Self-absorbed, coddled, selfish, over-confident, arrogant, and accused of suffering from a deep epidemic of narcissism, Gen Y’s are constantly battered and bruised from those of earlier generations.

However, in the world of digital marketing it is Gen Y’s that are the cornerstone of our ever-expanding business; offering professional and cutting edge advice while showing our clients real results.

Here’s why:

• For starters, Gen Y’s are techy. Sure many Gen X’s and Baby Boomers are relatively active in the digital space, but Gen Y’s have shown older generations massive time-saving tech shortcuts that increase their productivity.
• Gen Y’s speak digital as their first language. They sleep with their iPhone under the pillow, are searching the net whilst watching TV, and are usually involved in 5-10 asynchronous conversations at any given time of the day.  This convergence of media, technology and communication  has unwittingly bred a generation of very capable multi-taskers and digital natives. They can take in huge amounts of information and filter out what is most useful to THEM. It’s no wonder that they are the most digitally targeted marketing segment. Which leads to my next point…
• They’re sponges. Some of us might see facebook, or just surfing the net as a mere pass time. However, these guys are communicating and absorbing a wide range of information from various sources.  If your business is looking to delve into the murky waters of Social Media, do you know what social media channels and strategies are right for your business? We rely on the Gen Y’s in our office to provide extensive advice on how your company can capitalise on  the social media boom through social media marketing and promotion.
• They’re natural Googlers. Gen Y’s have been using the internet for as long as they can remember. They rely on it for information and use it to source the most up-to-date products. They will rarely go beyond the first page of Google searches; therefore SEO & SEM is imperative when attempting to target them. And due to Gen Y emerging as the largest demographic in Australia (with 4.67million of them floating around), Reload Media understands your business is likely interested in a slice of the Gen Y pie! We have Gen Y SEO & SEM specialists who know how to effectively target Gen Y’s and take your online presence to the next level.
• They buzz! Gen Y’s are switched on and full of energy. They provide a company with that much needed positive momentum that uplifts everyone in the room. Is your business currently running on empty? Maybe you need a Gen Y to come in and add some spark.
• Opportunity drives them. Some of the biggest complaints people have about Gen Y’s are that:

1. They don’t have the patience to stay at one job for long enough,
2. They will inevitably leave and work overseas, and
3. That they expect to reach the top immediately.

This simply isn’t true. However, we have found that, by simply offering Gen Y’s a Gen Y working environment and presenting them with actual responsibility and trust to grow your business, they will relish the opportunity and exceed your expectations.

• They’re not into 9-5. They’re more 24/7. Shoot a Gen Y an email at 11pm and I would bet my bottom dollar that you’ll get a quick reply. They are not phased about putting in extra time to get the job done. Our Gen Y staff members put endless hours in to ensure our clients get industry leading service.
• Finally, Gen Y’s are adaptable. They thrive on change and learning a plethora of new information. Just ask a Gen Y to learn something new and report the findings to you and they’ll enthusiastically jump on it.

So if you’re still unsure about Gen Y’s, then you should employ one and witness the momentum they can add to your business given the right mix of responsibility and opportunity. In digital marketing, we depend on their natural digital expertise in order to keep up to date with the latest trends and maximise our clients results. This is what makes us the leader in search optimisation and internet marketing that we are today.

As a business owner who employs Gen Y’s, I know firsthand how efficient they can be given the right motivation and working atmosphere.

As a matter of fact, a Gen Y is writing this article for me right now… Now that’s efficiency!

At Reload Media we believe it’s very important to Google and your search engine rankings.

If you combine domain age with URL matches and good on-page optimisation, you are setting yourself up to have some great results.

Many businesses such as Digital Point are selling people (and spammers) older domains than what they can buy brand new on say Go Daddy.

At Reload, what we prefer to do is work with clients that have existing domain age and a good website, and therefore relevancy in the Google search algorithm.

That way, you aren’t artificially creating a result with a domain you don’t personally know or control and one that might have been in ‘blacklisting’ trouble in the past.

If you buy a business in the future it’s worth considering the value of the domain. With many baby boomers selling up in the next few years there are going to be many domains out there that aren’t valued properly if domain age isn’t factored in.

