Fresh SEM in OZ

Fresh SEM in Oz
by Paul Donley

When I started looking into SEO and SEM, I roamed the Net a little to see what the buzz was all about, then - after realizing that I was lost in acronyms and neologisms again - checked out a couple of books from my online reference library and settled down in front of the computer with a strong cup of coffee for some reading.
It didn't take a long time before I realized that I was looking at some grreeeat stuff -- but it didn't pertain to the Land of OZ.

Fresh in Oz
Australia took to the Internet faster, person by person (per capita), than any other country in the world. In 2000-2001, fewer than 10% of Australian households had access to the Net. Last year, 2005, 35% of all Australian households had access; and slightly more, 41%, of Australian businesses - mostly small businesses.
Of those, 65% were using broadband access of one form or the other.
It's been predicted in 2010 that 70% of small businesses in Australia will be on the Net. The Internet will be the most important advertising resource for small business. And Australia has a lot of small, regional and local businesses.

Googled
At this point, however, Australia is new to the Net - and computers.
There have already been a few marketing surges as Australians moved first to replace their older P1 and P2 systems with P4's in order to run XP, then Celeron made a splash, and the next surge is already underway with the dual-core hardware. Households no longer have just one computer. There is usually a desktop and a couple of laptops in most households these days.

All those new computers need access to the Internet, so .. wireless networking is popular. For most households, the first network they'll see will be wireless - at the home or office.

But all this hardware doesn't mean everyone has instantly acquired computer skills. Far from it.
Driven by their children, who see the latest hardware and software in the schools - because both Victoria and NSW are constantly upgrading the school to fulfill campaign promises - households have spent thousands over the past 5 years to acquire computers that no one seems to really know what to do with.
Even the teachers who are running around with those hot new laptops are a little confused. But they sure look impressive!

Let me use the major search engines to illustrate what I mean.
Internationally, Google and Yahoo are neck and neck when it comes to searches. The last figures I saw put Google at 40% and Yahoo! at 43% of all searches. Google, because its name has become synonymous with "search on the Net"; and Yahoo! because they are the best established portal to the Net.
The International figures look something like this. (I made this chart using an online service for school children called Create a Graph from the National Institute for Educational Statistics. It's a free online service.)



Australia is a little different. Since the aussies are new to the Net, they're more susceptible to the buzzwords. They "google" for things.
While Yahoo! and Google pretty much split the International pie; in Australia, Google-Australia has 65% of the searches.
Since the aussies are new kids on the block, many don't realize there is a Google-Australia. About 13% use the original Google site. -- In Australia, Google commands nearly 80% of all online searches.
That is a commanding position.

If, for example, I want to build Internet presence and recognition for a website - based on keywords - by putting their services before 70% of the web, all I need is Google. They command nearly 80%. I can accomplish my goal easily with a Google PPC (point per click) campaign.

Aussies suss it out
As the aussies suss out the Internet, that will change.



Australians follow the trends from America, especially on the Net. It's reasonable to assume that they'll be moving more towards the International market split for searches soon.

Local Directories
Australian governments have spent to provide every large town and region with its own Community Guide - a local directory of business and events. Even local townships and suburbs have their own Community Guides.
Telstra (with vast government subsidies) has developed the Yellow and White pages, then linked both to a national advertising campaign for Sensis.

There are also a number of entrepreneurial search engines and directories that have sprung up.
Although all this activity will not supplant the dominance of Google Australia and Yahoo! Australia, it will serve to nudge the aussies along to suss out the way to search the Net.
Aussies are pretty clewy.
eBay is going to help, too, over the Christmas shopping season. Australians go to eBay for things almost as much as they do to the search engines. A shopper can have a bit of fun with eBay. If they find something on eBay, but want to see the (approximate) price in Australian dollars, all they have to do is add ".au" to the URL - and the price in Australian dollars appears!

How long is it??
This long!
Aussies are moving fast on the Net. But the question for any Internet Marketing campaign is: How long will it be before they are searching like the rest of the world?
A number of factors come into play here quickly. Aussies are notoriously brand loyal. It takes a tsunami or a good hit of dynamite to make them move from something. Then again, there is that pressure to be like the US and UK, which sorta balances it all out.

