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.

Agency vs. In-House SEO Battle is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO

When I started working with Nurture3, my previous role was that of a team leader which meant only executing the plan and strategies set by my manager or the client. Then I had the opportunity (and the challenge) of doing everything as an SEO manager.

When you’re heading an SEO department from the beginning, your major roles will include establishing procedures from keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and analysis.

Building the benchmark, a.k.a. KPI’s, for your SEO campaign is a process you should not miss. You can’t improve what you can’t measure – that’s a constant reminder by the analytics experts in the industry. With the onset of personalized search and now Google Instant, search engine rankings alone are not effective KPI’s anymore.

There are a number of KPI’s you can establish to measure your SEO campaign. We’ll start with organic traffic and conversions.

Luckily Google Analytics allows you to create custom reports according to your data needs. Let’s go through creating one step by step.

Custom Reporting can be accessed through the left side panel once you log into Google Analytics.

You can create / edit custom reports in this interface.

Once inside, there are 2 parts that you’ll have to fill in – Metrics and Dimensions. Metrics and Dimensions are the building blocks of every Google Analytics report. For those of you who are still new to these elements of Google Analytics, you can have a quick start guide here.

For the purpose of this post, we’ll go directly to the custom report for SEO analysis, here’s an example from one of my projects:

This report prioritizes goal completions (conversions) and organic traffic (visits). Although you can add as much data as you want (provided your dimension/metric combination is correct). For me, I’ve added conversion and bounce rates because it’s also important for me to know whether a certain traffic source is efficient or not for a given time.

You can drill down on your dimensions to view the sources for each medium and you can even view the keywords for each search engine source.

Once you have decided on your metrics and dimensions, please don’t forget to name your report and save.

With the settings above, you can have a report that would look like this:

I did a comparison between the previous and the current 3 months of our SEO campaign for this project and I can proudly say we have been successful!

One important reminder: before relying on the accuracy of your Analytics data, please tag your URL’s properly for each campaign, giving you the accurate categories (cpc, organic, direct, referral, email), for your traffic. Here’s a good post from Ian Lurie of ConversationMarketing.Com regarding Google Analytics Tagging.

If you have any other custom / special reports for your SEO KPI’s, give us a shoutout!

Measuring SEO Through Google Analytics Custom Reports is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO

Ever since I started working on conversion optimization last January 2010, I knew I found my new love. An increase of 20% in conversions after 2 months of optimizing message to landing page to registration flow, is a great figure to present to your boss.

For those who are not familiar yet with conversion optimization or conversion rate optimization (CRO), I would recommend reading one of my conversion superheroes, Bryan Eisenberg’s Blog.

An essential element of CRO is the landing page. It’s the customers’ entry point into your business and it’s your marketing pitch for them to purchase, register or whatever conversion you would like them to do.

I have been examining and evaluating landing pages for my clients’ projects and I have found that landing page holy grail at SEOMoz.Org. It’s neat, complete, and functional.

I would have written a top 10 strategy post for landing page structure but I think this demonstration will point out the important elements in landing page optimization.

Don’t take my word for it, let me who show you 7 reasons why SEOMoz has the perfect landing page:

1. Value Proposition (Enough Said!) – According to Bryan Eisenberg, there is one secret of top converting websites that is so simple, so obvious, yet so many people forget to use – Value Proposition. Tell your customers why they should buy your products, why they should choose you instead of your competitors.

What makes you stand out? What makes you better than the competitors? Answer that and deliver that message in a few seconds!For SEOMoz, there’s nothing simpler than “Get Started with SEOMoz Pro, risk free, now.” Apart from the brand that they have, they also give you that money back guarantee. Sweet! Right?

2. Comprehensive Product Description – God knows how many times I and you have landed on a page and you keep asking what are they selling? What are they offiering? And most importantly HOW MUCH??!!!! Believe you me, once those questions are not answered, it’ll piss your customers away and move on to your competitor.

