This morning, I woke up to an interesting snail mail in my inbox – My insurance provider Prudential Asset Management (Singapore) Limited would be changing it’s name to Eastspring Investments (Singapore) Limited. That was a perfect way to awaken with my eyes wide open as we have recently been working on a number of Rebranding projects. In most of these projects, the client is changing their name or moving to a new domain name.

Most of the time, we get called in for a simpler sounding task like “Make us a new website” or “Figure out our new Social Media strategy“. Search, as always is the black sheep in the family of Internet marketing tools. Even though 20-40% of every website we see gets its traffic from natural search, presence & traffic from that medium is just assumed, without much thought.

In reality, getting listed in Google, attaining impressive ranks and getting significant traffic is a tough job. And most businesses don’t realize that until calamity hits, and they’re suddenly 10,000 visitors/day poorer due to nobody taking charge of the SEO impact of Website & IT decisions.

Anyway, back to Prudential. So, a search for “Prudential” brings up a page where Prudential is #1

That’s good news. (Although it’s not perfect – the sitemap listings are pretty badly filled with incomplete descriptions, inaccurate sections of the site etc – there are no news or video listings for such a large brand – and most of the links that come up are bland and unclickable). Still, it comes up and ranks #1, so that’s pretty good news.

Now, if we run a search for “Eastspring”, we get a page where the new website isn’t even on the page.

There is one result at #4 referencing www.prudentialcorporation-asia.com, a completely unknown site within the prudential family. And Prudential’s UK site is #9 on that page, where the press release announcing the new brand is ranked.

The main problem with this is that people ARE going to be searching for both Prudential and EastSpring releated keywords. And they just expect to be led to the right page.

Most IT departments don’t have the internal know-how to manage that process. The typical process is that on Feb 14th (official launch date of EastSpring), the old Prudential site will be turned off. If the IT dept is really good, they’ll redirect all Prudential.com.sg/xxx queries to the new home page EastSpringInvestments.com.sg (although most don’t). The new site, unfortunately will contain all new content that contains almost no traces of the old “Prudential” related keywords.

For a few months, Google will penalize them as the old site and Prudential related content is now gone. And the new site and EastSpring related content is new and unproven.

After that, EastSpring related content will come back up the ranks. And any hope of ranking for Prudential related keywords will slowly fade away.

Of course, I’m just guessing here – hopefully the Corp Comm department has a good SEO agency on staff, and they’ve already forseen this entire scenario. I sincerely hope they do, and for the rest of the post, I’m just using these guys as an example for general lessons on Rebranding SEO.

In our SEO training and Enterprise SEO consulting engagements, we go much deeper into this process – but in the interest of making this post readable, we’ll stick to the most important things. And I’ll do my analysis using the KARATE SEO framework we use in all our engagements.

1 – Keywords to use in Rebranding SEO

The first stage in SEO project is to figure out which keywords we need to rank for. For such a project, we need to expand from one to two families – “Prudential” related keywords and “Eastspring” related keywords.

Of course, standard keyword best practices will apply in putting on hats of different types of users and expanding this family into many keywords. Prospects, Customers, Employees, Investors, Media – will all have different variations of these keywords they’ll type into Google. I recommend expanding each brand into 200 odd keywords.

2 – Architecture to modify for Rebranding SEO

The next stage is deciding the sitemap & architecture to accommodate these keywords.

We have two sites to contend with:

• Original site (Prudential.com.sg) that will be scheduled to sunset soon
• New site (Eastspring.com.sg) that will be the main site going forward

All those keywords related to Eastspring would obviously be needed to mapped to the new site. But the interesting part is that all the original keywords relating to Prudential Asset Management will also need to be mapped to the new site because the old site won’t exist in a while.

The best bet for the initial site launch would be to mirror the structure & content of the old site as closely as possible in the new site. That will allow for accurate redirecting from old pages, to their new relevant equivalents.

3 – Relevance & On Page Optimization during Rebranding SEO

The next step would be to increase the content on the new site to accommodate all these keywords. Here, the delicate balance between SEO, Copywriting, Corp Comm and Compliance comes in. The simplest way to keep both Prudential and Eastspring related keywords would be a tweak to the title that has both words.

For example, on the “Contact Us” page, I’d recommend a title like “Contact Us at Eastspring (formerly Prudential) Asset Management, Singapore”

We need something like this that accommodates multiple keywords, the Page’s purpose, and satisfies typical compliance requirements.

4 – Authority & Link Building during Rebranding SEO

The best way to get instant authority into the new site – would be to redirect all the pages from the old site, to the new equivalent pages on the new site.

So for example, the old contact page (www.olddomain.com/contact) should be 301 redirected to the new site’s contact page (www.newdomain.com/contactus). In the same fashion, all the old pages (can run into hundreds) should be redirected to the right page.

Be careful not to redirect all the pages blindly to the home page – that’s poison for SEO. It’s important that internal pages redirect to internal pages.

Now, if complete redirection is not possible (if for example, only 1 division of Prudential is getting the name change, and the rest of Prudential.com.sg is still relevant) – then the old pages on the old site, should contain text links to the new pages. The same deal as above (each page linking to then new version), but instead of permanent 301 redirections, we use simple text links to maintain both assets.

All of the internal company links to the old products and pages, should be reset to the new site to pass on the PageRank juice to the new website.

And all of the PR activities should start mentioning the new site and encouraging partners and media to link to the new site.

(Of course, link building is a huge topic – but this is a simple to do list for the IT folks if they have 24 hours or less to do SEO).

5 – Technical Challenges & Trouble Spots during Rebranding SEO

The main issue is going to be deciding how to handle two separate sites. Options include:

• Keep both sites alive (but have extensive linking between them)
• Keep only the old site alive (with just the content changed)
• Keep only the new site alive (with the old site being killed off)

Depending on the strategic decision here, the main challenge will be doing accurate 301 redirections to the new pages.

Of course typical SEO challenges (making sure the pages are HTML friendly, they’re being indexed, Not using Flash or Frames, No programming errors & infinite loops) will still exist. A proper audit will have to be done to ensure other trouble spots are avoided during the building/maintenance of whichever site is being kept alive.

6 – Experience & Usability Management for Rebranding SEO

The final step of any SEO project is ensuring that the new site’s customer experience is optimal. That’s because, more and more, the bounce rates and time on site are being factored into search rankings (along with newer factors like social media engagement, Schema.org compliance etc).

Some of the things that can be done include:

• Keeping the layout & navigation of the new site similar to the old one
• Indicating that the brand was formerly called “Prudential” in the logo and Page titles
• Referencing the old brand name plenty of times in the content, for folks who haven’t gotten used to the change yet
• Removing any old content / elements that aren’t accurate for the new brand

Figuring out how to make the User Experience better through Google Analytics Consulting and Usability Best Practices is another longer discussion, but for now – don’t rock the boat. Keep things as people expect them, and that’ll be a good start to the new brand.

So, that’s our 6 step KARATE SEO process, customized for brands undergoing Rebranding. Again, Prudential/Eastspring are just examples – any company undergoing rebranding can hopefully pick up a few tips from this article.

After a lacklustre 2010 which saw the Google Analytics team mostly working on back-end changes, and not doing much in terms of improving the feature set, 2011 was a whole new ball game. Sparked by Facebook’s explosive growth, and their internal Google+ initiative, the Analytics division also moved at a much faster pace.

The year was full of announcements, feature launches, improvements and a much greater attention to the Analytics business. Here are the 10 different areas that saw the most changes:

1. Upgrades to UI & Features
2. Brand New Features
3. Mobile
4. Social Media
5. SEO & Site Speed
6. API & Back-end
7. Education
8. News & Controversies

1. Upgrades to Existing Features & the UI with GA v5

As certified Google Analytics Consultants, we had been teased with images of Google Analytics version 5 since late last year, but the official announcement of the upgrade to the new Google Analytics v5 was made in March 2011. At that time, we also posted a GA v5 review with a mixed report card.

But over the course of the year, GA v5 has gotten more robust, more features and the best part, it hasn’t been made compulsory yet. The new Google Analytics now only lacks two notable features (email scheduling and PDF export), and brought with it – a whole bunch of new features.

This journey of feature launches started in March with the official announcement, followed soon after by introductory posts introducing the new features. This included features walkthroughs of the new Dashboard, Plat Rows, Goals & Event Goals, Custom Reports, non-interactive Events, new Intelligent notifications and many webinars posted on the Google Analytics Youtube channel.

