Low-Cost Search Tactics

Although search marketing is not known as being an extremely expensive marketing endeavor, it still takes some monetary resources. Not every small mom-n-pop business has the budget to fund these efforts. There are some small businesses that even have to make a choice between paying utility bills and investing in search marketing strategies.

Matt Van Wagner of Find Me Faster explains that, in spite of these circumstances, the Web offers every business an opportunity to be found, even with a small budget. First and foremost, a business needs to have an online presence with a website. The site does not need to be elaborate, but needs to be able to operate and provide basic functions.

He recommends utilizing David Mihm’s site called GetListed.org. This site gives actionable tips and information for small businesses and the best part is, it is free. If you are going to do paid search, Van Wagner suggest being conservative and local in what you do.

Low-Cost Search Tactics

Is SEO Dead?

The stability in the future of search has recently been put into question due to the impact of social media on search. Since people are doing more and more searches on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, does it mean that social media will eventually replace search engines?

Both Twitter and Facebook have launched real-time search engines within their service offerings, and the major search engines are still struggling to enter the real-time search arena. Heather Dougherty, the Research Director at Hitwise, said:

“I think this [social media] will become integrated as part of search but certainly not circumvent search entirely.”

Based upon this information, it is however fair to say that social media has changed SEO permanently. According to Hitwise data, the number of visits to social networking sites exceeds the number of visits to email sites. As a result, Dougherty suggests that marketers increase their efforts with social media in order to reach their customers better.

How have your SEO efforts changed as a result of social media? What role do you see social media playing in the future of search?

Discover Who Your Audience Is

How well do you know your audience? Many advertisers think they know their audience well, but unfortunately, some do not utilize all the resources that would help them know their audience even better.
Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist with Google, explains how tools such as Google Ad Planner and Google Insights for Search provide data that help advertisers truly understand the demographics of their audience. These tools essentially allow users to build a target audience profile based on actual data and analytics.
Avinash says, “The reality is, you can focus by using data.”
He went on to say that he has found that many advertisers only have opinions on their audience but neglect to run experiments and tests to validate their views. Although experiments and tests take time, they save advertisers from targeting the wrong audience.
Is your advertising campaign working? Can you prove your target audience with data? If not, you may need to re-evaluate and make sure you truly know who you are targeting.

Google Matt Cutts Explains Caffeine Update

Google announced yesterday that it has been working on a project called “Caffeine” that will re-write the architecture for Google’s Web search. As Matt Cutts shares exclusively with WebProNews, Caffeine is comparable to the “Big Daddy Update” back in 2005, which consisted of changes to the way Google crawls and indexes websites.

How much of an impact will Caffeine have on results? Matt says there will, hopefully, not be a big difference. Google will integrate Caffeine slowly and take user feedback into consideration.

Matt says, “If we push forward as fast as we can, double down on innovation and try to do the best that we can, [and] do the right thing for users, everything else will work out.”

This infrastructure modification will lay the foundation for future indexing changes and will also allow for the expansion of website speed and size. Incidentally, it could even provide a stronger architecture for potential real-time and semantic efforts.

If you would like to try Caffeine, you can check it out at: http://www2.sandbox.google.com.