With E-Commerce Still On The Rise, Expect More Investment In EMarketing
Posted by Ahmad Barirani in 
According to ComScore, Holiday shopping was 5% on the rise for 2009. Taking into account that 2009 wasn’t really a good year for the economy, it is great news for the e-commerce industry and an indication of future trends to come in terms of consumer behavior. In my opinion, time saving is the most important benefit offered by online shopping. Of course, people save money when they buy a book from Amazon.com, but they save time which might be more important that the money they’ll be saving.
As a result of this new reality, brick and mortar SMBs that haven’t started with having an online shop should be seriously thinking of doing so. Of course, there is one thing that a brick and mortar stores can do that an website will not be able to do: human contact. But except a decrease in the number of customers who can ‘afford’ to spend on such ‘luxury’ as human contact. Therefore, businesses should think of having a virtual store as well as their physical store to stay competitive in today’s fast moving market.
Facebook Number One For Christmas
Facebook got more traffic than Google for Christmas. I guess this is the best gift they could have dreamed for. This is somehow normal if we take into consideration that 1) Facebook has more than 300 million members, that 2) people keep more in touch with friends and family during Christmas. Of course, this is to be expected for special holidays where people spend more time sending each other good wishes. However, I believe there is more in this news than just something related to special holidays.
First of all, Facebook is not going to lose members. Therefore, the critical mass that is needed to become number one website is there to stay and will only get bigger. Second, certain features of Facebook offer benefits that other conventional means of communication do not offer. Therefore, Facebook is changing the way people keep in touch with each other, gradually supplanting traditional communication channels in the process.
So if Facebook will have more users who will spend more time on the website, then it will soon have more traffic than Google. This was somehow expected as major marketing analysts expect a rise of marketing spending on Facebook and other mainstream social media.
SEO Link Building Starter Kit
There is popular belief that good content is what will give a high ranking to a web page, but that’s not all there is to SEO as link building can sometimes be more important. The fact is that Google page ranking model is based on the number of web pages linking to a given page. These are called backlinks in SEO terms. Basically, a page that has more backlinks than other pages will have a higher pagerank than those pages and will, therefore, appear at a higher position in SERPs. Also, the linking page’s rank is transferred to the linked page’s rank. In other words, all links are not worth the same as it is better to get linked from a page that has a high ranking than one that has a lower one.
Naturally, link building becomes an important part of SEO tasks. In this post, I would like to describe the most common techniques used to get backlinks to a website. The link building list here is the result of surveying some of the most important SEO articles and blogs. Since I didn’t want to enumerate the totality of techniques that are described in these posts, I chose those that come most often and that are part of the basics of link building. After all, this is a starter kit and the point here is not to become a link building guru.
Link building techniques
- Directories: This is one the most popular way to get backlinks. Directories are websites that classify and list other websites. Of course, not all directories aren’t good. The most popular and selective is DMOZ and being indexed there is always a good thing. Now, you have to be careful about the directory you pick. Some of them aren’t really well ranked and being listed there is going to do more harm than good to your ranking.
- Webrings: these are a collection of websites that are linked together in a circular structure. When you join a webring, you will have to add a link to the previous and next website of the ring. Again you have to be careful what you link to here. If you link to a spammy website or a spammy website links to you, you will end up with more remorse than rewards.
- Link exchange: The point here is to contact webmasters and ask for having a link to your web page. Of course, nothing is free in this world and common courtesy is to give a link back. A few principle of good mannerism are needed here to make the effort be profitable. It is very easy to offend someone you never talked to before. As a rule of thumb, give before you take.
- Paid links: Whether you pay a directory, blogger or webmaster, the idea here is to receive a link in exchange of money. You would be amazed to see how this technique is effective, but once again, you will need to have to show common courtesy. The advantage of this techniques with link exchange is that you don’t have to give a link back.
- Have great content: if your page offers something unique or just plain fun, it will get linked by other pages. This is the whole point with Google page rank model as pages of better quality are supposed to get more links than pages of lower quality. You can find a lot of tips on how to write great content. Generally, Top 10, How to and link articles are a good way to get links.
- Article submission: write articles on EzineArticles and ArticlesBase. These sites have good page ranks so you can write an article with a link to your site which will inherit from the page rank.
- Social bookmarking: social bookmarking can be useful at many levels. Here a list of DoFollow social bookmarking sites that can be used for this purpose. Another trick is to have social bookmarking buttons on your page. This might encourage a few to bookmark your page. This will bring you traffic and a couple of links with minimum effort.
- DoFollow blogs commenting: Some people spend a lot of time commenting on blogs thinking their website will get better page ranking. The truth is that most blogs add the rel=”nofollow” tag to links in their post comments which will not transfer ranking to those website. However, there are a few blogs who don’t add rel=”nofollow” to their comments. Look around DoFollow blog directories to find a couple of these blogs in your niche and you will get yourself a couple of DoFollow backlinks. But don’t forget that Google will penalize websites that spam through comments. So when you comment blogs, make sure you do it in ethical way. As a general rule, content created on social media should add value. If you can’t justify the reason why you added a comment to a blog post, other than that you wanted to have a link, then it is going to be risky in the eyes of the bot.
