Every New Year inevitably brings with it a surge of new resolutions; gyms are crowded, savings accounts are opened, cigarettes are ditched in favour of chewing gum. It’s a time when many individuals make the decision to take better care of their health and happiness. In the same way, it’s the perfect time for business owners to take stock of their company’s strengths and weaknesses, and identify the areas that require the most improvement in the coming months.

Naturally, there’s plenty of advice going around for search marketing companies looking to enjoy a healthier, wealthier start to 2012.

Here is the MediaVision list of three essential New Year’s resolutions for SEO company owners:

Speakers

Kevin Ryan, Motive Marketing
Craig Danuloff, Click Equations Inc
Anders Hjorth, COO GroupM Search EMEA

This session went through the various aspects of PPC tools and when you should consider investing in tools.

Kevin Ryan, Motive Marketing

Tools like “Clickable” are mid market and pretty good.

From a survey I did –

• “What non-technical resources would your ideal search firm have?”
• “What are you missing now?”
• “What technical resources would you rate as most important?”
• “What is the primary driver in a search agency?”

The most common answer was – 3^rd party paid search tools. Agencies should build infographics to explain what they are doing.

Over the years bidding got really more complicated. The tools have become very good. Agencies have been squeezed to other services like landing page optimisation, Client intelligence, Primary research, technical oversight and informed decision making because the margins on a “percentage of spend” have become so low.

Welcome to my very own guide to becoming an SEO “Expert”. This “guide” is based entirely on my own experience and is to be used or abused as you wish. For the record, I am not an SEO expert just YET, but I now know what it’s going to take to become one, and I thought I should share this with anyone interested in taking on SEO as a career choice.

I’ve been involved in online marketing for about 3 years now, having started out touching on SEO at a price comparison website. After that I moved on to become a project manager at an online marketing company and was bitten by the SEO bug. I moved to MediaVision to leave the complicated world of project management and get started with pure SEO work.

What a great decision! A year on and I have four of my own clients who are flourishing thanks to the knowledge I’ve gained in SEO, conversion analysis and effective copywriting. Here’s how I got to where I am now as an SEO specialist…

When it comes to measuring effectiveness of a particular online marketing strategy, campaign or experimental implementation that you’re trying out on your website, it’s imperative that you are able to implement effective performance management in order to track exactly which tactics are doing what as far as your site’s performance goes.

We’ve all been to conferences, seminars and online marketing networking events where we meet new people and exchange ideas, theories and strategies that have worked on our websites and others. It is always useful to take note of these strategies and give them a go yourself to try and measure the effectiveness of each strategy on your own websites.

The seasoned SEO consultant is bound to know all the tricks of the trade, but those new to the search engine optimisation industry can improve their success rates by following a few simple SEO tips:

Know your Niche
Successful SEO marketing services always start with careful analysis of the client. Before you rush ahead and start reading up on SEO copywriting tips, do your homework thoroughly. Get to know and understand the client, as well as the product or service they are offering their target audience. Think about who your client will be competing with in the market and what sets them apart from their competitors.

Most sources offering SEO tips will also advise you to know the strengths and weaknesses of your client, as well as their level of establishment online, thereby helping you to strategically promote them in the appropriate niche.

Having an opportunity to thoroughly review some keyword data for one of my proposals while traveling on a train up to Sheffield, I came to realise that as much as we talk about regularly reviewing keyword data we just don’t actually do it enough! We all know that every month something like 20% of all searches are unique and have not been seen by Google in the last 90 days.  

Image by Danard Vincente via Flickr

This can however be a double edged sword – lessons learnt in the past have also taught me that it is possibly even more important to pick a route and stick to it. It is all too tempting to see the vast variety of (search phrase) opportunities open to a website and to want to grab all of them. It very quickly leads to a scattergun approach, with just not enough weight behind any of it. Result: dilution, mixed messages, a multitude of pages with similar content, confusion on the site, and ultimately poor performance!

Having been in the online marketing industry for a few years now, I’ve often come across people and businesses that are convinced that they can do better SEO optimization than professional SEO specialists, free of charge. One mistake that these business owners and admittedly, some (not-so-professional) professional SEO companies often make, is that of over-optimizing their sites. Let’s take a closer look…

Overdoing your keyword optimization:

The very first thing everyone learns in SEO is the implementation of keyword optimization for pages and websites as a whole. Newcomers to the search engine optimization (SEO) game will learn that having the correct keywords on a page will tell search engines that the article is relevant to a particular subject that users have searched for. So the first thing they do is completely saturate their pages with relevant keywords. The problem is however, that Google and other search engines are not stupid. They can EASILY detect someone who is overdoing their SEO optimization with keyword stuffing and quickly penalize the page with low rankings and a damaged reputation.

When it comes to dishing out top SEO tips, few are more important than advising on the correct use and implementation of internal linking. So many companies and individuals out there are so pre-occupied with getting quality links into their sites from reputable sites (which isn’t a bad thing) that they completely forget about the impact that good internal linking can have on a website. This article takes a look at why internal linking is so important and contains some top SEO tips on how to implement these links effectively.

SEO Tips: Why bother with internal linking?

An extremely valuable SEO tip that you need always bear in mind, is the three main effects that internal linking has on a website. Each effect has a different weight as far as its actual SEO value is concerned, however you can’t afford not to think about each when implementing internal links: