Comparative research on changes in SEO strategies from Google

 

Abstract

This generation have got so fond of the internet that they trust and depend on it for almost anything and almost everything; from shopping, sourcing for news or sourcing for jobs, entertainment to social networking; and with about 2.5 billion of them on the internet and digital media, digital marketing becomes the most effective avenue to communicate with them. By this, marketers promote their products and services using digital distribution channels via computers, mobile phones, smart phones, or other digital devices

Google on the other hand Google has changed the way these marketers think about their operation, such that whatever digital channel they choose to operate through, Google bridges the gap. It has changed the way financiers think about financial models. There is no thinking about product development and awareness without considering google. Thinking of growing your market share? Simply google it. If you are not at the top, you are not growing

Google never fully discloses to advertisers how their rates are calculated. In fact, rumor has it that no single person knows all the criteria of the Google search algorithm. Supposedly, that knowledge is spread across multiple employees like keys and codes at a Swiss bank (Goldman, 2011); yet Sharma stated that there is a “marketing war” (Sharma, 2001) as marketers compete (make efforts) to be on top of the Google organic list or pay to be presented to consumers. These efforts, as also confirmed by chaffey and smith 2008, is for the purpose of achieving the highest position or ranking practical in the natural listing on the search engine results after a specific combination of keywords or key phrases has been typed in

This study therefore aims to explore how these algorithms and updates from Google shape the activities and strategies of search marketers toward search engine optimization; and how marketers like the London School of Business and Finance  of this world play the ‘Google game’ right, and how/why, for instance, chert computers and especially marketers in the developing nations still do not get the rules; we will then put forward our research questions and means of data collection; we will there after present the results and discuss them after which we will make our conclusion and then close with suggestions for further improvements.

Chapter 1

The Introduction

1.1 Journey to the Internet.

Commerce and indeed marketing has gone beyond the ordinary and the traditional old module of dictating messages to the mass market. Changes in time and the advent of information and communication technology, coupled with consumer requirements and expectations and of course the internet has changed and continue to change commerce and the concepts of marketing. It is worthy of note that marketing dynamics has shifted from the ‘production minded’ orientation to ‘consumer minded’ perspectives, and thanks to digital technology, especially the internet that has enabled a global market place, distinguished by even availability of product information, prices and distribution. Consumer however, with the quest to overcome distance, location and time constraints as well as sourcing for social networking, convenience, variety, better prices and sometimes discreet purchases, make the internet their choice market place. Source says there is about 35 percent of the world population available on the internet (internetworldstats.com, 2012); and this huge population attracts every deliberate marketer to come online and thus, makes digital marketing inherently an effective means to reach this generation.

1.2. Industry Background.

Playing SEO game the Google way.

As marketers however compete for (online) space and attention, they make as relevant as possible information available to consumers through web sites and content management; and there is only one means through which consumers can search or find these information- the search engines.

Although there are about 6 web sites (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Seekport and Exalead, in that order) that attract 99.03 per cent of the worldwide traffic toward search engines, research states that Google attracts 90.59 per cent of these searches. Its popularity and influence hence makes Google the benchmark for SEO (Quinton, S. and Khan, M., 2009). With its mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (google.com, 2013), Google seems to know and understand what really you want during a search and gives it back to you as you have hoped or expected (google.com, 2013). It is assumed a “perfect search engine” to the extent that “when people don’t find what they are looking for on Google, they blame themselves and their query choice, not the search engine” (Goldman, 2011), because it is believed that Google has answers to every question and results to every search; and indeed Google has become an habit and a part of everyday enterprise for every internet user.  Google on the other hand changes its search algorithm five hundred to six hundred times every year since 2000 (moz.com, 2013) to uphold the users’ trust in it results by ascertaining that the very best and most relevant results come up for any kind of search.  “A logical, arithmetical or computational procedure that if correctly applied ensures the solution” (World English Dictionary) to optimization issues. Some of these changes are minor though, but in every few months Google come up with major algorithm updates that significantly affect search results (moz.com, 2013). These updates thereby make search marketers ‘play SEO games the Google way and obey its regulations’.

Richard Hall confirms that about 60 percent of marketers are looking to increase their natural and paid-for-search budgets in the next 12 months more than any other aspects of digital marketing (Hall, 2009)

According to goldman, Google is not so transparent in its business operation and system that no one knows for certain what it’s really up to. He states in his study that Google never fully discloses to advertisers how their rates are calculated. In fact, rumor has it that no single person knows all the criteria of the Google search algorithm. Supposedly, that knowledge is spread across multiple employees like keys and codes at a Swiss bank (Goldman, 2011); yet Sharma stated that there is a “marketing war” (Sharma, 2001) as marketers compete (make efforts) to be on top of the Google organic list or pay to be presented to consumers. These efforts, as also confirmed by chaffey and smith 2008, is for the purpose of achieving the highest position or ranking practical in the natural listing on the search engine results after a specific combination of keywords or key phrases has been typed in (Chaffey and Smith, 2008). They also concluded that only marketers who understand the ranking processes or in this case, the marketers who follow and play by the ‘Google rules’ can boost their position higher than their competitors and so achieve higher levels of traffic.

1.3. Objectives

This study therefore aims to explore how these algorithms and updates from Google shape the activities and strategies of search marketers toward search engine optimization; and how marketers like the Amazons and eBays of this world play the ‘Google game’ right, and how/why, for instance, chert computers and especially marketers in the developing nation still do not get the rules; this study will then put forward its research questions and means of data collection; it will there after present the results and discuss them after which it will make our conclusion and then close with suggestions for further improvements.

Furthermore, it is the objective of this research to:

1. know what sets the marketer on top of google search lists apart from those that are not really recognised- to know for instance why ‘xe.com’ comes first in a google search for ‘currency converter’ 

2.To know how often these marketers change their online marketing strategies- if google  makes up to 500- 600 updates in a year

3.To know if these marketers control their SEO in-house by themselves on pay agents to do it for them and leave the result wholly to the efforts of the agents

4.To learn from marketers that are doing well in their SEO strategies and make recommendations  for marketers that are still strugling with their SEO, based on the knowledge obtained from the former.

1.4 Research methodology

This study will be partly exploratory and partly descriptive; it will adopt the exploratory (qualitative) research to allow the reseacher a better understanding into the concepts involved in the subject so as to clarify the nature of the broblems to be solved. It will help us know what is the trend of events and why it is happening, through which we can ascertain how variables in the situations (and what is going on) are related. For instance, the explorative research will help us look in detail some of the very major algorithms and changes Google have made over time, what it (Google) intended that it (the changes) meant to marketers and how it (Google) wanted the updates change online maketing strategies- or how Google wanted the marketers to obey these changes. On the other hand, it will also analyze how marketers adopted this changes, how it altered their approach to online marketing and the results that came thereafter.

The descriptive aspect of this research is where the reseacher intends to describe the characteristics of those that follow google algorithm closely and make their search engine optimisation strategies in reference to the algorithms in comparison  with the characteristics of firm that are ill informed about these algorithms or do not set their SEO strategies in line the criteria from google. Buttressing  the points in emphasizing the relationship that exist between individual criteria or algorithm and specific SEO strategies.

CHAPTER 2

Literature review

This chapter discusses the concept and strategies of digital marketing with focus on SEO among others, how Google dominates and coordinates search criteria and algorithms, as well as an overview of some of the individual algorithms and their effects on marketers’ search results.

2.1 Digital Marketing: The Concept

Shuliang Li stated in her study that as the dynamics and complexity of markets and the business context increase, the need for pertinent, accurate and immediate information continues to grow (Li, 2004). More so, shim et al. (2002) confirms that the internet has emerged as an essentially important platform that has reduced technological barriers and made it easier for consumer irrespective of their geographical locations to access decision support models and tools; and the marketplace is migrating into the electronic marketplace as considered by Chaffey and Smith (2008). The internet continues to grow “rapidly and seamlessly across borders and into an online world already inhabited by over two billion customers” (Chaffey and Smith, 2008).  Considering its scale, potential and its benefits to our world and businesses today, it is not just “a big part” of our future, it is a factor to reckon in charting the pattern of our developments as well as businesses and commerce. Source says there are already in China more phone subscribers than the entire US population, and survey by Comscore shows that the usage of mobile in Japan is almost the same as that of PC. The digital world continues to expand in terms of the numbers of websites online, and essentially, from a marketing perspective and the population of people that has access to the internet (Ryan and Jones, 2012). In 2000, at the ‘bubble burst’ of the dot.com, there were about 304 million of the world population that had internet access. The figure had doubled by 2003 to 608 million, and the end of 2005 the population of the online community had passed a billion. As of June 2012, about a third of the world population had been on the internet amounting to over 2.4 billion people  (internetworldstats.com, 2012).

