National Positions University : President of National Positions USA, Bernard May, covers the top 10 trends affecting Internet Marketing, SEO and Social Media in the coming year. Internet Marketing in South Africa is booming and 2012 will continue to see rapid growth.
This Webinar covers a variety of critical topics and provides practical advice and examples to help boost your Search Engine Marketing efforts this year.
Top 10 Internet Marketing and SEO Trends 2012 – South Africa
There does not need to be any conflict between SEO and social media, but it is necessary to bear a few points in mind while you work to improve your presence on social media and what effect it will have on your SEO efforts.
Followers on Twitter vary in quality and it is important that you gather the better ones. In the same way that spam-laden and poor links can be detrimental to your SEO campaign, Twitter followers bearing spam will hamper it. There is no algorithm for Twitter profiles and followers in search engine results, yet if you go to the effort of creating a list of quality followers instead of a bigger collection of irrelevant contacts, your business will reap the benefits.
It is useful to cultivate followers who will retweet your messages. Search engines are more likely to regard information as useful if a greater number of users retweet it. A company who has a greater number of retweets, are more likely to appear prominently on search engines, all to the benefit of brand recognition.
A large number of Facebook fans is important, but then they have to interact with your Facebook page. The quality of interaction on your Facebook page will have an influence on your SEO campaign. If your brand receives positive reviews, it is an indication that you are on the right track. Search engines have started to track the comments and weigh the positive against the negative in the search results.
Unique content, everybody knows, is something every successful website needs, even more since the arrival of Google’s Panda update. Terrific content is well and good, but you need to optimize it to gain the best search engine position. If a search reveals that your content is being copied and pasted into other, unrelated websites, there are measures you can take.
It is counter-productive for your website if your content is being snaffled by other websites. It is unique no longer. You won’t be the sole authority anymore and will have to compete with other sites for content that belongs to you. This is exacerbated if the content concerns a product or service you’re offering. If the website that is using your information is also a competitor, you can lose customers. Sites using your content could even end above you in the search engine rankings, depending on their design and the number of their back links. You could end up being the loser. The search engine could even pick up on the duplicate content and hold you responsible for it. It will consider the content on your site as low grade and this will have a negative impact on your ranking.
There are measures you can take to safeguard your site against this type of piracy. It is not compulsory to carry a copyright notice, but if you do, you will pre-empt any attempt by the pirates to claim the content as their own. If you discover that your stuff is being used on other sites, it is best to go straight to the source to try and remedy the situation. Often all it takes is a reasonable request to remove the content. If they should resist, you can send a much sterner notice to the webhost and owner of the site to tell them to cease and desist. If they can’t supply provenance for the content, they are constrained to remove it. A lawyer could be the last resort. This could lead to legal action against the pirates and if they lose the case, they could be forced to pay restitution.
It is in the nature of the Internet for content to be duplicated on a large scale. Safeguarding your content against it, can take a lot of effort, but sometimes you won’t have any option. Your content is precious and can be the key to the success of your website and business. Don’t be the patsy that has to suffer lower rankings and lose customers. Look after your content. It is worth it.
Useful links:
The time it takes for your page to load, or page speed, is important. Recently Google’s Mark Cutts uploaded a video on his blog about the extent to which page speed affects SEO. Page speed, it transpires, is important, but how much does it matter and how do you increase it? Google does use page speed for your page’s overall ranking, but there are 200 other variables that also contribute. Only if your page speed is so sluggish that Google can’t access your page to rank it, does it become a priority in page ranking. That does not mean that page speed is unimportant in the SEO scheme of things.
An Internet user has an enormous number of choices in websites. You need to get as many visitors as possible choosing your site and spending as much time as possible on your website to get a good ranking. Therefore you need a properly designed website with loads of interesting information. The best content in the web, however, is of little value if the page takes too long to load. The most effective way to increase your page speed is to prune unnecessary coding and other media elements which can be distracting. You should make your site easy to navigate. While good content is crucial, it would be to little avail if the visitor has to trawl through a thicket of unnecessary content which slows down your page speed and will repel visitors.
Google has a nifty tool with analytics report that you can use to measure your site speed. Use this tool to find out which landing pages are slow, what the download speed is on different browsers and the difference in page speed in different locations.
This tool has a lot of benefits. If it turns out that your target audience is in an area with slower page speed or your site takes longer to download on a different browser, you can make valuable adjustments.
You can only concentrate on the things you can change. You can’t control everything that affects download speed. Factors beyond your control are Internet connection speed, how far the visitor’s computer is from your server and which browser they’re using. By streamlining your website and getting rid of unnecessary text, images and other media, more visitors will come to your site and they will stay longer. This will be reflected in your site rankings.
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-page-speed.html
Google now has a surprising number of country level domains – obvious ones like .co.za for local searches in South Africa but how about St Helena or an even smaller dot on the earth; Norfolk Island. This list is probably missing a few as Google expands its ecosystem ever further.
Local domains will have different Doodles according to that country. Here is a list of local domains which Google has created for your country.
