SEO and SEM

WHAT IS SEO?

SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization". It is the process of getting traffic from the free, organic, and natural search results on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. In SEO, the result will be websites and other content like images, videos, or news, etc... 

WHAT IS SEM?

SEM stands for "Search Engine Marketing". It is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid (most likely) and organic searching efforts.

THE DIFFERENCE:

As the the definition above, the main difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO is simply apply to the organic searching activities, while SEM include both organic search and paid search such ass PPC (pay per click) and SMM (Social media marketing).

WHICH IS BETTER?

In my opinion, it depend on the situation. SEM relies on making quick clear ads for quickly get people attention in short term. While SEO focus on the catching keywords that search engine will likely want. The search engine from Google want to deliver the top content to searchers, so they will tent to get the sites with clear navigation and easy to understand content for users in long term.

So when it comes to decide which one is better, it is important to evaluate your own situation, your need at the moment, and switching between SEO and SEM at the right time.

Source:

blog.hubspot.com/insiders/seo-sem-faqs

www.staples.com

SEO Tips For 2015

There used to be a time when adding keywords to everything on your site would guarantee you a better ranking in the search results. There were keywords in URL, title, description, heading, side nav, main nav, footer nav and gazillion times in the content. Nowadays adding too many keywords makes you look like a spammer in Google's eyes. Here are four practices that will strengthen your website's value.

1. Forget Meta Keywords

Google gave us meta keywords and we overused them so Google took them away. Now plastering your site with meta keywords will only make your site look like spam to Google. 

This is why we can't have nice things. - Google most likely.

2. Add Keywords to Content With Good Taste

Again, the amount of keywords is no longer of importance so don't do it. Instead of keywords focus on identifying some keyphrases to include throughout your content, but remember quality over quantity. Here is a short bullet point list summarizing Cyrus Shephard's post about keyword targeting.

Optimizing Content for Users and Ranking

• Decide upon a topic for a page or blog post
• Extensively research said topic
• Write content that is uniquely valuable to your targeted visitor
• Verify that you have written a minimum of 400 words
• Split the content into short paragraphs, consisting of 2-4 sentences, or bulleted lists
• Add a headline to the opening of each paragraph to describe the upcoming info
• Within the body content create anchor text links to a similar page on the site
• Add a page title that speaks to your targeted visitor and the topic of the page
• Make the page easily shareable on social networks

3. Don't Ignore Your Meta Descriptions

Now we are talking about meta descriptions not meta keywords. Meta descriptions are those short on or two sentence paragraphs showing under your sites link on the search results page. Take time to write relevant descriptions for all important pages on your site. Good tip is to add a call to action, like share, learn, or find out.



source: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo-tactics-2015

B2B SEO Strategy

Hi! In my first blog post in this course, chapter 1. Marketing and consumerism in the digital era, I wrote my post from the B2B point of view. What would be a better ending than writing this last blog post with the same thought?

So basically B2B SEO strategy is quite the same as in B2C. In both you should "put yourself in the head of your consumer". Understand what the customer thinks and what would she or he want?

In a blog post in Who is Visiting writer Jake Hughes has written about this topic, and I'm going to briefly summarize the main points to you. You can read the whole blog post HERE.

(http://www.searchengineppc.com/images/seo-cycle.png)

There is three main points in B2B SEO strategy:

1. Keywords and keyword phrases - The most critical part. It's important that the key words is chosen carefully. It should not be too loose, but not either too focused, like on one or just a few words (repeating). The keywords should be repeated only a couple of times in the main text, preferably mentioned in the headlines.

2. Researching  your keywords - Follow up which keywords are used the most. You should constantly develop this area so the ranking of your site remains on top. You should focus on the intentions of the page, picking keywords for each optimized page and analyzing the competition.

3. Applying keywords on your page - As mentioned before, use primary key words in the headings and sub-headings. Don't overuse your keywords as this can have an adverse effect. It's preferred that companies add keywords while building the website. Start with less and add more when learning by the process.

I think the biggest difference in B2C and B2B SEO strategy is the different customers. You really need to know your customers. Companies think completely different than privet consumers. I believe that companies search in a more informative way whilst privet consumers mostly search in an entertaining way. What do you think?

