Praveen: Analytics SEO SEM Online Marketing

Selling SEO is a bad business model, since any business must have strong fundamentals. Businesses should be able to define finite parameters that affect its revenue, expenditure and therefore profit. And a considerable amount of control is expected of these businesses on these parameters.

SEO is a field where parameters affecting the business model are more dynamic. Search Engine Optimization services offered by an agency to its clients has absolutely no control over Search Engine Algorithms, which ranks web pages in organic listings. Neither has it any full/part knowledge about its working.

Despite all this agencies across the world offer Search Engine Optimization services promising its clients higher ranking in Google search results, fully aware of the fact that Google itself cautions users on choosing SO services.

My idea about writing this post is about SEO Agencies how they can best sell services & operate ethically and businesses on whether or not choosing such a company if yes then how to do it?

SEO Agency India

SEO Agencies must act like any other Ad agency or a PR agency, they promise to work for your promote your brand online but do not take fully responsible for the result of the action/promotion.

Similarly SEO agency must follow the below important issues:

1) Make a review of the website initially and send it to the client.

2) Educate your clients about Search Engine Guidelines & process of SEO. They should be repetitive, if need to be emphasize on maintaining search engine friendly site.

3) Suggest/Work more on making the client content copies more appealing to the user.

4) Overlook every change made on the site to ensure high search engine crawl ability.

5) Evaluate the site on all commonly believed ranking factors

6) Any change you suggest on the site, educate the client first on why you are suggesting it.

7) Be transparent about your past clients, projects and method of working, such as explaining this activity would have high probability of generating this result.

Do not perform Link exchanges, use more Link baiting methods.

9) Communication is the key, keep informed about latest developments in your work.

10) Avoid spamming of all forms, Black Hat SEO and other unacceptable methods to boost rankings.

11) Avoid using software that queries Google, other search engines.

12) R&D and innovation is must need for every SEO company. They should have resources/manpower who constantly works on new methods & ways of promotion.

13) There are some SEO companies who have converted their SEO division into an assembly line production unit, every new SEO project is taken through same set of standard processes without any customization or knowledge input. All this in the name of ISO standardization. This is due to sheer lack of knowledge of Industry dynamics (environment). You must understand one size does not fit all.

SEO Client India

Every Company having a website & can convert its online visitors into sales/revenue must think about SEO services at some point or the other. Organic traffic is highly targeted and gives higher ROI than any other online source of traffic. More over Organic traffic adds branding value to the company, for ranking top for branded terms, in addition to generating traffic.

Companies when choosing a SEO service provider must remember following things:

A) SEO results cannot be achieved overnight. It requires patience and hard work.

B) SEO can be done both in-house and outsourced to an agency.

C) In-house SEO will give you flexibility, Accountability and a person who understands your business and your company.

D) SEO agency may have the expertise but lack insight into your business, or may be unaware of your company processes. Also if you do not want your outsourced partner to make direct changes to your website, then co-ordination between your Tech departments is a key issue.

E) Get details of past work, previous clients.

F) Know about their mode of work or standard processes. Get to know if they use any SEO software

G) This is a single test for choosing SEO agency; find out how much of R&D, knowledge work, innovation or Human involvement is present in forming SEO strategies for your project.

H) Make sure they do not perform any spammy activities to artificially boost your rankings.

I) They should be ready to educate you, whenever & whatever necessary about SEO and processes.

J) Be Open to new suggestions/ideas which your SEO consultant may suggest. For example Flashy design, extensive facelift for the site may not convert into equivalent sales/revenue for the business. It may not make business sense to have a highly decorative website. Ordinary simple websites with great content can do a much better job of generating traffic, revenue, meeting ROI & brand value.

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Search engine Optimization is more like public relations exercise made online. The main objective of your activity should be to increase your existing visibility by working on all forms of content and effectively making it work to your advantage.

This simply means suppose you search for any brand name or generic word on Google.com more than 6/10 times you will find one or more results from:

A) Wikipedia

B) Technorati

C) Del.icio.us

D) Blog Site

E) New Site

F) PR Site

G) Tags with that Keywords

H) Last but not the least from Vertical Engines (Images, Videos etc…)

Optimization must be done by closely monitoring the type of results displayed by search engines. For generic names or brand names it is very essential to have content online in all forms and media formats. This content must not only be optimized with keywords but also popularized by driving traffic by linking from main site, including popular tags, intelligently interlinking each other content.

Each media hosting your content has a potential to attract traffic and hence drive traffic to you website. Aggregate of traffic from all referral sources forms a signification chunk in your overall traffic to any website. Building the long tail of referral sites is very essential for every website.

Try to port your content in as many media formats, languages possible, which makes sense to business. Distribute this content to all possible publishing sites. Link to these content intelligently giving users access to all relevant content distributed and published online.

