Danconia Media Blog
At Danconia Media, we spend a lot of time researching marketing and web design trends so we can always stay current. Most of what we encounter is written for industry professionals, not regular businesspeople. This blog is meant to help business owners and managers seeking marketing and design information free of jargon. If you'd like to recommend topics for us to cover, please shoot us an email.
It's not all about Google: Why focusing on only one search engine could hurt your business
The news that Microsoft and Yahoo! plan to join forces to compete with Google makes it clear that SEOs can no longer concentrate on obtaining high rankings on just one search engine. Google has long dominated the search marketplace, but there are still other search engines that, if you properly optimize for them, will drive relevant traffic to your site. And while Google may be on top now, the company is only a decade old and there's no telling what the future holds for it. It probably won't happen tomorrow, but consumers may very well jump ship if Microsoft/Yahoo! develops a superior product. The latest statistics from Hitwise, an Experian company that tracks Internet traffic, show that Google's marketshare is at 71.42 percent, far ahead of Yahoo!'s 17.18 percent, Bing's 8 percent and Ask's 2.47 percent. When Microsoft's Bing becomes Yahoo!'s default search engine, the two companies will presumably have roughly 25 percent of the marketshare. Obviously, ignoring a quarter of the market is not a wise business decision, especially when there's evidence that its gaining headway. So far, Microsoft has done a good job at piquing the public's curiosity about Bing, and SEOs have praised the relevancy of its results.
Writing effective press releases that help SEO
Press releases are much less powerful than they used to be for SEO purposes. While churning out news releases and submitting them to free sites may not do much, the medium can actually be more powerful than ever if used right. Convincing a single reporter or high-profile blogger to pick up your news is infinitely more beneficial than posting worthless releases all over the place and Digg'ing and StumbleUpon'ing them with your multiple accounts.
Using Twitter's Search Function to Your Company's Advantage
As you're surely aware, there's been a lot of hype surrounding the microblogging site Twitter lately, but what might be its coolest feature is being largely overlooked by the media: its ability to tell you what people all over the world are saying right this second. Never before has it been so easy to gain real-time insight into what people are saying about anything from products, businesses, current events and life in general. PPC vs. SEO: Which one's the smarter investment?
It seems that small and medium-sized businesses are finally coming around to the fact that they must invest in Internet marketing if they want to stay competitive. But too many of them dedicate most or all of their resources into Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns that fail to lead to inbound sales leads and wind up costing much more than they generate.
Does Social Media Marketing Deserve All the Hype?
If you're in marketing, it's hard to go even a few minutes these days without hearing about social media. Some marketers make it out to be the ultimate solution, while others question the point of it all and call it useless. Like most things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. While social media marketing can be a good way to augment existing branding efforts, it won't do much good on its own.