SEO and keywords in Videos (Check for good tips!)

I am really interesting in videos and want to bring the subject to this blog also. After all videos are playing a huge role nowadays are definitely in Future also, maybe even a bigger role.  The biggest video channel YouTube is owned by Google, the biggest search engine. That is why YouTube is also a big part of search engine and videos in search engine are gaining more popularity. I want to share with you guys 7 video SEO tips that can help your rankings:

Use video to solve problems and provide new information. I'm always trying to find a video if I need something information or to do something that I can't. The reason for that is I'm lazy to read anything but I know that many others do that also and it is gaining popularity all of the time. For example I had to clean my bathroom's seal and my fiancé said that look the "remonttireiska" video from YouTube and you can easily do it. So I watched it and actually now know how to do it and didn't even broke anything! So what I learned that videos with "learn how to..." and "how to..." titles are really popular actually. If you want to learn something or know how to do something, the easiest way is to watch a video about it. Also the title "how to.." is good in SEO and that is why many videos begins with that title.

Make videos easy to browse and link to individual video playback pages. Make a gallery of your videos which is user friendly and easy to browse. You want to get the videos in proper order that is easy to navigate. Each video should have separate landing page that search engines find it better. Also remember to add helpful tags to videos that they are found easily.

 Use interactive video elements to connect to viewers. Use in-video links, quizzes, surveys and forms to drive people to your actual site. For example in how to.. video if the company has an app and the video is how to use the one part of that application include the link to the application to that point that the part is.

Use rich metadata and smart content. Also make sure the you have hidden tags in your HTML code of your video landing page if it's possible.

Use transcriptions for indexing, usability and content. Add video transcriptions to HTML of each page where the video is. For example Volvo trucks add in YouTube have transcriptions and it comes first in YouTube search almost in overtime and have never problem to find that video. Also if you check the statistics you can notice that the video has had many viewer through one whole year. I really think that if a advertise video gets popularity that long it has to bee amazing.

Host your video on your own domain. Have your videos in your website and don't give all the credit to video service providers. Simply you want to have more audience to your page through your video so include them on your site. You can use YouTube and Vimeo but with these services include the link to your site and make the content of your video interesting that they would actually do that.

Measure how keywords affect to the bottom line. See how many viewers comes from searches based on your keywords and what keyword drives more traffic. If some keyword doesn't drive traffic at all you maybe want to change it to something else. With different analytics software you can measure that, good ones are Google analytics and YouTube has it own analytics.

If your interested in SEO in YouTube videos, see the following video about it. It is over a year old and I noticed that YouTube has changed a little bit but the basic structure is still the same:

I really hope that these tips would help all of you to succeed if you are interested in videos and how to gain traffic to your videos.

-Mira Niemi-

resources: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2343365/10-video-seo-tips-that-can-truly-impact-your-rankings

Tips for Keyword Planning

Choosing the right keywords is crucial in both SEO and SEM. Google Trends is a great tool for this because it allows you to compare the popularity of different search-terms. Based on Google Search, it shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.

Another useful feature in Google Trends is Hot Trends. It displays the 20 fastest rising search-terms, news and contents of the past hour in various countries. The information provided helps in content planning.

Here are some screenshots of Google Trends. Unfortunately the texts are in Finnish, but I will explain the content in brief.

These are Hot Trends in Finland this Saturday. I think they are a bit surprising, but then again, it's an F1 weekend so at least the first search-term is quite understandable.

I wanted to check out some details so I opened the statistics of the first search-term. This diagram displays the amount of searches over time.

Here you can see how the search-volume varies geographically.

Here we have related search-terms, both the most popular and the rising ones. Not later than now it's obvious why Finns have searched Abu Dhabi...

Finally, these are lists of the most popular and rising search-terms in Finland from the last 30 days. Interesting and surely useful.

Google also has a Keyword Planner but it's a feature of AdWords and as such chargeable. If you don't want to pay for keyword planning, Keyword Tool seems like a great alternative. I tested it and here are the results: