Digital Marketer Profile: Ben Liau

Posted on | October 25, 2011 | No Comments

Ben was born in Melbourne Australia but grew up in Malaysia until the age of 20, he then moved to Queesland to study and work, and moved back to Melbourne in 2007.  Ben has a bachelor degree in IT and a masters in integrated marketing communications.

Ben started in the digital marketing industry in 2006, beginning with working with domains, hosting and websites. While he was the channel development manager at Planetdomain he learned about SEO, and SEM and started doing freelance work for small agencies just for work experience.

After Planetdomain Ben decided to specialise in SEO, and SEM working at  fairfax digital’s agency for search marketing.  After honing his digital marketing skills, Ben decided to take up an in-house marketing manger role at a start up called mooo.

At mooo he currently manages the marketing function of the business, and has since launched a sister brand to mooo in the UK called tinyme.

As a proud Malaysian Ben urges all Malaysians to live up their dreams and dare to be the best they can be whether the are back home or in a foreign country. Malaysia Boleh!

Google is opening an office in Malaysia

Posted on | January 30, 2011 | No Comments

Hello people,

Sorry i know its been a while but life has been pretty hectic.

I just found out the big boys Google are finally opening up an office in Malaysia.

From what i remember Google initially wanted to open an office in Malaysia a while back, but decided to go with Hong Kong and then Singapore.

Its good to hear that people in Malaysia are starting to really take the internet seriously and Google has positioned itself in Malaysia.

Its looking like things could really heat up in the online marketing space, and im keen to see how things progress.

All in all its been a long time coming for online marketing to get ahead in Malaysia to be in line with other countries like Singapore, Hong Kong & Australia.

If anyone knows how to contact google malaysia, please let me know.

Till we meet again

Tips on image SEO

Posted on | November 13, 2010 | No Comments

Holla , im still trying find time to do seo experiments and also blog about it. Life is just so busy with my girlfriend and work, that I have to grasp any time I get.

Ok today im going to go over the 5 basic tips of optimising images for SEO.

I found, that images & specifically the alt text that’s inside of them are closely related metrics for SEO. Images are very useful for people and also search engines. Images seem to connect better with people than just plain text.

Tip 1, well I better go over what the alt text is first. The alt text is the bit of text that displays when an image fails to load, so this naturally would be great for SEO. Best tip here is to be very descriptive use the right keywords and keep it in 140 characters.
Tip 2, the next important thing is the file name, which works with the same principles. The file name is information that you give to the search engines to identify what the image is about.

Tip 3, Naming and tagging images are not all that is important. Another important seo tip is having the surrounding text descriptive and using the right keywords that compliment the file and alt tag.

Tip 4, Inbound anchor links need to also be complimenting the file name and alt tags using supporting and related keywords.

Tip 5, this tip is actually what ive been saying for the last 4 tips. Google likes words that are related to each other, so when creating any of the above, just make sure that the keywords are supporting and related.

Ok that’s all the time I have today. Still on the quest to fix up my schedules so I have more time dedicated to this blog.

If you do find the stuff im talking about interesting, please do leave a comment for me and let me know. It does take time doing this stuff, so id love to hear your thoughts.

Ciaos for now

Site Architecture Tips

Posted on | September 21, 2010 | No Comments

Happy Malaysia Day everyone, hope you all had a great day.

Ive been so busy over the last couple of weeks, its been crazy.

Anyway this week I want to go back to basics, so im going to talk about website architecture and what to avoid.

With all my experience with websites, I continually find that site architecture best practices are always being ignored. Since everyone is in a holiday mood, I thought it would be good for me to provide a quick peek into what I would recommend on the structural side of SEO:

• Dynamic URLs : Please avoid these completely. Search engines don’t like dynamic urls, as it affects the trust factor of a site. ISAPI and mod_rewrite are simple to implement and in regards to seo positivity, certainly worth the time.

• 3 Clicks to Any Page : Normally, webdev industry insiders consider this a rule of thumb for usability, but it’s also very critical to successful SEO. If you want search engine spiders to quickly find your site content and engines to rank your site well, make your sitemap page accessible from every single page on the site, and if you’ve got a freakishly huge site, use sub-sitemaps for unique sections to ensure that most of pages can be accessed in 2-3 clicks.

