Marketing has changed.
Traditional advertising does not work,
brochure-like websites do not work, the web has given people ultimate freedom
of choice and of goods. When there are no monopolies and constrictions,
interrupting people's lives is not effective marketing anymore.
There are no secrets. The networked market
knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is
good or bad, they tell everyone. – Cluetrain
Manifesto
“If the news is important,
it will find me” – some random mySpace user
An online marketer now needs to find where
people are congregating online and needs to engage them in a meaningful way. Be
it in matching with what they are looking for, watching how they interact and
understand what they’d like or listening to their natural opinions on your
company or market and reacting to that.
Google
Google is the most used search engine and
is used more each day. Google's share of the search market is growing, not
declining. Each month Google is used by more and more people in the English speaking
world and many are jumping shop from Yahoo! and Live.com to start using Google.
People who already use Google start using it more frequently too. It is almost
addictive.
Search engines themselves are changing.
They are being used for more and more things. Website owners and bloggers find
they are using Google to search their own properties as it is so effective.
People are using Google as a spellchecker, as a calculator and as a unit
converter. People search Google for the latest news. Google is the jumping
point for web destinations but also as a Swiss army knife for non web actions
such as spelling, as mentioned above.
Many Irish people instead of typing in
Bebo.com in the address bar actually go to Google and search for Bebo and then
click on the result to bring them to the site. Consider the amount of trust
Google now has for people to do this.
It makes sense then to try and engage with
people on Google since that's where they start so many of their digital
actions. It’s a trusted place for them. You can react to someone’s searches by
making sure your website ranks well in search results (SEO) but since you
cannot rank well for every single search result, you can reach these people by
advertising next to search results with relevant ads (Adwords)
Onsite Techniques
Search Engines and Your Website
Search Engines and Your Website
SEO
One definition: Search Engine
Optimisation is the process of streamlining the structure and content of a
website to make it position well in search engine results.
Originally search engines were quite basic
and you could do well for search phrases based just on the keywords that were
on your website, nowadays with Google dominating, the ranking methodologies are
far more complex and Google state there are about 200 factors that are
considered by their search engine before you are given a placing in the results.
Some of these factors have more weight than
others. Adjusting your website to take consideration of just one of these can
create a positive outcome for your site in search placings. Combining all of
them could mean that your website could jump from 60th place to 4th place or
even 1st. It does all depend though on your competition and what they're doing
to make sure they do well in Google too. As SEO becomes more popular, ranking
sites does too but clever planning from the start will result in good placings.
Some factors to keep in mind:
Page Titles
The title of a page is the writing at the
very top of a web browser. Google sees this almost like the title of a book.
The more descriptive the title the better for Google results. Consider a book
called "Dante's Inferno", it might be hard to decipher what the rest
of the book contains; now compare this to "101 recipes using beef".
One is far far more descriptive than the other.
