SEO Hong Kong | HK Search Marketing and Optimization Blog

Just like any other online marketing campaign, we all want social media to provide us with proven results more than the hype everyone seems to be touting it. It’s no surprise that social media is getting a ton of attention. Social media helps increase brand awareness, improve visitor traffic, generate leads, convert into sales and add subscribers, so the more impact our pages get received, the better results. On the other hand, social media may also help influence search results, by way of referring links and targeted content (relevant content, anchor text, etc). For the sake of illustration, we’ll use Google Analytics as our web analytics tool.

It’s nice to have Hong Kong’s blueprint displayed online with the launch of Google Street View Hong Kong Edition. The city comes after Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. Along with Hong Kong’s launch is also Macau’s debut. For the uninformed, you can access this feature using Google Maps, find an address (try Time Square, Lan Kwai Fong or Ladies Market.

Time Square, Causeway Bay

Queens Road Central

Ladies Market, Mong Kok

Nathan Road, Kowloon

Tsing Ma Bridge

Kings Road, North Point

Canton Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

Tuen Mun Road & Ting Kau Bridge

Sai Kung

Island East Corridor

Tai Tam Road

Tsing Kwai Highway, Kowloon

Just a quick post. Maybe you have come across people from search agencies who tell you “we do both SEO and SEM”. Sounds fine, right? Maybe, but if we dig deeper into the meaning of these acronyms, we could start asking what’s the difference between SEO and SEM.

First, let’s look at how I would define both terms:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The use of various techniques to improve a web site’s natural ranking on search engines in order to attract more visitors.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
The process of marketing a website using search engines either through improving natural rankings or paying for clicks or both.

One interesting topic in web analytics is bounce rate. Bounce rate, is defined as the percentage of web site visitors who arrive at an entry page on your web site, then leave without visiting any other pages.

We can use this metric to measure engagement of visitors. The higher the bounce rate, the less engaging our site becomes. Sometimes I come to think that bounce rates are open to different interpretations. For example, a high bounce rate means users were not impressed on what they saw on the landing page and didn’t bother to explore. But it could also mean they immediately found what they were looking for on that landing page and is therefore unnecessary to go further. Or the site simply doesn’t provide avenues for the visitor to explore further (broken navigation links, no search function available, etc).

Even before the highly publicized news about Google’s bold plan to produce uncensored search results in China, its popularity in the mainland has been dwindling. This is according to iResearch, a local Chinese search consultancy firm.

In addition to Google losing search market share in mainland, Yahoo! and Bing also lost a certain portion of their slices in search popularity in China. Google had 18.9 per cent share of Web searches done in China in 2009, compared to 76 per cent enjoyed by Baidu. In terms of percentage points, Google’s share is down 1.8 per cent while Baidu gained 2.8 percentage points, iResearch said.