• Avoid Unneccessary Subdomains : This is up for speculation as to whether each of the search engines applies the whole of a domain’s trust and linkjuice weight to sub-domains. Some people think it’s on a case-by-case basis, which I find quite reasonable, and other people thing they are generally lower valued as compared to the primary domain. In both cases, unless you’re looking to dominate the SERPs with a subdomain takeover , subdomain content should go into a subfolder.

• Internal Anchor Text Bombing : This tactic used to work a long time ago. You could easily change the link to your website’s home page to read “malaysia mortgage refinance” and actually be ranking for it. Luckily, Google & Yahoo! got smart quickly and actually started penalizing websites that used this sneaky tactic. Your best move now is to write internal anchor text for visitors, and not search engines. If you run a Malaysia real estate site and link to a refinance page, it is fine to use that anchor text, but for general site navigation, this technique is more likely to hurt you than help you.

• PageRank Flow : Don’t waste your time and ignore it. Back in the day PageRank flow through a website used to be a valid tactic, but nowadays, you’re just wasting your valuable time finding the number of links, where they point to and attempting to modify your website based on an age old formula. Also, keeping a watchful eye on your outbound links dont pay. Just think of the human user on your site and deliver what they would want. Focusing on the user will take you where you wanna go.

• One Piece of Content, to One URL : This probably effects more big, commercial sites than any other ones. The issue is that the same content can be accessed in many ways and on multiple URLs, forcing the search engines and visitors, to choose which version is the canonical version, which to link to and which link to disregard. No one wins when a site fights with itself. If you have to deliver the content in different ways,  you should rely on cookies or session IDs so you don’t get the spiders confused.

I hope this was helpful and not tooo confusing, im sure the geeky web devs understand what im talking about..

Anyway my google analytics for my blog seems to have gone haywire, so I have to investigate on what happened. Please if you have any comments or want to share your own experiences feel free. I get heaps of spammers submitting comments so im abit weary of anything that looks suspicious

Ill next time, same channel….see yaa.

Yahoo or Google… That is the question

Posted on | September 13, 2010 | No Comments

Ive been posting about seo a lot so I thought id talk abit about PPC.

Now the 2 main players are google adwords and yahoo search (YSM).

Honestly using yahoo’s platform to manage ppc campaigns is a total nightmare, it is just so hard to use. While google adwords is excellent and has constant updates to make things easier for advertisers

But after running the same campaigns on both platforms for a period of time the results are quite surprising.

Yahoo! is most of the time half the price, and double the ROI. My site’s conversion rate with visitors from the Yahoo, which display on Yahoo!, MSN & other smaller engines are always outperforming the Google ads by double or more.

Now these are the exact same ads, with the exact same landing pages and the exact same search terms. The cause is quite a mystery, and I don’t want to attribute it entirely to demographics (yet).

I have to say that Yahoo!’s performance has been surprisingly good – the conversion rate across search terms was over 10%, while Google’s was under 5%. Click through rate is also exceptional – 7.5%, while Google’s CTR is around 4.5%. I’m going to test new ads and further optimize the landing pages, but I’m not convinced about what Google is reporting and I am very concerned about just how “inflated” google’s click and impression count is. There are many rumours that googles click fraud is not actually working.

So the question is, do you go for the popular option, or the option that bring results. And the answer is do BOTH!

Sorry but this is a short one, next post will be on social media… how interesting!

Ben Liau

Use PPC to test before going straight to SEO!

Posted on | September 6, 2010 | No Comments

This is a simple concept – in any given seo campaign, you are naturally going to gather a list of high-traffic, (perceived) high value keywords that are an optimistic goal for your site to dominate. For a site like onlineadvertising.com, those might be the highly competitive terms like “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization,” while in a field like thestar.com.my it might be “malaysian news” or “tv news.”

The problem is that while these keyword searches seem very obvious, ranking for them can be quite challenging on both the content and link building side. To justify that investment, you need to know, from a business perspective, that cash returns will follow high the rankings. One great way to do this is to use paid search (PPC) to investigate the likely ROI of visits from those particular keywords. Buy the keyword traffic on google for a few weeks or a month and measure visitors using a segmented tracking campaign . If the visits that arrive via those searches are converting well and produce good value, you know that a serious investment is validated If, however, they turn out to be crap and have a low propensity to produce returns, you can re-look on higher ROI targets.

There’s just a few valuable tips to bear in mind when you thinking about following this plan.