For example your business sells bicycles, you can do the following:

A) Create all possible useful textual content on bicycles and publish them online.

B) Publish Image of Bicycles online, upload on blogs, Flickr etc..

C) Videos of Bicycles on your site, Youtube, Video search engines.

D) Create Tags on technorati, del.icio.us etc.

E) Create blogs linking all of them. Link to wikipedia, swicki, rollyo, del.icio.us,

Some Optimization Tips for other Media Formats

A) Host Images in the same server; do not source it from other domain/server.

B) Do not have images of the size of wallpaper. Have smaller images with content covering around the image.

C) Use Stemmed Keywords/related words appropriately in Titles, Alts, Tags, Headings, Image Names, Video Names, Description content, Category Names, Urls without repeating the same word.

D) Keywords can be repeated in for proper names.

E) Give Location names wherever possible, Video Tags, Blog Titles, Image Description, Image Headings, Image Names, Anchor Texts etc.

F) Host Videos on Youtube, Google Videos. Give a link to your site in the Title or description of your Video. Include Location Names in description.

G) Use all possible keywords & location names as Tags in the Video.

H) Embed your Videos, Maps on Blogs, Website.

I) Create Custom Search Engines on Google, Swicki, Rollyo specific to a location. Include all you content from PR, Youtube, Websites, Blogs in Custom Search Engines etc.

J) Drive traffic to CSE, Swicki, by embedding in Blogs.

K) Regularly update Blogs & increase RSS subscriber count.

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Google says 80% of its searches are informational and the rest are navigational and some are transactional. Also it points out that every year more than 25% of the keywords typed by users are new, which have never been typed by users before. Google also has 55% market share as per comScore report.

Therefore according to this we analyze that most users searching on search engines are basically looking for information which they may use it to make offline decisions. This is an opportunity for the companies to provide user awareness and education to equip/empower them with required information to make a decision.

A website presence is basic essential of any company, at the same search engine visibility is very important for this both SEO, SEM becomes necessary. Just as a public relations is to offline media, SEO is to search engines.

What is Blogging?

Blogging is personal opinion dashboard of an individual to express his/her views, opinion or suggestions to the world. Many people blog about their work, personal life, hobby, related interests etc.

Blogs can be created on any freely available blogging system such as Blogger.com, Wordpress.com and many more. Every blog has a feed which can be subscribed by users who can read your posts from their personal feed readers. Also people can post comments on the posts.

Advantage of Blogging

In an offline comparison, you would express your views, thoughts (all types political, personal, business etc) to few close friends and relations. Your expression of thoughts may not have had an impact on your friends but certainly have counted as word of mouth marketing.

Porting the similar analogy to online scenario, your ideas on your blog my have an impact to an information seeker who has landed from a search engine & who is reading your posts.

Many users who visit a website may not be able to find all information or may not have complete trust in what you say. They may be looking for additional information from another user, who may be available on social networks or blogs.

Providing additional information on your blog about the company, its policies and products gives an excellent way to build trust with users and convert an information seeker into a customer.

Google always sets an example in every aspect of online marketing. Google has a blog for its each & every product & service it has launched so far. This gives Google an excellent way to communicate to users in casual and user friendly fashion. Also this provides a platform to provide comprehensive information about its products to end users. This gives them tremendous scope to gain confidence among users and ensure their user base community grows. My belief is that popularity of users & webmaster community has greatly increased only because Google maintains extensive communication about its products through blogs, forums, usenet groups etc.

Apart from the official blogs, there numerous personal blogs that are maintained by company employees such as Mattcutts, Avinash Kaushik and other such people. They promote the policies and procedures of the company through their personal blogs.

AOL product manger talks about the new home page on his personal blog, Avinash Kaushik talks about Google Analytics new interface on his personal blog. The information provided here were very useful to end user and builds confidence and therefore brand value.

Companies must demonstrate the way to blogs by first indulging themselves actively into blogging & social networks before they expect the users to blog about them. This is the simple basic principle on which user activity, habits & behavior on internet are transformed. Practice before your preach. This is after you have a excellent product with very good technology.

How Online Companies should blog?

A) Blog about products that are displayed online,

B) Blog about website features & enhancements & every product on website.

C) Blog about policies, procedures, payment systems

D) Blog about FAQs, and user activity

E) Blog about happy customers, happy users, use photographs, videos etc.

F) Participate in popular forums; solve problems/ grievances posted by users.

G) Increase your presence wherever your target users are located online.

H) Encourage your employees to blog about the company and its policies to send out positive signal to end users.

This would definitely build more confidence into your customers as well as turn information seekers into potential customers. This is a big boost to your brand as it increases your popularity in the online community.

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Google has acquired DoubleClick for $3.1bn, Double click is an Ad company working with Advertisers and Publishers in Ad business. They developed a DART product respectively for Advertisers and Publishers to help target and manage campaigns to meet their respective goals.

