Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘Search Engine Marketing’ Category

With the anticipated launch of Google ’s Caffeine in the New Year and the focus on real time  and personalised search, 2010 is promising to be a nail biting  time for webmasters.  Here are a few tips to maintain your rankings in 2010:

1) Website load time.  In 2010 website load time will be a critical factor in determining which sites rank at the top of Google’s search results.  Ensure your site loads quickly and that it does not have any broken links.  Use tools such as  this and check against the top sites ranking for your keyword.  Ensure that your site’s loadtime is better than theirs.

2) Brank visibility.  2010 will also take into account your brand’s visibility on the net.  Make sure you optimise your social media assets such as your Twitter profile, your Facbook page , Flickr , LinkedIn and YouTube.

3) Real Time search.  Google and Bing recently paid 15 and 10 million dollars to index Twitter.  This was done primarily due to the fact that real time search will be an important factor in 2010.  Ensure that you produce enough content that can keep your social profiles active.

4) Universal Search.  Universal results or bleneded results will become even more prominent in 2010.  We’ve already started seeing the effect of Universal results in 2009 but 2010 promises to be the year when these results will become more of the norm.  Ensure you invest in multimedia content such as images, videos and news.

5) Personalised Search.  Google recently announced that it has switched it’s default search results to “personalised”.  With this being the case, ensure that your site is optimised to rank for the various keywords in your consumers buying cycle.  Also ensure that your site is user friendly in order to decrease bounce rates.  Google will be keeping an eye on bounce/click through rates in 2010.

In addition to the above, make sure that you follow all the basic SEO best practice techniques as recommended by the main search engines.

Happy Holidays!

On it’s official Adwords blog Google has announced Interest-based ads, a new advetising model that serves ads based on what a user has previously viewed in their browser. 

This, according to Google will allow them to serve better targeted ads to users of their network including YouTube.  But how does this fair in terms of privacy concerns? 

Google has officially stated it’s plan to combat the privacy issues arising from such advertising model by allowing users to opt out of such model.  This can be done by installing a browser “plugin” that controls whether or not internet users wants to participate in such a programme, but is this enough?

Not according to many webmasters who feel that Google’s new interest-based ad model, while in alignment with their objective of increasing click through rates of their ads, is a huge blow to online privacy efforts.

I for one feel that Google is right in trying to maximise returns from it’s cash cow (Adwords) and the introduction of interest based ads will do just that.  However, the idea that you would need to download a plugin and clear your browser cache in order to safeguard your privacy disqualifies many non-techie internet users who will be unable to understand how to do this let alone even know what a “plugin” is. 

Will interest-based ads succeed? Sure they will.  Will Google fair well out of all of this?  Sure it will.  Will advertisers be happy?  Definitely.  Will internet users complain?  ofcourse they won’t, that is until internet privacy becomes more of a top level priority for governments around the World.

There is no denying it, the credit crunch is upon us, it’s severe and for the foreseeable future, its here to stay.  Everyone is tightening their belts to get though it and so must advertisers.  How do you “tighten your belt” as a PPC advertiser?  Follow these 5 simple PPC optimisation tips.    

1. Focus your ad copy on low prices, value and savings

2. Create very targeted and relevant ad groups

3. Trim the fat, don’t waste money on non-converting keywords

4. Improve your site’s usability and conversion points, make it simple for customers to buy from you.

5. Focus your budget on high-performing ads and keywords

The above tips should not only be used during a recession, they should be best practices to be used all the time (unless you’re using PPC for branding purposes).

By following the above simple tips, you’ll ensure that your PPC budget goes further.  Improvements in your ROI will soon follow!

Have you added a favicon to your site?  If you haven’t then this post will guide you through the simple process.  But before I start, let me explain what a favicon is.  A favicon is the little icon that shows up in the browser and tabs of your computer (depicted below).  It can distinguish your site from the masses by adding that special touch.

So how do you go about creating your favicon?  Simple, follow the following few steps:

1. Go to  http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

2. Create the favicon as instructed.

3. save it to your desktop

4. upload it to the root of your site (where the index page lies)

5. In the head section of your html add the following code:  <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>

Done!  You now have your very own Favicon!  Enjoy!

Do you monitor and manage  your company’s reputation online?  If you don’t then this post is a good place to start. 

Long are the days when companies were in control of their brands reputation by controling what messages their consumers are exposed  to.  The internet has changed all that, and today, with the internet penetrating more and more homes,  the tides have turned in favour of the consumer.

Today, internet users can  “virtually” go to a number of forums, blogs and social networks and speak freely about their experiences with your brand or service.  In an ideal world you’d like them to speak positively about your brand but are you really in control of that? Well no.  This is where reputation management plays a very important role.

So how do you go about managing your reputation?  Follow these three simple step:

1) Define Scope

Before you begin monitoring your brand’s online reputation, you will need to know what you’re monitoring.  I suggest you brainstorm the various areas of your business and categorise them.  Examples of reputation management categories can include:

• Brands/Services:

• Competitors

• Industry

• Employees (current and ex)

2) Research

There are a number of free and commercial online tools and sites available to you as a brand owner, these include:

• technorati

• blogpulse

• Subscribe to the Google, Yahoo and MSN News RSS feeds for the keywords you want to monitor.

• Create Yahoo Pipes using keywords you want to monitor

3) Manage & Engage

Once you’ve begun monitoring your brand, its time to create a strategy to counter the negative effects of bad publicity and to capitalise on the effects of positive publicity.   Below are examples of ways to fend off negative publicity:

• Create a company blog that allows users to interact with your brand as opposed to going elsewhere to do the same

• If you provide news, make sure you’re indexed in the news section of the search engines.  There is a detailed process of how to do this for Google can be found in this official guide for google news inclusion

Hopefully your brand only gets good publicity but if it doesn’t I hope the above tips are enough of an inspiration to set you off on the highly important task of manging your brands reputation. Good luck!