SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SEO COMPANY

Last Sunday, six crazy E-Webbers entered the City of Sydney Spring Cycle and helped raise $80,000 for the MS Society and Oncology Children’s Foundation!  Together under the team name Spokie Dokies they proudly cycled 84 kilometres (a whole 14 each) around Sydney Olympic Park starting at the Blaxland Riverside Park and ending up at the impressive Olympic Boulevard. Their team leader Irene, kept motivation high making sure no one was left behind or ended up in the Parramatta River.

After their hard work they relaxed in Homebush Park under the sun eating hot chips, chicken satay sticks and lamb rolls. After getting a little too comfortable they forgot about the ride back. Hesitation broke out particularly from Josephine who asked “can we catch a cab back?”

Relaxing after the cycle

To make it a little more exciting Jeff and Matt lead the way taking an unusual yet slightly more dangerous route over three gigantic green hills. The team wasn’t too sure if Matt and Jeff realised what goes up must come down, as Matt only fixed his bike brakes 5 minutes before the cycle. The rest of the team unfortunately knowing this watched through nervous eyes hoping their mechanic skills were slightly better than their cycling skills. Luckily they were, they flew down with beaming smiles and landed safely.

Matt on a mission!

The Spokie Dokies had a really great time and can’t wait for next year. They welcome anyone who is up for an adventure to join them in the 2010 Spring Cycle!

Jo, Leah and Irene

Josh, Matt and Jeff

Landing page optimisation is rapidly becoming the most powerful method that smart internet marketers use to build a lasting competitive advantage. Well optimised landing pages can help transform your business instantly and increase the success and conversion rate of your online marketing campaigns.

Tim Ash, the author of Landing Page Optimisation, teaches that you should not give a guess as to what your visitors want but should “turn your landing page into a dynamic laboratory to find out what your searches actually respond to”.

One interesting concept I picked up from Landing Page Optimisation is the understanding of awareness and attention. Awareness and attention is scarcely thought of in this fast paced world. Individuals are constantly bombarded with information from when they first step out on the street in the morning through to the exhausting last hours of the day. The pace of change constantly increases and can overwhelms us. The internet has given us access to a vast wealth of information, but has not  helped us to organise or make sense of it.

Herbet Simon noted in his book Interdisciplinary Computational and Social Scientist that “a wealth of information creates poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”.

Herrbet reinforces that it has become increasingly important for us to tap into the mind set of our visitors. Let’s be honest now, when people come to us their commitment is low, they may click away in any moment. They are looking for reassurance, recognition of their needs and a clear path to follow. In knowing this it will help to create a website/ landing page that people actually want to read, that catches our readers eye and encourages them to stay on, read, enquire or make a purchase.

So, for us to do this the experts say to be aware of the awareness rules:
•    If the visitor can’t find something easily, it does not exist;
•    If you emphasize too many items, concepts become diluted and all of them loose importance;
•    Any delays increase client irritation.

Think before building a landing page; consider all the external factors of an individual coming to your site, think about the amount of advertising they have already seen and your competitors. Make their life easier and address the questions they are coming to your site with. Build a landing page for them, keep it simple, test and modify and the rest will follow.

When optimising a website, it is easy to fall into a few negative traps. An article written by Jolina, from Online Marketing expresses how there are 5 prominent factors, which one can follow in order to avoid falling into these tricky traps and get the most out of your online advertising campaigns you are investing in.

Maintain open communication between your Web Developer and your SEO Client Manager

When building or redesigning a new website, huge benefit can be found in maintaining open communication with your SEO company. Your SEO company can help work with you to build a website which is enjoyed by your potential clients, portrays your brand, and has an SEO friendly back end system. Designing a new website is a team effort having both the web developer and the SEO team’s input will ensure your website looks great, is user friendly, converts business into leads and sales, all at the same time has great potential to get a lot of exposure within the search engines.

