29 May 2008

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.

27 May 2008

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...

23 May 2008

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

22 May 2008

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