So 2011 has arrived and given the recent and ongoing onslaught on small businesses in Ireland, we have compiled 2 very cost effective solutions aimed at reducing marketing spend while increasing qualified sales-leads for small businesses. You can read about it here – http://www.marcommedia.ie/small-business-solutions.

So what is the Google Adwords Quality Score all about? Google AdWords uses a number of factors to determine the accuracy of an Ad, and provides you with a final score. This score is on a 0 – 10 rating. As your click through rate increases, your Quality Score increases. You might need to adjust your ad until you get the perfect listing. When you have shown a significant increase in your click through rate, and taken the steps to improve your quality score, the minimum bid on your Google AdWords campaign should decrease. You should check the daily results to ensure that you remain an effective campaign, and your CTR stays high. If you maintain a high level of quality and return, your campaign will be successful, and you should be able to afford the minimum bid that has been set to your Google AdWords campaign.

To learn more about PPC management and strategy, call our Dublin office on 01 456 9934.

When it comes to internet marketing and SEO, building a linkwheel is one of the more advanced strategies there is. The basic concept of a linkwheel is to create a bunch of articles or blog posts on different websites and link them to each other and, eventually, back to your website. This will give your website a higher ranking on search engines result pages (SERP’s). In order to get the most out of your linkwheel, be sure to use good SEO (search engine optimisation) tactics so that you can drive as much traffic to each of the links in your wheel as possible. The more people that visit your links, the more people will eventually find your website.

To learn more about internet marketing strategy and tactics, or to find out how we can drive qualified sales leads to your business, email sales@marcommedia.ie or call our Dublin office on 01 456 9934.

Video will dominate the future of advertising, with 50pc of online ads featuring video by 2015, Google has revealed. By 2015, the smartphone will be the No 1 screen through which users will engage with advertisers’ digital brands.

With 99pc of its top clients now running campaigns on its Display Network and Android hurtling towards No 1 smartphone operating system in the world, Google seems to have many reasons for smiling. It’s no wonder that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is keeping his eye in the rear-view mirror on Microsoft with Bing and its Windows Phone 7, not Facebook.

According to Google, 50pc of ad campaigns will include video ads bought on a cost-per-view basis, which means that the user will choose whether to watch the ad or not, and the advertiser will only pay if the user watches. That’s up from very little today.

It said that today, advertisers are starting to deliver ads that are tailored to particular audiences. Many are using real-time bidding technology, so that they can bid on the ad space that they think is most valuable. In 2015, 50pc of these ads will be bought using this real-time technology. Marcom Media Ltd is Ireland’s Leading Digital Marketing Agency – to find out what we can do for your business email sales@marcommedia.ie

Determining the real ROI of social media is muddied at best.

One thing is certain: social is no silver bullet. Alone, social cannot and will not drive the monetisation of more established channels. Here are the four top tips that we have compiled to help you find the right mix of paid and earned media for your brand:

1. Advertising in the age of social media is not just about selling your product. It’s about selling positive experiences with your product. People need to be at the center of your social media strategy, not your product. Find the passion point for your brand and use it to ignite and excite your target audience. Measure engagement not just impressions.

2. Social and traditional don’t need to be mutually exclusive words. Social media actually needs to be part of the marketing mix, not some outlying afterthought of a program. Make sure to fold it into all your creative. Social media can’t exist in a vacuum. It has to feel cohesive with all your brand messages and media buys.

3. Remember people are media too. In other words, if a consumer thinks something is relevant, they will share it with everyone they know. By aligning to a consumer’s passions and explicitly acknowledging his/her need to connect, you can make your brand stand out in a powerful way.

4. Social is not right for every brand. If you don’t have a corporate culture of experimentation, it’s probably not for you. If you don’t have anyone other than an intern to focus of on it, it’s not for you. In other words, consumers may not want to brag about their relationship with you on Facebook. Harsh? Maybe but it’s important to be realistic and spend your time on efforts that will move the needle for your business.

If you think social media advertising is right for your organisation, or if you would like to learn more, contact us on +353 1 456 9934 or email sales@marcommedia.ie

Keywords and human beings have more in common than some might think. For starters, they have serious relationships (whether messy and dramatic, or solid and transparent) with one another. Also similar to humans, each keyword has its own unique value and deserves to feel appreciated for the role they play within these relationships. This is not always an easy task with humans or with keywords, but doesn’t mean it’s any less important to try for. Now, before you go thinking that we are gone mad, let us explain a bit more into why we are drawing this comparison.