Before you proceed to the advanced features, remember to make sure all your existing campaigns are already tagged. And the quickest way to do that is to watch my speech at the GoMeasure event by Google Analytics – about 360 degree tracking with GA.

2. Brand New Features

The award for the coolest new feature definitely goes to something that was called “Analytics Right Now” (right now, it’s called “Real Time (Beta)”). This awesome feature lets you see what’s happening on the site with a delay of less than 1 second! Pretty amazing feature and an amazing tool to demonstrate to clients what an awesome, feature-rich tool Google Analytics is.

The most useful tool released this year would be the Multi-Channel Attribution report. It lets you get a complete picture of your marketing efforts, letting you see which mediums and sources your audience used before converting into a sale. This is a well needed development that will finally push clients away from last-touchpoint-attribution which usually increases the importance given to search marketing, and doesn’t capture the effect of all the online branding efforts.

Google Analytics also launched some fancier features like Path Analysis (excellent intro by Justin Cutrioni here), DoubleClick integration (part of Google Analytics Premium). These are probably more appropriate for really large organizations with significant investments into the digital realm.

3. Mobile Tracking Features

Before 2011 rolled around, Google Analytics already had healthy support for tracking activities in Mobile Apps (Android & iOS) & Mobile Websites (high end sites, and low end sites). All that support had rolled around the previous few years and is still admittedly, the most robust & flexible platform for Mobile tracking (even in the face of dedicated frameworks like Flurry, Localytics & Webtrends Mobile)

This year, most of the work on the product included improvements in number of features and the flexibility of the SDKs. February started off with the iOS SDK getting Custom Variables (about three months after the Android SDK got them. For a great explanation for using Custom Variables on the web version, check out this post by e-nor). The May update brought ecommerce tracking and validation to Android apps.

In August & September, both the Android and iOS SDKs saw new versions with features like campaign tracking within apps. Finally in November, both versions again got an upgrade with significantly easier tracking because of the EasyTracker library.

4. Social Media Tracking Features

If there’s one feature that gets a marketing division excited today, it’s Social Media! Trust us, our Social Media Training division gets more enquiries than we can handle wanting to know how to tackle the whole social landscape.

Unfortunately, this is also one area in which Google Analytics has been sorely lacking. While platforms like Radian 6, Brandtology & ThoughtBuzz have been working hard on analytics in this space, Google Analytics has been stuck mostly in the world of Pageviews & Visitors.

Now, to their credit, they’ve been working on various things to fix that. They have shown off social tracking solutions to select partners under NDAs. They’ve acquired Social Media companies like PostRank and SocialGrapple which will eventually show up in some of their products. But everything they’ve done is private and there’s really nothing we can work with as users.

Well, in 2011 they finally started waking up to Social with the Google+ initiative. The whole company got into a competitive mood with Facebook, announcing raises to stop defections to Facebook, matching week-to-week launch schedules and betting everyone’s bonuses to their success in Social.

In terms of Analytics, they had plenty to announce this year.

In June, they announced the “+1” button for web results. These later got extended to Ads and could be placed freely anywhere. (Incidentally, this was a week before they announced “Google+” … seriously, nobody in branding & PR could come up with better names?). Google Analytics also started auto-integrating +1 results into the data. BTW, if you’re not into the in-built solution, you should check out this ultra-geeky alternative by tracking Social Activities as Events from Analytics Geek Eduardo.

Almost immediately afterwards, Google extended this feature for tracking Facebook “Likes” and Twitter “Tweets”. These features are definitely not seamless like the tracking of +1, but with a little work webmasters can accomplish these for their own sites.

In October, they finally announced that the Social Tracking feature would be automatically built into Social Plugins by AddThis and ShareThis.

At the end of the year, Google Analytics announced something called “Social Data Hub” which would basically allow social media networks and platform owners to auto-send usage data to Google. A little optimistic on Google’s part to expect this as there’s no way the large platforms like Facebook & Twitter are going to do this, but this could take off for smaller networks (starting with Google+, Orkut and YouTube). For an explanation of this feature, check out this post on Lunametrics.

5. Search Engine Optimization & Site Speed

The biggest feature in terms of SEO features for Analytics came in the middle of the year in the form of Google Webmaster Tools integration with GA. Webmaster tools collects and shows some excellent data (though nowhere as insightful as GA), and there was no way to share that data until now. In June, Google Webmaster Tools data could finally be passed on to GA.

