Search engine marketing (SEM) agencies typically fall into two camps: specializing in search engine optimization (SEO) to the exclusion of all else or focusing exclusively on pay-per-click (PPC) while shunning SEO altogether.

Hence, entrenched SEM silos have become the norm and businesses end up working a the traditional ad agency for “outbound” marketing activities (print and radio/TV advertising, direct mail), an SEO agency, and/or a PPC agency.

The problem with this scenario is three-fold:

First, companies end up overlapping their efforts.

Second, little integration exists between traditional marketing and SEM (and online versus offline).

Third, the ability to see a comprehensive view of the marketing “big picture” is often severely compromised.

The SEM silo within companies occurred naturally, according to search marketing specialist Marta Turek. In an objective and insightful essay, “Breaking the Search Marketing Silo,” on her SEM Street Cred blog, Marta points out that while traditional marketing and sales have always been at odds with each other, at least they have a relationship. Search marketing, on the other hand, “is completely out of the loop. Search marketing and traditional marketing efforts are run by different departments and different people that barely know of the others’ existence.”

And, search’s “image” problem also creates a disconnect, which leads to marketing silos. This is due to how traditional agencies define “creative.” According to Matt Spiegel in a Search Engine Watch article, “Search Engines, Silos, and SES Solutions,” those in marketing and advertising get “their creative juices flowing from an image that makes them stop in awe.”

Search, on the other hand – whether organic or PPC – is just not seen as sexy. (When was the last time an SEM agency won an award for “best looking text ad”? Never!) When it comes to search, says Matt, the term “creativity” needs to encompass “the idea of purchasing keywords connected to your Super Bowl ads, or capitalizing on a competitor’s missed opportunity, or using search to create buzz months before your product is launched.”

So, if you’re a traditional ad agency, or an SEM agency with one specialty, how do you help your clients’ overcome the silos and disconnects inherent in their marketing, advertising and sales departments – without adding expensive headcount or sending your team back to school?

Simply, consider software applications that automate critical functions and that give you the “big picture” data you need to help your clients make informed decisions that increase revenues.

One reason we developed the Yield Web Marketing Suite is because we saw that many businesses focused only on Google AdWords, or only on SEO, but failed to apply both SEO and PPC across all three major search engines – and thus were missing huge opportunities to increase conversions and sales.

On top of that, because smaller businesses in particular often feel they can’t afford the services of agencies, they try to manage their search campaigns themselves – resulting in weak strategy, low conversions, and wasted money.

Even if you decide to use technologies other than ours, which integrates PPC, SEO and landing page optimization into a single, automated system, there are a variety of point solutions out there that agencies can pull together toward greater automation of the full SEM remit.  What’s critical here is helping agency clients to manage their total SEM effort to drive the best possible traffic to their sites and ensure the highest conversion rates.

To see how V Channel Solutions can help your agency add value to your clients’ campaigns, give me a call at 03 8070 2661. We’ll be happy to walk you through a demo.

Usefulness is more important than usability.

In most discussions of landing page optimization, the focus tends to be on ways to test lots of presentation variations on one particular page. Try different headlines. Try different images. Try different button colors. MVT advocates sometimes go overboard with this (“test hundreds of variations!”). It’s true, these things can have an impact on a page’s conversion rate.

But, frankly, that kind of optimization is a side show.

Such tweaks represent maybe 20% of the potential value to be achieved in post-click marketing — even though they tend to dominate 80% of the talk around landing pages.

If you want to make a major leap forward in the effectiveness of your landing pages — and your entire search marketing program — you need to focus on the more fundamental issue of usefulness. A really useful landing page gives the respondent exactly what they were looking for when they typed their search query into Google (or Bing?).

As I show in the above slide deck, Overland Storage has done a wonderful job with this. If you do a search for “data deduplication,” they offer you a useful fulfillment specifically on data deduplication. Click, click, you’ve got it. They also do the same with data recovery, SOX compliance, data retention, backup window, business continuity, etc. They are masters of giving searchers specifically what they’re looking for — and in the process generate quality leads with double-digit conversion rates.