When we look at the Traditional Search Funnel, it’s key to realise that users will typically begin searching on “Upper funnel” (e.g. online dating ) broad terms that are high volume and low converting. Users then gradually drill down to more specific terms as they are still in the consideration process; where they tend to complete the purchase cycle on specific “Brand” (e.g. match.com) terms that are low volume and higher converting. Knowing this, it’s important to recognise the role of each keyword in the path to conversion and give proper credit where credit is due. This means that the last click might not really deserve all the credit, considering users might have found your Brand in the first place through an upper funnel/general keyword.

Benefits of knowing which roles keywords play in the path to conversion include, providing valuable insight for optimisations, when defining which keywords perform and which do not , as well as helping make smarter assessments with budget allocation. More and more, Technologies are helping Search marketers better understand these relationships, shown through advances in tools such as the Search Funnel Report within Google Adwords, Exposure to Conversion Report within DoubleClick, Cross Visitation report within Omniture or the Path to Conversion report within Kenshoo. These reports are helpful as they break down different pathways, showing all the keywords that are clicked along the way, leading to a conversion.

Once these relationships are clearly understood, and the proper value is allocated (e.g. upper funnel, general keywords) marketers are better equipped to make more intelligent, data driven decisions. Again, similar to humans, if a keyword (e.g. boyfriend or girlfriend) isn’t pulling its weight and falls short of expectations, despite being optimised (e.g. working at it) then, perhaps it’s time to call it quits and remove it altogether (e.g. break-up). To the opposite effect, maybe the realisation has finally set in that you’ve been overlooking that special keyword all along, and they could just be “the one.”

Remember those good old days, when all you needed was a website to establish your company as a technologically competent enterprise?

As the technology behind Internet marketing has become more engaging, consumer sophistication has grown proportionally. Customers are no longer satisfied with an online presentation of your company’s brochure.

Today’s Internet users want personal interactions with those they do business with before they make a buying decision.

Web 2.0 has made countless new features available to online marketers:

* Blogs
* Forums
* RSS Feeds
* Wikis
* Social Networking Opportunities
* Multimedia Posts

…and Marcom Media Ltd. can put these social websites (and more) to work for you. But why are they so important to your success?

These tools allow consumers to be involved in your world, while you can be a force in theirs. Relevant and dynamic content—about your business, your industry, your people or your products—can now migrate away from your site, finding its way to interested consumers across the globe. Through social networking advertising, and social media advertising those consumers can easily link to it and, in turn, find their way back to your online presence.

Your website won’t succeed in today’s rapidly changing online marketing environment if it’s simply a static display of information about you. Potential customers are more interested in what you can do for them. They’re making judgments about your business as soon as they hit your landing page. If they’re not instantly engaged, they’ll move on to find another supplier who can capture their interest and, as a result, capture the sale. Online viral marketing utilises social networking sites to create brand awareness and attract customers.

At Marcom Media Ltd., we’ve been involved in Social Media Optimisation since its inception, and we invest the resources required to consistently keep our staff on the leading edge of these technological innovations.

If you’re ready to move your website into the 21st century, and are ready to promote your business online in a more modernised way, we can show you how to make the most of Web 2.0’s incredible emerging opportunities. You’ll start the game ahead of your competitors, and we’ll keep you in the lead with the latest tools entering the online environment.

Go ahead: ask us what we can do for your business. Get started growing your business online now! Email sales@marcommedia.ie

In the simplest terms, search engines collect data about a unique website by sending an electronic spider to visit the site and copy its content which is stored in the search engine’s database. Generally known as ‘bots’, these spiders are designed to follow links from one page to the next. As they copy and assimilate content from one page, they record links and send other bots to make copies of content on those linked pages. This process continues ad-infinitum. By sending out spiders and collecting information 24/7, the major search engines have established databases that measure their size in the tens of billions.

Knowing the spiders and how they read information on a site is the technical end of basic SEO. Spiders are designed to read site content like you and I read a newspaper. Starting in the top left hand corner, a spider will read site content line by line from left to right. If columns are used (as they are in most sites), spiders will follow the left hand column to its conclusion before moving to central and right hand columns. If a spider encounters a link it can follow, it will record that link and send another bot to copy and record data found on the page the link leads to. The spider will proceed through the site until it records everything it can possible find there.

As spiders follow links and record everything in their paths, we can safely assume that if a link to a site exists, a spider will find that site. There is no need to manually or electronically submit your site to the major search engines. The search spiders are perfectly capable of finding it on their own, provided a link to your site exists somewhere on the web. Search engines have an uncanny ability to judge the topic or theme of pages they are examining, and use that ability to judge the topical relationship of pages that are linked together. The most valuable incoming links, come from sites that share topical themes.

