I have been reading for quite some time arguing about whether SEO is dead…will be dead…has already died..and i cant understand why they all want to kill it!

Well it cannot die and its immortal! : P How can it die? Even if Google says that in the first page of their search results it will be only be paid results, there will be always a bunch of companies trying to figure out how they are going to be on second page and get hits.

SEO for company is essential as breathing…You can create the most fancy sites that you want and you can put as many flash images and pictures on them , but essentially the customer will always be looking for content and good content that he can read and can answer the question he first put on the search engine before he reached your site.

Because that is what Search Engines are doing essentially…they are answering questions…

When Nick Garner first introduced me the concept of SEO  4 years ago he told me one basic thing…”Think as your customer, what your customer is looking. And what he might be searching in search engines?” That’s exactly what it is..

How can you expect to have a lot of visitors from Search Engines that you can convert when you don’t have quality content that will satisfy their needs? It’s the same like tweeter, facebook and all the social media sites. How can you expect to have quality followers/fans if you are not interacting with them and getting closer with them.

Optimizing a site is an investment that –like all investments- needs time and a small amount of capital. However, after some time you realize the importance of that investment.

Ofcourse there are other things that you can always do to optimize your site and content its just a small part but it’s a start. Lets get over the fact whether SEO is dead or will die or whatever and lets just work on finding the best way to work on those sites.

I was really pleased today when i saw a really nice presentation from Nick Garner explaining all the basic tools for SEO using wordpress. What pluggin’s you should use, type of content, getting links, all the information are there…all you have to do is pick them up and start reading.

Check the presentation for WordPress for SEO

p.s. its been really difficult blogging in the past few months due to work  and even more now that i came back after holidays in Greece…But the rainy London will help my mood i guess a little bit more. J

What I really like the most about SEO is all the graphs and the analysis. Looking at them and taking as much info as possible for the progress of our project. Google Analytics gives you a lot of info and graphs that you can analyze and hopefully learn a thing or two about your customers and the people that are visiting your site.

Checking out the visits that the official blog of Betfair for the Greek Department had from Search engines we can see this following graph.

We started to press for proper link Building in the Greek Blog after mid-July.  Until then we did rank really good in Search but we had some really few peaks depending on the events that were going on every month. More characteristic was May 16 when the last Eurovision contest held in Moscow. The competition is really famous in Greece (for some weird reason) and a lot of people watch it. We knew about that posting a lot of articles regarding that with separate category on the blog. It wasn’t too difficult to rank high.

However, the really interesting starts after September when the link building starts to kick in. Its obvious in the graph that it has affected the visitors and you can see the graph rising and still heading up…

The region is really “new” on internet and search engines and people search for everything on Google. The really funny part was when I tried to check more specifically the date 28 January where we had our highest peak.

These are the Google analytics with the keywords that people used to find us that day.

Keywords Google Analytics

You notice anything? The word “spread” is everywhere. Well…if you are reading a little bit this time of the year the news, you should have read about the economic crisis in the world and especially how that has affected my home country Greece.

Everywhere in the news right now are talking about “Spreads” , “bonds” and other stuff that has affected the Greek economy. “The global economic downturn, and extensive government spending to fight it, have led to major fiscal problems in Europe, especially for less-dynamic economies like Greece Portugal, Ireland and Spain”

So…what more natural than everyone going to the net and try to learn what those terms mean? That’s was exactly what they tried to do….and they did it. Making queries about “what is spread” brought the Greek blog really high. The reason was that we have a lot of articles and specific categories explaining those terms for “Spread betting” for our tradefair company in Betfair. Also the fact that Greece is a new country on the internet world and there is insufficient amount of Greek sites that could have explanation about the query helped us rank in the first page.

Google.gr results for "what is spread?" query

So its easy to guess that articles with good content and using the correct words could attract visitors any possible day. As a webmaster of the Greek blog I am interested in both attracting visitors and converting them to funded accounts. Stoixima.betfair.gr has almost close to 60% conversion rate. However, that day…the important thing was that out of nothing…the blog manage to attract attention for –almost- free and that’s the power of SEO….