SEOMoz’s PRO, PRO Elite, and Pro Premier packages are the great examples of proper and effective product descriptions. The price is there upfront and the list of what you will get with each package. There are no technical knowledge needed for a customer to understand these products. You know exactly what you will be getting. I would also commend SEOMoz for giving the customers the choice to go for a special offer and the normal package. Most users love the opt in option rather than opting out.

3. Site Secured – Ah yes the seal of security from Verisign. It gives us that sense of security that our transactions and personal data are secured. Whatever software you choose, be it eTrust or Verisign, a trust / security seal will always be a plus most especially for your paying customers.

4. Call To Action – Smashing Magazine has a list of their call to action best practices. But what I love about SEOMoz’s call to action is that they’re somewhat whispering: “It’s okay, click that button now!” “No minimum term. Cancel anytime.” gives customers that extra push to convert without the fear of getting stuck with unwanted subscriptions later on.

And the best part is all the important elements are within the first fold. No need to scroll further down to get the primary action done!

However not every customer will be convinced on these elements.

Some of them may need a little bit more assurance. Well this SEOMoz landing page did not fall short on that part either.

5. Crystal Clear Benefits – It’s textbook marketing, tell your customers how they can benefit your products and more. But not everybody does it effectively without technical jargons. What I love in their landing page is that SEOMoz has taken their time in explaining carefully their tools and their community support. It gives their customers that sense of value for their products.

6. Valuable Testimonials – If you have people like Lauren Vaccarello of Sales Force and Chris Winfield of BlueGlass endorsing your product, you can never go wrong. It’s not only the quantity of satisfied customers you have but also the quality and relevance of these customers to your business. Their testimonials are from the big names within the online media industry, who are also the major group of customers for SEOMoz’s products.

7. Pleasant Reminder – This is the part I love the most. On the 3^rd fold, you again see the product description with the call to action to ensure that customers will not miss what they ought to do in this page.

There you have it – 7 giant reasons why SEOMoz rocks in their landing page optimization. I think it’s also worthwhile mentioning that this page was a product of a landing page contest that SEOMoz conducted back in 2007 and the winner, Paul Robb of CredibleCopy.Org was the creator of this genius entry.

If you have found your own perfect landing page, please share them on the comments section and maybe we’ll feature them next time on SaktoSEO!

Why SEOMoz has the Perfect Landing Page is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO

It’s been a while since I’ve had someone on Interview Fridays. Ever since I’ve re-branded my site (previously on Click-Dubai.Com), it’s been hectic making things right this time and keeping up with good content to deliver to the readers.

I have a special treat for you social media aficionados in today’s Interview Friday. I consider her the darling of Dubai’s social media industry, especially on Twitter (and she looks prettier in person).

She’s the founder of Socialize, UAE’s first dedicated social media agency, headquatered in Dubai. She’s also an actives peaker for marketing trainings across Asia and the Middle East. Without further ado, please help me welcome Ms. Akanksha Goel.

Thank you for this opportunity Akanksha. For the benefit of SaktoSEO readers, can you please tell us more about yourself and your work?

Thanks Dave. The short of it is that I was invited to Dubai almost 2 years ago as the Marketing Director for the Sherazade group, which specializes in loyalty marketing solutions. Before that, I’d worked on special projects with the TATA group in India, marketing with the TAJ group of hotels and finally getting involved with the Singapore media circuit as the Editor of STUFF Magazine. Social media is a subject close to my heart and I’ve had many adventures with it, like co-organizing Asia’s first podcamp a few years ago and researching the subject with Professor Michael Netzley, in Singapore. Plausibly, after coming to Dubai, I couldn’t stay away from the subject so I started doing trainings with Murdoch University after which many more followed getting me in-sync with social media marketing in the Middle East.

What is Socialize? What do you specialize in?

The idea for Socialize was born when a team of social media enthusiasts came together as a result of the above-mentioned trainings and we saw the need to have an entity in UAE dedicated to educating the business community on social media marketing, helping them see through the clutter and successfully leverage it as a part of the marketing puzzle.

