The Adwords system is completely user-centric, whether you are someone typing in a search query, or a company looking to sell more of a product or service. It is all about relevance. Ads show that satisfy the user’s search query most effectively, and the company benefits because they know that the click, for which they have just paid, is a very qualified lead.

From a company perspective, Adwords can be much cheaper than employing a full-time sales team; with all the fixed overheads that come with that. You can measure exactly how much profit each sale generates (ROI) via a suite of measuring tools that Google offers to its advertisers for free.

How much did it cost to acquire each new customer? You can think about the margin you are looking to make on each sale, and then control the budget you spend on trying to acquire that sale via the Google Adwords/ PPC method. You are in complete control of your budget and who you are trying to target. And in conjunction with Google’s measuring tools, you can always look to improve your ROI.

By constantly tweaking your keywords and ad text, you will improve your sales and profit. A free keyword tool from Google, even does a lot of the leg work for you!

Google Adwords works. Our own clients can testify to this. We have increased their sales significantly over the past couple of years. And with complete control over the costs attached to marketing via Adwords, there are no hidden risks.

So two weeks ago at the Shrewsbury e-commerce expo, we were given an excellent opportunity to share our ideas and thoughts with customers and interested parties across the region. Our MD David opened up with a talk on SEO, and then David and Paul spoke later on in the day on effective SEO and social media strategies for companies.

Although, the seminars were short, we appreciate these opportunities to meet new people and to share our thoughts face-to-face. Of course, its a great selling tool for us, as it enables us to forge new relationships, in a way that social media advocates would approve. Human to human.Thanks to 7video for their great work on preparing these videos for us.

Spring has most definitely sprung..wishing you all a very pleasant weekend.

Today this has taken another step forward—enabling us users to get even more information from the people that matter to us, whether they’re publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website.

Relevance is the main issue

First, social search results will now be mixed throughout our results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom). This means youwe’ll start seeing more from people like colleagues and friends, with annotations below the results they’ve shared or created.

So if you’re thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague  has written a blog post about his own experience, then  that post will now be elevated up the rankings with a note and a picture:

The social search service will only be available to users who have a Google account. Account holders can also link their social media accounts to their Google profiles.

Additional Google Search Features

Additional services include adding notes for links people have shared on Twitter. If you are looking for information on Aston Villa for example, and your friend has tweeted an article or video, you will now see this higher up the page.

You can also add accounts publicly and privately on your profile now. So not everyone needs to know who you follow.

Giving customers what they want

This shows what we already know. Social media content is becoming increasingly favoured by Google in their search algorithms. It makes a great deal of sense for two fundamental reasons. Firstly, we want to know what our friends and people we follow blog and tweet about. They influence our decisions. Secondly, Google’s aim is to provide relevant answers to our search queries. Therefore this increasing focus on search is vital both for us as users, and Google as the leading search engine.

Impact upon businesses

To drive traffic to the site, you need to create more content. In light of this new emphasis on social search, that means consistent blog posts, relevant tweets etc. This will increase your followers and fans, and will also give Google more ways to find you. And in a much more cost-effective way than a PPC campaign or traditional offline marketing efforts.

One way to increase adoption and results is to develop a process that is followed by anyone in communications, media relations or PR that is in a position to publish content online.

By adding a process, it adds accountability as well as the likelihood that a much greater quantity of content will be keyword optimised and promoted to extend the reach of news direct to end consumers as well as to journalists and reporters doing online research.

Here is a possible framework, which we hope will help you.

• Objectives:  What are your goals? You can’t finish your mission without an end goal, so it’s important to identify some kind of general website traffic, citations, links, social engagement and organic referring traffic goals.

• Audience:    Who are you trying to reach? This question can be answered at a broad level in relation to online PR and news content as well as at the individual content level. Keywords and promotion tactics can vary whether it’s direct to consumer, journalists, analysts or bloggers that you’re after.

• Social Conversations & SERPs:  Listening to social conversations about the topics important to your company, brand and constituents is essential for knowing where to engage and promote. Think of it as reconnaissance.  The SERPs, (Search Engine Results Pages) are your SEO battlefield and it’s important to understand what types of content is being displayed for your most important keyword phrases. While personalization is a factor that can make the SERP experience vary according to your location and web history, it still makes sense to identify what media types are included: web pages, images, video, blog posts, news, etc.

