Twitter has proved itself to be a useful tool in search engine marketing, but has the potential to become detrimental to the company’s online presence if not used in a way that satisfies the followers. The guys at Mashable took it upon themselves to research this by interviewing people and analysing streams in order to produce a few essential dos and don’ts for brand tweeters.

Use proper spelling and grammar
Remember, you’re representing your company so bad spelling and grammar reflects negatively on the brand. Some abbreviations and ‘text talk’ is OK but should be kept to a minimum.

Always reply to @comments
Users will engage with a brand through @comments – this voluntary engagement is extremely valuable to any company or brand so it is vital you reply as soon as possible, preferably within a few hours. It is also important to respond to positive tweets and comments about your brand, even if it’s just a simple ‘thanks’.

Monitor keywords and competitors
Monitoring keywords and competitors can prove a great opportunity to gain new followers, convert users into customers and develop a strong reputation within your field.

Be informative
You need to be informative in your tweets and present an explanatory description on your actual profile page as well as a link to your web address.

Don’t show off
No-one likes a show off. Your followers are following you because they are interested in your company or products so don’t bombard them with extravagant claims or links to every company press release, article etc. Make sure all your tweets are user-friendly and aren’t portrayed as overly commercial.

Don’t get too personal
The level of personality portrayed via Twitter is different for every company and should be determined by its size and nature. Tweets and conversations should communicate at a personal level but it is important to remember professionalism.

Don’t over-tweet
Followers don’t want their timelines flooded with tweets from the same company. It is important to remember that everything that excites you about the brand doesn’t necessarily appeal to other users, therefore it’s important to filter the information you tweet.

Don’t auto-tweet
The main focus of a company Twitter account is to engage with users on a personal level so to roll out automated tweets defeats the objective and won’t have a positive impact on your SEM strategy. Users have become well accustomed to this style of promotion and will easily recognise the output of a bot.

For more help with your search engine marketing strategy contact 4Ps Marketing where specialists can advise you on integrating campaigns with social media.

How does Product Feed help with Search Marketing?

In terms of SEO , a product feed could be used to check the various products that need optimising. Page titles and Meta information for products could either be individually optimised or this could be done dynamically. This would potentially help products to be more searchable.

In terms of PPC , a product feed could be used to check and analyse information for the various product related search ads. You could then potentially be able to “feed newly optimized data back into your system, improving your on-site search and product pages”.

Additionally, depending on the capabilities of the PPC search team –a dynamic mechanism could be facilitated to create, update or delete product-specific ads as inventories change.

As noted on Search Engine Watch , some of the important issues to consider:

• How well optimised is the online content copy?
• How well optimised are the product categories?
• Do the data feeds contain all the appropriate attributes?

Product feeds could either be submitted directly to search engines or a professional search engine marketing agency could optimise & submit that for you.

Penny shares are classified as shares which have a low price. Typically they have a value of a few pence as opposed to shares with much higher values. They are traded in the AIM (Alternative Investment Market) which opened in 1995. Over the last few years there has been an increasing amount of information which can be found online for people who currently invest in or are looking to buy penny shares. The AIM market was opened to give the smaller and younger companies an opportunity to access the public markets. It offers an alternative to the London Stock Exchange (otherwise referred to as the main market) which has strict rules and regulation for admission.

So how does someone who is interested in penny shares go about their online research? It depends whether they are looking to research historical share prices or buy shares? As always there are a number of search terms people use, from "share prices" "penny share", "penny shares", and "pennyshares when looking for information. Those looking to invest often use search terms such as "buy stock", "penny stock" or "penny stocks".

In a similar vein, how does a company with information about pennyshares reach their audience? Using search engine optimisation is one strategy to embed in the marketing plan. This will enable people who are looking for the information to find your website quickly and easily. When looking at SEO, it is imperative to remember that although you are writing for the search engines you are ultimately writing for your target audience. Therefore it is vital that keys words are not over used throughout the content of your site.

4Ps Marketing are currently working with City Equities Ltd, endeavouring to make sure that searchers receive the information they are looking for in relation to pennyshares.

If you have a website you are not sure is reaching the correct audience please feel free to contact us.

