SEO; In the beginning.

Filed under: SEO,hedgehog digital — Tags: , , — Greg @ 13 Feb,09

Nowadays, its hard to use the Internet without hearing something about search engine optimisation, many think its all smoke and mirrors and SEO specialists are charlatans. This series of posts is aimed a debunking some of the common myths, SEO is not as simple as it may appear. For a better understanding of SEO, we should look back to a time when the Web was first catalogued/indexed by the first search engines.

Those of us who were using the web back in 1994 will remember the ‘What’s new on the internet’ menu item on the browsers of the day – obviously this quickly became impractical :-) and search engines became the way of finding your way around the internet.

Early version of Netscape showing the ‘What’s new’ button

netscape-beta

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, has been around since the mid 90′s when the first search engines appeared, even though nobody knew or talked about SEO. Back in the old days all webmasters had to do was submit a URL of a page to the search engines which would send a spider to crawl the page and index it.

As time passed, the Web grew bigger and site owners started to recognize the importance of having their sites ranked high on the results of searches (SERPs), the first information about search engine optimization begun to emerge on the web.

In those days, the job of SEO seems relatively easy compared to now, with search engines relying on webmasters (SEO specialists) to provide information about their sites through the use of the Meta Keywords tag. But soon enough, some webmasters started to abuse those tags with excessive and irrelevant keywords, like adding their competitors names, making the search results false or irrelevant which forced the Search engine to update and improve their algorithms.

The search engine algorithms became more complex, additional factors were introduced to determine a page ranking and they became more difficult for webmaster to manipulate, even though there were still ways of beating these algorithms, and webmasters continued to manipulate search results.

All that changed when a certain search engine was created, using a simple and catchy design, with an algorithm that considered off-page factors such as the number of other sites that linked to a page as well as on-page factors to improve the quality of results.

An Early Version of Google still running at Stanford University at this point

1997-google

Google changed the search game completely by combining the information of on-page and off-page factors to determine page rankings. With the analysis of off-page factors came Page Rank, a function to determine the quantity and quality of inbound links, we will be discussing Page Rank in later post.

With algorithms to deliver relevant search results and an exponentially growing number of users, Google soon became the most popular search engine and started to more or less dictate the rules of the search industry.
After Google, search engine optimization turned into another ball game, which lead us to the second part of this post…to be continued.

Online marketing to succeed the economic downturn.

Filed under: Blogs,Email Marketing,SEO,hedgehog digital,online-marketing — Tags: , , , , , , — Felipe @ 04 Feb,09

The world’s economy is going through one of its worst crisis in history, with many experts predicting a global economical recession, countries approving multi-billion dollars bailout programs to help their economies to survive and companies having to cut down their costs.

One of the first things on CEOs and Managing Directors minds is to reduce spending; this often includes their marketing campaigns. But this is exactly when marketing plays an important role to ensure a company is well known and easily found for economic growth.

Online Marketing is a great way of providing Local, National, even Global coverage to promote businesses. As the name already suggests – Online Marketing is any type of marketing via the Internet; email marketing, search engine marketing or search engine optimisation campaigns, social media marketing, blog marketing social networking or any other form of promoting your business via Internet.

Four factors put online marketing ahead of any other marketing techniques during an economic downturn:

1 – Measurement

Traditional marketing campaigns often lack measurement. With online marketing and a good web analytics package, you are able to track, measure, document the effect, adjust and justify your marketing investments.

2 – Immediate Effect

It is almost impossible to know how effective a TV commercial or other type offline advertisement is. Online marketing methods have a direct value on sales; especially search engine marketing.

3 – Good ROI

The success of a marketing campaign is measured by its ROI (return over investment); the higher the better; and there are few things beating online marketing. For every dollar spent on online marketing, marketers are making more than a dollar through sales or other conversions on their sites.

4 – Small Budgets

Online marketing can start with a small budget and gradually increase it as it succeeds, then reduce to maintain success. Many multi-million dollar companies are basing their economic strategies around this simple principle nowadays.

The DMA estimates that expenditures with online marketing will maintain a significant growth in the coming year with more than 50% of U.S marketing dollars directed to Interactive marketing.

We would like to hear your opinion; with the computer screen rapidly becoming the shop window of the future, should companies prioritise their marketing budgets on online marketing? Add your view in our comments section below.