For the travel industry, at least, social media is seen as more valuable than pay-per-click advertising. The World Travel Market 2011 report says that travel professionals see social media as one of the key revenue-generating channels over the next five years. As proof of this, the study found that eight out of ten travel-related businesses use some form of social media. Not only that: the World Travel Market 2011 also expects that in five years, half of all travel-related companies would be generating income and bookings on social media, rising from the current 22%. Out of those using social media marketing, around 50% do not even invest in PPC advertising, while 1 out of 5 of those who do use PPC aim to stop or reduce their spending in the next few years. It is very apparent that the travel industry loves social media. So if you are in the travel business, it is time to amp up your social media activities. Blogs – Read the full article
The World Wide Web has billion of websites. Some of them are small (for example, most of the personal blogs), some of them are big (for example, eBay), and some of them are too big (for example, Facebook). But some of them are just very important, because they really changed the world over the last years and gave way to a number of Internet-enabled revolutions. What are these websites and how did they influence the world? 1. info.cern.ch: This is where it all began. In 1990, not many years ago if you think about it, a revolution took place in CERN and the first website on the World Wide Web was made by Sir Tim Burns Lee and browsed by Robert Cailliau. 2. Google: Some people confuse it with the Internet itself. Some people even type Google inside Google’s search box! It is considered to be the main entrance of the Internet and changed the way we search for information. It started – Read the full article
SEO copywriters can be placed into three broad categories: Those who write for users. Those who write for search engines. Those who try to blend the two. Copywriters who actually succeed in the third category are like blue diamonds: rare and extremely valuable. Search engines don’t care about grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. They don’t care for eloquence. Instead, they care about keywords. Search engines are crows and keywords are bright, shiny objects that gleam amid reams of text. Search engines zero in on the keywords and proudly display them in search results. That’s why keyword research and matching keywords to specific website pages is so important. It’s why some copywriters are reluctant to stray too far away from keywords; some will even use the weird combinations that keyword tools provide – e.g. “recipe lasagnarome” – instead of boldly splitting them up into a coherent sentence. Unfortunately for these writers, people don’t care about keywords, but they do care – Read the full article
Yesterday Yahoo! Site Explorer decided to retire from business. It has left many amateur SEOs, and some professional SEOs too, at a bit of a loss. Many SEOs and agencies have been using the back link service in Yahoo! Site Explorer to monitor, analyse, and generally try to copy the link building actions of their competitors. As someone who has been involved in SEO for over 5 years (not so much by choice but by necessity) I have used Yahoo! extensively, and seen my competitors use it against me, too! I manage several sites across various niches, and some of my sites do interlink with each other, wherever a connection really does benefit a reader. I have seen people leave comments on all my blogs, and doing so in the order of Yahoo! backlinks for my main website. SEO Stalkers are gonna have a harder time I have also seen the same people leave comments on other blogs where I – Read the full article
Content marketing can be used to attract more traffic and build a better online reputation for your business. Here are a number of tips to help you do just that: 1. Be consistent in providing new and valuable information One thing that you need to do with content marketing is to make sure that you actually have new and valuable content to market. So, write up some articles, publish them, make sure you consistently provide useful information to your audience, and establish your expertise on the topic you’re writing about. 2. Always create keyword-targeted content Don’t just create any content. Your content must be optimized for the search engines, using certain relevant keywords, in order to be found and read. Remember that we are working with search engines to attract more (and better-targeted) potential customers to your website. In this case, if you are not doing SEO for your content, if you are not optimizing the textual content you’re writing, – Read the full article
If you are hoping to increase the traffic directed to your website as well as your positioning in Google’s rankings, putting an effective and well-structured link building campaign together could work wonders for you. Increased traffic to your website can come from a number of benefits that link building can give you. If your ranking increase in the eyes of search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, your website will undoubtedly receive more traffic from organic searches (simply clicking through to your page via the hyperlink displayed on a search engine results page or SERPS), alternatively you can hope to see extra visitors landing on your website from the links you have established on other sites. Search engines are now users’ main tool for internet navigation and ranking high for some well-targeted search terms should be your ultimate goal when assembling a link building strategy. After being presented with a list of search engine results, a user is far – Read the full article
Small businesses have a daunting task as they compete with larger companies that boast more resources and staff. How can a small business compete for a share of the search engine market with so much stacked against them? Here are some tips on creating an SEO strategy for your small business: Learn from the Competition Promodo’s SEO specialist Anna Moseva suggests starting your small business SEO strategy with a thorough analysis of the competition. You’re probably familiar with piecing together keywords on Google in order to figure out what people are searching for and what’s already out there by way of content, but Moseva advises that you take the top 20 results in Google and analyze their Alexa Rank with the SEO Quake plugin for Firefox. Once you know the top sites among your competition, you can analyze the kind of traffic they generate and which keywords and adwords are linked to their sites at SEM Rush. This technique will – Read the full article
Google’s quest for perfection in search results has led the tech giant back to the drawing board to once again tinker with its AdWords algorithm. The goal remains the same: to deliver users to the most relevant content available that fits their chosen search words while also attracting advertisers by delivering superior return on investment for online advertising. Google Adwords auctions control the “promoted search results” seen at the top and to the right of the organic search results; however, Google and businesses lose customers when those results are of poor quality, because people have no use for spam and will use other search engines. To avoid this, Google offers lower prices to advertisers who have higher rankings as determined by its algorithms. In short, this keyword auction wherein advertisers bid on keywords relevant to their businesses is the way Google makes ad revenue without disappointing search clients. This process is somewhat contentious considering that the real high-quality material should – Read the full article