This generation of consumer do not only rely on the adoption digital technology for the quest to overcome distance, location and time constraints, news and entertainment, sourcing for social networking, convenience, variety, better prices and sometimes discreet purchases; it also to a great extent influence their behavior in several ways (as explained by Ryan and Jones 2012): with over 1 billion people around the world regularly using the web to find products, entertainment and soulmates, consumer behavior and the way companies market to both consumers and business have changed dramatically  (Chaffey et al. , 2009).

2.2 The need for Internet

 Social networking: The interconnectivity of the internet and the digital technology enables consumers to connect with themselves at any instant, be it through mobile messaging, instant messaging (IM), e-mail, or web-based social networking platforms like LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook- or possibly on all of these platforms. Consumers all around the world are interacting with like minds, regardless of distance, time zones or location; these interactions reinforce social networks to further expand the virtual communities (Ryan and Jones, 2012).

News and information/ increasing relevant filtering: with such a huge amount of information available on the internet, online consumers, by importance and need, have come to learn to filter items that are of relevance to them and ignoring the ones that are perceived irrelevant (Ryan and Jones, 2012).

Growing niche aggregation: the volume and diversity of online contents let consumers take part and satisfy their interests and hobbies. “Aggregations of like-minds congregate online; the homogeneous mass consumer population is fragmenting into ever-smaller niche groups, with increasingly individual requirements” (Ryan and Jones, 2012).

Blossoming micropublishing of personal contents: the interactive and interconnected nature of digital media gives consumers the chance to express themselves online. Whether through personal blog or photo gallery, feedback forms, message boards, voting platforms or discussion forums; it cost only a bit more than time and imaginations to publish your own contents. Ryan and Jones further confirm that “users are posting their opinions online for all to see, and consulting the opinion of their online peers before making purchase decisions”. For instance, I would rather consider the opinions and reviews of my peers before booking a table at an unknown restaurant, a weekend break in a hotel or buying a car; as in the stead of visiting the websites first.

Rise of the ‘prosumer’: Ryan and Jones also explain that consumers online are found of being involved in creating the products and services they pay for, which shifts the power and control of the market from producers to consumers. They simply put- : “they are letting producers know what they want in no uncertain terms: the level of interaction between producers and consumers is unprecedented”. Consumers these days get involved in customizing, specifying and creating goods and services to suit their actual need, more so, the old concepts of mass production and mass marketing are fading out as consumers now (directly or indirectly) “shape and mould” the  messages and experiences they receive from producers  (Ryan and Jones, 2012).

Availability: as the internet becomes more important in people’s life, the subsequent speed of business process means that “consumers can satisfy their needs more quickly, more easily and with fewer barriers”. In today’s digital world and economy, time and geography has ceased to be barriers; so are physical store space and location irrelevant. Ryan and Jones further concluded “it is a world of instant gratification- and the more consumers get of it, the more they want it now, now, now” (Ryan and Jones, 2012).

For marketers, this new development in the market and the shift in consumer mindset indicate a whole new challenges and a call for new strategies. As consumers continue to fashion and embrace new ways of communicating, ”take greater ownership of the information and entertainment they consume, and aggregate in increasingly specialized niche online communities” (Ryan and Jones, 2012), there is also need for marketers to shift approach and strategies if they want to connect with them.

2.3 Sales situations

Meanwhile Chaffey and Smith (2008) identified online ‘sales situations’ being possible ways online transactions take place as; B2C, B2B, C2B and C2C.

B2B andB2C being where the bulk of online business take place. Unlike in the time past when FMCG manufactureres like coca-cola, Guinness and Heinz were in the lead of marketing and industrial or B2B (business to business) marketing was considered to less exciting, it was estimated that the B2B companies make as much as 10 times more revenue than the B2C (business to consumer) companies today. They (Chaffey and Smith) also sited instances where General Electric made a decision (about ten years ago) to “ procure $1 billion worth of purchases online in one year, followed by $3 billion in the second year and followed by total procument online”. Cisco systems also announced years back to no longer do business with suppliers that would not take orders over the web. There are also examples of major organisations, including government councils that are moving online. In 2005 the British Government’s Local District Councils procured their goods and services only online. Chaffey and Smith further sited that “Several years ago Ford and General Motors combined forces through the B2B marketplace Covisint (www.covisint.com) and moved their then $300 and $500 billion dollar supply chains online. This (they pointed) created great hype about the potential of online B2B auctions which didn’t really realize expectations. Today, Covisint is no longer an open marketplace used by a handful of motor manufacturers, instead it is a software provider which helps over 30 000 companies in automotive and other sectors, such as Healthcare, manage communications with their suppliers and in 2003, Covisint sold its auctions business to Ariba which now has 120 000 suppliers in its network – a surprisingly small number for the largest online network. In this new market evolution, the advantages of the online B2B exchange are more about identifying products in electronic catalogues from a range of suppliers, selecting the best option and then managing the paperwork and workflow electronically. (Chaffey and Smith, 2008)

C2C and C2B

The advent of the widespread and acceptance of C2C (consumer to consumer), as narrated in their study, was the “growth of online consumer auctions at eBay and niche communities focusing on interests such as sport, films or pastimes”. In recent time, the boom in the C2C interaction has been credited to the growth of social networks like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn among several others. They pointed that social interactions are these day so important that they are beginning to reduce the consumption of other forms of digital and traditional media and organizations are beginning to develop strategies to engage these consumers (Chaffey and Smith, 2008).

2.4 The strategies and Tools

Though Chaffey and Smith 2012 explained that once any organisation identifies the need to pursue digital marketing, the next step of action is to map out its strategies, they also pointed out that every business basically needs to make its own unique strategies according to its own circumstance; as it apparent that for different products there are different markets, different needs and undoubtedly different solutions; Chaffey et al. ( 2009) also confirms that it is not necessarilly technology that drives digital marketing, but the returns from gaining new customers and maintaining relationships with existing customers, laying emphasys on the fact that digital marketing does not exist in isolation, but is more effective when it is integrated with other channels. More so, they analyzed the range of access platforms and communication tools for online channels that e-marketers use in building and developing relationships with consumers; acertaining the fact that there are different access platforms that deliver contents and enable interaction through a range of different online communication tools or media channels. Some of which are well established techniques and are familier to consumers like competitive pricing, comprehensive product information, websites features that grab attention as well as a convenient and brief online purchase and payment process; some of the common tools marketers use also include affiliate marketing, blogging, pay per click and of course search engine optimisation as highlited below (Chaffey et al., 2009).

Website features that grab attention: a report by smith (2012) shows that researches have proven that one of the website features that consistently grabs the attention of a good number of this generation is graphics. She explained that marketers have learnt therefore that any website meant to target this generation of consumer for revisits and loyalty would not underestimate the use of graphics among other features, as graphics is seen as an appealing interest to catch their minds. Other features that could make a website their favorite are personalization (by way of modifying the site, showing that it obviously originated from or belonged to the user), professional layout, simple and interactive site as well as (sometimes) bright colours (Smith, 2012)

Competitive Pricing: At whatever level of transaction and category of business (visible or visual), pricing is one of the factors considered most important. Competitive pricing is a pungent and appealing incentive for this generation of consumer to stay loyal to a product and effectively prompt repeat visits (Smith, 2012).

Product Information: According to Webster, products are bundles of benefits that an organizations offer to consumers to meet their needs and wants (Webster, 2004). Consumers are looking for these problem-solving properties in goods and services, and searching every medium (books, movies, magazines, audio tapes, on computer screens) for information about these products and the benefits they offer and how they meet their needs. It is therefore essential that marketers make this information available by every means possible.

Convenient/Brief purchase and payment process: Shopping convenience has been one of the prime motivations for online shoppers, it is believed that these consumers often allocate less time to shopping and thereby seeking to save time and minimize every effort. Researches also show that the greater the time costs related with a service, the lower the degree of consumers’ perceived service convenience. It is therefore appropriate that marketers adopt systems that allow shoppers make their purchases and payments with ease and within a good time frame (Smith, 2012).

 2.5 Online Marketing Strategies

Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is a major and important strategy for companies involved in online trading. The idea acts as the ultimate in genuine pay for performance marketing and, thus, remains one of the most promising long-term marketing concepts for online trading (Duffy, 2005). The affiliates construct e-commerce websites with data feed from the manufacturers. The data feed are information made available by the manufacturers which would contain product descriptions, name, photographs and prices. The affiliates will then converse for customer to visit its website for these products and then redirect its visitor and customer to the manufacturers’ site for the actual shopping, transaction and shipment.

