It does seem a bit incongruous for Google to give us lots of advice on how to optimise our websites, for them to then turn round and, as some were suggesting, literally throw the baby out with the bathwater!

In reality it’s simply more tweaking to try to give sites that merit it a better chance of bubbling to the top of results than would have been the case in the past.

I guess the question that’s not yet got a clear answer is, just how much and for what acts will sites that are already good at the SEO JuJu suffer?

Best

Ralph

As I’m sure that Taryn Wallis from Phenomenoodle would confirm, blogging doesn’t need to be either a difficult, nor a particularly scary prospect. But, especially if your budget for traditional advertising is limited, the simple act of blogging has the potential to raise your profile and give you a chance of getting seen in a sea of competing messages.

I think your deli business is an absolutely perfect candidate for it too.

Cheers

Ralph

Kind regards

Lorna

Particularly in online, everything is measureable. That means there’s nowhere to hide if a particualr piece of marketing collateral fails to deliver. The numbers don’t lie. At least not any more.

In the past marketing was more a dark art than a science, with plenty of opportunities to befuddle the uninitiated boss or client. That’s part of history now. The trackable click has transformed marketing from art to science (or perhaps a good mix of both).

But a good marketing concept or strategy is only as good as the material you have to back it up. If the words and ideas being peddled are a pile of pants, then it’s still going to fail.

Ralph
@ralphenn
http://ennclick.com

When it’s all about setting up a website, or a Facebook page it’s a relatively easy sell and a quantifiable task. By contrast, whilst it’s intellectually understandable that content is the fuel which drives SEO and thus web visibility, the reality of this is, for a great many businesses, too hard to handle.

But it doesn’t need to be. It’s all about doing a little but often. Just make sure that little is quality. If it isn’t it will be money down the drain.

Ralph
@ralphenn

I’ve noticed how Newsweaver, one of the email newsletter services ENNclick uses, is introducing much more tightly integrated links to social media networks which can be embedded in email templates.

See Easier Social Sharing

In many ways this reflects a similar trend in Television. Many pundits were quick to predict the demise of TV as more and more people made their own entertainment choices thanks to the web. In reality it’s not happened. Instead TV seems, if anything, to have been enhanced by the web — especially social media — as it’s created a means for people to generate real time community around specific programmes such as X Factor and many others.

Similarly, many have been arguing that the emergence of social media would sound the death knell of email. Not so. We’ve seen how key groups interested in a newsletter’s content can be more easily found and its content shared through social media. In one example a client’s traffic to an article in it’s regular email newsletter generated more traffic from unknown sources via social media than through the subscriber base.

The point is, the email newsletters still has a valuable role to perform as one of many ways to share relevant information with interested audiences.

Cheers

Ralph
@ralphenn

Great summary of what’s hot and what’s not. Almost felt like I’d been there myself :)

Looking forward to the next installment.

Ralph

There’s really no reason why you couldn’t do something similar using a Facebook page which patrons sign up to. That way, if there’s a message that needs to go out, by posting it to the wall of that page, anyone who’s already ‘liked’ it will get an alert.

I still think Twitter’s the cleaner solution and probably easier to use if all you have to send out a service message to followers is a phone.

Ralph