Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be defined as optimising your website so search engines can rank your website in the natural search results, as high as possible for those targetted keywords.

But is all the effort in SEO really worth it?
Should you put all that time and effort into optimising your website so that when the search engine bots come through, that your page will rank higher?

Should you even think about paying an SEO professional to do it for you? What return on investment can you expect?

There’s no  guarantees
No one can guarantee number one position for your chosen keywords for the natural search results. You might get emails in everyday with promises but still no real guarantee.

The statistics
The number one ranking website for any keyword has an average click through rate of 56%. So if 1,000 searches are done for that keyword each day, that’s 560 visitors each day on average.

Of these 560 visitors you get daily, 5% purchase a product – that’s 1 in 20 people. That’s a nice conversion rate and works out to be 112 new customers each day from that keyword. If the average purchase was $100, that’s $11,200 a day in revenue. That number 1 ranking is worth a lot of money.

Imagine if it was a popular keyword and it was being searched 100,000 times a day – 56,000 visitors a day and up to 11,200 new customers a day in an ideal scenario. That’s $1,120,000 a day. Now we’re starting to talk big business!!

Would your business benefit from this kind of traffic?
Any online business could benefit from this kind of traffic. On the Internet, targetted traffic is king. It earns money and it’s what some businesses survive on.

Competition is heavy in the search engines and the most profitable the keywords, that more likely there is going to be more competition.

Conclusion
SEO is definitely worth it and can take a company from being good to great! If your website is not search engine optimised, you are not helping the business at all.

If you have any questions about SEO, please contact me – nigel@burke.com.au

Susan Boyle from Blackburn, Scottland was relatively unknown until she entered the reality TV show called Britains Got Talent. The 47 year old, never been kissed, less than average looking woman who looked like she was going to make a mockery of herself suprised the audience with an unbelievable performance of “I had a Dream” for Les Miserables.

A well executed viral marketing campaign quickly catapulted her into stardom. If the social media wheels didn’t start rolling for her, I do not belive she would have been heard of outside of the UK.

YouTube and other online video websites
Within 9 days of the competition, the audition performance had been viewed over 100 million times. The total number of views today is over 300 million times. The live cast of the show would have been lucky to be a tenth of this number.

Email Marketing
One of the best known tools for getting the order out to everyone is through emails. People sent the link of the YouTube videos to all their friends. I received a number of emails to watch the “amazing video that I had to watch” as recommended by friends.

I could have forwarded the email onto all my other friends but I’m not much of an email forwarder myself. I get enough emails as it is but I know a lot of people would have sent it onto their friends and family to watch.

Facebook
Fan clubs on facebook appeared with one of them having nearly 1.8 million fans. Facebook gives Susan Boyle more publicity and reaching millions more of people.

Twitter
I checked Twitter but Susan doesn’t appear very much on here. There were a couple of fake profiles but this social media tool didn’t seem to help Susan.

Forums
A number of fan websites appeared and fans discussed Susan’s new found fame with other fans through forums.

Social Media Bookmarks
People posted links to Susan’s videos, facebook pages and other online media using Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. The link on Digg was so popular that it was on the frontpage generating more publicity for Susan.

Blogs
With the Susan Boyle phenomenon, bloggers wrote about Susan and what they thought of her. Bloggers have the ability to embed videos directly from YouTube and other online video websites. Their readers added comments and all this generated even more publicity.

The Result
The well executed social media campaign which was pushed along by the TV show’s producers, made Susan Boyle the largest ever debut album for a female artist with over 5 million CDs solf worldwide in the first week.

The Wrap
I do not believe that Susan Boyle would have experienced such a success like she has if it wasn’t for social media. Millions of people got behind the move and posted about it all over the Internet. This gave Susan free publicity to many more potential fans.

Are you convinced that social media could help your business sell more products and services?

Many people may not have noticed this but Google has changed their homepage.

It’s not until you are told of the change that you would realize it.

Go to http://google.com but do not move your mouse. Only the search box and logo are visible. Once you move your mouse, the rest of the details appear.

This is just one of many changes Google has made that is not visible to the general Internet population. By writing and researching for this blog, I read about nearly every change.

Many of these changes are advanced and meaningless to users but as an Internet marketing expert like myself, they are important.

Your Internet marketing consultant should be aware of all the changes Google, Yahoo and Bing do so your website ranks at the top for your targetted keywords and stays at the top!

Twitter is one of the hottest social media tools today. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon because … because everyone else is so it must be great.

I have been on Twitter for a few months now and yet to see real value from it.

I’m following 2,000 people because that is my limit but I’m not reading many of the tweets that come in. Maybe I am following the wrong people because most of them are about network marketing and making money.

It might be time for a clean out and following some better Twitters.

There is about 500 Twitters following me now. When I post a new blog entry, I normal send a tweet but I’m not seeing any traffic from it.

Is Twitter really worth it?
This makes me wonder if this company is really worth a billion dollars? It has no revenue and any advertisements are going to be ignored.

I see more value in the Facebook platform yet they are still having issues trying to make money from advertising.

Spam Tweets
I am noticing that many of the tweets that I receive are spam. I don’t read many of them because everyone is shouting out to get me to their website.

The statistics from January to November 2009.
The number of new users in July was 9.4 million down to 7.1 million in November. How many of these accounts are really accounts?

The number of Tweets has been increasing more. Are people using this as a real communications tool or are spammers using Twitter to help market their websites?

Conclusion
Will Twitter stand the test of time? Will people remember Twitter as a fad or will it keep growing into a important communications tool?

If Twitter cannot find a better purpose, with real people and less spammers, it may not be be really worth it.

A number of our customers have received letters about renewing their domain. The problem is that the customers have never dealth with this company previously.

The domain renewal scammers send out thousands of letters everyday to domain owners and they still get many people’s money. Often the domain name is not renewed after it’s being paid for.

If you receive a letter from a company that you are unsure about that is Internet related or you have received an invoice that you are just not sure about, contact your web developer, hosting company or even email me direct. They should be happy to answer any questions regarding any invoices or letters that could be a scam.

Companies that you need to be cautious of include -

• Domain Registry of America
• Domain Registry of Australia
• Internet Names Group

We recommend throwing all their letters into the bin because they are ‘domain slammers’ (scammers).

Don’t get caught in this scam – use your common sense.