 An affiliate is a potential marketing partner that helps grow businesses by generating more sales outside the traditional marketing efforts of the organization. The affiliate is also independent in its activities and as such, responsible (financially or otherwise) for whatever its doing (e.g marketing) to generate sales for the producing partner, i.e it bears all the risks involved in its marketing activities but gets paid (on commission based) for every sale it makes, (Duffy, 2005) therefore puts no extra cost on the producing partner.

 Blogging: Blogs are websites created by individuals/organizations (likened to diaries or journals) to display historical as well as up-to-date content disseminating knowledge internally among staff and externally among customers and suppliers through series of text and links that redirect visitor to pre purposed websites.

Company that blog have far better marketing result as argued by John McTigue in his report, referencing a study by HubSpot. He stated that there is a contiguous relationship between blogging and inbound marketing. He also stated that record have it that blogging regularly yield 55 percent more website visitors, 97 percent more inbound links and 434 percent more indexed pages, that would  further boost SEO results  (McTigue, 2009). Research also shows that blogging has an interdependent relationship with social media as popular social media could be a means of promoting blogs, more so, helpful and informative blogs  are more appealing to the social media community, and they pay back with comments, leads, and of course more importantly  higher traffic.

Pay per Click (PPC): PPC would be considered an important and productive option especially for new/small businesses as organizations compete for online presence and consumers’ attention.  It can be expensive though, but sometimes it is the only thing a company has to do stay in this competition and be seen by consumers as it could be hard for smaller firms to match head to head with the stronger and bigger organizations in the organic ranking, as it is prevalent for bigger names and brands to come on top first in the organic stream. To be on the organic ranking of a search engine is at no cost to any organisation. Search engines present a list of websites according to their relevance to the keywords queried by the customer. The sites that come first on this list are those considered most relevant by search engines as related the contents on the sites, links and updates. Every search engine has got its own criteria for ranking websites though and these criteria can oftentimes change. PPC Ads are often shaded in different colours from the organic list on the very top of the screen or at the side, to let the customers know that the links were paid for by the websites; and prices paid for these sets of list is determined on an auction basis (Kennedy, 2008).

Therefore, companies will have to regularly determine their budget for PPC, and what position on the list they want to go for, but most importantly, they need to often review their site designs and content management to ensure that they are well ranked on the organic lists, that they would naturally come on top of the list when customers go in search of their keywords. These two paths to online marketing must be carefully explored (Kennedy, 2008).

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Aure´lie Gandour and Amanda Regolini (2011) in their report explained SEO as a ‘set techniques’ that websites use in order to be better ranked by search engine (Gandour and Regolini, 2011). It is a technique to improve a website’s content, for the purpose of making it more interactive to its visitors (users) and search engines, by some deliberate changes within the pages of the website while making some specifically choice themes and keywords the centre of attention, for the site to be of relevance and ultimately, get better ranking by targeted search engines and therefore appearing higher in the result list for requests that are made as related to the chosen themes.

Although only about six web sites are recognized to be responsible for attracting about 99.03 percent of the world traffic toward search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, Jeeves and Baidu) (StatCounter, 1999-2010, for July 2010), several other search engines creep over websites in quest of the site relevance; and we might then need to ask which of them must we take into consideration in our own site’s SEO. I suppose there are few questions every digital marketer needs to ask, as suggested by Aure´lie Gandour and Amanda Regolini (2011), which are: where do our visitors come from? What search engine do our target markets use? (Gandour and Regolini, 2011) how many connections were made to the web site by just typing an URL directly to the web browser, using bookmarks or clicking a link in an email? How many connections came through external pages and/or search engines? Getting answers to these questions would determine the approach towards a SEO campaign. Research states though, that Google attracts 90.59% of world traffic towards search engines (Gandour and Regolini, 2011); its popularity hence makes google a good benchmark for SEO. Quinton and Khan more (2009) so suggested that strategically distributing directories and press releases would be a good strategy to improve sites’ ranking (Quinton and Khan, 2009). These techniques would in no doubt increase links to a site; improve its PageRank (Gandour and Regolini, 2011) and altimately, its final ranking.

Although Evans (2007) did clearly demonstrate that a high PageRank is a key to make a web site rank high, a site can as well rank high on its themes and precise keywords in its contents other than focusing on the overall page. This act and practice of SEO reflects the popular saying that, on the web, “Content is King”. If we follow a couple of rules and give our web site some rich and interesting contents, a good search engine’s ranking will be inevitable (Andrieu, 2009). A fundamental way to get the best out of optimization is to have keywords for which search engines will recognize the site, and thereby optimize the site on those words. After choosing these keywords, we then should duplicate them all over the optimized pages, and in utmost they should reflect in key parts like the “title” tag and in the headings (SEOmoz.org, 2009).

2.6 What is Google’s business?

As soon as the World Wide Web went beyond a few hundreds, thousands, and millions of pages, it became impossible to navigate directly. It is worthy of note that the internet is not a TV set but a field strewn with pages of potentially useful information for anyone and everyone who wants it; which literarily means that “search- really clever search- would become essential” (Arthur, 2012).

The race to be world favourite seach engine looked as though would go to the swift and the large as the first as the early seach engines took the lead, some of which were set up to show off the power of the 64-bit Alpha chip. This chips are able to chomp through huge indexes; all the search engines had to do then was to crawl the site and index it, they simply dominated and by selling advertisements on their opening pages they made money. However, as the web grew, the services and the results they produced became polluted. Arthur comfirmed that “spam, and porn sites began using invisible text- white on a white background, or sized so small that humans may not see  it”. The user’s problem of having to encounter spams got increasingly frustrating, but search engines continued to grow in their revenues as more people came online. It wasn’t because it had significantly improved the users’ experience or its search results ( as pointed out by Arthur), but because marketers kept buying more advertising slots. As a matter of fact, these advertisements made the experience of the users even worse, because they made the pages load quite slow on those dial-up connections used by the majority of people. But those search engines were the available options at that moment as their indexes all treated the internet like “it were a flat field covered with pages filled with information” while in actual fact they are made up of information about each other, encoded by how they link each other. This in no doubt takes a hugely complex mathematical calculation, requiring a huge amount of computing power to figure out what information those links are intended to pass across for each page and each phrase; which according to Arthur, “not even Microsoft, with its overweening ambition, seemed to have grasped this”. In this kind of complex task, Arthur concluded all the search engines needed to do was to calculate how every page on the web ranked relative to the others- “ which would be shifting, especially for the smaller ones, based on their links”; and based on that ranking, search engines would then have to decide which pages on the internet points to the text the users want. Ranking would then vary based on these texts; and would have to be done each time a query for search is entered. Source says that Page and Brin (founders of Google) did this for the first time with a system on one PC in 1996 at Stanford, which they called the ‘the algorithm for ranking web pages’ –PageRank. They further developed it into “a massive parrallel computing system and software that could harness the power of hundreds of thousands of stripped-dowm PCs running a version of free linux operating system to do this over and over againg, millions of times a day”  (Arthur, 2012)

Google runs an enterprise that is worth over $250 billion organising the world’s information; and undoubtedly the largest information provider in the world  (Seeking Alpha, 2012); and of course Google knew the web was big. on its official blog, google had stated that its first index in 1998 had about 26 million pages, and by 2000 it’s index had reached a billion mark. Between then and now, google has seen even huge number about how much content is really out there. In 2008, even Google’s search engineers were amazed about how big the internet had become when its systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone- 1trillion unique URLs on the web at once  (Google Official Blog, 2008).

However, as these links and pages grow and increase in number as well as in contents, Google seek to make the very relevant ones available for search results; making sure that only the marketer that have taken their time and worked hard to make unique website are presented to the user, as well as ascertaining that consumers’ search expectations are met and their experiences are such pleasant ones. For these purposes Google has over the years change its algorithm and critaria for search results. Source says each year Google introduces over 500 algorithms, the decisions to make these improvements are made weekly to affect seach results. Wired.com states: “one might think that after more than a decade of search-market dominance, Google could relax. After all, it holds a commanding over 80 percent market share and is still the only company whose name is synonymous with the verb search. But just as Google isn’t ready to rest on its laurels, its competitors aren’t ready to concede defeat. For years, the Silicon Valley monolith has used its mysterious, seemingly omniscient algorithm to (as its mission statement puts it) organizes the world’s information.” Some the algorithms are as discussed below:

Cassandra – 2003 April: this update according to google was meant to crack down on “some of the basic link-quality issues, such as massive linking from co-owned domains”  (moz.com, 2013). It was also meant to raise the bar against hidden texts and hidden links. This update in other words could be interpreted to mean that multiple links from the same site would no longer be recognised and ‘crosslinking’ spam will be filtered out of search result; more so, econsultancy.com (2003) confirms this to mean cleaner results.

