The growth and popularity of Web search is an indication that marketing manager must consider SEO as part of their overall marketing plans. An online cosmetics website without SEO is just like having a cosmetics store in a jungle that nobody will find it.

SEO is a demand-based marketing, one must know which keywords searchers are using and is meaningless to focus on extremely low search volume keywords that not many people search for.

There aren’t many good SEO course or seminar available locally. That’s why we decided to share some SEO info for FREE. Even though it was created two years back and has not been updated since then, but most info is still very relevant for today.

Visit www.seomalaysia.co.

]]> http://www.ibizclicks.com/blog/free-seo-course/feed/ 0 http://www.ibizclicks.com/blog/content-is-king/ http://www.ibizclicks.com/blog/content-is-king/#comments Sun, 25 Mar 2012 07:43:48 +0000 YC Ng http://www.ibizclicks.com/blog/?p=349

If you’ve been in Internet marketing for a while, you’ve probably heard the phrase content is king.

With all the recent Google slap and the Google Panda update, content is still the favorite method used by top SEOs to generate incoming links.

Quality and buzz-worthy content will not only generate the incoming links that power top rankings but also result in traffic.

Learn more about the evolution of content marketing and the impact it’s having on the Internet marketing industry in the infographic from Blueglass:-

If your are aggressively doing SEO, your need to take note of this…

Head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, announced during Q&A panel at SXSW that Google is releasing an algorithm update specifically to target websites over doing their SEO.

What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.

In fact, Google has started penalizing websites that overly optimized with identical keywords in inbound links. We have observed some changes of Google SERPs these few weeks, but Google denied any new update at the moment. Perhaps, there are still in tweaking their algo. Anyway, there are lot of active discussions at forums and marketeers have started calling it as “Google Panda v3.3″. If you’re caught, your website will be slapped with a -10, -50, -100 & etc rankings penalty or even banned for a more serious case.

Does it mean that you should stop doing SEO? NO.

It is just that Google doesn’t like webmaster to artificially influence or manipulate their SERPs. We need to be smart in SEO our site to prevent over-optimization in the eye of Google.

Naturalization is the key!

In SearchGuru, we practice only safe SEO method for sustainable ranking. We only build high quality backlinks directly to our client sites and have different layers of backlinks to safeguard and boost strength.

We received a few enquiries lately about international SEO. Most thought that getting top ranking in google.com will automatically place their website top rank in any Google countries specific results.

Is that simple?

Well, in fact, it is much more complicated than this! It’s a tricky and complex in formulating a strategy for targeting international search engine result pages.  This is because Google’s geotargeting algorithm targets their results for the relevant country.  The searches of google.com from Malaysia and Singapore, both will show the different mixture of international together with local results.

So, what are the factors that influence the results in each country specific results?

Here are few important factors to take note:

• The top level domain – general (.com, .net, .org & etc)  or country specific (.com.my, .sg & etc)
• The country the domain is hosted in
• Contents (language, phone number and address)
• Backlink profile

With the above-mentioned, we can consider 3 possible options to focus on multiple countries target:

Option 1: Having Countries Specific Domains

Effective and most targeted method (but expensive)

One of the most straight forward ways is to create a different domain for each country’s site with the extension that is identified closely to the country itself. This is referring to the use of “.com.my”, “.com.sg” and “.co.th” for Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand respectively.

Option 2: Subdomains for different targeting countries

Not the best but workable

Another option is creating them into subdomains instead of different URL sites. Subdomains can be created in different ways, such as http://my.yoursite.com, http://sg.yoursite.com. This approach is adopted by Wikepedia.

Option 3: Having Countries Specific Subfolders

Cost Effective Method

You can also create a country specific in separate sub pages to something like http://www.yoursite.com/my/ for the Malaysia site, and http://www.yoursite.com/sg/ for a Singapore site. This is the cheapest method. We have seen many sites did it successfully in international SEO.

Summary of the Pros & Cons

Reference: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

There are issues to note about Option 2 & 3. Customer preference is one of the main concerns. This is because for some customers, the origin country’s extension in a site’s URL is a critical factor in their decision making for their purchasing process. This is especially true for French customers, and even in Canada. They will want to see the .fr or .ca before clicking on the search engine result to proceed for business. True, it is a little biased, but perhaps there may also be some company’s consideration to support local fellow businessmen.

