Google is now letting businesses respond to reviews posted on their Place Pages in Google Maps. This should be huge for reputation management, particularly as Google continues to place increased emphasis on these pages.

“Engaging with the people who have shared their thoughts about your business is a great way to get to know your customers and find out more,” says John Maguire of the Google Place Page team. “Both positive and negative feedback can be good for your business and help it grow (even though it’s sometimes hard to hear). By responding, you can build stronger relationships with existing and prospective customers.”

“For example, a thoughtful response acknowledging a problem and offering a solution can often turn a customer who had an initially negative experience into a raving supporter,” he continues. “A simple thank you or a personal message can further reinforce a positive experience. Ultimately, business owner responses give you the opportunity to learn what you do well, what you can do better, and show your customers that you’re listening.”

Google actually has a user guide with some tips on how to handle your responses, just in case customer service isn’t your strong point.

You must have your listing verified before you are able to respond to reviews.

Yelp is probably going to love this, considering they already have something of a beef with how Google uses its content.

When developing content for your web pages it is important to have well written articles that are concise and engaging. If you are selling products or services you may also want to include calls to action that will help you maximize conversions. For individuals with a marketing background this may all sound very familiar to you.

However, since you are writing content for websites you will not only have to cater to potential customers but also to search engines crawlers that are trying to index your pages in order to rank them on search engines.

Search engines match a user’s search query with keywords found on your pages in an effort to display the most relevant search results. Your web page will definitely not rank if a user query on Google does not match keyword phrases on your pages. Effective SEO copywriting requires the right combination of compelling content and pages that are optimized for search engines.
Keyword Research

It is generally a good idea to start your SEO content writing process with a comprehensive keyword research. This will give you a good idea as to which keyword phrases are relevant and should be targeted during your content writing process. Google offers a free Keyword Research Tool. You can also use this Geo Specific Keyword Tool if you are targeting local keywords. Copy/Paste your list of keywords in a spread sheet so you can refer back to this list as you write content.
Organizing Your Content

It is a good idea to develop articles that target no more than three related keyword phrases. With this strategy you make it easy for search engines to understand what the particular page is all about. Plus, you avoid having multiple pages on your site compete for the same keyword. (Keyword Cannibalization) Many websites solve this issue by creating a resource section that targets specific keywords assigned to individual pages.
Optimizing Web Pages for Search Engines

Developing optimized web pages is not complicated. However there are a couple of elements that need to be address in order to give your pages the best chance to rank well on search engines:
1. Page Title

Page titles are the most relevant tags on your entire page and will significantly affect the ranking on Search Engines. Use these guidelines when developing effective page titles:
Your targeted keyword(s) must be in the page title
Write your title with conversion in mind
Have a unique title tag for every page
Match searchers intent – if your page is designed to sell something keep the title short. For example:’ Buy HP Printer Cartridges’. If your visitors intent is more researched based use a longer more descriptive tile.
Limit your title to 66 characters – (Your title tag gets cut off after 66 character)
Make page titles easy to read by separating your brand from your keywords. For example: SEO Services – DoneSEO.com

2. Meta Description-Meta Keywords

Meta Descriptions will not help you with rankings. However they are often used as the description for your webpages on search results. Therefore write a meta description that matched you page content. Each page should have a unique meta tags and meta keywords. For your meta description use between 20 and 30 words.
3. H1 Tag

Include your keyword phrase in your H1 tag. This will further help search engines understand what this page is all about.
4. Content

As you develop content be mindful of the keywords you are targeting for a particular page. Refer back to your keyword research spreadsheet and list the various pages that you have optimized for specific keywords. This way you know which keyword phrases are missing a corresponding page.