Florida- 2003 November: florida is an algorithm update meant to hit low level SEO techniques. It was simply meant to eliminate pages that have repetitive inbound anchor text with little diversity from search results as well as heavy repetitions of key word phrase in the page title and on the page. More so, it got rid of page that have got words or phrases exhibiting close proximity with few occurrences of the keywords spread apart; and pages that lack related or supporting vocabulary in the page copy. It was believed that the “Florida update was the first update that made SEO seemingly complicated enough to where people could not figure out how to do it” (seobook.com, 2009)

Austin-2004 January: this is a smarter and better algorithm that was meant for a further clean up for invisible texts and spam. It was an algorithm update that introduced  penalties or ban on sites that have got “things such as FFA’s (Free for All) link farms, invisible text and stuffed meta tags that are 20 screens long, or filled with useless spam  (searchenginejournal.com, 2004). seobook.com objected though that “The algorithms have got so complex on some fronts that Google engineers do not even know about some of the filters/penalties/bugs (the difference between the 3 labels often being an issue of semantics). In December 2007, a lot of pages that ranked #1 suddenly ended up ranking no better than position #6 for their core target keyword (and many related keywords)” (seobook.com, 2009).

Big Daddy- 2005 December: this an ‘infrastructure update’ that changed how duplicate contents and non-canonical( non-www) URLs were treated  (moz.com, 2013); disregarding sites that have got 302 redirects, duplicates and “excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling”  (mattcutts.com, 2006).

 Negative Reviews 2010 December: this is an algorithm update that seperates ‘catcalls from huzzahs’ (nytimes.com, 2010). It was meant to hit on marketers that believe in treating customers badly to generate complaints and negative comments would translate to more links to their sites; and in turn, make them more prominent in search engines. This, Google simply puts “being bad is, and will always be, bad for business in Google search results (googleblog, 2010).

The Panda 2011 February: also known as the ‘farmer’, the Panda is the algorithm update that changed the search results forever and made marketer, and SEO professionals stand on their toes to work the rank they desire. Affecting about 12% of all search results, and the web still buzzing about its implications according to wired.com, the Panda “addressed the growing complaint that low-quality content sites (derisively referred to as content farms) were ranked higher than higher-quality sites that seemed to be more important to users. Moz.com also confirms that:

“It seemed that sites whose pages had fewer and/or less intrusive blocks of  advertisements on them tended to be in the winner bucket, while those with more and more intrusive advertising tended to be in the loser group.

Likewise, sites whose UI/design would likely be described as more modern, high quality, thoughtful and "attractive" were winners vs. the "ugly" sites that tended to be in the loser bucket.

When it came to user-generated-content (UGC) sites, those that tended to attract "thin" contributions (think EzineArticles, Hubpages or Buzzle) lost, while those with richer, often more authentic, non-paid, and not-intended to build SEO value or links (think Etsy, DailyMotion, LinkedIn, Facebook) won.

In the "rich content" sector, pages with less usable/readable/easily-consumable content (think AllBusiness, FindArticles) tended to lose out to similarly content-rich sites that had made their work more usable (think LOC.gov, HuffingtonPost)”

The effect of this algorithm on web marketer and SEO strategies meant that when marketers are creating content, they now think about the idea of ‘sameness’  (www.searchenginewatch.com, 2013). To avoid Google’s penalties, they now think about how they are adding value by asking if what is being written on a topic is something unique from what is in the result for a query. If not, it perceived bad for Google’s search product and this is the primary reason panda exists. At the mention of the algorithm ‘Panda’, cloaking and sneaky redirects as well as hidden text and keyword stuffing cease. Marketer would also have to stop thin contents like auto-generated contents, scraped contents as well as user generated spam like un-moderated comments.

Penguin 2012 April: this update was also made for a better clean-up for SEO, eliminating sites with webspams, as well as adjusting keyword stuffing and link schemes. Another of such update released May 22^nd 2013 is a comprehensive update with more impact on search- the Penguin 2.0; a web spam change dedicated to finding ‘black hat’ web spam. The purpose of this algorithm for instance according to Matt Cutts, (Mountain View), is to make sure that search marketers make a great website that users love and want to tell a friend about, bookmark and visit over and over again- all the things that make a site compelling. Google wants to see if that is the marketers’ goal, it also aligns itself with that goal, making sure that as long as the marketers are working hard for users, it will work hard to show the marketers’ high quality contents to users as well (smartinsights.com, 2013).

It has once been ascertained by Google that “search engine optimization, or SEO, can be positive and constructive” (insisesearch, 2012). This implies that effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages more accessible and easier to find. This is an effort that includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that an average person will never type.
Inherently, by this algorithm, any link intended to manipulate pagerank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google Webmaster guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to a site or outgoing links from a site. More so, Eric Enge ( president of Stone Temple Consulting) confirmed that this algorithm also affected infographics which have been vastly abused, the key now is to make sure they offer value, be of high value and factual if marketers are going to use them as part of their digital marketing strategy  (www.searchenginewatch.com, 2013).

CHAPTER 3

3.1. Methodological Framework

This chapter will highlight several research methods adopted in business and management, highlighting their limitations and give valid justification for the methods adopted in this study. This chapter would present the methods of data collection and analysis, and discuss techniques deployed in the study.

Before a methodology is decided on any reseach work, it is important to have an appropriate and in-depth understanding of what a reseach is, as well as the concept and idea of a research.

Nicholas Williman (2011) stated in his study that it is important that a student or practitioner embarking on a programme of academic or practical research has a clear idea of what the word ‘research’ really means, and clears away any misconceptions that might exist owing to the word’s common use in other fields as “research has been a term loosely used in everyday speech to describe a multitude of activities, such as collecting masses of information, delving into esoteric theories, and producing wonderful new products” (Williman, 2011)

He also ascertained as highlighted below that the term ‘research’ is not limited to these ways in which it is wrongly used:

Ø  As just a gathering of facts or information: it is often heard of how people say they would do a bit of reseach into a subject or situation, which usually means a quick reading through a few lines in books or magazines to get more information about something. Information that could also be collected through other means such as, by asking questions from people in the street, or for instance, taking records of number of stores on a major or popular streets of a city. This kind of activity williman says “may more accurately be called ‘collection of information’, and can be carried out in a systematic and thorough way. It certainly can be seen as an important part of research” (Williman, 2011).

Ø  Moving facts from one situation to another:  It is often common in report writing how people had over times say they have done their researches, and come up with some forms of information which they present in papers. It is easy to collect information and reassemble it in papers or reports, duly annotated and referenced, and think of it as reseach. However, even if the work is meticulously carried out, and brings enlightenment about the subject to the author and the reader, one vital ingredient of the research process is missing – the interpretation of the information, one might call this form of activity ‘assembly of information’. This is, as with the collection of information, an important component of research, but not its entirety.

Ø  An esoteric activity, far removed from practical life: williman concluded to this point that “While many research projects deal with abstract and theoretical subjects, it is often forgotten that the activity of research has greatly influenced all aspects of our daily lives and created our understanding of the world. It is an activity that is prompted by our need to satisfy our natural curiosity and our wish to make sense of the world around us” (Williman, 2011).

Ø  A word to get a product noticed: it is common to often hear marketers say ‘years of painstaking research have produced this revolutionary, labour-saving product’. According to williman, they habitually use the term ‘research’ in an “emotive fashion way to impress and build confidence”. One is most likely to be faced with an incomprehensive, muddled thinking when one asks for evidence of such research process and methodology; and possibly, it could even be worse that such product is an outcome of just a guesswork.

However, Saunders et al (2012) defined research as “something that people undertake in order to find out things in a systematic way, thereby increasing their knowledge” (Saunders et al, 2012; p 5). It is also said by Collis and Hussey (2003) to be a process of enquiry and investigation which is systematic and methodical, which relates to the process of collecting data in a systematic manner, interpreting data collected, developing ideas from and with it for the purpose of the study.

There could be variety of definitions of research which could differ in emphasis and scope; williman (2011) agreed in his study that one certain thing is that there are many different opinions about and approaches to research. He added however, “as a means of achieving a greater comprehension of our world, research distinguishes itself from the two other basic and more ancient means, those of experience and reasoning”.