Once a search spider finds your site, helping it get around is the first priority. One of the most important basic SEO tips is to provide clear paths for spiders to follow from point A to point Z in your website. This is easily accomplished by providing easy to follow text links directed to the most important pages on the site in the navigation menu or simply at the bottom of each page. One of these text links should lead to a text-based sitemap, which lists and provides a text link to every page in the site. The sitemap can be the most basic page in the site as its purpose is more to direct spiders than help lost site visitors though designers should keep site visitors in mind when creating the sitemap. Google also accepts more advanced, XML based sitemaps, which can be read about in their Webmaster Help Center.

There will be cases where allowing spiders free access to every page on a site is not always desirable. Therefor you’ll need to know how to tell spiders that some site content is off limits and should not be added to their database using “robots.txt” files. (To learn more about setting up your Robots.txt file, email sales@marcommedia.ie)

Offering spiders’ access to the areas of the site one wants them to access is half the battle. The other half is found in the site content. Search engines are supposed to provide their users with lists of pages that relate to the search terms people enter in their search box. Search engines need to determine which of billions of pages is relevant to a small number of specific words. In order to do this, the search engine needs to know your site relates to those words.

To begin with, there are a few elements, a search engine looks at when examining a page. After the URL of a site, a search spider records the site title. It also examines the description meta tag. Both of these elements are found in the “head” section of the source code.

Titles should be written using the strongest keyword targets as the foundation. Some titles are written using two or three basic two-keyword phrases. A key to writing a good title is to remember that human readers will see the title as the reference link on the search engine results page. Don’t overload your title with keyword phrases. Concentrate on the strongest keywords that best describe the topic of the page content.

The description meta tag is also fairly important. Search engines tend to use it to gather information on the topic or theme of the page. A well written description is phrased in two or three complete sentences with the strongest keyword phrases woven into each sentence. As with the title tag, some search engines will display the description on the search results pages, generally using it in whole or in part to provide the text that appears under the reference link.

Due to abuse by webmasters, such as using irrelevant terms, search engines place minor (if any) weight in the keywords meta tag. As such, it is not necessary to spend a lot of time worrying about the keywords tag.

After reading information found in the “head” section of the source code, spiders continue on to examine site content. It is wise to remember that spiders read the same way we do, left to right and following columns.

Good content is the most important aspect of search engine optimisation. The easiest and most basic SEO rule is search engine spiders can be relied upon to read basic body text 100% of the time. By providing a search engine spider with basic text content, you offer the engines information in the easiest format for them to read. While some search engines can strip text and link content from Flash files, nothing beats basic body text when it comes to providing information to the spiders. You can almost always find a way to work basic body text into a site without compromising the designer’s intended look, feel and functionality.

The content itself should be thematically focused. In other words, keep it simple. Some pages cover multiple topics on each page, which is confusing for spiders. The basic SEO rule here is if you need to express more than one topic on a page, you need more pages. Fortunately, creating new pages with unique topic-focused content is one of the most basic SEO techniques, making a site simpler for both live-users and electronic spiders.

When writing page content, try to use the strongest keyword targets early in the copy. For example, a site selling “College Books” might use the following as a lead-sentence;

“College Books by Acme Books Ltd. are the cheapest college books available and are trusted by leading universities and colleges in Ireland.”

The primary target is obviously college books for the colleges and universities in Ireland. By placing the keyword phrases “college books” and “colleges in Ireland” along side other keywords such as the singular words, “cheapest”, “trusted” and “universities” and “colleges”, the sentence is crafted to help the search engine see a relationship between these words. Subsequent sentences would also have keywords and phrases weaved into them. One thing to keep in mind when writing page copy is unnecessary repetition of keywords (keyword stuffing) is often considered spam by search engines. Another thing to remember is that ultimately, the written copy is meant to be read by human eyes as well as search spiders. Read your copy out loud. Does is make sense and sound natural? If not, you’ve overdone the use of keyword phrases and need to make adjustments.

Another important element a spider examines when reading the site (and later relating the content to user queries), is the anchor text used in internal links. Using relevant keyword phrases in the anchor text is a basic SEO technique aimed at solidifying the search engine’s perception of the relationship between pages and the words used in the link. For example… we also have a series of popular blog posts on the Best Practices For SEO. Linking the term “Best Practices For SEO” is an example of using keyword phrases in the anchor text. Terms such as “SEO Practices” or “SEO for Irish business” could also have been used.

Remember, the foundation of successfully optimising your site is simplicity. The goal is to make a site easy to find, easy to follow, and easy to read for search spiders and live-visitors, with well written topical content and relevant incoming links. While basic SEO can be time consuming in the early stages, the results are worth the effort and set the stage for more advanced future work.

Marcom Media Ltd. is a young dynamic company based in Dublin, Ireland. We provide online marketing solutions for SMB, MNC’s and Public Sector clients. To learn more, email sales@marcommedia.ie or call our Dublin office on 01 456 9934.