Socialize is the region’s first dedicated social media agency and training house. We specialize in customized in-house consulting sessions and run marketing campaigns for a few technology and home brands in the region.

For many online media marketers, social media is the new “shiny thing” and everyone wants to get into the bandwagon. What’s so special about social media?

Yes, there is a lot of hyperbole surrounding social media online. Neither is social media the problem to all marketing problem, nor is it rocket science. It’s a part of the bigger marketing puzzle and the only way to get good at it is practice. An individual, who can get himself to the top of Google, will probably be able to do the same for his business.

Also, Social media apart from being a generally free of cost tool is effective in building personal relationships. The tools that social media utilizes are not new. They’ve been here for quite a while. Its just that companies now recognize the importance of harnessing these online tools to create direct connections with customers. They then use that for crowd sourcing and hence have a go-to community online for marketing.

What do you think companies should consider first before getting into Social Media?

Social media can be an incredible tool for your business, providing you with more customer insight, direct communication channels and the ability to measure the effectiveness of these conversations very closely. But as the proliferation of social media platforms grow, participating can turn into little more than a giant time suck without some sort of structure behind it. Companies need to have a clear set of objectives and goals in mind before they implement a social media campaign. Also, Social media, like marketing is a long-term commitment and comes with its set of risks and businesses need to aware of the dangers and have a crisis communication plan put in place before they embark onto the journey of social media.

How’s the social media scene in the UAE? How about the whole of Middle East?

It’s an ever evolving scene. U.A.E has reached a stage where an online community creates events to meet offline. This is something that grew rapidly in the past few years and we can see it manifest itself in the likes of GeekFest, Social Media Day and other tweetups. This shows a level of maturity in the progression of social media, with users committed to creating and nurturing niche communities.

What are the major challenges in social media for the Middle East market?

Most offices conduct their online social media marketing from the U.A.E for the entire MENA region. The challenge here is that, not the entire region is growing on usage of Social Media evenly. There also is a major issue with language support since the MENA region consists of the lot of cultures and approach to each community cannot be the same. Dividing them into two categories as English speaking community and Arabic speaking community, finding a common approach for both is the challenge.

Also, social media is about community marketing and someone who isn’t a part of the community or doesn’t understand the community can’t market a product effectively within it. Thus, I usually find it shocking to find out how some Dubai businesses outsource their social media campaigns to India and make social media about publishing advertising content on online mediums and not actually connecting with the community.

How important is it for organizations to allocate resources for social media as part of their online marketing strategy?

Typically a Marketing manager must allocate 25% of his / her time online social media marketing.If he/she undergoes training for social media and chooses to handle campaigns on their own, I feel its ideal. However, apart from posting content managers also need to monitoractivity on the page continuously, which they don’t usually have the time for. This can be tackled by hiring a social media marketer in-house or appointing an agency.

What’s your take on search engine optimization / marketing as a strong partner of social media? Should companies treat it separately or as a necessary combination?

SEO is very important since social media marketing is all about creating a presence for a person or brand online. Therefore search engine optimization helps in not only getting to the brand easy, multiple search results give it a higher value. Therefore, SEO is usually taken to be a necessary combination with social media since their objective is the same: increasing online visibility for a brand.

You’ve been actively conducting numerous training events and preaching the importance of effective social media and marketing. What are the important points you repeatedly instill in your audience?

• Intimate social customer service is the best protection against price sensitivity and commodisation
• You’re not going to find out about social marketing by reading about it. You need to just do it.
• To create a compelling story, you need people who are directly affected by the story you’re reporting on. Use social media to find those real people. They’re out there tweeting. The beauty of these social media [sites] is they’re searchable.
• With social campaigns, once you build momentum, don’t squander it.Use your successes to justify bigger budgets, more staffing and cooler projects.

For those who are still deciding to go into social media or those who are having doubts in this marketing subject, what piece of advice can you give to them?

