We’d like to thank Promotion World and TopSEO’s this month for both ranking the Algo-holics at Direct Hit Solutions top SEO honors. We’ve been working long hours to bring real results to our SEO clients and take our SEO skills to the next level. We again appreciate the awards and are committed to providing the best Internet Marketing and Web Services available.

The new “buzz” (no pun intended) in the Internet Marketing World is Viral Marketing. Direct Hit Solutions launched our Viral Marketing Services a couple of months ago and we went through grueling testing to perfect the creation and management of what makes a Viral Marketing campaign a success and what can be otherwise known as the Viral Marketing flop.

Here’s some basics on what makes a Viral Marketing campaign successful

1. Create a Cool Concept- Seems easy enough, but too often companies try to replicate what made other company’s Viral Marketing campaigns successful and this often leads to a lack of interest and poor user response. Think outside the box!

2. Build a Microsite – Once your cool new concept is visualized after a good night drinking (playing a Sarah Palin drinking game), now it’s time to bring that concept to life.  Whether you’ve come up with a video, widget or something no-one has ever seen before, you’ll want to create a microsite around that concept that is different from the original products website and that can be tracked separately.

3. Grunt Work – Viral means “spread the virus”. Infecting only a few people might create some type of infection, but to make certain you get the proper exposure, you’ll need to infect as many people directly, meaning yourself, as you can. Don’t rely and don’t try some type of 3rd party spamming tool to create the virus. Get out there and get to as many people as possible directly. If people sense your spamming it can tarnish the campaign’s reputation and Social Networks like MySpace and Facebook can detect a spammer a mile away.

4. Track Your Results – Every Viral Marketing campaign has a separate success rate. There’s no guarantee that even if you do everything perfectly that your campaign will be a success, so Track Everything! Track downloads, user behavior and don’t skimp on this one. There are several good and free 3rd party tracking tools like Google Analytics, etc… that can help you with this one. 

5. Learn  – Lastly, after your Viral Marketing campaign has ended, take some time, yes more time than the fun night of drinking that gave you the brilliant Viral idea and analyze what worked and most importantly, what didn’t. Hopefully you left an area for comments on your microsite to get user feedback, but if you didn’t, you can always go back into the communities you developed for the Viral campaign and read feedback.

Here a some common misconceptions you’ll need to get out of your head when approaching a Viral campaign that others say simply don’t work.

1. You need to piss someone off on a video and that alone will work.
2. The Viral campaign needs to make people laugh.
3. Blood = Success

Check back as Viral Marketing 102 will be coming soon.

Aug 21, 2008 – TopSEOs.com has now ranked Direct Hit Solutions as a “Top 10″ SEO Company coming in at #9. This is a recent report in the August 2008 TopSEOs.com ranking report. Direct Hit Solutions was founded in 2005 in the outlying Chicago suburbs delivering solely Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing and now has increased their arsenal to include Web Design and Web Development. Included in this achievement was also as #1 ranking in Web Development and a #4 ranking in Reputation Management.

Direct Hit Solutions is more of a boutique SEM firm with clients ranging from small business to some of the Internet’s top web properties including CreditReport.com and Zango.

TopSEOs evaluates each SEO company based on a rigorous selection process. Each Internet marketing firm is evaluated in terms of:

- Customer feedback
- Overall performance
- Competitive advantage
- Superior services and pricing
- Customer and technical support
- Response to client problems
- Innovations that set it apart from the competition
- Overall efficiency

You can view the Direct Hit Solutions website @ http://www.directhitsolutions.com

I’ve had many people ask me recently about what Google is looking for when the mysterious Googlebot crawls their website. I with most everything I have people explain to me, to keep things in layman’s terms. Think of the Googlebot as someone you really want to take out for a great night on the town.

Make a Good 1st Impression!

Like you want to do on any 1st date, make a good 1st impression. Make everything as perfect and as well thought out as possible. Now you can’t exactly make your site smell good or give your fellow dater (the Googlebot) flowers, but you can make sure everything is buttoned up and ready for a good night. For instance, one of the first things a Googlebot notices is basics, like tags. Make sure your tags, yes all of them including title, meta content, meta keywords, alt tags etc… are in good shape. Also avoid being fake (no tag stuffing) and make sure they make sense.

Don’t Be Cheap or Sell Yourself Short!

It’s very easy on dates to forget about the little things, but daters always notice the little things on the 1st date especially the Googlebot. When your describing something, BE DESCRIPTIVE. Makes enough sense, but time and time again I run into newby webmasters that create a graphic masterpiece with little to no detail describing the masterpiece. Remember, the Googlebot or your date aren’t mindreaders. If you don’t share as much as you can to your date. You don’t want to go home from the date that night or after the Googlebot has left your site thinking “what ifs” for hours. Make it count then and there. Let it all hang out. I mean for god sake’s, this could be THE ONE or the crawl that lands you on the 1st Page!

Part II coming soon. By the way, the Algo-holics just launched our new site. Take a look if you get a sec. http://directhitsolutions.com

Ok. Cheers to Google. I’ve had SEO migraines for years now, but they have miraculously vanished now that Google has improved their keyword research tool. What have they done? What they should’ve done years ago. Google has now added numerical data or actual monthly Search volume as part of the free keyword tool. Who knows why they gave such a vague green bar without actual Search volume numbers before, but those days seem to be over. Now if they’d incorporate KEI , better Keyword Trends and some other basics, Wordtracker and Wordze might be in for an early retirement. So jager bombs our on the Algo-holics at Direct Hit Solutions to all parties responsible for lifting our SEO migraines and making keyword research better.