Duplicate Content Issue

If you are setting up multiple countries versions of the sites, as long as they’re in different languages duplicate content doesn’t pose a problem. But it would be problem if all sites are in the English language targeting the Malaysia, Singapore, Australia & others. Even though Google stated in Webmaster Central Blog that “this is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries”, we noted that in most cases, one of the sites will do alright and the rest won’t do as good.

To avoid duplicate content problems, it is recommended to vary the content, file names, and templates a bit on each domain so they’re not exact duplicates, as well as some unique contents to each site.

Decision making

Strengths and weaknesses always come in one package. How do we make the call?

When you are targeting consumers in multiple regions, it is advisable for you need to have separate marketing strategy for each target market, online marketing is no exception.

If there is no financial constraint, the definitive way to go is an option 1. We also recommend having an international .com site centralizing all the sites together in one page, where visitors may select the country and click to it specifically. For instance, like apple.com showing the international page and giving the option to choose the country version.

For limited budget or less important market, the best bet is going to be in Option 2 or 3. Personally, we prefer Option 3 due to the strength of potentially inheriting some of that root domain authority.

Are you in search for a PPC (Pay Per Click) management company for your Google AdWords campaign?

To ensure that you hire the right company, the selection process is vital.

There are several starting points for you to hunt for the right company.

This could be an individual AdWords consultant or engaging a AdWords service provider with pool of certified specialist in AdWords campaign management.

With the selected potential AdWords companies of your need on hand, the next stage can’t be taken lightly either.

You need to deep dive further for the below of each company:

1. Level of expertise
2. Cost/Package structure
3. Past results and current clientele.
4. Approach/Methodology to your account

Here are five suggested key questions to ask your potential company:

1. How long have they been doing AdWords management?

A minimum of 5 year experience would be an advantage. Do request for their current clientele and testimonials. It would be wonderful if you could speak to at least 2 of their past and current clients.

2. Who would be running your campaign?

It is vital for you to have a dedicated representative who is a GAP (Google Advertising Professional) or Google AdWords Certified Partner to be in-charge of your account.

3. What are the reporting would you be provided?

You need make it clear about the metrics will be given. It is critical for you to ensure you would be granted for full access to reporting functions. It is also mattering much for you to know the types and timeline (daily, weekly or monthly) of reports you would be provided.

4. How do you measure success?

What metrics do you believe are the most important in determining the success of an AdWords campaign? Ensure that you would be provided with detailed assistance fleshing out goals for this campaign.

5. Who keeps your accounts? (IMPORTANT!)

The worst thing you can do is hire a firm who sets-up and manages AdWords accounts for you, then KEEPS these accounts forever. Make sure you confirm that these accounts are YOURS once you terminate this service provider relationship.

The above isn’t an exhaustive list of guidelines but doing the above will lead you to the right part in the process of searching the right quality AdWords management company.

We are now the Google AdWords Certified Partner!

This achievement is only held by a few Internet marketing companies in Malaysia.

iBizClicks’ approach is to help to reduce wastage in your online marketing campaign by narrowing down to the target market. By using tools such as web analytics the company is able to understand how visitors are interacting with a business website. This allows the business to extend their online reach to target customers and boost website profits.

We have great experience in campaign optimization, from small account (RM1K a month) up to bigger account (RM100K a month) and have many success case studies to share.

Contact us for more information about our AdWords management services.

We have just watched the complete footage from Google Inside Search media event that was held at San Francisco few days ago. The media event was centered around on mobile search and the announcement of Google latest innovation -  Voice Search, Search by Image & Instant Pages.

In this post, we would like to share what we have learned about desktop and mobile search from the video.

Google researchers have found that people are always searching for information. When desktop searches drop (on weekends and at night), mobile searches surge.

Search is about removing barriers between what you seek.

The below Google’s data proof that humanity has a fundamental need to learn.

Desktop Search Traffic by Day of Week

It is common for most websites to observe the drop of the traffic when approaching the weekend. It goes down further on Saturday and Sunday when people go out of their desk and spend more time with their family and friends.