The people most probably didn’t found exactly what they were looking for. However, that is not our mistake. It may had as a result to mess up the conversion rate but we did won some visitors and the registrations at that day were quite good. mainly because we were all ready explaining in search results what they were about to read in the article.

Take a look at the search engine optimisation success map.

The plan is fairly easy even if at first glance it looks like the most complicated thing you have ever seen but its not..

It all starts from SEO planning, defining what you want to do and analyzing your targets. Index coverage refers to the sites position towards the search engine result pages. (SERP’S) Analyzing the position you are will help you in the next steps.

Number 3 on the list is On Site Optimisation (which is my favourite) where you can be as creative as you can. Analyzing all the previous steps, copywriting, keywords ect ect all comes over here.  When you are sure about that then you can go to link building which is one of the basic things that drives traffic

All these are summarized again in 5.Seo Process. Conversion efficiency is something that is last on the map but I believe should be checked all the time together with On Page Optimisation. Things change in the Search Engines world every day so you have to continually monitor the efficiency of your strategy and change it accordingly.

Following these things isn’t assuring you success but you are 95% close to that….ok maybe 99% to be more accurate..

There are a lot of nice articles over there describing what can you do with SEO and how you can make it to be more effective. The picture you can find it in the  free version of the e-consultancy SEO best practice guide and you can buy if you want the full version.

In addition to all that, dont forget also the social media which are really famous in our time.  Many have a strong disbelief about whether social media can really improve the position of a company and whether they can bring profits. Well, Clay McDaniel in Mashable has a really nice article regarding 5 tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest.

Take a look at it. It may bring up some ideas.

The way this report was created was really simple according to fb. They started by looking at how many times each phrase with length from one-to-four words occurred in U.S. Facebook status updates, then they computed the rate at which each phrase occurred in 2009 compared to 2008. Not difficult.

Did it brought any important results though?

Well the most important think the Americans are saying in facebook according to fb itself is…. (drums) The Facebook applications! Farmville and Farm Town at its best… Well I couldn’t expect anything less…

2^nd place is an interesting site that I have to admit I have never heard it before.. FML.  Apparently it’s a site that everyone can go and say all the unfortunate situations that had in his life and people can click and tell him that he deserved it or not….Funny idea!

From there on Facebooks generalises and tries to categorizes all the updates in different categories.

The only important things that I could find on the data they released was the fact that “swine flu” had become more important in people before it actually peaked as a disease around the world showing with that way the importance of media around the world as they set up trends.

In generall I think fb was afraid to realise more real stats regarding important subjects. It would be important to see what people in US think about  for subjects like the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, the Financial Crisis, the Climate and the Green House effect. Where are all this subjects? Americans don’t talk about them at all?

Instead of these subjects the Facebook data team said that the 15^th more important trend of the year was …and I quote :

“15 – I
Specific words: I, is

Until March of 2009, people updated their status in a box that appeared next to their name on the home page and, consequently, many updates started with the word “is.” Once that box no longer was shown next to people’s name, the usage of “is” dropped off dramatically and usage of “I” doubled almost overnight. Prior to March of 2009, “is” represented about 9 percent of all words in status updates. With the change in interface, it remained high in absolute terms, but dropped all the way to about 1.5 percent recently while “I” increased from 1 percent to about 2.5 percent.”

So am i wrong ? I think they can dig up a little bit further…

The multi billionaire Australian has seen recently a lot of his media to report significant losses of revenue.  The whole landscape is changing and now more people prefer to read the news on the internet rather than buying newspapers.  As he says  there are various sites that post the news of his media channels and making money out of it.

“The people who just simply pick up everything and run with it, and steal our stories. We say they steal our stories — they just take them without payment. There’s Google, there’s Microsoft, Ask.com … there’s a whole lot of people.”

check out the interview in -how ironic- youtube

So  ok, Mr Murdoch is targeting google. Rumours came that his company News Corp is in talks with Microsoft for an exclusive deal .

