Michon Blog

When looking at a multi-disciplinary marketing campaign here at Michon, we look at all the options available to us. For online businesses or those with a website, Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is a very valuable and effective tool.

For many people, SEO is seen as a highly complex, confusing process that is difficult to explain or understand. Here’s a helpful little video that demystifies it all:

If you’d like to fins out more about SEO and how it can help your business, just give us a call.

.Net magazine has recently published an article debunking the top 10 myths surrounding search engine optimisation. The world of SEO and online marketing is still shrouded in mystery, often perpetuated by those who work in the field.

Ever since I started working specifically with online marketing as a separate entity to web design or development, I realised that there really is no trick to it. As with any other marketing platform, it is a case of proper planning, ongoing commitment and regular reviewing that will ensure success. This article goes some way to expand on that approach whilst highlighting a few specific things which I’ve heard many times… and make me cringe every single time!!

The top 10 things that people often get wrong are:

• You can’t guarantee any results
• A high Google Page Rank does not equal high search engine rankings
• Google doesn’t endorse any agency/marketer
• Meta Tag Keywords do not matter
• You can’t cheat your way to the top
• There’s no point in cramming keywords onto the pages
• Paid advertising doesn’t help organic ranking
• Don’t assume everyone will hit the homepage first
• You can’t simply ‘do SEO’ once
• There’s more to life than getting to the top

It really is a very good article – read the full ‘The top 10 SEO myths‘.

Came across this video this morning and it offers up some interesting points in the external linking debate that is often discussed when planning a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.

I think the 2 approaches discussed here demonstrate how the internet and subsequently, online marketing has changed over the past few years. Perceived wisdom was to keep all your ‘link juice’ for yourself and your partners and build a fairly defined yet disconnected mini-network, exchanging links but excluding anyone who could be a competitor on the SERPs. This has changed somewhat as the web has become more ‘social’.

With the advent and growth of sites such as Twitter and Facebook, linking to interesting and engaging content has become as much of an aspiration as writing original content on your own site. The works favourably in a number of ways:

• it can help position you as an expert with their ‘finger on the pulse’
• subsequently people may follow you for more insider knowledge
• linking to larger sites or more popular accounts can sometimes result in a link back
• in turn, this can put you on their radar and may develop into more interaction
• clever use of anchor text and web copywriting can actually make another’s content into a positive contribution to your own site

Personally, I’m all for sharing information, links, infographics, videos and anything else that inspires. Obviously you need to be careful about the anchor text that’s used and how prominent someone else’s content is on your own site but done correctly, it can be massively important and helpful for your own web presence.

What do you think? How do you handle external linking?

Rich

Whilst putting together a proposal for a mobile app for one of our clients I came across some very interesting statistics. They really show how much mobile app and website usage has grown recently and how much they are used throughout the UK and the rest of the world.

Here are some particularly interesting findings:

• the average daily app usage increased from 43 minutes per day in June 2010 to over 81 minutes in June 2011
• this now exceeds the daily average of internet usage, at 74 minutes
• 47% of app usage is gaming, 32% is social networking, 9% is news-related and 7% is for entertainment purposes
• Apple apps make up 59% of total app market, down from 81% 2 years ago
• there are currently over 425,000 apps available through the official Apple app store
• this compares to just over 220,000 Android apps available
• Android apps are approximately twice as likely to be removed or deleted from the marketplace once they’ve been launched
• this is said to be due to developers testing apps using the Android platform more than the Apple platform
• in the UK, Android phones are the most popular smartphone (37.4%) with Blackberrys second (23.3%) and Apple products third (22%)

So, app usage is growing year on year and Apple’s market domination is slowly being eroded despite having a very strong foothold in the marketplace. A big part of this is the growing popularity of the Android platform across a wide variety of premium and more simple smartphones as well as the growing tablet market. But that’s a whole different topic…

Rich

References

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/jun/21/flurry-app-usage-stats
http://www.padgadget.com/2011/06/01/q1-2011-showed-market-share-loss-for-apple-app-store/
http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20110708/apple-app-store-shifts-15-billion-apps/
http://www.appbrain.com/stats/number-of-android-apps
http://gigaom.com/2011/06/08/app-attrition-on-android-market-twice-as-high-vs-app-store/
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/48197.php

More than any election in the past, the 2010 General Election will be fought across an ever-widening range of media including the first ever televised debates.

Interestingly, all 3 major parties are using Facebook, YouTube and Twitter alongside their main websites to help spread their message. But who is leading the way online?

We’ve had a look at each of the 3 major parties to see who is leading the way online. We’ve looked at each online element purely focussing on the number of followers, pagerank or views. There are no subjective assessments here, it’s all based on cold, hard numbers…

Conclusions

As a whole, the Conservatives are definitely leading the way with a more visible website and more Facebook and Twitter followers than their competition although they are led by Labour on YouTube. The Lib Dems are behind in all areas apart from outperforming Labour on Facebook.

Regardless of who is leading and who eventually wins the election, it is really interesting to see that all the major parties are embracing social media as a way to engage their audience and spread their message more directly. As we get closer to the election itself I can only anticipate that this activity will increase even further.

We’ll be watching closely.

Rich