Another huge push Google made this year was towards giving more importance to Site Speed. Apart from other initiatives like the “Page Speed Tool”, which analyzes your sites and makes suggestions to improve loading time, and announcing that Speed is a factor in search results, Google Analytics also introduced tools to help marketers adapt to these new ranking factors.

May brought with it, a launch of a feature called “Site Speed” which helped measure the Page Load time on your site. Over the course of the year, the feature got upgrades and finally was made available to all pages without any code customization. For those interested, here’s a tutorial on getting insights from the Site Speed tool.

But the biggest news of the year was actually a controversy when Google decided to auto-send visitors to the “https” (secure) version of the site. When people on a secure version of Google search for something and then get redirected to the site, now Google Analytics (and any other Analytics tool), doesn’t see the actual keywords used by their visitors.

This was a huge change, and the controversial part was that if you ran campaign on Google AdWords, you could still see the keyword data for that source. It was just for the free search results (clicks on which don’t directly make Google any money), that all the keyword data was stripped out. Needless to say, this would be terrible as it takes away our ability to understand our audience or tailor or message based on keyword behaviour.

Pretty much every online expert jumped in to criticize Google for this double standard – some openly accused Google have having ulterior motive (Danny Sullivan in his passionate piece “Google Puts a Price on Privacy”). Others thought it was mostly a messaging and communication gap, the actual gaffe was minimal (More comments here from Brian Clifton and Lunametrics).

Personally, I think it’s a crappy move on Google’s part stripping out this data considering it’s still providing this data to advertisers. Anonymized keyword data doesn’t hurt users’ privacy any more than age-old cookies, but helps marketers, webmasters and businesses get a much more complete picture of the marketing

In my private conversations with Googlers in the Analytics team, they admitted they’re helpless on this move as this is a diktat from the top. Google’s going overboard to show regulators around the world that it’s one-step ahead in terms of protecting people’s privacy. While I appreciate their compulsions, the future with this kind of thought is scary – I hope we’re not looking at a world where Google refuses to release any data and goes back on it’s basic “openness” DNA.

6. APIs & Back End Upgrades

Google Analytics v5 brought with it tonnes of invisible upgrades that weren’t discussed much in the blogosphere – from faster AJAXy loads, to unique URLs to reports, a much more refined number crunching system and overall UI coherence.

Early in the year , Google announced new features for the API – with Server Side Authorization and announcing new dimensions and metrics being available.

In April, the Google Analytics blog highlighted new tracking code improvements (client side POST support) that build upon it’s asynchronous code introduced in late 2009.

Finally, two old features were overhauled. Benchmarking as we knew it was killed (with a creatively titled post called “Evolution of Benchmarking” ) in favour of a private email that goes out to webmasters with benchmarking data. We haven’t seen much about this report through the rest of the year, so I guess this feature may get a boost sometime next year when the Social Media Monitoring features that came from the PostRank acquisition make their way to the launchpad.

The second feature was a difference in the way sessions were calculated, logically ending the session when one of the one of the variables (utm_medium, utm_source, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign and gclid) changes.

7. Education

One area in which the GA team excelled in 2010 was Education. That year, they started the excellent web series called Analytics TV. Every episode featured the energetic, enthusiastic & passionate Analytics Guru Avinash Kaushik and other Team Leaders from the Analytics team answering questions from the web audience. For most regular users, the content was probably too technical … but for regular Analytics users, it was pure gold.

Our very own Vinny launched the Conversion JAPAC blog which brings together awesome Analytics and Conversion focussed case studies in the Asian context. That blog featured several fascinating case studies including Fairmont Hotels and one on Price Testing (written and shamelessly plugged by yours truly).

In April, a new Help Center was also launched to match the  new GA version 5. Thankfully this version gets updated much more than the previous version and links to articles contributed by external authors

And finally, there were also plenty of articles from the usual array of bloggers, authors and Analytics expert. One highlight that I’d definitely like to bring up is an awesome Google Analytics infographic from Tatvic on improving your GA setup.

8. News & Controversies

Among all the feature launches, upgrades and integrations – probably the biggest news for the product that stretched the entire year was the launch of Google Analytics version 5. Mostly because it was such a slow rollout (that’s still not finished), the Analytics team has taken their time to introduce features.

