Justin Hartman, co-founder of Afrigator and new media innovator at Avusa iLab, is talking Search Engine Marketing and Social Media. Big topic in today's world of online marketing.
A few elements from Justin's presentation:
SEO 101
Three categories: (1) Organic SEO, (2) PPC (pay per click) and (3) Trusted Feed (the old paid inclusion model)
According to JH, SEO rocks because:
- It's free (to rank for organic results)
- For PPC campaigns, it's relatively inexpensive
- SEO is a gift that keeps on giving
But SEO sucks because: - SEO is changing all the time
- Delayed gratification chance of no gratification
- You live and die by search engines and their algorithms
SEO ranking factors - markup:
- Title tag
- Description tag
- Keywords tag
- H1 tag
- Body text
SEO ranking factors - linking:
- Domain name
- Keywords in URL
- Internal linking
- Inbound links and Google PageRank
SEO negative factors: - Duplicate content (pages and titles)
- Keyword stuffing (which is exactly what it sounds like)
Things to do: - Check that spiders ARE indexing your site
- Create a sitemap (HTML and/or XML)
- Add title, description and keyword tags before other meta data
- Create internal link text
- Focus on internal link popularity
- Feature related content boxes
A good place to start for keyword research:
"What is social media?", asks Justin.
Just a way of communicating in a new way, where users have the tools to create their own content with a set of tools for a different market. Web 2.0 has given us the power to decide what content we want, how we want to read it and create our own as well.
Global social media tools Local social media tools
Is it all worth it?
- 7.8 million internet users in 2007
- 163% growth in SA industry
