To give you an example  it is useful to track discussions and themes relating to your brand. This is valuable when it comes to identifying prospective opportunities to your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.

What I found practically is that certain keywords relate to each other.  Through the use of ORM software I find mentions of specific keywords relating to my brand. These keywords then again find other keywords that I might not have thought about which you can call secondary keywords.

Let me talk you through how this all happens:

Firstly you need to research keywords that are relevant to your brand. For example:

Keywords for  Barack Obama would include US President, USA, US Democrat, America, White House, US Legislation etc.

Then, when reviewing the data found you are able to pick up certain trends relating to your keyword which in this case could be the BP Oil spill. It takes some common sense to pick up the patterns with these trends. The trends can then be converted  to keywords relating to your brand.

Out of those keywords that you found, you need to decide which ones would bring you more return on investment and which are less competitive.

Once you’ve identified these keywords, the real SEO effort begins. You then go through the process of adjusting your content, optimizing and creating new pages to leverage the demand of those keywords you identified.

Why does this work?

Because you are already using the existing content out there and leveraging it further to promote your own brand. This way the foundation is already there for you to use.

A reputable SEO company should perform a competitive analysis and develop a strategy for you to achieve high ranking across the specific keyword terms being searched. There are a few ways you can determine whether a company is reputable or not. CEO of Urban Interact, Beverly Garvin offers 3 things you should be doing:

1. Ask for references from 3 clients who have worked with them for a year or more. This will show you whether they are good and, more importantly, experienced in what they do. Happy long term clients are a great indicator that you are working with a credible provider.

2.  SEO is a long term strategy and if you want your website to be competitive you’ll need to understand that this is an ongoing effort. A reputable SEO provider will work with you during the contract period and will consult with you being transparent in their activities, even going so far as to train you on how to help continue those efforts when the contract period expires. “If they hide behind “proprietary processes, software, blah blah blah” they are not someone you should work with” says Beverly.

3.  Understand that you get what you pay for. This doesn’t mean that if you spend more you will get better results, but keep in mind that if someone promises a deal that sounds way too cheap and the results way too good to be true – they probably are. These people are taking your for a ride. Go do a little shopping around and get a general idea of how much this should cost you. Don’t go bargain hunting! The company you decide on should include a monthly consulting session where they will meet with you to review the reports (not just an emailed report) explaining the efforts made from last month, what the results were and what they will focus on in the upcoming month.

Beverly wrote a very helpful post on how hiring an SEO company is similar to hiring a Personal Trainer which should also help you put things in perspective. Thanks Beverly for such great advice!

Walking into my first day at WWC as the new intern, I knew very little about the world of eMarketing that I was diving headlong into.  My recently acquired degree in Business Administration, from back home in the States, certainly did not cover web analytics, link building, or SEO.  Though nervous as I was, relief came quickly as I soon realized it was Ok that I was just learning.  It became clear to me that learning is a large part of what eMarketing is, and that even the most experienced veterans in the office are still learning new things on a regular basis.  World Wide Creative’s very own Heavy Chef Project is a shining example of how everyone here is constantly craving new information and developing new ideas to become better at what they do, to become the all knowing and ever trustworthy Heavy Chef.

As I was introduced to the team I started feeling at home already, the relaxed atmosphere of the office seems to make everyone enjoy their time here.  While there is certainly much work to be done and there are many deadlines to keep up with, there is still time for a friendly conversation or a quick joke, which makes the work much more enjoyable.  Mike pulled me aside and gave me a quick run through on what World Wide Creative was all about, and specifically where I would be fitting into the equation, in the area of Web Marketing.  He then put me to work right away, doing one of the less exciting, but possibly most important aspects of marketing, that being research.  As I sat down at my desk, laptop in front of me, I wasn’t really sure how the research I was doing would be of any benefit.  I was simply searching Wikipedia for content related to one of WWC’s client sites. What I soon learned however, which is contrary to what every professor said to me in university, is that Wikipedia is in fact a highly respectable site, at least as far as Google is concerned.  By searching for related content in Wikipedia I was making it possible for us to put links in Wikipedia that would go to the client’s site.  By doing so, Google will realize that the client site has a lot of relevant and important information, therefore ranking it higher on related searches. Though my research was somewhat tedious at first, it led to some important link building opportunities that will help our client’s site to rank higher on Google searches.   I had just had my very first lesson in link building and search engine optimization.

