engine optimisation is that it can shed light into hidden aspects of different industry segments that we work in and we can use these insights to better optimise pages. It also has a site explorer function (similar to Google and Yahoo) where if you put in a URL you can get some information and statistics. Unfortunately most of these statistics are generally pulled from Alexa which is known for its unreliability. All in all it's a pretty nifty tool that will have great application for technical research and data mining, however it doesn't help you understand what the data means. The mainstream public will view it as a novelty and get bored with it eventually while it will be a tremendous time-saving device for those in technical and data driven fields.
P.S Wolfram has some pretty cool Easter eggs built into it; here are some of my favourites:
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/26/09 at 4:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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22 May 2009
SEO vs Paid Search
When people hear about internet marketing, they often think of two of the more popular methods used to enhance visibility on the web, namely search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising (paid search).
In an ideal world both should be used strategically to maximise your site's profile and ROI.
Search Engine Optimisation
As many recent studies have shown, search engine optimisation offers several distinct advantages over pay-per-click advertising campaigns.
1.Tendency to Click
Numerous studies show people are less likely to click on paid search ads as opposed to organic search results.
For example, one study found that search users are up to six times more likely to click on the first few organic results than they are to choose any of the paid results (Oneupweb study), while an eye tracking study showed that 50 percent of users begin their search by scanning the top organic results. Other studies have shown that only 30 percent of search engine users click on paid listings, meaning 70 percent click the organic listings (Are Corporate Web Sites Optimized for SEO?).
2.Trust
Crucially, studies show that people trust organic results more than paid results.
The "An Examination of Searcher's Perceptions of Nonsponsored and Sponsored Links During Ecommerce Web Searching" by Bernard J. Jansen, reported:
"The major reason for not examining sponsored links was lack of trust."
Another study found that only that only 14 percent of searchers trusted paid listings, with 29 percent saying they were "annoyed" by them. (eMarketer)
3.Value of visitors
Search engine results tend to be seen as non-biased and are therefore able to provide visitors who are deemed more "valuable" to the organically listed sites. According to the "Are Corporate Web Sites Optimized for SEO?" by Paul Bruemmer, recent trends show that more sales originated in organic search listings than paid listings. We see this across the majority of our clients where organic traffic conversion are significantly higher than paid conversion rates- sometimes up to 3-4 times better conversion rates have been observed.
Photo by Danard Vincente via Creative Commons |
4.Relevance
Users also have rated organic search engine results as more relevant than paid results. "An Examination of Searcher's Perceptions of Nonsponsored and Sponsored Links During Ecommerce Web Searching" by Bernard J. Jansen, also found:
• "Participants rated 52% of the organic listings as relevant compared to only 42% of the sponsored listings"
• "When using a Web search engine for e-commerce searching, searchers will evaluate organic links as more relevant than sponsored links".
• "Summary [?"description" meta tag] (42%) and Title [tag] (41%) were the primary bases that searchers used to determine if an organic link was relevant. Title (60%) was the primary basis for determining that an organic result was not relevant. Interestingly, iProspect, Survey Sampling International, WebSurveyor, and Stratagem Research reports:
"On Google, 72.3 percent of users felt that organic results were more relevant, while only 27.7 percent of users rated paid results as more relevant. Yahoo offered similar results, with 60.8 percent of users calling organic results relevant compared to only 39.2 percent of users for paid."
5.Long Term Results
While a pay-per-click campaign may produce results more quickly than a search engine optimisation campaign, search engine optimisation campaigns can give results that last.
Paid Search
While the above statistics may make search engine optimisation seem the clear choice in all cases, it is only half of the story. In certain situations it actually makes more sense to do pay-per-click advertising.
1.Immediate Results
As stated above, results from pay-per-click advertising are immediate. On the other hand, a search engine optimisation campaign may take months for results to be apparent.
In this case, pay-per-click is advantageous for those who are looking to promote an initiative that will go live in a short amount of time, or whose business is seasonal in nature and who only do promotion during certain months of the year.
2.Type of search
The type of search is key as to how users interact with search results.
"An Examination of Searcher's Perceptions of Nonsponsored and Sponsored Links During Ecommerce Web Searching" by Bernard J. Jansen found:
• "If the e-commerce query is general, the searcher will be equally likely to view either organic or sponsored links."
• "If the e-commerce query is location specific, the searcher will be less likely to view a sponsored link."
• "The participants viewed more sponsored links for brand-specific queries than for general or location queries. If the e-commerce query is brand specific, the searcher will be more likely to view a sponsored link."
• "If the e-commerce query is location specific, the searcher will be less likely to view a sponsored link."
3. Small initial investment.
The search engines generally don't charge a fee to place or run your advertisement. You only pay for the users that click through on the ad
4. Budget flexibility.
PPC advertising allows businesses of all sizes to advertise and reach their target customers. Because setting budgets and cost-of-traffic acquisition is under their control. Therefore, small businesses can also take advantage of PPC marketing to reach their target customers, both in domestic and international markets
5. You can experiment cheaply.
The good thing about advertising on Google is that you don't have to create a huge budget for advertising, you can throw as little money as you want, experiment efficiently, get the ratios where you want, and then expand.