Mobile Search Traffic by Day of Week

However, when people spend more time outside over the weekend, they tend to search more on mobile. Mobile search traffic picks up on weekend.

As Google Fellow Amit Singhal say,

Your quest for knowledge does not stop because you are away from your computer.

Desktop Search Traffic by Time of Day

Now, let us look at the data for 24 hours period. Search traffic rises to lunch, take a tiny dip when we eat, then dips down toward the evening.

Mobile Search Traffic by Time of Day

But on mobile, from evening on through 9pm, mobile search traffic starts to go up. At noon, when desktop traffic dropped on lunch time, mobile traffic goes up.

Mobile Search Growth

In the past two years, mobile search traffic has grown five-fold. Mobile search today is growing at a comparable pace to Google in the early years.

According to Google, mobile search traffic growth over the past three years (the red line) is comparable to overall Google search traffic growth over the same duration (the blue line) but earlier in our history.

In Google desktop search growth, the dips happened mainly in Christmas as well as summer time . Google calls it “the summer slump”.

However, the mobile traffic is growing without any dips. There are no Christmas slowdown or “summer slump” in mobile!

It is true that humanity has a fundamental need to learn. People are always searching for information. Always. And… Google wants to be an integral part of your quest for knowledge.

A joint study between eye tracking companies Eyetools, Enquiro and Did-it has verified that most searches on Google (and any other engine for that matter) centralize within the “golden triangle.”

The golden triangle refers to a systematic eye tracking movement by the person who is looking for information on Google.

(Source: Eyetools, Enquiro and Did-it)

If you refer to the image above, you can clearly see where the “heat” of the search activity lies. It starts at the top left of the results page (organic listings), moves over to the top right of the PPC listings (sponsored listings) and then back to the left to just above the fold. This concentrated area is commonly called the golden triangle and one of the most important aspects of search marketing.

Included in the golden triangle area are the top organic, top sponsored and Google’s alternative results (these often include news, local suggestions and shopping).

It is critical for your website to rank on 1st page of Google results. To gain the most search traffic, you have to aim for top 5 in organic position.

According to the finding from Optify, website ranked No.1 position received 36.4% click-through-rate (CTR), No.2 had 12.5% CTR and No.3 had 9.5%. It’s worth to note that the potential traffic being No.1 in Google is the equivalent to overall potential traffic from No.2 through No.5 position!

(Source: Search Engine Watch)

This is in line with our observation from our clients’ project, where we see the significant surge of traffic when the keywords are ranked No.1 position in Google.

Here is the complete Optify’s CTR finding for Google Top 20:

Based on the above findings, it is very important to focus getting into page 1 as initial target. Then, aim for top 5 position in Google with continuous SEO effort. This is where you will enjoy a good ROI for SEO. Sorry to say that there are little business value being in page 2 or page 3.

We keep telling our clients…

The best search marketing results are a happy marriage between both SEO and PPC.

Domain names are literally the addresses of the web. When someone needs to mail you something, they send it to your physical address. When someone wants to go to your website, they’ll type in your web address. The difference between a web address and a real address though is that your physical address probably isn’t part of your branding, and the odds are you don’t have a specific house and street number you want to use, that may very well already be taken by someone else! Welcome to the world of domain names!

Selecting a domain name is one of the most important steps to creating an effective website!

Your domain name is part of your branding. You want people to be able to remember what your website is if possible, and ideally you should own your businesses own name as a domain.

Unfortunately, that can be difficult since most .com domain names are already taken up. This is especially true if your business operates under a name that is fairly common overall. You might be the only Pest Control Sdn. Bhd. in your area, but that doesn’t mean that PestControl.com is going to be available (it isn’t, in case you were inclined to check!) So what do you do if yourbusinessname.com is unavailable? Well you have some options.

First, you can look to other extensions, .net is a popular alternative, or, if you can use your countries top-level-domain, i.e. .com.my for Malaysia, .com.sg for Singapore, .co.uk for Britain, .ca for Canada, etc. Often times names that are unavailable as .com will be up for grabs in these extensions.

