Its been a while....back as an online marketing manager!

Yes its been a very long time since I last posted here, so if anybody's been waiting ....apologies!
Well, a lot of things have changed recently, I left my previous company and Im now Online Marketing Manager for PaypPoint.net (http://www.paypoint.net ). I wouldnt be working in marketing and SEO if i didnt tell you more about the company :) Basically, PayPoint.net is a payment service provider and they allow online merchants to process credit card payments on their online shop. Online payments is a fascinating industry, and definitely very competitive when it comes to SEO, so ive got my work cut out! But im definitely up for a challenge, and im currently really enjoying all the planning and project management that this new role gives me. i'll try and stick to a weekly post updated from now on!

DirectNews part 1

In one of my previous posts I briefly talked about DirectNews, saying this was a tool I was considering for my netlinking strategy.....and this time its official, my company is going ahead with it, so i'll be able to keep you updated on the progress of this project as I go along. To put it simply, DirectNews produces a minimum of 3 articles a day based on a chosen topic, with pre decided editorial guidelines and keywords. These articles are written by journalists and are automatically updating the customers site (ie my site in this case) via an xml feed.
So what this gives me is highly relevant and optimised content with anchor text, all ready to be found by search spiders! Well thats the theory and Im actually expecting quite a lot from this in terms of organic rankings since it will add 60 pages of keyword rich content to the site every month (and content is king in SEO as we all know!) It also comes with its own RSS feed, so I really hope that it ll help link popularity which is currently my number 1 optimisation problem.
I've been struggling recently to obtain decent results in my netlinking campaigns by taking the "can i have a link please" approach, but fresh and industry specific content should definitely help syndication. Sounds too good to be true? Lets wait and see
All of this however has a rather high cost so it's only advisable if you have a decent budget (minimum of £1000/month), but experience tells me that money usually brings results, or so I like to tell my boss, so lets hope im right on this one.

Link building, how does that work?

OK, first post written on my brand new shiny Asus eee pc 4g (in black!) I have to admit it, i love gadgets, and this is probably one of the coolest i've ever owned so far...
Today I'd like to talk about netlinking, or link building, or increasing link popularity (LP for the savvy people out there!)
Link building is something i've tried to get my head around for a while and I still havent found the perfect way to do it yet. It looks like if you dont have a consequent budget to support this activity, there is only a limited chance that you will be able to increase your rankings through this method. I know it is a crucial part of any SEO strategy, but it is also one of the most time consuming and trickiest. If you do not have the resources, both financial and physical, to do it, how can you increase your page rank? I've tried to get my sites listed in industry specific directories, but Google doesnt seem to care much for them....i've also tried to buy sponsored links on a hardware website on which my competitors are (and which google seems to consider as relevant for them) but somehow it had no impact on my rankings. So what next?
I did talk to a company called DirectNews recently, and they seem to have a pretty good answer with a service that offers you 3 optimised news articles a day , automatically updating your site via an xml feed. That plus RSS functionalities seem to be a killer combination....but as I said before, it all costs money, £1000 ($2000) a month. But at the moment, it still seems to be the best solution for me, so I'll have to wait until my company gives me the budget to set that up. If anybody knows a cheap, fast and reliable way to increase link popularity, please let me know!!!

Yahoo - Google, something to look forward to

In a surprising turn of events, Yahoo has agreed a paid search deal with Google today http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080613/tts-uk-yahoo-ca02f96.html. This means that Yahoo and Microsoft talks are finally over and that Google ads will now start appearing in yahoo (basically competing with yahoo bids).

If this is successful, it could put yahoo completely back in the picture not only for paid search but also for organic optimisation. To be honest, in the last year or so, I havent paid a great deal of attention to my sites rankings in Yahoo or MSN and almost focused only on Google, but this new deal could potentially change things. And who is to say that MSN is not going to come back with a "killer plan" to wipe competition on the search engine market (how long has everybody been expecting that to happen??!!)
More competiton would certainly be a good thing, at least for organic results, as I'm sure like me, many people get frustrated with Google rules and almost weekly changes in rankings...I do appreciate the fact that they re trying to improve search results, but I don't like being at the mercy of one company when my performance depends on their mood....

