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One part of SEO that is often hard to explain to people not familiar with search engine optimisation parlance is the importance of Nofollow and Dofollow links. Anyway, I was going to write an article on this, however after reading the one below by Kevin John Lewis, it’s pretty hard to top. So have a read and see what you think.

No Nofollow Here - Join the Anti Nofollow Movement

Many people aren’t actually aware of this, but many of the backlinks you’re creating to your website by replying to relevant blog posts, are completely pointless, thanks to the use of Nofollow tags.

(When I say this, I am assuming that you create good, valuable content in blog comments - rather than just blog spam comments - but the very fact you’re reading this says you’re probably not the blog spamming type, if blog spammers spent time reading about what they’re doing, they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing - as most of it is completely pointless)

Nofollow tags simple tell search engine spiders not to follow links on a page - and they were introduced in order to help stop the motivation for spammers to plague blogs & forums with pointless, valueless spam comments just in order to get backlinks.

Personally I think it was a bit of a strange movement that most of the web marketing community have followed. The real value of spending time & effort creating valuable content by replying to blog posts, and other forms of content, has been taken away just to deter spammers!

If there is a link on your website that you don’t want there - you don’t want it there because it has no value to your reader, so you’ll want it deleting, not making nofollow. If you just make it nofollow & don’t spend the time to make sure that your visitors time isn’t wasted by following spam links, but you do spend the time making sure that these links aren’t followed by the search engines, what you’re saying is that you’re making your website for the search engines, not for your visitors!

So - what is the point of nofollow? In my opinion there’s absolutely no need for it, spam links should be deleted, or prevented from appearing in the first place with the use of anti spam tools - of which there are many, especially for the more popular blog packages - just setting all comments to nofollow so that spam links don’t effect your website negatively in terms of SEO, is saying that you don’t care as much about your visitors than you do about search engine ranking.

So why is everyone still using nofollow? Well, firstly not everyone is using nofollow, there is now a strong movement away from nofollow, there are growing numbers of people who share this same opinion as I do.

Having said that, the vast majority of blogs use nofollow and many large websites, including wikipedia.

Most of this is due to the fact that most blogs are set to nofollow as standard, and most people don’t realise there is a need to change this.

The easiest way to see if links are set to nofollow, is to use the seobook SEO for Firefox addon, which is a simple plug in for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Just download the plug in, go to options, and select for nofollow links to be highlighted - you’ll then be opened to a whole new world of nofollow links - and you may notice some interesting things.

Firstly, check if your own blog is set to nofollow the comments - if it is, then I encourage you to join the movement, bring the value back to blogs by saying no to nofollow. You can do this by downloading add ons for your blog package.  If you use wordpress, as I do, there are a number of nofollow remover plugins you can use.

Personally I use two plugins - one called Nofollow case-by-case which allows you to be selective in your use of Nofollow, rather than setting is as default, and another plugin called Nofollow Reciprocity, a very clever plugin which allows you to automatically nofollow links to those larger websites who are known to be using the nofollow attribute in order to help them to sculpt their pagerank.

You see, although most people use the nofollow attribute now because it’s set as standard in blog packages, there are a number of people who’re using it in order to help them to get a better link popularity.

The idea many people have is that the link popularity coming in to any page of your site, known as “link juice” is set out through links, so by getting as many links as possible into your site, and letting out as few as possible - your juice will rise, and your Google page rank will increase.

The truth is that it doesn’t quite work like that, you don’t “lose” link juice by linking to other pages, it’s simply that the amount of link juice that goes to the page you’re linking to is divided by the number of links on the page. Yes, if you only have three links from a page then each of these links are going to do a lot better off from the link than they would if you linked to 100 pages from the same page - but it wouldn’t do your site any harm either way.

The link juice you share with other sites isn’t lost.

Many people have the idea that if you keep all your links in your blog pages internal links, you’ll keep all the link juice passing back in a loop through your own site, instead of sharing. In practice however this isn’t the case, and link juice hoarding isn’t a great long-term strategy - for many reasons.

