seo, sem, ppc, where do I start?
Acronyms. They are a funny thing. Increasingly a part of life and if you dont know your RAM from your jam these days you are really at a disadvantage!
As the whole arena of search engine optimization services is relatively new to most people, a lot of the time you hear or see discussion going on about seo that should be sem, or ppc being labelled seo and so on. Well, they are relatively easy to differentiate BUT given the close correlation between the different “disciplines” of the subject many people confuse them.
SEO - Search Engine Optimisation (or optimization if you are US based!) is the art of making sure that a website is as optimised as possible for search engine spiders to correctly gather all of the data that the site contains, and trying to ensure that the relevant pages on the site are returned when a search is displayed. Having your site optimized for search positioning is of absolute importance, as a site with poor optimisation it would be akin to a great brochure for your company, but no distribution. People will not find your companies website if it is not well optimized (hence positioned well) for search engines to spider correctly.
PPC - Pay Per Click Advertising, is the methodology of promoting your company on search engines and web portals, by means of paying for the results that the advertiser produces, ie. directly paying for a “click” or a person actually visiting your site. Pay per click advertising is the number one revenue stream for all search engines today, and in the UK google have for the first time in 30 years usurped ITV1’s positioning as the number one advertising revenue generating company, which is a true reflection on the maturing of the internet advertising industry.
SEM - Search Engine Marketing, is either pure SEO, PPC, or more often a combination of the two disciplines to give an overall “marketing” or means of achieving good search engine positioning, using the whole range of ways that a search engine can bring you exposure.
So, next time you use the acronyms, you should know which is which!
off for my cafe con leche!
MM
Im ranked #3 seo kent, and #2 seo costa del sol!
Well, its saturday morning, the sun is out, the birds are singing, and Im checking my SERPs. ahhh, the life of an SEOer - its days like this that I know why I do what I do!
No, its not because I am stuck here in front of my monitors in what I affectionately call my “SEO War Room” (my multi monitor setup makes the office seem like the bridge of a destroyer when they are all on!) its because I have just stumbled across some decent search engine rankings for a few competitive keywords I started targetting a few months ago.
When I set the website MOGmedia up, a little over a year ago, it was my intention to rank first page for some seo related terms specific to my co-location living, namely Kent and the Costa Del Sol. Well, I was surprised to find that my last post, along with the MOGmedia homepage rank 2nd and 3rd respectively for either term!
You can check the websites, and the search terms that yields their positions as follows:
SEO Kent #3 in google.com for seo kent
SEO Costa Del Sol #2 in google.com for costa del sol SEO
These updates to the SERPs appear to have only happened since the last pagerank updates so Im not seeing a huge impact on traffic yet, but with some further refinement of inner pages and their relative keyword densities along with some creative linking, I think I might see an upturn in the next few weeks.
Anyway, back of to continue my SERP searching sessions!
MM
UPDATE:
ranked 4th and 8th for SEO kent in google see here
ranked 2nd and 3rd for SEO costa del sol see here
ranked 1st and 3rd for SEO rochester Kent see here
ranked 2nd for Kent SEO see here
ranked 4th and 5th for seo medway kent see here
ranked 9th for Search Engine Optimization Kent see here
Deeplinking your way to Success!
Its an often misunderstood important factor in Search Engine Optimization, “Deep Linking”.. while it sounds dark and mysterious its dead simple infact.
If you can visualise pagerank arriving at the index.xxx page of your website and being distributed downstream with each stage filtering out some more and more, until your last content pages pick up very little pagerank, deeplinking is the practice of getting outside links to “deep” within your website with a view to increasing the pagerank distribution to the rest of your website.
An example would be the blogroll link on this blog to my main site, MOGmedia well, thats just a link to the main page of my website, and google will spider the pages and assign value to them using the main page as an entry “doorway”, and in doing so it will drop a bit of pagerank there first before it moves on and values the other pages.