Ranking organically with tweets largely depends on the keyword usage and what comes first in your tweet. You don’t want to rank for [RT @bill RT @bob RT @geoff] so make sure you add the users you retweet at the end with a blog-like [via @andy @bill #chris]. Also you should add some meaningful tags: #seo is fine for Twitter but something more exact like #twitterseo might be better findable and more accurate.

We feel that getting found in Twitter search is no real advantage. The results are messy and lack focus. Even the so called “popular” results on top are barely relevant. People still use this search in spite of better alternatives though. Scheduling recurring tweets might be a good idea here. Don’t spam though. I think more than 4 tweets a day is too much. Lots of Twitter tools support scheduled tweets – HootSuite for example.

Making tweets spread virally is perhaps the most important discipline of Twitter SEO. The other stuff is very basic. Add popular terms and keywords to your tweet to make people re-tweet. Words like “free”, “tips”, “tools” etc., brands like “Google”, “Yahoo” everybody cares for and something that makes a tweet stand out like “OMG!”, “WTF?” or a number.

Of course the link you tweet or the message must be worth re-tweeting. In case it isn’t nobody will re-tweet it. Tweets about Twitter, technology, social media, business that are helpful for most users will get more popular that tweets about niche topics like SEO. Humor is also key. Even SEO jokes are quite popular.

Entering Google results via realtime search is easy once you’re tweet has become viral but it sometimes also helps to tweet your link from more than one account and more than one time. For instance we at Marcom Media Ltd. tweet from the company account first, then in most cases we will re-tweet the link and post it again or re-tweet as an author from our individual accounts.

As our postings have considerable value the rest is done by other regular users. Don’t forget that many Twitter accounts are mostly useless bots that re-tweet automatically based on keywords: Nobody clicks those links. They may show up in Google though as it doesn’t really filter tweets.

These Twitter SEO best practices are neither SEO secrets nor controversial. Every business serious about Twitter SEO tweets that way. Other people don’t mind but if you’re using Twitter for business reasons should do more than just click and run. Make sure to act accordingly to perform better in search be it Google or Twitter.

Invariably, an online press release strategy is overlooked in most online campaigns, yet a successful and sustained digital PR campaign can compliment traditional SEO activities. In fact, an online press release can actually help to deliver better rankings and increase brand awareness.

As any marketing professional will know, a press release is an excellent vehicle for generating product and brand buzz. An easy way to reach a wide audience provided distribution is executed correctly, a press release delivers an instant hit of recognition. An online PR also promises:

1. Quality Content

Often with search engine optimisation campaigns, it can be hard to think of fresh, relevant, and really interesting content to upload onto a business website. One of the problems with search engines is their constant hunger for new pages, new data, and new information. Satisfying that desire becomes tougher and tougher the more content you create, as there are fewer and fewer original ideas remaining. A press release will help to lessen the load as a tried and tested format for communicating relevant information. Topics such as new product launches, special offers, company accolades, and business developments will go from being internal news to an external content creator.

2. Branding

Branding is becoming an integral part of search engine optimisation. A recognisable brand delivers some of the same kudos and traffic as a page-one search engine placement. An online PR campaign will help to develop brand identity at the same time as suggesting professionalism and aiding in the construction of a corporate image. Large corporations like Coca-Cola and Sony use both on and offline press releases to consolidate their brand – this regular flow of information helps to combat industry competitors and ensures customers retain their brand loyalty.

3. Ease of Distribution

A genuinely newsworthy press release, or series of press releases, can be distributed to thousands of journalists, commentators, and opinion leaders within seconds online. Each of these recipients is able to quickly and easily forward on the release to a colleague or other interested party, adding to the distribution network. One of the primary aims of search engine optimisation is to increase website visibility and traffic – something equally likely to occur through online PR distribution, making it the perfect SEO partner for proactive websites and organizations.

4. Authoritative Links

Building good quality inbound links is a constant trial for online marketers – an online PR can help to ease this burden. Once distributed, the PR can be picked up by any number of outlets including magazines and newspapers. Provided links have been planted in the original press release, a new link is created each time an outlet picks up on the PR’s story. If the distribution has been done correctly, these links should all be from very relevant sources – known to be of benefit to the off-page optimisation calculations employed by the search engines and likely to direct targeted traffic to the website.

5. User Data

Keeping a close eye on the online press release’s pick-up rate can provide useful data for the distributor. Monitoring which news items are picked up gives a clear insight into the types of subjects and messages most likely to be of interest to the target audience – this knowledge can be transferred to website copy, future releases, and optimised content.

To learn more about online press release strategy, email sales@marcommedia.ie or call our Dublin office on 01 456 9934.