The real risk doesn’t lie in having a project that doesn’t succeed, or doesn’t succeed in quite the way you’d hoped. The real risk is being taken by organizations that aren’t investing in learning those conversational skills – because increasingly, the public is coming to expect them. And if a company, organization or agency isn’t listening, they’ll turn to one that does.

For those who are interested in getting in touch with Akanksha, you can follow her on:

1. Akanksha Goel – Middle East and Asia Social Media Trainer
2. Twitter – @akankshagoel
3. Facebook
4. LinkedIn
5. Socialize

Interview Fridays – Akanksha Goel of Socialize.Ae is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO

A few days ago, one of our business development managers emailed me to ask about other ideas to market one of our newly launched products. We’ve been working on this product for a month now including the process flow which customers will go through until the final conversion – registration.

We’re currently running SEM and email marketing campaigns to drive short term traffic to the site. Here’s the catch after 2-3 weeks of analytics data I’ve found out that we were only converting at around 4-5% out of more than 5 thousand visits from a single email campaign.

We can see there’s a huge drop in traffic in the middle of our registration process which needs to be addressed.

Although our BDM has insisted that we should look for other channels to drive even more traffic to the site, I say let’s fix our funnel conversion first and try to capture what we already have rather than chasing more prospects and waste the leads at the end of the funnel.

Photo Credit

Let me share six simple strategies for small businesses to optimize their conversion funnels:

1. Analyze Your Data Carefully – A common mistake is to act on a premature data. What is considered premature data will depend on the campaigns that you are running. For example, analyzing PPC campaigns with a 3-day data is not as reliable as comparing to 2-3 week figures.

Tip: Do not, and I repeat, DO NOT forget to establish your funnels on GA before launching any online marketing campaigns. Do your diligence of tagging your URL’s for Analytics to keep track of the performance of your campaigns. You’ve heard this before, but let me repeat: you cannot improve what you can’t measure.

2. Get To Know Your Funnel – Know where your customers are dropping out of your funnel. Most of the analytics packages today have funnel sections, so it should be easy for you to. For Google Analtyics, Funnel Visualization will look like this (can be found under Goals section):

A lesser click-through rate (or higher exit rate) within a funnel should raise a concern for you. This means there’s something within that page that gives your visitors a distressing signal which lets them bounce off of your page.

Don’t attempt to fix your page yet until you have all the necessary data that will support your decision. You might end up fixing something which is not broken and my disrupt your current conversion flow.

3. Ask For What Is Needed (Not What’s Convenient) – In my experience, pages with registration forms often have a high exit rate within the funnel. Your visitors hate filling up online forms for the following reasons:

a. If they are too long
b. If you don’t remind them of what they’re registering for
c. If your form is asking for sensitive information like email address, phone number, salary, etc.

Especially for lead generation sites, online forms can get really lengthy and not to mention irritating at times because all of the fields are mandatory.

When building online forms, ask your users for what is needed for you to consider that visitor a lead or a purchasing customer. At the same don’t shorten a form which is performing well just for the sake of increasing for funnel conversion.

4. Fact Finding with Your Sales / Customer Service Team – I would consider this part vital in your conversion optimization. Your sales / customer service teams are the ones who have direct contacts with your customers. They are the direct receivers of feedbacks when your visitors visit the site, complete the registration and make the final purchase.

Talk to these teams and get to know what most of your visitors think about the usability of your site, the prices of your products, and the experience they have with your website.

5. Test Your Knowledge – You have your data, you’ve spoken with the rest of the teams, you know the issues of your site’s flow, now is the time to actually FIX it.

Whether you’re redesigning a page or restructuring your conversion flow, always be sure to test it. Even though you’ve done your diligence of fact finding in our previous steps, we’re still not sure that it will work your visitors. So always be testing.

You can go either go with Multivariate (MVT) or A/B Testing. When it’s your first time to do conversion optimization, I’d prefer you try out A/B testing because it’s simpler to implement and interpret.

