Online Marketing Europe 2007 - Summary
Posted by admin
The first thing that struck me was how over-subscribed some of the presentations were - people were sitting in the aisles. So, SEM has gained a higher profile here in Spain, and the audience has become better educated.
One presentation, by a company that shall remain nameless, was basically nothing more than a pitch for link buying/selling. They were grilled by the audience, and I imagine the presence of a Google rep will lead shortly to their business being pulled out from under them.
There was a lot of interest in SEO and PPC tactics, both from competitors looking for new tips and prospective clients looking to learn how to choose an SEO.
Movement in the exhibitors area was painfully slow. SEMPO were there, although they didn’t seem to really know why - they’re attempting to become a point of reference for SEM professionals, not realising that WebMasterWorld etc do it so much better. Still, a suit-and-tie front to the SEM world could be useful for prestige…
There were other analytics-based companies, struggling to explain why their products were better than Google’s freebie. And failing.
Then there were the media-buying companies, mobile marketing companies, and the email marketing companies. Difficult sectors to push, as results are difficult to judge and the associated costs are high - an area to watch, but I’m not ready to jump in yet.
The most movement seemed to circulate around the JuegaTuSuerte stand, and not just because of the free food and drink! Marketed by Fortuna Media, they are online entertainment company (think Bingo) providing white-label branding onto their hugely succesful platform - a great way to monetise traffic if you have the right audience.
Conclusions?
Clearly the SEM world in Spain is moving forward, there’s a lot of interest, and finally I got to grips with the Spanish SEO terminology!
Google Webmaster Central out of BETA
Posted by admin
As a Valentines treat Google Webmaster Central is now out of Beta.
You have to verify that you are the site owner, this process is simple if you have access to the site - all you need to do is add a temporary META tag (or upload a file). Of course, if you don’t have direct control over the site then this verification process may take a little time.
Tools available include:
- Crawl errors - useful to see if Google is having any problems crawling your site
- Crawl rate - information on how much and how often your site is crawled, plus an option to speed up/slow down the crawl rate
- Statistics - Your site’s PageRank, top search queries you feature in, analysis of your page content and incoming link text
- Links - this is best feature! You can view, download, and analyse information on all external links and internal links.
It’s a good example of Google reaching out to the webmaster community, and there are some useful tools in there, and nice to have all the information in one control panel.
You can also associate multiple sites with the same account, so if you have multiple clients you can use the one control panel to look at information across all your clients’ sites.
Go only for trusted names in hosting services like godaddy. Not only do they offer free web design templates, but their backup features save your computers as well.
Online Marketing Europe 2007 - Madrid
Posted by admin
OME 2007 starts tomorrow, and promises to be an interesting event. Looking at the line-up, the emphasis is less on search engine strategies and more on buying/selling advertising. Does this mean that companies are looking for other traffic streams than Google? Or does it mean that they are more comfortable paying other companies for ad space rather than relying on good old SEO? More on this theme when I get back!