In the ever evolving cat and mouse game of marketing, the spring loaded marketing message, popping out at you from the noise of everyday life has been one of the great constants.  Interruption marketing.

Now, with the evolution of search, and our constant old friend, need satisfaction, relevancy becomes the key.

With Google facing a ‘relevancy’ war with Bing in the results trenches, look forward to fallout on your own website. Both sides will be evolving their algorithms, and your rankings may be likewise evolving.  Some of the more well known tricks that raise ranking, but hurt relevancy may come under threat, including link farms, domain nurturing sites, hijacked keyword strategies, etc.  Would that be such a bad thing?

This takes me back to one of my previous posts, “SEO Tips and Tricks - Practical Advice“.

Digital Ministry - Are you relevant?

Tags: Marketing, SEO by admin
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Part of the whole web2.0 and social interactive marketing buzz is about user generated content, word of mouth recommendation and the authority they bring.

It appears, at least in New York State, USA, that posing as a regular punter and putting up your own positive reviews constitutes the equivalent of false advertising.

So along with risking SEO purgatory, you may also be risking $$$ and lets not even talk about the brand value statement…

ATTORNEY GENERAL CUOMO SECURES SETTLEMENT WITH PLASTIC SURGERY FRANCHISE THAT FLOODED INTERNET WITH FALSE POSITIVE REVIEWS

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The first trick to SEO is that there are no tricks. Actually, there are, but the risk outweighs the benefit. This is proof Mama was right. Be honest, have integrity, do the right thing, and you’ll come out ahead.

This article covers the principles, the engines, the main authoring techniques, touches on link building and provides lots of links to useful resources to keep up with the ever changing cat-and-mouse game played between optimisers and search engines.

[Read more →]

Tags: SEO by admin
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Once again proof positive that users do not want to sit through indulgent animations and intro movies as they use the web.

Google Helping to Kill the Scourge of the Web - Webmonkey

Tags: Strategy, SEO by admin
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Web Marketing and its offspring, search engine optimisation, is certainly getting more interesting. Beyond the optimisation of your own site, and traditional link building, new opportunities are making a big impact, and in my humble opinion, for the better.

Social bookmarking sites, and the list is long indeed, allow you to consolidate, aggregate and sort user nominated websites. They also allow you an opportunity to promote your own. This creates a new pool of opportunities to not only build links, but more significantly, get the good word out to people who care.

So, beyond the technical opportunity to raise link count (and perhaps more honestly, based upon some of the link building techniques I’ve seen) you can supplement the organic search results from the big search engines with a more positioned, focused and optimised audience - real golden opportunity you want in the first place.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the like are no longer the only way to put your site up-front before new users. With their gazillion listings, I think often that even they do not know what to do with all the data. It gets harder and harder to get what you want out of them, even using complex boolean search techniques.

Many social bookmarking sites offer key word tagging and other sorting options, as well as user reviews of one sort or another, giving users a good clue to the validity of the content, and not simply the skill of the optimisation team, or the budget for keyword advertising.

Have a look at this incarnation “Hey Nielsen!” and give it some thought.

Here’s an article in Trend Hunter on the same topic, adding Brands as Friends.

Matthew

Tags: Marketing, SEO by admin
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