Commentary by Allen Qu

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.

The CEO of  Netconcepts China,  Mr. Allen Qu shared his experience in search marketing, including  differences between Baidu SEO and Google Search Engine Optimisation (SEO),  resolving content duplication issues on websites, case studies on search marketing,  updates on “nofollow” issues, blogging techniques and use of popular SEO tools.

Differences In SEO Approach For Baidu and Google:
On the topic of differences between Baidu SEO and Google SEO, Allen said: “SEO for these two major search engines in China does not have any fundamental difference, but the imperative thing we should keep in mind is to fulfill clients’ needs”.

He also elaborated the differences in approach with some typical examples and then he introduced two main methods of resolving duplicate content: Canonical Tag and 301 redirect.   He completed his speech with an analysis of Search Engine Optimisation in general.

Key points by Baidu Search Marketing Mangaer:
Mr. Zhang Tao, the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) manager from Baidu presented an indepth analysis of Keyword research for SEM or PPC (pay per click), which included operation processes, marketing strategies, search behavior and trends.

Under the topic of SEM operation process, Mr. Zhang Tao introduced 7 major steps including goals of SEM, keyword data and analysis of historical data, strategic planning, tracking, reporting, analyzing and optimisation.

Outling a successful SEM strategy, he introduced methods and shared valuable information on how to break through the bottleneck of SEM. He then predicted search behavior and trends with the help of concrete examples.

Active Interaction:
The event witnessed active interaction between the speakers and the attending SEOs on the popular search marketing issues and topics confronting the industry today. The personal experiences of SEO practitioners in tackling various issues both unique to the China SEO industry and in general provided invaluable wisdom to all present.

The Beijing  search marketing salon highlighted the importance and value of new media marketing in the current economic trends. Search marketing is able to bring businesses more measureable and effective outcomes compared with traditional marketing. It also fulfills the needs of quick and effective Return on Investment (ROI) for businesses.

The event provided good opportunity for knowledge sharing and innovation. The attendees got a great insight into  internet marketing.

Netconcepts China is an integrated e-marketing company offering the best of  search engine optimization, search engine marketing, personalized internet marketing services and website development.

Netconcepts,  founded in 1995 by Stephan Spencer in the United States, is one of the leading internet marketing companies. As a member of the international search engine marketing experts association, Netconcepts has been providing search engine marketing solutions to the global Top 500 companies and numerous large-scale Web sites by its professional SEO consulting team in the past 14 years and achieved great success.

Netconcepts New Zealand is a well established New Zealand search marketing company offering search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

The client list of Netconcepts Group includes Expedia,  Elong travel booking site, Taikang insurance, Epson (China), Microsoft, Yahoo!, America Online, HP, Discovery Discovery Channel, Verizon, Disney, Zappos, Air New Zealand, House of Travel, CNET.com, MP3.com, the University of Auckland New Zealand, and so forth.

A collection of photos of the Search Marketing Salon 2009 Event in Beijing, China

I’m not really looking for a new search interface, the fast and easy Google interface is good enough for me. But people (developers and marketers) always want to bring us new things. Now, Searchme delivers the new graphical search interface - the iTunes Cover Flow style. While it’s still in Beta, the quality of the search results is still not up-to-speed. And the question is “do we really need to search this way?”. But anyway, it’s a very interesting thing to watch.

Apart from the graphical search interface, Searchme also provides a service called Searchme Stacks which is much cooler and useful in my opinion. You can create any stacks with your favorite websites and share with others, through email, social bookmarks or drop onto your blog, like the one below:

Baidu.com is the leading search engine in China with over 60% market share. Baidu also ranked third largest worldwide search property according to comScore, just behind Google sites and Yahoo! sites. China now has the largest Internet population in the world. By the end of 2008, China will reach 300 million Internet population and about 240 million search engine users. The Internet penetration rate is still low (about 20%), so I guess China could reach 400-500 million Internet users easily in the next few years to catch up to its 600 million mobile phone users.

Thus, Google won’t let Baidu take such a big piece of cake and remain happy with its current 20% market share in China. Google has partnered with China’s largest portal site Sina.com who used to use Baidu’s search technology and has also been the mobile search provider for China Mobile. Google is also going to invest a lot this year and beyond on advertising in China. They now have about 800 staff in China, but they will hire 200 or 300 staff each year in the next few years.

Last week Google teamed up with China’s most popular dictionary software - iCiba. iCiba has been the market leader for 10 years in the field and selling the dictionary software for about US$20 per copy. It has about 30 million loyal users. Google has bought it and started to offer the software for free. The 30 million user base will help Google to gain some market share and Google will also get some ad revenue from the built-in Google search function.