Stale content

When writing content the best way to satisfy and impress the search engines is to continually add fresh and unique content to your website. By doing this, Google sees that the website is being monitored, where up to date information is constantly being provided for the visitors. Website needs ongoing care and attention to stay proactive, for a company to maintain the leader in the industry they must have a dynamic and proactive website that is continually updated. Thinking literally, why would Google want to send their searches to a stale website that has not been updated for months opposed to a updated and fresh website? Google values websites who provide new content for the searches to read and will rank you accordingly. A stale website will only keep your website successful for the short term and will limit its potential to grow and become the leader in the long term stages of the website. Don’t let your competitors out write you or succeed you in key word phrases!

Engage in poor analytics packages

It is advised to run two analytics programs on your website with one of them being a Google Analytics program. Often websites have analytics packages which do not provide comprehensive data. In situations like this, if you have one or more packages, with one being Google Analytics, you have the opportunity to look at unique capabilities and observe the campaign from different angles. You can also look at the two packages and use the best data from each to help inform decisions. Also in the event of analytics loss you can then have back up data to ensure important information is not lost..

Focus on particular phrases

It is important not to get carried away with the desire to get a particular keyword ranking. Sometimes people determine the success of an online campaign by a particular phrase or keyword because they ‘think’ it is will increase business not because data will predict it will drive traffic. Therefore we should not cling onto a keyword for potential success. As you express your desire for a particular keyword to be ranking to your SEO firm they will want to achieve this for you, where ideally your SEO firm should be investing time and energy on rankings that will drive traffic and increase the overall success of the campaign.  Determining your success to only one keyword will limit your return and dilute your SEO campaign and potentially prevent you from achieving you campaign goals.

Limiting success factors

It is important to ensure your SEO, PPC, PR campaigns TV ads, pamphlet and any other marketing groups you are investing in are aware of each other. There are many ways each initiative can benefit and learn from the other, but if they do not communicate together exchange is unlikely to happen. For example, your PPC partner and your SEO partner should be in communication exchanging information such as, high converting key phrases. The information can benefit both campaigns and save time and money.

To keep the audience intrigued and to heighten the public interest in movies, television and news, You Tube and Warner Bros have arranged for short clips from Time Warner Proprieties, Warner Bros Entertainment and Turner Broadcasting System to be available on  You Tube.

This agreement unveiled last week  allows You Tube to show short clippings of television episodes, movies and news excerpts of what Time Warner and You Tube describe as “high quality short form content”. Some of the clips available will include CNN News Coverage, Cartoon Network Shows, Adult Swim animated, TNT dramas, Warner Bros Television productions like Gossip Girl, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and more.
Time Warner chairman and chief executive Jeff Bewkes is very excited about this joint business venture. “Our agreement with YouTube helps us expand the amount of our promotional content, animation and news that we already make available online,” Bewkes said.
“Working with YouTube, we expect to improve our ability to monetise this short-form content through new and creative advertising initiatives” he said.
YouTube co-founder and chief executive Chad Hurley is equally excited. “This partnership with Time Warner will provide our community with some of the most popular video content produced” said Hurley.
In 2006 Google Purchased You Tube for 2 billion Australian dollars, and have been searching for ways to translate its enormous popularity into a money making venture. This new deal with the US media and entertainment giant Time Warner is definitely a move towards this goal making You Tube the new comprehensive video destination.

Google is developing a new secret search engine technology, currently nicknamed Google Caffeine. Google introduced the new search engine technology on their company blog, and hinted that Caffeine could change the current way that search results are yielded. “It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing, speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results, but web developers and power searches (SEO professionals) might,” two engineers detailed, on the official company blog.

Google Caffeine represents the biggest alteration of the Google search engine in the past 5 years. In the interest of maintaining first page rankings and positions on Google search results the E-Web programmers are excited to see the changes that will be implemented and what tools will need to be created to maintain their client’s top rankings. The E-Web programmers have already noticed a few changes. Searching the keyword ‘dog’ on the old Google we receive 304,000,000 search results and on the new Google Caffeine (sandbox) we receive 355,000,000 results, more results are revealed in the same download time. The E-Web team have also noted the results are more accurate filtering out the spam websites from the user friendly and focused websites. Although the changes are evident, the E-Web programmers are confident in their ideas and SEO tools, it’s nothing they haven’t handled before.