• Paid search traffic may behave differently than organic traffic, so don’t  believe the figures at 100% accuracy. Build in some room for mistakes, and you’ll create far better expectations.
• When creating your PPC campaign for test purposes, make sure to narrow to exact match so you don’t accidentally measure the wrong type of traffic. It’s great to do this and track & measure response in a PPC campaign, but with SEO, it take time, and you won’t be able to naturally rank for those same keywords unless you identify and target them individually.
• Make sure to narrow to a local geographic area, especially if your keywords contain any potential local intent or local presence. Otherwise, you can seriously over or under-estimate.
• Keep seasonal variation/flux in mind. Use google insights to help out. Volume fluctuations usually indicate changing intent as well, so purchasing keywords in a low period can decrease the accuracy of your forecasts.

That’s this week from me, hope it was helpful. Im trying to make my post a weekly thing, and cover all areas, even the basic seo stuff.

Ben Liau Outta here



Servers and SEO are best friends!

Posted on | August 30, 2010 | No Comments

Today i want to talk about servers, and how they can be mysterious for even an SEO specialist.

A hosting company or server administrator often handles that area of websites, which can lead to a lack of knowledge about them among SEO specialists. Servers deserve more attention than they get and play an important role in SEO.

Here are some tips to get you started in learning more about this important area of SEO.

Domains

The domain of your site is the starting point. What type of server hosts your domain? Is it on a shared server?, or is it a dedicated server? Dedicated servers cost alot more, but allow you much more control.

Or mabe your domain is hosted on multiple servers, in which case you can have a load balancer sitting in front of the servers. Depending on the configuration, a load balancer may actually lead to duplicate content problems.

For example, if users are being to be sent to www1, www2, www3, etc., by a load balancer. This was common years ago, but less so today because they can be set to treat all requests as simply www instead.

Subdomains

Subdomains are another issue altogether. Unlike most directories, your subdomain can be hosted anywhere.

You can although set a subdomain on the same server, or use an “A” record DNS entry for pointing the subdomain to another server’s IP. A “CNAME” DNS entry also allows you to point to another domain entirely, masking it with your domain.

For example, you may want to use a content delivery service such as Amazon, where you can point your images subdomain to their servers. This reduces the requests coming to your server, which helps your pages load faster.

While page speed has always been very important, it’s now an essential factor in search engine ranking. Speed considerations alone are a good reason to consider upgrading your servers, as well as offloading content.

International Implications

Another server factor in SEO is the actual physical location of the box. For multinational sites, it’s important to give search engines as many signals as possible for them to tie the correct country location to the correct site. One of those signals is the actual country a site is hosted in.

For example, you could set up a subdomain for your Malaysian site and actually host that subdomain in Malaysia, or set up a .com.my site hosted there.

Handling Redirects

Another area where servers play a big role in SEO are redirects. While using a 301-type redirect set in an individual page with server side script can be done, a site-wide redirect management happens at the server level.

This is done with an .htaccess file on an Apache web server, but can be set in IIS as well. For IIS 6, an ISAPI rewrite plug-in needs to be installed to make redirects easier. On IIS 7, Microsoft has finally come out with their very own URL rewrite module.

Microsoft has also developed an SEO Kit for IIS, which has a number of options to make SEO alot easier — including managing sitemaps, robots, and other various reports. In addition to redirects, your web server will need to be set up with the  proper 404 error handling.

So take a break from optimizing title tags and alt text to take your server administrator out for makan. You might find an important new friend in your SEO efforts.

Hope you enjoyed this, and stay tuned for more SEO insights.

Where to focus your SEO efforts in?

Posted on | August 25, 2010 | No Comments

Google is not the preferred search engine in all countries.

You’ve probably heard of Baidu, the Chinese search engine, which leads Google China on searches by 52 percent to 33 percent.

There are several theories about why Baidu is the Google-killer in China. Some experts believe that Chinese patriotism is the answer (despite the fact that Baidu began in the U.S.). But the most likely reason is that the Chinese like to search the Web for MP3 files (55 percent of Baidu users are mp3 researchers). Baidu is best for illegal downloading because it requires less stringent rules than Western seekers. Among others, Google’s popularity is attributed to it being optimized for the alphabet and English language.

For instance Yandex is preferred in Russia (with a 64 percent market share). Google.ru fails, mainly because Yandex is built around the Cyrillic alphabet and recognizes the Russian grammar and inflection. Then of course there is Seznam, the most dominant search engine in the Czech Republic.