For example, a site brought to an SEO company that is technically very sound but poorly visually designed won’t convert well, meaning no amount of SEO will be able to increase revenue because users will simply arrive at the site from Google, take one look at it and never come back.

By the same token, a fantastic looking site that is SEO-technically challenged will not look attractive to the search engines when being crawled. This means you’ve got a great looking site that no-one ever sees.

If the SEO industry wants to gain more credibility, then SEO providers need to start acting more like banks that process home loans. In a nutshell, not every home loan is approved.

For SEO companies, we must look at a range of conversion, design, technical and financial factors during the assessment period to ascertain whether the client is serious about SEO, whether they have the right website for SEO and whether they understand that it’s a long term process, and not something that happens overnight by throwing a few bad links around.

When a bank is assessing a loan, they determine whether or not a person is capable of paying back the loan over a period of say 30 years.

With SEO, we need to make sure that the client has the shared vision and commitment to ensure the website is initially designed well to suit their target audience, they are ready to add SEO friendly content when requested and most importantly they are prepared to take the time to read the FAQs and understand how the SEO process works.

Without this shared commitment, sometimes there isn’t any point in doing SEO for a client as it may leave “a bad taste in the mouth” for all parties involved and eventually hurt the industry itself.

For Reload Media’s SEO FAQs, please see: http://www.reloadmedia.com.au/seo-faqs.php

At Reload Media, we make sure we stick to a quality process to measure expectation management that includes:

• Clearly defining that a good quality SEO program is a long term process. We work over 12 month SEO programs as SEO needs this amount of time to meet keyword position targets and guarantees.
• Gain a clear understanding of the most important keywords to the client. Although we might optimise for numerous keywords as part of  our SEO programs, there are always ones that the client really wants to get higher up the rankings. Sometimes however, these generic keywords they select may be too ambitious for the amount the client is paying per month. This is often due to their industry already being highly competitive on these generic terms.
• If in a given month a search engine bounces some keywords around, then clearly discussing this movement with the client is important. As often other sites will have experienced the same reshuffle of positions as things always don’t stay the same in search engine land.
• Discussing with the client that we need to access their website to make changes to the meta, footers and other key areas. Some clients haven’t understood that we actually need to change their web pages. Working with them is important to gain the required trust that we won’t crash their site!
• Finally, re-emphasising that it takes patience to be on the first page of the search engines.

If some or all of these areas are done on an ongoing basis, the expectation “bar” can be raised for everyone in the industry. And this will be a good thing for us all.

One of the reasons small business can’t live without SEO is that fact that it is one of the only marketing channels available where the smaller players can compete with, and even trump big business.

Consider the marketing alternatives to SEO and the costs associated with achieving global exposure on TV, Radio or Newspaper?

So how exactly can small business utilise search marketing to compete and even thrive on the web while big business can’t?

1. Focus on the Longtail

The basic premise of the Longtail is that our culture and economy is shifting away from mainstream products and markets to a number of small, specific niches. Many of the typical constraints such as production, distribution and marketing (SEO) are changing and being alleviated by technology and the internet.

Take a big site like Amazon, they must cover all their bases and sell a large number of unique items in smaller quantity. However, when consumers are faced with unlimited choice, shopping around to get exactly what you’re after becomes much easier. Niches are so successful because they allow people to satisfy and fulfill their specific interests.

With SEO and SEM it is easy to measure exactly how profitable your different niches are so that you can focus on the highest performing ones.

2. Unlimited Ad Budget

Traditional marketing tells us that we need to ‘set a budget’ for our marketing costs. When you can measure the exact cost of a conversion, why not simply keep purchasing ads while it’s profitable? As long as every ad click is costing you less than you’re making from that click (accounting for overheads), then there’s no reason to threshold your budget.

In big business, how often have you heard a marketer tell you ‘we don’t have the budget for that at the moment‘?

As a small business, armed with the tangible information of digital ads, you can now say ‘we have an unlimited budget for ads that work‘.

3. Create Valuable Alliances

Unburdened by bureaucracy, small business can easily align with other business’ when it mutually beneficial. Big business can often be slow to change because of procedures and legal issues making it take much longer to create strategic partnerships.

Ask your strategic partners to link to you and they will do your marketing for you. Make it easy and beneficial for them to talk about you and they won’t be able to help themselves.