Conclusion
Clearly, search engine optimisation has some distinct advantages over paid search. However, there are certain situations and scenarios where pay-per-click advertising makes better sense strategically.
That being said there has been a recent study concluded by Hitwise that shows the decrease of paid search over the past year.
The bottom line is that businesses should not rely solely on one or the other, organic or paid, but need to tailor their approach based on their business, driving the highest converting traffic and the highest return on investment traffic to their site.
Posted by Valeriya Tselebrovskaya on 05/22/09 at 1:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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18 May 2009
Cebit Australia: In-House SEO Plus Live Clinics
Managing an In-House SEO Program, Jasmine Batra, Director, Arrow Internet Marketing
Jasmine began by elaborating on the different SEO models, namely, in-House, Consultants, Co-Source and Outsourced. Managing an in-house SEO program has the following steps:
1. Setting your campaign objectives
2. Analysing your competitive environment
3. Managing stakeholders
4. Selecting the core team
5. Mapping the key skills
6. Bridging skills gap
Typical core team comprises of: SEO strategist, technical engineers, content specialists and link building experts. The SEO process is as follows:
1. SEO audit
2. SEO plan
3. Implementation
4. Benchmarking
5. Reviewing and reporting
Tests of a good SEO audit:
• More than stating the obvious
• Includes specific examples and recommendations
• What's broken?
• What's working well?
• Design and structure flaws
• Keyword analysis and positioning
• Geographic targeting
• Server checks
• Pages indexed by the major S.E's
Implementation means applying your findings from the SEO audit and proposed SEO plan to the website in question. Important aspects include the role clarity, overcoming technology barriers and managing the approval process. Benchmarking includes internal benchmarking, industry benchmarking and international benchmarking. Reviewing and reporting means you need to ascertain what you are measuring, consistently measuring the same metrics, celebrating wins and re-defining SEO goals.
Costly SEO mistakes
• Misplaced expectations
• Incongruent teams
• Self-proclaimed gurus
• Turf battles
Pillars of SEO success
• 20-80 rule - 20% implementation = 80% results
• SEO champions - people who understand and believe in the SEO cause
• Skill sets
• Milestones & KPI's - set yourself manageable goals and celebrate them
• SEO knowledge - share knowledge within the organisation
Nice overview of steps and process' that are needed to run a successful in-house SEO team, good pointers and high level overview of the entire project management process. Jasmine even got a few laughs which on the second day of a web conference at 3-30pm is a seriously impressive feat.
Live Clinic 101 - Analysing Your Websites, Joshua Hay, Chief Operating Officer, E-Web Marketing.
This site clinic was performed on bridgestone.com.au. Various observations that came out of the clinic:
• For "tyre" Bridgestone needs to put tyres first in the title tag
• Bridgestone has 591 pages indexed while their competitors have less
• Bridgestone has 19 links only-need to create more
• Canonicalization issues
• Good unique meta description tags
• Some code is bloated-need an external file
• Have a sitemap and robots files which is good, although the robots file should have a link to the sitemap
• Some usability issues with the dealer locator button
• Flesh out titles for pages
Wow after 2 intense days on talks and live blogging I am pretty exhausted, guess im not as young as I used to be. It has been a whirlwind ride from building brands online to the semantic web and all of it has been warmly received by the webforward audience. The Cebit exhibition itself was a great event with a huge number of exhibitors and massive numbers of delegates. Look forward to next year.
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/18/09 at 1:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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15 May 2009
Cebit Australia- Location, Location: Online Maps, Local Listing and Mobile Search
Tapping into Mobile Search -Mr Gregan McMahon, Group Manager, Mobile Digital Development, Sensis Pty Ltd
There was some poor Twitter feedback on the previous Sensis presentation with it being compared to a sales pitch, Gregan promised this time it wouldn't be the case.
Brief overview of the current mobile search landscape:
• Mobile search is more than web search on a mobile
• Usage approaching the tipping point
• Previous inhibitors falling away
• Smartphone revolution
• "open web"- but optimisation still critical
Mobile builds bridges between the digital and the physical, it allows search to be carried around by the user. Since July 1st 2008, 3,500,000 links have been embedded in yellow pages text messages. It's not about new media for new media sake; rather it allows great integration and enables a plethora of information at the users' fingertips.
Sensis mobile search highlights:
• Used 1.8 million times per month
• Represents 8% of total Sensis page views
• Avg 3.5 million searches per month
• Visits tripled in 2008 (222%)
Five ways to harness mobile search:
• Remember-one size doesn't fit all
• Find aggregation points
• Optimise UX for mobile
• Don't forget the basics
• Be prepared to learn
As promised this was most definitely not a sales pitch, some good basics for mobile search optimisation and some great stats from Sensis to back up their methodologies and tips that they presented.