Yes I know what you’re going to ask next – How do I test?

There are a couple of A/B testing tools you can use: Google Website Optimizer, SiteSpect, ProImpact 7, etc. You can find a good list of providers by Econsultancy.

6. Follow Through – Optimization is a continuous process. When you have implemented the final version / flow of your website according to the winner of your tests, monitor them from time to time.

Remember that your users evolve over time and their change may shift in so many ways. Always be aware of these changes and respond to their needs as they happen.

Recently, I completed a CRO test and implementation which gave a project 27% increase in the number of registrations and a 20% increase in conversion rate. And that inspired this blog post.

Good times

Six Funnel Conversion Optimization Tips for SMB’s is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO

Lately we have been tasked to increase conversions (registration leads) in one of our project websites. While conversion rate optimization (CRO) is still a new skill for me, I love working towards achieving meaningful goal conversions.

One of the major phases for CRO is the landing page optimization.

Although I’m not a designer myself, part of my work is to come up with landing page sketches / ideas for the project. And it is always great to have powerful tools at your disposal.

Let me give you a rundown of my favorite tools that I’ve used in landing page design / wireframing:

1. Unbounce – Unbounce.Com may be the best landing page solutions out there. They offer you optimization solutions in 4 major steps:
   • Build a landing page
   • Publish It
   • Drive Traffic
   • Test & Optimize

   

   It seems that the guys behind Unbounce.Com have done their homework in identifying the right solutions for landing page optimization requirements. They’re main objective is for you to launch landing pages without the IT guys.

   What I like: WYSIWYG Landing Page Editor and Landing Page Templates. If you’re still new with landing page optimization, the templates at Unbounce.Com can give you a jumpstart. These templates have been formulated to come up with ready-made best practice templates including: simple lead generation templates, pre-launch lead generation template, and business consultant lead generation templates.

2. iPlotz – This was the first web wireframe tool I used when I started on landing page optimization. I found it quite impressive especially with its straightforward interface and with its drag-and-drop functionality. What it lacks though is an on-screen comments section for designers’ reference for any feedback on the initial drafts.What I Like: iPhone application elements – iPlotz will prove to be useful especially for those optimizing for mobile applications or mobile websites.
3. MockingBird – GoMockingBird is one of those feel good tools that you’d love to have. It’s clean, easy to use, and multi-functional. Although it’s still in its beta stage, GoMockingBird promises you an efficient wireframing toolWhat I Like – Interlinking multi-page mockups which allow you to create a an entire website with the ability of modifying elements here and there easily.
4. MortenJust.Com’s Wireframe Kit for Google Drawings – This is a cool wireframe kit made by Morten Just of Denmark, who works for Vodafone as a user experience guy. Basically he used the latest addition of Google Docs, Google Drawings, and created a few diagrams and some wireframing elements for you to use.What I Like: Morten Just shares it on a public folder of his Google Docs and you can save a copy of his different modules for you to sketch your page designs. Another bonus is the updated wireframe stencils for iPhone.

I’m sure there are several other excellent wireframe tools out there which you can use. It all depends on what features are you most comfortable with using.

If you have other kick-ass tools you want to be featured on this article, send me a note at info [at] saktoseo [dot] com and I’ll gladly update this post from time to time.

Landing Page Design / Wireframe Tools is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO

Just like links, not all leads are created equal. Some leads are highly valuable to some companies while others are just secondary. Some leads convert easily into sales while some leads will remain as they are.

You need to determine which leads give you a better ROI of course. How do you do that? You need to understand your data / web metrics.

If you have successfully driven traffic to your website, it’s now time to gain knowledge of what percentage of those traffic give you conversions or which type of users give you a significant return on investment.

Enter Goal Funnels Stage Left

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. These customized reports are reflections of your online marketing efforts and will give you the right amount of data to help you decide which marketing efforts are worth investing more resources, which processes to drop, or which ones you can improve on.