Experience

From a dictionary meaning experience is the “practical contact with and observation of facts or events” it could also mean “an event or occurrence which leaves an impression on someone”. Williman simply puts:

Experience results in knowledge and understanding gained either individually or as a group or society, or shared by experts or leaders, through day-to-day living. The most immediate form of experience is personal experience, the body of knowledge gained individually through encountering situations and events in life. When solutions to problems are not to be found within the personal experience of an individual, then he or she may turn to those who have wider or more specialist experience for advice, for example a solicitor in legal matters. Beyond this are the ‘experts’ who have written books on particular subjects, e.g. health care or the finer points of playing golf. Knowledge gained from experience forms an essential aid to our understanding and activities in everyday life. However, it does have severe limitations as a means of methodically and reliably extending knowledge and understanding of the world. This is because learning from experience tends to be rather haphazard and uncontrolled. Conclusions are often quickly drawn and not exhaustively tested, ‘common sense’ is invoked as self-evident, and the advice of experts is frequently misplaced or seen as irrelevant. Despite these shortcomings, experience can be a valuable starting point for systematic research, and may provide a wealth of questions to be investigated and ideas to be tested.

Reasoning

Williman (2011) defined reasoning as the method of using logical argument to make conclusions, where he pointed to three forms of arguments being: deductive, inductive and the combination of the two which is inductive/deductive argument.

Deductive argument as refined by Aristotle through his deductive syllogism begins with general statements, after which it comes to a specific conclusion through logical argument. He argued however that the “deductive reasoning was found to be limiting because it could only handle certain types of statement, and could become increasingly divorced from observation and experience” (Williman, 2011).

“Inductive argument works the other way round. It starts from specific observations and derives general conclusions therefrom” (Williman, 2011). “Purely inductive reasoning proved to be unwieldy and haphazard though, and in practice was rarely applied to the letter” (Williman, 2011).

3.2 Methodology

Saunders et al (2012) clearly illustrated the process of carrying out a research methodology with the research onion process.

The Research Onion

Figure 1.

Source: Saunders et al (2009)

The research onion comprises of philosophies, approaches, strategies, choices, time horizons, techniques and procedures that make up the research design. The research onion process serves as a guide, and allows for explicit description of the methods used, and the process of data collection and analysis in this study.

Saunders et al (2012) referred to methods as procedures and techniques used in analyzing and obtaining data which includes observation and interviews, questionnaires as well as qualitative (non- statistical) and quantitative (statistical) analysis techniques.  Methodology on the other hand refers to how research should be undertaken; it is in other words a framework associated with a particular set of paradigmatic assumption which helps researchers in conducting research (O'Leary, 2004).

According to Williman (2011), an essential early step in the research process is to find research problems. It is the nature of these problems that will in its turn, influence the form of research to take. It is in the effort to find a possible solution or solve these problems that forms the task in the final sections of the research (Williman, 2011). Furthermore, Saunders et al (2007) discussed it comprehensively in their study where they cited Robson (2002) that research questions are an important factor influencing a research project. They further illustrated that the way one chooses to answer these research questions will be influenced by the research philosophy and approach. The research questions will subsequently inform the choice of research strategy, the choice of collection techniques and analysis procedures, and the time horizon over which the researcher undertakes the research project (Saunders et al, 2007). They also explained that the research design will be the general plan of how the researcher will go about answering the research questions, knowing that the importance of clearly defining the research questions cannot be overemphasized. This will contain clear objectives derived from the research questions, specify the resources from which the researcher intends to collect data, and consider the constraints that the researcher will inevitably have ( for example, access to data, time, location and money) as  well as discussing ethical issues.

At this point there are two interdependent processes toward a comprehensive methodology which are the design and tactics and it is important to make a clear distinction between these two; as the former is concerned with the overall plan of the research, and the later, a finer detail of data collection and analysis. Decisions about tactics as explained by Saunders et al (2007) will involve the researcher being clear about the different quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques (for example, questionnaires, interviews, focus group, published data). 

3.3. Research purpose

Having ascertained the fact that researchers should think about research project in terms of the questions they wish to answer and the research purpose, Saunders et al (2007) further explained that the way a researcher asks research questions would result in descriptive, descriptive and explanatory, or explanatory answers. They simply put: in thinking about the research question, the researcher have inevitably begun to think about the purpose of the research. The classification of research purpose most often used in the research methods’ literature is the threefold one of exploratory, descriptive and exploratory. However, in the same way as the research questions can be both descriptive and explanatory, so the research project may have more than one purpose.

Exploratory studies: the business dictionary calls this form of research an “investigation into a problem or situation which provides insights to the researcher which may use a variety of methods such as trial studies, interviews, group discussions, experiments, or other tactics for the purpose of gaining information” (BusinessDictionary.com, 2013). It seeks to find out happenings, finds new insights, asking questions and assessing phenomena and trends in a new light. The major advantage of this type of research is its flexibility and adaptability to change and it is particularly useful if a researcher wishes to clarify his understanding of a problem (Saunders et al, 2007)

Descriptive studies: This study attempts to examine situations in order to establish what is the norm, i.e. what can be predicted to happen again under the same circumstances (Williman, 2011). Saunders et al (2007) analyzed that is necessary to have a clear picture of the phenomena on which the researcher wishes to collect data prior the collection of the data; this thereby makes the descriptive study an extension of, or a forerunner to the exploratory or explanatory research as it portrays an accurate profile of persons, scenario, events or situations (Saunders et al, 2007).

Explanatory studies: The term explanatory research implies that the research in question is intended to explain, rather than simply to describe, the phenomena studied (sagepub.com, 2013). The emphasis here is on studying a situation or a problem in order to explain the relationship between variables (Saunders et al, 2007).

3.4. Research philosophy

Saunders et al (2007) defined research philosophy as the comprehensive term that relates to the development of knowledge and the nature of that knowledge.  They concluded that the research philosophy a researcher adopts is as important as the indication of such researcher’s assumptions about the way in which he views the world. These assumptions which they elucidated will underpin the research strategy and methods the researcher chooses as part of that strategy. More so, research philosophy is mainly influenced by researcher’s particular view of the relationship between knowledge and the process by which it is developed.

Four fundamental research philosophies have been highlighted, which includes; positivism, constructivism, interpretivism and functionalism (Quinlan, 2011) .Positivism adopts “philosophical stance of natural scientist” (Saunders et al, 2012; p 134), and research questions are responded to with quantitative data (Quinlan 2011)

The interpretivist and constructivist posit that reality is unique to each individual based on personal experience, circumstances; hence a researcher would explore beliefs, thoughts and feelings about the phenomenon under investigation in an individual way (Quinlan 2011).

3.5 Applicable to this research  

This research has adopted the interpretivist philosophy, as the study seeks to investigate issues within case studies, with an attempt to deduce meaning and understand reality from the data provided by participants of the research as opposed to quantitative data collection.

More so, as stated in the reseach proposal, this study will be partly exploratory and partly descriptive; it will adopt the exploratory (qualitative) research to allow us a better understanding into the concepts involved in the subject so as to clarify the nature of the broblems to be solved. As part of the purpose of this reseach is to know how marketers follow the Google algorithms,  an exploratory research will help us know what is the trend of events and why it is happening, through which we can ascertain how variables in the situations (and what is going on) are related. This part may not necessarily  provide the final and conclusive answers to the SEO problem (as it gives room to other future researcher to further explore and give more recommendation), but will provide rich and meaningful information and where necessary will provide definitive explanations of concepts. For instance, the exploratory research will help us look in detail some of the very major algorithms and changes Google have made over time, what it (Google) intended that it (the changes) meant to marketers and how it (Google) wanted the updates change online maketing strategies- or how Google wanted the marketers to obey these changes. On the other hand, it will also analyze how marketers adopted this changes, how it altered their approach to online marketing and the results that came thereafter.

The exploratory research will be structured to start with literature search, in which we will rely on books from libraries, online sources for academic literatures,  and where deemed necessary and relevant we could refer to popular press like newspapers and magazines. I do believe that at this point, the literature search would establish enough credible facts; after which there will be dept interviews to tap knowledge and experience of those that have the information relevant to this research. Anyone that could have relevant information that would contribute to achieving the aim and objective of this research will be a potential candidate for the interview. These may include CEOs, managers of client organisations,   marketing managers, members of online marketing departments, members of target audience and so on. Recorded data garthered from these interviews would be transcribed and analyzed.

I do hope to have credible encounters with as many as possible organisations in the course of this research, but as at the time this proposal is being put together, there about specific and strategic organisation I have proposed to use as case studies, with which I propose to carry out the interviews.