- Forums: Yes. anything in the hands of SEO professionals can be turned into a link building weapon. Forums are no exception. Again, forum spamming should be avoided as it could have a perverse effect on page rank. The same common sense as for blog comments should be followed here.
- Link Baiting: this is a very effective way of creating links. Let’s say you are web design consultant and that you happen to have built a couple of cool WordPress themes. Why not give some of them for free. All you have to do is to make sure there is a link from that theme to your website. What’s going to happen is that all those who will use your theme will “give” you a backlink.
Conclusion: build a strong network
If you sum up all these techniques here, something will strike out: they are all time consuming. Why, because you need to do a lot of things manually. My advice is that you need to have a couple of SEO friends if you want to be productive. The value of a network is exponential compared to the number of nodes. The more you will have friends, easier it will be to exchange useful links, get bookmarked, join a clean webring and even get linked because of your great content.
What makes the difference between an top SEO and an average SEO professional is the size and quality of the network. Top SEO people will have good connection withing the search engine industry. They might befriend a couple of Google people and they will have a lot of collaboration with other SEO guys. As a result, they know how to optimize a web page so it looks good to the bot and the know can get a lot of backlinks fast.
Confirmed: More Money Will be Spent on eMarketing in Future Years
Take a look at this great article about how emarketing is going to grow in the future years. Of course, who says emarketing says social media and who ever says social media says Facebook and Twitter. Expect to see a lot happening there as this market has till not reached its plateau.
Indeed people already use Facebook a lot and they not going to stop any time soon. Since people cant’ be reached on TV anymore, they have to be reached on Facebook and Twitter, hence all that money that goes into those platforms.
These are all signs that things are going really well for the Internet industry and that it can do a lot of good to the rest of the economy.
Facebook Hasn’t Reached its S-Curve’s Plateau Yet
According to ComScore, people in the U.S. spend 5 minutes a day on Facebook. What I find even more interesting is the shape of the curve. It is clear that from September 2007 to May 2009, Facebook’s average time on site has grown exponentially. My guess is that this growth could be associated with a similar growth in the size of the Facebook network: more people = more interaction = more time spent on Facebook. Things have grown a bit more slowly from May to July 2009 but there seems to be a more important rise since then.
The question is: will it continue to grow exponentially or has it achieved to apex of the S-Curve?
My opinion is that there is still going to be exponential growth because there is a lot of value to get from Facebook applications. Once people start using these applications, there is going to be at least another wave of growth in terms of time spend on the platform.
For businesses and marketers, this means more people to reach on Facebook and less people to reach on other traditional media, which will translate into more spent in online advertising. Good news for social media optimization specialists: the market will grow in 2010…well that wasn’t really a risky guess…
Social Media is Now Stronger Than Ever: It is Part Of Google SERPs
Starting today, Google will redirect users to social media through its new real-time search feature. This means more alignment between SMO and SEO. This is good for Google as it is good for social media websites that will see an increase in their traffic. Well, it is good for businesses that could use this feature to gt some of the traffic for important keywords that would otherwise be difficult to compete for. I’m talking about words like money, cars, flowers, etc. that drive millions of people everyday. While it is hard to get any of the traffic for those keywords through traditional SEO techniques, it might be more simple to get a very small portion of that traffic by optimizing for real-time search. One tweet shown for only a second could get some traffic and if that tweet gets retweeted, then it means more traffic. Isn’t that cool?
Content Adds Value, Therefore it has a Price
Variety.com will start charging fees for some of its content. This comes a little while after Murdoch announced his decision to block Google crawler. If you ask me, these are all signs that the Internet is cannibalizing the information market (uh..da!) in a way that traditional information providers have to move all their resources to that direction and move fast before they become dinosaurs. Since those resources have a certain cost, it is obvious that the output (the articles) will also have a price tag. My best wishes of luck to Variety.
The Disruptive Nature of Chrome OS and What it Means For Windows
Chrome OS is disruptive
A disruptive product would be one that initially under-performs other products on the market even for the simplest needs. Think of all those extensions that Chrome OS will miss, making it a less attractive solution that Windows + Firefox. Gradually, the new product will be enhanced by other components or optimization of those parts that make it under-perform. At a certain point, the new product will offer better performance other products that are at the low-end of the market. For example, lets suppose someone is using Windows + Firefox + Google Toolbar for surfing the Internet and sending/receiving email though Gmail. For this person, as soon as the Google Toolbar is available for Chrome OS, it would be better to use Chrome OS instead of Windows + Firefox because the former is a faster and lighter than the latter.