The Google Analytics Premium was another product launch that was much discussed in the blogosphere. At Happy Marketer, we’re still unsure about whether our clients require paying for the tool (as Avinash says, you need 10x the investment in Analysts than in Analytics tools), but for many of the global Google Analytics Certified Partners, this is a significant revenue & support opportunity.

And the biggest controversy was the removal of keyword data for regular search engine traffic from the tool. Obviously a huge deal for SEOs and Webmasters, this was discussed, dissected and was a hot passionate topic on the interwebs.

Wrapping Up …

As we start off 2012, we can remember 2011 as a turning point when the Google team started taking the pace of launches and features really seriously. This has been a standout year in terms of product development and we hope that some of the major holes in GA’s features (social media, better mobile tracking, more automatic integrations) will get filled up in 2012.  For a more well informed prediction post, here’s a recent Justin Cutrioni video by Online Behaviour on Analytics Future.

Awesome video! Love it when the checkout times out

Finally, let me leave you with an awesome video above from the UK Analytics team that encourages you to pay attention to user behaviour on your site.

And it was also a very fun year for us! David and I got to spend time at Google Mountain View, and have a quick conversation with Avinash, one of our Analytics idols!

What do you think of this wrap-up? Did we miss something important out? Do you disagree with some of my analysis? Chime in below in the comments section!

I recently studied hundreds of examples of how brands found success and failure on social media. I’ve broken their processes down into 4 simple steps, and also done up a nice attractive infographic for you to understand the concepts better. Enjoy!

I’ve also attached a power point presentation that explains the graph in more detail.

About Rachit – Curious about the speaker? Here’s his bio and Google Analytics qualifications

Follow us on Twitter – We rarely post updates, but when they do – they go to our twitter feed here.

Google Analytics Trainings – We offer a wide variety of GA trainings for organizations – GA training details here.

Google Analytics Services – We help companies set up, manage & troubleshoot GA installations – GA company services here.

URL Tagging & Campaign Variables Presentation – The first, 12 minute presentation’s PPT slides – Google Analytics URL Tagging Tips at GoMeasure slides here (on slideshare) (or embedded below).

Google Analytics 101 Training – Master Slide Deck for the Longer Beginner Training (we didn’t cover all the slides, and it’s hard to put that exercise into words, right?) – Google Analytics 101 Beginner Training Slides here (on slideshare) (or embedded below).

Thanks again for dropping by – see you again soon! If you have any questions, feel free to sound off in the comments below or email us at Hello@HappyMarketer.com

We started using web video as a marketing and branding tool at the start of this year and it has created a lot of excitement for the team and also for our clients.

Video for the web needs to be ‘bite-sized’ (2-3 minutes) in length, simple, and personal. Having personalized videos of about your products and services creates credibility and perceived value that stock photos, and text cannot do. Of course, it take much longer to produce and requires technical know-how about video production, and costly video recording and editing equipment, but the payoff can be worth it.

And of course, your time is precious and if you don’t have loads of money to spend on a full-fledge media production house (that can costs 10k+ per video), you need easy ways of producing an engaging video. Here are a few simple yet sophisticated examples of videos we’ve done recently. I hope you can get some idea from here and apply them in your organization.

Venue Expose

Naumi’s Rooftop Infinity Pool & Fireworks, Singapore from David Liem on Vimeo.

I went over to Naumi Hotel, a boutique hotel in Singapore, and spend a 2 hours recording different angles of their infiniti pool both in day light and night time to promote its appeal to watch fireworks.

Here’s another example.

Interviews

What is Hypnosis Like? from David Liem on Vimeo.

This was a combination of 3 interviews merged into one video to explain the benefits of being a Interviews are a great way of bringing out the personality in your product and service. It can show you how your business has benefited its customers. Sometimes we forget lose touch with how our products really impacts the lives of our customers, and so interviews are a great way of showcasing the positive effect your business has.

Candylicious! from David Liem on Vimeo.

This video was for a friend who’s a professional blogger. We did a video about a candy store. I recorded answers to 5 questions and shot some background footage and then combined it into one video. From this video you understand more about how this company came to be and some of the interesting tidbits about the store.

When it comes to video, quality goes a long way. Meaning, a professionally produced video (as opposed to a home video), will engage and captivate your audience and your customers on a whole new level. So what are you waiting for? Press that record button!

