Search Engine Optimization
05.12.2011
Search Engine Optimization
I knew this time would come – that I would have to give my own insight on this age-old comparison. This is not a 100% representation of what an in-house or agency SEO is but it’s a reflection and comparison of my experience.
It’s not a battle per se but it’s worth noticing what it looks like when you’re behind both fences.
In-House SEO Jedi
For 4 consecutive years, I’ve been working on the client side. I’ve built, trained, and led a couple of teams of junior SEO’s, link builders, copywriters and web designers in the ultimate goal of optimizing client sites. Being an in-house SEO seemed like nurturing a baby from birth to adulthood. The close familiarity with your projects in house definitely helps you in learning how it behaves in every aspect of digital marketing – performance in search results, gaining traffic from different channels, acquisition of goals, and seasonal lifecycles.
Planning and execution of campaigns were also quite flexible (well depending on how many steps up the ladder you need to climb for approvals) when you’re in-house because you’re directly connected with the stakeholders of the project. In terms of reporting, it is quite straightforward. Once you’ve established your KPI’s (and enhance them over the period of time), then building a monthly template would be fluid enough. This is where you can see the fruits of your effort (and mistakes) come to life. Being able to monitor KPI’s on a regular basis for a single client gives you that confidence in generating projections and action plans for the next proceeding months.If there’s one word that I can attribute to being an in-house SEO, it would be FOCUS. It’s that focus that gives an in-house SEO his core strength vs. an SEO agency. I was fortunate enough that my bosses were patient and generous enough to let me experiment, innovate, and develop my processes for their websites for their success. Yes, I made a lot of mistakes but I always made a point to correct them for twice the gain. An inevitable weakness which is inherited by in-house SEO jedi’s is the disease of being “nearsightedness”. They will become so immersed with the company and industry that sometimes he loses touch of what’s happening in the industry as a whole specially if they stick to process which works and never have the courage or the time to experiment and think out of the corporate box.
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31.05.2010
Search Engine Optimization
In my years of working with clients in their organic SEO efforts, I’ve been asked this question over and over again. As a business, I think it is imperative to capitalize on the time at which you can expect good returns from your investment. And SEO being part of your marketing strategy is no different.
Unfortunately, there is not yet a black and white answer to this question. Although your SEO consultants / vendors may have told you that it may take 3-6 months to a year to see results or maybe even more than that. Personally I’ve seen core keywords rank in as short as a month to a longer period of 18 months.
*Photo courtesy of Borkur.Net
Organic SEO results will depend on these following factors:
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16.08.2009
Search Engine Optimization
Ever since Bing launched and when they finally closed the deal with Yahoo, I’ve been itching to do this review on Bing’s results and the implications it has on SEO’s.
Now that Binghoo has been in existence, optimizing for Google’s competition is growing significantly. If Binghoo will be capturing 1/3 of the search market it’s definitely worth your efforts of grabbing that pie of your traffic.
Let me give you a brief walk through of a few interesting features that Bing has.
Document/Site Preview – Aside from the ordinary SERP’s you have, Bing helps users by giving them a preview of the page/site. According to the Bing team, “it helps searchers find the content they want faster, without leaving the SERP until they are ready.” As a webmaster, you can also disable the document preview feature for your site in Bing. (By the way I’m not affiliated in anyway with the featured websites on the searches.)
Quick Tabs & Related Searches – Bing gives you a neat list of related topical searches at the left panel of every search. In our keyword “dubai business”, we have related search options of “online businesses”, “dubai business directory”, “business opportunities dubai”, and so on.
Another feature I like on Bing is the Quick Tabs section which gives you filtering options on a broad scope of search. For example, I was interested in finding out for “Nike Shoes”, it gave me options for Catalog, Coupons, and Jobs. The Bing team aims to let the searcher to “fully explore their subject without losing track of their initial query.
Best Match – If I remembered it correctly, Microsoft branded Bing as a “decision engine”. The best match feature has made this statement clear enough. Bing highlights huge brands and names in their best match feature. It isolates the search results if you’re looking for official websites and leading brands.
You can see that aside from the single listing for the Google site, it also features the site’s search box which you can use directly, a “Similar to this” section which listed other similar results which you might have in mind. And then there’s the usual quick tabs, related searches, and search history.
You can read the rest of Bing’s features on the New Features Relevant to Webmasters PDF they’ve released last June 2009. They’ve also mentioned a little bit on Search Engine Optimization (but I still think Google’s SEO Starter Guide was way way more interesting and informative).
Disclaimer: The two websites that I will be reviewing in a while were picked by the fact that they have ranked number 1 during the time of search on Google.Com and Bing.Com. I’m not in any way promoting any of the sites featured in this review.
Let’s get down to the face-off. I did a search for the term “dubai business” (don’t ask me why and how, it’s a random keyword I thought of) on Google and Bing. For everyone’s information “dubai business” has a search volume of 74,000 for the month of July from Google Keyword Tool (this means the keyword is worthy of traffic).
And let’s go tally the results: read more
21.06.2009
Search Engine Optimization
Last night we went to see Up. It did live up to its expectations. The weird thing is I felt it was more of an adult, rather than a typical 3D kiddie cartoon flick. It was about an old man who promised his wife that they’ll embark on an adventure. And when his wife died, he decided to pursue the adventure and lived the dream of his wife. Pretty simple story but was definitely touching and inspiring.
Although it was quite farfetched, I somehow associated Up’s story with the inspiration I had upon seeing The Secrets. Again, the main thought was simple, positive thoughts and feelings results to positive endings. If you want something so bad, all you got to do is believe in it so hard that you can actually see yourself in it, touch it, and feel it.