Thirty of the Search Engine Marketing industries most esteemed professionals gathered last month for the first ever Google Versus E-Web Games Olympia at the Google head office in Pyrmont. The E-Web team arrived on a Friday night, all dressed in red, carrying cupcakes for the Google team. The competition constituted of a variety of games, including table tennis, foosball, Mario Kart, pool, ping-pong and Guitar Hero.

At the end of the exciting night, the winning trophy was awarded by Jon Day, the Agency Relationship Manager, to Irene Lee the Head of Paid Search Marketing. “This trophy represents a great night out at Google and a few late nights at the office, where we stayed back practicing Guitar Hero, our singing skills and our table tennis serves. Looking forward to having you guys (Google) over at E-Web soon” said Irene Lee.

The E-Web team was very excited at their invitation by Google to visit and participate in a few friendly games in the Google recreation room. “The E-Web team enjoys working closely with staff at Google as our companies share similar visions and office culture. When given the opportunity to extend this relationship on a social front, and demonstrate our superior gaming skills, we jumped at the challenge.” said Joshua Hay, COO of E-Web Marketing.

E-Web will be in training mode in preparation for the next exciting challenge, whether Google or any other company who wants to challenge them. They are always up for a fun gaming night!

For more information about the night and game results please visit the next post on the E-Web Company Blog!

Last month Google and E-Web team members watched in wonder as their team leaders Irene Lee, from E-Web and Jon Day from Google transformed what usually was an in-house gaming Friday night, to a spontaneous and exciting competition between both parties and friends.

After Google’s invitation, the E-Webbers were plotting and planning all week on how they could dominate and take home to the rest of the team in St Leonards the champion cup of the Google versus E-Web gaming night. All dressed in red t-shirts, with their personalised ping pong bats and Mario Kart remote controls we were (or maybe should I say appeared to look) ready for anything.

Our skills on Guitar Hero were E-Web’s strongest points of the night. With Jeff on the microphone as lead singer he sung (with incredible talent) Michael Jackson’s Beat It. He tied the knot and took home first place when he brought his moves to the table (literally) featuring the Moon walk and split double jump. There were a few rumours going around that we won by default (due to Google not having a lead singer) but we didn’t let Jeff hear about that!

Ben and Irene showed extreme skill in Mario Kart winning an entire 2 games out of 20! But we can’t really compare our true skill in this area because Michael J. Fox the Google Agency Team Leader admitted he practices Mario Kart about 4 hours a day!

The real aptitude laid with Gary and Josh on the gigantic Google Foosball table where E-Web won 10-8 and again on table tennis with Fung, Roberto and Bhavesh as their side kicks.

Cathy and the Google Wave team showed great skill on the foosball table too and beat Forz and I 10 -3. Luckily we scored a few points because if it the score was 10 -0 we would have had to crawl under the Foosball table in our birthday suits (Google Rules)!

Don’t know how it happened but E-Web managed to take home the champion cup, maybe the scoring was based on the best eater’s and drinkers of the night, or maybe it was a sympathy vote on Google’s behalf. But either way we were not going to challenge the end results.

The first Google versus E-Web Gaming Night will hopefully be the beginning of an exciting regular challenge. Maybe next time E-Web will have a bit of luck and some additional training where we will be able to take home the challenger cup out rightly!

Twitter is a communication platform that helps connect business and their customers. It can help a business act as an information portal to quickly up-to-date people interested in their company. It allows business to gather real time market intelligence and feedback and foster relationships between partners and customers or anyone who is interested about their work and business. As an individual user, you can Tweet to tell a company that you have had a great, or indifferent experience about their business, as well as learning about great offers and product deals.

When you combine tweets that are quick to write, easy to read, public, controlled by the recipient and exchangeable anywhere you have got a really powerful, real time communications medium.

You might be asking, so how do businesses use Twitter? Twitter connects you to your customers instantly in a way that was never before possible. For example, let’s say you are at work for a custom trailer manufacturer. If you search for your brand, you may find people talking bout how great the trailers are and sharing information about trailers and boats. Or you could find small complaints or queries that your customers would not intend to contact you about. You can find real valuable customer feedback that you could make the choice to respond and rectify or use for future reference and planning. It’s inevitable that others will offer bad feedback which you can turn around a bad situation and prevent bad publicity. It’s commonly known that listening and engaging with your services can ultimately lead to happier more satisfied clients and key product and service improvements.