Firstly -  Google and all other search engines, do not like tricks, cheats & shortcuts - anything that they feel is being abused, will be changed so it can no longer be abused - and may even be reversed so that sites that were benefiting from such a strategy may be penalized for continuing to use it. We’ve seen this happen with many strategies in the past.

The use of the nofollow attribute to hoard pagerank, is now basically being used to show visitors one thing, and show another thing to the search engines - to the point that entire websites are full of links to websites that they are not allowing the search engines to follow. Google are very clever, they employ a lot of very clever people - they will already be onto the fact that the nofollow attribute is being abused in this way, and they will already be finding a way to filter out the effects of this strategy.

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to start to see websites with very low numbers of outbound links, being penalized for hoarding link juice in this way - at the very least the effectiveness of this kind of strategy will diminish, as do all strategies of increasing results without increasing value to the visitor.

Secondly - outbound links are important! A website with good content will always include links to interesting & relevant websites. Google do not recognize nofollow links as outbound links at all, so if you show google a site with virtually no outbound links, you’re showing them a website which isn’t giving as much value to the visitor as a site that does have outbound links.  Outbound links to relevant, quality websites, using anchor text (link text) relevant to your topic or industry, are good for your website. Yes, we do need to be careful not to allow spam links to bad neighbourhoods, and we do this with the use of good housekeeping & clever antispam tools, but we don’t need to make every link nofollow.

There are many other reasons not to attempt to hoard link juice in this way.

· You risk making enemies of past & future allies.

Many people are not aware of nofollow links, and give content in forms of blog content, forum posts, and other forms of content, thinking that they’re gaining something in return - give & take. If you’re using the nofollow attribute to get without giving, while allowing contributors to believe that they were actually getting something in return, you’ll find that people stop giving you content.

As more & more people are becoming aware of nofollow, many people are checking this before giving content, in the form of blog replies, forum posts, whatever it may be - so you will probably find as time goes on, less & less people will be visiting your blog who do actually have the ability to add good content. Think about it, if someone can spend their time contributing somewhere that does give something back by allowing a backlink which does count - or they can spend their time contributing to somewhere that will not allow backlinks which count, where are you going to contribute?

· You risk your reputation

More & more people are becoming aware of - and annoyed by, the use of the nofollow attribute. There is even an uprising against large websites such as Wikipedia, who now use the nofollow attribute on all outbound links - and with tools such as Nofollow Reciprocity which publish the details of all of the larger websites which use nofollow for outbound links, and with a growing movement away from nofollow, wesbites which use nofollow for all outbound links are going to start being seen as lesser quality websites, and their reputation may be at risk over the next few years.

This is certainly the case for large websites - but for smaller websites in niche markets, the damage to a websites reputation could happen a lot quicker, as news travels a lot quicker in smaller niche markets.  It only takes a few people within a market to start talking about a particular website that was well respected in that particular market, to start to be seen in a dimmer light once people realise that the indiscriminate use of nofollow tags is being used in order to selfishly hoard link juice.

SO - in conclusion, I recommend that you do not use the nofollow attribute in blog comments in order to hoard link juice. If there is a link on your blog that you do not think adds valuable content that you would like to link to - then why allow your visitors to waste their time visiting the link?  If you think it’s a link to a lousy site, delete it all together.

Visit my SEO Blog, as long as you’re contributing to my blog posts with decent replies, and your website appears to be a genuine website with unique content, that is relevant to web marketing, SEO, online business, then it will be left where it is - spam posts won’t even get on thanks to the use of decent anti spam tools.

Based in Cheshire, UK (Close to Manchester) - SEO Consultant Kevin John Lewis delivers effective SEO services, and SEO web design and Re-design and prides himself on the increases in the quantity & quality of search engine traffic that he achieves for his clients.

What do you think? Was this blog post useful? Please comment below or add to the debate. Please do not hesitate to contact Generate UK for more information and ideas about how Dofollow and Nofollow links affect your business.