Yahoo! is a little quiet in the Chinese search market at the moment, although its partner Alibaba is doing great on B2B portal (Alibaba.com) and C2C auction site (Taobao.com). Microsoft is investing US$280 million to build a new research and development center in Beijing. The new R&D center is expected to accommodate 5,000 employees. There is a rumor that Microsoft is willing to invest in Baidu after its failure with Yahoo!.

It’s an interesting battle happening in China :-). At Netconcepts we’re keen to watch the developments as they unfold, but also keep our clients aware of the upcoming opportunities available in that online marketplace.

Have you seen some links below some sites in Google search results? They’re called Google Sitelinks. They don’t show for every site and search keywords. You may be wondering how they work and how to get for your websites. Then let’s have a closer look at what Sitelinks are.

What are Google Sitelinks?

Google Sitelinks are displayed in Google search results and are meant to help users navigate your website. Google systems analyze the link structure of your website to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information. Sitelinks are completely automated by Google’s algorithm. In short, Google Sitelinks are shortcuts to your main pages from the search result pages.

When do Google Sitelinks show?

Google only shows Sitelinks for results when they think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your website doesn’t allow Google spider to find good Sitelinks, or they don’t think the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, they won’t show them.

Although there are no certain answers to this question from Google, the following factors seem to influence whether Google displays Sitelinks or not:

1. Your site must have a stable no.1 ranking for the search query. So Sitelinks show up most often for searches on brand names.
2. Your site must be old enough. It seems that websites under 2 years old don’t get Sitelinks
3. The number of searches - it seems that the search keywords aren’t searched often enough don’t get Sitelinks
4. The number of clicks - it seems that your site has to get many clicks for the searched keywords
5. It seems that Sitelinks don’t show to search queries consisting of two or more keywords
6. The number of links - links are important everywhere in the SEO world, aren’t they? The inbound links with the relevant anchor text seems to influence the chance of getting Sitelinks

How can we get Sitelinks for our website?

If you can meet the above mentioned criteria, you’ll have a big chance to get Sitelinks shown for your site. But you can also improve the structure of your website to increase the possibility and quality of your Sitelinks.

Google seems to use the first level links on a website for the Sitelinks, so make sure all your important links are on the homepage.

The links should be text links or image links with an IMG ALT attribute. JavaScript or Flash links are not considered for Sitelinks. Also, it seems that Google likes links that appear at the top of a webpage. So try to put your important links at the top of the HTML code and then re-position using CSS.

Overall, build your website following SEO best practices and rank no.1 for your most important keywords will ensure the Sitelinks appearances and help users to navigate your website.

Have you ever received emails about April Fools’ Day jokes or pranks? Have you ever sent out prank emails or website links to your friends? If yes, then that’s the sign of April Fools’ Day viral marketing. As a marketer, we tend to use any marketing channel and occasion to engage our customers or prospects. Then why not April Fools’ Day?

If you deploy the strategy correctly, an April Fools’ Day campaign can inject humour elements into your brand, provide a welcome break, and may reach the audience that you’d never think about. An April Fools’ Day campaign through online channels could help you to achieve results at almost no cost. You can use any online marketing channel to construct your campaign such as websites, emails, widgets & gadgets, blogs and social media sites. Of course, you need to be very careful about it and you don’t want to harm your brand. Don’t even try it if it doesn’t fit your brand image at all. For example, if you’re a legal firm or government agency, you may not want to try.

Google is pretty good at April Fools’ Day pranks. Last year, it announced two faux products on April Fools’ Day - Gmail Paper (Google will print thousands of your emails as hard copy and deliver to you for free. Of course, there will be ads on the back) and Google TiSP (a plumbing-based in-home wireless broadband service). You can come out with any ideas for your own campaign. The only thing that limits you is your imagination. PC World has summarized the top April Fools’ Day Jokes of the past few years. It may be a good starting point for generating your own ideas. Let’s take a look at the top 5 (source: PCWorld.com).

Top 5 April Fools’ Day Joke Web Sites

1. Camouflage Deer? - On 1st April 2007, the PETA Files blog announced a new plan to protect local deer from hunters by painting them with a camouflage pattern.
2. Opera SoundWave - On 1st April 2005, Opera announced platform-independent real-time speech technology for short and medium range interpersonal communication. It may be a way to outdo Firefox and IE :-)
3. The Risks Digest - On 1st April 2006, it reported about a motorist trapped in a traffic circle for 14 hours because of his car’s malfunctioning lane-keeping software.
4. The Screened Sphorb - ThinkGeek announced a product called The Screened Sphorb that uses resolution transistors to create an array of functional sub-screens for just $39.99.
5. Animated Tattoos - Want to try? On 1st April 2006, howstuffworks.com told you how animated tattoos work.

Again, why do an April Fools’ Day campaign? Apart from possible branding benefits I mentioned earlier, it may help you generate inbound links to your website to boost PageRank and website traffic. Furthermore, people do pass it around and talk about it (like what I just did) for years, if you do it right!

