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!

An article by me was publised last Februar in the annual Baidu Magazine. The article was written in cooperation with Baidu’s marketing team and the SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Organization) were I am on the board of directors. The idea behind the article was to give Chinese marketers an insight into the markets out side of China and how the Internet with focus on search and display was developing.

Firstly what is a big site? Is it 10.000 pages or 100.000 or even 100.000? My experience is that sites that more than 10 .000 to 15.000 pages start to show the same symptoms, the main problem in most cases is the WCMS (web content management system), how it is used to manage the sites content.

This can be how templates are designed to show and possibly reuse content. Little problems within sites that contain millions of pages can occur again and again and grow from being a minor glitch in being a huge disaster that prevents search visibility.So planning ahead can be really helpful when managing a large site. In most cases Google problem is either too much of the same content or to little access to it.  Google as the other crawlers should only be allowed to index valuable pages with legitimate none duplicate content.

So what does that mean? Well if we look at the “too much” of the content problem, better known as duplicate content, this is in most cases because it is being reused again and again and again and …. This leads to Google either demoting the site, parts of it or even taking it out completely.

To find if there is a problem it´s in all cases good to put Google Webmaster tools on the site and Yahoo Site Explorer. When the site has been verified you will start to see all kinds of data such as crawler errors, what keywords the site us found under but not getting clicks through and more.

Although very basic this should get you going in identifying crawler issues that will eventually lead to visibility issues on the search engines.

Last year Microsoft and Google told about their partnership with Facebook and recently Yahoo! and Twitter started their cooperation. This will add to Yahoo! services by allowing Yahoo members to access their personal Twitter accounts across the portal’s online properties like Yahoo! mail, Flickr etc. Yahoo! has been known for it’s stable audience and brands using Twitter should benefit from that.

I was travelling in the UK recently and saw on the front page of the London Evening Standard news about the UK being the first country to open up a rehab centre for Internet and computer game junkies. What was shocking (but not surprising) was how young the kids were that needed to go into rehab because of their Internet addiction.  As stated in the paper children as young as twelve will need to go “cold turkey” in a residential unit to help them fight their addiction and to help them take on the world again they will be taught face to face social skills.

So now we will have people going to IA and GA meetings as recovering Internet/Gamingholic. Good luck!

Look over the image I am sending has more text and see if you can add more text

The American marketing and advertising research company, Nielsen, provides an up-to-date understanding of consumers and markets worldwide with the Top U.S. Search Providers report for January 2010.

The total number of web searches conducted during January 2010 was 10,272,099. Nielsen Online estimated a total of 8.1 billion web searches in comparison to November last year, which also indicated a 9.6% increase in overall web searches during the same month in 2008.According to Nielsen’s reports, Google searches accounted for 66.3% of all web based searches, making it a number one provider. In comparison to last year’s report, Google searches have increased from 5,177,158 searches in November 2008, up to 6,805,424 searches in January 2010.

Yahoo!Search is in second place after Google, accounting for 14.5 % and total of 1,488,476 searches. MSN, AOL, and Ask.com were also listed in the top five.

For more information on the top 10 searches providers for January 2010 please follow this link: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s-web-searches-top-10-2-billion-in-january/

As Microsoft and Yahoo! have now received regulatory clearance to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance in the USA and the European Union they can now offer more reach to potential customers offering a search ad inventory from both the Yahoo! and Microsoft networks.

The combined audience of Yahoo and Microsoft is over 150 million searchers in the U.S and some 577 million searchers worldwide so there is much to be gained through this joined venture.

After all the rumours, Microsoft and Yahoo finally agreed to merge their search services to compete with the grand search engine, Google.

Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing will power the Yahoo search engine, while Yahoo Search Marketing will be powered by Microsoft AdCenter. Yahoo rankings are going to change once it is replaced by Bing, so if Microsoft’s search offerings have not been of any concern to you before, now is the time to become familiar with it’s rules and ways to optimize your website for Bing. Bing is an open search engine to webmaster’s optimization efforts and you can get your website, even the brand new one, to be listed at the top of Bing much faster than on Google. Once your website is well ranked on Bing’s listings you can move on to optimization for Google.

 Five simple steps to get noticed on Bing: 

 1. Choose the oldest domain – the older the domain, the more chances there are of getting your site a high ranking.

2. Pick the best keywords in the title tags of every page on your website – Bing places a lot more emphasis on title tags than Google does.

3. Come up with excellent text – for Bing the amount of text on pages holds more value than it does for Google, so aim for at least 300 words.

4. Outbound links are OK – Google is cautious of the number of outbound links you have on a page whereas Bing seems to like them.

5.  Get as many backlines from relevant sites as possible – Bing’s attitude here is “the more, the merrier” but make sure the links are coming from relevant sites.

It takes time to get good rankings with Bing, so the sooner you align your website with Microsoft’s search policies, the better chance you will have to ride the wave of change to the top of Bing’s–and Yahoo’s–search results

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!