Before reading this post, we recommend that you get Generate UK - Digital Marketing Blog delivered directly to your email inboxIt is still very surprising how many companies in the UK that have a website, yet do not take advantage of a Blog. For us, it is a no brainer. The business benefits of running your own blog far out weigh the concerns, it is just a matter of taking the time to understand what these benefits are and how they fit in with your online marketing objectives. Have a read through the list below and see whether your excuse is listed.

1. We don’t understand why we would need a blog, it is just an online diary so how can this help us? This is quite a popular excuse and one that is usually made at the top of the management tree. Once senior management understand that by blogging you are opening the door to an increase in targeted traffic to your website, they usually see the light.
2. I don’t want just anyone within my company making posts on our behalf This is usually said by a business owner or a managing director. It’s still very surprising how many business leaders do not trust or allow their staff to make blog posts. This is strange because it is no different to other forms of marketing. This is easily overcome with an internal blog post approval process or a blogging policy which are being widely adopted. If you’re already working with an agency, perhaps this is something else they can do for you?
3. Your marketing department or PR guys have said that blogging is a bad idea This is a very interesting situation and although it is happening less and less, there are a few PR guys and marketing people out there that are advising against setting up blogs. If this is happening, you need to challenge them and ask them why it would not work for your business. Test their understanding of Internet Marketing, ask them how a blog works. If they can not talk to you about RSS, pings and how important they are from a search engine marketing perspective, then they do not know what they are talking about. As a result, you can be sure that their advice is based upon them protecting your monthly payment to them and not based upon the interests of your business.
4. Controlling quality would be very difficult This should not be a deal breaker. Usually this excuse can be overcome with some training and an internal blog approval policy. All posts should be submitted to an approving editor before they go live, this way you ensure that quality remains high. You should also guide your staff about the topics that you would like covered, if you have a flower business, then you ask your staff to write about something that relates to flowers. If you’re really buying into the whole blog idea, then you will have articles written that relate to keyphrases you have identified as part of your keyword research. Once you’re at this level, you’ll really start to see your blog work for you.
5. We’re waiting for the technical department to sort this out Don’t leave the blog in the hands of the technical department, do some research or talk to people who know about the benefits of blogs and tell the IT guys to just take care of the installation. Your choice of blog software and the type of blog you go with will determine how successful your project is. This is all about understanding your marketing objectives, you’re better placed than your IT guys to do this.
6. We have not got anything to talk or blog about This probably should have been the number one excuse for setting up a blog. All companies have something to write about, it is just working out what it is. If you sell products or services, then you might consider writing guides for their use. If you have happy customers, then you might interview them about why they think you are so good. If there is something important happening within your industry, then the blog is a great place to have your say.
7. There is no one available to spend time writing blog posts So just how many blog posts are you thinking of writing? Even if you wrote one article once a week, you would only require an hour or so. If you prefer to post more, then perhaps you might want to move some of your marketing budget around. The great thing about a blog is that you can measure the success of it from a marketing perspective. At the very worst case, you can hire an English student to write some posts for you in exchange for their Saturday night money.
8. It is difficult to predict the return on investment, until we can be more sure we are not interested This is a tough excuse to overcome because it is used by very risk averse companies. We would look at the other forms of advertising the company may use and ask how they measure the ROI with those campaigns. If there is a performance management culture, we will compare their metrics with what can be achieved with blogs. There is always the intangible benefits of advertising, such as brand awareness, thought leadership and sometimes the expectation that you just have to be there. There is also the feedback you receive from your customers and prospects, this is great for research purposes and can help you identify new markets and opportunities.You will have access to analytics and visitor details on your blog. If you’re using the blog to compliment your SEO strategy, then you will very quickly be able to measure the impact. If your blog is a sales type of blog, your ROI will be measured based upon conversions.
9. Blogging is just some hype, we’re waiting for the next big thing It could be a long wait. Blogging has been around for many years now and continues to grow, it has definitely reached the stage where it is mainstream. Adding a blog to your site just to compliment your search engine optimisation strategies will ensure a return on your time and investment. That’s before you consider the potential to increase your branding, expertise and enquires from local press.
10. It’s just too difficult and we don’t know where to start This is really not a good excuse. Blogs can be set up so that you’re ready to go in an hour. If you’re still not sure, speak to an agency or have some training. You won’t need a lot, once you know you will wonder why you took so long to get onboard.