Local Search - How to Leverage the Consumer Uptake in Location-Based Services, Peter Crowe, Chief Executive Officer, Quotify
Why bother? Customers are buying local. Customers are supporting local. Customers are engaging with local media and local customers deliver higher profits. Local search is growing at a rapid rate. The Google ten pack is becoming more and more visible. [Ok encase your like me and weren't sure exactly what the '10 pack' is (after all most of my fav drinks come in either 6 or 12 packs...), it is the list of 10 search results located next to a map on localised search queries at the top of the SERPs. - Kate] It occupies key real-estate, consumer queries increasingly contain location and search engine are increasingly aware of your location. 40% of queries used in a search engine have location based keywords in them. Analysts think that by this time next year, Google will achieve 1 billion dollars in revenue in Australia. Customer ratings are very powerful, 84% of online customers say online evaluations have influenced their purchase decisions. 66% of respondents checked some kind of online review forum when looking to purchase a product/brand
Getting the basics of local listing right:
• Make sure all your locations are listed with Google/Yellow/True Local
• Identify and update any relevant vertical directories
• Create a content page for every branch location on your website
• Develop an inbound link strategy around the location page
• Don't forget regions i.e. inner west, north shore
• Standardise your location data
Some good technical points made on local business as well as a high level review on converting customers through pipeline management and further using the IVR and leveraging SMS in the pipeline.
Local Search and Online Maps - Super Power Business Platform, John Allan, Chief Executive Officer, truelocal.com.au
John started up by bringing up a great statistic that broadband penetration is currently at 95% for the demographic 35-49, which is also the highest demographic of internet usage. The 25-34 year olds have the greatest frequency of internet usage. People with above average income are still the greatest uses of the internet in Australia. On average, John explains that 80% of online reviews are positive and 20% are negative in Australia.
Local is about disaggregation and narrowing choice. Yelp.com is one of the sites that is doing this well, they have such strength with regard to consumer review; when the consumers on Yelp turn on a business , that business often goes under. From 2004 the highest growth in the local space is whereis.com.au, which has had massive growth and is the market leader. Many apps in the iPhone store have high take up but low usage.
5 Tips for SME's
• Review your advertising activity
• Go for the free kicks i.e. Google, online directories, Facebook etc
• Upload as much content as you can
• Make sure your listings stand out from the competition i.e. well positioned or eye catching
• Read your reports
I enjoyed this presentation, once again great useful stats and good theories and suggestions on the use of local and how it relates to the purchase decision making process.
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/15/09 at 10:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Mobile Search and SEO
Growth of Mobile Search
Today at the Cebit conference on Web and Mobile Applications I discovered something really interesting. 99% of people attending the conference had a blackberry/iPhone or any sort of smart phone. Some people while taking notes, were twitting, sending email or just browsing with their mobiles. According to Nic Williams - Chief Executive Office/Founder at Mocra -the iPhone has the leading browser experience. Nic mentioned that not only social networking (Facebook, Skype and Twitter) is becoming popular on a new iPhone but also sites such as sports.com.au or Surfline that offer interesting data and interesting way to visualize the data. Keith Ahern - CEO of MoGeneration - talked about the Critical Success Factors for Commercial Mobile Applications and how to use mobile apps to increase brand awareness, to reach customers on the go and to generate revenue.
Do people like to use mobiles to buy online? More likely, people are searching for directions, restaurants, locations, entertainment and information. Where do people start searching? According to a recent survey conducted by TMP Directional Marketing, 31% of local searches come from search engines and 60% of shoppers with Wi-Fi phones have conducted local mobile searches.
Source: http://www.google.com/reader/view/#search/Search%20Engines%20Top%20Source%20for%20Local%20Search/6
SEO is a must for mobile sites
The growth of mobile search usage isn't something new to me, however it makes me think about its impact on search engine marketing and how the future of SEO for mobiles will be.
In the last year lots of companies around the globe have started realizing how having a mobile friendly site is becoming essential. In April 2009 dotMobi, the company behind .mobi, the first top level domain dedicated to delivering the Internet to mobile devices, counted something like 1.1 million mobile site addresses in the world.
Mobile Web is still at its early stage. Most of websites in Australia are not optimised for viewing on mobiles. In addition there are slow downloading speed and connectivity issues. With a bad user experience, users will most likely not come back. There is a massive opportunity for businesses in the emerging internet mobile market. Businesses would need to consider SEO techniques when developing mobile sites. Many aspects of mobile optimisation will follow traditional SEO practices with particular emphasis on on-page factors.
SEO for mobile sites - Tips
Here are few tips that might help you when optimizing a site for mobiles: - use a dedicated url for mobile - provide information that are relevant and easy to access to mobile users - rely on a simple navigation - submit your mobile site to Mobile Search Engines (such as Yahoo One Search - http://us.m.yahoo.com/p/search - and Google http://www.google.com/m - ) - adhere to mobile standards - don't rely on embedded images, objects, scripts, frames, flash, pop-up windows
You might want to refer also to Google's webmaster guidelines for mobile website - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40348.
I believe mobile search will become more and more an integrated part of our daily life with a wider selection of user friendly devices with a faster broadband speed. Business will become more aware of the importance of their mobile search capability. Search engines will develop more sophisticated apps to facilitate local search through mobile phones.
Posted by Raffaella Bronzi on 05/15/09 at 10:11 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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14 May 2009
Cebit Australia- Web Analytics, Metrics and Information Management
The Future of the Web - The Semantic Web, Sebastian Chan, Head of Digital, Social & Emerging Technologies, Powerhouse Museum.
