Monday, December 05, 2005

SEO Marketing Boom

Search engine optimization (SEO) and Search engine marketing (SEM) are becoming more recognized form of online advertising for ever-growing number of companies. Over 12 billion dollars will be spent this year in the United States alone. In Australia this figure is close to 90 million dollars. Many big companies like for example Procter & Gamble are cutting back on their TV ad spending, and increasing funds for Internet brand building. The main challenge for SEO companies is to ensure that the websites of their customers are appearing first in the search engine results when certain keywords for products or services are requested. However this will become increasingly difficult as more companies will enhance their websites to compete for top search results.

Friday, December 02, 2005

MSN Book Search

According to internal Microsoft research over 50 percent of online queries go unanswered on search engines. To address this issue Microsoft intention is to to launch MSN Book Search. This will greatly improve finding the exact information including the content from the books, academic materials, periodicals and other print resources. The idea of a book search in not new, since Google started its own Google Book Search called Library Project many months ago. This has created already some controversy and has provoked lawsuits by publishers and writers. It will be a battle for Microsoft as well, to achive its goal in creating more relevent search results.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Google Earth Search

Google Earth, the site launched in June this year, offers maps and satellite images for regional searches. Although not all areas are highly detailed, some images are very high resolution, and some show sensitive military or government locations.
Countries like India and China expressed concerns about danger of this knowledge to be used in possible attacks against those locations. Debbie Frost, spokewoman for Google, noted that the software uses information already available from public sources however Google welcomes dialogue with governments, and we will be happy to talk to authorities about any concerns they may have.
In Australia there is strong opposition from Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation ANSTO for making the Sydney Lucas Heights nuclear reactor images freely available. And ANSTO demands for the Google Earth images to be completely obscured or at least the quality of imagery downgraded.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Search Engine Rankings

According to recent search engine rankings conducted by ComScore Networks Google accounted for 37.3% of searches (up 1.2% from July 2005 search engine rankings), Yahoo! had 29.7% of the search engine traffic, followed by MSN 15.8% , AOL Search 9.6% and Ask Jeeves 6%. Google is also recognized as the best news search engine, most SEO and webmaster friendly search provider and best search ads provider.

Monday, October 03, 2005

Spam Blog Crusade

There is a spam blog crusade going out there. And some people are attempting to explore this trend from a commercial perspective creating spam blog directories and generating lots of traffic to their sites where they usually have AdSense or other type of advertising. Just recently I have seen on Technorati big adds about making money from the blog by placing text links. So what is a spam blog? I guess it is all about where do we draw the line? It would be similar as a question: at which point a man who starts to lose hair becomes a bald man? Sorites paradox again.
For me one of the examples of spam blogging is what bloggers are doing with the keyword "failure". It is an old story I admit, but it will not go away. So, are we going to call all the tens of thousands of bloggers link spammers? I am not here to judge that. And I think that the First Amendment does guarantee freedom of speech and the freedom of links we can have on our blogs. And for those who don't like the results, they most likely missed out on this special sort of voting.

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Interview with SEO Consultant

I share belief with Terrence Gordon from Performance SEO that Search Engine Optimization will become more of a controlled environment and less of a "wild west" as more companies realize its value and start investing larger sums of money. In his recent interview he has been discussing the value of a page rank, integrating Flash into SEO projects, Google sandbox, SEO competitions and return on investment that companies are receiving from Top Rankings in the search engine results. To view the entire interview see Google Blogoscoped.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Relevance in Search Results

The ongoing pursuit by Google for greater relevance in search engine results has been shown in Patent filing #20050071741 - Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data. From now on Google algorithm will analyze the history of your web pages and the history of links to your website. All the information gathered will be used to determine relevance. If you want to prevent your website from disappearing in search results you need to create new content on existing pages and keep adding new web pages.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

SEO Principles

The following is an excerpt from Infoworld.com

What are some basic SEO principles?

A Web site built with users in mind is likely to fare well with the software "spiders" that search engines use to index content and rank sites, Thurow says. The three building blocks of such a site are:

-- Text: Use content that includes words and phrases your company's target audience is likely to type into search queries. If you're selling mountain bikes, that term should be everywhere -- in page headings, navigation buttons, photo captions and the like.

-- Links: A site's navigation scheme should be accessible, coherent and consistent so that spiders and humans can easily traverse it.

-- Popularity: A good site will prompt others to link to it. External links from reputable sites will enhance your Web site's ranking in search engines.

Why should a company bother to use SEO if it can buy pay-per-click ads?

