Matt Jura Blog on Design, Web & DotNetNuke

The term “marketing” gets used a lot and, sometimes, it’s used rather loosely in search and social media circles.

“Not all, but a lot of the search industry tends to be kind of search geeks who are trying to figure out what marketing is,” says Bill Leake of Apogee Results, formerly Apogee Search.

To make a long-term difference in customers, he believes effective marketing is key. Factors such as determining what the customer wants to do, how you can make it happen, and how you can transfer business objectives into strategies that can be implemented, are all instrumental aspects of marketing. He goes on to say that search is just one area of marketing that is important, but it works best when used with the other aspects.

Source: WebProNews

Cross posted from WSI Internet Marketing UK

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Since SEO is constantly changing, how can SEOs determine the most important areas of focus? As Matt Bailey of SiteLogic Marketing tells WebProNews, the foundation has to be strong in order to be built upon.  For this reason, he believes the fundamentals are critical to SEO success.

Content is just one of the fundamental areas of SEO. Not only is the content itself important, but the structure of the content is also important. Bailey says content needs to be scalable, readable, and allow users to understand the content on the rest of the page by simply looking at the headline. This is significant because numerous studies show that the majority of people scan content instead of reading it.

Cross posted from WSI Internet Marketing UK

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Small businesses in the UK and US increased their spending on online marketing in the second quarter of 2010, according to a new report.

Figures from WebVisible show that US expenditure in particular shot up by 159 per cent compared with the same period last year.

In the UK, Yahoo! saw the biggest increase in web marketing spending by small firms, while both Bing and Google registered declines.

The cost-per-click (CPC) metric rose by 5.4 per cent on Google and 3.7 per cent on Bing, while click-through rates increased for the former and dropped for the latter.

Source: DirectNews

Cross posted from WSI Internet Marketing UK

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We all know that how we conduct our business has not changed much over the years, as the most important thing that you need to do is market your brand. However, how we approach has certainly changed. Going back five years the best way to do this was with email campaigns, but now most of us use social media marketing for that end goal of success.

We are being told time and time again that marketing your brand on social media services such as Facebook and Twitter is the key to growth, but an article on IABUK offers some interesting stats that refute this belief.

According to research provided by Econsultancy over 38 percent of people have still not embraced social networking sites – so the need to focus on email marketing is still as important as ever.

In the survey taken the results showed that out of 36 percent of consumers studied, they said that they were more likely to purchase something online via an email that was sent to them.

So this tells us one thing, do not underestimate the power of an email campaign.

Source: Econsultancy

Cross posted from WSI Internet Marketing UK

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It is widely accepted that SEO has evolved from simplistic initiatives such as keyword density and frequency within a page of content. Search algorithms are continually evolving to understand context and attitudes based on advanced semantic analysis.

That said, understanding the target keywords of a given web page will always remain a key focus for SEO development. The main principal remains; each page should have a clear and unique theme.

When briefed on SEO strategy, content creators frequently ask for a methodology by which they can identify the target keyword for a given page. To this end, over time I have constructed a five point checklist that can be deployed to help determine the target keyword for a given webpage. Each method can be used together or in isolation. They are designed as a guide rather than a strict process.

1. Empathise with the user. In my opinion this is the most simple but valuable stage of the keyword identification process. Anticipating the potential search terms that could be used in order to accomplish the task that the web page sets out to achieve is a fairly rudimentary practice. Nevertheless, it is advisable to benchmark these assumptions using the following methods.

Cross posted from WSI Internet Marketing UK

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