“SEM SEO Expert Blog” is a blog written by Nima Asrar Haghighi. Nima is an Internet Marketing Specialist with hands on experience in SEM (PPC Advertising), Organic SEO, RSS, Social Media and Web Analytics. Nima holds an MBA in marketing, B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering, Project Management Certification, and CIW (Certified Internet Webmaster) in E-commerce.
Welcome to Nima Asrar Haghighi's blog covering Internet marketing topics such as search engine optimization, search engine marketing, Web Analytics, RSS and online marketing industry as a whole.
Earlier this week we exhibited at Search Engine Strategies Conference here in Toronto. SES Toronto was held in Metro Convention Centre. The exhibition hall was busier than last year. Our booth specifically had a very good traffic as I was offering a quick 15-minute evaluation of search engine friendlienss of the visitors' sites.
Overal, 2008 SES Conferences were not as strong as the SES conferences in San Jose. However, we had a very successful exhibition. Here are some pictures from the booth.
Recently, I volunteered to help the organizers of Tirgan Festival, a Persian event that will be held in Toronto (Harbourfront Centre) in July 17 - 20, 2008.
Tirgan festival presents Iranian art and culture through a four-day cultural festival in Toronto. The event makes a deliberate effort to include contributions from various ethnic groups in Iran in as many art forms as possible. Celebrating Tirgan will showcase internationally acclaimed as well as local artists and performers of Iranian descent, who celebrate Iranian heritage through music, dance, theater, cinema, literature, and visual arts. Tirgan festival also features Iranian cuisine and special arts and crafts presentations made available by vendor kiosks.
The festival offers both free and paid events. Persian events tickets and more information are available on the festival's site.
Even though it will not be enforced until mid-June, Google announced the landing page load time is now added to AdWords interface on the Keyword Analysis page.
To keep things fair, the load time is compared to the average landing page speed in your server's geographic region.
Earlier this week, Google announced a preview release of the newest addition to its product mix, Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling sites on the web to easily add social features to their websites.
By offering Friend Connect, which can be added to a web property by simply adding a snippet of code to the site, Google removes the technological barriers of offering social applications.
Website owners can now attract more traffic to their sites and keep them engaged utilizing the social gadgets created by Google and OpenSocial developers. Some of the main gadgets offered are member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing.
So in a nutshell, Google Friend Connect helps website owners in three major ways:
Increase Traffic -Visitors get engaged and bring along their Internet friends and connections from social networks such as Facebook, orkut and MySpace.
Improve Engagement KPIs - People can get more involved by getting engaged with social features developed by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.
Reduce Cost to Market - With no programming needed, the technological and financial barriers of adding social features to the sites are removed.
Friend Connect can also give Google more insight into the websites' audiences by mapping a virtual representation of a social user on the web. This will eventually help Google provide more robust advertising through Google AdSense and Placement Targeting by providing demographic and interest segmentation.
This Google application has major implications on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) as it incorporates user generated content to the sites.
Here is a video that shows how Google Connect works:
Google announced recently that they Will soon incorporate "landing page load time" as a factor to their Quality Score formula. Load time evaluation will be added to the keyword analysis tips on AdWords interface.
Quality Score has always been treated as black box and there has not been much transparency around it (for the obvious reasons such as protecting trade secrets and preventing advertisers from biting the system). This time it's not any different.
Google defines load time as the amount of time it takes for a visitor to see the landing page after clicking a Google AdWords ad. However, they have not yet crystallized what they consider as a high/low load time.
By incorporating landing page load time into Quality Score Index calculation, Google is trying to improve user experience and as a by product increase the ppc advertisers conversion rate. They are hopping that because visitors do not abandon the pages because of poor web page load speed advertisers will get a higher return on their investments.
This means that website owners should consider optimizing their servers response time and improving landing page rendition to prevent poor quality score which will translate to higher minimum bid. This might negatively impact the accounts of smaller businesses that do not have the resources to update their sites.
The good news is that there are tools such as Web Page Analyzer and YSlow available that can help companies diagnose slow loading pages and increase their landing page load time.
Here are some tips Google offers for improving the load time:
* Using fewer redirects * Reducing landing page size by using fewer, smaller and more compressed images. * Avoiding the use of interstitial pages * Minimizing the use of iframes on landing pages