Award winning journalist Zhang Haijie came down to our office, spent an hour discussing social media strategies – and used a couple of clips of David in her news piece on Sunday night, 5th June 2011. While our Mandarin is fairly broken, and we’re working on adding subtitles to the youtube video – here is the summary of what she said about us:

• Happy Marketer is a company that specializes in other companies set up web presence
• We have 100+ SME and MNC clients in the space
• Started and run by two twenty-something year old entrepreneurs, with a tinyteam
• Specializing in consulting & training in search, social media and web marketing
• Have reached revenues of S$250k/year in the second year (first time we’ve ever revealed that number to the world btw)

Watch for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments! If you can’t see the embedded video, click here to see it on YouTube.

Your Website

Strengths

• Effective for branding, sparking excitement with product announcements,
• Credible official source of information for product researchers.

Weaknesses

• Products may appear ‘one-sided’, glossed over, fake.
• Information may not be as ‘cutting edge’ as 3rd party sites

Company Blog

Strengths

• More content, and perspectives for loyal customers,
• A platform at engaging customers (ex. AirAsia’s Blog)
• A platform to clarify misunderstandings from news, or critics, and gain feedback
• Increased search engines visibility,
• ‘Humanizes’ your brand,
• Publishing insightful articles increases brand value, and repeat visitors,

Weaknesses

• Time commitment

News Portal

Strengths

• Source of ‘alternative’ views,
• More comments from readers means more transparency of product and better consumer understanding overall
• Product reviews / testimonials are powerful to shape customer sentiment
• Great for PR (ex. Engadget)

Weaknesses

• Lots of clutter / overload of information
• No control over user sentiment, comments

Email

Strengths

• Direct to your inbox
• Fast, repetitive

Weaknesses

• Easy to ignore
• Not personalized
• Repetitive, ‘spammy’

Facebook Fan Page

Strengths

• It’s where the fishes are
• Convenient channel to communicate, short term engagement
• Great for branding

Weaknesses

• Many businesses experience difficulty finding direction/purpose
• Not strong for conversions or sales without significant incentives

YouTube

Strengths

• High degree of engagement, believability
• Videos more likely to be shared and go ‘viral’
• Powerful to shape user sentiment
• Consistent content rewards consistent viewers

Weaknesses

• Costly (but quality counts)
• Time consuming
• Returns to sales not easy to track

Twitter

Strengths

• ‘Faster than TV’, cutting edge
• Easy to use, get ideas and answers
• Ability to reach out to mobile & tablet users
• Share info quickly, interact directly, listen effectively

Weaknesses

• ‘Only 140 characters’,
• Time consuming,
• Most tweets narcissistic, boring,
• Twitter service often overwhelmed,
• Low engagement levels

Slideshare

Strengths

• Spread thought leaderships presentations
• Share company principles, product information
• Great for generating new content
• Helps generate leads
• Search engine visibility
• Embed power point presentations on your website.

Weaknesses

• Sensitivity of information in slides,
• More business related,
• Not highly engaging

Linkedin

Strengths

• Strengthen your online brand by creating a customizable business page
• Build professional business network,
• Collaborate with other professionals in groups by sharing expertise
• Recruitment tools / services.
• Connect with other employees

Weaknesses

• Smaller network than Facebook,
• Slow linking process,
• Less conversation / engagement than Facebook

Reviews

Strengths

• Critical for visitors in comparing / buying phase
• Customers get a better understanding of your product
• Useful to understand customers needs
• See where you stand with your competitors
• Great reviews will increase favourable word of mouth referrals.

Weaknesses

• No control over ratings, comments
• Bad reviews can hurt your sales

Group Buying

Strengths

• Can effectively boost your brand visibility
• Reach out to Women. 77% of Groupon users are women

Weaknesses

• May tarnish your company’s reputation if deal is misleading.
• You may lose money on it.

Why is it important to work with a knowledgeable SEO consultant?

SEO can be quite straightforward yet quite tricky at the same time. The difference between a highly ranked page that draws tones of traffic and a page that no one knows exists is the quality of SEO work put on that particular page.

For your sites to get high rankings consistently, you will need to enlist the services of a knowledgeable SEO consultant who knows all the tricks of the trade and how to effectively apply them to produce great results. In today’s competitive online business world, a top page ranking won’t necessarily be a top page ranking tomorrow. This is because everyday technologies are being discovered and others being revolutionized, making techniques of yesterday inefficient and obsolete.