The staff at Direct Hit Solutions are huge MMA (Mixed Martial Arts, Cagefighting) fans, so to no surprise, we were all extremely excited on the huge MMA Superfight at UFC 86 this weekend. Unfortunately for myself, I was unable to watch the Rampage Jackson vs. Forest Griffin headliner, but I was able to keep track thanks to many useful MMA blogs and Wikipedia? Yes Wikipedia. I was tuned into the fight as much as possible this past Saturday night and I’m a huge Rampage Jackson, former UFC light-heavyweight Champion. Anyways, as I mentioned, I was able to get live updates all night, but these updates seemed to slow down once the main event started. It was making me crazy not to know what was going on but that soon changed as I was able to find the results thanks to your friend and mine, Wikipedia. Believe it or not, the top result on Google for “UFC 86 Results” exactly when the fight concluded was our trusty friend Wikipedia. We all know that Wikipedia is optimized like crazy for general static info, but I never would have guessed that it would rank as the top Search Result for a live MMA Event. I’m officially calling Wikipedia, the most valuable website on the Internet. Congrats to Wikipedia and drinks are on the house!

The argument that SEO is Dead is preposterous! New stats from SEMPO show that not only has SEO not even hit yet, but the SEO fetus is still growing. According to SEMPO, the North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007 and SEO only accounts for a mere 10.5% as part of the pie. How can something be dead that hasn’t even been born yet?

In fact, my prediction is that SEO and Organic traffic awareness is likely to increase as most small to mid-size business owners can’t afford spending thousands per day on PPC as their larger competitors do. PPC definitely has its advantages, but how should we as Search Professionals expect an emerging competitor of Dell for instance to outspend and compete with the mega giant that is spending more than $200k day on PPC. The best alternative to the PPC craze is definitely SEO and new and up and coming businesses should take advantage in an industry that is growing at a record pace.

Need another reason as if trying to outspend the big boys doesn’t sound intimidating enough? Organic traffic converts better than its PPC counterpart. The majority of retailers, almost 1/2, maintain that natural search delivers better sales conversions than PPC. Organic needs to be put in the spotlight a little but more, however with the major SE’s getting $0 from Organic and Billions from PPC, this is still not realistically going to happen in the near future unless Google and Yahoo buy their own SEO company like Microsoft has.

Another free shot from the algorithm addicts (algo-holics) at Direct Hit Solutions.

It appears as though the UK has figured out that spending $$$ on Search Engine Marketing and Online Ad Spending is the one way to guarantee growth. According to Reuters, Online Ad Spending in the UK will overtake television as the top advertising medium in the UK this year.

And I thought the US was the country to follow. It appears even though the US has hit a recession, Online Ad Spending here is likely to increase and remain the hottest trend of advertising on the mainland with Search Engine Marketing remaining the hottest trend in Online Spending.

So to answer the question, I believe it’s only a matter of time and a short period of time before US advertisers shift the majority of their yearly ad spend Online and realize that the days of spending on a declining Television industry are coming to an end.

The algo-holics at Direct Hit Solutions will keep you up to date on this topic. Check back frequently.

The SEO team at Direct Hit Solutions has recently (meaning in the past couple of months) noticed ranking changes on yes everybody’s favorite Search Engines: Google & Yahoo. So what is going on with these SE’s?

We remember a little over a year ago we received floods of calls after a huge shift in Yahoo was made leaving many website owners scratching their heads and wondering what the deal with Yahoo was. Well, we’d like to officially announce Yahoo is at it again and they are finally looking like a real Google competitor. The recent changes that Yahoo is making are finally making SERP’s look reasonable again. For a long time we was wondering if Yahoo would ever figure out what they were doing wrong, and it looks like the buyout offer from Microsoft made them get back on track. It appears that they’ve gone back to the basics and started ranking based on the way it should be i.e. content, site structure, keyword density, etc. We’d like to buy a shot for Yahoo and say “Welcome Back”. We missed you!

And we didn’t forget about the Googlebots either. It must be hard to be perfect. We can’t imagine being in any business and owning nearly 70% of the marketshare. Fresh content and videos have now climbed their way to the top of Google’s SERP’s and are now a force to be reckoned with. So what can you do about this? Simple.

Step 1. Create a blog and update it often. Make sure the blog posts are written with loads of content and keywords that are generating current and future interest.

Step 2. Create correctly coded videos and place them on YouTube. Not only can these videos get ranked highly on the SERP’s, but they can also generate a steady flow of traffic from the streaming video giant.

Lastly, this final shot we’re buying is for Google. Cheers to Google for making searching a more pleasurable experience for the searcher. We were all getting sick of looking at outdated info on the web and videos make searching tons more fun.

Nielsen Online has released data showing that Wikipedia’s 8,000% growth in the past 5 years is attributed to search. Really? Is that what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1? I had no idea.

Breaking down the not-at-all suprising data:

Google sent the most search traffic to en.wikipedia.org with 61% of searches on home computers and 66% of work computers. Yahoo came in second at 19% home, 16% work. The main www.Wikipedia.org came in third, beating out MSN and AOL at home and search.MSN.com and search.Live.com at work.

Wikipedia’s growth is slowing, however. Here’s data for unique visitors in the month of April for the past six years with the year-over-year growth percentages:

2003 700,000, n/a
2004 2,082,000, 197%
2005 6,753,000, 224%
2006 25,970,000, 285%
2007 45,934,000 77%
2008 55,820,000 17%

Source: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080515-095839