SEO Best Techniques and Practices of 2015

The SEO game – long characterized by rapid change and fluidity – continues to transform at a frenetic pace. SEO techniques once considered best practices in the industry are now cripplingly ineffective, and may even serve to damage overall online visibility. Meta-keyword tags, anchor text over-reliance and article syndication, for example, have fallen from grace and are now tactics that should be avoided.

Now that we have moved into a new year, we've decided to reflect on how SEO has changed and what SEO techniques and practices will help drive traffic to your website in 2015.

How SEO Has Changed

Given that Google – by far the most popular search engine – changes its algorithm upwards of 550 times per year, it doesn't come as a surprise that SEO techniques and best practices are also in a constant state of flux. It's difficult to stay up-to-date when things can change at the drop of a dime.

However, there is one thing that can be said with absolute certainty: Google strives to provide the most useful, relevant search results in relation to its users search queries. The most impactful of Google's algorithm changes, updates and modifications over the past few years – Caffeine, Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird – were all implemented to achieve this goal. As a result, high-quality content creation and awesome user experience have become paramount to good website performance.

So while it may not be clear how Google will change and update its algorithm in the future, it is clear that you must EARN your position on search engine results pages.

SEO Techniques And Best Practices In 2015

In the current landscape, achieving a strong online presence requires implementing a multifaceted, cohesive and integrated SEO strategy. The following are the areas we recommend you focus on in order to ramp up your SEO efforts and ensure your brand has a killer online presence.

Content Creation

When it comes down to the wire, Google ranks content, not companies. Essentially, when users conduct a search on the search engine, they are looking for an answer to a specific question, and Google wants to provide them with the best, most relevant answer possible. The more detailed that answer is, and the more superior it is in relation to other similar answers, the more useful it will be to Google's users. If you produce content that Google perceives as useful and relevant, then it will rank better in search results, plain and simple.

Content Promotion

The content you create can't exist on an island; in order for it to gain more exposure and make more impact, it must be promoted. In the current landscape, the following are the best methods you can use in order to promote your content:

• Social Media – Use your social reach on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others to expand the reach of your content. Encourage social sharing, commenting and other forms of engagement in order to amplify its impact.
• Outreach – Reach out to prominent bloggers and other influencers in your industry with your content offerings. If you have yet to identify who these people/sites may be, reference blog directories or try services like Buzzstream or BlogDash that help you find relevant influencers.
• Public relations – While outreach can be a highly effective endeavor, good ol' conventional PR placements in trade and general interest publications are a great way to promote your content (and by association your brand).
• Paid advertising – There are a variety of paid advertising options that can be used to create exposure for your content: Paid search, promoted tweets, Outbrain, Facebook ads, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, and more. Best of all, putting money into paid advertising can elicit strong results, usually at an affordable price.
  

  Conversion Optimization

  Conversion optimization is important because it can increase the return on your current SEO investment, and converting a higher percentage of your traffic is much more cost effective than attracting more visitors. It focuses not on attracting more visitors to your website, but on capitalizing on already existing traffic by getting visitors to take a desired action once they have arrived.
  Among other aspects, conversion optimization involves:
  
  
• Clear messaging so customers understand the value you are offering
• Eliminating problematic features (poor navigation, ineffective CTAs, etc)
• Creating an easy path through your sales funnel
• Offering the right content at the right time
• Measuring the right aspects to gain insight into further improvements that can be madeIt can help you secure the right kind of customers, maximize your profits, and significantly lower you cost-per-acquisition. Furthermore, because conversion optimization doesn't require paying more to acquire conversions, you can allocate more marketing dollars in order to acquire more traffic to your website.
  

  Provide Awesome User Experience

  Website usability and user experience are important because search engines like Google use data to determine how people interact with websites, and this gives them an idea of the quality of the site. These two aspects act as indirect influences on search engine ranking success, because visitors who have a positive experience on your website are more likely to share, bookmark and revisit your website, all of which can serve to boost performance on SERPs.
  Focus on building up your website so that it's easy to use, navigate and understand, provides direct and relevant information, and delivers remarkable content.
  While we may not be able to determine what kind of changes Google and other search engines will make to their algorithms, we can bolster our SEO efforts by understanding their end goal – providing users with the best, most relevant answers to their questions. Building up a stream of remarkable content and providing an awesome user experience on your website – while not an exhaustive list – are two SEO techniques that will help you drive traffic to your website and insulate it from future algorithm updates.

