If you would like to have a SWOT done for your firm, the video above is a must see – brief interesting lecture? on SWOT by Malcolm McDonald, an Oxford Marketing Professor.? It is quite different than from what my Marketing Prof had taught me 5 years ago, when I was doing my Honors in Marketing, but this new ‘SWOT by Segments’ approach surely is a better way to do it.

Unless your company offers just one product, having a single SWOT gives you very general and vague points that are many times useless and sometimes could even be harmful for your company.

It makes more sense when SWOT is done for each different product that a company provides. OR, if a company provides products that cater to specific segments (we are ethnic targeted), then SWOT can be done even for each of these segments.

For us, it just seemed more apt to have SWOT done by-product rather than by ethnic. I looked at our company’s 4 major products – Long Distance, Homephone/VOIP, Mobile Products? & IPTV. There is also ‘Internet’, ‘Conferencing’ and few other products but these 4 were a good start. I have made a template/sample of this new & better SWOT analysis method.

Now, I cannot share that SWOT with you, but I assure you that when it was done and ready, I found it very useful to understand our product in comparison to our competitors and? have a better idea to market it, and gain a competitive edge.

Apple has way of things, and they do it so well, the rest just benchmark and follow.

I know that their website layout & design is one of the most imitated design for many e-Commerce websites. There is a reason for that. The user-friendliness, the hip look, the clean layout and most of all – the organized structuring of products so visitors do not spend much time finding a product.

Product is not always the most important thing on the website. Apple doesn’t have to tell it to us, they’ll just show us how.
A heart-warming gesture from an incredible company. Without any doubt, this gesture has made me even more of an Apple fan.

I?ve come across this interesting article on Matt Kelly?s speech ?Put SEO in its place?. Matt Kelly is the associate editor of The Mirror and he talks about how they used SEO to increase traffic for their newspaper. He believes that all journalists and newspapers should ignore SEO and focus primarily on providing stories that are more readable to the users. The article was a good read and the author has some valid points, but I think his personal experience with SEO has instilled some sort of negativity with it. If optimizing the website (Mirror.co.uk) caused such huge increase in inflow of targeted visitors ? that is the sign that SEO actually worked for them and not otherwise. If they were unable to monetize that surge in traffic, SEO is not the factor to be blamed, but rather they should have taken the opportunity to analyze their own human & other resources to see why they were unable to earn from that traffic, and possibly considering hiring an online content monetizing expert.

Matt blames SEO for the fall in their advertising rates, as SEO led to considerable increase in traffic which in turn caused a fall in their advertising rates? and the reason he states is of one of the basic principles in economy “massively oversupplying a finite market generally leads to a collapse in value”. True, more supply & stagnant demand leads to a fall in prices, but if we are blaming SEO for getting a site too much traffic and a subsequent fall in advertising rates, then why not blame it for rising hosting costs as well?

Yes I agree with Matt Kelly when he writes that news portals should not churn out content only for the search engines and rather design their website and content with the users in mind. I was a regular reader of their articles and I did notice a consistent fall in value of the quality of content, and so I agree with his statement ?In treating SEO as the be-all and end-all of online publishing, we devalued our content in the mind of the users? .

I believe there is always a possibility of achieving a balance in a website, a balance the search engines are happy to crawl and index your website while the visitors enjoy reading and digesting the content as well. I am not supporting SEO just because I specialize in it. Lets face it, we all are Googlers. We are so used to searching that many of us actually even google the URL itself. Dont believe me? Ask the 45 million users who search ?youtube.com? on Google every month. I think no website or business should undermine or ignore the potential of search engine traffic. Achieving that ?balance? is the key in my opinion and although not very easy, it is definitely not impossible to achieve.

I got asked few times if building inbound links via posting comment on blogs works well? I always mentioned that its not a good idea unless your link is relevant and useful – as the Big G has spent lot greens to track such practice. Well, it is now official and Google have just recently posted that they are actively seeking out comment spammers and punishing accordingly.

I will have to come out honest and mention that I did put my websites links in comments but only if I thought it was appropriate and I always disclosed that it is my own website – rather than acting as a regular visitor referring to a site.

Broad Session-Based - Google Adwords

website. He finds the SEO service – and so his need for this service is fulfilled. Now he proceeds to search for ‘toys’ for his 12 year old kid, and when starts to search it on Google, the ads he comes across are for ‘SEO Services’, and that’s because few Adwords campaigners targeted for ‘SEO Services’ on broad “session based” and according to Google, Marks search session is still on. Obviously, the ad space is being wasted, Mark’s time is being wasted and possibly the campaigners money may be just going down the drain.

According to recent stats, rougly 2% of all broad match queries were session based.

This is not one of the better features introduced by Google. Even if they continue to retain this option, which I hope they do not, they probably should consider providing at least and more controls (opt-out) for campaigners – their clients.

Rather than starting off with any article, I decided to use my first post as an opportunity to give readers an idea about what this blog will be about.

What can you expect to find on this blog?

Latest developments & trends on SEO and Social Media. Also, tips & facts. Sometimes, you will see just a weird post that doesn?t have anything to do with online marketing. Don?t get scared, that would be just me trying to mix things up. All work and no play can make Jack a dull boy. So to avoid this situation with Jack going dull and all, I’ll try to make this blog as much interesting & readable as possible. If this sounds like something you might find useful, please? feel free to sign up.

What can you not expect on this blog?

You can expect me not to act like a professor lecturing about online marketing. While its been over 4 years since I started in this field, I consider myself more of a? learner & researcher of SEO & SEM. That’s because, I spend a good 40% of my time researching different SEO and SEM techniques and see how they work. Frankly, I will not share each and every technique that I learn, but I will be more open and sharing than, you know.. the other blogs :p
I am glad you visited my blog & hope to see you around.
To your success,
Syed