What to do next? Do you think we are being fair?We’d love to hear from you, post your comments and feedback below. If you would like to speak to Generate UK, please feel free to contact us on 0845 388 9185 or via our contact page.

Special Offer: If you have read this post and would like to learn more about launching your own blog, contact us immediately for details of how we can take your blog site from conception to go live. Quote the title of this blog for a 20% discount.

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There has been some interesting predictions this week, most notably from industry voice E-consultancy who have predicted that the expenditure in search engine marketing is likely to be nearly £2.8 billion by the end of the current year, an increase of around 25% year on year. That’s a fairly healthy growth prediction, especially if you believe the doom and gloom about the economic outlook.

So why are the well respected E-consultancy group predicting this rise? To start with, we are in the middle of an upwards curve when it comes to online spend. The growth has been evident for a number of years and will more than likely continue so for the next few years before finding a nice level.

The growth in online spend has not been without casualties, above the line advertising has been steadily slowing, in fact it is predicted that online spend will overtake television advertising spend in the next few years.. If a business has not had their marketing budget reduced, then they are most likely having conversations about where the best place to put their marketing pounds might be. This means we are getting closer to the real reason why E-consultancy are absolutely correct.

Businesses are making decisions to put more of their budget into online marketing strategies. The business decision is the fact that they can quickly measure a return on investment. They can quickly see the results of their campaigns and they know they have more chance of reaching their targeted audience who have money to spend. Altogether they have a more potent marketing weapon.

So it is a pretty safe bet that online advertising spend will continue to grow for the next few years. Although, we do think that the market will become more competitive. Traditionally agencies will extend their digital capabilities, design companies will introduce new services, which should lead to some consolidation in the market.

As competition grows, the agency fees will start to be eroded. This is an interesting debate that is waiting to happen. What parts of online advertising services can be commoditised? I’ve already seen companies offering email marketing and SEO type solutions for incredibly low fees. Is this good for the market or does it confuse our customers?

In summary, search engine marketing is in a very healthy position. There will almost certainly be more competition for each customer and that should should be welcomed. However, for the time being; measurable marketing and performance management seem to be winning out, this is why online marketing will continue with steady growth. It is the agencies who need to watch out for the recession, especially those who are not innovating and helping their clients to deliver winning campaigns.

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For a while now, there has been something about search engine optimisation that has been bothering me. It’s not the practise of SEO in general, it’s not even the multitude of companies popping up with their “New SEO services” conveniently added to their portfolio as the hot new thing to talk about. What is bothering me is that there are too many companies out there offering SEO in a market that does not offer an industry quality standard. They are offering a service in a market that has not really been defined.

This means that there is potential for customers to get ripped off and for SEO in general to be given a bad name, some will argue that this is already happening. I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy for companies who sign up with SEO firms without doing their homework, usually the better SEO firms benefit in the long term as companies who have had their fingers burned understand the true value of what SEO is and will make better decisions next time. The lesson they learn is that SEO should form a portion of their wider marketing objectives, SEO alone is only part of the story. A defined Internet marketing strategy that incorporates SEO and a whole host of other digital marketing techniques is where the magic happens.

This view and these comments are not typical of our industry, but they are a key mantra for us at Generate UK. This is because if you look at the average SEO key performance indicators, they do not sit pretty with what the company business goals might be. Let’s use keyword ranking as an example; this is a great metric that your SEO company will use to demonstrate to you that they have had a positive impact on your rankings. They have a clear before and after picture that can not be doubted. This is absolutely true, however would you use this metric when measuring the success of your site? If you were a business owner, would you prefer to measure the success of how high you rank for a specific keyword or how many new orders you have received? I know you could argue that the higher you rank the more targeted traffic you receive, but this asumes keyword research. More importantly, it assumes that you have a super landing page that is making the most from your visitors. Put another way, high rankings does not necessarily mean conversations.

