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Content is Key to a Successful SEO Campaign

By Andrew Redfern @ 6th July 2011 8:20 am Internet Marketing

Everybody wants their website to show up on the first page of an internet search but for that to be possible, you’d need one hell of a big page. Search engines are designed to present their results in order of the pages’ relevance to the search criteria and their quality, based on a number of factors.

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, refers to a range of techniques designed to ensure that your site demands as much of the search engine’s attention as possible. Because you could offer the best product or service in your field, but if nobody can see your site, they’re unlikely to ever know it.

One of the most important facts to get your head around when trying to optimise your site is the power of the written word. They say a picture speaks a thousand words, but search engines don’t see pictures, so we’d take the thousand words every time.

Of course it’s not quite as simple as that.

If you’re selling bikes, there’s no point transcribing ‘War and Peace’ over your homepage. The key is to feature plenty of text that’s relevant to the searches you’re hoping to feature on. In this example, that would mean featuring words like ‘bike’, ‘bikes’ or ‘bicycle’ for the search engine crawlers to pick up on.

A beautiful image of a shiny, new bike might look great, but the search engines simply won’t know that it’s there.

That’s why when designing your site, it’s crucial to remember to include plenty of relevant text based information. The search engine spiders can crawl through text, but not Flash or images.

Hit Search calls for help for digital push for SME’s

By Andrew Redfern @ 28th October 2010 12:43 pm Internet Marketing

According to the ‘Connected Kingdom’ report commissioned by Google, the UK internet is now worth more than £100 billion. A significant finding of the report was that the internet in the UK is growing at a rate of 10% every year, in 2008 it made up 7.2% of the UK economy and is predicted to generate up to 10% of the UK’s economy by 2015.

“As the report highlights the UK is the leading nation for e-commerce and the Internet is one of the key drivers for steady growth in the economy in 2010.” said Andy Redfern, Director of Hit Search Limited, online marketing specialists.

The UK has the largest per capita online market and the second largest e-commerce market in the world according to the report. Redfern add “At a time when the government is spending vast amount of time on austerity measures – a greater focus on getting the majority of SME’s digitally enabled from a sales point of view would no doubt help increase the country’s GDP.”

The report also found that the growing online industry accounts for approximately 250,000 UK jobs and will play a vital part for the UKs economic recovery during the next few years. Within the UK, the online industry is already larger than the construction, transport and utility sectors. Redfern commented “I am proud that our industry directly employees over 250,000 staff and growth of SME’s that use internet marketing outstrips those offline by a ratio of four to one. “

Redfern concludes “The Digital Inclusion task force focus was on the general public, this report highlights that greater investment is needed to push our business community online.”

TSD-HS-28910

247% Increase in UK Mobile Web Search

By Andrew Redfern @ 11th October 2010 5:36 pm Internet Marketing

A white paper study by a digital agency has linked an increase of 70% in smartphones sales led by Apple’s iPhone and Android based models to an increase of 247% in mobile web searches. This is also being driven by the increase of superphones and tablets making mobile web browsing even easier.

14% of respondents in the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups said they carried out at least one mobile internet search a day. Contrary to the large increase in mobile search volume, the survey also revealed that mobile traffic accounts for just 3% of all internet use.

With a 15% year on year drop in desktop/ laptop search web designers and brand marketers will need to develop new methods and strategies to gain full potential from the mobile opportunity by optimising their web pages and mobile app SEO/design.

According to Google UK and Ireland CEO Matt Brittin, the company designs everything for mobile first, then for other platforms. The CEO of the same digital agency quotes his view is “If you think the internet revolution is big, the mobile revolution is going to be bigger and much more widespread and faster.”

The report conductied by YouGov surveyed 2100 adults in April 2010.

Hit Search Online Marketing: Digital Marketing Budgets to Increase by 17 Per Cent

By Andrew Redfern @ 8th February 2010 2:19 pm Internet Marketing

A number of businesses are set to increase their digital marketing budgets by around 17 per cent this year.

That’s the findings of a recent survey carried out amongst firms in both Britain and the US.

Online marketing network site Econsultancy found that digital marketing would account for almost a quarter of total marketing budgets in 2010.

Of all the firms that participated in the study, 46 per cent said they were planning to increase their overall marketing budget for 2010, while over 50 per cent of companies are planning to increase their mobile marketing budgets.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are set to come into their own in 2010, with 70 per cent of businesses looking to increase their spending on these areas of marketing in the next 12 months.

Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy, said: “Digital evangelists have long been trying to get the big brands to spend more on online marketing (especially display advertising), and social media is now helping to give impetus to a second wave of marketers who are moving budgets online.

“Why? Because they see digital as crucial to brand reputation, and they’re right.”

Meanwhile, another survey released this week claimed that online spending on business to business marketing will grow by 8 per cent during the coming year, followed by a 14 per cent rise in 2012.

Ref: HSLP0101AA207

Hit Search Online Marketing: Paid Search Predictions for 2010

By Andrew Redfern @ 8th February 2010 12:07 pm Internet Marketing

It is widely expected that the amount of money invested by businesses into the paid search market will grow significantly over the next 12 months. This means that the need for campaigns to deliver an ever-increasing return on investment (ROI) is greater than ever. Digital marketing community Econsultancy has posted its predictions for the paid search market in the next 12 months.