1. Goals by Keywords – If you’re running organic SEO campaigns, you would want to see which keywords have driven you traffic which ultimately lead to your conversions.What to Monitor: You may want to take a look at Visits and Unique Visits in combination with your conversion goals. This will tell you which keyword to optimize more according to the volume of traffic and number of conversions the particular keywords has contributed your site.
2. Goals by Medium / Source – This is a no brainer. Identify which of your online marketing campaigns, be it email marketing, social media, PPC, SEO, online advertising, is giving you the best of your conversions.What to Monitor: Be flexible on what metrics you would want to analyze. You can have visits, page views, bounce rates all in one report. What I suggest is to track the navigational paths on each campaign / source. Try to understand which type of customer has the intention to purchase your product or which user is only looking to consume content and leave.
3. Goals by Top Content / Landing Pages – This report is quite tricky. You’ll have to decide whether to measure the most visited content on your page or which page does your visitors land frequently.

   

   What to Monitor: Bounce rate and Exit % will give you a good idea of how your visitors are treating your pages. If a landing page for example has a high rate of conversion but has a high bounce rate, you would want to improve the content and therefore retain a significant amount of traffic that will eventually give you more conversions in the end.

4. Goals by Country / Region – This I love looking at from day to day. If you’re an organization which targets a number of overseas regions, you should have this report…What to Monitor: You’ll have to go an extra mile here. Extend your metrics until to sales conversions. Reason that is you may want to evaluate which regions gives you a significant ROI and therefore focus your marketing efforts on such regions and improve on those which are trailing behind.
5. Combination Metrics – The good thing about Google Analytics’s custom reports is its versatility to give you which combination of metrics you want to analyze for better decision making. There are hundreds of combinations possible.
   a. Goals by Country / Region drilled down by Keywords
   b. Goals by Keywords drilled down by Landing Pages or Sources

You know your own business better than anyone else and you know what type of event on your website you’ll consider as a conversion. Therefore, it’s only you who can determine which metric is significant. It doesn’t mean that if it’s being measured, it matters vis-à-vis it doesn’t mean that it’s not being tracked, it’s less important.

Data which are not actionable are plain numbers on your monitor – so don’t waste your time. Concentrate on the data which can lead you to a corresponding action.

Customized Goal Reports in Google Analytics for SMB Websites is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO

I’m not really a fan of pop stars. I’m more of an alternative-jazz-punk-fusion kind of guy, more like Incubus, Rage Against The Machine or Red Hot Chilli Peppers. But I couldn’t ignore the aura and the charisma of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta or popularly known as Lady Gaga!

Gaga’s talent, unique sense of style, and exceptional music has made her one of the hottest female artist of the decade. But what has this pop sensation have to do with social media?

Let me break it down to you with just a couple of her social media statistics (as of May 16, 2010):

1. Facebook Fan Page – 7,132,043 Fans
2. Official YouTube Channel – 122,233,383 Total Upload views (which also made her the first franchise to reach one billion views)
3. Verified Twitter Account – 4,023,719 Followers
4. Lady Gaga Alejandro Myspace Page – 1,298,665 Friends
5. According to Adage.Com,
   

   Since fall 2008, her digital-single sales have exceeded 20 million and her album sales hit 8 million…

*Photo Courtesy of SpreePix-Berlin

Fine, I know she’s a celebrity and is expected to have those digits on her social media space. But name me a celebrity who has achieved this kind of feat to this date? I didn’t think so.

The point is she was (and still is) smart enough to use social media in distributing her music across the globe, extending her brand name, and reaching out to her fans (which are ultimately her customers). So what are the take aways from these amazing achievements?

Well Just Dance a bit and let me break it down to you how an ordinary Poker Face can rock the social media Paparazzi:

1. Great Product comes with Great Responsibilities – Every successful brand you see in social media started out with a great product. For Lady Gaga, it was her sheer talent and individuality that gave her that instantaneous stardom, without which, she would have been just any other pop star with the likes of Spears, Aguilera, and what’s her face? Simpson? (told you, not a fan or Pop stars)

   A great product will always last and will reach the rest of your customers through word of mouth. But a poor product / service cannot be rescued by great marketing, not even social media. In the recent SMX London 2010, Keving Gibbons of SEOptimise said: “Build brands around reputation not products.” – that’s how great it should be.