Sebastian starts by giving us the caution that what he is going to talk about is "A POSSIBLE" future with regard to the semantic web. The semantic web is about linking information across the web. The discussion is going to focus on content rich sites. Powehouse's bread and butter is semi-structured data which they use to improve archived data. Even low quality data has value. The aim is to connect things up. Currently this is all done manually which is a lot of work; in order to hurry things along Sebastian needs to find a way to piece together the data automatically.
Textual analysis tools are used to try automate this function and locate the building blocks of the semantic web. What are the current possibilities of linking all this information? Yahoo pipes can be modified and customised to automate this project somewhat; this is data mining at a pretty big level, mining wiki's, twitter, blog posts, meta data etc.
The key challenges are:
• Seeing business value beyond your own content
• Building compelling use cases
• Dealing with IP and content rights
• Focusing on the 'what' and 'why' instead of the 'how'
• Longer term project but enables many other paths and other futures
Interesting view on the world of data mining and the future it holds. Sebastian's view of the world is a streamlined and interconnected 'web'.
Web Analytics: How to Make Sense of the Data by Rod Jacka, Managing Director, Panalysis
Common metrics measured are visitors, bounce rate and conversion rate. You need to ask yourself a few core questions. Do you get enough of the right customers to your site? How effective is your site in converting these customers. How can you improve the numbers? Many of these metrics can't be seen in isolation but when viewed in context they become valuable. For example bounce rate should be viewed by traffic sources to get some intelligent information. Bounce rate by landing page also yields some intriguing insights. Small changes based on analytical data can make some big changes to the bottom line.
How can you track purchases offline? You need to model your sales process and you need intelligence, not just data. [As we like to say back at BCA HQ it's what you do with the data that counts! - Kate] You can qualify a visitors value by seeing that they spent at least 30 seconds on your site and viewed 2 product pages.
Big thanks to Rod for some great ways to extract useful and actionable intelligence from data derived from analytics programs. And as Rod points out using that intelligence can benefit the bottom line of any organisation.
Identify, Target and Engage with Your Customers Like Never Before, Mark Allison, Territory Manager for Australasia, WebTrends
Well I got the fright of my life when I was called up to present this session, I even almost got up, luckily the speaker did and I was saved the embarrassment (my name is almost identical to the speakers name when spoken) [Glad you had something prepared... Its pretty hard to find Marc with nothing to say... tee hee hee -- Kate]
Mark Allison started off by announcing how the original 4 P's are changing into the 4 R's. [I think it has now become compulsory to redefine the 4 Ps at every web and new media conference... Then you can show the required 2 by 2 graph - Kate]
80% of execs believe that they lose consumers by not engaging successfully with clients. The original method was taking people through the process of awareness, interest, desire and action. The new method is reveal, reward, respect and retain.
• Reveal-understand who your clients are
• Reward- reward behaviours with offers and special opportunities
• Respect- highly relevant targeted activities to consumers
• Retain- stimulate interactions with the products through fun and other elements
There needs to be a holistic 360 degree online marketing campaign in order to be successful and the 4 R's are an innovative method to achieve this.
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/14/09 at 5:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Cebit Australia - Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation: Is it More than Following the Rules? Jeremy Bolt, Director, Bruce Clay Australia.
The packed room stands up and gives a raucous applause that lasts a good 30 seconds, some wolf whistles can even me made out over the din to welcome the esteemed Jeremy Bolt .Whoops, I'm daydreaming again, in reality there is some polite applause as Jeremy strides to the podium.
Jeremy started off his discussion about what life was like before Google and how the search engines have changed and in particular the relationship between the search engines and how this relationship has changed over time.
Getting results- things you need to take heed of:
• SEO is evolving- algorithm changes, competitors, content types, search results and technology
• SEO knowledge is critical to momentum- training and enthusiasm is critical or the project will lose speed and your competition will prevail
• SEO is like the T.V show 'House'- the symptoms are often hard to diagnose and the cure might take experimentation
• SEO is a professional sport- use professional and integrated tools
Key SEO Factors (basics)
• On-page factors- meta tags along with a clear subject-matter focus
• Expertness- inbound links, outbound links, internal links and controlling pagerank movement
• Copywriting- structural content, Kincaid levels and clarification words
Key SEO Factors (advanced)
• Optimisation of engagement objects - videos, mp3s, images, maps, books, news etc
• Architecture aka siloing - you need to theme align your content by the relevant search query
• Spidering- a slow server discourages spiders, crawlable XML sitemap and robots.txt file
• Building trust- how trusted is your domain?
Key SEO trends
• User engagement objects
• Trust authority - vince update
• Canonicalization tags
• Personalisation / behavioural/ localisation
• Mobile
• Duplicate content
• Global spam focus
10 SEO tips
1. Keyword research 'it all starts here'
2. Understand your competitors
3. Ongoing commitment to new content
4. Structure your site correctly
5. Include SEO in your IA
6. Professional training and updates
7. Implementation and project management
8. Continually source themed links
9. SEO KPI's
10. Design and specification
Jeremy managed to cram a days worth of information into 30 mins and did this very well. Everyone in the audience looked captivated and for once I wasn't the only person furiously taking down notes.