To be sure, there’s a lot of “usability” that has gone into these pages too. Beautiful designs, clear calls to action, helpful segmentation choices, strong headlines, etc. But that’s icing on the cake. The reason people convert isn’t because they’ve been dazzled by a secret incantation headline; it’s because they’re getting what they want.

In my presentation, I show a slide of a respondent saying, “Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for.” That’s the goal we need to go after.

Once you set your sights on that target, you start to realize how powerful landing pages can really be. Your primary website has a lot of inertia — it’s hard to squeeze dozens or hundreds of niche concepts or offers into a cohesive navigation system. But with short, focused landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites, you can whip together clear and compelling content that tightly integrates with the promises you’re making (explicitly or implicitly) in your keyword buys and search ad creatives.

“Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for.”

Landing pages are to paid advertising what blog posts are to organic search (or what tweets are to social media). They’re a way to rapidly deploy a targeted (and meaningful!) message to a targeted audience that’s looking for just that specific content.

Once you frame your post-click marketing mission in those terms, then you evolve from trying to optimize a handful of pages ad infinitum — forever held back by the law of averages — and embrace the real objective of landing page management agility: being able to quickly and efficiently generate lots of individual landing pages, each one matched to a particular niche of your audience that will find it to be immensely useful in their search.

“Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for.”

That’s the goal.

Search engine optimization techniques/beliefs have been debated for many years, since SEO’s conception, though a new topic has been bothering me for quite a few weeks now.

When viewing website results in search engines, let’s say Google for this example, visitors put more strength in websites that a) appear on the first page and b) appear towards the top of the page. This relates back to Pavlov’s salivating dog experiment — search engine algorithms have trained us to react in this manner. Websites that are more reliable, relevant and popular rank higher in search engines and over time we have become accustomed to looking at the the first page of search engine result pages (SERPS).

As one scans through results (from top to bottom) importance, reliability, relevancy and other factors exponentially decrease. Simply said, the listings on the top of the page have more “strength” in the eyes of humans compared to results that appear towards the bottom of the page. After scanning through irrelevant listings on top, interest/retention diminishes and users will either enter a new search query or go to the second page.

Now, this is where the fun comes in… Is it better to have a website appear on the bottom of the first page or on the top of the second page?

Personally, I believe search engine users feel a re-birth, or enlightenment, when clicking to the second page and seeing fresh, new results. This leads me to believe that positioning a website on the top of the second page for competitive keywords may be more beneficial than being on the very bottom of the first page.

I will be researching this topic more in-depth and will share my thoughts when I come to a final conclusion.

Sincerely,

Aaron Schoenberger

The Brainchild Group

source from “Business Week”

If you have a website – even a modest one – or use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, using the right keywords or keyword phrases is vital to success. Well-chosen keywords give you a better chance of showing up near the top of search results. But not just any results. What you want are the most relevant searches conducted by your best prospects.

Keywords tell the search engine robots what your business is all about. Selecting good ones is harder than you think. The bots aren’t really that smart, so you have to be clever in what you feed them. Experts at Network Solutions, a top domain registrar and web hosting firm, compare it to placing “bait” on your site. The bait attracts the search engine “spiders” that crawl billions of website pages and index what they find.  Most entrepreneurs use common sense to create keywords. That’s fine, since they must appeal to real people as well as search spiders.  But many keywords are not common sense, and anything you come up with still must be properly implemented to be effective.

Here are 7 steps to improving your keyword power, drawn from experience here at Business.com as well as Network Solutions:

1. Gather your prospects: If you have a typical small business site of 5-10 pages, you’ll want to end up with a polished list of perhaps 15 to 30 keywords and keyword phrases. A keyword phrases might include several words, but only counts as one. Develop a list of 30 to 60 and pare it down.  Start with common sense. So-called “natural language” keywords tend to work best. These are the terms people would use in everyday language when talking about your products or services. Write down as many as you can think of. Include those you might even think sound goofy.