Chert system solutions owns www.chertcomputers.com. It is a Nigeria based -pure play- information technology firm, whose business is “distribution of IT products and implementation of IT solutions in Nigeria and the rest of Africa, working with resellers, corporate businesses and end-users” (www.chertcomputers.com, 2010). I have chosen to explore the online marketing strategy and activities of this organisation for couple of reasons. First, because it an oline retail store in a developing country, second, because of its poor SEO performance. Being an online store, I thought it should be one of the top and best rated websites in Nigeria; but in the stead of this, chertcomputers was ranked as 7,121st website in Nigeria three months ago, and by August it has no rank or record to be reckorned with (alexa.com, 2013), meaning it has no much relevance in the region where it operates.

Another organisation I have proposed to meet during the dept interview is a Nigeria based oil and gas servicing firm that does oil exploration and production training as well as recruitment and manpower supply- Danvic Concepts International Nigeria Limited. This research intends to find out how informed the management of this organisation is about SEO and what form its online marketing strategies take.

I  also intend to encounter firms in the developed countries in my interviews, and suppose the UK and USA would be a good bench mark, in which I have proposed to chat with the online marketing executive(s)/ personnel at the London School of Business and Finance, and Officelist LLC respectively.

I do believe that comparing these organisations and exploring their online marketing strategies as well as their SEO trategies will give insight as to the right and appropriate recommendations to make based on facts, information and knowledge obtained from my encounter with them.

The descriptive aspect of this research is where I intend to describe the characteristics of those that follow google algorithm closely and make their search engine optimisation strategies in reference to the algorithms in comparison  with the characteristics of firm that are ill informed about these algorithms or do not set their SEO strategies in line the criteria from Google; and buttressing  the points in emphasizing the relationship that exist between individual criteria or algorithm and specific SEO trategies.

CHAPTER 4

Interviews and findings

This chapter will discuss the findings of the research from interviews based on the research questions and objectives. From the research proposal, it has been established that this study aims to know what sets the marketer on top of google search lists apart from those that are not really recognised- to know for instance why ‘www.lsbf.org.uk’ comes first in a google search for ‘ACCA + MBA in UK’, to know how often these marketers change their online marketing strategies- if Google  makes up to 500- 600 updates in a year; to know if these marketers control their SEO in-house by themselves on pay agents to do it for them and leave the results wholly to the efforts of the agents; in order to learn from marketers that are doing well in their SEO strategies and to be able to make recommendations  for marketers that are still strugling with their SEO, based on the knowledge obtained from the former. In the bid to catch a vast knowledge about the happenings in the industry, the research study has chosen to examine the acvities of different companies from different parts of the world through the same set of questions which are listed below:

1.    What is your organization’s online marketing strategy?

2.    Do you do your digital marketing in-house? Or have you contracted it out to an agent?

3.    Do you follow Google algorithms in your online marketing strategies and do these algorithms influence your online marketing strategies?

4.    How informed is your organization about Google algorithms? Please rate yourself

5.    Talking about some of the most significant algorithms like the PANDA, PENGUIN and the HUMMINGBIRD, how has these algorithms and updates influenced/ shaped your online marketing activities?

b) How did you react to these algorithms and updates?

      6. Do you think the cost of internet, civilization and social developments has       influenced the results of your SEO strategies in your target markets? And how?

      7. Has your organization been at any time sanctioned by Google for any misconduct in your digital marketing activities?

b) If yes, what did you do wrong? What was the penalty? And how did you correct the mistakes?

However, as it was pointed out in the research methodological framework, anyone that could have relevant information that would contribute to achieving the aim and objective of this research will be a potential candidate for the interview, which may include CEOs, managers of client organisations, marketing managers, members of online marketing departments, members of target audience and so on; and in an effort to go by the explications in the methodological framework, major interviews were made with the CEO of chert compters; CEO of Danvic Concepts International Nigeria Limited;  head of SEO and International Search  Development, as well as the regional marketing manager at the London School of Business and Finance; head of digital marketing department at Officelist Limited Liability Company and so on, all for the purpose of knowing how these organizations follow the Google algorithm.

4.1. The organizations

Chert system solutions owns www.chertcomputers.com. It is a Nigeria based -pure play- information technology firm, whose business is “distribution of IT products and implementation of IT solutions in Nigeria and the rest of Africa, working with resellers, corporate businesses and end-users” (www.chertcomputers.com, 2010).

Danvic Concepts International Nigeria Limited’s mission is to be a leader in Geological and Petroleum Engineering consultancy (www.danvicconcepts.com, 2013). It is a Nigeria based oil and gas servicing firm that does oil exploration and production training as well as recruitment and manpower supply.

OfficeList has placed well over 10,000 companies and professionals at nearly 2,500 locations throughout the US and Canada since its birth in May 2004. It is majored in servicing offices, also known as office business centers and executive office suites; and providing furnished, ready-to-move-in office space (www.officelist.com, 2013).

London School of Business & Finance is an institution that offers industry-focused programmes designed to reflect global market trends. It attracts students and candidates from over one hundred and fifty countries worldwide (www.lsbf.org.uk, 2013).

4.2. Reponses and Findings

Online marketing strategies

First we do plenty of research to always understand what our competitors are doing and how Google or search engines evolve each day. In terms of advertisement, our strategy is to invest in pay per click & ads for immediate results, at the same time and to keep our costs low we do SEO (search engine optimization), as this is more of a long term investment. To keep our community engaged we also do social media – Officelist Llc, USA

The overarching Online Marketing Strategy for LSBF is to increase Brand presence online, in the United Kingdom and across the Countries that we have identified as geographical areas of interest from an educational and potential students standpoint.

Looking further into the content strategy, our main aim is to deliver correct, factual and accurate information to our new and returning visitors of the LSBF Group collective- LSBF, UK

For the purpose our business, we keep our website to have an online presence, whereby we can make available the necessary information about our business and organization as well as updates about past and upcoming events; not necessarily for sales, but to create awareness. We also believe that it is an avenue or platform where people can reach us- Danvic Concepts International Nigeria Limited.

These responses show that some of the organisations operate on strong and firm online marketing strategies while others are frail in their strategies as represented in the chat below.

Figure 2.

Doing digital marketing in-house or through an SEO agent

It’s a mix of both, most of our marketing is done in-house but our pay per click campaign is outsourced to an agency- Officelist Llc, USA

Our Strategies are conceptualized in-house, as well as some work being completed by our internal teams. We also do have strategic partners that we enlist the services of in order to bolster the strategies we have in place across the Brands- LSBF, UK

We have an in-house team that is in charge of our SEO and from time to time get the Google analytical reports, and look at the key words analyses, they look at how we are ranking. Similarly, the pay per click campaign is very much focusing on the key words and how they are performing for us because obviously those are what people are searching for and where we need to make sure we are ranking quite highly- Sarah Challender, LSBF, UK

We do some of our SEO in-house and we contracted some out; the reason we use the this strategy is cost of investment and return on investment, in order to get someone in house with the right expertise and the right training, is going to take us longer to achieve both the training and understanding what we want to achieve and the supervision of that person. That time we don’t have; hence, the reason for contracting out- chert system solutions

We only make updates of information on our website, which include the news and events for instance. We cannot possibly contract that out to anyone; that can always be done in-house. If we need to change the out-look or the graphical user interface of our website, then we can call on our web designers (which we do not have in-house) and inform them of what we need to get done, otherwise, we do not have to contract anything that has to do with updates on our website out to anyone- Danvic Concepts International Nigeria Limited.

Most of the sample companies have mixed strategies, in which they contract parts their digital marketing and SEO activities to agents. The pie chart below shows that about 76% of the sample companies have direct or indirect contributions from outside sources in their online activities.

Figure 3.

Following the Google algorithm in online marketing strategies.

Yes, whoever uses Google will be influenced by its algorithm. We follow its behavior day by day and the different strategies that we use in SEO are guided by what Google favors- Officelist Llc, USA

Yes, we do follow the changes that are from Google in the UK and abroad. We also look at the factors for Bing, Yahoo, Badoo and Yandex.  Due to the changes and updates across these search engines, we do “tweak” our online marketing strategies accordingly, however as the Head of SEO and International Search Development, we still look at content for the users as priority over content for search engines- LSBF, UK

The algorithms as you know keep changing, but rather than using algorithms, what we choose to work with is standard industry practice or best industry practice and best standard practice in relation to making sure that pages are properly tagged; like the meta tag and the basic of meta tagging, making sure that the URL itself correlate with the content of the page. All those are minor works and those can be done in-house and that is what we do in order to set a foundation for indexing by Google, just to be sure everything is right according to what Google wants- chert system solutions

To be honest we do not follow algorithms, we keep our website as simple as possible with the focus on the exact purpose and objective for which it was created, and believing it will provide as much information to the public as we have wanted it to do- Danvic Concepts International Nigeria Limited

As much as it may sound strange to know that some of the sample companies do not comply by any search engine algorithm or absolutely indifferent about them, the responses as well as the chart bellow shows that 50% do their SEO in line with Google algorithms, while 50% do not either comply or indifferent by Google’s rules.