Don’t stuff your page with keywords. Start by writing for human consumption first and make your content compelling and concise. As you start editing, see if you can include keywords in to your article in a way that sounds natural. I suggest you try to achieve between 2-5% keyword density for your any given page. I use SEO Quake’s Firefox Plug in to check the keyword density on web pages.
Content Development Based On Existing Rankings

If your website has been online for some time there is a good chance that some of the keywords you are interested in already rank somewhere in the top 10 pages on Google and other search engines. If that’s the case it probably makes more sense to optimize pages that already rank using the guidelines mentioned above. To quickly check rankings of a site I use SEO Books’ Ranking Checker. The tool will tell you which keywords and pages are ranking.

Author: Christian Neeser

Every major search engine provides hints and tips about how to optimize your pages for improved rankings on their sites. But when you read these guidelines you quickly see that most of it is just their own wish list. Things like ‘Write for humans not search engine bots – or – do not hide keywords with a font matching the background color.’ It is all good advice but kind of general and already well known (for the past decade.)

But there are always things a search engine will not tell you. And, of course, these are the things that make all the difference in your SEO efforts and results. That said; here are eight things that Bing does not want you to know (or you can skip to the Magic Formula section at the end):

1.) Your Domain Name Matters – A Lot

Search for just about anything on MSN / Bing and at least three of the top five matches will have some version of that keyword as the domain name. For example if you wanted to optimize for the keyword ‘my domain’ you should try to get the domain name ‘mydomain.com.’ If that is taken, opt for ‘my-domain.com.’ If that’s taken try for a name starting with ‘mydomain’ and ending with a word that is commonly associated. This is called LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. A good example would be ‘mydomainname.com’ or ‘my-domain-name.com.’ BTW, Bing treats dashes as a space so as long as long as the dashes merely separate words, they are treated much like the non dash version.

2.) There is No Sandbox

Here’s some great news for anyone just getting started. Bing does not seem to care about the age of your domain name. There is no ‘sandbox’ like Google has. Many people, myself included, have registered brand new domains and had them ranking in a matter of days.

3.) DotCom Trumps DotNet

Today some search engines like Google will often give .net and .com virtually the same value, and possibly higher value for a .org that is for a recognized non-profit organization. Bing however appears to prefer the .com version. You can even see instances where a ‘.co.uk’ site gets high rankings simply because it uses the exact keyword in the domain name and .co is close enough to .com.

4.) We Like Sub Domains

Most web hosts will let you add sub domains to your website. On Bing, if you have the sub domain mydomain.mydomain.com you are in for some potentially great rankings. The same is true if you have my.domain.com, but to a slightly lesser degree.

5.) Less is More – Part One

We have been trained by Google to try to have hundreds of pages of quality content on every website. Bing adheres to the old policy that they are indexing web ‘pages’ not web ‘sites’ (like Google says they do, but Bing appears to really mean it.) This means each page is treated on its own merit so a site with one page has the same chances of being ranked as a site with 100 pages, because each page is genuinely treated individually.

6.) Less is More – Part Two

The same rule as above goes for on-page text. Pages with 800 to 1,200 words seem to do best on Google but on Bing the reverse is true, with 250 to 500 words being the magic number. Just do not overuse your keyword.

7.) Links are Nice But Not Required

Forget about spending your life building an ever growing number of inbound links for Bing. They do not need them. Your site, for now at least, is judged by its own merits, page by page.

8.) Be Bold not Strong

The original SEO method dating back to 1996 was using the H1 or ‘strong’ heading tags in your HTML. Forget them for now. Bing gives higher priority to how you would express importance in a word processor document; larger font and bolded text as the main markers.

Summary: I build hundreds of Bing (formerly MSN) targeted mini sites every year using the information above (as it has evolved) and the results have been consistent top ten rankings. You can do it too!

Here’s my magic formula for a one hour top ranking:

A.) Get the .com version of a three to four word keyword as the domain name (dashes are fine.)

B.) Use the domain name as the page heading in a bolded font, slightly larger than the paragraph text.

C.) Write 400 words of natural sounding text using the keyword up to five times.

D.) Mention the keyword once in the first sentence and once in the final sentence of the page – then up to three times scattered throughout the remainder.

