How to Win R10 000 cash in the AVG SEO contest? Simple, on the morning of 21st October 2009 at 11am, judges will perform a search on Google.com (not logged in) for the keyword “anti-virus”. .

Prizes:

1. R 5 000.00
2. R 3 000.00
3. R 2 000.00

The winners of the AVG Anti-virus SEO contest will be announced on teh AVG site at the following URL: http://avgsecurity.co.za/avg_seo_challenge.html Good luck SEOing! Would you consider this buying links? Let me know in the comments.

What does this mean?

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Guru's Guide to Better Search Engine Marketing

Reserve your seat! Join luminaries in the online advertising industry to celebrate the launch of the “Clickable Guru’s Guide To Better Search Marketing.” Free drinks and pizza. Networking. First 100 to register receive a free signed book copy. Attendees have chance to win a Clickable iPod Nano. A fun, convenient SMX Conference excursion.
Date:
October 5th, 2009, 6:30pm – 9:30pm
Location:
Clickable New York Headquarters
Address:
7 West 22nd Street (7th Floor)
New York, NY 10010

RSVP here

I am still undecided to which talks to attend after looking at the awesome agenda, 50+ sessions on SEO, PPC, social media, local & mobile search, plus the line-up of keynote speakers at SMX East 2009 is mind-blowing.

The biggest draw card of SMX East 2009 must be the awesome networking opportunities it presents. Personally, I am looking forward to sharing the SEO experiences from a South African perspective with you.

If you are attending SMX East this year I’d love to connect with you. This will be my first trip to New York City and am really looking forward to it. Let’s connect! If you are attending SMX East 2009 follow me on twitter @rafiq, simply post a comment below. Let’s put faces to the Avatars

Latest Stats about the Search Engines Merinda Peppard European Marketing Manager – efrontier.com

Follow Search Marketing Expo on twitter #smx

Online marketing is setting the trend for a new wave in communications. In South Africa, there is a growing interest which is not only motivated by a global recession but also a drive toward more measurable advertising. An additional stimulus was the worldwide observation of the success of the Obama election campaign.

Addressing the lack of qualified people to lead this revolution, the AAA School of Advertising and Google South Africa have joined forces to offer the first fully comprehensive training course on AdWords. The training programme is one of two courses that the AAA is launching under the auspices of its new Digital Marketing Academy. Digital Marketing Strategy is the second option and forms part of a practical overview of the field of digital and online marketing, and its application within the marketing and communications industry.

Visit Bandwidth Blog for more

WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines. Its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.

The ‘all-in-one’ SEO plugin tweaks the Wordpress CMS even further to optimize every aspect of your blog.

Some features:

* Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
* Generates META tags automatically
* Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
* For Wordpress 2.7 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
* You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
* You can fine-tune everything
* Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

You can download the plugin directly from here

When writing copy for the web the following should be considered: Your keyword and content strategy would have been determined at the start of your SEO campaign.

1. Do not write copy for Search Engines, write it for your target audience. Take into account how your target audience would go about trying to find a site like yours through search engines and purpose your copy appropriately.
2. Include Calls to Action. Every web page should have a purpose, a specific action you would like the visitor to take. It may be posting a comment (on a blog), purchasing an item (on an e-commerce store) or completing a contact from. Be sure to include one or two calls to action on your copy as users do not always know it is possible to perform those actions.
3. Highlight the important bits. You probably skimmed through this post only reading the text in bold right? We are all short of time, so are your users. By ensuring the main message you are trying to convey is communicated quickly and easily, ensure the calls to action and important information is highlighted by changing the colour, font size or making it bold.
4. Keep It Simple, Stupid. To reach as many people as possible make sure the language used can be understood by everyone. This will give the reader more time to perform the actions you want them to, grass the ideas you are trying to share instead of Googling the definition of big scary words.
5. Include links explaining concepts further. In the start of this blog post I mentioned ‘the start of your SEO campaign’. Notice that it was linked to a previous post that explains the questions that should be asked before starting an SEO campaign.
6. Main points at the begining of a sentence. This saves those reading your copy time and also helps with scanning.
7. Add your SEO copy writing suggestion as a comment. This list is far from complete. Please feel free to post a comment below suggesting an SEO copy writing tip.

SearchStatus allows you to check the quality of any website. Designed by Quirk for search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search engine related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar placed at the bottom right of your Firefox browser.

Once installed SearchStatus allows you to view a website’s Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This combined cocktail of search-related data means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa and Compete), so providing a balanced view of site quality.

The SearchStatus Firefox extension appears unobtrusively at the bottom of the browser on the status bar.

Requirements: Firefox 1.0+

Size: 45.44 KB

Install this plugin

SEO Who?

Who are you trying to target with your Search Engine Optimization campaign? Before venturing into the quest to rank number 1 one Google for any keywords you should first consider who your target audience is. The better you define your user, no it is not every user who uses Google (or any other Search Engine) to find information, the easier it will be to target the right keywords/phrases that the user searches for.

SEO What?

What would you like to achieve once the user (your potential customer) has found your blog or your company website via search engines? Would you like them to subscribe to your newsletter, feed, purchase a product or make contact with you? Determining the action you would like the user who has found your website via search results should always be considered before starting an SEO campaign.

SEO Where?

The Where question can be split into 2:

1. Where is the user searching from? (home or work)
2. Where in the world is the ideal user you are targeting with SEO located?

The users who will find your website via search results have different amounts of time at their disposal when comparing browsing from home or work. Once determining this by analyzing your website statistics the length of your copy on your site should be adjusted to allow them to achieve the answer to the ‘What?’ questioned you have just determined.

The location of your ideal user who finds your site via search should also be considered. Your hosting location and domain name play an important role in the Search Engine Result Pages(SERPs) especially with Google.com and Google.co.za. There are also other ways to adjust this but will be discussed in future updates to this site. Subscribe to The SEOblog.co.za newsletter or RSS feed to stay updated.

SEO When?

When will the ideal user be searching for your website? Examples: Is it while they are making a decision on where or from whom to buy property in Cape Town? Or when referring friends to their favourite accommodation in Port Elizabeth and cannot remember your domain name? This is when a simple search will answer their questions.

SEO Why?

Why should your business consider SEO? That answer is easy: more customers, increased cash flow, a return on investmet for the expenditure on your website. If there is anything more you would like to know or are in need of SEO feel free to make contact or leave a comment below.