The Dos & Don’ts of SEO – a newbie’s perspective

Posted 27 January 2012 by
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Don’ts Keyword Stuffing While most companies refrain from keyword stuffing, it is still the biggest no-no of SEO. In the past, people used to stuff meta tags with irrelevant key words in order to boost their rankings. If you were to do this today, you would be penalized by the search engine companies. To avoid [...]

YouTube = Better ROI

Posted 27 January 2012 by
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The age of digital marketing is upon us, and it has never been clearer than in this year’s upcoming Super Bowl. With some of the biggest companies in the world wanting to advertise in the coveted half-time spot, the race is on. The contenders The companies that will be advertising include Doritos; Samsung; Apple; Evian; [...]

What makes a great website?

Posted 27 January 2012 by
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Some websites just make us want to know more, while others make us click back and go to another website. So what aspects of a website make it worthy of our attention? SEF (Search Engine Friendly) This one is usually overlooked, but a search engine friendly website allows people to discover you. An SEF website [...]

What is the Future of Blogging?

Posted 22 December 2011 by
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“Is blogging coming to an end?” A question that has been around since the boom of social media, but the answer all depends on who you ask. There’s always the good old talk about how blogging is fading away, but let’s face it: blogging is not dying, it’s changing. The Internet is not a fad, [...]

Mobile email marketing and m-commerce this festive season

Posted 7 December 2011 by
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By now you must be sick of all the blogs and articles that emphasise the importance of mobile SEO or adapting web design and marketing to suit mobile platforms. Bear with me, as here comes another one. It’s the holiday season, just about, which means that people are in a gift buying frenzy and a [...]

Chrome challenges IE’s crown

Posted 5 December 2011 by
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What internet browser do you use? When I was noob I used Internet Explorer (IE). Don’t all noobs? I mean, it is the default browser on pretty much all PCs. My first digital marketing agency put me onto Firefox and it’s been my default browser ever since. Well, at least until a month or so [...]

Fortune 500 still doesn’t buy into social media

Posted 5 December 2011 by
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Since blogging first became a lauded tool for companies large and small to communicate and engage with their consumers, people have been interested in whether the really big companies – the Fortune 500 companies – have joined the fray. Facebook and Twitter came along and interest escalated. After all, if social media is the great [...]

Will social gaming dictate future advertising spend?

Posted 18 November 2011 by
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Gamers are considered to be reclusive geeks. They wrap themselves in comforting cocoons of virtual reality in which they become gods. Stereotypically, they don’t get out much. Social gamers – those that play games, like Farmville, on social media sites – are a new breed. They’re average people who like a bit of escapism when [...]

Human social behaviour is evolving and governments need to deal with it

Posted 14 November 2011 by
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Mark Zuckerberg has famously (or infamously, depending on your view) said that the age of privacy is over. Privacy no longer exists. From a man who makes it his business to encourage people to share as much information about themselves as possible, his stance is not surprising. He’s made token concessions to people who still [...]

On nightmare clients and the urgency of social media management

Posted 11 November 2011 by
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Because online marketing people write so regularly about the importance of properly planned and implemented SEO and SEM strategies, we tend to assume that the rest of the world shares our views. We may not assume that our business clients know what we know – we joke about them living in blissful ignorance – but [...]

Are Google+ brand pages like a fine wine, will they improve with time?

Posted 9 November 2011 by
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Google+ is like a firecracker: the fuse was lit and anticipation grew; some sparks appeared and online marketers craned their necks to see what would happen; it wavered in the sky and threatened to go out; it burst into an impressive array and the world flocked to the now public social network; the array fizzled [...]

Facebook has privacy settings – use them

Posted 7 November 2011 by
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A few years ago (three or four years ago, I think), researchers conducted a study to find out how willing Facebook users are to friend complete strangers. They set up two accounts for fictional “people” and used cute animals as profile pictures. It didn’t take long before both accounts had hundreds of friends. Even more [...]