On only my second day in the office I had the privilege to go and see Mike give a lecture to graduate students at Old Mutual.  How privileged I felt to be interning with WWC after seeing how well received we were at a graduate school, even despite Mike’s long and dry lecture… just kidding, the lecture was actually very interesting and clearly benefitted not only the graduate students, but me as well.   I returned to the office that afternoon and did some more link building research for a few other clients.  I also had my first taste of web analytics while doing some keyword research for various clients.  I think the coolest thing about eMarketing is our ability to measure its success in such detail.  No other form of marketing can give you such an accurate idea of your return on investment (ROI).  By far the highlight of my first week at WWC was being on the set of the Property Ninja’s third video shooting.  Property Ninjas is a viral marketing campaign WWC is doing for a realty client, we have two ninjas running around doing crazy ninja moves and fighting throughout various properties.  It is a really great way to showpiece the properties while making it entertaining as well.  It is the kind of thing you might send to your friends to give them something to laugh about.  I think it is going to be very successful at getting the clients name out there and I invite you to check out the Property Ninjas on your own to see just how fun it has been for yourself.  Property Ninjas Link:  http://www.facebook.com/inbox/?ref=mb#/propertyninjas?ref=ts.  That is all for me this week, I’m off to the Garden Route this weekend to get a taste of South Africa outside of Cape Town.

Note: I use the the term “Google” quite freely throughout the talk, when in realty I mean “search engines”. Especially when I talk about the early days before Google even existed:-)

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Today, search engines work much like a phone book directory used to – just on a much larger scale. How your company’s site is found can be difficult with so many options available. To single out you company’s website from the mass of information on the web, it is vital to make use Search Engine Optimization (or SEO).

People have made a shift towards using the Internet to help them in their daily activities. Search engine optimization helps you to get higher rankings in search engines and so, guide more traffic towards your website. In short it can be said that search engine optimization’s goal is to make a website appear on the first pages, if not the very first page of a search done through the search engine.

The Internet Digest provides us with 3 fundamental stages of optimizing your website. The first stage is to choose the right keywords. The right keywords are those that “clearly describe the purpose and content of your site, and allow your site to show up as close to the first results page as possible”. Secondly, you need to optimize your pages for your selected keywords. On all the pages of your website you need to position your keywords in strategic locations. The last stage is to make sure that you get linked from the best directories and from lots of quality sites with a related topic.

It seems that the last stage really is the most important. For Mike Perk, Co-founder of the energetic web marketing company World Wide Creative, the most important thing is relevant links pointing back to your site. Mike explains linking in Google terms: “Google is looking for the centre of authority on a particular topic or search term. It does this by looking at where all the links point to and seeing who has the most relevant to that topic/search term. That’s the one that goes to the top.” So from my understanding, linking is basically a case of the site with the most links that refer back to them will have the highest ranking.

Gabriel Weinberg runs a search engine called Duck Duck Go. For Gabriel, it is important to have attractive URL’s and page titles but the thing that matters most is external link texts. “Google often repeats that they use more than 200 ranking factors. In my experience, external link texts matter way more than anything else. That is, the actual words in the links back to your sites and pages.”

But now, SEO might already be expanding to other fields and evolving. According to Mike “what has become extremely interesting in the last year and something that will continue to grow, is the type of content Google is indexing and rating highly. Video, images, mapping, etc are finding their way to the top of the search a lot more easily than new text content.” We should pay close attention to this expansion into multimedia fields. It could mean more ways to SEO than simply text-based content and URL’s.

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I popped over to watch our esteemed colleague at World Wide Creative, Mike Perk, do his web marketing slot at the highly successful Nomadic Marketing course at UCT’s Graduate School of Business. Awesome stuff, and hopefully one day we’ll be able to capture him on film. I arrived just before Mike pulled a whole whack of people up from the audience to be spiders, bots, keywords, florists, butchers, bakers, and, of course, candlestick-makers.

…and, yes, that is Dave Duarte’s head in the foreground.

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I will try and persuade Mike to put his presentation on Heavy Chef. Watch this space.