Category Archives: SEO

Online search has already revolutionised the way many companies do business and how we as consumers find the things we need. Smart marketers have used search engine optimisation to ensure their website are easily found by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Yet it is amazing how many organisations are still lagging behind when it comes to search and missing valuable business.

Well now Google is launching an initiative that will see the smart marketers move further ahead and the laggards choking on dust: real-time search.

According to Mashable, Google real-time search updates as stuff is happening around the Web – for example, live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages now stream in on the actual result pages for your query. It works on mobile too (at least iPhone and Android for now).

That’s not all, though. Google’s announced that they’ve inked partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace to pull in data in real-time. For Facebook, that means public Facebook Pages, and for MySpace, it means any stream data that is publicly available. This is on top of the partnership that the company announced with Twitter back in October.

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Excerpt of Report by Jeanne-Vida Douglas. BRW Magazine

Technologies once limited to only the biggest budgets are now affordable for businesses of any scale. Here are five of the most rewarding. 

Information technology has been the biggest driver of productivity since mechanisation took over from manual and animal labour at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Research from Finland suggests that access to simple data storage and processing computing facilities will increase the productivity of an average worked by 9 per cent a year; access to the internet will boost it by 14 per cent; mobile computing will increase worker productivity by 32 per cent.

Nonetheless, small businesses, which stand to gain the most from investing in It services, are often the most reticent to take advantage of the opportunities technology provides.

Unlike their larger counterparts, SMEs are often founded and run by specialists. The real estate agent, the carpenter and the distributor all know their trades, but don’t necessarily have the time to investigate emerging technologies or sit down to create a strategy for how a certain piece of software or hardware might make their businesses run more efficiently.

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Are you using the sledgehammer approach to SEO?

It seems that in search engine optimisation (SEO), as in most marketing, there are those who try to use sledgehammer to succeed rather than use the more precise and sophisticated scalpel approach of inbound marketing.

For most search engine optimisation (SEO) “experts” the sledgehammer they use is links. Lots and lots of links. Not ranking high enough on Google? Get more links. Sure it works up to a point, but its crude, requires a lot of effort of effort or expense and still doesn’t mean that the visitors to your site will be satisfied with what they find…hence a low traffic conversion rate.

Professional inbound marketing is more like a using a scalpel. Identify the best and most relevant keywords, create a keyword landing page strategy, provide relevant content and convert traffic to leads, inquires and sales.

A marketer using this approach can achieve amazing results across a broad range of keyword searches. Plus the approach is more effective than pure link-building with alternate search engines. Sure, Google is the biggest and you need to rank well with them but you can also achieve excellent results from being first on Bing and Yahoo. We see it every day.

So next time you’re offered the sledgehammer option for your search engine optimisation (SEO) ask whether they know how to use a scalpel.