Internet marketing works across many industries but it is particularly successful for health care sites, including doctors practices, cosmetic surgery centres, beauty treatments and many more. The reason is simple, when there is demand, there is a market.

If you belong to the sector and have not had any success yet, you need to ask yourself:

1. Am I covering the right marketing channels?
2. Do I have internal knowledge or proven third party expertise?
3. Do I know my company and my service?
4. Have I placed myself in the correct competitive environment?
5. Do I have the right tools in place to track results & return of investment?

More often than not, many of these questions remain unanswered and too many times, it is not clear if a campaign is profitable, successful or optimised. The Health Care sector has its own rules and sensitivities, so running a campaign requires knowledge and market insight. Social Media has a range of marketing services for healthcare companies. Our in-depth industry knowledge gives us an advantage over competition.

With Google services expanding I thought it would be a useful insight to list keywords that Google dominates with number 1 positions, both SEO and PPC  in it’s own results (for maximum impact try to read only the blue keywords first):

SEO

1. Google Search – Search
2. Google Docs – Documents, Document, Docs, Doc
3. Webmaster Central – Webmasters, Webmaster
4. Google Analytics – Analytic, Analytics
5. Google Maps – Map, Maps
6. Gooogle Images – Images, Image
7. Google Finance – Finance
8. Blogger – Blogs, Blog
9. Google Translate – Translate, Translation
10. Google Videos – Videos, Video, Vid
11. Google Sites – Sites
12. Google Groups – Group, Groups
13. Google Alerts – Alerts, Alert
    
14. Google Earth – Earth
15. Google Code – Code
16. Google Labs – Lab, Labs
17. Google Desktop – Desktop, Desktop Download
18. Google Talk – Talk
19. Google Trends – Trends

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For small and medium-size businesses that are dependent on their telephone activity to generate revenue there are no excuses for not tracking the calls. When you engage in online marketing through various channels such as SEO, PPC and social media you need to be able to identify your income source.

Social Media Ltd is proud to introduce call tracking services focused on SEO & PPC campaigns. Stop losing track of your sales once the consumer picks up the phone, and use simple software that measures in detail where the call came from, if it was answered and how long it lasted for. Other features include sales and lead tracking as well as call recording, a powerful training tool for those in call centers. You can see the locations of the callers, their telephone number and how many times they called.

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There is a growing notion that SEO is a seasonal process, affected by a company’s sales cycle and that short bursts of activity or heavy investment can yield similar results to that of a PPC or social media campaign. Afraid it is not that simple.

SEO is always a process that is looking to build for the future. Focusing on the moment can not only distract from the end goals but also destabilise any campaign. Since most SEO projects start delivering real results 3-6 months after introduction, you have little ability to predict when positions will break through to the first page, or how long they will stay there if you slow down your efforts.

First positions are like spoiled kids, they need care, attention and further investment for the future. Treat them with respect and you shall prevail. Ignore this rule and you might need to start juggling priorities until it is impossible to see the big picture.

SEO is not seasonal, it is a long term investment, not a cycle, more of a linear line that needs to consistently move forward.

SEO has widely accepted principles across all industries. However with search engines becoming more sophisticated each sector is developing certain characteristics. The Travel sector is a competitive one and an area that boosted the web’s popularity. Travel companies were one of the first to feel the power of the internet in their accounts and have evolved much since.

When it comes to SEO, data manipulation has become more important than site structure. Finding new niche space is becoming increasingly difficult and the knowledge and product experience are becoming more important. As with the old days, the more competitive a product becomes the better the salesman.

In SEO for Travel there is such a thing as direct sales. Good SEO rankings are also proven to increase the positive perception of a brand. In Travel though, it is much more complicated. As the searches and algorithms change so does the direction of a well structured SEO campaign. When seasonality also becomes a factor things intensify.

So a new breed of search engine optimisation, Travel SEO is naturally born out of this process and the game is on.

The web evolves and changes very rapidly. A change in which people have been resistant to is the change from www to non-www domain names such as http://www.example.com to http://example.com. In both situations you have a redirection from the one to other to guarantee seamless use.

However cutting off the www element you save time and money. You don’t have to SAY www anymore. You can just say that ‘my site is example.com’. Saves time, and no, I am not going to say time is money. Not yet anyway.

Cutting off the www also means it is faster to type (in Firefox, the retro IE still does not support this) but most importantly easier to memorise and remember. Hence more money.

If there is any reason you think you should keep www, I would very much like to hear it.

It is a little comical that MSN adCenter fails to rank in position number 1 for the term MSN adCenter.
Maybe it goes to show… Read more

It seems that BA has acquired some strange SEO habits. Such one is that they hide the text displayed within Flash files on the site.
One could argue that the text is contained in the visual file and therefore this is not classed as SPAM.

However, when the user lands on the page, they are not presented with the text, which only starts displaying in the Flash movie if the user decides to play it. Certainly a major dilemma here. Is this SPAM?

News that search giant Google is going to introduce social media elements, such as voting search results for specific queries and approving or disapproving them in order to modify their own search results.

The big question is:
I am continuously logged in to my Google account. If I disapprove of one site in a specific query and that site refreshes it’s content and provides something useful a few months later…will I then lose it forever? Read more

One of the most common misconception of internet users is that organic (or natural) search engine rankings, (the rank of a website when making a search), are influenced by the number of visitors to that website. This is not true… Read more