Year in review—SEO– 2009 in Hindsight...

Alright, let us continue with few more predictions for 2009, and let us evaluate how much of what we would have predicted has turned out be true for this year.

Prediction 4:

• More and more Videos will be used to market the websites and products. As a result more Videos will become part of the search results, which online marketers would want to leverage. In 2009, a result with accompanying video will have about 50 times more chance of appearing in the results than the traditional webpage.

Convert or not? If companies asking for Social media optimizations services (youtube etc.) is any proof that video optimizations is continuing to be an important part of online marketing/SEO strategies.

Holds for 2010? Sure as heaven.

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Prediction 5:

• Blogs will become important part of your website. Interestingly there are still many major companies/businesses/people who still don’t endorse blog as a potential tool for interacting with the world on web. It is accepted by almost the entire major companies that without a blog a website and hence the activity surrounding your brand is pretty much dead. Blogging reflects the efforts of the companies to share and learn information (which is power). TG encourages all the top businesses to blog and become part of larger information sharing communities.

Convert or not? The required shift certainly seems to have started, but it seems that most of the small businesses are very reluctant towards blog. A blog is a small investment which leads to long time benefits. People visiting the website these days make sure to have a look at the blog. I guess the prediction was true, but blogging will pick up even more in coming year.

Holds for 2010? Already said that.

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Prediction 6:

• ROI tracking and analysis will gain momentum. As the economy is taking a fall, more and more metrics will be analyzed for making decisions and checking the ROI. What works and what don’t work online has to be backed up by facts, and tools that define and measure such metrics will play an important role.

Convert or not? Definitely a yes, Google and Yahoo have done lots of investment in making and upgrading the analytics too. The user generated content is now more than ever, and every savvy online marketer is using these tools to their advantage.

Holds for 2010? Not sure where the research is heading in this direction, but we will touch base with this in the predictions for 2010.

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These predictions were not facts, but they are way to measure our direction of thought. We will continue to update ourselves by keeping an eye on the latest in the online marketing world, but to predict and act is to be proactive in approach, and lots of businesses rather take action instead of waiting for reaction. We will continue our year in review series by writing down some predictions for the year 2010. Stay tuned!!

Year in review—SEO– 2009 in Hindsight...

One of the things even a novice in Internet Marketing would have predicted at the end of 2008 was the fact that more and more traditional marketing spending will move online at a rate more increasing than before. As told, the spending was expected to increase in organic SEO, and it has, and it will continue to do so (more in later posts in the series).

Ok, so as search engine marketers, there were few predictions that are mostly evident by the content of our blogs:

Prediction 1:

• Google will take a step closer to ruling this world: kidding, no bet I am not, we at TG realize the importance of knowing how Google is changing, and that is why we watch the search engine behavior closely, some examples are here, here, and here. Point being, we all use Google for search, so more and more of SEO world will try to learn the Google insides more than ever.

Convert or not? Definitely yes, for the reasons just mentioned above.

Holds for 2010? Definitely go. Let’s hold this till next year.

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Prediction 2:

• Lots of small businesses will try to enter SEO business. Lots of them will try to enter the business just to make money, and because they are expecting losses in other departments. But as they say, big fish will always eat the small fish.

Convert or not? Yes, the acquisitions in the industry have been astounding in number.

Holds for 2010? There are so many new companies coming up with technology in the s            same areas (e.g. PPC), that they are bound to be merges to create more space in the market.

Prediction 3:

• More money will be spent on SEO and SMO. Lots of people will realize the importance of organic SEO in their campaigns, and they will continue to invest more in this area.

Convert or not? Yes, there is lots of data about the same on the web. Fact remains that tried and tested methodologies like link building, good content, small codes, smart design will always remain the basic priority of any SEO optimizer.

Holds for 2010? Kudos (More data and analysis on this later).

to be continued

Year in Review—Online marketing in hindsight...

As the market demands fell, businesses looked towards newer ways of selling their business. Internet was the obvious choice, everybody look towards it, the small and medium sized businesses in particular. That is where companies like us came in to sell our services. As more and more companies started venturing to SEM and SEO, the chunk of pie that everybody got, got smaller and smaller. The shrinking budgets meant that the marketers got smarter and we as SEO services providers faced ever so harder times in trying to convince the marketers to spend a bit of their money.

