I have come across many people who are confused about the terms SEO and SEM and especially about the differences between the two processes. While there maybe differing opinions even within the Internet Marketing industry, here’s my take on it:

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is  a collection of the different Internet marketing strategies to promote The SE rankings of websites  (SERPs) through the use of search engine optimization, Paid placement, and contextual advertising.  Usage of the term has been inconsistent and it is often narrowly used to exclusively refer to Pay per Click or PPC.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is defined as the process improving  a website’s organic ( non-sponsored)  results on the Search Engines.  When a user types in a Search Phrase or Query , the Search Engine pulls up a list of sites, these  results are independently determined by the search engine’s own mathematical algorithm, and are based on relevance to the search phrase.

The algorithms are said to use a  large number of criteria  in the  calculation of their results. Some of the criteria include Title Tag optimization, Quality of original content , Keywords in hyperlinks / URL, Link structure ,  amount and quality of Incoming links, Site Speed , Accessibility and User-friendliness of the site and so on.

SEO is a slow, long-term process, it involves several stages of work including competitor analysis, keyword research. On page optimization such as HTML code implementation, regular content / media addition and Off page  optimization which involves adding inbound links, targeting local search, verifying the site with the Search engine  play a large role in achieving successful results.
Since results from Search Engines are dynamic and constantly changing, there are no guarantees of first page results and especially instant first page results. SEO  is  an on-going, steady process where the optimizer works relentlessly to prove and maintain the authority  and relevance of his site to the SE.

Pay per click advertising refers to the short text advertisements often labelled as “sponsored Links” or “sponsored results”. These advertisements are generally purchased from GoogleTM (the Google AdwordsTM product), or Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM – formerly Overture)TM Or Bing ( MSN paid search). In response to a search phrase, the PPC advertisements which have bid on that phrase are displayed, and if the viewer clicks on a text advertisement they are taken to the advertiser’s website. At that point, the advertiser’s account is charged for the ‘click through’ by the search engine’s advertising partner.

The advantage of SEM is the fact that you can get instant qualified traffic to your site , the amount of traffic mainly depends on your budget. However this is also potential hazard -  if you do not properly optimize your ads,  you run the risk of using up your marketing budget very fast and having a low conversion rate to show for it. Click fraud is another serious problem.

Contextual advertising refers to targeted advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as mobile browsers. The advertisements are selected by automated systems based on the content displayed to the user and may be displayed on the webpage or as pop-up ads. Google AdSense was the first major contextual advertising network,  Yahoo! Publisher Network, Microsoft adCenter, AOL Sponsored Listings area  and others have been gearing up to make similar offerings.

Whew! Just got back from a whirlwind wedding, honeymoon and road trip combo – and of course, being the web junkie that I am, I couldn’t help but think about work. (Bad Tara, bad!) Here are some lessons from the road on how to address your online audience!

5. If they want X, they’ll probably want Y. One thing that really impressed me about our honeymoon cruise to Ensenada was how well our cruise liner had thought of everything we could possibly want to do (or spend money on). For example, they plan on doing a formal night on the cruise, which is great for fools like me who like to make anything romantic. Then, as you make your way to your formal dinner, feeling dressed to the nines, there’s a staff of professional photographers waiting to take your portrait. I couldn’t turn them down! Even with the $20/print pricetag.

You can take this lesson and apply it to your website by really thinking about which services or products your clients will want in addition to what they’re offering on the page. For example, a cosmetic surgeon’s page on liposuction might be a great place to put a Call-to-Action for brachioplasty (arm lift) or buttock augmentation. This helps your bounce rate, time on site and helps convert visitors to patients.

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What the heck is that? It’s a Wordle of our blog feed! Wordles can be a really nice visual way of looking at content. It basically makes words larger or smaller depending on how frequently they are used in content. It can be very telling for looking at the keywords you use. Apparently we should write about other search engines besides Google!

There are many of us who see the BBB sticker posted on trucks and business buildings around town, and the meaning of it kind of surpasses those of us who are less savvy with internet marketing. Yes, the Better Business Bureau has some awesome implications for your business in the physical world, if anyone knows what it is or what it stands for. But the real power of the BBB can be seen in your web presence. Being a member of the BBB and having a listing on BBB.org can be one of the strongest things you can do for your online presence. The most important “person” to see your online influence with the BBB is Google, and other search engines. Here’s seven reasons why your BBB listing will improve your search engine results!

