Looks like we are getting there, finally – The book I am co-authoring with Anne Kennedy is on Amazon and the date is set. The book is published by Que Biz-Tech and is called “Global Search Engine Marketing: Getting Better International Search Engine Results“. The description is as follows:

“For companies that operate internationally, English-only, U.S.-centric search programs leave far too many customers behind. Marketing through search engines to non-English-speaking customers outside North America has become essential, but it presents complex and unfamiliar challenges.

Now, for the first time, there’s a complete and practical guide to succeeding with global search marketing. In Global Search Engine Marketing, two leading experts bring together proven solutions to all the issues marketers will encounter – from culture and communication to technology and law. The authors cover all this, and much more:

” Understanding key cultural and behavioral differences, including the surprising local differences in how people search ” Crafting online marketing campaigns that reflect local cultures ” Selecting the right search media in each market – including markets where Google doesn’t dominate ” Achieving higher rankings in search engines around the world ” Organizing effective global pay-per-click search marketing campaigns ” Optimizing online press releases and other content for global search media ” Leveraging non-U.S. social media tools and platforms ” Optimizing mobile sites and apps for worldwide audiences ” Using web analytics to track key performance indicators (KPIs) in multilingual/multicultural campaigns – even if you don’t speak the language”

The popularity of Internet as a medium of communication and source of information has surged in the recent years and this has also affected the use of digital marketing to woo customers. Businesses today are using a variety of digital distribution channels to reach their customers in a timely, relevant, personal and cost effective manner. Direct emails, Facebook, Twitter, and the apps on smartphone and digital tablets are some of the channels in which brands are effectively connecting with customers.

Study by Yahoo! shows that digital marketing segment drew 15 billion Ducats in half of year in 2011. The global spending on digital advertising amounted to $14.9 billion in the first six months of 2011. This is 23 percent more than what was spent last the same period.

The use of social media has increased for marketing and the reasons are obvious. With more and more people joining the bandwagon on social networking sites everyday, marketers would not like to miss any opportunity to woo them before their competitors do. There were 225 million users of Twitter as per March 2011 reports and the current number of tweets per second is 1200. Facebook remains the most popular social media site with more than 750 million active users. When it comes to blogs on the Internet, 70 of the bloggers organically chirp about brands on their blogs. Naturally, the digital marketers want to advertise on these immensely popular social networking platforms. And now for the facts – the global ad revenues from social networks touched $5.54 billions and this will rise to $10 billion by the year 2013 as per a report on Tech Crunch.

Let us also check some of the digital marketing trends in the world of mobiles and smartphones. As per July 2011 data on Neilsen, more than 40 percent of the adult US mobile phone users specifically use smartphones. The figure is expected to cross the 50 percent mark by the end of year 2011. Businesses do not want to be left behind in the race to connect with their customers through these smartphones. As per a study by eMarketer, the total spending is expected to reach $1.23 billion by the end of year 2011. The year 2010 had witnessed a spending of $743 million and this year’s spending would be a 65 percent increase. The advertising amount typically includes the dollars spent on display ads, search ads and mobile video ads.

Marketing pros and advertisers have been traditionally reluctant to spend large amounts of their budgets on mobile advertising but recent trends indicate that resistance is diminishing. With the number of potential customers accessing the Internet through mobile devices steadily increasing, advertisers have started allocating more funds to mobile ads.

The reason for escalating budgets on advertising is not only due to the huge popularity of digital media. Another reason for which marketers prefer this mode is the ability to measure quick and often real time results of advertising. There are tools that let businesses know how often their ads are being clicked and what exactly attracts the attention of target audience.

Digital advertising indeed rocks – at least that’s what the stats portray!

Five Ways to Avoid Norwegian Prayer Syndrome

1. Make sure your content is relevant to your ad (ie. Are you  speaking the same language literally and figuratively on your site as in  your ad?)

2. Use your keywords on the page when possible

3. Keep your keywords in the main content of the page when using them

4. Make sure your page loads quickly

5. Show signs of trust on the landing page

What is it, this Norwegian Prayer Syndrom (or problem as some would call it)

Read about it here

A short introduction to the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference held in Iceland every year. This year there are speakers from Facebook, Bing, Hotels.com, Wall Street Journal, Icelandair, AOL, SAP, Boats.com YouTube and more.

For more information about the Conference go to www.rimc.is/en/

Five years ago, Yahoo engineers wrote about TrustRank, an algorithm used to fight spam in the search results. TrustRank works in such way that it semi-automatically separates trustworthy and good quality pages from spam.

