Search and Online Marketing

There’s a bit of buzz going around in search circles at the moment regarding the acquisition of our sister company Netconcepts USA so we wanted to clarify what’s happening and what it means for Netconcepts New Zealand.

Summarising the news…Netconcepts USA has been acquired by Covario Inc., one of the big players in enterprise class search advertising software and services. The combined company has customers in key industries such as high tech, financial services, ecommerce, retail, consumer electronics, media, life sciences, and consumer packaged goods. We consider this great news for the US business as it strengthens both companies and gives our US team the opportunity to work with new clients in industries they haven’t traditionally served. Good news all round.

So what does it mean for Netconcepts New Zealand?

Netconcepts NZ has had the same shareholders as Netconcepts USA, but it is a separate entity and is not part of the sale. In other words, for us it is business as usual. We’ll continue to serve the New Zealand and Australia markets as we have been for the past 10 years. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

Netconcepts China is similarly not impacted by the sale.

To celebrate Christmas this year, we decided to give $1,000 and help build links to a number of our favourite causes. We came up with the concept of ‘Give a Link for Christmas’ where an email was sent out to our customers, thanking them for their support in 2009 and encouraging them to link to one of our favourite causes, by posting it to Facebook, Twitter, Delicious or indeed posting a link to their blog/website.  We suggested that if they liked the idea they should spread the word to their friends. Whenever someone posted a link to one of the social networks, there was a link back to the ‘Give a Link for Christmas’ landing page.

See some real time Tweets here

Give a Link for Christmas Landing Page

Hi all,
Pay per click advertising has proved to be a fantastic cashcow for Google with Adwords proving to be its flagship revenue generator. Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsfot AdCenter, the ppc networks offered by Yahoo and MSN respectively,  have also tasted success though not on the same scale as the Google Adwords program.

As far as the advertiser is concerned, there is not much joy when it comes to click costs for the keywords they target in their ppc campaigns. Unlike the stock market where crashes occur, the prices of keywords have been going up steadily and there is no possibility of them coming down in future.  It is not fair to expect every advertiser to know the intricacies of PPC marketing and factors like quality score, targeting and relevancy.

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Recently, Netconcepts China successfully organised “the search marketing salon 2009” event in Beijing. The leading lights of the China SEO industry gathered and shared their experiences in search marketing field.

This event not only provides good opportunities for interactive discussion of new techniques and new methods of search marketing, but also aims to create a sustainable interactive platform for internet marketing in the long run in China.

The search marketing salon drew many SEOs’ attention and was well received industry wide. Many reputable companies from internet related industries attended this event including Elong travel booking, Net Ease, adSage, 99go.com, taikang insurance, DHgate.com, China Travel Service Head Office, 99Bill.com, Tuubar.com and Edeng.cn to name a few.

As honored guests, Mr. Zhang Tao (Baidu search marketing manager) and Allen Qu (Netconcepts CEO) held a series of seminars on search marketing techniques and development with many case studies.

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Hi everyone,
Caffeine is the latest offering from Google which has to do with the next generation architecture for web search. Crawling large sections of the web and indexing the pages of sites is most vital for a good web search engine.

The next step would be to determine the reputation of the indexed pages and finally rank and return the most relevant pages in response to users’ search queries. Google spends a lot on resources (hardware) in carrying out crawling and indexing operations. It is quite expensive and this explains the reason why there are only 3 major search engines capapble of doing this and providing these results to secondary sites for a fee.

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Hi all,
In today’s post, I am discussing the relevance of article marketing and article directories in the context of SEO. A pretty common refrain is that submission to article directories is not valued anymore by the search engines even though it is one of the best ways of gaining a one way link with anchor text of your choice to your site. Read the rest of this entry »

HI all,
The latest search deal between Yahoo and Microsoft has galvanised the SEO world for another bout of dynamics that will impact on the future of the search industry. The deal between Yahoo and Bing is to last for 10 years but the complete implementation will take atleast 2 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi all,
Reciprocal linking is one of the most used methods to obtain links to a site to the point that it has lost some of its sheen due to excessive abuse. The web is still an untamed jungle in many ways and automotive sites linking to bridal wear sites can still be found. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi all,
This post aims to uncover the various ways in which you can build your external linking profile or backlinks (links pointing to your site from external sources to your site) in a decent way where you have the right to earn a link and not go about begging for it. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi everyone,
Most small business owners invest time and money in their small business website when they decide to join the internet bandwagon. More often than not, their first point of call is a designer who helps them set up a CMS (Content Management System) so that the owner can add, edit and delete content on the site. Most times, this is an open source CMS. The site can be a plain vanilla type website or an ecommerce site. Read the rest of this entry »