We online marketers and web world people like to think our language is as universal as music. However, majority of people, even people who use the internet fairly regularly, have difficulty understanding the whole concept of “online marketing” or ideas like “search engine optimization“. But what are these concepts really?

Speaking of ranking, pagerank, algorithms, links and even engaging copy designed to help Search Engines, all these concepts sound to most people like language from another planet. Sure, once its explained it all makes perfect sense.

Online Marketing: The art or study of promoting a product, service, business or idea using the internet and its different technologies. It sums the understanding of people’s behaviours online as well as the technologies and strategies required to attract the public and generate specific actions.

Search Engine Optimization: Google, Bing or Yahoo don’t show the same thing everywhere. However, it is possible to influence them to show specific web pages for specific user searches and generate traffic related to that term (be it a name, product, service or concept), given that enough interest exists in the market. Or simply put, the art of getting your website up on search results.

And even with those definitions, it sometimes isn’t clear enough. First of all, using Google, most people don’t think about how it works. A general principle is that we don’t need to know how electricity works to turn on a light or plug in a TV. Understanding that, it helps to show an actual search and where websites show up and exactly what “ranking” means. See below:

CualliOhtli.com ranks number one for that specific search. It also ranks high for many other searches that bring visitors to the site. That is SEO, getting websites up there, on top of the competition.

Anywho. My point is that no matter how much we think it is pretty standard to know these things, the reality is that most people don’t know much about them and we need to keep that always in mind.

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Or don’t wait until your competition out-ranks you, hire that SEO right now!

Really. Search engine optimization is an extremely important element for your website. Back in 1994, when there were a handful of websites, SEO was meaningless (doubt if it even existed beyond getting the proper domain name). In 2011, launching a website that is not search engine optimized with clean code, proper tagging, well written, etc, will only mean you are spending money to have a pretty brochure that only the people you give the domain address will see. Its not bad, you can use it in your printed materials to give people more information online. However, most businesses want their websites to be a strong sales tool that gets them prospects and customers.

If you want your website to be found online by the people who can buy from you, this shouldn’t even be a question.

Ok. But how does it work?

Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc) use algorithms to determine if a website is relevant to a specific search term. What they are really trying to accomplish is guess what the person wants by reading the search term used. Search Term and Keyword Phrase is what you type in the search field (see image below).

When you click Search the Search Engine reviews the database of sites in the servers nearest to you and determines which are the most “relevant” to your term. Relevancy is a big thing for SEO and Search Engines. When a website is “relevant” enough the person searching is happy. If the person is happy, said person uses the search engine more often driving up possible sales of advertising for the SE (Search Engine) and importance.

You can attain high relevancy by ensuring the content on your website is readable by the “spiders” or programs that register the information displayed and in code. Flash is a big issue here. Flash is what some designers use to make sites dynamic and animated. Some designers use it for menus and other page elements and this is a problem. Spiders “crawl” your menus and links and find the other pages. If the menus are Flash, then the spider sees it as an image and nothing gets found. Spiders only read text. Google and Adobe (the owners of Flash) have reported working hard on improving readability of Flash content, but it has been years and it still is not very good. So, for the time being, stay away from Flash if what you want is a website that ranks. I do know ways of getting ranked with Flash and have successfully ranked 100% flash websites in the past, however, it is expensive and most of the time, not worth it.

Another element is Links. The activity of generating links pointing to your site from other sites is called Linkbuilding. By far the most tedious and time consuming task of SEO. You may find software that does the job automatically,  but results are usually very low. The links generated are of poor quality and most are  garbage. The best linkbuilding is manually done by an expert SEO (Search Engine Opimtizer).

Generally speaking, that is SEO in a nutshell.

It sounds rather simple, do I really need to hire someone to do it?

In principle, it is simple. However, in each element there are many other little factors that affect the effectiveness of the work. Moreover, doing it wrong can get your site banned from search engines (its happened to some big corporations in the past). A ban in a search engine means you will NEVER be found, no matter what and that is much worse than not doing anything at all.

Hiring an expert search engine optimizer is an investment worth your money. Good optimization will land you on top of the competition and it may even open markets you were not even aware of resulting in more sales and better business for you.

Should I hire a crafty student to do it?

If you are ready to invest a lot of time learning the ropes of SEO and tracking his work while not paying attention to your business, go ahead. If you don’t want to  become an expert yourself and teach someone to do the tedious part of the job, then don’t. You’ll probably get subpar results or even negative penalties up to a full ban.

Be weary of newbies and wannabes too. Many people instead of looking for a job, think that web services are rather comfy and try to start a business doing SEO. Stay away, most are experimenting on you and will probably not give you the results you need.

Hire professional SEOs with experience, preferably international experience (doing SEO for different countries) as these people would normally know a bit more than local SEOs and have proven experience with Search Engines in many different ways. Also, highly recommended, hire content writing for your website, which is better obtained from the same SEO firm as they will ensure the content is optimized for humans AND search engines.

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

SEO is sometimes referred as an art, a skill, a craft and even a science. However it is never referred as something people just do for fun.