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Around here, we call it “The Scallion.” It’s a play on The Onion, but slightly less clever. Every month I gather together the news that I’ve found around the web about SEO, the search engines, and the internet in general. I put it all in small, easy-to-digest niblets that I send around in a newsletter to the whole company – web designers, writers, account managers, etc – so that they can keep up without having to spend hours reading the same articles over and over.

This month, I’m sharing it with you.

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Way back in 1993, I went to college and got my first ever email account. It was a novelty back then. No one but the rich and the ubergeeky had computers in their dorm rooms. We stood in lines in computer labs and printed our papers on a dot matrix printer.

About a year later, my friends and I discovered the world wide web, and we taught ourselves HTML by raiding the page source of sites we liked and programmed everything in PICO, Elm and, sometimes, Notepad.

One time, when I wanted to post a photo of myself on a website I had built (on the space allotted to my UIUC student account), I scoured a few IRC channels to find someone who had a scanner, a highly advanced, rare and expensive piece of equipment. I found a guy who agreed to scan it for me for free, and so I stuck my senior yearbook photo in the mail. To South Africa.

Spam was still a strange sort of canned meat product.

When I went home for Christmas break, I’d been so spoiled by my dorm’s 56K dialup connection that my dad’s 28.8 modem was unbearably slow.

Back in the day, I created a website on a topic for which Yahoo didn’t yet have a category. I asked them to add it and they did. Try getting that to happen today!

Back in the day, I went to a Trek convention (shut up) and Wil Wheaton gave the audience his personal email address. And it was on AOL.

Today, I think nothing of pulling up Google Maps on my smartphone to get GPS voice navigation to a restaurant whose address I don’t even have. I watch TV with a Macbook in my lap. I work in a career field that didn’t even exist when I built my first web site. My 80 year old Grandma sends me email, and my sister uploads videos of my niece to Facebook.

The internet has come a long, long way since its infant state as a lawless underground timewaster of the early 1990s. It was only natural this video by Vimeo user JESS3, “The State of the Internet”, caught my attention. The numbers? They blow my mind.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

Did you know that you can use web analytics to track different SEO and internet marketing practices? You bet your sweet giraffe you can! Here are five really great ways to track your efforts as an optimizer.

5. Event Tracking. This is a method you can use where, by adding a small snippet of code to select areas of your site, you can very specifically track visitor clicks on certain areas of your site. This is especially handy with things like Calls-To-Action that go to your social media pages (buttons to your Twitter profile, for example). This is also handy in doing things like experimenting with the location of certain links or buttons on a page, to see if they get more clicks. Although you should definitely read Google Code’s guide on Event Tracking, implementing the Event Tracking code is not as difficult as they make it sound.  Simply add this code:

onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Category', 'Action', 'Label');"

Within the code of whatever you want to track. For images, this is within the <img> tag, for links this is within the <a> tag. Swap out the “Category, Action, Label” tags with your own custom tags. One example might be, “Twitter” for Category, “Follow” for Action, and “SideNav” for Label. You will start to see hits on these spots in the “Content” section of Google Analytics, under the “Event Tracking” report!

4. Custom URLs. Custom URLs using Google’s URL Builder are a great way to track external content, or content that you send off into the world with a link back to your client’s site. This can be anything from a Press Release, to a Linkbait Article, to a banner ad on an external website.

It won’t track how many views a page gets, but it will track how many times the URL that you create is clicked, and it will add specific labels so that you know where the clicks came from. Our Account Managers wrote a great blog post outlining how to use the Google URL Builder to this purpose.

Once the URL has been set up, you will start to see hits come in the “Traffic Sources” section of Google Analytics, in the “Campaigns” report.

3. Search Engines Report. The value of this report to an optimizer is so self-explanatory that I won’t even bother explaining it. It is also found in the “Traffic Sources” section. Check it out.

2. Referring Sites Report. This is a really simple report, found in the “Traffic Sources” section of Google Analytics, but it can have a treasure trove of information on your link building efforts! This report will show you all the non-search engine websites that send traffic to your site. If one of your link building sites is sending a lot of traffic, then you know it is a valuable resource. Conversely, if you’re spending money on a link resource that never sends you traffic, you might want to reconsider investing in that website…

1. Keywords Report. One use of the keywords report that you might not have considered is that if a keyword has a lot of visits but a really high bounce rate (the % of people who visit your site then leave without viewing any other pages) then it may be that you don’t have a good page for that keyword, or that the page isn’t well optimized. This can be extremely valuable for making sure that your website’s pages are really well targeted towards your chosen keywords. I usually like to complement the Keywords report with Google Insights for Search, to compare keyword popularity across all of Google.