SEM strategy

Wow, the week just flew by and I didnt even get a chance to write a new post....things have been a bit hectic at work, but still, no excuse!
I've reached the point in my career where I've acquired enough knowledge about search engine marketing and online marketing to do most of my daily tasks almost instinctively, but there is a skill I still need to master....planning!
Working on many different online projects in 3 languages is great but it's very easy to forget some things or miss out a key element, hence the need for a clean SEM strategy.
The question is, how to organise it? The way I see it, any work I do on my company's websites is linked to SEO such as netlinking, adding new content, updating news. But SEO has become such a generic word that a strategy needs to be much more granular than this. There are so many things that need to be included that I'm always worried Im going to forget something, so if anybody has a definitive list of what an SEM/online marketing strategy should include, please send it to me!
I'll work on my strategy next week and post it here to get some feedback

White hat vs black hat SEO

How come that no matter how hard you work to optimise your websites, SEO results are very rarely the ones you expect?
I regularly work across 3 markets (UK, France and Spain) and my company's websites, while achieving decent results for my chosen keywords, still get lower rankings than some random small companies.
Granted I may not know everything there is to know about SEO, but after 6 years working in the industry, I think I've got enough knowledge to provide good results.
So this leads to the question of black hat vs white hat SEO...Despite all the announcements search engines have made about rules, guidelines and the ways they have to penalise sites who "cheat", I still think that there are a lot of unethical practices on the web, and this can only mean one thing, unfair competition.
Too many dodgy sites still escape penalties because search engines do not have the resources nor the will to look at all the spam reports they receive. So what do you do then I hear you ask?
Well in my opinion, the best method to do SEO is still the old fashioned way, with hard work! As frustrating as it is, I don't think there will ever such a thing as a clean internet where all websites do their SEO ethically....sad but true.

Sponsored links, what next?

With Google changing the policy on trademark bidding in May in uk and Ireland, advertisers are now left with a difficult choice, both financially and ethically: to bid or not to bid on competitors / trademarked brands?

Since Google's policy allows it, why not do it you could ask? Its all well and good, but with paid advertising costs already going through the roof, how can advertisers sustain yet another increase in their paid spend? It looks to me that this new policy will lead to a bidding war in which the only beneficiary will be Google itself with advertising revenues increasing even further...

Are advertisers going to benefit from this, highly unlikely....but running paid campaigns is currently unavoidable for any business wanting to maximise their online presence. We could then witness a win-lose scenario for advertisers and even more focus put on black hat SEO techniques by smaller companies not able to afford the cost of sponsored listings> Lets keep an eye on this in the next few months and see how everything turns out...

Help me.....I'm addicted to Facebook!

(Replace facebook with MySpace, Bebo or whatever social network you use at the moment)
As I logged in to my Facebook this morning, I realised that I had actually became addicted to it. I've been using it for a while now, but not until now did I think I'd login every single day....
Its all about web 2.0 and social media these days, and what other tools could give you the opportunity to learn everything about people without being called a stalker and promote your company at the same time?
So yes, I'm a Facebook addict, and shame of shame, I even use it for work (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ontrack-Data-Recovery/38853130789?ref=ts) and so does every other company. Even Nutella has more than 140,000 fans!
The question is, how to make the most of such a volatile website in a business context? Well I'm still trying to solve this, but a GreenLight webinar I attended this week gave me the beginning of an answer: syndication or the art of getting your content reproduced across the web while getting people's endorsement. More on this soon

Here we go....

Well it is finally happening, after 6 years working on the web, i've created my own blog! The way I see it, i'll post mostly about SEM, SEO, web2.0 and all of the great things I learn everyday as a web marketing specialist