Search engine optimization is complicated and time consuming. There is no serious SEO who will tell you otherwise. Most serious SEO companies need to have a large team of programmers and SEO experts to provide proper services to their clients.

Now, it has come to my attention that there are many search engine marketing “experts” who now offer not only super cheap services (as low as $600 dollars a year) but even guarantee first three spots on Google for all terms. As many will sure know, there a couple of ways to charge so low for such a time consuming service.

1. You have a magic wand and a friend that works in Google who nicely pushes your clients up in rankings

2. You have a factory of barely English speaking workers who live on peanuts every month (and even those factories are not cheap)

3. They may be dabbling in the demonic arts of “Black hat”

4. They don’t really deliver as promised

SEO takes time, skill, effort and lots of experience, why on earth would someone do it for so little?

So, be smart and don’t let false “guarantees” or the promise of cheap SEO tempt you. After all, it is cheap for a reason.

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Google is taking caffeine and its about to become a little brat running around the house and messing all the stuff… or is it?

So Google has been rolling out Caffeine. As per their announcement before the holidays, Google was not going to commence rolling out the new changes in their indexing algorithm until after the seasons. According to several people among the SEO community, Caffeine has been seen in several servers across Google US.

As per Google’s own, Matt Cutts states: “It’s a re-write of our indexing infrastructure. It’s taking the old way that we used to index things that we’d crawled around the web, and we’re replacing that with new architecture that’s fresh and that had been written to be more scalable, more flexible, [with] the ability to attach different types of data, and in the process of indexing, the ability to do more documents for a more comprehensive version of the web, and the ability to do it faster.” (Text boldfaced for dramatic effect)

With the addition of real-time search and the new indexing techniques, ranking in Search Engines is becoming much more complicated than ever, and yet, for those who know, it seems to be as simple as ever. Soon people will come out with “magic” formulas to get your site ranking better. Is this the end of days for Search Engine Optimization? Will our Search Engine Optimization friends begin starving to death? Have the search engines finally put a stop to a practice that some consider wrong and immoral? Will Search Engine Optimization be a thing of the past? Nah! Changes come and go all the time and sooner than we know all is going to be business as usual (it actually hasn’t changed much, really).

Search Engine Optimization in the horizon

What does the future entail for the Search Engine Optimization industry? The reality is that SEO has been since quite some time, one more of the many tools available to online marketing companies. Should people begin worrying about the changes and how these will affect their rankings? Only if your site is small, has very little to give and its not updated regularly (all those online brochures out there, I’m looking at you!).

This Matt Cutts video talks about many other things, but please pay attention to about the minute 22 where he mentions Caffeine (and the quote from above this post).

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

To my dear readers, sorry about being out for a while. Really, I’m sorry.

We had tons of news over this time. Tiger Woods became a prime time mess, a marketing disaster of major proportions and a big comics’ tool. There was a so called bombing attempt on Xmas in the US and flying has become every travelers’ biggest nightmare. Oprah is retiring… in a couple of years and to her own channel (is it really retiring?). The Sci Fi channel became Sy-Fy and even though everyone blasted their marketing department for that, the Sy-Fy channel has reported and claimed success… interesting stuff.

In the online marketing world we’ve had even more news than that. Google applied for a license to buy and sell energy, launched the first “superphone” the Google Nexus One, changed the URL display guidelines and got some feathers ruffled with some over the moon charges for canceling the Nexus One contract with T-Mobile. China has become an international mess with Google and things keep getting worse (now after Google apparently got hacked by Chinese hackers). Bing still lags in functionality and even Chris Brogan has begun a quest to try Bing or die in 30 days.

I have tried Bing, I still give it a chance every now and then, but frankly, even though it has some nice features, the results (the main reason for a search engine to exist) are at best, buggy. Most of Bing’s results are either obvious or completely off the mark. Chris Brogan, a well known blogger, social media expert and internet marketer found out that when typing his name in the search, Chris Brown (you know who) showed up. THAT is buggy as a simple comparison of word by word should give the crawler the obvious results, everything related to the people with the same name. The same test with my name yields equally disappointing results. Now, getting indexed by Bing (regular business sites or any kind of site) is quite the adventure. There is an extremely long and useless thread in Bing about this particular issue.

Anywho, getting back to the original subject, there have been many news and many changes. I kept myself off the predictions bus but here are my two cents:

• The world will continue the great migration online
• Cellphones (smartphones, superphones) will be much more important
• Big growth in mobile marketing or mobile-friendly marketing
• The world economies will continue to be a mess, but will probably get better
• Bing will continue to struggle until everybody realizes its just Live with a different name and more images
• Google will continue its path towards world domination
• China and Google will continue on bad terms
• Brasil will be a dominant team in the world cup (if they don’t win it again)
• Canada will be big on the Winter Olympics (specially the hockey teams)
• Yahoo will continue in its nice quiet little place… or maybe not?

That is as far as my crystal ball (or Liquid Crystal Display screen) allows me to see. There is something very certain about it, that no matter what, I’ll continue to write about it all and probably, hopefully, just maybe, someone will care and eventually read my stuff and find it at least entertaining.