Tags : SEO services, thailand SEO, thailand SEO company

Email Marketing top 10 tips

Email marketing is still one of the most direct platforms for reaching and targeting existing customers and prospective leads. Whether in a B2B or B2C context, the percentage of users who operate email account far exceeds those who are on any given social media platform.
The longevity of email marketing has alot to do with the ease of communication and the low cost of campaigns when compared to other facets of marketing. The discipline has evolved somewhat since its inception years ago and with that in mind I put together a 10 step guide to email marketing success!

1. Create A Clear Goal!
   The first step to creating a successful email marketing campaign is to define a clear goal or purpose, lt’s important to revisit the goal throughout the creation process so that you don’t stray.
2. Segment Your Audience
   Make the campaign reflect your audience’s needs give them what they’ve signed up for. List segmentation is key to ensuríng that your message gets in front of the right people.
   

   Stats from Thomson Local Direct Marketing Services
3. Create A Compelling Headline
   Create a headline that answers the question; ‘What’s In It For Me?’
4. Timing Is Key
   When you send your email is of crucial importance, and varies a lot depending on industry and customers. The best way to understand what works for you is to run tests.
   

   Stats from Thomson Local Direct Marketing Services
5. Brand Optimisation
   Make it clear who the e-mail is from:
   1. Use your brand name in the ‘from’ field
   2. Use and email address from your recognised domain
   3. Display your logo clearly
   4. Use your brand colours
   5. Reflect the design of your website
      

      Stats from Thomson Local Direct Marketing Services
6. Design and compatibility
   Design should be used to get your message across and encourage users to take action. Whilst your content should be compatible with all popular mail clients.
   

   Stats from Thomson Local Direct Marketing Services
7. Create a Clear Call to Action
   Even a well-crafted e-mail can fall down without a strong call to action. Your call to action should aim to fulfil the overall marketing goals of the campaign.
   Here are 5 tips to ensure users take action after opening your email:
   1. Keep your call to action above the fold – ie, the reader shouldn’t have to scroll to reach it
   2. Create a path to your call to action. The design should naturally lead the user towards the call to action
   3. Use colour to grab attention
   4. Create a sense of urgency
   5. Make it persuasive. Use action words to tell the readers what you want them to do
8. Create an Effective Landing Page
   If you are pushing users onto your site, you need an effective landing page. It should be free of Distraction, reflect the customer intent and persuade them to carry out further actions.

Set-Up Tracking

• Most email packages will give you stats around open rates and click-throughs but it is important to measure more than that. To get real insight into the success of your campaign you need to track the people who convert on your website via your email marketing.

This is done by tagging the links within your emails so that they can be monitored by your analytics software. Doing this means you can start to work out the ROI of your email campaigns based on sales, leads or other goal-based activities.

1. Test, Test and then Test Again!
   There is no magic formula for creating the perfect email marketing campaign. A lot of it is going to come down to the knowledge you gain with each campaign.

From start to finish, the process of email marketing needn't be out of any marketers reach, even with little digital experience. Following these ten steps should result in as successful a campaign as possible!
Email marketing is one of the longest serving tactics for digital marketers and shows no sign of retiring any time soon. It’s a discipline worth mastering and developing around your brand and marketing strategy.

Source: http://www.emarketingandcommerce.com/aggregatedcontent/10-steps-to-e-mail-marketing-success
Tags: email marketing, thailand SEO

Email Marketing Software – An automation to generate leads and ways to make it an effective marketing tool.

Email Marketing Software – An automation to generate leads and ways to make it an effective marketing tool.

Email marketing system or Email Direct Marketing (hereinafter known as EDM in this article) is a platform to send email to a collection of leads mainly to communicate or to advertise product to the intended group of people.

At some point, we will be asked of this question.

What is a lead?