Hopefully, this arguement is allowing us to make our point. SEO alone is not enough anymore, the real value from a digital marketing agency is that they should know how to deliver targeted traffic to your site, traffic that converts and is delivered within your budget. SEO absolutely forms a part of that, but it is not the total solution that is being pitched in our market space. Let’s look at another example, SEO firms will point to a growth in traffic via the search engines as a result of their work, it’s a straightforward to measurement and is undeniable. The question is whether or not that increase in traffic meant more sales for you, did it convert, did you receive more sign ups, if the answer is no, then is the increase in traffic worth it?

We maintain that the only way to measure your digital marketing agency, regardless of whether they are providing just SEO or the full spectrum of search marketing services is via conversions. Only then are they adding true value to your business and working in line with your marketing objectives. By understanding your marketing objectives, they fully understand what constitutes success, therefore the SEO companies can then provide you with metrics that actually mean something to you. SEO alone is a tool that might help you towards your goal, a digital marketing strategy will enable you to exceed it.

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We’re having a pay per click week this week on the Generate UK blog. Feel free to look back on our previous posts about the importance of landing pages and the Beauty and the Beast of PPC. This post is about providing further details about optimising your campaign and where your thoughts should be in order to get the biggest bang for your buck.

In our opinion, the first thing that your visitor should see after they click your ad and go through to your landing page is the keyword or phrase they used. It’s well documented that your page should have a title for SEO and usability reasons, however from a PPC perspective it is a little more important because you have paid for that visitor to be there. So whatever it was that they were searching for and whatever it was that encouraged them to click your ad, you have to make sure that your landing page delivers this.

So let’s think about the heading. The easiest way to do this would be to use an example and walk through the process. Let’s use a driving instructor business for our example, obviously they offer driving lessons as part of their service. Upon completion of their keyword research and analysis, they quickly understand that locality is important to show their ads at the right time. After all, it would be a waste of money if a driving instructor from Cornwall was showing up in searches for “Driving lessons Glasgow”.

In our example, the heading should include the words driving lessons and the locality. Let’s be as specific as possible and assume our driving instructor is based in Winchester. Let’s also assume that our friendly driving instructor has a special incentive for people to click his ads. Our page title or header now becomes -

Driving Lessons in Winchester – First lesson Free

You can change the details of the offer to whatever suits you or your market. The point is that you should think about something compelling to keep your visitor on the page. If they clicked your ad and it only had “Driving Lessons”, our experience tells us that this will not be as successful a campaign as if it was ran with the headline above.

The next step is general marketing, make the offer time dependent. How do you encourage your visitor to act as quickly as possible? You could also mention that the offer is subject to space, so they need to act quickly to secure a spot.

As part of the page copy, you should include your main keyword phrase (”driving lessons Winchester”). Winchester is a big place, so you might want to consider doing the same exercise for smaller suburbs and villages that surround Winchester that you’re happy to service.

Think about what the action is on your landing page, for our driving instructor the ultimate goal is to increase his driving lesson bookings. This objective is made up of smaller goals, if people are clicking his ad then they’re interested in driving lessons in Winchester, right? So how else can they be leveraged once they are there? In this example, the instructor offered vouchers via the site as he knew that parents were often searching on behalf of their children. He also had an incentive for his visitors to sign up and receive a paper about study tips for the theory test and free mock tests.

In summary, your landing page should be as sticky as you can possibly make it, without it looking like spam. You should be relevant to the search term that you’re optimising for and provide a solution or a service that offers a benefit to your visitor. During your planning process, be conscious of the fact that you’re paying for these visitors, so give yourself every advantage to get the most from each click.