SEO is no exception. How SEO is done today is quite different from how it was done at the inception of the internet and it will definitely be done differently in the future. To always have a competitive edge in the online business world, you will need to have by your side a knowledgeable SEO consultant who not only knows the tricks of yesterday but is keen on keeping a vast directory with new trends that could be more effective today.

Knowledgeable SEO consultants will merge old and new SEO techniques to produce an enriched SEO effect that will see your page rankings stay at the top. They use these tricks efficiently to ensure they don’t diminish your website’s appearance but rather give your clients a more fulfilling experience on your site. So pick out a reputable SEO Singapore consulting firm to handle your SEO needs and ensure consistent results on your sites.

Bad SEO vendors use unethical, black hat strategies

SEO strategies come in various forms and use different techniques to achieve the same goal which is increasing flow of traffic to a client’s site. However, not all SEO vendors use ethical means to achieve this and instead use what are referred to as black hat strategies which are unethical and could lead to your site being banned by search engines.

Black hat strategies involve any techniques that may be used to trick the search engine crawlers into ranking a page higher than it actually deserves to be. These strategies can take one of the following forms;

Keyword Stuffing – this is where a site is overly populated with keywords not only in the visible text but also in code tags such as Meta tags and alt tags. This results in a page with high keyword density but with little value to the site visitor in terms of information quality.

Hidden text – this is where a page is populated with keywords written in colors to match the background of the site along the borders and edges to influence search engines.

Doorway pages – these are pages that lead site visitors to sites other than those they expected to land at when they clicked the link.

Irrelevant links – since links are used to give a PageRank to a particular site, bad vendors could populate your site with a large number of irrelevant links that lead to sites with no relation to the subject matter of your site.

Black hat strategies are dangerous and their use could lead to banning of your site from search engine directories which could consequently mean losses for your online business. You should therefore always work with your vendor and find out what strategies they employ to optimize your site.

Good SEO consultants create a richer experience for your website visitors

In contrast to bad SEO vendors who use black hat strategies to optimize your page, good SEO consultants use only ethical means to ensure the optimization of your site. Good consultants are usually knowledgeable and have taken time to study search engines to come up with techniques that are ethical and acceptable by the search engines for SEO use.

Good SEO consultants aim at producing tailor made solutions for each client’s needs unlike unethical vendors who have template solutions for every SEO need. They conduct in-depth research into a site, keywords and market to ensure that the SEO techniques they apply are effective for that particular business. In addition, these consultants take time to find out a client’s goals for their business and website. Their approach is that of a partnership with the client and they are flexible in their workings both behind the scenes and in open partnership.

Good SEO consultants are invested in the success of their client’s company and value communication and education as they carry out their duties. They always ensure that professionalism and ethics prevail and they uphold good business sense and marketing principles at all times. The end result is a site that is not only optimized for the search engines but also highly optimized to fulfill the needs of the client’s site visitors. Sites optimized by professional SEO consultants offer quality to visitors and make their experience on a site unforgettable. This leads to repeat visits and recommendations to a site which consequently improves its PageRank.

How to ask for past experience and case studies from potential vendors

Asking for past experience from a potential SEO vendor is important since it will act as evidence on the quality of the SEO work done by the SEO consulting company. This will reduce the chances of one falling prey to bad vendors using black hat SEO strategies which could lead to a site being banned.

Before enlisting the services of an SEO vendor, you should carry out some sort of due diligence by requesting for a “Declaration of Skills and Services”. This will allow one to have an idea of what they should expect from the vendor. In addition, one can use this declaration as a benchmark to see whether the vendor is capable of offering a particular service as per their skill set.

Most vendors offer this declaration together with case studies of works they have previously undertaken. The vendor would therefore provide you with links to sites they have optimized or give you details of previous satisfied client’s so that you can confirm the level of their service. In addition, you could check their sites for reviews from previous satisfied clients.

If you are convinced that the vendor will offer quality service, you can enter into contract with them for their SEO services.

SEO firms in Singapore offer various SEO services to meet the needs of your online Singapore business. These services are SEO copywriting, SEO link building, SEO PageRank and SEO page markup services.

What is SEO copywriting?