In the digital marketing, the term lead is often used by digital marketer as a prospect of sale. This is not a technical jargon but to someone initially exposing to online marketing his products / services this doesn’t sound right to him. Lead is not a chemical element in this article, chemist, sorry another day perhaps.

A lead is a piece of information or any personal details usually an email address obtained through;

a) Filling an e-form in a website;

b) Subscribing to monthly email content or;

c) A participant to your seminar or webinar (web conferencing).

Are the leads generated genuinely representing prospects which can be converted into sales? As digital marketers we are the fronting the line to provide various solutions to answer YES, but how?

EDM is one of the effective marketing tool today and still stand the test of the booming Internet Technology era. One can assume it is known as a traditional marketing tool now due to uprising streams of social media marketing.

Research from Experian(http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/2013/07/email-marketing-stats.html) shows that in every $1 invested in email marketing initiatives still yields roughly $44.25 return for marketers. Considering the huge percentage of yield it does show full confidence in EDM.  

Although facts show how familiarity in EDM breeds confidence and comfort in this marketing tool, yet many are still unaware of how to effectively manage an email campaign let alone generate revenue. Let’s face it, the market is huge and there are millions of businesses still reluctant in trying EDM.

List below are 5 important steps (list is not exhaustive but comprehensive) on how to fully utilize EDM.

1) Segmentation -

In every EDM, there is a basic function to track the leads by filtering grey or white leads. Not everybody subscribing to your email content are interested in buying the product. Perhaps they just want the latest news feed or certain contents are informative for whatever reasons they think is relevant.

The first step to effective conversion lead into sale is segmenting the types of lead. Grey lead is what I term as indecisive prospect. They are unsure whether to switch brand but more likely to be informed of the latest information. 

White lead is a typical genuine prospect that will readily submit their feedback and subscribe to your weekly / monthly email content.

One way to be sure is to insert 2 different types of subscription link. A link to subscribe for daily / monthly newsfeed and another link to direct audience to your landing page (your website).

With the response we get, we can segment each group of leads and only send relevant information. Quality communication with your prospects and customers can get you closer to that group of people actually looking forward to your message.

2) Personalize your email -

This has been said too often many times but seems a huge neglect. 

Recipients will feel connected to the sender if email content has the person’s name acknowledged. It is a serious blunder telling them oh okay we are mass emailing so we can’t type your name.

Most EDM allows personalization and by using it you get to go long way by earning their trust.

3) Designing your Email Content

The question that every digital marketer ask is, what is the ultimate aim of you sending the email content?

Generally, selling or promoting a product is the top of the list, followed by brand awareness or promoting seminars. The central idea is communicating a message to the intended recipients. Relevant content is king. A few tips on the designing the email content.

Subject line  – The subject line should be short but carry weight of what the content is about. It is an invitation for someone to open the email. Having said that, the subject line must be interesting yet not misleading and capital letters should be avoided outright so it doesn’t look ‘spammy’. So spend some time on creating a fantastic subject line. 

There is no one size fits all for a great subject line. What sounds amazing to one business doesn’t mean it can make it for a different business in different industry. Hence, creativity is the key.

Image  – Something I read recently, the brain comprehends images 60,000 times faster than text. Words brief and to the point enough for communication.

Information details  – Leaving contact detail and subscription link to avoid your email content be deemed as spam by spamming filter and this leads us to point number 4.

4) Remember your landing page.

In digital marketing, CTA is our widely used word simply means ‘Call To Action’. Some emails ultimate aim is to just drive recipients to their website. 

Your email content can be amazing but it must be resourceful by directing recipients to the landing page, which is your fantastic website.

Be creative in designing a landing page. Outsource if you do not have an in-house creative team. Landing page must be optimized for smartphones, tablets with user-friendly buttons. Traffic routed to landing page can be captured as a valuable data. Bottom line here is if your email content is mobile-friendly so should be your landing page.

5) Contact us for advice

Finally, the safest bet to avoid the trappings in EDM is to contact us for more information. You don’t want your email newsletter to be junked by the internet service provider without knowing why.

Happy working ladies and gentlemen and have a great day.

Tags: email marketing thailand, thailand SEO