16 Jun

Social Search Engines

To make any online marketing strategy garner the desired ROI, it is imperative that the right search engines be chosen to get maximum mileage out of the Online Marketing initiatives.

Thus far the obvious choice of most Online Marketers has been the big three Search Engines, viz Google, Yahoo and MSN, besides the smaller regional Search Engines like Looksmart, Altavista etc.

While most of these Search Engines have been successful in delivering relevant results for the searched query, they have lacked in objectivity.

A website can rank well by being Search Engine compliant, however, it may not always be the sought website. Eg. When the keyword oxygen is searched, only one website of the top ten gives relevant result and provides information about the element.

Though the Search Engines were successful in delivering the expected results, however the efficacy of the same appears to be diminishing. The inherent deficiency of the first generation Search Engines has been addressed by the emerging Social Search Engines (SSE).

SSEs like Google or Yahoo, Social Search Engines seek to produce relevant information for end users, but with an element of human mediation. While regular search engines are purely algorithmic, based on link and text-based computations, social search engines attach importance to book marking, tagging, voting, highlighting and other prejudicial indications of relative popularity of content among its consumers.

The Social Search Engine concept gained boom between 2004-2005. Yahoo MyWeb 1.0 (2004), for example, allowed users to save one favorite links and web pages in a searchable and sharable directory. Encouraged by its success, Yahoo introduced MyWeb 2.0 in 2005 that allows the users to form groups and expand their communities by sending invitations to people.

The prominent difference between a social search engine and a regular search engine is the expanse of human opinion that plays a pivotal role in concluding search results. While search engines place more value to the choices of web masters, social search engines organize their choices based on the consumers of the content. It has been established beyond doubt that Content is the King and any website that is content rich will always have loyal patrons who would further act like walking talking billboards of the respective website.

Social search engines also enable web masters to compete better. For example, social search engine Eurekster provides Swikis service that enables empowered websites to control the listings in their search results index to their benefit.
Another advantage that the social Search Engines have over the first generation search engines is that the SSE are specifically more fruitful when finding non-textual content, including photos, videos and music. Google is attempting to address this deficiency by introducing Google Universal Search.

From the marketers view point Social Search Engines offer the advantage of using videos to promote the website, while also leveraging their popularity among the visitors to their advantage.

Human mediated search engines is a rather novel concept that still is exploring its true dimensions. A major limitation that handicaps the actualization of the potential of this concept is its overt dependence on human element. The chief pitfall of human involvement is that it cannot cope up with the rapid pace of Internet propagation. In other words, the social search results cannot be expected to be as comprehensive as the results from regular search engines. Though in terms of delivering dynamic and relevant results.

However, the phenomenon of social search engine holds a lot of promise on the basis of the merit of the concept itself. The phenomenon is anticipated to take off with flying colors in the coming years, probably in conjunction with algorithmic search.

Watch out this space for more on the emerging web 2.0 Search Engines.

by parvesh | Internet Marketing |  3 Comments continue reading

17 May

The keyword research dilemma

One of the most common pitfalls while doing keyword research is to pick the keywords with the most search count as shown/predicted by various tools including but not limited to Overture, SEO Book and Wordtracker.

Often you would find that even though you achieve a good rank with the ultra-competitive keywords that you chose isn’t yielding the right right benefits.

There could be various reasons:

  • Google’s SERPs change with the datacenter the query is executed on and  also the location from where the search query was fired.
  • With the rise of SEO, people competititors researching for keywords often end  up looking for a keyword more than your target customer!

So – what could be done about it?

One of the first steps that you could do is to tweak your Traffic Analyzer to stop accounting for unwanted traffic. For instance, we have tweaked Google Analytics to exclude local traffic from India to give us a true picture of the outcome of the rankings achieved by our website.

Other steps revolve around choosing the right keywords and strategically planning to optimize your website for them.

I would cover them in my next post - until then, the aforementioned may be useful! 

by parvesh | Internet Marketing |  No Comments continue reading

16 May

Marketing over Internet – The Viability and the Risk

Advent of Internet has literally revolutionized the way business is done in the contemporary world. With millions of users across the globe surfing the World Wide Web for their day-to-day needs, activity and recreation, the potential of Internet as a market can easily be imagined.

The statistics reveal that more than 12 million websites are already over Internet and about one million new websites join in everyday! The figures reflect a stark picture of the extent of cut-throat competition prevailing over the medium. Doing business under the circumstances indeed needs a well-planned marketing strategy or a smart mix of strategies.