E.g. the people who want SEM of their websites do not know that 80% of the clicks happen through organic results. Yet, 80% of the money that is spent on SEM goes to PPC and other advertising. In-exposure to facts can be costly to those who know it too, because that is exactly what happened in 2009, where a multitude of companies came into SEO field and promised things that lured lots of businesses.

What’s my point?

I am not saying that PPC is not worth it, it just means that the better companies always know how to balance the budget that is dedicated to SEO and the amount that is spend on PPC and other paid advertisements.

Many had predicted that SEO would be dead by the end of 2009, but isn’t, the traditional SEO is here to stay, and I admit my foolhardy predictions a year ago. In some ways, I would have been correct if I had said that SEO would be dead but for organic search engine results marketing—would you agree that the search engine business is going in that direction?

Web remains the most effective way to market business these days because that is where the people are: our moms and dads are on the Internet, the college guys are on the Facebook, and people like us are always on there!!

So many of the things happen, and we tend to discuss lots of things in the hindsight, and so let us see what are the things we would have easily predicted in the beginning of the year from the search engine marketers perspective.

….to be continued

Look out for anything fishy during the New Year’...

We as Virtual assistants try to save money for the clients’, which means we are trying to our best to keep the client’s business running smoothly. Time to time we do periodical review of problems faced by the clients. After all, Virtual assistants work on one to one basis, it means that we are concerned about the clients’ and their operations.

Lots of scams and fishy activities go around the Christmas and the New Year’s time, when people are trying to do all kinds of promotions just to get your credit card number in some way or another. Lots of our clients have reported things like getting emails from Pay pal, or other major companies trying to offer money, or even a jackpot sometimes!!

So here are few tips that might keep your accounts safe and will keep you festive season hassle free:

• All the emails which are not personally addressed to you and talk about some specific things which are related to you should be just marked as spam. Banks will rarely email you, so if you are getting emails and then follow up emails for something—better stay out of it.
• Check the email address, there are always variation of email addresses that are used by the spammers and the scammers. A no-reply email address is definitely a good runner in such cases.
• Always read the hyperlinks in the email. DO NOT click them directly, instead place the mouse on the hyperlinks and try to find the site that the link is pointing to.
• Above all, the content in the email will be of suspicious nature. Ask yourself if you would ever write such an email to somebody you don’t know?

Have a great Christmas and New Years from the entire TG’s VA family.

How much are your Virtual assistants taxing you?...

One of the most important things you would want to consider when you decide that virtual assistants can help to save you some time and money—is that they really do so? Evaluating the various options takes a little thought depending on how much money you want to spend.

This economy makes our job even more difficult, since we have to decide how much you want to work and how much you want to make? Some of the assistants are tempted to lower the prices to adjust to the economy and help the businesses, but the approach might compromise the quality. All these things usually become the part of something called a business plan when we are ready with the business model. There are various things we as Virtual assistant providers have to ponder upon when we are trying to provide high quality services at competitive prices:

• We have to pay the bills in the end; obviously, we cannot keep your prices less than the desk space.
• We are required to pay for the entire resources like Internet, FAX, phone, so we have to make sure that we cover all the expenses
• We have to pay for our marketing expenses: The website, advertisements, and the personals charge associated with the same.

At the end of it, the prices you charge are dependent on the kind of services you provide. If you are providing services that demand specialized skills, a certification, then you might consider charging accordingly.

Can I keep my charges low at the beginning and raise my rates as I do well?

That’s a good question; it is always difficult to raise the prices with your existing or the new clients who is referred to you by another business. Well, the price may be raised gradually, over a period of time, by trying to provide more services and covering up the price of other services that we are selling for lower prices.

Stay tuned for some more analysis of this new business that many have been trying to venture into.

Google continues to make news…...

Google continues to make news…

…and this time with the integration of Google Blogger with the Amazon Associates. This just means that people can make some more bread by promoting the products placed on Amazon site, and yes without having to pay money for hosting a site.

Google blogger is still a widely used platform for blogging in spite of threat from Wordpress. People will welcome this change, as this monetization option will allow them a better commission from the Amazon, which is now integrated with the Google ad sense program.

It is easy to set it up even for the non-webmasters, we just have to register for the program and start using the affiliate program for your blog. Business strategy wise, this is move by Amazon to widen its territory, meaning both the parties and the people will benefit from this.

If you accidentally drop by this blog, don’t forget to tell us how much money you have already from this!!!

Trends in search volumes for Virtual assistants...