E.) Bold one instance of the keyword. Italicize one instance of the keyword. Use one instance of the keyword as a link back to the same page.

F.) Always fill in your Title, Description and Keywords META tags. That’s it.

Good luck and take care!

PS: This works for Yahoo too.

Author: Mike Small

Have you ever considered that one of the reasons YouTube became so popular is because there are YouTube videos embedded all over the web? There is a good chance that on any given day, you will see YouTube videos without ever actually visiting YouTube. It’s one reason YouTube videos go viral. Now Twitter is launching embeddable tweets.

Implications for Twitter

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine on the web, according to YouTube. In other ways, Twitter search holds that same title according to Twitter, as reported by Danny Sullivan, who also explains some of the caveats to this claim, which greatly dilute its effect. Either way, YouTube likely has embeddable videos to thank for a good deal of its visibility and ultimately its usage. If you think Twitter is big now, wait until Tweets are embedded everywhere.

Clearly there has been demand for such a feature as many publications (WebProNews included) place images of tweets in articles when quoting. If tweets are easily embeddable, you can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to see a lot more tweets visually appearing in content all over the web. Like it did for YouTube, this may bring a great deal more visibility and usage to Twitter.

Tweets as News

It’s no secret at this point that Twitter is a medium for breaking news. Sure, it’s a medium for a great deal of noise, but news breaks on Twitter all the time. Chalk it up to the ease of which it takes to enter in 140 characters or less on the scene from your mobile device. It’s a lot simpler than concocting an entire article or blog post.

News outlets are already turning to Twitter every day for stories and quotes, and to interact with their readerships/viewerships. Embedding tweets will only be an extension of this, in the online news world. It will likely inspire newsmakers to turn to Twitter first, so they can get their Tweet embedded in any publication or blog that chooses to cover the topic. The news-breaking tweet is likely to be the one embedded.

If you’re a news organization or a blogger yourself, it’s going to be much quicker and easier to assert yourself as the breaker of the news via a quick tweet before you take the time to write the post/article and give others a chance to catch up. If bloggers/journalists weren’t breaking their news with Twitter already, this is going to give them a greater incentive to do so.

Promoted Tweets

Twitter announced its ad platform Promoted Tweets last month. In this system, only tweets that receive high levels of engagement will remain promoted (and get that ad real estate at the top of relevant Twitter search results pages).

Embeddable Tweets will likely fuel engagement. With the tweets appearing on various blogs and news sites, it’s gong to open up the audience for that particular tweet. It’s not going to be limited to one’s followers, and search queries. I’m surprised the embedded tweets don’t feature engagement buttons for replying, retweeting, and favoriting, as this would drive engagement much more, and contribute to the success of Promoted Tweets, but who’s to say they won’t include this stuff eventually.

Note: They haven’t actually rolled these embedded tweets out yet at the time of this writing, so there is a possibility that once they do they will be slightly different than the example Twitter has pointed to, but based on the sample provided, the buttons are not included, though it does link through to the actual tweet:

“It’s very simple. Just a snippet of code you’ll be able to use to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets like the one we used here,” says the company.

Increased Followers

To the point of increased visibility, it stands to reason that embedded tweets will also potentially lead to more followers for the Twitterer. Let’s say I’ve never heard of you, but you tweet about the kind of stuff I’m interested in. Being interested in that stuff, I might regularly read a blog about whatever that might be. Given that you tweet about that stuff, said blog may embed a particular tweet from you in some blog post. Then I see that tweet, which I find valuable, and discover a new person to follow on Twitter. Just like that, you’ve gained a new follower. Assuming that blog has more readers interested in that topic, you may gain a significant amount of new followers, all from that single tweet that was embedded in that single blog post.

More followers can of course lead to more retweets, and ultimately more traffic to your site/content. Then there’s the whole PageRank for social media scenario, which requires you to have quality followers engaging with your content.

Reason to Tweet More

This should be viewed as a reason to tweet more if you are currently a light Tweeter. The more you tweet, the more content there is that may be embedded by someone, then you can possibly reap the benefits discussed above.