4. The Personal Touch

How often have you phoned a call centre, only to be greeted by a faceless voice that tells you they can’t help because ‘it’s not standard procedure‘?

Small business has the luxury of taking the time to add that personal touch. If it makes sense to both the business and the customer, why not break the rules? When you can give people something they don’t expect you’re giving them a reason to remember and talk about you.

Rather than trying to disguise it, emphasise the fact that you’re small. Shout out the advantages to the customer; lower overheads, faster responses and savings passed onto the customer.

5. Change Often, and Quickly

With so many freely available research tools, it’s easy to stay on top of trends and discover new niches. When there is a shift in direction in a market, how long does it take a big business to react?

Small business has the advantage of flexibility. If it makes sense to change, you can do something totally different tomorrow. If it doesn’t work out, change again. That’s where the beauty of SEO comes out.

photo by fisserman

SEO Tip #3

If there’s one catch-22 in the SEO game, then having a high-ranking, fully optimised search result that is right at the top of Google but is not getting any clicks is it.

This problem normally comes about because a business has spent so much time optimising their page full of keywords that when their listing appears in Google or one of the other search engines, their result is just a mash of keywords.

Having your website ranking highly is one thing, but actually getting users to click on it is another.

The trick then is to optimise your site well whilst still keeping your listing as an attractive result for the user.

One of the first ways to do this is to include your business name at the start of your listing. So instead of having ‘Neon Lighting Brisbane, Neon Lights, etc’ as your listing heading, you want to modify it so it reads ‘Search Strategy – Neon Lighting Brisbane, Neon Lights, etc.’ This allows your business’ listing to still remain attractive to the user.

This logic is also followed through to the second and third lines of search engine listings, where it is important again to ensure your description is attractive to the user. Once again, simple things like capitalising appropriately and punctuation makes a big difference, whilst avoiding those unsightly keyword mashes.

And finally, having a primary domain name, rather than a free subdomain, makes a big difference to the appearance of your listing as it gives your business a professional look.

This practice was causing such a problem that Google introduced a new attrbute for hyperlinks; nofollow. The nofollow tag can be added by webmasters to their pages to show that they do not endorse the outbound link. When a search engine spider reads the hyperlink, if it detects the nofollow attribute it will ignore the link.

It is important to note however, that all search engines treat nofollow differently. The 3 big players, Google, Yahoo! and MSN all discount links with the nofollow attribute, but in different ways. Most importantly however, is that nofollow links are not counted as part of Google PageRank.

Despite this, spammers continue to post keyword-flooded hyperlinks into blogs and forum posts. Why do they do this?

The answer is simple, they don’t get penalised.

Google have come out and said on many occasions that they don’t penalise sites for anything that your competitors could do to harm your rankings.

Let’s imagine for a second that Google and the other search engines penalised sites for putting their links all over blogs and forums. This would certainly stop spammers placing their links all over the place, but would open up a new market; link sabotage.

This would mean that your competitor’s could go around putting your link all over blogs and forums and as a result, you would be punished.

For this reason, Google don’t punish you for putting links everywhere, but through the use of the nofollow attribute have found a way to simply not count the link.

This is currently the fairest system, but is not providing any disincentive to spammers spreading their links. Having said that, it’s still the best way to solve the spamming problem.

This is evident by the fact that marketing positions are down by 26% across Australia (BRW Magazine) as many businesses look to cut the fat from their advertising dollars.

But there is a cheap alternative to traditional advertising mediums… search.

There are two kinds of ways businesses can spend money on search. One is through search engine optimisation (SEO) where professional optimisers improve your website’s position in search engine rankings. The other is search engine marketing (SEM) which are the paid ads you will see above and to the right of natural search results.

There are a number of reasons why search engine spending is a wise alternative. Let’s do a quick comparison:

A full page ad in many print media publications costs between $6000-10,000 for just one run. And this is occuring at a time when many businesses are noting a distinct drop in conversion to sales from print media.