[See Jeremy I told you not to be nervous! LOL - Kate]
Search Engine Optimisation in Further Depth, Andy Jamieson, Founder, Switched On Media.
Andy used slideshare to pick and choose a whole lot of SEO presentations and cherry picked what he thought were the best slides on the SEO industry. SEO is business critical as 43% of page views come from search. So where to start when looking at SEO? Is my site showing up on the front page ? Is my site being indexed? Does my SERP look compelling?
AJAX/Flash/anything that is difficult to index, how do we handle this? Flash is used to enhance the user experience but search engines have a major problem reading and indexing the content. Trying to fix this issue you may get busted for cloaking, be careful when doing this. Don't cloak rather provide the same content in both elements.
When to use 301 URL's:
• Domain migration
• Canonicalization
• Site architecture changes
• Misspelled domains
Andy then gave some broad overviews on some deep subjects like the canonicalization tag, pagerank sculpting and offsite link building. All in all a nice top level discussion of some important SEO elements.
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/14/09 at 5:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
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Cebit Australia - Keynote Address, Moderated Websites : Achieve Online Engagement- Dr Steven A. Zielke, Founder and CEO of EyeT Communications and Innovator of moderated websites
Steven started out with a nice flash presentation that briefly outlined how the idea for moderated websites came about in the bathtub and originated and transformed from online education to website moderations. The goal is to humanise the internet. Engagement through advertising - often offline commercials are emotional, human, stimulating exciting and appealing. While online advertisements are dry rather than emotional, factual rather than human, animated rather than stimulating and dumb rather than appealing. In the offline world you would never leave your customers alone.
With human banners you get 3-4 times higher clickrates, while 89% of the visitors stay a minimum of 40 seconds, up from 4 seconds with traditional banners, even on a boring topic such as financials. Online engagement is vital so you need to listen to your customers.
Modsite's main function is to design and implement human overlays/salespeople that are shown on several websites that direct you to the chosen topic or explain the site in general. The overlays can actually move to different pages within the website. Moderated isn't really the word to describe what Steven does, it should be labelled 'explanation websites'. This is really cool, it is not annoying and is really engaging. One great feature is the overlay's ability to help fill out difficult forms. This functionality never starts if you put in the URL directly - only when you arrive from Google or another advertising platform.
[Ok if you missed the keynote and really don't understand what Marc is talking about here... Join the club! Click through to the Modsite website and the nice lady with the cool accent will explain how it all works - Kate]
This is a unique form of online engagement, it's not the solution for everything but is a nifty feature in order to humanise the web, what's next? Possibly a true human [Whahhh? The girl with the accent is not a 'true' human? - Kate] The next stage of the internet - reality web! I thought this functionality is truly something new and unique and applied in a way that is not too intrusive or irritating.
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/14/09 at 4:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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13 May 2009
Cebit Australia-Increasing Possibilities in Online Marketing
Building Your Brand Online, Nic Cola, Chief Operating Officer, Fairfax Digital.
To kick off the Web Forward conference here at Cebit Sydney we had Nic Cola from Fairfax. Nic was discussing brand building online.
There is a changing behaviour of online consumer', consumers are engaging more and more with brands online, in particular with video objects. The Victorian Bushfires saw 6,000,000 videos watched online from Fairfax properties. Middle of the day is the new primetime with this being the period where most people view online videos. Online video revenue is growing 68% per year in Australia. Banner displays will be less prevalent while video advertising and integrated content will become more popular. Fairfax users spend an average of 4 minutes online.
Digihub is an online section of the SMH and is rapidly gaining impressions and is ranking highly for certain terms by using great SEO tactics. Nic pulls in some great snippets of video to help prove his next point : that 31% of internet activity occurs when consumers are watching TV. Nic also went into some case studies about how Fairfax has achieved significant success by using online and in particular video to build several brands online.
The Case for Brand Building Online - An FMCG Brand Study, Paul Fisher, Chief Executive Officer, Interactive Advertising Bureau
Paul brings up an Australian case study of Sultana Bran (Kelloggs). The study objectives were to measure the impact and effectiveness of an online campaign. A mix of contextual placement advertisements were used over a period over 5 weeks. Video executions were also used.
The Results where:
• Brand awareness increased 5%
• The video creative increased brand awareness more than standard creative execution
• Brand consideration increased by 8%
• Brand advocacy increased by 5%
The full presentation is at IAB. This presentation had some great reasons for using online advertising; it's not only a direct marketing platform but also tremendously useful for brand building.
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/13/09 at 5:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Cebit Australia - Smarter Strategy Management Using Search and Online Marketing
10 Golden Rules for Best Practice Online Marketing by Tony Keusgen from Technology Markets, Google.
The room is packed, just another indicator of the popularity of any speaker with the word "Google" in their job title. Tony got straight into it with some interesting online marketing trends. Search query volume for "Telco products and services", this has gone up 235% since 2005. Home video queries have risen 135 % while laptop queries have increased 300% since 2005. During the presentation 11,000 queries related to mobile phones and broadband will take place, thats really amazing.
As Tony says, "metrics matter", some examples of success metrics are:
• Bounce rates
• Time on site
• Visitor Loyalty
• Lead/appointments
Google insights for search can teach you about seasonality and how to best optimise your site to coincide with this seasonality. Google insights can also help a business learn about product trends and search behaviour. [Insights is a great tool for giving clients a pretty graph showing why they should pick one keyword over another - Kate]
Google's 10 Golden Rules
• Advertise all saleable products
• Advertise on every relevant keyword
• Campaigns are constantly visible
• Having a "win a click" mentality
• Ensure fresh creative's and landing pages
• Winning unique selling proposition - Does the user benefit? How?
• Great user experience
• Full tracker capability
• Leverage offline activity online
• Exploit media in terms of ROI: search/context based ads etc
Cross Channel Impact of Search and Display by Mick O'Brien, VP of Operations, APAC, Eyeblaster
Mick's discussion will concentrate on bridging the gap between display and search. These two disciplines operate completely independently of each other. Search is dominated by Google, while Display is dominated by Fairfax digital.
Different teams working on each discipline often does not communicate between each other and as a result of this synergy and customers are lost. When they work together time on site and total numbers of pages viewed are lifted remarkably. Search is mostly a consumer journey where display can act as a catalyst to increase the effectiveness of the search. There are lingering effects of display particularly when brand is used. 1 in 5 search conversions is affected by display advertising.
10 cross-channel recommendations
• Keep lines of communications open
• Share and share alike collective work
• Tag events
• One landing pages
• Create a path for consumers
• Go beyond the last click
• Maintain a unified reporting system
• Don't be hasty to shift budget from display to search
• View the campaign holistically
• Keep it simple
The rest of the talk went into Eyeblasters tools for bridging the gap between search and display, some nice elements to the tools but it became slightly like a sales pitch. This was confirmed by some less than flattering Twitter comments
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/13/09 at 5:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Cebit Australia Keynote Address - 'Marketing to the Informed Consumer' by Karim Temsamani, General Manager, Google Australia and New Zealand
Karim started off by elaborating on the financial crisis, stating that the current recession has caused the past 4 years of financial gains to be wiped off the books. However recessions have been very good for innovation in the past. Google is now focusing on its core search business and prioritising where it spends its money. Consumers aren't going anywhere, but they are using the internet to research and spend more wisely.
50% of Australians research a product on the internet prior to buying. Google insights showed the searches for coupons were up 90% from May last year. Browsing the internet was the #1 way to relax at home in Australia.
4 keys trends Google sees:
• We are on the cusp of a fully mobile internet (iPhone, Android etc) 1.4 billion people browse the internet while 4 billion people have mobile phones.
• 'Openness' - the availability of different components that innovators can utilise to create great products; many of these components are available on the cloud.
• Rise of Social Networking - Its is only in its infancy but is already a catalyst for real world action. Here Karim uses the example of Barack Obama who leveraged social media to gain unprecedented grass roots engagement.
• Speed - Broadband networks that the government recently announced will be the greatest enabler of change in Australia. It will allow new innovation, new business models and allow greater consumer interaction.
Every minute of every day 15 hours of video is uploaded to Youtube, WOW, that's seriously an incredible statistic. By 2019 an iPod will be able to carry 80 years of video on it. Businesses should embrace the internet to grow their sales online; businesses need to be online so that a consumer researching a product can find their online visibility. 41% of Europeans have changed their mind about what product to purchase by researching online. Data is the new cool tool. The vast majority of computing in the future will take place in the cloud. Convergence won't happen at the device level, everything happens in the cloud and the devices will allow access to the cloud.
Some jaw dropping stats and interesting trends were discussed in this talk. Cloud computing was also one of the major talking points and it's obviously where Google sees the future of information interaction.
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/13/09 at 11:40 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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12 May 2009
Bruce Clay Australia SEO Training
After the phenomenal success of the Bruce Clay SEO Training in Sydney that took place in April the decision was made to hold a 1 day training course in Tasmania, based on the 1 day training from the US with some localisation. The course covers everything from search engine concepts to detailed advice as well as linkbuilding and social media and paid search. The course has been designed to suit a wide audience from developers to business owners to marketing executives. The training session in Tasmania will be held at the beautiful surrounds of the Royal Hobart Yacht Club, Tasmania on the 21st May 2009. The training will cover the following vital SEO aspects:
• Introduction and importance of SEO
• SEO concepts and search engines
• SEO methodology
• Keyword Research
• Website anatomy and getting the basics right
• Universal search and engagement objects
• Link building tactics
• SEO implementation
• Paid search
• Social Media
• Conversion rates
• Usability
• Review
The training will be conducted by Jeremy Bolt, Director Bruce Clay Australia. Jeremy will be perfecting his speaking skills, in anticipation for the training, at CeBIT's two-day WebForward Conference on the 14th of May where he will be discussing Search Engine Optimisation: Is it More than Following the Rules?
Places are limited and seats are going rapidly, more details on the training and booking for the Sales Focused workshops are available Here
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/12/09 at 10:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Cebit Australia and Bruce Clay and a Blonde at SMX Sydney
At Bruce Clay Australia we are all getting excited for Cebit Australia Conference, especially the Webforward element which is branded as "Australia's Premier Web, Search and eMarketing summit" . Our own Jeremy Bolt will be speaking on "Search Engine Optimisation: Is it More than Following the Rules?" His discussion will start at 9-40am on the 14th of May at the Parkside 110a venue. I will be live blogging the event so watch out for updates.
Bruce Clay Australia will also have a booth at the Cebit Exhibition held at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Center ,Darling Harbor which is starting on Tuesday the 12th of May and Finishing on Thursday the 14th of May . Bruce Clay Australia will be at booth L14. If you come down and chat to us at the booth and pass on your business card with the word "tools" on the back you will receive a FREE 30 day trial of the Bruce Clay tools. Below is a picture of the booth.
If you want a sneak preview of what is to come, see the video below of Bruce being interviewed at SMX Sydney.
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/12/09 at 9:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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7 May 2009
Why I have quit Twitter
Recently I have seen a lot of posts about how 'big' twitter is getting (I was a pretty early adopter due to the SEO industry I work in). It is also interesting to see people comment on the rate of growth of Twitter all while my personal use of this network drops off rapidly.
So why the decline in my interest in Twitter?
Twitter, like an extra strong cup of coffee, gives you a massive buzz up front, but leaves you feeling distracted and short tempered for the rest of the day. The buzz I used to get from Twitter was like connecting to an infinitely wide network of people who related and enjoyed the same type of media consumption that I did. One of Twitter's initial appeals for me was the fact that I could connect with fellow search junkies and social media mavens any time via my browser, iPhone, tweetdeck etc. Logging on and having the news as filtered by my twitter stream, rather than a Sydney Morning Herald editor was refreshing and relevant.
So why is twitter doomed to be J.A.S.N (just another social network)?
Just like Facebook, people will bastardise anything once it reaches a certain size. Twitter is going through its 'facebook app' equivalent stage, you know that period when everyone wanted to play you in poker, dungeons and dragons or any other of the myriad of annoying time wasting games available to the avid procrastinator. This is the future of twitter, more brands are starting to spam you about products and offering they hope you will find relevant.
But brands aren't the only ones who are sabotaging the beauty of Twitter, no sir, just like the hole in the ozone layer above Australia, we are all to blame. As Twitter catches on and people follow their friends they will be introduced to an intimate level of understanding about the everyday exploits of people they would ordinarily catch up with infrequently. Is this really what we want? Face it, just because I am your mate does not mean I need to know you are "on the bus" / "eating a sandwich" / "on the loo". I don't want to know people! Hence my new conclusion that my real world friends are not as interesting as the industry leaders for blogging, social media, tech news.
Once the percentage of my twitter stream tweets turned from experts / evangelists to tweets on sandwiches, this social network becomes less vital to my morning routine. But what is the solution? It is rude to unfollow mates; imagine the scandal "didn't you see my update on twitter, I can't make lunch at 12!" So now, rather than being a source of interesting internet highlights, Twitter is a clogged up stream of 'too much information' and many social faux pas
Twitter as a ticket to play
Our famous microblogging engine has (almost) become the norm and so we watch it descend from its noisy heights into one more internet website you need to monitor for your company / brand / social life.
Twitter is now a "ticket to play" in the social media sandpit; the leverage opportunities are limited and while most brands will jump on the bandwagon trying to be the first to market to leverage the ever growing traffic opportunities, most will be left cold as the wave washes on by.
The solution is to be one step ahead, remember that while social media platforms come and go, your message, if it's a good one, can have a lasting effect. So Twitter become just one more social media breadcrumb box to tick. Are you anticipating the next big thing your company can be preparing for?
So what is next?
The solution to my problems with Twitter is Foursquare, a new social media network that plugs into Yelp so that you can geo-target your posts to different GPS locations. I am not saying this is going to grow massive overnight; I am making the point that this social network will help ME with my problems on Twitter. What's going to help you with yours? Answering this problem might help you figure out where to put your social media resources next..While Foursquare is not available here in Sydney we will hopefully see its expansion soon.
Posted by Kate Gamble on 05/ 7/09 at 1:27 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
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5 May 2009
Heads you lose, tails I win
Originally the term longtail was first used by Chris Anderson. The term describes the approach of businesses, such as Amazon.com , that sell a great amount of unique items, each in comparatively small quantities.
How it works is that there are a small number of terms that will bring your website thousands of visitors. However, there are thousands of search terms that will bring just one or two visitors each per month. Those thousands of search terms that bring in just a few visitors a month are the 'longtail searches'. Here is an example to illustrate
Head keyword- "SEO training"
Longtail keyword- "SEO keyword research training Sydney Australia"
Thats one Loooongtail
Why are so many SEO professionals now targeting this method of search engine marketing?
Some sites report that almost 70% of searches that locate them are longtail - Now I know that is a big claim to make, but WOW, 70% of searches are coming from keywords that are not the top performers from the keyword research. This is based on analytical data collected from our clients.
People use longtail keywords for searches when they are near to making a purchase - The conversion rates for longtail keywords are exponentially higher than the head keywords when they are relevant. This is due to the fact that as consumers get closer to the buying phase, they tend to use longer, more detailed keywords in their searches.