SEO is always the trump card

Posted 7 November 2011 by
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As someone who started her career in digital marketing with a crash course in SEO, I’m a loyal believer in its intrinsic benefits. I know PPC is great and social media marketing is the current trendy channel of choice, but I keep coming back to SEO and the necessity of having a properly optimised website [...]

Irrelevant, repetitive search results are on the way down

Posted 2 November 2011 by
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You know how frustrating it can be when you type in a search query and don’t get the results that you want; then you type in another query – different but similar – and you get results that are much the same? Well, it appears that Google is finally going to do something about it. [...]

Discovering how SEO works

Posted 31 October 2011 by
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It was only a few months ago that I heard of the term “search engine optimization”. As an intern, I still only have a vague idea of how it works, but it certainly seems to be the “in” thing when it comes to advertising online. From the little that I do understand, SEO is all [...]

Is guest posting all it’s cracked up to be?

Posted 17 October 2011 by
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This is a question raised by Andy Havard in a recent post on Soshable. Havard looked at the dangers of guest posting, which he listed as: Cheating and getting caught. This is when you try submit the same piece of content to several bloggers while claiming that it is completely original and not available anywhere [...]

Digging Digg and giving up on Google+

Posted 17 October 2011 by
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I remember when I first got into the SEO industry and Digg was untainted by rumours of gaming and spamming. Getting a story on Digg was something to be celebrated and moving up the Digg ladder was a bit like being on Mashable is today. It was something of a reliable news source, especially if [...]

LinkedIn follows in Facebook’s footsteps

Posted 10 October 2011 by
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LinkedIn is the professional social network. At least that’s how it styles itself and how it is generally perceived. It’s not for inane status updates about what you had for breakfast, links to cracked.com or photos of your latest debauched night out. It’s for establishing business contacts, networking with like-minded business professionals and improving business [...]

Phishers of men and money

Posted 7 October 2011 by
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You’ve probably seen them countless times before; the emails telling you that there has been a problem with your bank account or your tax return or your postal delivery. You’ve probably ignored them, which is a good thing. These emails are called phishing scams, which is a great name for a thorny problem. Phishing scams [...]

Top searches on Google South Africa for September 2011

Posted 7 October 2011 by
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As one might imagine with a month full of Facebook updates and privacy shenanigans, the top search for the month of September was, very simply, Facebook. What is also not surprising in a rugby mad nation is that rugby made it to seventh place. Google only made it to fifth place. Top 10 searches:   [...]

Facebook continues to fall foul of user privacy expectations

Posted 28 September 2011 by
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Facebook has kicked up a lot of fuss about Google’s approach to privacy. You know the adage about people living in glass houses? Well, apply it here. As most people will know, sometimes the only way to make big corporations hear you is to use a very public platform to shout out your complaints. This [...]

Bing rings in the changes but does anybody care?

Posted 26 September 2011 by
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Remember Bing – the other search engine? Well, Bing is working just as hard as Google and Facebook to improve its service and entice users. The problem for Bing is that it’s simply not considered as news worthy as the other two internet giants, so its updates fly beneath the radar. If you’re a regular [...]

Google+ changes overshadowed by Facebook

Posted 26 September 2011 by
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Facebook has grabbed the lion’s share of headlines in social media news this week. It’s rolled out huge changes to its platform, many of which have not been met with pleasure. Google has also rolled out huge changes to Google+, most of which have been overshadowed by Facebook (possibly owing to some great showmanship by [...]

6 Lessons SEOs can learn from CSI

Posted 21 September 2011 by
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I have recently started watching CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (that’s the original and best for the uninitiated) from scratch and it occurred to me that the show has several lessons to teach SEOs, with the overarching lesson being never give up. 1)     A bad start isn’t the end of the world. The pilot episode is [...]

Crowdsourcing is the new black when it comes to marketing

Posted 20 September 2011 by
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Crowdsourcing: it’s a scary concept for marketers who are only just getting used to conversations with consumers as opposed to monologues. Crowdsourcing takes the idea of marketing as a two-way conversation a step further. Conversation is still two-way (how could be anything else), but consumers have much more input in the manner in which marketing [...]