Drew - 19/01/06 - Search Watch - Are Search Engines Leeches?

Usability Guru Jacob Nielsen has brought up some interesting points in an article outlining how he considers our dependency on search engines to be detrimental.

I agree in principal to many of his concerns: online marketing should not be dependent on search, but we also feel a smart campaign will use the strongest elements of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to inform all marketing processes and increase traffic.

Nielsen lists some alternatives to search optimisation which we prefer to think of as mutually beneficial:

• Email newsletters. This is a vital source of direct marketing to increase repeat purchases/conversions and build a relationship with the user. It can work in tandem with an SEO campaign; the emails sending traffic to products not yet ranked on search engines.
• Request marketing. Search marketing can evolve a site when used in conjunction with direct feedback and user trend analysis.
• RSS, email on products, extras. All valid ideas, but the icing on the cake rather than large traffic generators.

He also recommends Affiliate Programs. However, these can have a negative impact on ranking (duplicate content, affiliates in bad neighbourhoods) so only websites that can honestly recommend the destination site to its own target audience should be approached. Choose the wrong affiliates and your search traffic will dry up, or your online credibility will be affected.

Finally, Nielsen discusses how PPC (Pay Per Click) dependency can inflate the cost of a campaign (as your competitors increase their bids/quality of their sites so must you). One solution is to use PPC in conjunction with a natural SEO campaign. As the organic search results become more successful, the PPC budget can be decreased or invested in new keywords to avoid so-called bidding wars.

So, although it is not necessary to liberate yourself from search engines, it is important to look outside the box and experiment with new ways to develop your site and attract new visitors.

Dan - 19/01/06 - Comment - We have just returned from our annual client drinks event. Thought I would summarise for those of you who were unable to make it...

Aside from the usual wine & buffet, Vicky gave an update on what happened at Chameleon in 2005, and what we have in store for 2006.

2005 - We had a good steady year. We acquired clients in numerous industry sectors, including as Education (UCL, University of Southampton), Property (Allsop, Fadesa), and Not-for-profit (Childline). Also, we established our in-house online marketing department and dedicated time and resource to further refining our modular code library.

Vicky outlined two projects as examples of our work last year. First off, UNICEF had a great year online, not least through their online shops and their new Inspired Gifts shop, where people can buy a range of virtual gifts that then translate to aid, such as goats, tents and water pumps. The Inspired Gifts shop was a huge hit over Christmas.

Secondly, we developed a UK site for Fadesa, the leading developer of second homes in Spain. Not only does this site give them a well-designed online presence in the UK, but we also complemented the site design/development with an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) campaign which in a matter of 14 weeks has seen significant progress with key phrase visibility on Google, MSN and Yahoo. For instance, here's a Google seach for "Apartment in Ayamonte". You'll spot Fadesa at the top.

Of course, we're proud of all the sites we launched last year. I posted a full list in the blog for December.

2006 - This year's looking very promising. A number of projects for high profile clients in the pipeline that will go live this year. We're looking forward to those! We are also recruiting again to bolster our team, and will be investing in further R&D resource to ensure we're on the cutting edge of web technology for the foreseeable future.

Last but not least, we wanted to say thank you to all of our clients for their business in 2005, and that we're looking forward to working with them in 2006 and beyond.

Chris - 10/01/06 - Comment - Well, I am glad to say that Sir Howard Stringer, Sony's CEO, didn't make a liar out of me at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week - he said that Sony had suffered from a scatter gun approach to new product launches in the past and in the future would throw its weight behind fewer products with strong revenue potential.

The two examples he gave of such products, were Sony's portable game player (PSP) and the Sony Reader - the new electronic book reader that I mentioned in my blog at the end of last year, which apparently Sony are going to launch in America in April. See the full article at ft.com for more info, which was accompanied by a nice picture of Sir Howard with the book reader in the article in the FT at the weekend.

The FT also reported on another web milestone as digital downloads sales overtook the sales of the traditional single for the first time. When I worked in the music industry in the 90's, we all thought the single if not dead was on it's way to a slow decline into oblivion. Singles were simply marketing loss leaders for Album sales.

However, now that people can download single mp3 tracks, easily put together their own play lists on their PCs and mp3 players, upload their playlists for others to applaud or ridicule - the single is going is going through something of renaissance. However, this boom in creating "home grown" compilations has been at the expense of traditional compilation albums, whose sales dropped 15.7 per cent during the year whereas sales of albums by individual artists or bands increased for a 6th consecutive year with rise of 1.4 per cent to 126m units.

Downloads rose 250 per cent from 5.8 to 26.4 million tracks in 2005 and the year saw the first week in which digital sales topped 1m unit between Christmas and New Year. Sales of the traditional single, however, dropped 19 per cent to 21.4m units in 2005 and it was only the increase in digital single sales that spurred a 48 per cent rise in the number of total digital and physical single track songs sold according to figures compiled by the The Official Chart Company for the BPI, the music industry's trade body.