Here is a SEO Tip for those that travel a lot: if you want to access www.google.com always in your browser and override the country specific domains.
Type in your browser address bar www.google.com/ncr
ncr stands for No Country Redirect and that will create a cookie in your browser then every time you access Google it will go to www.google.com
Anytime you can disable this by clearing out the cookies
There does not need to be any conflict between SEO and social media, but it is necessary to bear a few points in mind while you work to improve your presence on social media and what effect it will have on your SEO efforts.
Followers on Twitter vary in quality and it is important that you gather the better ones. In the same way that spam-laden and poor links can be detrimental to your SEO campaign, Twitter followers bearing spam will hamper it. There is no algorithm for Twitter profiles and followers in search engine results, yet if you go to the effort of creating a list of quality followers instead of a bigger collection of irrelevant contacts, your business will reap the benefits.
It is useful to cultivate followers who will retweet your messages. Search engines are more likely to regard information as useful if a greater number of users retweet it. A company who has a greater number of retweets, are more likely to appear prominently on search engines, all to the benefit of brand recognition.
A large number of Facebook fans is important, but then they have to interact with your Facebook page. The quality of interaction on your Facebook page will have an influence on your SEO campaign. If your brand receives positive reviews, it is an indication that you are on the right track. Search engines have started to track the comments and weigh the positive against the negative in the search results.
Your company’s SEO success utterly depends on a strategy of creating strong links. It is axiomatic that SEO stands on three legs: Onsite optimization, content and linking.
Linking is crucial because search engines like Google use it to gauge how popular your site is. Google will consider your website very popular if thousands of websites send inbound links to your site. The web is, in fact, an enormous popularity contest.
Receiving a myriad of links inbound from other sites is crucial to get a high rank on Google, yet your linking strategy will demand more than just a deluge of inbound links. To be sure, well-chosen anchor texts contained in the links are the key to achieve a high ranking for your chosen keywords.
Many people seem confused about the value of anchor texts, so we decided to clear this up by producing a video which demonstrates why anchor texts are indispensable to your SEO success and why this will lead more potential customers to find your business online.
Googlers were in Johannesburg last week and kicked off a 2 day mutli-track conference covering AdWords, website optimiser, YouTube and presentations covering the entire Google ecosystem.
Below are a few (random!) take aways from the conference….. click here for full agenda and presentations
Google+ – Plans for further expansion (naturally!). The now have 40m users of Google+ in the past 100 days.
Focus on both SEO and SEM at the same time -
AdRank in AdWords = Max CPC x Quality Score = AdRank
Key Elements: Keyword Selection, Ad Text, Bids, Budgets
A recent SEO report 1 shows that 52% of searchers click on a search result found on the first page of Google. The report based on Bing vs. Google CTR 2 study shows a noticeable drop of Click Through Rates from previous studies. The question on SEO’s minds is why and how can we use this information to help our clients be one step ahead of their competitors.
This is the average number as a percentage of clicks on a listing over the impressions (amount the listing was shown). The Click Through Rate is a tangible way to measure if your listing is being successful. Remember this only shows percentage of the traffic going to your site via clicking on the listing and not the holy grail of internet marketing, a good conversion rate.
So the question why are the Click Through Rates dropping for organic searches overtime. The most obvious answer is that paid for advertisements through Google AdWords and Bing AdCenter have come a long way since banner advertisements and have become more relevant to what the searchers are looking for. The paid advertisements have become more intelligent and are better placed to take advantage of the search results.
Although dropping slowly, the Click Through Rate from organic searches on Google at 52% 2 is still way higher the Click Through Rate from AdWords at 3% 3, Facebook advertising at 0.5% 4 and banner advertisements at 0.3% 5. Organic search on Google are obviously very central to the long term survival of your internet marketing but as the above graph shows it is vital to get your listing on page one of Google for the right set of keywords and a more comprehensive SEO strategy is needed taking into account other SEO tools such as Google AdWords, Social Media advertisements and backlinks.
References
Google Fresh Content Update
Does Google prefer fresh content? The question was always hotly debated amongst SEO companies because Google always held its cards close to its chest.
Google tends to revamp their search engine algorithm often but recently it started to announce the updates as they happen. Earlier this year there was the Panda update which Google stated would have a 12% impact on search results. Last week Google announced it latest update with a huge emphasis of freshness of content which Amit Singhal, Google’s head of Search Quality, blog “Google’s new Freshness Update affects 35% of queries. It prioritizes recent and timely results will have a 35% impact on searches.” That is much higher than the 12% impact of the Panda update.
How does this affect your company’s website ranking? Search Engine Optimisation specialists are not sure how Google would decide how fresh your web page is but the one sure thing that is coming across is that new relevant content is important to Google. Blogs, social media and real time search results are coming up much higher up the ranking than ever before.
Not everyone has time to write new online content as they need to focus on their business at hand. That is where National Positions South Africa comes in. By being a global SEO company with resources that stretch across the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, India, Australia and South Africa, we can partner with you to look after your online marketing needs and provide fresh new content.
