SEO predictions 2010—“Social-recommendations�...

The way data is “picked up” from various sources to give users the best data for search has changed over the years. In the beginning it used to be straight up blogs, which were supposed to be the best possible updated source of information for a company of person. That has evolved—we have information coming from so many sources, and now the search engines display the latest information from a wide array of sources.

The way Google and other search engines are trying to calculations for displaying the search results that are most relevant is probably going to be a subject of research in the coming year too.

As mentioned earlier, real time search is picking up, and personalized search is the main aim of doing that. The kind of metrics that are going to be impact the personal search experience has still to be confirmed. How the organic results will sort out? Will it be just based on what a user clicks through? Or will it just be based on the history of the users, or may be it will be a combination of everything. May be Google will track the clicks on the Adsense ads, who knows?

But the experimentation will be on in 2010 on these two fronts. As things move forward there will few things that will remain the same in SEO world:

• The top websites will remain on top
• Small businesses will concentrate on branding (more about this later)
• There is not going to be a simple rule book for SEO

Let’s keep our search lenses on all the time and see what happens in 2010. Btw it does take a month to realize that we are in 2010. When I started writing this piece, I started with “SEO predictions 2009”—I need to get over it!!

SEO predictions for 2010—Real time search will g...

With Twitter, facebook and other micro-blogging sites gaining popularity, Google has started including real-time information in the SERPs. Google took some time to get into the business, but now it has started playing with it, even though the initial search engine talks proved that Google real time search is a failure.

Yes, if you see the above results, you are certainly going to believe that the real time search is doing enough damage by getting results which were last uploaded on to the Internet, but this is just the beginning. The SEO gurus have censured Google for this and have handed over the game into the hands of some engineers, who, according to some, are responsible for putting it up altogether.

It isn’t about the fact that whether such results will confuse SEO experts, it is about the fact that it is natural for people to ask for latest information than the “best” information most of the times. That said, it is true that we are long way away from there.

It is a very natural for people to expect the latest Lil Wayne song when they hit the artist’s name. A song name, its small video along with some information can do wonders to search experience. I cannot believe people think it should be done away with. Although I understand the rationale behind the criticism for the real time search thing, but it will be surely one of the biggest areas of research in the year 2010.

SEO predictions for 2010...

First of all— A very happy new year to the readers of the blog. Talent Gurus has been trying to expand by getting into newer forms of outsourcing solutions, and we want the clients to get the best service from an informed company. And we believe in information is power, and hence we talk about the services in so much detail that even a layman can understand what’s up on the Internet.

As promised we are back to ponder upon some of the SEO PREDICTIONS for the year 2010. How Google and other companies are going to make search experience a natural phenomenon, remains to be seen, but we can be assured of some sweeping changes in how information will be processed by machines. I am not trying to sound sentimental about the whole change, but lots of our lives and earnings are dependent on how our industry will evolve over a period of time. So without any delay, let’s get on with it:

SEO PREDICTIONS FOR THE YEAR 2010

We will deal with each of the predictions in a series of blogs over the next fortnight.

1)      Real time search is gaining pace

2)      Twitter will break through newer grounds

3)      More customizations in personal search

4)      Google will still rule

5)      Page rank might become obsolete

6)      SEO spending will rise by proportions

7)      2010 will be year of conversion

8)      More and more queries will be natural language

We will deal with these one at a time over the next few days. Thanks a lot and Happy new year’s once again.

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.