2. Create Your Own Style – Have you seen her music videos? Have you seen her in the Grammys? Have you seen her performed live? You’ll definitely know it’s Gaga performing. Not only did she create a unique artist, but she created a persona on her own. We’ve seen new brands suffer social media prejudice, being branded as copy-cats for the sole reason that they lacked individuality.

   Cliché as it may sound but – Strive to be Unique. Don’t keep looking at the rear view of what your competitors are doing, instead look at what they’re NOT doing yet and profit from those opportunities of your unique brand.

3. Consistency is Definitely Key – You may not have noticed, but Lady Gaga’s live gigs surpass her recordings – ALWAYS. Whether she’s performing for the Grammy Awards, VMAs, or at American IDOL, her performances are second to none.

   Your social media brand doesn’t have to be perfect all the time. But you have to work at giving your customers consistency in the quality of your products / services. If you have been doing customer service through Twitter then keep it up. If you have been posting blog updates weekly on your Facebook fan page – maintain that frequency. Your customers will be expecting that exact consistency that you have established.

4. Reach Out – According to Steve Berman, Universal Music’s president of sales and marketing;

   Gaga has worked tirelessly in keeping up daily if not hourly communication with her fans and growing fanbase through all the technology that exists now.

   Social media is all about conversation. Yes it has been the shiny little toy in marketing but the core is all about people’s conversations and relationships. Customers will always appreciate a human voice attending to their queries and concerns. It’s even better if you engage in little chats every now and then just to getting to know them a little bit more and learning what gets them engaged.

5. Brag a Little, Impress More – During the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, Gaga teamed up with Sir Elton John to perform a magnificent duet. When they entered the stage, Gaga shouted: “Take my picture Hollywood!” Well she had her bragging rights as she was singing side by side with the legendary Sir Elton John.

   This is quite tricky because the social media field is the center stage to every brand there is. While most shameless promotions end on deaf eyes ears, boasting your brand coverage or increased in sales can actually build credibility to your brand provided you have the performance to back it up with be it excellent customer service or renowned product satisfaction.

Go Gaga Genius on Social Media Branding is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO

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:

1. How competitive your target keywords are – During my early years in organic SEO, I used to be very careless with agreeing to optimize for keywords that clients are pursuing in a time frame that is often too short and impossible to achieve. Oftentimes these keywords are overly saturated with competition that despite of establishing a bullet-proof on-page optimized page, it will take you to build links at a rate beyond Google’s unnatural radar.

   Solution: Choose the low-hanging-fruit or long-tail keywords at the start of your SEO campaigns. Every website behaves and performs differently than the other. Observe how your fast your pages can climb the ranks of the results and expand gradually to more competitive keywords when you’re more experienced.When you have a successful PPC campaign running, you can do tests on Google Adwords to know which keywords your customers are using (or converting) with lesser competition to get a clear idea of which ones to pursue.

2. Flexibility of Your Engineering Team – There is a reason why web developers and SEO’s have a sensitive relationship. SEO’s oftentimes will have modifications to on-page factors, URL rewrites and redirects, tracking codes to be installed which the development team may not implement ASAP due to reasons like scheduled web releases, compilations, staging and testing. Believe me this is quite irritating at times as an SEO but you really need the web development team’s cooperation to succeed in your SEO campaigns.

   Solution: Open communications – Learn to communicate with your development team in a way that they can understand your objectives. How? Show them results of small changes to the website. Both of the parties have only one objective in the end and that is to make your website perform better. Another tip is to plan ahead of time with any on-page and backend implementations you may need for SEO. If you’re going to start tracking your pages, it would be good to send your development team codes for your Analytics, WebmasterTools, WebSiteOptimizer codes all in one email for them to upload in one go.