2. “Spy” on your competitors. Check competitor websites to see what they use. Here’s an insider tip from Network Solutions: You don’t have to read their entire site. Keywords used on a webpage can be found on the site’s “Source” page, which you can easily see by clicking “View” on the toolbar at the top of your browser, then selecting “Source.”  Once the source page opens (it won’t look pretty), look for entries that look like this: <meta name=”KEYWORDS” content=”the keywords you are looking for here”>.

3. Use Keyword Services and Tools: There are several helpful (and often free) online tools and services that will help you find the best keywords and phrases for your business. Google AdWords offers free keyword help, while paid services such as Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) offer greater capabilities (Wordtracker also has a free version). Other free online tools include Keyworddiscovery.com, Wordpot.com, and Google’s tool at google.com/sktool.

4. Focus on relevancy: If you market to a specific demographic such as teens, seniors, pet owners or fitness fanatics, aim for keywords that appeal to them. But unless you target a technical or professional audience of some kind, stick with natural rather than technical language. Resist the urge to use “bait and switch” keywords from related categories on the chance that customers for those products might also be interested in yours. The leads you get will be a poor fit and will probably click away immediately anyhow.

5. Be specific – but not overly specific. It’s a tricky balance. If you use general keywords – the same ones used by millions of other sites – you’ll get lost in the crowd. Instead, consider phrases specific to a product or service you sell. Network Solutions uses the example of a pet store that includes keyword phrases such as “jeweled dog dollar,” “large dog collar,” or “paw print dog pillow” to attract customers. But avoid adjectives, such as colors or “striped” as they can hurt your results. Customers still looking might not yet know what they want and might not use such descriptors in their searches.

6. Pick strong-performing keywords:  The best keywords are not necessarily those that show up as most-used in the keyword tools. If a keyword has millions of uses, that probably just means you’d have to compete with millions of websites for clicks.  “A better measure of a powerful keyword is the number of times the term is searched, balanced against the amount of competition for that word,” says Network Solutions. For example, a phrase that gets just 500 searches per month but has almost no competition is generally a better option than a phrase that is searched 2,000 times but is competing with a million other sites.

7. Consider geographic keywords:  If you are trying to attract customers to a specific physical store location, “geo-targeting” some keywords can be a terrific tactic. A pet store, for example, could use “dog collars in austin texas” or “phoenix cat toys” to help attract local customers.

A question we hear often is: “For my type of business, is search engine marketing relevant?” While it’s not safe to over-generalize, I’ve put some thoughts together that can help you decide how relevant pay-per-click is for your business.

The benefits are well known and documented–search marketing has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry because it is effective and measurable. Combining the fact that a disproportionate share of marketing budgets are targeted to the Internet relative to the amount of time users spend on the it, together with the ability to assess exactly how valuable each placement is, it is not surprising that search marketing has quickly become a staple in every marketer’s arsenal.

But, will it work for your business? Here are some of the common concerns:

“My customers already know how to find me.”
If you are fortunate enough to have a well known or unique brand, you have already invested the necessary resources such that your prospects can find you when they want to. You also may have achieved the top natural search results for your target keywords. A great example of this is a professional sports team. If a customer wants to buy tickets or find out event information, natural search will undoubtedly drive that customer to your site. However, search engine marketing can still be very useful. For instance, if you broaden your targeting to include people who are interested in fun things to do for the weekend or good activities for families, you can easily see opportunities to drive new, high-quality traffic.  Also, you can use search engine marketing to generate interest for your other events — batting clinics, fireworks shows, and corporate events, for example. In both cases, you are targeting a more generalized need for a product or service than in your core keywords where your brand is dominant.

