Today I was surfing the net and looking at design blogs, and a post from Toxel.com really grabbed my attention.

The post is a collection of pictures of bus stop advertising – not boring posters, but original ideas which were different, grabbed attention, and some really worked specifically for bus stops.

However, the best was saved until last, and was a picture of a 3M ad.



It is the wall of a bus stop filled with cash (some fake, top bits real), and covered with their product – Security Glass. This is a physical demonstration of their product, with a bit of wow factor added in. It certainly got my attention, and made me think – how cool is this? How can I recreate this online?

Well, the thing with online and offline these days  is, that they are starting to come closer and closer together. The lines are being blurred. 3M could easily have spruiked this ad online -

• Lauching the ad online via Twitter, Facebook or other social media – including photo’s and explanations of the ad.
• Continue the campaign by posting video’s of people interacting with the ad
• Maps of the location of the bus stops so people could check them out

Similarly, there is a cool post from Designer Daily , showing ‘Unconventional urban marketing’ techniques.


For example, moss graffiti, reverse graffiti and snow tagging. These are all completely cool ideas, but how to transfer them online? Well, these kinds of marketing are obviously location specific, so a Facebook application, Flickr, Youtube or Twitter campaign could alert people to where they are, display photo’s of the artwork, or even show how they are made.

SEOmoz has released its 2009 Search Engine ranking factors – a conglomeration of the opinions of a number of professional search marketers. (Take it all with a pinch of salt of course, would you give everyone the answers if you knew them?)

Of course, SEO is a mix of science and art – you guess a bit, you test a bit, you combine and see how things come out. No one except the magicians at the search engine algorithm departments know exactly how your site is ranked, but these experts all gave their opinions and there were a few things they agreed on…

The number 1 most important thing for ranking, according to 73% of those surveyed, was external links with keyword anchor text .

Most of the top 5 were link related, with Title tag being the only on-site factor listed.

The worst things for SEO, included link farming, cloaking and having a lot of downtime for your website.

In fact, it seems that the 2009 survey listed a lot of the same things as the 2007 survey, indicating that the ‘dynamic’ world of SEO isn’t changing as much or as fast as we sometimes think.

Nobody seemed to be going out on a limb with their opinions or predictions. In particular, I found it really strange that for the question:

Which of the following statements best represents your opinion of how Google will treat links as part of their ranking algorithm over the next 5 years?

Nobody at all chose the answer

Links will become largely obsolete, much the way keyword stuffing fell by the wayside in the late 1990’s.

The most popular answer – that the importance will decline, but they will remain powerful , seems to make sense, but I just find it odd that in a ‘cutting edge’ profession like internet marketing, no one could conceive that links would become obsolete.

No one chose it because the current idea of ‘recommendation’ and PageRank makes so much sense. But have we become so insititutionalised by this system that we can’t imagine another way? Will we be blindsided by Google if/when they come up with an alternative?

With link farming, link buying and the proliferation of sites which are practically pointless except in the business of placing links on them, I can definitely imagine a clean-up of some kind coming along.  Perhaps there will be umbrella groups of sites, or you will need sponsorship, or you will need authentication, or you will have to BUY your way in (would you put this past Google?).

Would Google rule out the possibility of getting rid of links? I wouldn’t think they would rule out anything, and so thats why I don’t like to either.

Alice laughed: "There’s no use trying," she said; "one can’t believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven’t had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

    Alice in Wonderland.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, is paid advertising where you buy space on a search engine results pages.

These paid listings can be bought in Google , Bing and Yahoo (Bing and Yahoo will still have separate ad-buying interfaces), and even Baidu if you are in China. However, if you are new to search marketing, it probably isn’t worth your time and effort in learning how to use all search engines, so it might be a good idea to start with the most popular search engine – Google.

Ad space is bought by the ‘keyword’, and you bid on the keywords in an auction. This might seem intimidating, especially for a beginner, but as long as you have the money for advertising, you may as well start right now, because doing is the best way of learning.

Despite the claims of many Paid search providers, you don’t need a fancy piece of software to help you manage your account – you can do it easily within the Adwords interface. And even if you do want something more than that, the Google Adwords Editor is a free piece of software which is fantastically easy to use, and can be scaled up to huge projects – I would not recommend buying any PPC software, even for agencies, until you have reached the limitations of Google’s Adwords Editor.

There are two main ways of using Google’s PPC auction – on the Search engine results, and across their partner sites (for example, on Sydney Morning Herald). This lesson will focus on Search Engine ads.