   I won’t forget what my head of IT told be back in the days – Just tell me your objective and I’ll create the solutions for you instead of thinking what solutions make for your objectives. Well he was right all along.

3. Amount of Site Content – Search engines will always be looking for quality content to deliver for its end users. Recently, SEO experts have emphasized on the component of QDF or Query Deserves Freshness. This may mean that SE’s are now looking for fresh content for certain queries that may need updating. To sum it all up that is Consistent Quality Fresh Content (CQFC) this is just my own invention, don’t quote me for it LOL!

   Solution: Build a content marketing strategy that will enable you to create continuous quality content to last a certain period for your SEO campaign. You can brainstorm with your content writers and marketers for content that will be evenly distributed for 6 months to a year. You can either build individual content pages regularly or establish a corporate blog that you can update easily.Remember that I place emphasis on continuity / consistency in your content. Your visitors will be expecting fresh content once you have established that frequency.

4. Link Building Frequency – This is a very tricky subject and as much as I wanted to avoid touching on this subject, link building is a given in every successful organic SEO campaign. Build links rapidly and you get flagged by Google but if you’re dilly-dallying then you get left behind by competitors.

   Solution: Sadly there’s no definite formula for an exact number of links to be acquired on a weekly / monthly basis. I’m sure link building experts can pitch into this topic. But as far as my experience goes of training and working with in-house link builders, I don’t acquire links more than what we can maintain on a monthly basis. One thing to remember is that – the quality of the links will be far more important than the quantity.

   So if my team has achieved an average of 80 quality links (coming from trusted domains which are highly relevant to my niche), then that will be my benchmark. That will be better than having 200 links per month with more than 50% of it coming from rubbish domain links. We’ll deal with more of link building issues later.

5. What are your objectives? – So what are your objectives? Is your site an e-commerce site which would mean sales as conversions, a lead generation site which would mean registrations as goals, or a corporate brand which would mean that your objectives may include traffic generation and increased exposure in social media and the rest of universal search. Each of these objectives have different time frames in achieving.

   Solution: It’s as simple as knowing your goals before diving into your SEO campaigns (I know this should have been the first item to this list). Lead generation and sales conversions may involve usability testing, landing page and conversion rate optimization, and therefore can take more time than pure rankings and traffic objectives.

How Long before I See Results in SEO? is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO

It’s a new year and I wasn’t able to greet you folks (better late than never). I’m hoping you’re having a great start for this new millenium.

It’s been more than 3 months since I’ve last posted in this blog. I’ve been focusing more on writing as guest writers in top SEO blogs in the community. It has been pretty exciting (and a drop dead challenge) to expand my portfolio, now I’m working on building strategies for Online Reputation Management for my clients and start on Conversion Optimization.

In a few weeks from now I will be featuring a few parts of Online Reputation (ORM) and Conversion Optimization. I have to admit, I’m learning as I master these new areas in my work but it will be interesting to see the developments and tests of what works and what doesn’t.

As for now, I’m going to leave you with a couple of my previous blog posts at SEODubai.Org and SearchEngineJournal.Com:

1. How SEO’s Win the War on Personalized & Real-Time Search

Google’s announcement of personalized search for everyone has stirred a lot of mixed reactions from the search industry. Eric Schmidt’s interview on CNBC has even provoked various sentiments on privacy issues. I think Aaron Wall of SEOBook.Com has an excellent take on this one.

2. On-Page vs. Off-Page Search Engine Optimization

The tests just confirmed that keywords in page title, domain, URL, and meta description (forget about meta keywords, they don’t matter no more!) are still significant ranking factors. They have carried a huge weight in rankings ever since 2007 and they still have that punching power up until now.

I would like to thank those who have left comments on my previous posts and those who have contacted me through our contact forms to pay compliments to Click-Dubai.Com. It was lovely reading your comments and your appreciations.

Latest Guest Blog Posts is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO