The Internet Marketing & Seo Malta Guy

It’s hard to find someone that really knows how to take a project from start to finish.  A lot can take a project from 0 to 95% on their own but only a few can take it up to 100%.  These people that can give a 100% on a project and pay attention to every little detail are hard to find.

We all know how exciting it is to hop on the next project or the newest idea and we tend to forget on the task at hand.  We leave out the small details in a website, aligning the text properly, make sure the alt tags are all set, calling the client for the last bit information and debugging the code to make sure it’s perfect for deployment.

So the question is are you a 0 to 100% guy or are you settling for 90%?  If you are the former, you have a winner’s mindset if you’re the latter, that’s a looser’s mentality.  The team that slacks down the last 10 mins of the game when the score is tied is the team that’s going to lose.

If you are the team’s leader, what are you going to do to get them to work to 100% all the time, and are you giving a 100% yourself?

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I am currently at home in my pjs since I caught a cold and the first thing I do when I open my eyes is check my e-mail.  Behold, a sale was made for 180 Euros. Not bad at all.  I have always liked the idea that you can make money while you sleep, even though it’s hyped up by many Internet Marketers.

Now don’t get me wrong I HAVE made money while sleeping through Pay Per Click campaigns but never through Search Engine Optimization in such a competitive market.

What really makes this exciting is not the money but it’s the sense of accomplishment that hard work, research and proper strategical execution really does pay off.  Taking the time to build good quality optimized content that adds value to your customers and to the search engines pays off.

It’s exciting because it shows that in any market, the little guy, with a relatively small budget (compared to giant brands) can come out on top if he’s smart enough.  Everyday I get more exciting results which show that using SEO and Social Media effectively will give your more results in the long run than  a TV Campaign or any other traditional media can at a fraction of the cost.

It’s exciting to know that with the right people backing you up, you can do pretty much anything. GO Team!

Live long and prosper!

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The holiday season is among us and if you haven’t started shopping for presents you probably soon will be.  Marketers know this of course and they have their Holiday Marketing plans and budgets ready and rolling out slowly, but will that budget be enough?

In May 2009, Google changed its policy toward trademark usage in AdWords ads. Previously, Google had not allowed advertisers to use trademarks they didn’t own, either for targeting or in ad text, and Google was responsible for policing that policy. Under the new trademark policy, advertisers can use trademarks they don’t own under certain circumstances, such as if they are reselling a product or discussing the product on an informational site.

Search for branded terms naturally go up in the holiday season and Google’s self-policing new policy means that spammers and fraudulent sites who have larger budgets than the average affiliates will have more opportunity to buy branded terms, increasing the CPC and overtake brand terms from affiliates and even brand owners.  Also if they are selling knock off products, they will have a higher ROI as the markup on the products ain’t so high.

Some think Google are being greedy in profit terms and that they are taking advantage of the season and the people’s need.  What do you think?

You can read more on the issue and Google’s policy at http://www.clickz.com/

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I have always said that the basis of good SEO is getting the fundamentals of building websites right.  This includes good navigation, good quality structured content, good hosting and in general the way your site is developed.

Load speed is one very important factor for both search engines and humans alike.   If you have a site that’s in flash and takes 90 seconds to load a lot of visitors will bounce off your site and if they do manage to stay there, it’s very unlikely that they will be repeat visitors.

Last week at PubCon, Google’s Matt Cutts revealed a new ranking factor that may debut in 2010: page load time.

Load time dependents on a lot of factors, but it mainly relies on these factors:

Website Hosting
Stop buying cheap hosting that’s $10 for 12 months.  They are probably server farms with hundreds or 1000s of domains on the same server.  Get a good quality server that your website(s) deserves.  In the case of database-driven websites in particular, a slow server can have a significant effect on load time.

Website Development
Even with the best hosting in the world and a server with Gigabytes of RAM, slow page load times are often the result of poor
development practices. Thanks to scripting languages like PHP, it’s
easy to learn how to build dynamic websites.  This can be loading too many images and javascript files, redundant database data, bad sql queries and much more.

It is very important to test your website speed regularly to ensure your customers are getting a good service.

Resources For Testing Site Speed:

• Firefox Plugin: Firebug with YSlow
• Google Web Performance Best Practices (Highly Recommended Resource)
• For some general rules of page design, please look at http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
• Free online website speed test

Last But Definitely Not Least

I Highly Recommend visiting http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

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