So what’s in it for today’s post? I’m getting there. One of the tips that The Secrets has given is that if you have goals/dreams, write them down and each morning remind yourself that someday (you don’t have to worry how) the universe will eventually conspire and make those dreams come true (yeah, cheesy I know but I believe in it).
I still remember the very first job interview I had here in Dubai. Wore my black suit, fixed my tie in the mirror and said to myself, “I’m going to be big here in Dubai”. I don’t know if I was joking or was setting myself on a mission. I bet it was the latter.
In the spirit of lifting my dreams in a house hoisted up in balloons of hopes, here are my SEO wishlist that I’m hoping to achieve in the next 2-3 years of my career: read more
06.06.2009
Search Engine Optimization
So Bing and Google rode the waves of trend for last week. People still have some mixed reactions for Microsoft (should they be bothered with But It’s Not Google excitement). Although it’s too early to tell, it’s good to finally have that friendly (or maybe not) competition out there. I loved the part where Matt Cutts was bashing the Bing Team at Twitter.
Anyways, so last week, another interesting article came up on TheNational.Ae – “UAE internet users prefer global Google”. Husni Khuffash, Google’s Business Development Manager in the UAE, has an interesting take on UAE’s online business and end-users.
“It’s a big sign that we need more content over here,” he said.
Mr Khuffash was speaking on the second day of a two-day conference in Dubai aimed at educating advertising agencies about the possibility of search advertising and search engine optimisation to increase business in the region. He said he believed education was the key to breaking the Arab world out of its current pattern of having 5 per cent of the world’s population but only 1 per cent of its online content.
“Companies are not taking the right tools to be online and to show that you are there,” he said. “If you are not there, I cannot help you.” Some UAE companies, particularly in the technology and travel sectors, had been using search advertising in a sophisticated way, he said.
I also met Mohammad Zaher, author of Irrelevant Combinations, and I’ve asked him if I can feature an article of his blog here and he was generous enough to permit me. In his post, Google Survey in UAE, and an Agency Day, he has the following interesting stats:
- Search engines are the most used source of online research information (81% of respondents). Manufacturer websites (49%), Directories and local listings (27%), retailer websites (26%), and online auction websites (25%) are also very popular.
- Search engines are used most for research in relation to technology (67%) and travel (48%) products.
- Google is the preferred search engine in the UAE with (58% preferring google.com and 38% preferring google.ae)
- While one third of UAE respondents say the current economic crisis has not changed their shopping habits, an almost equal proportion say the recent financial turmoil has led to less of their shopping being done online. This may be related to the fact that many of their online purchases may have fallen more into the ‘non-essential/leisure’ categories (i.e. travel and event tickets) which people choose to cut out during difficult economic times
- In the UAE, English (76% of respondents) is by far the most popular ‘search’ language (likely to be related to the highly multinational nature of UAE society) vs. 23% preferring to search in Arabic.
So instead of replicating the thought of what I had in the previous post on Dubai needing SEO, I think I should lay down tips on how to increase search engine visibility for businesses online. These are not technical SEO / organic optimization processes but simple you-can-do-it-without-technical-knowledge kind of things. read more
26.05.2009
Search Engine Optimization
So while I was busy lining up topics to cope with the long absence of blog posts and coming up with both offline and online marketing strategies for client sites, I stumbled on a blog post by Tom Gara, Is SEO our Friend? Enemy? Frenemy? Well it really got my attention when he said:
SEO is the bad guy here. It is the reason that you can rarely find what you want on “commercial” google searches.
What you really want when you type “computer stores in Dubai” is to find a great blog post or newspaper article, written by somebody who knows and cares, listing the city’s best computer stores. Sure, someone like CompuMe or Jumbo Electronics could spend more money on getting to the front page, but then, so can anyone, including some random page of googlebait whose entire business model is to get clicks from google searches and surround useless information with ads. “
Google rocks when it comes to factual information (finding a company website or wikipedia entry or whatever), but type in “boutique hotel in Hong Kong” or “cheapest flights from Dubai to London” and you will get page after page of spam – spam that has been well optimised to make it to the front page of google search results.
Of course, I had to leave a comment to somehow defend my profession but I felt like that wasn’t enough. So here’s my take on Tom’s article. read more
24.04.2009
Search Engine Optimization
A couple of days ago it’s as if a request out my mind just got granted. Seth Godin, America’s Greatest Marketer (according to American Way Magazine) and author of bestselling marketing books, including Permission Marketing, just wrote a post titled “How to Make Money with SEO“.
Even that alone just got me hyped up. Surprisingly, Rand Fishkin just pimped out a post of his own in addition to Seth’s article – “There’s Way More Than 2 Ways to Make Money with SEO“
I wish I could add some more intelligent factors but these 2 gentlemen just laid out the best principles in milking the Benjamins out of the profession.
Here are some points which struck the home run for me: read more
30.03.2009
Search Engine Optimization
About 3 months ago, while planning for topics in the launch of Click-Dubai.Com, I conducted a survey to get to know the top search engines used within the UAE and Middle East regions.
In today’s settings it would have been wise to have channeled that poll through Twitter but back then I tried my LinkedIn network through their useful Answers section. Fortunately, my connections were generous enough to share their insights.
Oh before we go to the results, one thing I forgot is to set the parameters of the poll like naming only the top 3. But instead I laid down a generic question that prompted the participants to provide as many search engine names they think are popular within the region (I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it did arrive to a certain conclusion nevertheless). read more