Any of the providers you choose – Google, Yahoo, Bing – have great online interfaces to help you set up your account. They will take you through step-by-step what you need to do, so I won’t waste your time with that. But there are a few very high level things you need to get a handle on before you start your campaign:

• Site Architecture – be organised. You might want to target hundreds or thousands of keywords, make sure they are organised well so you can track your spend and analyse your results easily. Your advertising should be sorted into campaigns and ad groups. So, for example, if you sell lawn mowers, you might want one campaign for each brand, and then one group for each product. Alternatively, if you sell only own-brand products, you can do campaigns for each product, and then ad-groups based around keyword-themes.

• Be specific – when buying search terms in Adwords, make sure that you are not just targeting high level terms. Broad terms might have the most traffic, but they are also the most expensive and the farthest away from purchase. For example, someone searching for ‘lawn mower’ is less likely to buy than someone searching for ‘Cheapest Castrol automatic lawn mower’.

•  Test different ad-copy -you will have to write short ads, whose purpose is inducing searchers to click through to your site. Make the copy alluring, make it stand out, but also test it, test a few different versions of copy at any time. After two weeks or so (or whenever you have a good sample size), keep the best performing copy and introduce some others. Over time try and identify which aspects seem to work the best.

•  Landing Pages - Don’t send all your Adwords traffic to your home page. If your adgroup is about Castrol lawnmowers, send that traffic to your Castrol lawn mowers page. It shows visitors what they want, and will be better for conversion. Also, make sure that a customer knows what to do on your landing page – can they buy now? Order? Call for a quote? Don’t let them sit there and wonder.

•  Seasonality – Take advantage of the seasons. Unlike SEO, which has a long lead in time, PPC ads can be changed in an instant. This way you can use special promotions or change your campaign according to the time of year, or even the day of the week.  If you use special Christmas marketing in your store, remember you can use it online too! Similarly you can promote sales or other events.

Finally, as I said in a previous post, before you spend any money on AdWords, make sure you have a site worth visiting. Unlike SEO, you don’t have to start right away, you should make sure the visitors will like what they see before you pay to have them come.

An incredible, inevitable, innovation has occurred in the media world this week. American broadcast network CBS, in conjunction with Pepsi, will be advertising via a video-chip embedded in an issue of Entertainment Weekly, according to the Guardian and many other online news sources. Cnet has published the following picture of the advertisement;
The ad with embedded video.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

The ad, debuting in the September edition, but to New York  and LA subscribers only at first, uses a wafer thin screen and chip to show video of up to 40 minutes of video. Apparently, how it will work is that it will be prompted to play as soon as the page is opened. The cost of the ads are obviously going to be quite high, with the cost likely to be passed on to the ad buyers, not consumers.

While I am amazed at this innovation, and continue to marvel at the technological advancements which are occurring almost daily now, I can’t help but think this is going to be massively annoying until it is perfected. Like those ads which surprise you with video and sound at midnight in your quiet house, or 2pm in your silent, busy, office, unsolicited noise will be something which annoys, after it amazes. I  know people on the Tube will hate it!

The other thing I don’t like about this is the recycling and wastage issues it will raise – even though it says the chips are rechargeable – someone will have to care enough to recharge it first.

Despite all this whinging, obviously I can’t wait to see this in the ‘flesh’.

After covering keyword research , and onsite SEO, it is now time to get off your website and advertise it in other places across the internet.

The Google algorithm, which is the thing which says where your site ranks, takes over 200 factors into account when deciding where you can rank. We have already covered a few of these, like age of your site, content, meta data, and onsite headers and links. However, much of the influence comes from other sites – that is, if other sites link to you, Google will trust your site more, and your rankings should improve.

This is why linking strategies are such a major part of any SEO campaign. But what kind of links are SEO-friendly, and where can you get them?

The best links for SEO are:

• From sites about your industry, or related industries
• On pages which don’t have a tonne of other links
• Ones which don’t require you necessarily to reciprocate
• With your keywords as anchor text
• Links to deep pages within your site

You can try and get these links in many ways, but one of the best, and whitest of white hat ways, is through having great content, or cool gadgets, which people naturally want to link to. For example, if you have a great map or other gadget on your site, do a press release about it, or advertise it on other people’s blogs.

Reciprocal links are still links, and they won’t do harm to your site, just make sure they are reputable and relevant.

The thing about linking is, that although it should help with your SEO strategy, it also puts links to your site on lots of different sites across the internet – if you put these in good and relevant places, then people might click through, increasing traffic to your site as a nice side effect.

A previous linking article I wrote outlines the best way to put together your linking strategy, so I won’t go into the details too much here. Just remember that offsite SEO is just as important as onsite.