Solution Point Media

Google World – Search, Adwords, Adsense, Privacy & more

SEO Trends — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:30:00 +0000

We know countless web surfers use Google every day, the nature of the it’s products and services causes some people to wonder whether it shouldn’t simply be part of something else, as its main function, can be added on to a web browser or any other software. Nope, it’s not so simple.

Google want to know where you are surfing, what you are reading in your email, what you are buying, and even what brand of toilet shop you use, just by looking at your use of Google’s services. So, the more offerings Google provide, the more of your information they can harvest. The more of your information Google can harvest, the better Google is going to be able to target you with pertinent ads (yes, Adsense!) – this is how Google make it’s money via Adwords. Google is not only a search company or an ISP. They are a new media advertising company that sells targeted ads to its customers. Google collects every piece of information about you that you let it. It is not necessarily a bad thing, as the risk of privacy invasion is pretty minimal – who can sell you anything if you are an adamant!

It does not stop there, it is also gaining huge share in areas like Document Processing, News Delivery, Maps and GIS, Business Apps, Video Content, Buzz, and more. I am not a die-hard Microsoft fan, but, the question is, if Microsoft can repeat with Google what it did with Netscape i.e. with its marketing and technology power. Not an easy task, with Microsoft facing it’s own battle everywhere. Earlier Google had issues in China and more recently officials in Spain, France & Czech Republic announced plans to investigate Google’s collection of data from wireless networks, raising the likelihood that it could face sanctions in Europe. These may very well be covert PR stunts of a unique kind or may not. Well, this is a risk an investor is always taking in the Google World, isn’t it? It’s paying well also! What do you think?

- Author is the Chief SEM Architect with Solution Point

Social Media’s Impact on B2B Marketing Budgets?

eTrends India — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:56:13 +0000

A survey that looks at business-to-business marketing mix and budget trends. With many parts of West still feeling the effects of last year’s economic downturn, survey show some marked changes on which tactics marketers choose to spend their limited budget – we’re especially interested in the impact of social media on the marketing mix.

- Digital spending moved ahead but failed to shake up the status quo. While B2B marketers wrestle with a more complex marketing mix, digital channels have finally gained much needed mindshare. Web sites and email topped the list of the most popular marketing tactics, and search marketing moved up six percentage points since our last report. However, conventional approaches like trade shows, PR, direct mail, print advertising, sponsorships, and executive events still dominated the marketing mix in 2009. Will 2010 show even more dramatic changes?

- Traditional tactics commanded the lion’s share of B2B budgets. Conventional marketing tactics continued to capture big chunks of B2B marketer budgets. In fact, traditional tactics had a tight grip on the five top spots in our list of the most expensive B2B tactics. Coming in sixth, the company Web site was the only digital tactic to scrape together a double-digit percentage of the budget.

- Social media managed to make only a few budget inroads in 2008-09. Virtual trade shows, community sites, rich media (video, podcasts, etc.), blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools like RSS subscriptions, mashups, and widgets got the B2B budget scraps. Yet, while marketers try to work out social media’s place in the marketing mix, we were pleased to see, when taken together, these tactics accrued more than 10% of the marketing budget. this year may show some surprising changes in this category. Marketing tactic choices and budgets may have changed, comments welcome.

The Sad Plight of Small Businesses – SMO is best choice!

SEO Trends — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:27:31 +0000

comScore’s analysis of holiday shopping trends during the 2009 season was, in some ways, reassuring, with online sales during the November – December period growing 4% over a disastrous 2008 period. However, a closer examination reveals that for smaller retailers it was another bitterly disappointing shopping season for small business owners and entrepreneurs. BIG fishes got FAT, the smaller ones getting HIT!

So, what a small retailer to do in this ultra competitive market environment? Well, staying close to your customers is probably more important than ever. We think that using social networking to build communities of customers and then reaching out to them with relevant and frequent communications holds a lot of promise, especially for smaller retailers. They should be able to execute better than their larger competitors.