That said, this isn’t reason to tweet insignificant thoughts. The content is king rule still applies here. Tweet things of value, and you will be more likely to attract embeds. It’s not really that different than attracting retweets in that sense.

I wouldn’t expect as many embeds as retweets by any means. Even if embedding a tweet is greatly simplified, it’s still not going to be as simple as hitting a retweet button, and not all of your followers have blogs or publications. However, those who view your tweets and do have blogs/publications may embed a valuable tweet, and they just may have a much bigger audience than you do on Twitter. It’s something to think about.

All in all, embeddable tweets are going to inject Twitter into more places on the web. It’s not exactly the gamechanger that Facebook recently unleashed, but this will lead to an increased Twitter presence in content. In fact, this might be a bigger move for Twitter on the web than the @anywhere platform the company announced at SXSW, that lets publishers integrate Twitter with their sites.

Google recently introduced us to Real Time Search and this has been met with a lot of questions. What Tweets will show up in real time? How will this affect businesses who are, and those who are not, engaging in social media? How will it affect PPC? Where will the searches show up? The biggest question is what impact will this have on small business? Small business owners are met with limited resources and adding any additional hours into their day is nearly impossible. But can a small business ignore real time search?

What is Real Time Search? As per Google

“… new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.”

In other words, your tweets from Twitter and new blog articles will be appear as “Latest Results.” The latest results are featured in 2 ways.

a. On the search results page below the “News Results” (if there are news results). This appears for very hot topics that are getting a lot of activity.

b. The “Show Options” menu: click on “Latest” under All Results and the live search results will appear.

What Does This Mean for Small Businesses?

1. Customer Experience.

Consumers are much more savvy and they are going online for more information. A quick Google search will provide them possibly more information about your company than you might have thought. A business cannot control what a person tweets about. As we see in the example below, tweets are posted when they mention a topic, business name, a name, etc.

Most tweets, blog entries and company mentions will show up under “Latest” and not on the main search results page. However, if a consumer wants to see more information about you, they have the option at their fingertips.

2. Reputation Management.

Not every business is on Twitter or has a blog, nor do they necessarily belong. However, ignoring your “Latest” news can present a problem. If a consumer is singing your praises, or worse a bad comment is written and you do not respond, you are adding fuel to the fire. That customer has been given a chance to continuously go on and on about your company/brand whereas the praise singer just got deflated with no feedback from you. Failing to monitor your reputation online could result in some missed opportunities or a poor company image that leads to reduced sales.

3. Spam.

Yes there will be spam because spammers are going to jump on this like ants at a summer picnic. While Google will make every attempt to try and control spam, the current algorithm for posting in real time makes that nearly impossible. How will this affect a small business? Spammers could very well keyword stuff tweets to get ahead and push your company lower on the tweets area. This is going to happen. There is no control right now, but the key is to try and stay ahead of them.

4. Search Engine Optimization.

Will real time search improve page rank? This remains to be seen. Will keyword laden tweets that are tweeted over and over from different accounts and push a company to the top of a searched term make a difference? Will this be seen as spam? Keyword laden tweets will give great results for a specific term, especially for those difficult to rank terms, and even if your company is atop of tweets for a short time, you may reap some rewards.

Real time search is not just the posting of tweets. It also posts company mentions from blog articles. So if your company has a blog, you may want to check out your “Latest” results.

In small business branding we have to consider social media marketing as an extension of your brand in the same way that we do traditional advertising. For some businesses, it is a time of uncertainty. As stated earlier, not every business needs to be on Twitter. A “crickets” account is worse than no account at all. But can you still just ignore the social media community?

The good news here is that, if you are able to squeeze in an extra hour as a small business owner, you can go and see what terms are popular in your industry, see what is being said about you, and see if you need to move full steam ahead in 2010. Most smal businesses will need to do so because social media marketing has just started to make a big impact and getting in now will make a world of a difference in a year or so.