“My keywords are too expensive.”
Depending on the business you are in, keywords can be more or less expensive. There is generally a strong correlation between businesses that have high margins for transactions on the Internet and expensive keywords.  The nice thing about search engine marketing is that (with the exception of the quality score impact), in competitive markets, the bidding process ensures that the traffic goes to those sites that are willing to pay the most for that traffic — in effect, the businesses who will generate the most value from that traffic. So, what do you do if you aren’t the high-margin provider in a segment? Even in highly competitive segments, many advertisers run campaigns exclusively in Google. So, you should expand your paid search marketing efforts to include other search engines as well as other advertising mediums including Facebook and display advertising on networks such as Yahoo!

“There is little traffic for keywords relating to what I offer.”
If you are blazing a trail with a new product or technology in a category that has yet to be defined with a well known moniker, you are in the unenviable position: most people don’t know that your category (much less your product) exists. For those who do, it can be really hard to find you because of what I’ll call a terminology mismatch. I first noticed this effect at a company called Riverbed. They sell WAN Performance Optimization Appliances. How many people, when Riverbed first launched, knew to look for “WAN performance optimization appliances”? Most likely few, if any. Sure, customers searching for “Riverbed” would find them. How about everyone else? Companies in this situation should focus on targeting keywords that identify needs or problems. For example, “application acceleration” or “bandwidth optimization”.  In addition, they could target broader category searches like “top IT technologies”.

In summary, one of the best attributes in a search engine marketer is their ability to think more broadly about their business and to look at the world from the outside-in. In other words, they think about paid search from the perspectives of their prospects. If you can figure out a broader set of search queries that your prospects are likely to conduct and that correlate well to your offering,  you have a great opportunity to acquire additional relevant traffic.

Direct-to-consumer news releases can be loaded with keywords that are going to make you visible on search engines. These online news releases can generate interest not only from buyers or users, but from bloggers and online news sites and offline media as well.

You can do something like making a video and posting it on YouTube, post the video on your blog, on social networking site such as Facebook, Twitter or MySpace and Social Bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and more. Distribute the video to as many suitable channels you can get onto; YouTube is only one of many video sharing sites. Check out Traffic Geyser (paid) and Tube Mogul (free), both are great online video distribution tools.

Craigslist and other free classified websites are all effective ways to get people to your site. Create an ad that details what your site has to offer and put a link to your site. Think outside of the box, create an ad in the barter section, and exchange services with other companies that can bring value to yours. Even people without a company will see your add and learn about your services, always include a link to your site.

Send an email to all your friends telling them about your business.  If you do something really interesting with your website often times people will pass it around, especially your friends. Keep each email personalized, a personalized email will always go further than a copy/paste email. If you email someone new, let’s say you know them through a friend; try to mention how you established your relationship together to remind them you’re not a stranger. People like to do business with people they know, even if they barely know them.

Keep up the hard work and always be on the lookout for opportunity!

GOOGLE has the right tools to help small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) grow their businesses beyond the local market by taking advantage of the power of the Internet via AdWords, according to its head of online and reseller sales (South-East Asia) Charif El Ansari.

He says online marketing is a strategic business planning tool for entrepreneurs to consider in view of the current economic downturn.

“Fresh cost-effective marketing efforts are needed to create new revenue streams and this is where search engine marketing could be the best solution there is for any company,” he tells StarBizWeek.

AdWords is Google’s flagship advertising product and main source of revenue, with the company recording US$16.6bil in 2007. It offers pay-per-click advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads.

“Google’s text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines, and its AdWords programme includes local, national, and international distribution,” he says.

Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user searches Google’s search engine on www.google.com.my or the relevant local/national Google search websites, ads for relevant words are shown as “sponsored links” on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results.

“Online marketing is an engine for business growth in Malaysia and beyond the local market,” Charif says.

He says the tool is becoming exceedingly efficient because of its reach and relevance as it is “targeted and measurable”.

