Online, Internet, or Search Marketing?

What IS in a name?

My surname, for instance, means either 'mighty as a boar' if it's from Saxon Germany, or 'native of Evreux' in what is now northern France, if it's Norman.

My wife Jacqui's surname is French-speaking Swiss, via Jersey. I'm still amazed at the series of coincidences that brought us both to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk.

Anyway, I recently posed a question on Facebook:

'If you promote your business on the web, which do you use - online marketing, Internet marketing or search engine marketing?'

What I was trying to get at was not so much, 'Which do you use' as, 'What do you call it?' because the three terms are to most people virtually interchangeable. What I really wanted was a clue as to what search term I should optimise a website for.

But the people who answered tended to choose one type over the others, so I had to re-think.

Now, I still think 'online marketing' is interchangeable with 'Internet marketing', but they both cover a wide range of marketing strategies that happen to employ Internet-based technology. Emails, for example, or direct mail sending people to an otherwise obscure website.

For instance, Andrew Reynolds doesn't bother too much about optimising his sales pages for the search engines because he knows he can rely on exceptionally good direct mail to send visitors to them.

So if you're not on Mr Reynold's list, you might not ever stumble across one of his promotions in time to take advantage of it.

Whereas what we specialise in, under the broad title of 'online marketing' is in fact search engine marketing, or even just 'search marketing'. We get our clients' websites higher in the search results and we add a few more useful listings as well, so our clients don't so much show up on Google as invade it.

Much like the Saxons and Normans invaded England, actually. Maybe it's in the blood.

So that's what I've been doing with some of my time: invading Google and daydreaming around quotes from Shakespeare. How very English.

Roy

This SEO Stuff Works

Hello,

Proof, if proof were needed, that SEO really works was the page one listing I got for this blog, thanks to the previous post. Within hours, if you'd Googled 'Lucid SEO', you'd have seen RoyEveritt.com at number five.

I've always said that blogs are by far the easiest sites to optimise, and when you pay some more informed attention to key words and related words and phrases, it's even easier. Of course, I wouldn't have done so well if I hadn't paid attention to David Congreave's report, Lucid SEO on Trial.

Google loves Blogger blogs, and it loves fresh, readable and relevant comment. As long as you can string some reasonably intelligent sentences between the keywords, it's got to be the easiest way to grab a front page place!

Roy

PS. The labels help, too, so always have the keywords in there as well.

Proving SEO is Easy...

...When You Know How!

Hello again,

Recently, I've been asked by a few people to help them get more traffic to their websites, and I've come up with a few tailor-made recommendations for how we can do this.

Most people want quick results and don't have the time to do much work themselves, so I often recommend buying targeted traffic, using PPC. What I tend NOT to recommend is spending too much time on Search Engine Optimisation, because it's not usually so quick and it's something of a 'black art'.

David Congreave would beg to differ, I think, and he's convinced me that SEO is something we should always consider for every website we have a hand in.

To prove his point, David has published a free report 'Lucid SEO on Trial', detailing his campaign to win the SEO ranking contest for the recent Focus Marketing Seminar in London. And win it he did, handsomely, despite being banned by Google almost as soon as he'd started!

The report gives you a very good overview of how Mr Congreave's Lucid SEO system works, and it's worth grabbing, just for that. Plus, he nails a few misconceptions about optimisation (and he helped me modify my recommendations) with this well-written report.

I met David again at the Focus Seminar, and he was looking pretty pleased with himself, as well he might - he even beat the official Focus Marketing Seminars website on almost every major search engine - including Google.

Oh, here's Lucid SEO itself: http://www.lucid-seo.com/?rid=1713

Congratulations, David Congreave and Lucid SEO, and congratulations to you if you take a few of David's optimisation tips and transform your website's rankings.

Roy