Figure 4

  

How informed are marketers about Google algorithms

I am well informed about developments in the Search Arena, via friends and influencers in the Digital world as well as via thought leader friends such as Rand Fishkin and Martin MacDonald. These changes and developments are pass down to the content producers and curators of the websites and built into the process at LSBF- LSBF, UK

On a scale of 1 to 10, we’re a 10. It’s an absolute requirement to be informed; otherwise the company may suffer penalties or even being excluded from Google, which could mean the loss of thousands or millions of dollars- Officelist Llc, USA

If I need to grade our organization, I will say 2 or 3 over 10; Why I said so is because I know there is a lot of work to be done and from January we are going to do quite a lot of work and it’s not what we want to do one-off and let go, it something we have to do constantly. We hope by this time next year we might in 5 or 6- chert system solutions

The effects of some of the most significant updates and algorithms like the PANDA, PENGUIN and the HUMMINGBIRD

PANDA 2011 – This affected sites that were low quality or seeded sites that scraped content from other more authoritative sites. The domains owned by LSBF and collective Brands were not negatively affected by these updates and actually some of our domains showed an improvement in rank due to the “clutter” being removed from the listings, reaction to the update was pragmatic and responsive where there was a major change in the traffic or rank.

PEGUIN 2012 – This was directly toward sites that employ techniques that are not seen as White hat or ethically acceptable, in short black hat sites were penalized. Link Directories and schemes were negatively hit. LSBF’s link policy is quality relationships and partnerships as priority and as such our marketing campaigns were actually stronger due to the ethical tactics we employ in our activities. We monitored our link profile for the domains and where there were fluctuations, analyzed the change and were able to make changes accordingly.

HUMMINGBIRD 2013 – This is a new algorithm from Google that in short “Answers your long questions better”. Semantic Search is an area that I have always been working toward with micro schema and correct markup language and attributes. As with all schema, we continue to improve our semantic search related content and markup in order to improve our search engine presence. Hummingbird has made us reassess our content strategy and amend “how people” and “what people” are searching on Google and our site. The insights gained from site search and keyword data has allowed us to improve our visibility for direct questions and long tail search. For example undergraduate vs. bachelor’s degree and how as part of internationalization we use these terms accordingly- LSBF, UK

Google has just recently launched a new algorithm called Hummingbird, and that has again changed the way we are looking at content, and it is now very much focusing on the kind of questions consumers ask when they are coming to do a search. So obviously, we amend the contents all across our different programs. This is very much about trying to put ourselves in the customers’ shoe really; so if for instance they are looking for ACCA courses in Manchester, what are the key things and the key point of information they want to find quickly and how we can make our content relevant and maybe different to other providers around us. When we look at the ranking, we come up quite high Sarah Challender, LSBF, UK

Each algorithm update is meant to improve the quality of results and combat spam. Sometimes what used to be right is now wrong and “good” companies have also been hit by those updates, not only spammers. Penguin focused on those who had links from bad neighborhoods and those that were involved in bad practices. As for Panda, it was aimed at bad design or low quality sites.  Hummingbird didn’t hit many sites, but in means a big revolution in terms of search as it gives less relevance to specific keywords and aims more in the semantic meaning of the search. Every time an algorithm update is launched we update our strategy to make sure we comply with Google’s regulations and we were more focused on quality rather than quantity, so we shifted in that sense. We also gave priority to content and to social media which has won importance- Officelist Llc, USA

I as a person or our in-house team we may not know much specifically about these updates and algorithm, but like I said, what we choose to work with is standard industry practice or best industry practice and best standard practice as far as links, contents and site quality are concerned. As for links, depends on who you speak to and how upstate the information available is, the general consensus with back links is that they no longer work the way they use to. Back links is now almost irrelevant, because it is now very easy for you to cheat, and if you can cheat the system, then the system is not really serving well. So with back links, its not our priority and we generally do not focus on them; but when it comes to key words, I know we have to work more on key words, but we did work actively on key words for four months, hence we noticed some changes positively and there some key words we have worked on for almost a year and we always get good results on those key words; but there are other key words we worked on them for a short time, we got good results but we stopped working on them.  Why we do that is because of the nature of our business and because we have lots of products, we are constantly re-defining what we focus on at every point in time. We might focus on a product for one quarter and we change to another product for another quarter; and we focus on some key words for a year. We are ensuring the site URL sinks with our meta tags, data descriptions, making sure it links with the content within the page and making sure everything tallies; and when it comes to the usability and the site itself, we have improved the site in the last five months; in as far as we can go, we have done fairly better on that, I know there is more to do though.

For contents, Our contents are dynamic contents in the sense that they relate to a particular product. so, the name of a product is the content of the product, you can’t really manipulate or play around with it, all you have to do is to make sure that the contents correlate with the meta tag, the title, the link and be sure everything sinks together; and for site quality, our site quality is good. It can be improved I know, but again, everything goes down to ‘what is the return on the investment’. Every site can always be improved if it is worth it- chert system solutions

The effects of cost of internet, civilization and social developments on results of SEO strategies

YES, 100% in agreement that the internet, globalization, social media along with digital collectively is directly related to how our SEO and digital strategies are implemented.  In the age of free information and the information overload, we know and need to understand that our content is global, some marketed to specific demographics and geographic areas and as such we make sure we are on the pulse in social media, across multiple platforms in multiple countries and tailored to specific demographics.

It is very difficult to detail specific “hows” however I can say that more holistic, conjoined, robust and targeted strategies are in place at LSBF in order to be “in the game” with the rapid developments within www, social, mobile. We cannot and do not look at channel, brand and keyword in silo, but collectively across the brands, the Halo effect and as well as attribution modeling due to the Universal landscape users are exposed to within Search Media- LSBF, UK

It is really a big factor, because we work in an environment where the internet is used, however, but not very well understood. More so, the internet is still very expensive in Nigeria. Although there is a lot and big usage, but its expensive and even those that use it don’t understand the main concept of searching, so, they don’t understand how to search effectively, in short there is a lot of stuff about the internet they don’t understand. For instance if you do you SEO well and you get on a bottom of the first page or even the second page on the organic search result, you are still good. However, because this market do not really understand the significant of the first page, to them if you are not at the very top screaming them, you don’t get their attention. I suppose if you are looking for something in a search, you will take your time to look through the first page in the search result, and possibly the second page; but in our market, you need to be right in their face before they notice you. More so, the level of sophistication of the Nigerian sites is still under-developed and because most of the sites in Nigeria are not hosted in Nigeria; they are either hosted in the UK or USA which also has an impact on the result Nigerians get in their online search, so, if you use Google Nigeria and you try to search for an item, the tendency of you getting results from the UK and USA is higher than getting a local content. Putting all these together, you need to constantly think of how to be at the very top of the search result pages where you can be easily seen through tools like the Google ads; Google ad words and it likes become very important in order to be able to reach your target market.

If you for instance are searching for something, you need to know what you are searching for. Some people in this market search for stuffs and they don’t understand what they are searching for, and so if you don’t present yourself in a place where they can easily see you, they might not even bother looking for you- chert system solutions

Facing sanctions from Google

Non that I am aware of, because we are regulated by the quality assurance authority; and we just had a review and the part is that we have to adhere to public information policy and so everything we publish on the website is checked internally by the marketing team, checked by academics to make sure that the content we are giving to people is right, so as far as I am aware we have never had any issues with sanction- Sarah Challender, LSBF, UK

No, we have not been sanctioned by Google for Misconduct, not in my tenure here at least and not that I am aware of. We have previously been penalized for duplication of content, which we on a regular basis perform our due diligence in order to negate and reduce the possibility of being penalized. We are also regulated by Educational Bodies where we abide by a strict code and best practice- LSBF, UK

Being sanctioned or receiving a penalty is very different to being hit by an update. If Google penalizes a site, it will disappear from the search engine, it will not rank and it will take several months, even years to recover. Being hit means your site is less relevant to Google, thus is will lose rankings but it will not disappear. Yes, we were hit by penguin and as mentioned above, we focused on content and gave more relevance to social media- officelist, USA

Chapter 5

Analyses and Conclusion

This chapter presents the analyses and discussion of findings from the interviews and responses from the previous chapters. These analyses are framed around the themes as they emerged from the interviews and responses. More so, this chapter presents suggestions and conclusion to the findings of the research work.