Happy April Fools’ Day!

March usually means it is time for end of previous year research and figures.  We now have plenty of statistics on offer from 2007!  Very few people like statistical figures, but I love them :-)

There were 6.6 billion world population in 2007 and about 1.15 billion (17.5%) were regular Internet users.

In 2008, Asia Pacific region will top 500 million Internet users and we’ll see China overtake the US as the most popular Internet nation in the world.

According to eMarketer, by 2012, almost 50% of the world’s Internet population will live in the Asia Pacific area. The share of the world’s Internet users in North American and Europe will fall, although absolute numbers will continue to grow, as the share of users in Latin America and the Asia Pacific region both grow.

Countries including China, Russia, India, Brazil and Mexico will be the primary drivers of worldwide Internet user growth over the next five years.  As I manage international PPC campaigns, I have found strong growth in those countries in the last couple of years.

Let’s take a look at the New Zealand online market…  Online advertising spending in 2007 hit $135.16 million, or 5.8% of the total advertising market, according to IAB. However, online advertising share is over 10% in the US and over 15% in UK. Well, we’re growing, but still have plenty of room to catch up!

In New Zealand, online advertising is now the fifth largest advertising channel after newspaper (35.4%), TV (28%), radio (11.7%) and magazines (10.9%).

We’re confident that in 2008 there will be continued growth in online advertising.  We believe that online advertising spend will continue to grow in NZ and the Asia Pacific region will become stronger and stronger in the online world market. Go NZ! Go Asia Pacific!

Images by Onlinemarketer

Bond & Bond has rolled out a campaign about 3 months ago on its website – “This Week’s Top 10 Killer Deals” along with a campaign site – KillerDeals.co.nz. It is a fantastic idea to engage customers and attract returning visitors to the site. For a company like Bond & Bond who has very good brand awareness in New Zealand, plus some really good deals, the campaign site should go very well. However, is it a real killer yet? Can it be even more killing? Let’s find out.

First of all, let’s look at some figures of the campaign site – www.killerdeals.co.nz.

• PageRank – 0/10
• No. of indexed pages on Google – 2
• No. of indexed pages on Yahoo! – 1
• No. of indexed pages on Live Search – 1
• External backlinks reported by Google - 0
• External backlinks reported by Yahoo! – 80 (70 of them are from Bond & Bond website)
• Blog mentions – 0
• Social bookmarks – 0

By having lots of 0s and near 0 numbers, the campaign is definitely not doing its full potential. There are huge opportunities sitting behind. What can they do to make it fly? Of course, online marketing is the answer. But I’ll dig into the solutions by looking at three important online marketing aspects – SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SMO (Social Media Optimisation).

SEO

You may be wondering why the search engine index is so bad for killerdeals.co.nz. Simple answer, the entire site is a Flash file. There is no single live letter on the site. Search engines cannot read all other contents very well except plain text. So the site has been missing a lot of traffic opportunities from search engines. Nowadays, no one can afford to leave out the search engine traffic, cannot we?

Google can read Flash files at certain extent but very poorly. The above example is how Google reads the Flash file of killerdeal.co.nz. By having lots of “click Me” and “Buy Me” shown, it looks a little bit spammy, isn’t it?

I admit the Flash they built is kind of cool with all the mouse-over actions. But again, the whole site cannot be a single Flash. They need to change the site structure to a normal HTML site with real headings (especially H1), text copies and text links etc. They can still keep the Flash for each item instead of the normal product image, but with product descriptions in plain text.

Search engines love permanent text copy to determine the theme of the page and fresh content to keep the site live, like humans do. Each week’s top 10 is the prefect live content. An introductory copy will also be essential. They can also archive the expired specials with current prices and group them by categories and link back to Bond & Bond site. The category pages can be used as a place to introduce category level specials and/or vouchers.

From SEO’s point of view, we don’t want the campaign site to compete with the Bond & Bond site for search traffic. It will need to position itself as a heavy promotion site which is not the primary focus of the original Bond & Bond site. Good use of page titles, headings, keywords, unique content etc. will help them to achieve the goal.

You may want to argue that it’s a micro-site that doesn’t need to look and function like a normal website. It’s right, for a normal short life micro-site, we won’t need to worry much about SEO. But for a site like killerdeals.co.nz, it desires to act well and live forever. If Bond & Bond can optimise the site well, they’ll build up a real deal site and community over time and enjoy the free and unlimited search traffic day by day. Then they’ll be one step closer to be a real killer.

Of course, the real action won’t be as simple as I described above. It requires lots of detailed planning and twisting to make it shine. Feel free to leave your comments here or contact us for more discussions.

In the next posts, I’ll continue discussing the other killer weapons – SEM and SMO.