I guess every business relies on facts and figures, some of them more than others. The idea of Virtual assistants is relatively new concept that is still exploring the available market space.  As the recession-struck year is about to end, I guess one would expect that lots of businesses (e.s.p. the small and medium sized) would have capitalized the chance to offshore some of their tedious work to less expensive regions of the world.

As the graph suggests, the volume of searches reached peak levels two times in the year. May be the search volumes (and hence the demand for professionals) peak whenever companies venture out more, and seek to unload their work to other companies. Apart from that, the search volume has pretty remained the constant through out the year, and a little drop towards the end is something easily explainable (as the businesses wrap up their yearly cycle).

Interestingly Philippines have most of the searches for the same keyword. One wonders if people there are actually providing Virtual assistants services, or seeking services. Philippines has become one of the largest exporters of IT talent, and hence the results are not surprising at all. In U.S, the assistant services are gaining pace as indicated by the search volumes of Houston, Denver, Miami and San Francisco areas.

Let us keep an eye on the search trends as we break in to the new year, and global businesses are flattening more and more, one would expect this new form of business to gain rapid strides in the future.

What are Virtual business solutions anyway?...

Do you sometimes feel any of the following?

• Do you think your business is running you instead of you running the business?
• Do you sometimes wonder if someone could help you with all the tedious work that keeps you running off the track?
• But do you budge because you think the thing will cost you a fortune?

Well this is what Lawrence from Sunnyvale had to say about it:

“I felt it was only the Wall Street journal executives who are capable of availing a service like this, but finally, I came across the concept of virtual business assistants. I was a bit skeptical to start, but I can advice everyone to give the idea a thought”.

The situation of Lawrence is not very different—There are countless small things that we spend our time on everyday, some of them are:

• Reading your own documents
• Find the papers on which you made notes
• Tracking your expenses
• Remembering who you were supposed to call
• Paying the bills
• Planning a business or personal tour
• Backups of important documents

Well, now you can just email or call someone and say “can you please do this?”

It is not about the free time, it is what you do with the free time that counts. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have your stuff taken care off by someone else while you do the real business?

Time-sourcing is the order of the day; why not take advantage of it when it is available?

We have recently started the services, and the response has been better than good, is your business ready to go virtual?

Google tweaks—affects your SEO/SEM efforts...

Google is already making sweeping changes to its algorithm in an effort to make the user search experience better. Now, they have introduced a new search parameter that will be taken into account when it decides which site is better one to be promoted up the order—the page load speed.

It makes perfect sense that Google acknowledges the fact that user experience is time and again hampered by sites that have many features and takes ample time to load at the first place. I personally don’t like sites which take forever to load, I want my information and I want it quickly. Many webmasters  wondering why the their sites bounce rates are so high might want to rethink their site structures and take care of the site loading time in the future (now they have another incentive for doing so!!)

If you’re wondering how you can quantify the “magic-speed” factor, then here is the link to the tool that Google has put up for install:

The Page speed Tool

The tool clearly tells us about how well our site is performing when compared to other sites.

Another important factor that will play important role in your SEO campaign is ‘Personalized search’. It necessarily means that all the user generated content that Google is collecting all this while will now be used to rank the pages that show up in the search engine.

It will be interesting to see how much change they make to the site rank depending on these factors. Also, it is important to note that very big sites have got lot of data to load, e.g. Amazon, do you think Google will lower the page rank for Amazon user by user?

Browsers tools for SEO...

There are many browser plugins (esp. for Mozilla) to help SEO analysts. The browsers’ becoming more intelligent has lead to browsers highlighting lots of data that is useful when using many of the SEO tools. SEO tools can be used for variety of analysis, depending on the features one is looking for.

Some of the features that an SEO analyst should be looking for in SEO browser based tools are:

• Meta data report
• Analysis of robot.txt
• Lists of all the internal links
• List of all the external links
• Number of words
• Number of images in the site
• JavaScript elements
• Information about the cookies
• Source code View
• Link checker

There are varieties of tools that will serve the above purposes, but the top three tools that would be worth looking into are:

http://whois.domaintools.com/

http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/se-spider.html

http://www.seo-browser.com/

All the above three tools have different strengths, using only one of them might not serve the purpose entirely. For e.g. one might be better for server and Registrar info, one might be better for purpose of analyzing the code, and something like SEObrowser tool might be better for giving the site a quick health check.