For one thing, they don’t have to deal with the internal organizational bureaucracy and delays that can hinder many larger companies when deciding how CRM / social networking programs should be executed. And, the use of social networking offers significant opportunities to reduce marketing costs, which will help smaller retailers overcome the challenge of their larger competitors’ greater financial resources.

Keep your website and offers closer

eTrends India — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:31:07 +0000

One of the great things about the Internet is that it allows us all to exchange information easily. You and I can exchange emails, we can surf the web, have discussions in forums, argue in blogs and chat in real time over messenger services. With this right their is a responsibility – understand that everything becomes public almost anything you say or do can, and may well, become public property. Once you put something online it becomes viral, it can spin out of control and once you lose control of your information its hard to recover from this position without damaging your position online in some quarters – someone will be offended by the way you try to limit their access and use of this information.

Copywriting for Conversion Convince Visitors and Remove Barriers

eTrends India — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:17:39 +0000

This is first strategy in conversion based SEO copywriting. Sitting down and looking through what makes visitors to a website buy. There is the obvious stuff:

1. Easy to read copy – no keyword laden SEO copywriting anymore
2. Easy to digest copy – shorter sentences with less technical jargon where possible
3. Easy to follow copy – give each page a theme and take the consumer with you
A. Change in emphasis on a page start talking with the consumer not at them (after too many years at university was a shock)
4. Provide out going links – show them what other people say about the product or service
5. Provide testimonials – show them what other customers have said – combining that with the outgoing links works even better

All these things put the customer more at ease and helped convince the visitor that they had found what the needed. To my mind they still weren’t sold – conversion rate was too low. So refine the technique further – removing all the barriers to sale.

College Students – Connecting With the Connected Crowd

SEO Trends — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:00:00 +0000

College students and young professionals remain the single most connected demographic group. In 2009, most of them had gone online at least once a month, in years to come it is only going to grow. Students and Indian youth now use multiple electronic devices and have many ways to get information and to interact with friends. They may be the first truly platform-agnostic demographic group. Students believe it is less important how they get information than how easy it is to manipulate and interact with it across a range of devices.

This means that students are heavy consumers of not only on-line video, but also regular TV. They use social networking websites (like Facebook, Twitter, Orkut) to stay in touch with their friends and rely on text messaging as well. And smartphones, which are becoming more and more common on campus, give students the ability to do many activities without ever touching a computer.

Companies marketing to college students need to create fluid interactions with them, in multiple venues. Marketers must be flexible, open and honest across all of their communications. But at the same time, students are extremely savvy and will not respond well to being bombarded with the same ad message on their phone, in their social network Website and during their favorite online video.

Key questions this report answers:
- What kinds of online video do college students watch?
- Do students still use social networks with the same intensity?
- How are smartphones changing the way students interact with friends and get information?
* Where do students get information for making purchases?

Twittering for SEO, SMO and SEM

eTrends India — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:50:00 +0000

If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss. Little over a year ago, before Twitter was the tech/pop culture phenomenon it is today, doctors had a problem: how do you identify other health professionals on Twitter? At the time, there must have been at least dozens. A month ago, Twitter finally debuted the “lists” feature, allowing each user to create subscribable lists of other users.

Microblogging like Twitter.com is search engine friendly and not over done, yet. This lens is to show you how to use Twitter for SEO to help your position on the SERP and drive traffic to your site. Since Twitter started gaining popularity the question about its SEO value has been on the minds of many webmasters who obviously want to boost their placement into Google. But using Twitter for link juice is a lost battle in Google’s ranking methodology.

Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines, to ignore the link. Some of these follow the links but exclude them from their ranking calculations (Yahoo!, Google); some ignore the links completely (MSN). The only known search engine that doesn’t comply with Google’s “nofollow” at all is Ask.com. This example alone shows that Google’s algorithms are not the gospel for all search engines.