A company can always buy pay-per-click (PPC) ads on search engines. These ads appear whenever users query specific keywords. However, JupiterResearch has found that the average company gets about 80 percent of its commercial search engine referrals from organic results and the rest from PPC ads. So while PPC ads can complement organic search results, particularly when doing seasonal promotions, they are no substitute.

How much should a company expect to spend on SEO consulting work?

It depends on the size of the Web site and the condition it's in, says Chris Winfield, president and cofounder of search engine marketer 10e20. Most of his company's clients sign up for a year's service, paying between US$5,000 and $15,000 per month, plus sometimes an initial, one-time fee, he says.

What should CMOs look for when evaluating SEO consultants?

In addition to checking the obvious -- references, expertise and resources -- it's critical to hire a consultant who abides by a search engine's SEO guidelines. Avoid search engine marketing firms that offer to elevate rankings for a low, one-time fee, since the only way to legitimately guarantee top positioning is with a PPC ad. Unscrupulous firms typically try to trick search engine spiders by employing so-called black hat techniques, such as stuffing a Web site with hidden keywords. When a search engine detects such a trick, it will ban the site from its index. Then no amount of SEO will make it appear.

Saturday, June 04, 2005

Google Success and Failure

When searching the Internet one can find lots of optimism there. Google reveals about 74,400,000 results for the word Failure and about 201,000,000 results for the word Success. Perhaps this is why
I am so attracted to the Internet. I just wonder how many times the word success has been used to try to trap some of us into all those fraudulent business schemes.
Searching for failure Michael Moore website is at number two position. I wonder will MichaelMoore.com ever get to be number one in this fun SEO game?

Thursday, June 02, 2005

SEO Seminar

Advanet is conducting an entry level seminar in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne January 23-26 about search engine optimisation SEO. Subjects covered are:
Brand development online, strategic web marketing plan and how to leverage SEO to build your brand online.
Making your company products and services visible on the Internet searches.

In this one hour seminar you will find out how SEO will improve search engine results for your products and services so you can attract new customers by improving your website visibility.
Who Should Attend?
Those interested in learning how to improve their website in the search engines results.
Marketing directors and sales managers who want to get their websites to be found online.

If you would like more information about how Advanet Pty Ltd can help your company with SEO services and building your brand online please email us at advanet@gmail.com with your most important keywords list. One of our SEO experts will take your keywords list and refine it for better results, evaluate your competition and provide you with the strategic web marketing plan customised to suit the requirements for your business needs. We look forward to hearing from you.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Google Link Command

Many of us know by now that to find the inbound links to a website we can use the Google link command as follows: link:www.yourdomain.com. However as of late only less than 10% of inbound links is reported by Google. There is lots of speculation about why is that, but no one knows the full answer yet.
To find a better answer to links question use Yahoo link command linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com or MSN link:www.yourdomain.com and this will give you a better understanding of your link popularity.

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Searching Books

With Google Print and Amazon Search Inside the Book you can have limited full text and full image access to hundreds of thousands of books. However there are limits to what you can do with this information. You are unable to save or print or copy and paste the scanned pages from books. Google started also the Library Project where it works with several major libraries to digitize their collections and make them searchable on Google Print.

Friday, May 06, 2005

Web Analysis Under Pressure

Nerds On Site Inc. has announced that their current online hit counter service will be discontinued due to the old code which is not efficient enough to handle over million hits per day. The new hit counter web application will be significantly upgraded and be available online by May 9th. When the online visitor counter, which is on my site as well shows: "? online" it means that the web application is offline due to heavy traffic.

Updating this post in 2006 I would like to add that subsequently I have replaced the online visitor counter with the one from www.fastonlineusers.com.

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Google Adsense News

Internet is gradually becoming a billboard for Google's ads. Like it or not, it will stay that way. And as long as advertising revenues are helping small web publishers it is a positive outcome for most of us. Since March 2005, Google allows to "accurately disclose the amount of Google's gross payments". If you wonder how much other websites and blogs are making from Adsense you can visit AdMoolah.com and query its earnings database. And consider to view the story in USA Today on: Google's AdSense a bonanza for some websites.

Friday, April 22, 2005

Benedict XVI and Internet

Before new pope, Benedict XVI, has choosen his name, the Internet domain name www.benedictXVI.com was already taken. Shortly after, the domain name was offered for sale on eBay.com with the price well above $1000 last time I looked.

The other popular spot on the Internet is unofficial blog covering His Holiness thepopeblog.blogspot.com. If you need to contact the pope he got himself the email address: benedictxvi@vatican.va.