• Resources:   Content, people, processes.  What content and media do you have to promote? If you put out a press release, adding images and/or video can increase distribution quite a bit.  Who do you have available to you to help? Copywriters, IT, marketing. Adding SEO and Social Media components to content authoring and publishing processes will ensure more of your content goes out in an optimized state.
• Tactics:  What channels to optimize? This is where information captured in Listening and SERPs helps you decide what kind of content and which social channels to optimize for.  If news, images and video are represented in the search results and there are relevant conversations happening around social media sites including some or all of those media, then your “marching orders” are to leverage those types of media in your news optimization.

• Measure:  SEO, Social, PR. Knowing when you’re a success is important for productivity as well as reporting upstream in your organization. Setting goals, making benchmark measurements and then tracking progress as skills and effectiveness are refined will help you stay on track.

SEO insiders have wondered whether this new search innovation would affect placement strategies. And the simple answer is: yes. Yes, there will be changes to the way SEO professionals run their clients’ campaigns. Yes, this will affect the industry as a whole. And yes, we believe SEO professionals will have to adapt to meet ever-evolving needs.

But to think that this development is rocking the SEO world is to misunderstand the realities of the industry. In its roughly 15 years of existence, SEO has grown from being a small wildcat operation run by webmasters and content services to being one of the most dynamic, fast-growing sectors of the tech market. The reason for this rapid growth is because — not in spite –- of the constantly evolving nature of search engines.

Of course, as with any complex question about a dynamically evolving industry, there is a caveat. While the Bing-Facebook agreement and the recent updates to Google will change elements of how we do our business, the fundamentals will remain the same. As much as innovation shapes the day-to-day processes of optimization, the core foundations of the industry remain unchanged. The goal was — and still is — putting clients at the top of results pages, whether this is through organic search, paid search or social media.

Social media is nothing new in the world of online marketing. Facebook alone has 500 million users. We have already seen certain Twitter feeds included in Google search results. Before long, results may integrate other social networking sites, like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and myriad other sites that haven’t even been developed yet. For SEO professionals, this change highlights the need to integrate social networking if they haven’t already.

The Bing-Facebook agreement is indicative of the many changes that have taken SEO from a small-time game to a major, innovative industry. SEO is not about counter-punching, and it’s not about simply reacting to the changing search-engine landscape. Instead, it is about growing alongside search engines. It is about evolving with them to ensure that searchers get the results they need.

For years now, successful SEO firms have not been focusing their efforts strictly on organic search results. They’ve been steadily evolving along with changes in search engines: new Google algorithms, the emergence of Bing, the development of Google Local, instant searches, paid search, and searchable Twitter feeds. To be successful, SEO firms now need to become something more advanced: Digital Media Agencies.

Digital Media Ageniess are about handling the many online representation needs of their clients. While top search engine placement remains the major goal, it is just one aspect of what they seek to do. A Digital Media Agency also seeks to manage a client’s online reputation, create and maintain their social presence, and handle the many other aspects of a client’s online brand.

Will SEO professionals have to change their strategy in reaction to a new social media paradigm? The answer is yes. Their evolution into full-fledged Digital Media Agencies is imperative. And as the social and search industries continue to change, so too will Digital Media Agencies need to innovate.

SEO is the art of making sure your site makes the front page of search results, regardless of the search engine. If you want to be found for computer repair in Birmingham then you need to make sure you’ve done enough small business SEO to be found by Brummies with broken computers. You’re not worried about people in Leicester for example. They’re not going to be your customers, so there’s no reason in trying to reach them. This is where local search becomes more important.

Some small business SEO experts will tell you that keyword advertising and pay-per-click is the best way to go. However, depending on your industry and search terms, that can either be a shot in the dark or an expensive form of marketing. Before you give that a try, there are plenty of affordable search engine optimization strategies that exist for small business people.

Achieving your own small business SEO: When you’re just starting out, you may not have the budget to hire a small business SEO firm. So hopefully you have plenty of time. It’s actually fairly easy to manage the basics. For instance, when you produce your website, make sure you follow proper search engine optimization techniques — using proper keywords in page titles, sub-heads, and throughout body text — and build backlinks by leaving comments on various blogs and websites.

We should be prepared to spend a few hours each day on building backlinks. While many of us don’t have the time to spend a few hours doing this, it’s still important to put some time into it. Even if you only allow yourself enough time to put in three comments a day, you’ll have 100 backlinks within five weeks, which can greatly boost your small business SEO.

When is it time to hire a small business SEO professional? Eventually you will reach the point where you just don’t have time to put into your small business SEO. The time you took to submit those three comments, or the two hours you had been allowing yourself are now being taken up with other marketing, selling, meetings, fulfilling orders, and completing projects. You know your small business SEO is important, but you just haven’t had time for the last several weeks.

This is the time to start looking for a small business SEO professional. Presumably when you’re out of time to do it, you’re also reaching a success plateau which you’ll have a hard time moving off of if you can’t devote the time to your optimization efforts. A small business SEO professional will not only devote the time that you don’t have anymore, but they have been able to keep up with the latest developments in the technology and techniques. They’re reading the latest articles, they’re using the latest tools.

If you try to catch up, you could have a small learning curve you have to overcome before you’re ready to start your small business SEO efforts. And if this is something you continue to put off, you’ll either have a bigger curve later, or you’ll eventually start to slide back off the front page.

Hiring a small business SEO professional allows you to stay focused on those activities that make you money, rather than the ones that will detract from them.

Search engine optimization is going to be crucial if you’re trying to build your online brand, and attract local customers. While you can do most of the work yourself, you ideally want to get to the point in your business growth that you need to hire a professional to handle it for you. Regardless of what you do, small business SEO is going to be important enough to you that don’t want to ignore it.

With 10 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, we can offer affordable solution for you to develop your brand online. We have two Google Adwords professionals in-house, and know how to drive sales through SEO. We have done it for our own sites!

Why?

Because it’s 2010 and that’s just how it’s done. When using Social Media sites your main focus should be on sending direct targeted traffic to your site, building an arsenal of quality back links, generating online exposure by strengthening your websites online presence, attracting potential clients/users, shining a light on whatever it is you’re providing and building trust.

The four main pillars of social media that you should focus on are:

1. Blogs
2. Social Networking Sites
3. Social Bookmarking Sites
4. Forums

Social Media: Blogs

First if you don’t already have one, you’ll need to set up your websites blog that you will also need to optimize for the search engines: You’ll need it to connect to an array of services that will help get the word out about new content on the blog and site via the blogs RSS feed. You can then submit the RSS feed to a number of popular RSS aggregators that relay snippets of recent blog posts made and a link.

You’ll also use the site’s blog to generate exposure for the website through social media news sites such as Technorati and others like it. With a blog, people are more likely to link back to articles posted which in turn would help the site’s overall authority in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and Page Rank.

Social Network Sites

Networking is the key to any online marketing strategy, as it brings us that much closer to our targeted audience, and one-to-one with potential clients. Through Social Networking sites you should generate a following, a reader base, and interact with them in a way that will help shine the spot light on the company or product/service you’re offering.

A few of these sites include:

• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Facebook
• Myspace
• Linkedin
• PartnerUp
• Qapacity
• Ryze
• Talkbiznow

Search engine spiders troll these sites looking for links to something new and relevant so you should always utilize all the profile pages on these sites. You can easily do this by placing you site’s link and a bio where appropriate. Remember, keep your bios keyword rich and targeted but not spammy, that’s the key. With twitter for example, the Bio in your profile ends up being your profile pages description so keep things like that in mind.

Social Bookmarking Sites

These are an entirely different breed of social media sites and often confused with social networks. With social bookmarking sites, you end up generating exposure for the individual blog posts and articles. This is done by creating accounts on the top social bookmarking sites and submitting your article links as interesting to read content and spreading the word that way. Among those sites are a few popular bookmark giants such as:

• Delicious
• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Reddit

Remember, the key to making any Social Media campaign work is interaction and one-on-one marketing rather than mass marketing and spamming  people.

Forums

Further exposure can be achieved by registering on some of the web’s most popular forums, posting a few relevant threads, posts and general topics then adding links to your site/blog in both the forum signature and profile. DON’T join a community to spam them or talk incessantly about your website or business because like any community, listening, commenting, and making a genuine contribution here and there would yield better results and land you more potential clients, especially when people search for your business and find knowledgeable individuals representing your company helping others in the same industry online. It’s all about becoming an industry professional online!

In addition to forum marketing, you can also tap into e-mail based discussion lists and groups.

If you need any advice on how to maximise these different options for the benefit of your business, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on 01694 724 899.

Well, you are not alone.  Every year, thousands of UK businesses buy into rogue services that fail to deliver results of any kind. The most popular type of service that Internet Marketing companies push is called Search Engine Optimisation, otherwise known as SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of increasing a website’s position in the search engines so that the website receives more visitors. If carried out correctly, an SEO campaign can deliver a measurable increase in targeted traffic:  visitors looking for a particular service or product.

By focusing on specific keywords, a website can be optimised to appear in the search engines for relevant searches. The more exposure a website gets in the search engines and the higher up in the results the website appears, the more visitors the website will get from its target market.