We always welcome your feedback and thoughts, please feel free to comment via the comments section below. Or you can find our details on the Contact Generate UK page.

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The use of blogs as a personal tool to communicate is not new, there are over 100 million blogs in the so called “blogosphere” covering more topics than most of us even know exist. However it is only recently that small, medium and large enterprise customers have began to launch their own blogs. This is because they are starting to realise the value of having a blog. Not all companies have bought into this yet, so we thought it would be useful to explore what we think are the business benefits for owning a blog.

We’d like to continue to add to this list below, if you think we have missed something; please add to the debate by using our comments section.

Business Benefits of Blogging

Search Marketing purposes

By nature a blog is usually about a specific topic and is regularly updated. This in turn encourages the search engine spiders to visit your site more frequently, once this happens you are more likely to appear the organic search results, which means free and targeted traffic. The more experienced bloggers will target certain keywords and phrases in order to rank well and manipulate the search engines. Because of the flexibility of a blog, it is very quickly to launch a new post and therefore start to rank for different keywords relating to your business.

Direct Contact with people who are interested in you

Most blogs provide an option for its readers to be able to subscribe to them, meaning that every post you go live with will be sent to your subscriber base. These are people who have proactively giving you and your content the virtual equivalent of the thumbs up. You should value your subscribers very highly and ensure that you continue to provide them with content and information they are interested in. Conversely, these are the people you can test new products, seek feedback and leverage to help your provide a better service or product.

Brand Building

There are many ways to use a blog to build your brand or even to support an existing brand. In fact a blog is the perfect vehicle to use to interact with your potential customers, advanced bloggers may also use video or viral campaigns to tease their audience into coming back.

Dare to be different and differentiate yourselves from your competitors

There’s two questions to ask here; do your competitors have a blog and do they use it? And secondly, can we use our blog to add credibility to our services and solutions? For example, if you’re an IT company would it be good to have an interview with one of your customers on your blog?The answer is yes, as it adds to the credibility of your service. Likewise, you could include your views on new product launches or industry trends, all the time differentiating yourselves with other players in your market.

Build Relationships

There’s an old adage in sales and marketing, “people buy from people”. This has not changed and is probably even more apparent in tough economic times. A blog provides you with an opportunity to create relationships with your clients and prospects. There is a current trend for large companies to have a “CEO Blog”, this is where the head of the company writes a blog article once a week, which is designed to bring them closer to their target audience. It provides the reader with a feeling of involvement and interaction, especially if they are able to leave comments and respond directly to the company head.

Social Media Marketing

Most of the leading blog sites will have a social media aspect to them. They are normally visible via small graphical logos, which can be used by your readers to submit your blog post to other social media networks. The more well known social media sites are called Facebook, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Sphinn and Digg, however the list grows by the day and each will be focused on niche or have its own rules. From a blogging perspective, the reason to be aware of the social networks is because if your content is good then it is likely to be picked up by them. If this happens, it can mean a huge increase in targeted traffic.

PR & Media will find you

Depending on your niche and your content, there is every chance that you may be contacted by either local or national press. This is a great position to be in and will help you with brand building and of course provide you with some free advertising. Usually this type of contact is born from the understanding that you are an expert in your field or the topic you are discussing is of interest to their publications.

Thought Leadership and becoming an authority

The Internet has created some amazing opportunities for companies to market their products and services to a wider audience, however you could also argue that it has meant an increase in competition in almost all markets. This is why it is important to differentiate yourself from your competitors, one way to do this is to establish yourself as the de facto expert in your area. If you are an expert, tell the world. Use your blog to communicate and showcase your expertise, in a competitive market this will do wonders for your sales.

Online Reputation Management

Online reputation management is becoming big news, we have posted about this before and we advise our clients to be aware of it and proactively manage it. One of the ways to do this is by managing the content and using your blog to control what is being said. It is a little more complicated than just that, however it is better to be in control of the blog then letting someone else do it for you.