In South Korea, Naver has around 70 percent of the search market (compared to Google’s 2 percent), while, the Japanese prefer Yahoo Japan  & Google.

Of course, it is logical that if you have a Russian website, you want to focus most of your SEO efforts in Yandex and Baidu in China, and so on.

Make you think how you should really be planning for global search domination.

What is SEO?

Posted on | August 16, 2010 | No Comments

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some havea highly specialized focus while others take a more broad and general approach. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization (since so many of those elements intertwine).

Why does my company/organization/website need SEO?

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines – Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves (although AOL gets nearly 10% of searches, their engine is powered by Google’s results). If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search – people who want what you have visiting your site. Whether your site provides content, services, products or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users.

Search queries, the words that users type into the search box which contain terms and phrases best suited to your site carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make (or break) an organization’s success. Targeted visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue and exposure like no other. Investing in SEO, whether through time or finances, can have an exceptional rate of return.

Why can’t the search engines figure out my site without SEO help?

Search engines are always working towards improving their technology to crawl the web more deeply and return increasingly relevant results to users. However, there is and will always be a limit to how search engines can operate. Whereas the right moves can net you thousands of visitors and attention, the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal. In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO can also help boost rankings, so that content that has been found will be placed where searchers will more readily see it. The online environment is becoming increasingly competitive and those companies who perform SEO will have a decided advantage in visitors and customers.

The Future of (Offline) Shopping Search Engines

Posted on | August 9, 2010 | No Comments

There’s a new supermarket in our town. A very nice one. It’s big, it has lots more products than the old one had, it’s open more, and it has all the latest technology. You can even scan your own products — no more lines!

So it’s perfect! Or is it? When I was walking through the aisles of the supermarket this morning, looking for the macaroni, I realized this supermarket was missing something: a search engine.

Yes, I know, I’m biased, I work in search. I think everything needs a search engine. Or worse, everything is a search engine.

But when looking for that macaroni, which I never had any trouble finding in the old store, it became clear to me how I wanted to see my future shopping. And a search engine is needed for that.

Now, in this case I don’t mean online shopping. I mean serious, hard-core supermarket shopping. For my bread, my milk, and yes, my macaroni.

I know I can have things sent home, but I like going to the shop. It gets me out once in a while, and I might even run into some people. It’s nice. So, before you start commenting about delivery, I know I can do that, but I still want to go to the shop, OK?

It Starts With Making a Shopping List

There’s already talk of refrigerators that can add milk to your list when you run out of it. Of course, I want that, but I want more!

I have an Android phone. I want to make my shopping list with that phone, so it has to be connected to that refrigerator.

But I also want it to scan other products I want to buy and I’ll have to be able to talk to it (voice recognition) in order to make the list. And, of course, my wife, or anybody I want, should have access to that list if I allow them to. That’s the obvious stuff so far at home.

The Actual Search Engine Comes in Now

It must first point out what shops I would like to buy at. Is it just that one supermarket, or am I willing to go elsewhere (e.g., for a better price)? If so, it should show which shops I can choose from, which has the best prices, which is nearest by, etc.

Based on those choices, it should map me a route that I have to take when going to town (these directions being shown on my phone).

In-Store Search Engine

The application should show me what I need to buy (the list), but it also has to show me where I can find it. So no more searching for that macaroni. It should take me there, based on GPS data. And it should show me where all the other stuff I want is located — preferably, showing me the best route to take within the store.

(Paid) Suggestions

Oh, and let’s not forget the suggestions, which can at the same time be the business model here. When I’m going for that macaroni, the search engine might just suggest I get some cheese with that.

And here’s the business part: paid suggestions. Every store could have its paid suggestions in there. Based on where I’m walking, it could offer me discounts for specific products that aren’t on my list. Personalized, of course — I don’t want the same offer as that old lady in front of the vegetables.

It might just be I’d be buying a lot more that you’d expect. Sounds simple doesn’t it?

Not Search Engine Like At All?

Well, it’s a search engine all the way. Search engines are more than just machines that index the web. They (are going to?) index the world.

We might not call them search engines (the word “app” comes to mind…) but they certainly are search engines. Which will make the job of a search marketer much more than optimizing a website. And actually, that already is the case.

Search marketing has already become more than website optimizing. You just have to see it.

Well, that’s my take on the future of shopping search. Now, I’m off, gonna make some macaroni and cheese. If I can find the cheese, that is…