As part of my work in updating the recently published 2009 edition of the Econsultancy Best Practice Guide to SEO, and training on the Advanced SEO course it's essential I stay up-to-date by reviewing  the thousands of announcements by Google and commentary by SEO bloggers. While all SEO professionals and agencies will be doing this too, many general marketers, digital marketers don't have time for this, so in my blog category "Latest Updates on Google Marketing"  I hope it's useful to catalogue the most significant changes in marketing  and any actions you should  take. So, for me, these are the most significant changes in H1 2009 that Google has made which affect the natural search listings and so, SEO practice. The most important one for UK businesses is at the end. I also have a follow-up post on Google updates in Q2 2009. Google SEO updates summary

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Google tends to favour larger sites belonging to larger companies with well-known brands. Since more authority and trust is conferred on these sites which have greater scale and more backlinks, smaller and medium businesses (SMEs) have to work harder on their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to gain prominence in the natural listings of the search engines. But smaller businesses often have the advantage of being more nimble and dynamic, so if they can take advantage of this flexibility, how can they compete through SEO? To help answer this question, I asked Susan Hallam, a fellow-trainer and consultant whose clients include smaller businesses. My questions covered five key areas that SMEs should review for their SEO activities: SEO approaches SMEs can use to help them beat larger rivals in the search listings Tips on using the Google Local Business…

I love the expression Cult of Analytics! Two reasons. First, it's a great name for a book. The book in question is from Steve Jackson which is in the Elsevier E-marketing Essentials series for which I'm editor. In a future post, I'll explain the techniques I've found useful from the book, in particular, the REAN framework which I have succesfully applied in some recent consulting projects. [amazon-product]1856176118[/amazon-product] [amazon-product region="us"]1856176118[/amazon-product] Second, it highlights the difference between companies that are successful in their digital marketing and those that lag behind. This post highlights how Amazon has successfully applied the principle of developing a "Cult of Analytics" to drive its success.

Amazon's Culture of Metrics

The expression "Cult of Analytics" highlights one of the reasons behind Amazon's success - the culture that their CEO Jeff Bezos has instilled, almost from Day 1. In Amazonia:Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut, an excellent book charting Amazon's early growth from…

I've always believed that the most engaging, most effective blogs for marketing are not CEO blogs, rather they use guest bloggers; either different employees, or better still, customers. The award winning Tourism Ireland Taxi Challenge is another good example social media campaign of a customer video blog I featured a couple of  years ago.

The Blog Your Way to Antarctica campaign

The Blog Your Way to Antarctica campaign example I feature here is similar, but in this case social media is being used effectively to recruit the customer blogger. You may think this is a me too campaign similar to the "Best Job in the World Campaign" , but I think the way of getting customers involved is different in that it focuses more on blogging and encouraging bloggers to link back to the site.

Campaign results

A Yahoo search linkdomain:www.blogyourwaytoantarctica.com -site:www.blogyourwaytoantarctica.com shows nearly…

Not long ago, virtual reality was the futurists' "mot du jour" before the underwhelming takeup of VR gloves, headsets and Second Life. Now, in 2009, I'm sure you've noticed, augmented reality featuring widely in the media. So as an update to for the next editions of my books,  this post gives a definition and showcases some examples. I'd love to hear about other examples too - particularly where AR is being used for web marketing. Definition of augmented reality marketing It's tricky to define AR since it's new and has many different applications and feedback mechanisms from data capture to user. But here's the one sentence definition of how I see it used in commercial web context - please put me straight! Augmented reality blends real-world digital data capture typically with a digital camera in a webcam or mobile phone to create a browser-based digital representation or experience mimicking that of the real-world Examples always work…