If you are one of those people still skeptical about the business uses of social media, you may be interested to know that Google’s Social Search is no longer just an experiment. Though it does have the beta tag on it, it is now mainstream. This is something we’ve all known would come sooner or later, but now it’s here.

If people were already seeing different search results from one another before, that is really going to be true now, now that Google is plugging results based on the individual’s social circle into any given SERP. This is one of the many ways SEO is changing, and it would appear that any business looking to get some play in Google search, would do well to have as many connections established as possible, via various social networking sites and tools.

Keep in mind that the social circle is based upon information that Google has about you from your Google account. You can see your list of connections anytime from here (assuming you have a Google account). It pulls connections from your Google Contacts, and any services you have listed on your Google profile (assuming you have services listed on your profile). If you have Twitter listed for example (Facebook connections are not public), anyone you are connected to through one of those services is fair game for potential search results.

Google’s thinking is that if the user is connected to certain people, results from those people will have relevance because you know and trust them. Google says, “You can improve social search results for your friends and contacts by linking to content you have created such as blogs, photos and videos on your Google profile.”

“We’ve been having a lot of fun with Social Search. It’s baby season here on our team — two of us just had little ones, and a third is on the way,” the company says in the announcement. “We’re all getting ready to be parents for the first time and we have lots of questions. So, what do we do? We search Google, of course! With Social Search, when we search for [baby sleep patterns], [swaddling] or [best cribs], not only do we get the usual websites with expert opinions, we also find relevant pages from our friends and contacts. For example, if one of my friends has written a blog where he talks about a great baby shop he found in Mountain View, this might appear in my social results. I could probably find other reviews, but my friend’s blog is more relevant because I know and trust the author.”

Appearing in social search results means:

1. Make sure you have all of your important links on your Google Profile.
2. Make as many connections as possible.
3. Encourage customers to follow you via social networks.
4. Participate in social media so people will engage with you.
5. Encourage sharing of content (there are plenty available social media buttons)
6. Include social network info on business cards/signage, etc.
7. Include social network info in your online advertising
8. There are probably many more worthwhile tips (if you have any, share them in the comments).
Google’s social search doesn’t end with regular web search. They’re adding it to image search, and who knows what else. Look for a lot more features to become part of social search, as Google leaves that Beta tag on. Let’s not forget that Gmail only left beta last year, and I don’t have to tell you they’ve added a lot to that over the years.

Just remember that social results will always be clearly marked as such on Google’s SERPs. They will be accompanied by a heading that says “Results from your social circle”. Still, for traditional SEO it is just one more thing to compete with as far as page real estate. That’s why social is a much more of an important part of search than ever.

Google has been making many moves over the last couple years that seem to slowly turn it more and more into its own social network. Now that its profiles have a direct impact on search results, how people view Google in this light is likely to change significantly. Once more and more average users start to realize the social features are being integrated more into their everyday searches, they may find themselves getting sucked into using Google as more of a social tool, as opposed to just search.

Google and Microsoft have both inked deals with Twitter, and Microsoft has also inked one with Facebook to integrate Twitter and Facebook updates into Bing search results. Google will be adding tweets to search results.

Google’s Marissa Mayer says, “We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

There is a good chance that Google will be making a similar deal with Facebook, but even if they don’t, their deal with Twitter and Bing’s deals with both make it all the more important for marketers to be found in real-time searches and Facebook/Twitter in general.

Do you spend anytime trying to be found in real-time searches? Discuss here.

A while back WebProNews compiled a list of five tips for getting found in real-time searches, which basically boils down to staying in the conversation for relevant topics that people are searching for. The tips were:

1. Use keywords
2. Talk about timely events
3. Have a lot of followers
4. Promote conversation
5. Include calls to engagement

I elaborated on each of these in the previous article. Social media is viral by nature, and real-time search is nothing more than putting things in chronological order. You have to keep people talking to stay relevant “right now.”

