About Kristjan Mar

Kristjan Mar Hauksson is the founder and director of search and online communications at Nordic eMarketing. The company specializes in multilingual online communications, organic search engine optimization, and marketing through several verticals such as tourism, finance, government, and pharmaceuticals. It helps companies gain international visibility online and to use the Internet as a communication channel; it also provides consultation in web content management systems and analytics solutions. Hauksson is on the board of directors of SEMPO and founded the Iceland SEO/SEM forum. He has been involved in developing Internet solutions since 1996, and involved in search engine optimization and marketing since 1999. He is a publish author on the topic of Internet Marketing.

Here are my most recent posts

Author Archives: Kristjan Mar - Page 3

The Search Engine Optimisers Tool Box

Posted by on July 29, 2007 1 comment

I have done these sessions couple of times at the SES, both in London and Sweden and beside doing the site clinic session it’s one of my favourite sitting at conferences and workshops like the SES and Ad-Tech. It´s unbelievable how fast thinks change and the number of tools being developed to help people maximising their search engine marketing efforts.
Check out the My SEO SEM Toolbox, Internet Marketing Tools at the Nordic eMarketing web site I wrote it to follow up my PPT doc on the same topic.

10 great way’s of using my favourite Web Analytics tool

Posted by on July 28, 2007 4 comments

While searching (what else?) for some fun (yes analytics can be fun) I found a great aritcle on web belonging to a company called StoneTemple Consulting ( I know a band called StoneTemple Pilots) under the title “10 Cool Things you can do with IndexTools“.

I did with my former co-worker spend some time looking at web analytic tools, Webtrends was to complicated, Omniture to expencive and Urchin to primitive and from our point of view we struck gold when we found IndexTools, we had three main criteria that the tool needed to fullfill so we would want to look at it.

1. Manageable pricing
2. “Marketing department” friendly
3. As close to 100% deep drillable data and trend reporting

That and being a tool in constant development was our main criteria, Indextools had it all and is even getting stronger, when we reviewed it it was at version 8.5 and now they are bringing out version 10 – release date is in Q3 2007.

The new improved will contain among other Lifetime visitor-level metrics, External data source framework, Interactive visualization and Custom metrics.

Ad-Tech London

Posted by on July 27, 2007 No comments

Live is all fun and games!! As I have writen before I have been invited by the lovely people of Ad-Tech London to be a facilitator on Social Search, topic that is very dear to me. This will be a workshop on Social Search and how people will be getting more and more control over the material presented to them by the search engines. For me this is a great excuse to dig deeper into the world of online social media and the impact of Web 2.0. Looking forward to it I can tell you that!

Music on the Internet

Posted by on July 27, 2007 No comments

The impact that the internet has had on the music industry is huge, both good and bad. One of the good impacts are the distribution possibilities of small bands with little to none budget for marketing. Especially when using sites like MySpace and we have heard of bands being signed up after agents have heard them through the Internet.

Another sample is close to us, the www.icelandicmusic.is – a one stop resource on music from Iceland, such as Björk, Ampop, Sigur Rós and Mum to mention few. I am going to have a close eye on that site being a guitar player myself.

Power to the People; are we moving beyond Page Rank?

Posted by on July 27, 2007 No comments

“A social search engine is a type of search engine that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users. Example forms of user input include social bookmarking or direct interaction with the search results such as promoting or demoting results the user feels are more or less relevant to their query.”

Not so long ago Google’s Page Rank changed the face of Internet search as we knew it, the likes of Yahoo, Ask and AltaVista all lost out as the age of Google began. But now that we’ve just got to grips with page rank, the basic principles of Social Search threaten to undermine and change our online marketing strategies.  But is it really that simple? And what is Google besides a social search engine when it relies on the collective opinions of webmasters and editors who judge other sites?The idea behind social search, also referred to as community search or behavioural targeted search, is that online communities and users enter data into search results which then directly affect them, thus changing search as we know it and shifting the power to the people.

I have few basic questions on this matter

What are the pros and cons of social search, such as the potential increased importance of search results, the problems of search and link spam and the possibility of a drop in importance of long-tail searches?

Can this potential ‘revolution’ in search change the Internet forever? How can marketeers start identifying audiences according to online behaviour and target specific groups directly using Social search? And finally will the search engine landscape change overnight and ask ourselves how worried we really need to be!

Web 2.0 – The Internet is evolving, ain’t it?

Posted by on July 27, 2007 No comments

I am not sure we can say that the latest Jargon in the world of the Internet is ”Web 2.0″, because it’s getting to be old news, but here are my basic thoughts on the topic. While every evolution of software seams to have a evolving number the Internet has stayed the same. Windows Office has gone from 95 to 2003 (2006) and my favored videogame has gone through at least five stages. So why has the Internet not?

Well some say it has and some say it’s still evolving and has not left 1.0, is at most around 1.005. But those who do say it has evolved say it’s now at version 2.0. So what is different? Though this is more based on subjectivity than anything else, it might be worth thinking about, is the Internet evolving and how?

Internet Marketing not for dummies?

Posted by on July 16, 2007 No comments

We I remember the days!! Once it was a relatively easy task to optimise web pages and market them for top ranking among the most popular spider-based search engines. Now the task has turned out to be a complex process requiring in-depth research, analysis and hard well thought through work and to makes thinks even harder there is a new development. social search. Now people will be able to put their input into it all, are we opening a pandoras box? Great topic for my Workshop at the Ad-Conference in London next September. If I remeber corectly the title is “Social Search – tips and tricks”. I have only one thing to say – Power to the People!! You go Johnny boy!!

ePR as a part of a Holistic Internet Marketing Strategy

Posted by on July 9, 2007 No comments

“A June 2006 study by Outsell, reported in TrendAlert: 2006 User Update - Information Managers Challenged To Supply Time-Saving Solutions, More Efficient Search, found that corporate and government sectors have increasingly turned to press releases for information, surpassing trade publications. The report cited developments such as Google News Alerts and RSS as contributing factors to the rise in popularity of press releases in business research.”
Resource: Outsellinc.com

What does this mean? This is important for companies to understand, very important for companies that have used tratitional ways of distributing news, pr and product information through the “old channels”. I have seen some great results using online news distribution channels.

Search engine optimization strategies in short

Posted by on June 18, 2007 No comments

All marketing through the Internet should include many different marketing methods but it should always with good search engine optimization (US) -  optimisation (UK) strategies.

Before I start I would like to quote my friend Shari Thurow:

“Search friendliness isn’t only about Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, Teoma, or any other crawler-based search engine or human-based directory. Search friendliness is first and foremost about site visitors. Having a search-friendly site is far more important than having a search-engine-friendly site.”

So having quoted that golden rule let’s start.

SEO strategies
The first thing to remember is that nothing is achieved over night. Search engine optimization is a process. Search engine algorithms is never the same between each engine and they consist of many different elements and can be quite complex. REMEMBER that over doing this might get you banned or demoted by the search engines, there is a very thin line between GOOD SEO strategies and BAD.

What is Search Engine Marketing? Two of the main characteristics are typically referred to as on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

Read more »

Company that takes long-term approach to search engine optimization and marketing gets on the top

Posted by on June 14, 2007 No comments

The Internet can be a make or break of any company in the modern day marketing environment. The web as it is to day may be called the 8th continent due to it’s hundred of millions inhabitants. Much has changed in the Search Engine Optimization / Marketing business over the last years and Search Engine Marketing is now a distinct trade, done by people with expert knowledge.