Twitter isn’t just about the immediacy it also allows you to build long term relationships with customers, allowing you to have direct access to your customers and shrink the emotional distance. These factors can make Twitter an essential piece of your companies digital online business strategy.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent to specifically to encourage a certain action or prompt a specific result. The goal, copy and design of a landing page is to get your potential customers, clients, business partners or patients to take your desired action.

Below are a few example of various ways landing pages can be used with various traffic sources:
• Traffic is sent from a banner or graphic to a landing page designed to address the visitors needs;
• Traffic is sent via a link in an email to a landing page to encourage a purchase or action;
• Traffic is sent from a pay per click (PPC) campaign to multiple landing ages optimised to correspond with the keywords the searcher used.

Tips for writing a top landing page:

1. Make sure your landing page content matches exactly what they read to come there. Matching the language is a great trick as it keeps you visitors oriented and engaged, they were interested initially, that’s what made them click through, maintain their interest and answer their questions. This is by far the most important part of your landing page.

2. Provide a clear call to action. Tell you visitors what they need to do, and easily too. Use large telephone numbers and buttons that stand out, or links and enquiry forms that are user friendly and effortless to complete. You can use more than one call to action, give people the opportunity to call or email, whatever is easier for them. Remember, it’s all about a user friendly landing page, if aspects are too difficult you won’t hear from your potential visitors.

3. Write in second person. Use You marketing, people are interested in themselves and finding a solution to their own answers, no one wants to know about your company they want to know what your company can do for them.

4. Write clear persuasive copy, providing an answer or solution for the visitor, there is no need to write complicated clever sentences, simple and clear is best.

5. Keep your main paragraphs on point a logical progression from your headline banner and offer. Make sure you keep on track, don’t offer any other thoughts or services, you have your visitors hooked already because of a concept don’t diverge from this. Ever diversion is a potential conversion lost.

6. Keep you most important points at the beginning, as people are skim reading, make it easy for your visitor. Short paragraphs and bullet points are always great.

7. Make sure you compose the screen carefully, make note of where your call to action goes having call to action buttons above and below the fold (the scroll bar) is essential. This allows a visitor to be able to take action wherever they are on the screen.

Following these tips can improve your:

Conversion rate:
• A small increase of 1% in conversions can make a massive difference to your business.

Homepage abandonment rate (high bounce rate):
• How many people come to your landing page and leave? Like any page you have a short window of opportunity, utilise it!

Cost per sale:
• Divide your advertising costs by the amount of sales to calculate your average cost per sale. Look at your numbers and make your campaign work for you.

The Microsoft search engine Bing is now 5 weeks old and already has recorded over two million unique browsers. Yes, it is nowhere near Google or Yahoo but is definitely worth considering how our websites are appearing on Microsoft’s new site.

New figures show Bing has recorded 2.35 million unique browsers in Australia since its launch. Google recorded 9.52 million unique browsers, up from 9.1 million in May and 8.9, million in April. Yahoo7! Recorded 3.37 million unique browsers in June up from 3.23 million in May and 3.13 million in April.

Bing’s market share may be set to increase with Microsoft’s $80 million spend in marketing. Maybe Microsoft is right, is print advertising in magazines enough to build the idea that people need a decision engine- and that Bing is the solution they are after? Researchers believe either way it will be difficult for Bing to compete with Google, which currently accounts for 90% of Australian searches.

Just because there is a new product whether washing powder or bottled water and whoever calls them “new and improved” doesn’t mean consumers will abandon the brand that they already use and like. Bing faces this exact challenge when taking on Google. Google’s not broken, people like it, and there is no compelling reason for them to switch to Bing. Search is about comprehensiveness, freshness, scale and size it’s difficult for Bing to copy and emulate this. I feel searches are definitely not going to move to a different search engine just because it’s new, especially if it has inferior search algorithms and accuracy.

In summary, I don’t think we should be devoting out entire marketing budget to Bing just yet due to its small amount of visits and less accuracy than Google but it is well worth keeping your eye on it.