“Advertisers are able to maximise the return on their investment as they will be provided with reports and data that enable them to see how their advertisements are performing,” he says.

They can also track how their advertisement is displayed in relation to other ads, what keywords are searched that generate the ad display and suggest additional keywords that could be added to the AdWords account to generate more displays of the ad.

The cost effectiveness of the tool would enable advertisers to stay within limited budget because of the cost-per-click model, he says.

“With the cost-per-click option, you’re only charged if people click your ads. This means every dollar of your budget goes toward bringing in new prospects,” he says.

“Generally, most local SMEs have a small marketing budget to promote their products and services as a large part of their budget is focused on manufacturing and/or production.”

A true believer in the power of the internet, InMagine, a leading Malaysian supplier and distributor of digital stock photography, has gone global to find new customers via Google AdWords.

Stephanie Sitt, the co-founder of the company, says traffic to its website increased by 170% with a return on investment of 115% last year.

“We have started using Google AdWords since 2002 and have not looked back since as every ringgit we invested in AdWords generated RM10 in sales. InMagine has found customers from all over the world, particularly from the US,” she says.

It is difficult to imagine life without the Internet these days.

From instant football scores and the latest celebrity gossip to online shopping and music downloads, these are all available with a few clicks of the mouse.

With the breadth of content on the Net, search engines are essential to narrowing down one’s choices.

But search engines have come a long way since Yahoo’s dominance nearly a decade ago. The players have changed (and disappeared) over the years and now Google is the current king of the hill.

Its ability to remain at the top is credited to how many ‘Susan Boyle’ and ‘Twilight’ searches the world makes which in turn generates vast amount of revenue from internet search advertising.

Google ranked highest in number of page visits among search engines at the end of May at 64.15% of total visits. Trailing far behind is Yahoo! at 13.58% and finally Microsoft’s Live Search with only 3.42%.

This translates to net revenues of US$4.22bil (RM14.77bil) for Google’s Q4 2008. Google’s search advertising ability to ride the current economic climate relatively smoothly has attracted enough attention for both current and new competitors to rethink and reinvent their own search engines.

Two that have garnered much attention of late has been Microsoft’s ‘new’ engine Bing and newcomer WolframAlpha. Sunday Star looks at the pros and cons of each engine.

Bing

www.bing.com

Microsoft’s first foray into search engines started in 1998 with MSN Search. After much research, Windows Live Search was released in 2006 to replace MSN Search. A year later, Windows Live Search was reorganised to form Live Search. Finally on June 3, 2009, Bing was launched. Microsoft’s fourth reincarnation of its search engine hopes to put the software giant in a better position to tap the lucrative search advertising industry.

Touted to provide users with product price comparisons, travel planning, restaurant reviews, health information and business locations, the main search page now sports a more simplistic and personal design that reflects Google’s own.

What makes Bing stand out from the rest is its ability to compile all the requested information and represent it visually to make it easier for the user to process. This is where Bing has an advantage over the other search engines as retrieving and summarising the information has yet to be broadly provided until now.

Like Google, Bing also provides search suggestions within the main search box as you type. Bing also has an image search function which is essentially the same as Google’s.

However, as of writing, Bing is still under beta testing and many of its features are still not available on the Malaysian site. Two of the features which work and are of interest are the video search and xRank.

The xRank allows you to search for celebrities, musicians, politicians and bloggers based on a popularity ranking. Clicking on a name will bring you to a page which contains the biography, videos, images and other related media. Think of it as a Facebook for the rich and famous.

The video search allows you to search for videos and provides you with an interactive thumbnail that plays a short clip of the video when you move your mouse cursor over it. The video search is at the moment hidden and can only be accessed through the xRank search.

The US Bing video search has received much criticism lately as it allows for the search of adult content by switching off the safety search option. Concerned parents should know that our local children can easily find the link that directs users to the full-fledged US Bing site easily.