It’s really Simple

Creating and maintaining a blog is very simple. Once it is set up and designed, then your only challenge is creating the content and keeping it updated regularly. There are sites out there that post every day, whilst others do it once a week. We recommend that you find a happy medium that results in a good flow of content to keep your readers happy, without it becoming a chore.

Link Baiting

People have different views and ideas about link baiting. Often it is described as a black hat technique, whilst there are examples of blackhat link baiting, in general it is fine. The idea is that a blog post is so controversial or significant that it solicits a response from other members of the blogosphere. In turn they include a link back to your site, and you receive a boost in traffic and a short term buzz on your blog. If you’re lucky, you will keep hold of a number of your readers as well.

We want to keep growing this list, if you have any other business benefits for having a company blog please post in the comments.

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Search Marketing - The next battle ground for your brand?

In the UK just over 15% of of the total media spend is now spent on online advertising. This trend is set to continue with year on year growth expected at around 40%. By the end of this decade it is widely expected that online advertising will replace television as the leading advertising platform in this country.

The vast majority (nearly 60%) of the online budget is being spent on various forms of pay per click. The 800 pound gorilla in this market is obviously Google, other well know companies here include Yahoo and Microsoft. The attraction of pay per click as a tool for acquiring new customers or clicks to your site is incomparable. It may not be the most cost effective or scalable solution, however it certainly delivers the goods.

Currently, we believe that there is an opportunity for companies to reduce or compliment their pay per click campaigns with traditional search engine optimisation. We recognise that product launches and instant results can often only be accelerated with a pay per click strategy, however optimising for the search engines as well will reduce your customer acquisition costs, increase your branding, increase your traffic and hopefully positively impact your bottom line.

We’re starting to see the start of this trend now. Just this week MTV announced that they were going to concentrate on their search branding. They want to revamp their association with new and upcoming music and therefore improve their relationship with their core younger audience. They will do this by being associated in the search results for up and coming bands or via the names of their TV programmes. Basically, they want to increase their search engine presence as they have worked out that people who are searching for details of whatever new hip hop act is flavour of the day, do not use the search for MTV. This means there are hundreds and thousands of potential MTV clickers out there they currently do not reach.

Once this penny drops, companies will begin to leverage the natural search engine results and proactively try to influence them in different ways than today. Naturally, this could mean a slight reduction in the pay per click budget, however we think that the search budget will actually be increased and the pay per click budget will grow at a steady rate.

The great thing about search engine marketing is that in terms of cost it can be considerably lower than pay per click. Most if not all of it can be achieved in house if you had the right resources and skills. We run a number of Search Marketing Courses in the UK, our students tend to have the same skills requirements, below is a list of the most popular areas we cover:

- Do your keyword research, making sure you understand what your customers are using to search for you.
- Invest in your pages, have one for each product, service or solution that you have. Each of these pages can then be optimised. If you’re worried about how manageable your site might be, consider a web content management system.
- Make sure your site is search engine friendly, this is both on site and off site.
- Run monthly reports with your search engine consultants so that you can track the keyword success

If you do not want to take ownership of this inhouse, then you might want to work with an SEO consultancy. Naturally, we at Generate UK would be delighted to help, however this blog posting is not a pitch it is supposed to be a helpful guide. So we’ve listed below the key criteria that we use to help make our search engine marketing projects a success.

- Who owns the project. All projects require senior stakeholders and support, it is no different with search engine marketing and branding. If the project is supported, it can be strongly project managed.

- What are the objectives. This sounds like a no brainer but unfortunately often missed. This should involve; where you are and where you want to be.

- Target the right vehicle. By this we mean that you should focus on the search engine that means the most to you and offers the most potential to your business.

- Keywords and keyphrases. This is one of the areas we cover on our Internet Marketing course. our students will tell you how important we think keyword research is; without it, your project is doomed from the start.

- Content. The right content that is both search engine friendly, focused on your customer and includes the right number of keywords. It really is that simple!

- Pay per click. If you’re using pay per click make sure that you know what your bid prices are and have a budget. Agree beforehand what the maximum is that you will pay for a click.