How do businesses get stung?

SEO is a specialist service that requires technical knowledge of how the internet and search engines like Google operate. There are a variety of scenarios that lead to a business feeling cheated by an SEO company. Typical scenarios are rogue SEO companies;

• Pretending that guarantees can be given for what ranking position a site will attain and how long it will stay there for.
• Not analysing the individual requirements of a client’s business and then applying inappropriate or ineffective strategies that don’t deliver results.
• Charging monthly fees on a rolling contract so that business owners see the campaigns as low risk (and essentially ‘worth a gamble’) but end up paying more than the value of the work done.
• Taking on clients that operate in extremely competitive environments where there may be no room for successful optimization.

10 tips to qualify an SEO Agency

So how can you avoid the unpleasant situations that we have just discussed? Research, preparation and asking the right questions are pretty effective in our experience. Here’s our top 10 tips.

1.    Ask them what guarantees they provide on indexes and rankings over time.

If they give any guarantees to do with Google (or other search engines), bin them
2.    Ask them how long it will take to get your website on the first page of Google

All SEO campaigns take time, and a real SEO company will say that a minimum of 3 months work is needed to make progress (unless you already rank for the keywords). Any mention of anything less, walk away.

3.    Do a Google search for their company name, paying particular attention at forum posts

Any negative experiences will come up, as will positive experiences
4.    Ask them what their rates are and how they price up campaigns

If they price per keyword that’s fine, but if they offer packages for £100 or £250 per month without first finding out what your needs are be cautious; the campaigns may not be tailored to what you need.

5.    Ask them what reporting they provide for clients

A genuine SEO company will provide monthly reports on what is being done each month for your money.

6.    Ask them what keywords their company website ranks for in Google.

Check their rankings. If they don’t come up, be sceptical. If they are a new company it’s acceptable to ask how they intend on ranking and how long it will take them (they should be at least trying to rank and have an understanding of timeframes) and only move forward on client testimonials directly from the clients (as well as doing point 2).

7.    Ask them what they think about your website

Most SEO companies will highlight how well optimised your website is for the search engines to read. Page titles internal linking, and keyword optimised copy are some points they should mention.  The emphasis shouldn’t all be on Meta Tags and if anybody tells you to focus on the “keyword meta tag” in particular, then beat a hasty retreat.
8.    Ask them how campaigns are planned to get you a return on Investment as soon as possible.

A good company will have a plan that will target low hanging fruit keywords to get an additional amount of traffic through to your website in the initial 1-3 months. Alongside this, they will have a long term strategy (3-12 months) to target the competitive keywords for your business. If they don’t provide a reasonable plan, question their approach and how long it will take you to see some form of ROI.

9.    Ask them what policies they have to protect your campaign and service from competitors.

An ethical SEO company will only service 1 client per sector or niche. By doing so, you will be sure that they will only optimise your campaign and not your competitors after you. If they do not commit to working exclusively for you within your sector / niche, be skeptical about their approach and ethics.

10. Ask them for case studies of their clients and contact details.

A genuine SEO agency will be happy to provide case studies and contact details for client references. These references will provide you with an unbiased, real life experience of the services being provided.

Conclusion

Just a few simple checks could mean the difference between a cost-effective campaign that delivers traffic, leads and clients, and an expensive failure that could even leave you worse off in the search engine rankings than before.

Remember to keep asking those questions! We have a proven record of delivering a return on investment when it comes to our clients regarding SEO. Why not give us a call on 01694 724 899, and we will be only too happy to answer any queries that you may have!

From the index of over 10 billion images in Google’s databases, Google has cross-referenced images as often as possible in order to more thoroughly identify what’s in the picture.  For instance, if you post a photo of The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, but do not label it (even with a descriptive file name), Google will likely figure out what it is by comparing it to other photos of the hotel that have been labeled.  This is also true of many other types of images, even down to sub-species of animals.

When photos are displayed on the Google search, they pop up as a box over the top of the original page they’re on and this box has other information about the picture.  It tells you the size, weight (file size), any image information embedded (titles, photographer, usage rights, etc.) and gives you its best-guess if there is no labeling.  You can also use that image as the basis for a new search to find more like it.

You can even specify a color you prefer when searching for an image in the Advanced Search area.  So if you’re looking for Volkswagencars , but only want to look at red ones, you can include that and Google will do its best to only return red VWs. Now that is pretty neat!

All in all, there are a lot of cool new things in Google’s new Image Search.  It’s now become on-par with Bing and then one-upped the competition.