Marketing over Internet is a serious business in the present arena. Internet marketing comprises of many sophisticated and promising concepts, including Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Banner Advertising, E-Mail Marketing, Affiliate Marketing and Interactive Advertising. The span of Internet Marketing continues to evolve and expand, as the Internet marketers apply their tact and creativity to fight the ever-growing intense competition.

Of all, Search Engine Marketing is the most happening form of Internet marketing. It focuses on topping the Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP) by search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. The term includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. While SEO focuses on organic or natural search, PPC based links are called sponsored ads. SEO basically involves optimizing a website in all respects, so as to render it most favorable for top ranks as per search engine algorithms. The rest of the Internet marketing concepts are direct marketing strategies that may be easily comprehended by their name itself.

Given the informative and dynamic nature of Internet, Internet marketing provides even a small business entity with a lot of scope to expand its markets beyond its local margins and present itself with much more sophistication for lesser cost. Internet marketing is undoubtedly a considerably cheaper option than employing a sales workforce in an offline business. The highlight benefit of Internet Marketing is that it does not require much of experience to venture into it.

Internet Marketing may seem to be an all profit no loss situation. But, it also has a dark side to it. In the absence of any stringent rules and regulations against objectionable content, as well as, open nature of the medium, each online business entity runs the much dreaded risk of negative publicity. Spreading a bad word about something or someone over Internet is a very easy task that may render all marketing efforts futile.

by parvesh | Internet Marketing |  8 Comments continue reading

15 May

SMO: Social Media Optimization

A term being frequently tossed around in the contemporary Internet marketing circles is SMO or Social Media Optimization. As evident from the full form, SMO has everything to do with social media such as blogs, wikis, vlogs, forums and the likes.

The term SMO involves consistent and enduring implementation of all necessary changes in a website that may optimize it to render it more easily linkable and more vastly noticeable in the online social media. The essence of SMO is to provide such good quality content, design and usability that people should wish to link to your website. Accordingly, SMO focuses on designing, developing and maintaining a website to suit the social media applications like Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, Digg, Flickr, Miniclip et al, such that the pertinent social sites would want to stay connected to the website on their own.

Being a rather nascent concept, Social Media Optimization (SMO) still needs to be groomed into a full-fledged subject with exhaustive strategies and rules all laid down. Presently, there are few rules, coined by few Internet marketing experts, which dictate the scene in defining precise strategies.

The basic strategy involves giving up static web content in favor of dynamism. The tactics favor inclusion of blogs or white paper etc. to widen the scope of linkability and putting in quick buttons like add to del.icio.us / Digg this and ask a friend to facilitate tagging/ bookmarking, as well as, help the content travel. Supporting mashups is considered another fine strategy, wherein webmaster allows prudent reuse of his web content by others, so as to work in teamwork towards enhanced and augmented content. Further, rewarding inbound links is also a recommended strategy to encourage the links in the long run.

SMO, in essence, calls for being a user resource that is genuine and unpretentious. It is a good idea to keep trying new things and put across a fresh face forever. Active participation in activities of interest to ones target audience is a definite must.

If done properly, SMO can be your ticket to convincing and long-term commercial success. Effective SMO can fetch you highly desirable web traffic and significant brand recognition. The tale of extraordinary growth and glory of YouTube in a matter of mere 18 months is a striking instance of successful and innovative SMO.

Though SMO can drive crazy traffic to your website, it may also prove to be nasty, as you constantly run the risk of negative publicity. Therefore, it is utmost important to choose your tactics carefully and target the right audience.

by parvesh | Internet Marketing |  1 Comment continue reading

8 Apr

Future of SEO/Internet Marketing

Search engines seem to be either testing or moving towards a social search paradigm. Some of the examples include:

http://www.younanimous.com

http://www.eurekster.com/

Also, Yahoo is testing its social search engine:

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/faq

With numerous businesses relying on search engine rankings primarily, if not exclusively, an important question to ask is: What would be the future of Internet Marketing/SEO?

Some of the rather instant thoughts that come to mind are:

* Internet Marketing would further move towards a paid model with in-organic results over taking the organic ones.
* The search engine rankings would not only be driven by the search engine algorithms.
* The importance of currently existing concepts namely Google PageRank would recede.
* Content would rule: Websites serving quality content would attract repeat quality visitors and higher popularity resulting in even higher traffic.
* Meta search engines that integrate a number of tools like digg, del.icio.us etc. would further gain popularity.

It is now time for companies around the world re-think their long term Internet Marketing strategies and plan accordingly to minimize the “damage” social search engines might cause!

More later!

by parvesh | Internet Marketing |  4 Comments continue reading

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