Having just started at 4Ps Marketing this morning on work experience I had no idea as to the real depth of SEO , however, things change. In light of this I will attempt to explain its mysteries.

Picture yourself at home when suddenly the water pipes burst open and you are flooded. You have no idea about plumbing and you’ve just moved to London so you don’t know anyone. Being the genius you are you switch on the internet and perform a quick search. Within the coming hours everything is fixed. However, when we look closer at this process there is a lot more going on than meets the eye.

The owners of the website you visited had been planning for your arrival long before you arrived. They knew you would need plumbing help but they didn’t know much else about you, thus, they had to make sure in your search they came up first.

This is where SEO came in, to beat the competition to the top of the search results they needed to make sure their website was up to date and friendly with the Googlebot. This robot is responsible for scanning and ranking websites on the Google search engine. Therefore, the plumbing website designers used SEO to make sure that their website was talking efficiently to the Googlebot. This all sounds crazy but really it very simple.

SEO also makes use of external links from other websites to increase the amount of traffic to yours. Now this area seems to be even more complex but I am told inbound links are good and that I will find out more in the next few days.

• Many of our clients are on the door stop
• We can attract the top SEO & PPC professionals
• When we take the team out we have unlimited night spots to choose from

Tomorrow RMT have decided to strike which will obviously have an impact on the number of workers in central London due to London tube system being shut down.

The planned RMT strike for tomorrow does raise an interesting traffic issue that we often discuss internally. Web traffic in London will undoubtedly be down for our b-t-b SEO & PPC clients if the strike goes ahead. This is the same on bank holidays, Christmas & other public holidays. From a search perspective it is important for us to record these events so that we when we have our monthly client meetings we can report this back.

The more macro events that we record in turn helps us explain more micro events within SEM.

Businesses struggling to drive sales forward have slashed budgets and reduced employee numbers in order to "trim the fat". However, they are facing the challenge of how to increase customer awareness and avoid unprofitable marketing spends. Where better to do this than online? As more and more people turn towards the internet as their primary research tool it is absolutely vital to ensure that a company’s online presence is working for them. It is all very well having an impressive looking website but if your target audience cannot find it how much use will it actually be to your company? Step in those companies who specialise in Search Engine Marketing.

SEM (which includes Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click) can lay claim to the following benefits, low spend but high return on investment, long term increased web traffic, as well as improving brand awareness. SEM is a measurable business tool which is receiving increased media coverage due to its impact to successful marketing campaigns. Brands who were one-step ahead of the game, such as Uniqlo, have invested time and money to ensure that their long term marketing strategies have SEM at the centre.

Uniqlo, established in 1984, now has over 760 stores worldwide. Uniqlo are among the top 10 speciality apparel retailers in the world and Winner of a 2008 Time Out London Award. A focus on quality and value has stood Uniqlo in good stead throughout the economic downturn. Clothes are designed as individual pieces so that customers can tailor their own look. Recent media coverage, including features on Gok Wan’s Fashion Fix, has proved that the High Street has just as much to offer as the high end stores. Such an image has been reinforced thanks to the likes of Peaches Geldof and Jessica Michibata (Jenson Button’s girlfriend) being frequently been associated with Uniqlo in the press.

4Ps Marketing was setup by two young entrepreneurial marketing graduates who saw just how much potential this field has to offer and were fed up working for companies that offered awful results. The duo went on to become Google AdWords Qualified Individuals before establishing the agency. The London based agency now stands out from its competition by taking a uniquely marketing led approach within a traditionally technical discipline.

Uniqlo have recently invested in a collaboration with SEM agency 4Ps Marketing placing emphasis on the search engine Google. Through tailored Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click campaigns Uniqlo are ensuring they reach their target audience. Using the likes of Google Analytics the campaigns have been monitored and optimised to full advantage. With the results of the Uniqlo and 4Ps collaboration speaking for themselves as online revenue has recently increased by 30.76%.

4Ps Marketing and Uniqlo have both shown that if you innovate within a recession you can still grow and find profit even in the tougher times.

This year, advertising spending on social network sites is expected to rise 77% to £115 million. In 2012, marketers are projected to spend £285 million, a 148% increase over 2008. This increase is reflected across the board as many companies switch traditional telemarketing and mail shots to PPC and SEO activities.