If I were to link to my OTHER website pages from an external site such as:
These links will pass on the same amount of pagerank to the inner pages of the site. Now for all intensive purposes the juice that will be passed on from this post is minimal as it will be “diluted” by the total number of outgoing links, but for an example it will do for now….
So, if you are trying to get more pages indexed in your website, choose a relevant “deep” or inner page to link to, and get link building!
anyway, Im off for another calimocho, or four!
MM
SEO in 2008 - What we should concentrate on now.
Following on from a few other blog posts of mine this year already, it seems that the focus for SEO is moving away from that old mainstay of the SEO’er, buying links.
What does this mean in practice? Well, in my opinion its a great thing as lets face it, in the last two years being an SEO has almost become as ubiquitous as being a webdesigner, and nearly the same as saying you are an IT professional.. Heck every other person I meet these days is an SEO!! The changes that seem to have been brought about by this latest TBPR update signify the beginning of the end of the wild west period of search engine optimisation, and now it is starting to seem that your onsite content, inc0ming links and link weight as a combination are now much more important that just the incoming links that have been ruling the market for the last few years.
What does this to mean to me? Well, not much really, as I have never taken on an SEO job before for a site that doesnt have genuine relevant content - but it will mean that many of the link building based SEO’s will either go out of business totally in the next 6 months or have to learn a whole new skillset. Those of us that have been in the market for 10 years however will remember what SEO was before google placed so much importance on off site optimisation and we simply have to revert in part back to the old days of optimising.
So, to get back to this posts title: What should we concentrate on now….
1) On site Content
2) Organic link growth onto RELEVANT sites, ie. through targeted linkbait
3) Site Updates, increasing RELEVANT page yield per site.
4) W3 compliance (always important)
5) Incoming links from RELEVANT sites.
You have probably noticed a pattern with that list… Relevancy!
Basically I think that MFA sites have been dealt a huge blow in the latest update and if you want to keep SERPs over the next few months I think the only way to fully consolidate your position is to add content, content and more content. When thats done, add some more content for good luck (or should that be “goo-gle luck”!)
Anyway, off for my calimocho people,
MM
The Value of Websites
“The value of websites” - and I mean that literally. Since the .com bubble burst (or should that be “went broke”) some years ago, the venture capital money just hasnt been in selling dot coms the way it used to be.
We all read stories about online businesses that had never turned a profit going for ridiculous sums of money, or raising mammoth amounts from VC firms on the assumption that they would turn a profit one day. The best example that comes to mind would be govworks.com which was owned by Kaleil Tuzman and Tom Herman - this site was burgeoning at the very peak of the dot com bubble, and the aforementioned Kaleil was so revered by the finance industry as a whole that he accompanied Bill Clinton (then president) on several financial ecenomic missions. Eventually both founders ended up with nothing, after raising over 60,000,000 (thats Sixty Million!) dollars of other peoples money, and losing it in a tale of mismanagement, woe and strife.
If only it were that easy now to raise funds! A good example would be my current site thats up for sale. Five years ago it would be worth over a half million dollars based on the turnover its had in the first year, and what is it going for? Well, I cant say yet because the sale isn’t finalised but a realistic estimate would be 20, maybe 30% of what it would have been worth then.
Why is this important? Well - it proves that the internet market is at least maturing. We have moved past the days of the wild e-west, and into a more sustainable era of company valuation. Would I love to be in the old days? Ofcourse, but then Im the one selling the sites, not expecting to take a profit on them long term.
In short, the new internet savvy VC firms are a godsend to us, because of the now much more realistic values that they are attributing to online businesses - if the “good ‘ol days” had persisted much longer, nobody would trust the online business world, much less readily invest in it.
So it remains our task to create, manage, promote and eventually sell innovative web products - more of a challenge now perhaps, but again, a good thing in light of the fact that we now see the consumate professionals standing head and shoulders above the rest of the field.
Anyway, enough of my musings, Im off for my calimocho (and its the wife’s birthday tomorrow so I have to be up to make the breakfast.)
Buenas Tardes Muchachos!
MM.