Friday, April 15, 2005

Elusive Google Sandbox

Google created the sandbox new website filter starting in March, 2004. The main reason was to stop spam related websites from adding large number of purchased links, to achive high rankings for their keywords from the date of launch. Only some websites are placed in the sandbox, but it happens more frequently for those websites which are seeking rankings for highly competitive keyword phrases. In order for your site to get out of the sandbox, you need to continue building strong incoming links, have good link anchor text, and add more keyword rich relevant content on your webpages. Google does not say much about sandbox effect, and when you search for sandbox term you will find Google Adwords Keyword Tool as the first result.

Saturday, April 09, 2005

Yahoo supports Wikipedia

Yahoo Search engine will supply hardware and other resources to the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to support that nonprofit organization's free Wikipedia online encyclopedia. Yahoo Search also will feature abstracts of Wikipedia content at the top of relevant search results in the form of shortcuts, which are either factual information or links to factual information. Yahoo's shortcuts are intended to give the answers right on the search results page, so users don't have to browse away to other websites for the desired information.

Friday, March 25, 2005

Search Results and Blog Power

Blogs are achieving much higher search engine rankings than most websites from the same business sector. As an example when you type in Google the two word phrase business world you will see that blog www.blogbusinessworld.blogspot.com ranks # 5 out of 439,000,000 results, just few positions behind BBC News. We could debate of the importance of the search results but the fact is there are many far wealthier organizations, with expensively designed traditional websites, ranked behind that blog. And as everyone knows higher traffic to the blog or website equals higher sales revenue.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

Customer Satisfaction

Below are some of our customers search engine positioning results. We are not able to guarantee your company number one position on Google or Yahoo searches. However in most cases being at top five positions in the search results is the best outcome of our SEO process.

Click on the Google links below to see the search results for our selected customers:

Search for "boat syndicate" - in Top 10 results for Smartboating
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&safe=active&q=boat+syndicate&meta=

Search for "safety dvds" - in Top 10 results for FutureMedia
http://www.google.com.au/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=safety+dvds

Search for "homeopathics sydney" - in Top 10 results for Newton's Pharmacy
http://www.google.com.au/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=homeopathics+sydney

Search for "educational videos" - in Top 10 results for
Marcom Projects - Queensland
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=educational+videos&meta=cr%3DcountryAU

Search for "multimedia sydney" - in Top 10 results for
Art of Multimedia
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=multimedia+sydney&meta=cr%3DcountryAU

Search for "christian loans" - in Top 10 results for
Calvary Financial Services
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&cr=countryAU&q=christian+loans&spell=1

Search for "pharmacy POS" - in Top 10 results for Simple Retail
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=pharmacy+POS&meta=cr%3DcountryAU

Search for "rock climbing insurance" - in Top 10 results for
BMS Austpac Liverpool Insurance Brokers
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=rockclimbing+insurance&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryAU

Search for "Reverse Camera" - in Top 10 results for
Astral Electronics
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=Reverse+Camera&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryAU

Search for "Supply Chain Benchmarking" - in Top 10 results for
Benchmarking Success
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=Supply+Chain+Benchmarking&btnG=Search&meta=

Search for "forklift hire sydney" - in Top 10 results -
for All Lift Forklifts
http://www.google.com.au/#q=forklift+hire+sydney

Saturday, January 22, 2005

Search Engine Marketing Training

Search Engine Marketing Training has been launched from January 2005. It is the first SEO learn by doing course in Australia and is available by email for other countries. It offers tutored and online self-study courses in search engine marketing and optimization. The curriculum covers the subjects in SEO, SEM, PPC advertising, keyword research, link-building, and website usability.







Return to Advanet SEO Consulting Australia Home Page.

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Increase Website Visibility

Your website search engine position will improve by enhancing the meta tags, title and document text. Increasing your website
visibility is our main goal which can be achived by following the
SEO Best Practice.

Considering the increasing complexity of search engines algorithms below are some of the factors, which play a role in website visibility:

Age of the website
Age of content on the website
Length of time domain has been registered
Google Pagerank (Only used in Google's algorithm)
Depth of document in site
Incoming backlinks and anchor text of incoming backlinks
Frequency of content: regularity with which new content is added
Age of link and reputation of linking websites
Website hosting uptime
Whether the site serves different content to different categories of users
Broken outgoing links not rectified promptly
Citations and research sources
Unsafe or illegal content
Uniqueness of the content
Quality of HTML coding, presence of coding errors
Rate of document addition or change
Rate of removal of incoming links to the site
Actual click through rates observed by the search engines for
listings displayed on their SERPs

Text surrounding outward links and incoming backlinks. A link following the words "Sponsored Links" could be ignored
Hand ranking by humans of the most frequently accessed SERPs
Semantic connections of hosted documents


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