Well doing some research and reading articles of some experienced seo/marketing people I think I will have to agree with Michael Gray’s opinion. In his own words :

“ think this entire thing is saber rattling on both sides and that Murdoch really just wants a “piece of the action.” I don’t think he wants the Wall Street Journal to be out of the index any more than Google is being flippant about whether they are in the index or not. “

There are a lot of money in stake and everyone has realised (or started to realise) the potential that exist in the online world. However, taking your media channels out of the biggest search engine of the world is a move that needs “balls”. As Jeff Jarvis said on his blog, Rupert has but he doesn’t believe he will eventually do it, and neither do i.

WSJ will lose 25% of its inbound web traffic if they leave Google search resulting in lower visits and lower interest from the advertising companies. On the other hand those people that are using Google would have other interesting news sites to look which would offer them the same value.  So generally, no I don’t think that Rupert Murdoch is trying to leave google and if he finally does that it will be a big and most probably the most vital mistake that he will make regarding his media companies.

I believe that is just another chess move in the game he plays with Google. We shouldn’t forget that next year he will have to re-negotiate the deal he has with them to have the sole right to handle search and place ads on MySpace since 2006. The deal cost $900 million dollars then but now the social network site has come second to facebook loosing customers…

I think the problem is that companies do not understand the new media and how to exploit them. That’s why we have all those fights that don’t have any real reason….well except money…

Having viewers paying to read the news on your site will not get you anywhere especially on a time where internet users have got used to get everything for free. The best thing is to get some experts and try to optimize your site and taking advantage of the large amount of visitors that google (or any search engine) is sending to you. Bring some new ideas and add to your site value that will keep your visitors for more time… that’s what internet users want…and if they don’t find it they go back to google and click to the next choice…

Its an endless fight that just started and everyone are playing there cards. It is just a matter of who will blink first. But Did Goggle just blink?

Goggle just announced in the official blog that it will give more control to the publishers. Basically readers will be able to click to the articles of paid news sites only 5 times per day before they will be directed to subscription page.

That is one move that gives something to Rupert Murdoch so we have to say that he managed to get something out of google….but nothing much I would say…

On the contrary I believe it’s a move from google trying to prove to the world that they are not the big “devil” some are trying to make…..

The biggest mistake that Microsoft made during there time of growth was that they didn’t care about what people said. The result was that everyone were accusing Microsoft and Bill Gates for everything….and that is something that –in my personal opinion- google doesn’t want and try to avoid…

one thing is for sure…there will be more parts in this story..

Υοutube

In Wednesday google announced in its official blog that the Iraqi government will have a dedicated youtube channel in youtube.com/iraqigov . It’s a really an interesting addition to the channel that shows the efforts of google to increase the global influence of the site and show the potential uses of such a media.

take a look at the video of the official announcement

It wasn’t no long time ago when there were article on the press about the plans of google to increase the potential incomes from the site. Apparently until now even if the site has a huge amount of interest from the public and an increasing traffic, didn’t manage to generate the appropriate amount of revenue until now.

Taking out the copyrights issue as a marketer I think youtube gives a really good opportunity to promote your company and provide info to your customers.  Provided that you use the right videos it’s a matter of time to attract the right customers. Its my personal belief that in the next few months they will try to increase the community factor in youtube trying to bring it closer to other social media….and they have good chances to succeed that…

In the next few months youtube will be one of the social media sites i will be focusing in the marketing of betfair.gr . I think it’s the right time to have a channel that will explain to people about the company and promote it in the same time.  Basically we have gathered for a long time now a lot of material that can be used for that purpose. Trading videos, explanotary and simple informational ones that would be interesting.

The goal is to make your videos appear as high as possible in all searches in youtube. The basic idea is the same as google, it takes time and effort but you can make it. The basic idea is to be as sincere as possible in the tags and updating regularly. I believe with regular promotion from all the other media (facebook, twitter, blog) it wont be long before the youtube page finds its regular viewers…