Spam-pages get higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results and today any professional SEO optimizers, Google or any other search engine uses Trust Rank or similar techniques against spam.

That means getting as many links as possible for high PageRank from any link is a good idea if you want your website to be reliable and trusted.

How to become a trusted website

1. Get links from sites that are manually marked as trustworthy (called seed sites) or site that are linked to seed sites by the search engine owners

2. Get an old domain name (the older the better) with a good domain history with;

-Little changes of the domain owner

-Have never been used by spammers in the past.

3. Get links from related websites

4. Don’t link to websites that are known spammers or to websites with dubious quality.

5. Get many links from social networks

6. Offer good content! The more good content pages your site has the more chances there are to get a good TrustRank. If your website deals with a special topic, then it is likely that it will never get a high TrustRank because most spam emails are topic specific.

These tips should help you build a trusted site and as a result get high rankings!

At Nordic eMarketing, one of our big goals right now is help even more companies to increase and strengthen their presence on the Scandinavian markets. We are therefore really excited about the latest report on digital media consumer behavior and trends in the Nordic and Baltic countries, from one of Scandinavia’s largest telecom providers, Telia Sonera.

The report divides digital media consumers up into four different categories, “tech parents”, “iToddlers”, “infomaniacs” and “IT high society”. The latest group is defined as the most important and influential one. The report even appoints the “IT high society” as the new “upper class” of digital media consumers.

The common denominator for this group of consumers is that they consider constant access to Internet connectivity through a computer and/or mobile phone as essential for their social life. They consider the time spent online as an investment in nurturing relationships, creating new ones and building a social identity. They see the opportunities of constant connectivity offered by mobile technology as a natural extension of themselves in a social context. Sixty percent use their mobile devices to surf the Internet regularly and seventeen percent goes online with their mobile phone every day. Almost 40 percent even use the mobile phone in bed.

Almost half of the IT high society population read blogs regularly, compared to one third of the population in general.

What differs the IT high society most from all of the other consumer categories in the report is that it is the strive for social connection and communication that drives curiousness for exploring new technology rather than strive for search of information.

The IT high society consists of a fifth of the adult population in the surveyed countries. A majority of them are women (60 percent) and one third are 25 years of age or younger.

Even though the IT high society can still be considered an elite, it is expected to grow in a rapid pace and to have increased considerably in size by the end of 2009. The report also points out that even though this group is ahead in using digital media and the Internet, the remaining parts of the population in the surveyed countries are in no way an “under class” in digital media consumption. It is rather to be considered as a mainstream “middle class” of users with a relatively small but growing knowledge and interest for the social aspects offered by digital technology.

To successfully create a dialogue with this growing group of demanding and fastidious consumers will be a requirement for many companies that target Scandinavia with their Internet marketing. At Nordic eMarketing, we feel confident that our knowledge of Scandinavian market landscapes and our holistic approach to digital marketing makes us well equipped to help companies continue to achieve success in Scandinavia.

Finally I must say, now that Adobe has made Flash indexable Google launches their Flash indexing algorithm. As most SEO people know the big problem with Flash-based websites has been that they could not be properly indexed by the likes of Google and Yahoo. Flash websites have been favored by marketers and advertisers for a long time, because of the ability to create rich, interactive Web experiences and now they can be indexed by Google, now let’s see what Yahoo and MSN do.

It seems that Microsoft is testing Live Search. I have seen tens of visits to sites directly from “65.55.109.191 (microsoft.com)”, their headquaters in Washington DC – “us , WA, Washington”. This blog has had 8 visits from Microsoft under the search terms “search” and “Google”, here is a sample. These are all new visitors, that means that they are either clearing their cookie or there many testers running these test at the same time. All the testers seam to be using IE7 and 800 x 600 screen resolution.

What also stands out is that most of the time they are not coming to the same landing pages at this blog, I have counted eight so far, what is also something to consider is that when I try to search for the same words I can’t see anything from Optimizer Your Web.

I have gotten calls, over the past days, from clients wondering the same thing, why is Microsoft coming in so often? These search also seem to have it in common that they are nearly all single word searches. This has happened with my clients in the UK, France, Denmark, Iceland and the US.

A recent study IndexTools has reinforced Microsoft’s claim that their paid search product converts much better than Google’s across a broad range of search verticals. The study was not a small one either, covering over 15 Million visitors from paid search, Indextools found that Microsoft Adcenter adverts converted into sales around 20% better than Google’s AdWords product.

There is a great article on this at Dixons Jones Receptional News Site.

You can also read about the Paid Search Study at the Visual Revenue site.

Microsoft lauches their Icelandic versions of Live, thanks me like alot!