For more information on analyzing data in Google Analytics, you can check out my other recent blog entry, “Quickly and Visually Interpret Data in Google Analytics.”

How do you use Google Analytics to measure your SEO practices? We’d love to hear it! Please feel free to share your knowledge in our comments.

I have been looking forward to getting back to blogging and it’s great to begin the new year with our new and improved site.
We have an exciting year ahead at Page 1 Solutions, we have set some big targets and the SEO team is gearing up towards achieving our goals for this year.

In our quest toward further refining our processes, our team is working on testing the different variables we use as part of our optimization. This will help get scientific data for our optimization techniques which will be useful in gaining even even more success for our clients. While the benefits of testing are obvious, there are some important points that we need to keep in mind as we work on the different tests we have set up.

It is important to define clear and measurable criteria for the tests and to detemine what kind of testing is best suited for the situation.

1. We should assess our goals and determine a reasonable number of scenarios to test in a relatively short time period.
2. We need to prioritize the elements to be tested and use appropriate testing tools.
3. It is vital to methodically track and evaluate results, to assess the results, carry out follow up tests if needed and to use the results to standardize processes.

Some of the different testing processes include A/B testing, split run testing, multivariate testing, and something I’ve recently heard about called called Taguchi testing.

• A/B Split Testing involves testing one element of a page against another to see which is more effective.
• Multiple Variable Testing or Multivariate Testing involves Testing more than one element at a time to test the
• Advanced Testing using statistics to determine the ideal configuration of elements using the smallest possible number of visitors.
• Advanced Testing and Automated Optimization using the Taguchi Method – The Taguchi Method was developed 50 years ago and is supposed to be the most powerful and successful testing method to create a significant improvement without creating a large load of work.

Designing a good test scenario requires time and preparation. Successful tests are those that can be completed in short periods of time yet yield greatest possible improvements in results. While the tests may not give us all the answers we need, they will surely help get us closer to achieving optimum results for our clients.

A little while back, mobile sites were the one of the hot buzz topics around the office. Everyone was really excited about the idea of making a custom website for mobile devices, but the reality was that many of our clients just don’t garner very many mobile visitors, and those that do find their way to our client sites on a mobile device convert at the same rate. Not really enough action to justify a mobile design.

Now the fire for mobile sites has died down a bit, and yet everyone in my department now has a smart phone (our resident wine-enthusiast, Becky, is especially excited about her new Droid phone). The entire office has converted to Gmail, so we can all obsessively check our work email while standing in line at our favorite burger place on our lunch break. And I, personally, can compulsively check and balance my bank accounts anywhere, anytime with ease.

Wells Fargo has come up with what I think is the perfect mobile site design, for three main reasons.

1. There is the need for a mobile site for this company. Unlike our clients, who offer services that are not needed on a daily basis, everyone loves being able to check their bank accounts while on the go. Before mobile sites, I was texting my bank, and before that, I was calling the old-fashioned way. Now, I absolutely adore being able to see my balances, make transfers and pay my bills instantly on all of my accounts. These days, I rarely use the non-mobile website, or even actually enter a bank.
2. The URL is insanely easy to type. So easy, in fact, that I have never actually bookmarked the Wells Fargo mobile site in my browser. Just type wf.com and away you go! Some sites I rarely visit on my phone, because my poor fingers just don’t want to type all those letters, but the wf.com address completely lacks that intimidation.
3. They know exactly what I want, and don’t include anything else. Wells Fargo has clearly done some research on the top functions that their users want, and they have very cleverly kept these functions to a minimum, so that the site is very simple and easy to use. Viola, a screenshot:



There’s really only two things that I really want to do when using this site: view my accounts or find an ATM. So that’s all they’ve put on the homepage! Nice, isn’t it? There’s also an option to view the full site if you aren’t seeing what you’re looking for. Once you’re in, it’s a cinch to quickly see your account balances, make transfers, pay your bills, or pretty much anything else you might need to do on the go.

What about you? Do you have a favorite mobile site, or creative ideas on how a mobile site might be useful for your industry? We’d love to hear it!