• High keyword prices will force marketers to try new strategies

According to research carried out in the US, two-thirds of marketers see their biggest challenge in the paid search market as high prices for keywords. Despite the growth of paid searches beginning to slow down, advertisers are continually pumping more money into the industry, and as a result, keyword prices are becoming more expensive.

Because of this, marketers will need to focus on careful keyword management, testing, and targeting, in order to increase the ROI on their campaigns. Quality Score optimising will become a priority; this will bring costs down whilst simultaneously driving conversions up.

Geographic and demographic targeting will also be more widely used this year, with these strategies reaching out to national advertisers and retailers.

• Paid search will be more integrated

Although search marketing accounts for more than half of digital marketing budgets (representing tens of millions of pounds for the larger companies), most search marketing programmes are still managed separately from traditional marketing departments. This year, organisations will look to integrate their paid search operations more tightly into the business, rather than running them as a standalone unit.

Integrating systems will make search marketers change the way they report and organise their KPI’s, leading to a big shift in how this information is communicated upwards in the business. Search marketers will therefore need to adjust to new processes, using dashboards and proposals for investment. In return, they will be looking to see more executive support and therefore larger budgets.

• Paid search will go multichannel

Google recently found that over half of online shoppers research their purchases on the internet before eventually buying the products in-store. On this basis, search marketers are currently missing out on credit for half of the revenues their campaigns are driving.

However, the tools for measuring across channels are now much more accessible to businesses, whether it’s linking phone numbers to keywords, or taking in-store surveys to see how the customer learnt about the products they’ve purchased.

These tools will make it much easier for firms to make properly informed decisions on the allocation of their search budgets, and also make sure that they are driving both online and offline conversions. Learning how offline buyers are researching their needs will allow multichannel traders to find new, low cost keywords to drive profitable expansion of their paid-search programs.

• Facebook and Twitter Will Give Google a Run for Its Money

Social networking sites like Facebook, which currently has over a billion queries on its site every month, will extend their own search technology to allow users the ability to query the content in their news feeds. This will make it much easier for users to get recommendations from their friends on anything from restaurants and mobile phones, to films and TV programmes.

Advertising money for keyword placements is sure to follow suit, therefore search marketers will need to alter their campaigns to account for a more social set of keywords. This will enable them to catch consumers earlier in the consideration process than they could on traditional search engines like Google or Yahoo! And since these users will still in the research phase of purchasing a product (ie, placing a lot of value in word-of-mouth recommendations) these clicks could be very valuable.

While it will be difficult to incorporate all of these changes into campaigns, those marketers who can capitalise on some of these trends will most likely be a step ahead of the competition.

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Online Privacy : This Email is Set to Self Destruct

By Andrew Redfern @ 20th August 2009 5:36 pm Internet Marketing

Many users seem blissfully unaware that each and every time they send an email a copy is not only kept on the sender’s machine, but the recipient and even the ISP’s server. Now depending upon where about in the world you live, a copy of that record may also be request-able under a European Directive.

Imagine if every time you sent a letter, the postman made a copy. Or whenever you, under a European commission directive, to dip into some of that data.

There may however be a solution at hand. Seattle based researchers have a free self-destructing-email program. “Vanish” was created by Roxana Geambasu and Prof Hank Levy at the University of Washington. A delivery date set within the message and expiry date transforms emails to become unreadable when this date has passed. Even to the creator of the message.

The need for the service implies that a user may have some sinister reason for privacy, but do they? Many users will have sent emails which contain private data such as credit card details or names and addresses. These message swill often remain until the user upgrades their computer.

Similar sites have offered email services such as Hushmail which offered an encryption service. In 2007 Hushmail admitted that it wasn’t in fact as secure as it would like to make out as Canadian law enforcement had been forcing the company to decode the messages or face jail.

“Vanish” operates in a more innovative manner, following the encryption process the message becomes useless without the “key”. Vanish splits the key into 10 parts then spreads those across 1.5m computers. Making it impervious to hackers as every second goes by less and less machines hold the key until eventually it can never be decoded. Clever.

Google, Yahoo, Bing Take The “Blind” Search Engine Challange

By Andrew Redfern @ 10th August 2009 11:15 am Internet Marketing

Each of us have our favourite, we are by and large mostly Google devotees. But are we right to be? are we loyal to the best search engine or do we stick with them out of loyalty. There has been a general view within the industry is that users are not as discerning as they would like to think. Google has become what “Hoover” became to the vacuum industry and this will only serve to reinforce the idea that to search on the we, means: to “Google”.
So with a scientist cap on, the people at fejus.com. have created: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ .
Try now and search for something, it doesn’t matter what it is, you will receive the results from Yahoo, Bing ( soon to be the same) and Google ( fanfare please!). All branding is removed and the results are split into three columns.

I voted twice for the result which I favoured, by searching “HitSearch” I was presented with three different search results. At this point it would be nice to tell you the reader, that Google was hammered by Bing and that all the years we have been hoodwinked.

Well not quite..but almost:

Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%. When you compare this against the 80% market share of Google and paltry 5% for Bing, Bing may very well be one to look out for in the future!

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