Once you see a Tweets interactive map you will start seeing how absolutely incredible twitter is and how TV stations are using it to broadcast breaking news, traffic stations are using it to tell people about accidents to avoid, regular people are using it to promote products, people are using it for conversations, doctors use to prescribe, people are using it to make introductions and so on. It is an absolutely incredible thing. It isn’t perfect because sometimes the volume of traffic shuts the service down temporarily, however, anyone with good content or something positive to say can build a small following rather quickly. When you have what you think is a great post – put it on twitter. Although the traffic hasn’t been massive, you do get a fair amount from twitter.

There are also other benefits from using twitter. The key is to use your domain name if you can and post about things that are on your front page. That way the people who capture twitter’s public timeline via the API will also capture the link to your site. That way you can market your post, build backlinks to your site and market yourself. If people don’t want to hear what you have to say, they simply won’t subscribe. Everyone needs to be doing something with twitter!!

Search Engine Optimization + RSS Feeds

eTrends India — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:33:59 +0000

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is one of the web technologies that is often mentioned as being a way to market a website. If used correctly RSS can be a good step in moving towards creating improved search engine positions and improving your dialogue with consumers.

One of the best ways of using RSS is on other peoples websites. As RSS can be integrated to display on other websites easily many will aggregate your content into their website. This is a great benefit to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign.

Every time you update your feed anyone aggregating your feed will update their links to your site. Every new page listed will get a link. Each of these links, generally, will use your ‘Title Tag’ as the anchor text. They may also use your url as well. So assuming you have good quality search engine, and user focussed, title tags and URLs within your website you get more links.

Discovering new places to get your RSS feed syndicated is an exciting business. If you can find someone willing to syndicate your content, especially if the syndication source is ‘on topic’, you could have constantly developing links, pointing to your new pages when they go live, and you get to control your anchor texts – try getting that from a standard directory.

Well this bits easy. just stick in your feed, generally if you meet the conditions of the site you’ll get in. On many there could be ways of getting increased visibility – some may just stick you in the directory.

Smartphone Users and Mobile Web

eTrends India — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:30:30 +0000

Many key developments in digital media stand poised to redefine the way we consume content across platforms in 2010. Among these will be the introduction of paid-for content, further blurring of traditional TV broadcasting and online video distribution, and a significant acceleration in mobile internet use. This last is particularly important, for while content will continue to converge under the digital umbrella, the mobile internet can bring it to a wider and more consistently engaged audience.

Apps are undoubtedly the poster boys of the smartphone revolution. With more than 100,000 of them now available, their diversity is clearly appealing to a broad audience. Of the 17m mobile subscribers who used an app in October 2009, maps were the most popular, followed by weather, social networking and search apps.

In many ways the mobile internet will this year finish what the fixed internet started. One could argue that the internet has always been fundamentally flawed: the most up-to-the minute, real-time distribution mechanism in the history of media is constrained by access and hardware. The mobile internet looks set to rectify this, providing round-the-clock, immediately accessible news, information, entertainment and communications. At the risk of hailing the coming of yet another false dawn, expect the mobile internet to be big in 2010.

SEO Delights for 2010!

SEO Trends — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 07:58:57 +0000

As we near the end of another great year, we wanted to take a moment to thank you for the time, energy, commitment, and trust you have shared with us in 2009.

With sharing and web community in mind, this year we’ve decided to do something a little different. We hope you will find it fits the spirit of the holiday season and continue into the new year with new offers.

We are looking forward to working with you to build lasting success in 2010!

Happy New Year 2010
Solution Point Team
www.solutionpoint.in

Solution Point Media

Google World – Search, Adwords, Adsense, Privacy & more

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Social Media’s Impact on B2B Marketing Budgets?

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The Sad Plight of Small Businesses – SMO is best choice!

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Keep your website and offers closer

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College Students – Connecting With the Connected Crowd

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Twittering for SEO, SMO and SEM

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Search Engine Optimization + RSS Feeds

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