Nonetheless, Microsoft intends to get it right this time with Bing after past failures. The Redmond-based company has invested US$100mil (RM350mil) into marketing campaigns that span all forms of media to promote the use of Bing among Internet users.

WolframAlpha

(www.wolframalpha.com)

Publically released on May 15, 2009, WolframAlpha is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram and his start-up, Wolfram Research. The 49-year-old British physicist and mathematician received his PhD at the age of 20 and even had the co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, intern for him during the summer of 1993.

Unlike search engines where they provide you with a plethora of sites to find the answer, Wolfram gives you the answer, provided you ask the right questions.

WolframAlpha is best described as an “answer engine” rather than a traditional search engine. It shines best when dealing with numerical and factual searches.

For example, key in “Kuala Lumpur” into the search box and you will be provided with the population count, current time, map, elevation, nearby larger cities and the weather.

Not impressive enough? Type in “birthday” followed by your date of birth and you will be greeted with the exact day you were born, the days left to your next and previous birthday and your exact age in years, months and days.

Still not impressed? Key in “kuala lumpur to ipoh”. WolframAlpha will then compute the distance between the two locations, the time taken to travel, their current local times, and other comparable data.

Think of WolframAlpha as the uber calculator of sorts. Or to you Trekkers, the USS Enterprise ship computer. As long as there is a question which is computable and is able to be presented statistically, in numbers and graphs, WolframAlpha can do it.

The only drawback would be the steep learning curve on how to use WolframAlpha accurately and efficiently to provide more meaningful information.

Thankfully, a tutorial page teaches you how to use WolframAlpha to its fullest potential and it has many categories from Health & Medicine to Money & Finance.

WolframAlpha is certainly no “Google killer”. It is intended to fill a niche in the search engine industry. Stephen himself is unsure of the future of WolframAlpha at this point.

Revenues could come from selling databases which Wolfram generates. Or it could even be incorporated in another search engine’s coding.

Whatever it turns out to be, this answer engine paves the way for Internet users to find answers without having to swim through a sea of websites.

Fun things to try with WolframAlpha:

>What is your name?

>Where are you?

>Who am I?

>What are you?

>Why did the chicken cross the road?

Comparisons

Googling “proton” produces the expected results. Note the four sponsored links on the right hand side, one of the main sources of revenue for Google.

Bing-ing proton also provides similar results, with the exception that there are more local sites compared with Google.

On the left you can see that Bing also provides you with recommendations for related searches. Moving your mouse cursor over a link will pop up a window on the right, displaying the first few paragraphs of text that Bing retrieves from the site.

As of the moment, there is only one sponsored link and it is situated on the top. Only time (and perhaps good marketing) will tell if Bing’s ad revenue will pick up.

Wolfram-ing proton leads to detailed information regarding the particle proton.

You could search it as a word instead and it would direct you to the definition of the word proton and its origins.

Occasionally, one or two sponsored links will appear on the right hand side.

What is interesting is that Wolfram also has a “Search the Web” and “Related Links” box which provides you with a link to search other search engines using your input.

Google’s response

While it’s too early to say if either Bing or Wolfram will break any ground, Google isn’t the type to rest on its laurels. It introduced Google Docs to the world, providing everyone with a taste of what cloud computing had to offer in the form of a free web-based office suite.

Then came Google Chrome, their minimalist but speedy web browser that is gaining momentum due to its fresh approach to user interface and also the only web browser to have multi-threaded capabilities. A multi-threaded browser allows one tab or browser window which is locked (hanging) to be terminated while still maintaining other tabs open which may contain an important e-mail in the works.

Finally coming soon is Google Wave, their next “killer-app” that intends to revolutionise e-mail and online communication. In a nutshell Google Wave will integrate online communications and social networking seamlessly into one single multimedia web based application accessible from anywhere.