We can have a bit of a play with another figure, the loyalty numbers, and fuzzy logic to make a good guess.
Google commands a 74% loyalty. Yahoo! gets only about 47%. Neither bad numbers really.
And remember, MSN already has 13% of the searches within Australia through its affiliation with NineMSN.

Let's see what happens to Google.
We start with 65% - the portion of searches Google had in 2005 - and estimate their portion in 2006 to be 74% of 65%, or -- 48%. That leaves a bigger slice of the pie for Yahoo! Australia and NineMSN, along with all those local and regional directories.
If people know what kind of business or service they want, they will learn to turn to local directories because it's quicker. Aussies are very community minded.
Now, if you assume that the searches done on Google US are gonna stay about the same because those folks are looking for something outside Australia, then Google will enjoy about a (48 + 13) 61% share of the searches in 2006. (I gotta wonder how close I'm gonna be. The figures will be out soon.)

Do the same thing for 2007, and the number doesn't track. 74% of 48 plus 13 is .. 35 percent. In order to track with the 2005 International figures, Google will have to pick up a few from somewhere - probably Yahoo!, which can only keep the loyalty of less than half (47%) of its searches.
But the guesstimate still works. It'll take the aussies about two years to suss out the search options on the Net, which sounds about right.
By the end of 2007, aussies will be searching along like the rest of the world.
Where the community directories and entrepreneurs will come into the mix, we'll have to look into in another article.




If the stuff in this blog makes sense to you, visit my website at AEmeritus Relevant Training
because that's where it's all gonna be put in motion.
Just a raw plug for my first SEO clients:
Short Cut Computers belongs to Steve Trim, a friend who actually paid me to learn this stuff and put it to work for him.
And Steve Trim's other business, Barcode Solutions., which will be my second project. Sphere: Related Content

The debate continues about relevant links

A short lament.
It used to be so easy, even if it didn't seem like it at the time. If your business couldn't afford the big budget banner ads on huge portals, to generate links you signed up for an link exchange (which was usually a portal of sorts), webring, and got your site registered on as many directories and search engines as the freebie registration sites could muster. Then started exchanging links.
You did a little research to find complementary services, and sent those sites a letter asking for a link on their site if you'd put one on yours. This was often the fun part.
Because one of the common rules was that 70% of the purchases were from companies and sites that were physically within 70 miles of your company, it became a sort of social program. You had a reason to meet all sorts of people near you!
You exchanged links with them, and made new friends.

While that rule still applies, more and more buyers are willing to purchase from anywhere off the Net. Some significant percentage of buyers only purchase locally still.
You worked this guerrilla style until you made enough money to buy a big banner ad. And usually by then it wasn't traffic and links you were after, it was "transactional visitors", or .. buyers.
Anyway, that's enough of the lament.
Things still work that way. Sorta.

Developments
In the great hunt for links, an changed link with complementary business sites are invaluable but webrings and link exchanges have fallen into disfavor. There is a great debate going on that could cause a lot of change to the Web economy. Not just for webrings and link exchanges, but all affiliate programs.
Affiliate programs traditionally work one of two ways:

• The affiliate network places your ad on either targeted or non-specific sites that are also members of the network that go through their server then are redirected to your site;
• or you set up your own affiliate program, called a "network specific linking network".

Click- throughs are counted, and commissions paid. With an affiliate network running the show, you don't get any link count advantage for your page rank. Their server gets linked from thousands or even tens of thousands of sites.
If you run your own affiliate network though, you end up with many links to your site - and have to pay your own commissions. It's just harder because you have to administer your own program.

Newer Affiliate Networks
Newer affiliate networks have software, called an "affiliate management" application, that you install on your server to direct the click-through to your site. The program is often sold as much on this capability as on the number of links the network can provide. But if the company doesn't emphasize how their network works, ask. And ask your SEO people to watch for these networks. They can usually tell just by checking the links to the affiliate servers and a couple of their clients.

Google in its infinite wisdom has become aware of repititious wording in links. Google watches how quickly links to a site accumulate in order to avoid search engine spam. Since you submit an ad to a link exchange, often for a fee, the same ad ends up repeated all over the Net. If too many links appear in a short time, Google may penalize or even ban your site.
Google has even gone so far as to make a patent filing.