That said, we don’t know all the details about how Google and Bing will be integrating its Twitter and Facebook results into the rest of their results yet. Bing has made available a beta tool for people to mess around with for searching tweets with the search engine. “You can now search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favorite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today,” says Paul Yiu of Bing’s Social Search team.

A spokesperson for Microsoft tells WebProNews, more specifically, the new Twitter developments in Bing include:

A real-time index of the Tweets that match your search queries in results. This feature makes it easier to follow what’s going on by reducing the amount of duplicates, spam, etc.
Giving you the option to rank tweets either by most recent or by “best match,” where we consider a Tweeter’s popularity, interestingness of the tweet, and other indicators of quality and trustworthiness.
Providing the top links shared on Twitter around your specific search query by showcasing a few of the most relevant tweets. Additionally, Bing automatically expands those small URLs (like bit.ly) to enable you to understand what people are tweeting about. Instead of showing standard search result captions, we select 2 top tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link.

Bing already displays some Tweets for certain people results at the very top of the regular web search results page. That’s a good place to appear. Here is a little info about how they rank tweets in their Twitter search.

Google announced a new Google labs project that injects social media into its own search results. This was also announced at the Web 2.0 Summit. Ben Parr with Mashable has the details from Mayer:

- The bottom of search results will soon have social networking information from your friends, like their Flickr (Flickr) photos or their status updates. It’s a blended search integration, similar to seeing news or image results.

- These are pulled from social networks connected to your Google Profile. The more that are connected, the more social information that will appear in search results.

- They have also improved searching for images using social networks. Images become more relevant using social networking data.

- It will launch in Google Labs in the next few weeks.

The deals with Microsoft and Google make social media marketing all the more important to marketing in general, and specifically search engine marketing. Where social media has generally fit into the SEO equation thus far, has been the promotion of content, which inspires links and conversation, which can in turn help search engine rankings.

Now, if status updates and tweets become directly integrated into search results in Universal Search-type fashion, it will be not only be about promotion and outside links, it will be about direct exposure right in the results, not unlike the importance of online video right now (as you’re probably aware, videos are often displayed prominently on the first page of Google results).

Now, forgetting about Google for a moment, pretend that the deals with Microsoft are the only ones that happened. You may also recall that Microsoft has a certain deal in the works with Yahoo. This (if everything goes according to plan) will see Bing results taking over Yahoo’s own. Yahoo may still be controlling the front-end of its search, but Bing will be controlling the back-end. Ranking for Bing will mean ranking for Yahoo.

So with Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook deals all in place for Bing, getting found in real-time searches may not only mean getting found in Twitter searches, Facebook searches, and such. It may also mean getting found in Bing searches and in Yahoo searches. That’s pretty much the meat of the non-Google U.S. search market.

Now let’s bring Google back into the equation. It has a deal with Twitter and may very well have one with Facebook before long. Kara Swisher who broke the news about Microsoft’s deals says Google’s been talking with both social networks. Still think real-time search and social media are not worth your time?

In the good old days of directory submissions and the like, SEMs had the sole responsibility for search engine marketing. Not any more. Today, it’s about providing advice to clients on writing press releases and articles, on-site blogging, and how to get involved in social media marketing, together with tweeting.

But how many website owners either have the necessary skills or the resources to relate information about their “products” in a meaningful way in online articles and press releases? In my experience, not many. Most companies appear reluctant to become involved in this, and worse, cannot perceive any real value in a subject they barely understand.

At the height of the dot.com crash at the start of the millennium, I was working with a web design agency in London. To my mind then, and it remains so now, the importance of using the internet as a medium to expand reach and to bring in more business could not be clearer, but the bottom line is that when times get tough, the tough cut internet spend. That will sound a little strange to our industry, but it is inexplicably true.

From my company’s perspective, quality SEO’s are a rare breed and their real value should not only be to provide an excellent service but to educate management (those who will listen, that is) on what we have to offer, which is to help drive traffic to their website and boost revenue. In reality though, this is a far harder job than one would expect. It seems that most companies are resistant to dedicating resources to this effort. As such, SEM lacks both the financial and human resources that need its support.

