Wal-Mart SEO & SEM
This Post is geared towards Fellow SEO’s
Back in December there was a lot of talk about Sam’s Club offering SEO and SEM services. I haven’t seen a follow up on the service and wonder how the service is working out. I have not seen or heard of a business actually using the service.
Over at Search Engine Journal they discuss “Sam’s Club Search Marketing: Good or Bad for the Industry?” I haven’t seen a follow up since the rumblings started. I would like to get a hold of a solid review of the service. Let me know if you can review it objectively and show proof of the service.
. 02 Jun 08 | Business, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Advertising, Search Engine Optimization | Read on | Comments (0)
Social Media Makes the News
USA Today recognized social media as a marketing avenue. In fact they reviewed it so highly it made the front page.
Read the complete article here.
Social-networking sites work to turn users into profits
By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO — It is the burning question in tech circles, and Mike Murphy answers it before it is completed.
“I hear it every time I’m on a (tech) panel,” Murphy, Facebook’s vice president of media sales, says with a wry smile.STORY: Social networks vs. TV networks
He’s referring to the inevitable question on when Facebook and other social-networking sites will turn their steep market valuations into mounds of currency. (Invariably, Murphy answers that Facebook has a long list of major advertisers.)
Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites have been the rage of the tech industry for more than a year. Following investments by Microsoft and News Corp., the companies are valued in the billions of dollars and are considered blueprints for how to build a website. Yet a deeper question lingers: How are they going to consistently produce profits to match their soaring valuations?
It is a parlor game that has Silicon Valley buzzing. With online ad spending booming into a nearly $50 billion market this year, there is plenty of money to be had. Big-name advertisers are drooling over millions of young, affluent consumers who are spending more time on their online profiles than in front of TV and movie screens. They are particularly smitten with the prospect of tailoring ads to people’s specific interests.
But Google commands a sizable chunk of the market — especially in the USA — leaving dozens of social-networking sites to scramble for a piece of the advertising pie. Plus, there is the ticklish task of sites and advertisers pitching products without trampling the privacy of consumers.
Short of striking it rich with online ads or creating a new revenue stream, how can so many sites leverage their vast audiences? In many respects, it is the same query that dogged portal companies in the mid-1990s and search engines in the early ’90s. Some were sold. Some went public. Some went belly up.
The ongoing challenge is to concoct a potion — be it through banner ads, premium subscriptions or licensing agreements — that no one has perfected. Facebook, crown jewel of the field, is valued at $15 billion but barely turns a profit.
“You can’t have a $15 billion market valuation based on advertising alone,” says Bill Eager, co-founder of bSocial Networks, a maker of software that helps social-networking users market to each other. “It’s the single most-asked question in this field.”
Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li has pondered the next stage for social networks. She envisions the ubiquitous sites will, in five to 10 years, “be like air: They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.”
Eager estimates there will be as many as 250,000 sites that call themselves social networks within a year, compared with about 850 today. “Everyone will reposition their site to take advantage of this phenomenon. It happened before with portals.”
To get there, though, there is that little matter of making money. “Facebook’s real problem isn’t privacy, it’s monetization,” says Dave McClure, a start-up adviser and angel investor in Silicon Valley. “It’s not too early to worry about how Facebook makes money.”
Murphy and other Facebook executives are well aware of that concern. “Advertisers follow people,” says Sheryl Sandberg, a former Google executive who recently was named Facebook’s chief operating officer. “We have 70 million active members. Once you have engaged users, the revenue will follow in that order.”
I have often discounted the long term impact of social media. In the short term social media can be leveraged to your benefit. The verdict is still out on the long term effect.
What is search engine marketing?
Search engine marketing by definition is marketing and advertising through search engines.
If you do a quick search on Search Engine Marketing you will find all types of answers. The most practical answer is advertising through search engines. Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are two different marketing techniques. Both use search engines, both use keywords, both can be found on the same search engine result pages (SERP), but both are different. They are different in their approach. Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is paid or sponsored search often called Pay-Per-Click. The most commonly used tools for sponsor search is Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing. Search Engine Optimization is for free organic results and used with page content and many other factors discussed at this site.
Both Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing use keywords. They use keywords as a way to sell advertising space. Advertising space? If you have ever noticed along the top and bottom of most Search Engine Result Pages there are links. Those links are being paid to be there. Most all the times the ads are purchased based upon search terms or blocks of search terms.
What does this have to do with search engine optimization? With a joint effort of search engine marketing and optimization can produce a major Return on Investment (ROI). SEO is a long term investment and SEM should be used for the interim. Together the two different approaches can make a big difference on ROI. Using a Pay-Per-Click campaign to "kick start" a marketing campaign is a good idea. Pay-Per-Click offers very little direct SEO advantages besides traffic and visibility. Visibility leads to the potential of bookmarking and linking. Traffic brings search agents to the site also.
Back in the old days, summer 2007, search marketing occasionally gave excellent links. With many sites hosting paid listings on their site, much like SEO by Chris, search bot crawlers would occasionally index paid ads from these text link advertisements. Hosted ads are not supposed to be indexed or crawled, errors do happen (after all humans program the search agents). An ad appearing on a page often means that the ads are contextually relevant giving a credible link. Since October 2007 less of these type of indexing errors. Since these errors are not supposed to happen and should continue to be phased out as indexes are updated.
So what is Search Engine Marketing to Search Engine Optimization? Together in tandem they are part of complete online marketing strategy. Effectively used they will produce a maximum return on investment.
. 20 Feb 08 | Marketing, Online Marketing, PPC, SEM, SEO, SMO, Search Engine Advertising, Search Engine Optimization | Read on | Comments (0)
Your Brand - Online Marketing
What is branding? Answers.com defines branding as: A trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer. Branding your business and maintaining your image is important.
A traditional example of branding and image is pizza places. Most everyone has gotten fliers from the pizza place dot matrix neon pink flier that is hard to read. Then there are the fliers from the big chain places printed on a smooth high quality paper, with vibrant earth tones, and a picture of delicious looking pizza. Both places carry the same exact product with the same exact prices. Now which one are you most likely to buy? The one on the smooth nice paper. You spend a lot of time. energy, and money on your product don’t let it fall because of a bad image.
So how does branding apply to SEO and online advertising? If you don’t have a good web-site design you are giving good traffic to your competitors. No matter your SEO power, no matter how good your product, if you website is hard to read and unusable, no online plan is going to give you a maximum return on your investment. If your website is poorly designed or not usable you might as well stick with the neon pink flier.
Online branding is as important to your image as the cleanliness of your store front. Protect your online brand with a clean up-to-date style.
. 19 Feb 08 | Branding, Business, Marketing, New-Design, Online Marketing, Search Engine Advertising | Read on | Comments (0)
New Design - What do you think?
Notice the the colors? Notice the Design? What do you think?
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