Google now watches to see if too many links appear with identical anchor text, then checks to see if the links disappear quickly. Affiliate networks are automated inserted text and code which expose your link with others in a round table fashion. If you were to join an affiliate network, the number of links to your site would increase dramatically. But the links will appear, then disappear, from a site within a few minutes.
Since Google is doing this sort of thing, you can expect other search engines to adopt the same practice soon.

Complementary business sites
Sending out requests for links is one of the fundamental functions of marketing on the Net. Will this sort of activity trigger Google's anti-spamming defenses? Search engine marketers will have to be careful of the anchor text.

Another consideration is how stringently Google will enforce its rules against linking to banned sites. If another site in the affiliate network has been identified as using spamming tactics, you don't want a link to or from that site. But how will you - as the owner of a site - or your marketing agenty know?
There is a list of banned sites, of course. It's huge. But that is part of the reason you would hire an agent: to make the right decisions for you.

Interesting bit
This was an interesting thing to find. Recently, when one of my clients was setting up her new site and blog, she accidentally entered her site name into the search window. She entered "www.potsandpans.com". (not her site)
What came back was a surprise. There were 14 links to her site! - But her site wasn't finished and had not been submitted to any directories or search engines. In fact, the link to her domain only showed a non-functional page.
Checking later, there were only 4, then 5 links to her site in the same search.
All of the sites appeared to be different, but they contained the same segment of text from her blog, which included anchor text: "..only quality pots and pans are what we want .." (This is only an example. If it actually is a live link, it's an accident.)
It turned out that someone had set up a number of domains about kitchenware, kitchens, and pots, and pointed them to blogs. The made up pages which only contained a Google Adsense ad, and a little nonsense text.

Every link that showed had been modified as if it were generated by PHP. For example, instead of "http://www.kittykitchens.com", the linked page was "http://www.kittykitchens.com/?goop=nonsense". That last bit might be used to track a session.
If you've ever wondered what happens when a page is generated by a content management program, that's it. The server makes an identical page on the server. The page is called "http://www.kittykitchens.com/?goop=nonsense", but it's only there for a short while.
That's how she found 14 links, and later there were only 4, then 5.
There were literally hundreds of these blogs, with about 70 pages on each. The software just looped through the sites - There were at least 85 of them at my count. - and tried to generate a fake page for every page. (at least 85 X 70 = 5950!)
This was automated blog spamming in a big way!
No wonder Google has become concerned.

Link Quality, not Quantity
Not many people think about it, but many ads on a webpage dilute the relevancy of the content. In the example above, because the webpages contained only random snippets other than the Google ads, there was no relevant content other than the snippet injected into the page to generate the link!
The old days system couldn't help but produce relevant links since there weren't so many ways to produce irrelevant links.

Webrings are usually targeted within an industry or interest. But you don't hear much about webrings any more.
Affiliate networks are still a good source of links, there's no reason to bail out of them just yet. Like all things in business, you just have to know what you're dealing with and steer clear of the dangerous stuff.

Industry effects
Google will find some resistance in being too stringent about these new rules since Ad Words and AdSense are simply a new way of working affiliate networks in the final analysis. The same can be argued for all PPC (pay per click) services.

Google may find itself having to explain why it is trying to run the only affiliate network on the Net.

If the stuff in this blog makes sense to you, visit my website at AEmeritus Relevant Training because that's where it's all gonna be put in motion.
Just a raw plug for my first SEO clients:
Short Cut Computers belongs to Steve Trim, a friend who actually paid me to learn this stuff and put it to work for him.
And Steve Trim's other business, Barcode Solutions., which will be my second project. Sphere: Related Content

Starting Out

For the time being, this is gonna be a pretty mundane blog. Really, it's a place for me to store the research I'm doing on SEO and SEM in Australia. In time, it may even become an authoritative enterprise for SEO and SEM in Australia, who knows?

Australia is a special problem for search engine optimization, but then Australia is a special problem for everything.

If the stuff in this blog makes sense to you, visit my website at AEmeritus Relevant Training because that's where it's all gonna be put in motion.
Just a raw plug for my first SEO clients:
Short Cut Computers belongs to Steve Trim, a friend who actually paid me to learn this stuff and put it to work for him.
And Steve Trim's other business, Barcode Solutions., which will be my second project. Sphere: Related Content