Secondly, you can look to add descriptive words into your domain name. For instance if your business name is Apex, and you’re an automotive brake manufacturer, when you can’t get Apex.com, you can always try ApexAutomotive.com, ApexBrakes.com, etc. As long as the domain isn’t so long, or totally unrelated to your business, it’ll be ok.

There is also another domain option that any business that operates locally should explore. That option is domains based around local keywords. The reason these domains are worthwhile is that when a potential customer does a search in Google, the domain name is factored into the algorithm that decides which entries to show first. So for example, if a web user goes to Google and types in “Malaysia Property”, then the website with the domain name MalaysiaProperty.com will get a boost in the search rankings and will likely come up prominently. Both Google and Bing do clearly give an “exact match domain” bump when ranking websites that contain a searched for target keyword.

Besides, when browsing through the lists of links on search engine results pages, some studies have shown that people are far more likely to click links that contain the keyword they are searching for in the domain name. Many of these keyword rich, location specific domain names are readily available, and businesses that operate locally should always consider them for their web marketing efforts.

One important question that often comes up is what to do if a company’s name.com isn’t available, but is up for sale. How much is a domain worth and at what price is it worth it to buy? Well, that is a pretty tough question to answer because it depend on the age of the domain, no. of words, PageRank, whether it’s .com and many other factors. Just FYI, sex.com was sold last year for a whopping US$13 million!

One thing is for absolute certain though, domain names are going, and they’re going fast. Most short .com domains and most .com domains with common words are already gone, and many of the other extensions are quickly beginning to sell out. So if you don’t already have your domain name, you should probably seriously considering hitting the web and seeing what’s available, because if you wait too long, you might miss out on everything good and end up having to spend some serious cash in order to secure yourself a quality domain name for your businesses web efforts.

Even if your company name is the domain name, it is also a good idea to register other relevant keyword-rich domains pertaining to your products and services especially the domain fees are so affordable. It costs only US$10 per annum at GoDaddy for .com domain! This is like investing in “virtual real estate”. It will be helpful when you will want to develop specialized sites in future. This strategy also keeps these choice domain names out of the hands of future competitors, making it harder for them to enter your market.

In conclusion, the domain name is a key search engine algorithmic ranking factor - for the time being. However, it is likely to change soon, especially when Matt Cutts of Google has hinted in his recent video:

We give too much weight to keywords in domain and we will make some changes to the algorithm to adjust this.

Nevertheless, it’s still a sound strategy to pursue a domain that is catchy and includes a keyword. If a keyword focused domain is not possible, then consider something that is catchy and brandable.

For many people, the idea of having a website is mostly focused on its design, whether the design may entice customers to choose your company products and services, or just skimp away to the next available. This may be the idea that stayed in the minds of people who are accustomed to traditional marketing, since advertising through various media in the traditional ways will be displayed to capture the attention of the public quite explicitly.

Unlike traditional media, the world wide web is a vast space and there is no way that your website will be able to show itself to capture an audience with a creative design. The tool that you have to capture such an audience is in your site ranking, giving you more opportunity to actually get noticed by potential visitors, with words only.

1. Web Analytics

Hence, the most important thing that you should have as you launch your new website is to install a web analytics. One free program that you may use is obviously Google Analytics, and it will give you the most important statistics that you may need to see how you may strategize so that your website will rank higher in the search engines. Other free software that you may use may incude GoStats and Footprint Analytics. Footprint Analytics actually gives real-time analytics about the web visitors who are currently active on the website. Most web hosting services already have some tracking capabilities already packaged within your purchase, so the only task is to understand how to use the statistics to your best advantage.

Besides visitors analytics, you may wish to have the RSS Feed Analytics as well. If you want to improve on the reach and quality of the feed you are putting to your visitors, you will need data to support your decisions. It will be wise to install an RSS Feed Analytics such as Feedburner to track which feed attracts and which do not, and how to promote them. However, do not be eager to show your counters too early, since it will be bad publicity if visitors see that the counter for a particular feed is at zero.

2. Webmaster Tools

The second thing that you should do is to set up a Google and Bing Webmaster Tools Accounts, as both may monitor data about your site and message it back to you easily. These tools help you understand where you stand in the search engine’s perspective, and they will reveal to you those important data that will help you strategize to be in their good books. Although they may not be very accurate, nevertheless these tools will improve through time and it is wise to have them ready by then.