One of the clients I manage has a Google AdWords budget of $90 per day. One of the great things about investing in SEM is the ease with which detailed statistics can be obtained and sales conversions tracked. Here are the basic facts from four weeks of the AdWords campaign:

• Around $2500 was pumped through AdWords in that time. This compares quite well to the $6000 that would have been splurged on a print media ad.
• The Ads generated about 180,000 impressions. That means 180,000 people actually had the ad appear on their screens. Even if the readership of the print publication was 200,000, this does not mean that 200,000 people saw the ad, especially if the ad is buried on page 37.
• As a result of these impressions, over 1200 visitors were sent directly to the site.
• This translated into 350 conversions at an average cost per conversion of around $6.50. With the print media ads, it is often very difficult, if not impossible, to tell exactly how many sales have been generated.

So when we sit back now and look at the final figures, this particular client spent half as much money and generated around the same number, if not more, views of the ad. But the thing is, they know exactly how much they spent, how many views they had, and most importantly, how much it cost them per sale to undertake the advertising.

It is this combination of factors that makes search such an attractive alternative to traditional marketing.

But SEM is just half of the picture, as that $6000-10000 can also buy your company a whole lot of SEO. By putting that money into professional SEO you’ll get around 12 months of continual optimisation for Google and the other major search engines.

This means 12 months, not one print run, of potential customers seeing your site up the top of search engine results, and that translates into sales.

So despite many business’ financials being quite tight around Australia at the moment, SEO and SEM remain highly lucrative options as their relatively cheap nature and ease of tracking make them a smart solution for all businesses.

A few years ago, the link was well established. Google seemed to be attempting to stop its search results being flooded by spammy newcomer websites by valuing a website’s domain age heavily in determing search results. This did work, but the problem was that it also kept new sites that were of high quality out of the top of the results. In essence, it was a temporary fix to a permanent problem.

Then, in late 2006 and early 2007, SEO consultants all over the place watched as some of their respected clients suddenly dropped off the top 10 list. This led to many SEO “experts” claiming that Google had dropped domain age from its ranking algorithm.

Over the last 12 months, many SEO experts have come out and stated that Google has reinstated domain age into their algorithm, as many older sites are now performing much better. It is this humble SEO consultant’s opinion, that domain age is in the algorithm, but only in a limited form.

The practice of domain selling, where companies buy a domain name now, hold onto it for five years or so, and then sell it, has meant that it is not effective to weight domain age too heavily.

The feeling out there now is that Google is using other factors, such as traffic, content and backlinks, to determine a website’s authority. This explains why some SEO’s seem to think domain age is still critical, because for the most part, it is safe to assume that a site that has good traffic, content and backlinks has been around for a while. But it appears that some SEO consultant’s are mixing up correlation and causation.

By weighting traffic, network monitoring, content and backlinks (amongst other things) more heavily, Google are effectively removing those spammy sites from their results but also allowing young sites that have plenty to offer rank well.

It seems that Google may have finally found the balance.

In short, it is difficult for new sites to zoom up the Google rankings, but the age of the domain is not the reason for this. New sites struggle because they don’t have traffic or backlinks to help their ranking. By the same token, older sites will not rank well just because they have been around for ten years.

So while there does exist a correlation between the age of website’s domain and its search engine performance in general, the actual causation for this is most likely a string of other factors that more comprehensively determine a site’s authority, and hence its relevance to search results.

For this reason, understanding how Google’s patented algorithm works is critical to improving search engine performance.

From the outside however, I’d like to point out that the exact makeup of Google’s algorithm is a tightly guarded trade secret. Google have patented what’s included in their algorithm, but not how it all comes together. As a result of this, no-one (except those high in the Google hierarchy) knows for sure how search results are ranked.

This makes it nearly impossible for individual webmasters to be able to undertake SEO with any degree of certainty whatsoever. SEO companies basically learn what works through educated guesses and past experiences. As a result of this, a well-established SEO company, such as Reload Media, get as close as anyone outside of Google is going to get to determining how the algorithm works.

Many people are familiar with the notion of PageRank, Google’s way of ranking websites but this is just one part of the way Google organises its search results. Google’s overall ranking equation takes into account over 200 factors, way too many to dealt with in depth in this article but the main ones will be dealt with over time in our ‘SEO Tip of the Week’ section.

The important point to take away from this is that no SEO company can truthfully claim to knowing the inner workings of Google’s algorithm. It changes constantly and this makes it almost impossible to nail down. An SEO company’s usefullness then comes from their experience and proven track record in being able to predict how a certain change will affect one’s search engine performance.