Our industry has a long way to go yet in assembling and disseminating this concept. With directories moribund and other short-cuts removed from link building processes, providing quality SEO services today belongs in the hands of the wordsmith, the blogger and the social media engineer. And yet, how do we get this message across convincingly?

In one of my posts on this issue, I got the following comment: “Show them the results. Don’t even talk about SEO…then tell them how much in time and resources it’s going to take.” That’s all very good and valuable but how many company executives understand what they are paying for prior to “showing them the results”? Case studies and/or a results-based campaign? That is one strategy we are using for our clients.

In a related article I read recently, an SEO company was explaining why they didn’t end up closing more of their proposals. It was because they advised the company from the outset about how much in-house involvement was required in successfully delivering a comprehensive SEM campaign. It sort of summed up why we need to do more in providing information that will educate companies about the effectiveness of what we are looking to achieve for them.

There is also a case for educating SEO/SEM firms themselves, as almost every week I receive emails from SEO outsourcing companies, generally from India. The majority of these emails pitch the same tired old submission services, including the outmoded reciprocals. On one occasion I decided to try them out – it was a very cheap experiment – and found that not one single link out of the dozen they had submitted appeared in Google’s indexes.

Also, there are many SEO companies that falsely claim they can get a client’s website to the top of the search engines for a given keyword or phrase. This has always been a contentious claim, as we could easily get any site to the top of the first page of Google/Bing if the search term is easy to compete on, although the chances are it won’t be searched on. Too much of the time these blanket assurances are an across-the-board, indiscriminate boast. Try “music”, go up against Yahoo, and see what happens. So, let’s now look at some possibilities:
• It is extremely rare for management to understand the benefits and economics of SEM in organic search and how it can lead to extended market reach and more customers. Too much of the time they take the view that to boost revenue, or in a recession to maintain it, they need to fall back on the reliance of traditional media. The result of this is that migration languishes and profitability targets stagnate. We need to convince them otherwise with case studies and, where appropriate, with results-driven campaigns.

• One of the major problems in SEM today is that human resources do not normally extend to writers who are conversant with the web in general, and blogging and social media in particular. As such, the SEM is often asked to write about subjects they are unfamiliar with. If no in-house assistance is provided, the chances are the project won’t ever get off the ground. Ideally, companies need to start to look at hiring staff that can implement SEM strategies effectively. But they won’t change until management starts to understand how marketing online actually works. When they do, it could result in a shift of marketing spend towards SEM.

• The other difficulty is in the actual measuring of SEM, as the search engines have blocked page ranking tools, which in turn leads to sketchy reports on how the campaign is proceeding. Placement is the only real arbiter on this and that takes time. Companies need to be made aware of this.

• It really is no excuse for companies who are looking to the search engines to broaden their exposure to say that they don’t have the time. They have the time for glossy brochures and hoardings, so why not divert some of that effort to the internet? We may all be experiencing difficult times at the moment and the idea of expanded SEM campaigns now, with companies downsizing and all that entails, should not translate into “campaign postponed”. SEM is the cheapest way of getting a company’s message across to new markets.

As one of the clients we have just taken on board mentioned above, let’s look at the guts of the proposal we submitted in developing their online presence:
• Creation of RSS feeds for the dissemination and syndication of news;

• Submission of articles to high-value article sites;

• Updates to the meta information, including adjusting copy where appropriate to target specific key phrases;

• Creation of a presence in the Facebook community;

• Setting up a Twitter account to post weekly news as well as breaking news;

• Development of an on-site blog with regular updates, linking the headline from the home page so the search engines see movement;

• Writing and submitting to blogs related to their industry;

• Where circumstances permit, post regular podcasts, including YouTube and Google videos.

To sum up, we need to create a method, typically via case studies, by which companies not only see the value in SEM but, more importantly, how they ought to be participating in it.

Author:
John Sylvester
V9 Design & Build