On a side note, Search Engine Optimization is going to get much more complicated with all the changes Google and Bing are implementing. The content will continue to be king and writers will continue to prosper in this online jungle, or as I like to call it, this Online Wild West. Has anyone checked out the Tweets on Google searches? Pretty cool right?

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

This is part two of the little odyssey that could from some time back.

So, to whoever was or may be interested, the person removed the article after some heckling and nagging. Didn’t respond to any message or email, but simply removed the offending article, which was good, right? Unfortunately, other blogs have shown up. Nice! Now, the question is, is it worth it to chase all this copying? Guess not.

From now on, let people copy my stuff, at least it means my words are worth copying (even if it is just to do content stuffing!).

Have you noticed those “blogs” that only have copies of many posts from many websites for the sole purpose of creating an insurmountable amount of articles in their sites? Apparently, it helps their SEO efforts as having so many articles over a particular subject makes their blogs an “authority”. Now, if this were true, we should see a bunch of them on the first pages of Google, or at least their business sites (which is what they are really trying to promote).

Another strategy out there, is creating as many posts and articles as possible about 1 single subject but with as little meat as possible, mainly full of the same concept just “rolled over” and with some minor word changing (using synonyms and other tricks). These “blogs” do seem to work well, of course, the blog itself is pretty much garbage, but at least some results can be seen. Is this considered White Hat or Black Hat SEO? I can’t decide myself. I would call them black just because they are not really doing something honest (which is provide information to the public), but then again, they could be white just because they are creating so called original content every time (at least not copying it from others) and creating an enourmous database of the same stuff. What do you, my 3 or 4 readers think?

Ma Cualli Ohtli

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

So Google is having a killer week. They just released several things out and plan on stomping on everything and everyone of their competitors. Just when you thought Bing was quirky, but if fixed may have a chance, Google comes out and shows some brawn by pushing out several new products and features in about two days grace.

One such interesting change is related to search. Big Bro is now watching everything you do, whether you are signed in or not to its many, many services. The personalized results are in theory a great idea, as Google will learn with use what you prefer and what you like, tailor suit the results to fit your preferences invisibly and make it an overall seamless experience. We’ve had this feature when signed on to any Google service and performing a search. But the big G has just announced that your searches will be personalized even if you don’t sign in. Considering that only by clearing your cookies on your browser or disabling the feature in a not very obvious way (but accessible non the less), we may consider that Big Bro will now have much more information about everyone else.

For search engine optimization this is kind of a curse, as SEO experts will need to change the way they optimize sites… or maybe just start providing the best possible services online. Of course, any small business will have a harder time of attracting people, but we will need to see how this pans out and keep a close eye on search changes.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

During the last couple of weeks, I’ve been drowned with work. During this time I’ve been going through some interesting stuff (while working like mad). Someone asked me, what is better: Paid marketing (PPC) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

The answer is simple. It depends.

It all depends on what you want to accomplish, but if you are looking for immediate results and doing a test to verify whether you should optimize for a term or even give a spin to internet marketing, paid marketing is the best option. It is directly quantifiable, immediately measurable and can be very successful if performed by a skilled and experienced marketer. If performed by a non-professional, you may loose your shirt.

If you understand the advantages of Search Engine Optimization, then you may want to skip the paid marketing and get your site optimized to benefit for the highest amount of traffic.

But of course, in the ever changing world of the search engines, I learned today that search is going to change dramatically and search engine optimization may have to make a big adaptation. I’m talking about personalized search. I’ll post about this later today.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Marketing is about exposure and being in the client’s mind when the need arises. That is why marketing gurus talk about “Brand Awareness” which is the knowledge a consumer/prospect/client has of a brand’s existence. This is specially important for products or services that have a high cost and require a long sales process. Examples of these are Real Estate, Cars, Mortgage Brokers. This also helps with services or products that are not a regular need, that are only needed in particular situations. Examples of these are some Translation Services, Lawyers and other situational services.

What’s this got to do with Search Engines and on top?

I was talking with a potential client about internet marketing services for his company. His company provides one of the services mentioned above and definitively can benefit from “brand awareness”. He wanted to know how being online and having internet marketing get him clients. My explanation is simple:

By creating Brand Awareness and having a permanent presence where most consumers are spending their spare time, can definitively help bring those clients when the need for his services arise. Lawyers in particular know this. That is why they invest in newspapers, radio ads, television ads, charities, having their firm’s name on the building their offices are located in and yes, a presence online. Specially now, being available online creates brand awareness. People who don’t necessarily need you now, can come in contact with your brand and when they need you, if your branding is good, they will remember your brand and call.

The question is, can I be on top and would it benefit me? Yes.

To be on top of search engines, there’s a couple of basic principles. When SEOs (Search Engine Optimization Experts) look at a website, this is what we do:

• Review of your site content or structure
  • Verify the code and the actual text
• Technical aspects of website development. For example:
  • Hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript, Flash animations, etc.
• Content development (content is king)
• Management of online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• Quality of Incoming or inbound links

Additional to all those factors, it is even better if your SEO company is also an internet marketing agency that understands customer demographics and psychographics and focus on conversion (getting a visitor to take an action on your site).

Send me your questions below and I will answer directly or with a new post.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.