Moderator:
Rob Kerry, Ayima

Speakers:
Richard Baxter, SEOgadget
Martin Beijk, Onetomarket
Jonathan Hochman, JE Hochman & Associates
John Mueller, Google

SMX Coverage - Technical SEO

Richard Baxter – SEOgadget

12 popular, interesting & critical issues we have discovered recently.

1. Thin internal pages / no content and boiler plate content. You need unique text on page, persuasive, well written content to inspire visitors.
2. Resolve poor internal link architecture. Google “seogadget link architecture” for guide on how to.
3. Avoid excessive duplication via paginated navigation.
4. Indexed staging server – Clean up a leaky staging server. 301 redirect to production server.
5. Canonicalization and not just the www. Check for trailing slash and other versions of ww or wwww.
6. Soft 404 header or no 404 response. Google “Live http headers” and look for the Mozilla plugin to get a tool to check header codes.

A lot has changed since our last blog on the market share statistics in the search engine and social media industries. Twitter yesterday reached 50 million tweets a day, Facebook is just getting bigger and bigger and Bing is fast making and impression on the search engine market. Let’s take a look at some of the stats courtesy of Hitwise.

Search Engines:

First of all, let’s take a look at the UK search engine ranking report and compare it to last year’s report:

As you can see in the above search engine comparison, Bing didn’t even feature in the April 2009 report and now they are 3^rd behind Google. The Bing search engine most likely wont be ever be able to take on Google’s search engine, not in the foreseeable future anyway, but they certainly are making their presence felt. Yahoo on the other hand have dropped down one position even though they have remained steady as far as market share goes. Ask have dropped out of the top 5.

Whether you own an E-commerce site, an affiliate site or even a blog, it is important that you make the most of the numerous “selling seasons” that occur every year. In light of this, this blog post is aimed at optimizing your site for Valentines Day which is coming up in just a couple of weeks.

Now, I realize that you’ve only just removed the Christmas trees and snowflakes from your site as we move on from the Christmas selling season (if you haven’t taken your tree down by now, it’s bad luck), but that doesn’t mean that you can rest on your laurels for another 12 months until next Christmas. There are plenty selling seasons to focus on throughout the year – Valentine Day, Easter, Guy Fawkes, Independence day, Australia day, Thanksgiving and the list goes on depending on where in the world you are situated. It is massively important that you find a way to capitalize on these days and use them to your selling advantage.

So, online ad spend finally overtook TV ad spend this year, but is the shift in spend gaining momentum or slowing down? Ecommerce growth estimates are forecast to slow (Forrester as quoted on business week) but that growth is still stealing market share from traditional ad spend.

At the beginning of this year, growth and spend for 2009 was predicted to fall somewhat as we all battened down for the long hard winter of recession.

I had a much gloomier picture in mind than what the actual figures to date reveal as quoted by e-marketer. Looking at this growth curve would hardly have me believe that we were in recession this year!

Clients are often keen to try new things and take on a challenge if it means expanding their horizons and possibly bringing in more business. In terms of online marketing, a blog can be one of the best moves a thriving company makes. Aside from the fact that blogs are a lot of work, they can deliver impressive results when building consumer connections, creating an informative company platform, and bringing clients closer to understanding what you stand for and what you can offer them in return for their loyalty.

Sometimes clients aren’t too keen on the idea of having to manage their own blogs though, especially once their consulting agency has made them aware of the hard work that goes into a successful blog. Jennifer Osborne put together the first post in a series of five, focusing on blog strategy from the client’s point of view. It addresses some very common and valid questions posed by clients when approached with the blog idea.

In this time of financial instability, is there hope for the future of online marketing? Some say that many SEM companies will fall off the curb over the next few months, but not everyone will suffer. If you play your cards right, SEM will prove to be an indispensible marketing tool to the (sensible) clients who stick with it. Global search trends are already changing towards budgeting and money saving, for example, searches have increased significantly for ‘cheap DVD’ rather than ‘DVDs for sale’, according to the Google Trends results displayed for the last 30 days.

David Naylor discusses some of the advantages to online marketing that traditional marketing doesn’t necessarily offer. These factors reinforce the importance of using the available budget a company may have to constructively ‘invest’ it in SEM, which offers measurable results, unbeatable ROI, and leaves a long term impression in the eyes of its market.