SEO Hong Kong | HK Search Marketing and Optimization Blog

Just like how it helps individual writers connect with readers, blogs help businesses interact with clients in a more casual, personalized way. Business-to-business blogs help expound certain products or services without necessarily altering the tone of the message within product pages. But when they’re not optimized for search engines, their prospect clients may not easily find them.

Business people. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/44211617@N03/

Here are some common practices B2B blogs commit that could stunt progress on search engine visibility:

In its effort to save itself from further trouble, BP is employing search engine marketing as a PR tool. Yes, search engine marketing can be used as a reputation management device, even if it’s not sustainable or long term solution. I posted an entry about the benefits of having multiple pages appearing on the same search query results citing that by trying to own the page for a certain keyword query, the information search engine users see is the one you want them to see. That’s probably in the mind of BP, which is now spending up to US$10,000 per day to maintain its ads at the most prominent ranking. Hopefully, to those who use the query to find more news (and probably more degrading to BP) they’ll be able to find an alternative tone, essentially a positive message in spite of the huge tragedy the spill has caused. All searches on Google for ‘BP oil spill’, ‘BP oil spill lawsuit’ and ‘BP suit’ show a sponsored listing from BP as the first result.

Hong Kong is a place spoiled by the sheer number of restaurants, bars and night clubs. Some come and go, others last for decades. Over the web, they’re also among the most sought after. As search engines offer more facilities for users to access (maps, reviews, etc), the need to be more visible on search engine results has now become as important as ever. Equally important is the website’s ability to provide what visitors are looking for, hence the likelihood of an online booking or a physical visit.

A personal favorite: A Pho 24 beef bowl in Ho Chi Minh.

Since stiff competition will always pose as a challenge to new players (and even to veterans), hopefully the following tips would be considered by restaurants, cocktail bars and clubs considering a website revamp.

Contextual advertising is a form of advertising where ads are displayed on a website based on its content. These ads are served by automated systems which try to display them on relevant pages.

Google AdSense is one example, where ads are related to the words found within the content of a page. This type of advertisement is praised by publishers because having relevant ads placed next to a piece of content, the click-through rate is high. But this also attracted controversy, just like how people thought that the placement of ads related to messages in Gmail is a breach of privacy. The issue has been settled already but it’s not the only one related to contextual ads. When publishing news content, ads served by automated systems instead of humans can become subject of controversy. The recent death of Dennis Hopper on the news was an example.

We may always assume that top ranking results on search engine queries get more exposure. And that’s not just guess work; heat map studies show that search engine users are likely fixated towards top results that are located towards the top left section of search results. (Sometimes, its proximity can vary as maps, news, images, PPC ads and other properties may also occupy the same vicinity.)

The infamous AOL data leak has opened up ideas on how much advantage is a number one ranking is going to enjoy over #2 ranking , or a #2 ranking over a #3 placer, and so on. SEO Scoop posted a breakdown on how much percentage each rank position is getting; it seems that being on top spot brings almost half of all traffic.