Google is already a leader in Targeted Advertising both Text Ad/Image Ad display. They have great products such as Adwords & Adsense for Advertisers & Publishers respectively; this technology is for anybody and requires little or no human involvement from Google’s end.

The main question is why did Google Acquire DoubleClick? Some of the reasons I can think for are:

1) Google took inspiration from Overture to build an Ad system to display relevant text ads based on search terms. They built a system and revolutionized it in a big way. Now they might be thinking of repeating the history again with DoubleClick. DoubleClick has DART, which Google might want to make it enormously scalable for anybody to just plug and play. They might want to keep the human intervention to the minimum level and let technology work the maximum, mainly to reduce cost which ultimately benefits the end user.

2) The Ad business is growing at a rapid rate, with internet overtaking Radio and competing with Print. Ad Agency business is really on the rise. Google wants to have a share of that pie too. It not just wants to be a medium to offer and manage inventory, they would also want to actively work with advertisers and publishers to meet their end goals & take major share of the pie.

3) Most Agencies managing Ad business apart from few good ones do not have long term satisfied customers. Most companies are looking for more accountability and reliability from Agencies. Google is more trusted than anyone in the online industry.

4) Google being the leader in the Online Ad selling; its move towards vertical integration is very natural.

Google would be using its technological expertise in combination with DoubleClick’s business acumen & client servicing capabilities to reach it goals.

Yahoo has in acquired Right Media to be able to compete evenly with Google.com. To state another interesting acquisition is Google acquiring Performics, since Performics is a part of DoubleClick. Performics is a company that sells SEO services to its clients. So, formally Google has acquired a SEO Company, I am sure its business would increase whether Google actually supports it or not.

What will Google do with Performics is yet to be seen….

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Online Marketing Industry is very new compared to other industries including Information technology and Software development. People working in this industry especially successful people have some unique characteristics vis-à-vis other industries. Some of the qualities unique to the people working in this field are:

1) Innovative Skills: Believe it or not this is the industry which basically runs on innovation & new ideas. Every innovation can help a company grow only till it is widely followed and copied by everybody else.

a. This industry is an IP intensive industry, IP (intellectual property) is the key asset to any company operating in this industry. Here companies do not have inventory or physical assets; it thrives and grows by knowledge pool and talent of its people.

b. Therefore people who can think out of the box is essential in this industry.

c. The best example is Google & Yahoo; both the companies have a place in history only because they created great products for end users. They are popular not because of advertising or marketing, but because of the popularity of their innovative products.

2) Knowledge Skills: Technical know-how and methodology of working is very essential in this industry. The ever changing new trends in technology make it imperative for professionals working in this field to have latest knowledge to have technological advantage over others. For example Web 2.0, AJAX etc..

3) Marketing Skills: To efficiently market your online products with ROI oriented approach is very essential for your business. Deciding the right mix of media and external communication is the essential job of any online marketing individual. Manage, Monitor & constantly optimize campaigns to drive right traffic to the website and efficiently monetize it are the important skills needed for the individual.

The above qualities are some of the main qualities a person must have working in an online industry. However the most important aspect is to understand and believe in the overall vision of the company, the bigger picture which the company aims to reach. Consider the below example:

Compare a scenario where a person is walking today, tomorrow he starts to walk faster, 3rd day he starts to Jog, 4^th day he starts to run faster. Similarly there is another person who is walking today, 2^nd day he cycles, 3^rd day he moves in a two wheeler, 4^th day he drives a car. In the second case the person has grown while as in first case the person is in the same state but operating faster. Companies and individuals are also same. Most companies tend to operate in the same fashion but more efficiently as they progress, such companies were good in the traditional industries such as banking and finance however in online industries which are IP intensive they would soon die. The real growth happens to companies which follow the second path by moving up the value chain and not just offering a customer a better product but also to create a whole new set of customer base

Marketing, Knowledge & Other skills can make you No.1 in the game, but you need Vision, Innovation, out of the box thinking to Lift the Game to different level. Google was able to think Big, which clearly the other players lacked, this is the main reason why Google is in leadership position and is able to define the game.

Most online companies follow the traditional businesses and follow the Method 1 explained above. They have an idea, implement it, become successful and then want to become efficient in repeating it. They run out of innovation and startup spirit to create new things. They become busy implementing the same idea everywhere they go, even though the whole world has copied it. This is exactly Yahoo has been doing until recently they changed the organization structure to think differently.

But Google has been following the second path, they started thinking bigger and broader. They ventured into Radio, Newspaper, TV, and whole lot of acquisitions.

They bought Youtube, DoubleClick, partnered with myspace and other major online players.

This is the main reason why Google surpassed Microsoft to be the No.1 Brand in the world is less than decade of time, which Microsoft took almost 25 years to build it.

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