According to the article SEO spending in Britain will reach £400 million this year, and the figure is growing 60% year on year.

The article also highlights another, less welcome trend: basically that newspapers really don’t get Search Marketing!

When it comes to describing SEO I found it simplistic. Keeping things simple for the sake of clarity is of course a good thing… but in this case the article manages to be simplistic and confusing.

For example, Author James Ashton describes SEO as:

Part crystal-ball watching, part trial and error, it is the practice of improving lacklustre internet commerce by getting a firm noticed on the results pages of search engines.

Hmm! Not sure that’s really it.

Summarising how companies go about SEO he adds:

Most companies achieve SEO by peppering their websites with keywords that Google’s technology can easily read.

While comparing SEO and PPC he ventures:

Of the two, SEO was invented first, with the concept of paying for positions in search results introduced only a decade ago by Goto.com, now part of Yahoo.

Strictly speaking the article isn’t inaccurate, and it has some interesting facts and figures in it, but overall I found it a tad misleading.

Perhaps my biggest problem with it though is the unwritten implication that SEO is about gaming  the engines — when of course (at least for legitimate businesses looking for long term rankings), that’s really not what it’s about at all.

Think I’ll stick with this SEO theory.

Increasingly businesses around the world are harnessing the power of the internet to reach out to consumers in new and exciting ways. Studies show that more advertising spend is being diverted online – and that search is the biggest online channel by far. Keeping abreast of the latest trends in search engine marketing is vital for marketing professionals, web masters, website designers and developers, business owners, media buyers and just about anyone else involved in marketing today.

Search Marketing World is hosted by leading Irish interactive marketing agency, Interactive Return, and offers a uniquely Irish perspective on the global phenomenon of search engine marketing. More details are available on the website at www.searchmarketingworld2008.com, or by telephone on 01 672 9022 (9am – 4pm Mon-Fri).

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Marketing,Search Marketing events,search marketing Ireland,Interactive Return,Chris Sherman

Q. How long have you been involved in search?

Since 1999.

Q. What general advice would you give to someone just getting started with SEO / SEM – people trying to optimise their own sites, or launch their own online business?

First, recognize the importance of search for any business using the online channel. Second, resource your search marketing efforts appropriately. If you’re a small business the most importance resource is you. Give some time to understanding search yourself. It will pay dividends to your business for many years to come.

Q. What are your top tips for generating a good SERP ranking for a new site, and improving the ranking of an established site?

Make sure you don’t build a website that is inherently search unfriendly, for example, a website that consists of a single Flash movie. Content is king. Work on this. Use the medium – blogs, social networks, email etc etc

Q. What’s the best way to find relevant keywords / key phrases to use for both site optimisation and Pay Per Click advertising?

Ask your customers what they search on,. Analyse the web logs for your site. Examine the content of your competitors websites, especially the high-ranking ones. Use the search engine query tools.

Q. What should people look for when hiring an SEO / SEM professional?

Proven expertise, experience, a reporting methodology that delivers accountability, transparency.

Q. Tell me a bit about Black Hat SEO… can you give me a general overview?

For example, in the Summer of 2007 the BMW.de website employed a black-hat search marketing technique called “cloaking”. Their homepage was quite search unfriendly so they produced a second homepage which they displayed to search engines while regular users saw the original homepage. Search engines don’t like this as it means they are unable to measure the search relevance of the page seen by the user. The bmw.de site was banned from the Google index. Don’t do it. The search engines are smarter than you are. As in all other media and channels, use marketing techniques that deliver long-term value for your customer and your enterprise.

Q. Can Black Hat SEO / Negative SEO tactics be used to adversely affect the ranking of competitors sites? Tell me a bit more about this… are there any clear examples / case studies out there that we could use?

In theory you could point thousands of links from a link farm at a competitor site. This could look like the competitor is attempting to spam the search index. Therefore the competitor’s ranking could be adversely affected. Your time would be better employed writing some great content for your site and producing quality link-bait (content that will encourage other relevant sites to link to you).

Q. Is there anything web masters can do to protect their sites / search rankings from unscrupulous tactics?

Don’t employ unprofessional search marketers

Q. What is meant by the term “long tail” in SEO/SEM?

In any keyword domain there are a small number of highly trafficked keywords or phrases and a large number of low-trafficked keywords or phrases. Often, the keyword domain approximates to the right-half of a normal curve with the tail of the curve extending to infinity. Low trafficked keywords are therefore also known as “long-tail keywords”. The highly trafficked keywords have the following characteristics: highly competitive, consist of one or two words, have a high Cost per Click and may have low conversion rates as they tend to be quite general. Examples from the accommodation sector might include “hotel”, “London hotel” or “cheap hotel”. Low-trafficked keywords are not so competitive, often consist of 4, 5 or more words, have a lower Cost per Click and can have a higher conversion rate as they are quite specific indicating that the searcher is further along the online purchasing cycle. Examples might include “cheap city centre hotel Dublin”, “stags weekend hotel temple bar Dublin” or “business hotel with gym and spa Wexford”. Effective search marketing campaigns tend to put a lot of effort into discovering effective long-tail terms, particularly for use in sponsored listings campaigns.

Q. How do you see the search market developing over the next few years? Will Google continue to dominate between now and, say, 2012? What’s the next big thing in search?

2012 is an awful long way off in search. You may as well ask the postman. Google is quite dominant now. There is no significant competitor in sight. The big things currently happening in search include image ads, video ads, mobile search, social networking, local search and vertical (sectoral) search.

The more I think about this stuff the more I’m coming to realise that search optimisation / marketing is not about understanding automated robots and complex ranking algorithms (although some of the “experts” out there will probably disagree with me). Search marketing is about understanding people.

Understand the people using search, understand the people running the search engines, understand what both of those groups are trying to achieve… then align your site so that it meets their wants and needs.

Bingo! Sustainable high rankings.

People have this uncanny knack of wrapping things in layers of complexity that don’t really exist. More often than not poor ranking seems to stem from a failure to diligently apply basic principals in a consistent and iterative manner (something I’m as guilty of as the next man); not addressing the “prime directive” — which is to build a site with killer, information rich content that delivers what the user is looking for; or people basing their entire SEO efforts on finding and exploiting “loopholes” in the engines’ algorithms, and then wondering why their sites bomb out when the search engines slam the door.

If you’re looking to rank a site quickly to make a fast buck, those loopholes may well pay dividends. If you’re looking to build a sustainable, trusted online brand with sustainable long-term rankings though, it makes sense to work with the search engines and their users, rather than striving against them.

Technorati Tags: SEO , SEM , Search Engine Optimisation , Search Engine Marketing , digital marketing , internet marketing , digital marketing success

This is hardly going to be news to the SEO experts among you — but for those (like me) getting to grips with SEO for the first time, it’s a pretty important concept to grasp.

The 7 most used word phrase lengths for Web search engines averaged over a the two month period to the end of January 2004. (figures from OneStat.com)

Understanding how people are using search engines to find what they’re looking for lies at the very heart of your SEO/SEM efforts. Choosing the right keywords / phrases is critical both in terms of optimising (or optimizing, for Americans out there) your site for organic SEO, and choosing the phrases worth bidding on for your paid search / pay per click campaigns.

Web users are demanding more from search. They don’t want to trawl through spurious pages of results, and are getting much more sophisticated in the search terms they use in order to narrow those results down. Search engines are also getting better at handling these multi-word phrases, and are delivering back exactly what the user is looking for.

Search engines, and perhaps more importantly search users, are coming of age… typing more natural, and longer phrases into the search box is a natural extension of that.