"eMarketer expects that the UK market will enjoy slightly greater gains in social network ad spending, percentage-wise, than the US. But social sites represent a tiny portion of UK online ad spending-just 3.4% in 2008."

Source: eMarketer

We currently offer multilingual services for Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese dialects, Welsh, French, German and Japanese languages and search engines. We are always adding new multilingual SEO services so please contact us if your target market is not in this list. Multilingual SEO is of increasing importance to lots of multinational companies and 4Ps Marketing are well placed to assist you in this area.

Product :

Is this the correct product/service to sell online?

Are you looking at a transactional approach? (might be suited to PPC)

Are you looking to build brand awareness? (might be suited to SEO)

Place:

Is your website suited to search engine marketing?

Has your website been optimised?

Is your website’s content relevant to the targeted keywords?

Have you conducted keyword research to establish if there is a marketplace to ensure an ROI for SEO and/or PPC?

Promotion:

Is PPC and SEO the correct way to promote or sell your product and service?

Price:

Does your price point reflect the product, place and promotion?

On a micro level should you be bidding for expensive keywords that do not generate substantial returns in revenue?

Author: 4Ps Marketing London

Choice

Imagine walking into your local bookshop, to be confronted with a vast array of shelves containing every item that has ever been published, from the works Shakespeare to local newspapers such as the London Paper and the London Lite.

In the real world this is impossible, but in the online world such a degree of choice is available. Websites such as Amazon provide an immense variety of books that classical ‘bricks and mortar’ bookshops can only dream about. This phenomenon is replicated in the world of music and video by websites such as iTunes and Netflix.

What Does the long tail mean?

If you graphed the sales of all the products available online, starting with the bestsellers and moving down to the low-sellers, you would see that a small number of products at the left of the graph sell very well, but as you move to the right, the line dips down until sales begin to approach zero.

This graph is known as a long-tailed graph, because while the number of products selling well (the Head) is very short, the graph of all the products selling in small quantities is very, very long. This is the Long Tail: and what is happening in this part of the graph is remarkable.

Binning the traditional Pareto approach

In the classic ‘bricks and mortar’ shopping environment, the focus has always been on high-selling items: the hits, the bestsellers and the blockbusters.
The prevailing law known as the Pareto effect or Pareto’s law has been that 80% of all the profits arise from just 20% of the goods available – the so-called ‘80/20 Rule’. Poor-selling goods are too costly to store and are therefore ruthlessly purged from the shelves.

The reason for this is pure economics. Low-selling products take up expensive shelf-space and can quickly become unprofitable unless they sell in large numbers. The result for consumers is very limited choice, blandness and lowest-common-denominator offerings that appeal to a broad mass of people, but are not suited for the unique tastes and preferences of each individual.

The emerging importance of the long tail

In the online world however, it is possible to offer up a vast array of products even if they sell in very small numbers. Customers can use powerful search tools to sift through this vast range in order to find exactly what they are looking for. What happens is that when a wide choice of products is available, consumers gravitate away from the Head down into the Tail. They seek out products that are more customised to their own individual needs. A thriving market develops for niche items that would never have been apparent in marketplaces rooted in the real world. This movement away from the Head looks set to increase over the coming years.

As customers are migrating towards the tail, small online producers avail of minimal distribution costs to sell their products, so the Long Tail is getting longer as well as fatter. The total market in the Tail is becoming much larger than in the past. Not only is it large, but very profitable too.

The Age of the Niche

With the Internet and the development of the Long Tail, the age of the niche has arrived. This points to a longer-term fragmentation of society, where people are defined less by their geography than by their interests and values. Authority figures have limited impact, news media has less influence, micro-celebrities become more prevalent and mass-advertising becomes less effective. Good or bad, the Long Tail idea gives us an insight into the way the world is beginning to change.

The long tail and search engine marketing / SEO and PPC

Understanding the importance of the long tail impacts on search engine marketing in 2 key areas

1) Keyword research;
Keywords that may have been ignored as being too niche are now being looked at as an increasingly important part of any keyword strategy. Ongoing keyword research is esential for sustainable SEO

2) On page optimisation;
On page content must reflect this research and be built into your websites content in a user friendly way

Source: BBC

Author: 4Ps Marketing London