Conclusion

The Internet still remains a very powerful and grossly underutilised tool for the pursuit of knowledge and self development. Internet users should welcome and support any new players into the market that can provide pioneering methods for us to better surf for information.

More search engines only mean more competition among the players to better their products for the end-users and perhaps carry the long established methods of information gathering and learning to a new height.

ADVERTISING money should “follow the eyeballs” of online consumers as they are more sophisticated in their use of the Internet than most marketers realise.

According to Google South-East Asia head of online and reseller sales, Charif El Ansari, a survey of active online consumers reveal that there are sweeping changes in the behaviour of Internet consumers as they increasingly use search engines to help them decide on product purchases.

“59% cite search engines as a specific source for researching their new product,” he says, adding that 79% use the Internet during the purchase process.

He says digital lifestyle consumers – those who have bought a digital lifestyle product (like a notebook PC, digital camera or DVD) in the past six months – allocate a greater share of influence to the Internet than any other source.

“The Internet is also higher than any other source in terms of overall share of time spent to research a product purchase,” he says. Charif points out that out of the 3.9 hours spent on researching a product, 60 minutes is more likely to be spent online while friends, sales staff at stores and in house display and promotions take a backseat. In line with this, he says, marketers should adjust their advertising to fit that growing interactive mode.

“People are watching TV and reading the newspaper online. Soon there will no longer be a comparison between online and offline,” he says.

He says there is also a growing trend where local advertisers focus on the local market. “The first wave of online advertising we saw was small and medium enterprises and exporters trying to find international users,” he tells StarBizWeek.

He says online advertising/search engine marketing is becoming more relevant for local businesses targeting the domestic economy as more and more Malaysians are searching online for local products and services.

“Its not only about advertising. It’s about having a Web presence,” he adds.

Charif reveals domestic companies that have benefited from online advertising via Google AdWords platform.

“Through Google AdWords platform, SHL Cares, which does confinement services, has seen online traffic to its site jump by 200%. The company’s return on investment is 140 times for every ringgit it spends,” he said.

Charif El Ansari …’Marketers should adjust their advertising to fit that growing interactive mode.’

There are more and more people running SEO campaign for their business nowadays. Some knows what they are doing, but some just be the classic trend followers – “since my competitor has it, I also want to have it.”

The world is round, things are fair. Those businessmen who have put full thought into it and plan well will be successful; however, the rest of it… Will end up with a lot of complain to their vendor.

I guess here’s some guidelines that can give you a brief idea for your business plan before you start.

Understand your Business Needs

Ask yourself, who are you in your industry? Who you want to target?

If you are a manufacturer, of course you are targeting distributor who can buy in bulk; if you are a distributor then you are looking for retailer; if you are in trading business then you need end consumers. Different target customer needs different way of approach and different marketing plans. Well you can’t be open a group name “ABC Sdn Bhd” under facebook and expecting to attract distributor right?

The next, what market segment are you targeting? Are you focusing in local business, Asia or worldwide? I guess everyone know it is not logic if you advertise yourself in Malaysia newspaper while you are expecting customers from Indonesia?

If you are targeting worldwide business, no doubt the Internet Marketing is the best medium, best in cost-effective measures, to promote your business. Some businessman thinks that they do not need SEO because their business is too small and only target in local market. But it is not that fixated. Check out local search engines optimization. You can also market yourself only at your targeted regions. This will really open your eyes.

Understand SEO

A lot of businessmen think that they have paid a sum of SEO fees then they are assured for overseas business. Well these will be the ones who making noise when they get zero conversion throughout the whole year. This is absolutely wrong. The failure of SEO lies on many factors, which we will discuss in the next topic. Understand one thing that SEO only assures ranking but not assure on conversion. Give you a very simple example, did you ever come across a salesman from XX newspaper telling you “Hey Mr. Client, do advertise in our newspaper and I will guarantee you sales of RM XX!” No right? This is nonsense. If this will really happen, he might as well advertise for himself! In normal circumstances, they will tell you, “Mr. Client, do come and advertise in our newspaper. We have circulation of XX copies a day and statistic shown that we have X number of reader, ranging from what age to what age, with what kind of occupations. So I believe your advertisement to be highly exposed to this group of readers, and they are your targeted customers!”