- Landing Pages. If you’re spending lots of money on pay per click and search marketing, you have to make sure that your pages sell or capture or whatever it is that you decided was your objective.

- Analytics. One of the main reasons that online advertising spend will eclipse television is that it is immediately available to analyse, and it is very important you do.

- Was it worthwhile. Once you have analysed a campaign, you will be able to tell whether you had a decent return on investment.

- Review, review, review. Whatever campaign you send out, whatever keyword you are tracking and whatever new page you are creating it is vital that you have a culture of review. Constant tweaks and improvements can be the difference between sales and no sales.

As you can see, there is a real opportunity for companies to leverage the search engines in a different way to how they are currently doing it. It is a world of new prospects and branding opportunities, it is a world of proactive search management and a world that is still being defined.

We’d be delighted to hear from you if you have anything to add to this post, use the comments box below.

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Online reputation management is all about protecting your brand and image online. Most companies go to great lengths to protect their reputation offline, unfortunately they are often slow to react to different pressures online. In this world of blogospheres and user generated feedback, one of the greatest challenges for services or product led companies is to manage unflattering or malicious listings in search results.

Imagine the scenario of Company A who have launched a new product. They spend a lot of money on above the line advertising, used their Internet Marketing Agency to create a successful viral campaign and even have a well thought out pay per click strategy. Everyone is happy with the progress and all is going well. That was until somebody spots a “review” of their new product on a search listing result. Unfortunately, the “review” is not a flattering one, in fact it is not very encouraging at all. More frustrating is that it ranks higher than you do for your product. What can you do about this?

This is a very real issue. Whilst, we would always recommend a proactive strategy for online reputation management, we also know that asking clients to spend money to prevent something from happening is very difficult. Remember the early days with virus protection, you only ever invested if you have had your fingers burned. So for this example, we’re assuming that most people do not proactive and do not as a part of their roles seek to protect their online footprint against unflattering results.

The challenge is a pretty simple one, how do you remove the unflattering listing from search results Or what strategy do you use to reduce its ranking and increase yours?

The first job to do is really understand what the unflattering page is all about. Is it from a competitor? a consumer? is it overtly malicious? Is there a case to report it to the search engines for breach of rules and therefore have it removed from the listings? (Keep in mind that this does not always work). Is it possible that you can encourage the page owner to remove the content? It’s important to know whether the page is being honest or whether the report is false, if so you might use your “right of reply” to set the record straight. Try to learn as much as possible about the keywords of the page and how it is ranking.

At Generate UK, we do not encourage or use any Black Hat methods. We appreciate that many of you might suggest one or two interesting alternatives to having the unflattering page removed. So for the purposes of this article, consider everything white hat.

If it is not possible to have the page removed, then unfortunately you are going to have to work with it. This is where your understanding of the page comes in. What you need to do is to rank higher and in larger numbers in order to move their page down the results. Again, there are a number of black hat methods to assist with this, however we will be using what is available to us, using white hat methods.

The key to this is to increase your footprint in the search results. If you understood what keywords the unflattering page is using and how it is coming up in the search results, then you must start to target those keywords.

We would look at the different social media options available and recommend a bespoke effort based upon the client in question. Using our new product example above, we would engage with sites such as YouTube, Digg and other elements of the Blogosphere. This might take the form of video content, new friendly reviews, how to guides and other complimentary information and content that will support the effort. We would also use search engine marketing PR and leverage the more well known news and media outlets.

By using the sites that already rank well in search results and doing your research, you’ll soon be able to list for the keywords and phrases that the original unflattering page targeted. A carefully tailored approach with the client will soon have that page away from the eyes of the masses who only click on one of the first three results.

Online reputation management is very important, ideally you will already have a proactive approach and be busy in this area already. If not, consider how you might react to negativity and how quickly you are able to address it. Then consider the brand and reputation damage you might receive for doing nothing.

We’re always interest in your views and feedback. If you have anything to contribute to this article, please contact us below.

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