For a page to be highly ranked by the search engines it must contain search engine friendly content. Search engines use a series of algorithms to rank pages in terms of the content and keywords they contain to ensure that the pages ranked highly are those with more relevant information for a particular keyword. However, these algorithms, which are also known as spiders or crawlers, see the web pages in form of raw HTML and not the published output as a human surfer sees it.

SEO copywriting therefore involves the manipulating of text in the tags of the HTML code of your pages such as text in the Meta tag, keyword tags and the title tags to get a favorable rating from the search engine crawlers. However, since getting tones of traffic to your page without any actionable lead is useless, SEO copywriting also involves optimizing the viewable text on your page for your visitors.

SEO copywriters therefore ensure that your page is optimized for high search engine rankings but at the same time is able to ensure a low bounce rate for your visitors by providing quality information on a particular keyword. This way, you get many visitors to your site who are likely to purchase a product or subscribe for a service that comes with your recommendations. Since the emphasis in any business is to offer value to the client, SEO copywriters ensure they prioritize page optimization to improve client experience over optimization to gain higher rankings by search engine crawlers.

What is SEO link building?

Link building is very fundamental in any SEO strategy and is one of the major determinants of success in an SEO campaign. Apart from the keywords that a page contains, search engines also use links to and from a site as another means of ranking. The number of links to a particular site clearly defines the popularity of the site and the quality of the information contained in it. This makes SEO link building a very important aspect in any SEO strategy.

SEO link building services are usually aimed at improving a website’s link popularity and could eventually lead to more targeted traffic to that particular site. Link building can be done in a number of ways. Links can be bought or exchanged at some particular sites specializing in link building services. If you are working on a low budget you could simply ask for links from a particular site or write articles with links back to your site and submit them to article directories. Lastly, you could register your site with a number of directories where you can get links to other sites and could also benefit when others link to your sites.

Companies offering SEO services in Singapore provide information, advice and any necessary assistance one might need to successfully launch a link building campaign. Since most of these companies are affiliated with various web directory listings and article directories, they could offer you great value for your money by building your links to other sites and facilitating increased traffic to your site.

What are PageRank Services?

In order to clearly understand what PageRank Services are, one must first understand the meaning of the term. PageRank simply refers to a numerical value given to a webpage site to represent how important that particular page is on the World Wide Web.

The PageRank system was introduced by Google and a page is given a rank depending on the number of links to a particular page. Each page linking to another page is effectively voting for that page and thus increasing its importance. Apart from merely looking at the number of votes (links to a page) a page receives, the system also takes into account the importance of the page “casting” the vote to determine the final PageRank of a particular site. The final rank is therefore calculated as a weighted average of the importance of the total votes that a particular site receives.

Google uses the PageRank system as another means of determining a page’s ranking in the search results for a particular keyword. However, its not the only factor considered but is used hand in hand with other methods such as the use of search algorithms which are popularly known as crawlers.

PageRank services are offered to help one display the PageRank on their site without the use of the conventional Google Toolbar. This is done through a snippet of HTML code that one simply inserts into their website. The advantage of PageRank services is that the sites offering these services could provide link exchanging which could further increase your link popularity and consequently, your PageRank.

What are SEO page markup services?

Markup services are services offered in order to improve an already existing product or material. Any person who is serious about online marketing and businesses knows the importance of search engine optimization. However, with new tricks being discovered everyday on how to make that elusive first page on search engine rankings, there is need to keep abreast so that you don’t loose out to your competition. SEO page markup services ensure just that by equipping your sites or pages with the newest and latest online trends in search engine optimization.

Two very popular SEO page markup tools are blogs and Google Analytics. Adding a blog to a site increases interactivity with your visitors while allowing you to add fresh content to your site regularly. Since search engines love fresh content and interactivity increases the chances of your site getting bookmarked on social networks, your PageRank is bound to increase with this markup tool. As your blog following increases, your site grows and you will slowly see steady increases in the amount of traffic to your site.

The other great markup tool is Google Analytics. This free analytics software can be used to provide very vital data about a site’s performance. Its features help you track your site’s visitors by monitoring variables such as the bounce rate and traffic sources. These are very vital to help you know the success of your SEO campaign and can provide insights on how to improve your site over time.

SEO page markup services are very popular and are commonly offered by companies offering SEO services in Singapore.