3. Crawl Simulation

A third thing that you should do, and not miss out, is to run a crawl simulation of your site. This is important, just to avoid broken links, missing titles, improper redirects, and perhaps other problems such as files blocked by robots.txt, etc that may hinder your progress. There are several free tools to help with this, such as Xenu and GSiteCrawler. This is actually a step that all site builders and developers should execute, so that there will not be any problems later as your visitor base starts building up, because visitors are likely distracted and leave your site if they find that a link does not work. They can always go elsewhere.

4. Browser Compatibility Test

If there is anything that you should think about when it comes to design of a website is its compatibility with different browsers and devices. The most common browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Since there are also a lot of devices and gadgets in the market, you might wish to ensure that your website has a version which is compatible to these gadgets. For example, a common complain is that the iPad is not able to see flash content, and page loading on these handy devices may be a bit too slow. Some designers will propose to create pages quite similar to your website specially for smart phone and other non-computer logins, and you may see the example in facebook.

5. Actions Tracking

There is also a need to expand your analysis to actions taken by your visitors especially when they put your content into their social media, either by tweeting your content to others or letting others know that they “like” your content on Facebook. It is important to at least track how many visitors took these actions which will contribute positively to your site, and you may track this by using Google Analytics’ Event Tracking. You may discover that most of your visitors like your content and repost them on Facebook, and a lot of your traffic comes from there even though you have always thought that your visitors come from twitter. It makes a difference, as you may then strategize to concentrate on Facebook instead.

Your website should also have some ways to measure its success or failure, based on some key metrics. The quantitative measures will be the proof of whether what you are doing is bringing your business on the right track or does it actually need a particular focus. This measure should be set up before you launch your site, so that you will already have a way to gather reliable statistics and document them for further analysis of your website consistently.

6. Brand Tracking

You may want to keep track of those websites that make a mention of your name in their content. But how do you know there is such a backlink? You may wish to use the Google Alerts, which is free. It is not the most perfect tool, but it is better than none.

You may also want to keep track by setting up a series of queries that can run on a regular basis, perhaps even automated. It may include the mention of your brand name in a series of combination for

• Google Blog Search mentions
• Google Web mentions (past 24 hours)
• Google News mentions
• Twitter Search

as the most basic of all, and even for Facebook if you wish to, since Facebook surpassed Google as the site with the most visitors and it has its own search capability with Bing.

7. List Building

Before you launch your website, it will be good to ensure that you have a feedback form that will enable an email sign-up or subscription, if you have not already done so. This is not just an “automatic must have” item, but it is useful to capture your audience email address for use later on to promote new content, product and offerings. Use different things to entice your audience, the most common being a free newsletter or ebook. The significance of this is to build a database of your visitors that will become an asset for your business.

8. Social Media

When we talk about website, social media will always be in the picture. It will be useful for you to create an account on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Profiles, YouTube and Flickr. Each has a different niche, with Facebook being the biggest social network site that you may find. You may create a profile on Facebook or a commercial Page. Either way, Facebook is the fastest way to reach out to your customers when you have a new promotion that will involve some beautiful advertisements, and a huge following.

There are many more social media site, but these are the few worth spending your time on. One thing which you need to take note is that you may need to customize your bio in the various social media so that it attracts the different groups of users within that media itself. If you have a Facebook account, you may wish to portray your products as fun and fresh, and if you have LinkedIn, you may wish to project the image of serious professionalism. Whatever network you register with, be sure to link it back to your main website so that it will drive the traffic up in search engines.

9. Keywords for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you have not known it yet, you probably did not get the best advice for websites. We are talking about keywords, and it will be important for you to determine your keywords by doing a good research about them first. However, do not undermine search engines intelligence. You should never spam your keywords with those that are not related to your business just because these words draw high traffic in the search engines. Get keywords that are useful and relevant instead.

More tips about how to select the right keywords for your SEO plan.

Your website, once you launch it, is indeed a product of its own that will require marketing and maintenance, not just a tool for your clients to see and forget.