Same goes to Search Engine Optimization. Again bear in mind, SEO is only assuring you in exposure but not sales conversion. High exposure can help to increase your sales tremendously. End of the day, whether you can get hold of your customers, it still boils down to how great you are in your business.

Have an Internet Marketing Plan
As I mentioned before, success is only meant for people who has good planning. If you simply do it, blindly do it, you will end up wasting your time and money but not getting anything.

After fact finding, you have knew what are your business needs, and also understood what expectation you can have for SEO, or online marketing, then now you need to select and plan.

If you are planning to have Search Engine Optimization, do get a reliable consultant, plan the effective keywords for yourself then the rest of the effort or maintenance is on the vendor side.

If you are running on Local Search Engine Optimization, what countries do you target? What is the most famous local search engine? General Google is the best in the world but there are also very strong local search engines like Baidu in China. Also please find out what is the requirement in order to be listed in that local search engine? For example in certain country, you need to register a company in their country or have a domain extension in that region to obtain better result in their local search engines.

If you are interested in directory listing, you basically will be listed amongst your competitor pool. It then leads to a higher risk of involving yourself into a price war. However, to certain industries, e.g. premium and gifts industry, where products are commonly standard and price is very competitive, then directory is a channel that should not be ignored. Well, some people like to shop for variety but some people are specific and clear to what they need. We cannot deny also some big organizations needs 2-3 quotations to compare before making a purchase. Even our mothers will compare the price of milk in different supermarkets!

If you are going for paid listing you need to plan your budget wisely, and also select your keywords wisely. Forecast the conversion rate then decide how long can you run the campaign.

If you thinking of free marketing maybe you can try Social Network Marketing like Facebook. Again, you need to understand your niche and do the right campaign to attract the right customer.

Mind Your Web Language

Technology is evolving too fast until people always forgot the basic. The best language to development your website, if you want to go for SEO campaign, is HTML. A lot of people will get shock when their consultant said this. “OMG, that’s too outdate. Can’t you have something more advance, like full flash or plenty of gift animation?” Oh no. Please don’t. Search Engine Crawler read neither images nor animation. If you display an image of a table, search engine crawler does not know that image is actually a table. So the best way is to explain it in text. You rather have comprehensive web content writing to precisely present your business, services and products rather than having full flash. It does not help at all in SEO moreover slow down your page loading time. Well, unless you enjoy starring at a loading bar.

Content Management System

I believe open source is now the very hot topic in town. With open source, everybody seems can be a programmer, or to run a IT business, because everything is free and what one needs is just to combine all up then sell. These people then charge you management fees, maintenance fees, so on and so forth. Well, what happen when you really need maintenance or support? I am sure you are not strange with the answer “sorry, this is fixed and we are not able to modify”. Then you are forced to accept what you paid for. My advice is to spend a little bit more and look for in-house developed systems.  Well we should appreciate the programmer and the programmer needs to eat too. At least they care what you need, able to tailor-made to your requirements, and even if you need any maintenance, system upgrade or technical support, you are guaranteed served well because you are dealing with the programmer who develop your system. Be aware if your CMS comes with search engine friendly feature. CMS that comes with search engine friendly feature allows you to key in Meta text, Meta description and Meta keywords yourself.

Well in general I guess these are some basic areas where business owners always overlooked in running an SEO campaign. So, if you care of your business, and I believe you do, please do some fact findings plan smart in your SEO campaign. You do not need to do it hands on, but at least when you communicate with your consultant; you know what they are talking about. .

Select the right channel, attract the right customers. We channel the right prospects to you.