Bounce rates will be lower - Bounce rate is a significant KPI in the reporting arsenal of a SEO analyst. It pretty much shows how relevant the web site user believes the content on the page is (depending on his/her search). Essentially the lower the bounce rate, the better. Longtail searches significantly lower the bounce rate of a site as the detailed search term should lead the searcher to the correct page, with the information that they originally searched for.
There is less competition - Imagine you are a company selling 'shoes', ['cowboy boots' is the example Bruce likes to use in the SEO Training - Kate ] you want to get ranked in the top 3 places for the term 'shoes', this aint gonna be easy! You will need to invest a whole lot of time and MONEY to try get there, especially if you're a new domain. However, imagine you want to get ranked for the term 'industrial shoes for chemical workers' that's going to be a whole lot easier.
To create the right longtail keywords within your site two major things need to be done. Firstly just the right amount of unique, relevant and user friendly content regarding your brand/product needs to be created. This needs to be as varied as possible so that many keyword phrases are covered, but all content should have a clear focus. Secondly, concise, accurate and intelligent internal linking must used within the entire site architecture, using some of the common longtail phrases as the internal anchor text to deep link amongst pages.
Bruce Clay Australia achieves this goal through the use of themes and siloing. In its simplest terms, siloing is a site architecture technique used to split the focus of a site into multiple themes. The goal behind siloing is to create a site that ranks well for multiple keywords including the more popular and the more-targeted (or longtail) keywords. The theme and sub-themes are found by looking at total popularity of a topic across any particular keyword universe.
Siloing categorises the content both structurally and virtually. Structurally, it is how the content is ordered on the server which includes the directory structure of the site. Virtually, it's how the content is linked together in the site because PageRank also flows for internal links. More information can be found about siloing in this Bruce Clay article on building a web site theme with silos.
Chris Anderson remarks "When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not)." This sums up the longtail keyword approach; we are attempting to satisfy the niche needs of many customers using thousands of longtail phrases, to capture the attention of both the savvy searcher looking for information and the novice internet user close to a purchase. In summary we are using specific SEO tactics to help the user find what they are looking for faster.
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/ 5/09 at 3:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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1 May 2009
Facebook causes boost to global clothing sales, Maybe
It is fun Friday here at the Bruce Clay Australia offices and I decided that there should be a blog post in line with that. I have had an idea ruminating in my mind for a few months regarding Facebook's effect of user's buying patterns with regard to clothes and how use this change to improve SEO, today I am going to elaborate on this.
So I know you must be thinking, Marc is going to bring out stacks of data, historical and current, gathered from multiple reputable sources, repackaged it in a nice easy to understand way to support his theory, not this time :). The only evidence I have for this phenomenon is purely anecdotal from my own opinions and peers I chat to. Now I'm not talking about the advertising that Facebook supplies that in the words of Facebook "Reach your exact audience and connect real customers to your business" rather I am talking about photos, pictures, movies, mobile phone vids etc that get posted by your 'friends'.
The latest statistics indicate that Facebook has about 15 billion photos, with Facebook users adding photos at a rate of 850 million photos per month and that content is supplied by around 200 million active users. Now if you do the maths correctly (which I have not always done) that works out to roughly 75 pictures for each Facebook user, that is not including videos.
This brings me to the crux of my argument, a few months ago I was looking through my photos on Facebook (491 to be exact, but hey it's not a contest) and noticed that a large majority of the photos were from nights out on the town. While scrutinising these photos a little more carefully (strands of the Carly Simon song " You're so Vain" resound in my mind) it appears that I seem to be on a rotating schedule of only 5 shirts, or in fact that all I owned in the world were those 5 shirts. [how many are pink? - Kate] Wherever I look I seem to be in a similar outfit and I'm a guy, I shouldn't even be noticing/thinking about this kind of thing. This struck me as fairly odd; I always thought I had a fair variety when it came to my wardrobe, apparently not.
After this discovery I decided to consult people who would probably be more aware and perceptive of this phenomenon, the fairer sex. Voila, apparently I had stumbled onto something that until now had been the privy of those "girly talks" in powder rooms at venues across Sydney. [hehe, the privy in the privy - Kate] Some even griped how expensive it was getting as they felt every time they were invited to a function they felt a need for a new outfit so as not to have the shame of appearing in the Facebook photos section wearing the same thing time after time. Others went so far as to de-tag themselves in photo's where they felt they felt they had worn the same outfit one time too many.
Now what does this have to do with search engine optimisation? Unfortunately not a great deal but an element nevertheless. However online clothing stores may want to choose different value propositions when deciding which keywords to target for search engine marketing. I would suggest online retailers extend the current value and quality propositions that they use to sell their products (and by extension their keywords) and adding additional propositions (in this case variety). Then they should conduct extensive keyword research regarding these additional propositions and use it to garner a whole slew of longtail customers looking for variety in their wardrobe, as for me, Im off to buy some new shirts. Have a great weekend all.
Posted by Marc Elison on 05/ 1/09 at 3:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Marc Elison
Kate Gamble
Martin Orliac