Some of the themes in the findings (if not most of them) are such as triggered by the research and interviews questions; thus, discussions in this chapter are still going to be reflections (to a great extent) of the interview questions and frame work; such as, companies’ online marketing strategies that compel them to (or not to) follow Google algorithms; the position and contribution of SEO agents/companies; how much information marketers have about Google algorithms and how they (marketers) follow them; Panda, Penguin, Humming bird and their influences on online marketing activities; the effect of the cost of internet, civilization and social development on marketers’ SEO strategies; and how online marketers make corrections on their misconducts; as these in no doubt are the factors most responsible for page ranking and the differences between the good and the bad as far as organizations’ SEO strategies and successes are concerned.

5.1. Online marketing strategies.

As strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a goal (either long-term or short-term) or overall aim, it is the factor responsible for the decision of steps to be taken to achieve the planned goals. In the encounters and interviews made in the course of this research, it is apparent that companies’ online marketing strategy is one significant determinant of how much marketers would follow Google algorithms. As much as it is the desire of most marketers to be ranked high in search result, as much as they (marketers) mostly make efforts to be relevant in search results, some really do not care as they tend to tie their carefree attitude about these algorithms to the excuses of ‘nature of business’, which (according to the interview with Danvic Concepts International Nigeria Limited) does not necessarily require them obey Google. Comparing her (Danvic Concepts International Nigeria Limited) statement with LSBF’s online marketing strategy;

 ‘For the purpose our business, we keep our website to have an online presence, whereby we can make available the necessary information about our business and organization as well as updates about past and upcoming events; not necessarily for sales, but to create awareness. We also believe that it is an avenue or platform where people can reach us’- Danvic Concepts International Nigeria Limited

‘The overarching Online Marketing Strategy for LSBF is to increase Brand presence online, in the United Kingdom and across the Countries that we have identified as geographical areas of interest from an educational and potential students standpoint.

Looking further into the content strategy, our main aim is to deliver correct, factual and accurate information to our new and returning visitors of the LSBF Group collective’- LSBF, UK

From the statements above, it clear that the strategies state the difference. While the likes of Officelist Llc, USA make researches to always understand what her competitors are doing and how Google or other search engines evolve each day, Danvic Concepts International Nigeria Ltd. sees her website as a mere online presence and a platform for business and organization updates; and thus, the results are apparently worlds apart.

Figure 5

Google search engine result page for ‘acca+ mba in UK’

5.2. The contribution of SEO companies

For financial reasons and the logistics of doing SEO in- house as well as the purpose of cost of investment and return on investment, companies contract their SEO activities out to SEO agents. As chert system solutions rightly made clear, to get someone in-house with the right expertise and the right training, it may take longer time to achieve both the training and understanding of what the organization wants to achieve; and the supervision of that person, organizations may not readily have that time.

More so, Search Engine Optimization companies support Cherts System Solutions’ assertion as ‘SEOTONIC’   confirms in its statement that “ today with the fast galloping of the technology developments many organizations opt for in-house SEO, which is okay, as long as you are fully equipped for it, and are willing to put people who will remain solely responsible for this task 24x7. Unlike common belief, SEO is not a task that can be done in bits and pieces. Neither it is something that can be done once and forgotten. SEO, in simple language, is a way of life. The department/ personnel in charge of SEO will be the DJ at the discotheque. You have to keep your hand on the pulse every second. The time involved, the expertise required, the intense follow-up in terms of continuous analysis of results and fine-tuning the web-design and contents involves a great deal of effort and focus. This usually, is not possible from an internal platform” (www.seotonic.com, 2013), Hence, the reason for contracting out.

Chert System Solutions had at one time tried to experiment the relevance and importance of SEO companies when it decided to bring it SEO in-house, and it testimony was: “we noticed a good increase in traffic when we used the SEO companies and ever since we stopped, we have noticed a decrease in traffic. SEO agents, in most cases are experts as they are well experienced and seem to be dedicated to their clients. In choosing the right SEO agent however, organizations may have to examine two more different ones to ascertain that whoever understands its methodology, whoever understands its approach and its strategy to the market, is the kind they want to out-source their SEO to.

5.3. How much Google do marketers know?

According to SEOmoz, Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times each and “for search marketers, knowing the dates of these Google updates can help explain changes in rankings and organic website traffic and ultimately improve search engine optimization” (www.moz.com, 2013). More so, there are many components (as analyzed by Google) to the search process and the results page, and Google constantly updates its technologies and systems to deliver better results (www.google.com, 2013).

Marketers with intensions to be relevant and be ranked high already know these and play by the rules; Officelist Llc, USA made it clear that it is an absolute requirement to be informed, otherwise the company may suffer penalties or even being excluded from Google, which could mean the loss of thousands or millions of dollars; and ultimately, whoever uses Google will be influenced by its algorithm. It (Officelist Llc, USA) therefore follows Google’s behavior day by day and the different strategies that it uses in SEO are guided by what Google favors. It is shocking however  to have found out that the CEO of a pure play organization (Chert system Solutions) knows nothing about Google updates or any other updates from other search engines. The company had rated itself 2 out of 10 and it became also apparent during the course of the interview that the organization does not really have a well defined and sustained online marketing strategy. It may have sounded ridiculous or cheeky to conclude that the organization operates without clear plans or to say it operates without clues; but a proper assertion is evident in its ranking and how ‘alexa’ had rated the organization (as pointed out earlier in this research work).

On the other hand, for LSBF to have had 88%  increase ( as rated by alexa.com) in search visits (the percentage of visits to a site that comes from a search engine) in the last three months is in no doubt as a result of capable hands in its SEO that are not only well informed about developments in the Search Arena through friends and influencers in the Digital world but also make efforts to follow thought leader such as Rand Fishkin ( the wizard of MOZ) and Martin MacDonald (a well known digital marketer and popular writer about SEO, PPC and social medial marketing), whose influences are passed down to the content management department, curators of the website and are built into the process of following the changes from Google in the UK and abroad. It also looks at the factors for Bing, Yahoo, Badoo and Yandex; and as a result of the frequent changes and updates across these search engines, LSBF does “tweak” its online marketing strategies accordingly. However, according to the Head of SEO and International Search Development, LSBF still looks at content for the users as priority over content for search engines.

5.4. Google updates and their influences on online marketing activities

From ‘Boston’ the first named update in February 2003, Google has dominated the online search, making combinations of algorithm changes and index refreshes to always make improvement to search that answers the users’ information need as fast as possible, so that there is almost a seamless connection between searchers’ thought, the information they need and the search result that they find (www.google.com, 2013). To achieve its goal, Google will only present information from marketers that it considers most relevant to searchers’ need; and relevance to Google is a function of how much these marketers follow it algorithms.

For the purpose of this research work, timing, contemporary and the popularity of the algorithms, the Panda, Penguin and the Humming bird are considered three of the most significant algorithms, as these three updates have had great impact on SEO as much as site quality, contents/keywords and links are concerned. According to the diagram below, these three components are responsible for over 57% of the factors Google considers in how it ranks websites.

Figure 6

Source: www.businessmarketingblog.org

These are update that changed the search results forever and made marketers and SEO professionals stand on their toes to work the rank they desire. Each algorithm update is meant to improve the quality of results and combat spam. Sometimes what used to be right is now wrong and “good” companies have also been hit by those updates, not only spammers.

As for examples of how they affect “good” companies and how they respond to these updates, the testimonies from the interviews show how some companies keep up with the updates and why their results are proportionate to the efforts their they put in.

While Officelist Llc. updates its strategy every time an algorithm update is launched to make sure it complies with Google’s regulations, LSBF has policies guiding its practices as related to each of these updates. Although as far as the PANDA is concerned, the domains owned by LSBF and collective Brands were not negatively affected by these updates and actually some of its domains showed an improvement in rank due to the “clutter” being removed from the listings, it’s policy on links and ‘PENGUIN’ is quality relationships and partnerships as priority and as such its marketing campaigns were actually stronger due to the ethical tactics it employs in its activities. LSBF monitored its link profile for the domains and where there were fluctuations, analyzed the change and were able to make changes accordingly. It also continues to improve its semantic search related content and markup in order to improve its search engine presence and the ‘HUMMINGBIRD’ has made it reassess its content strategy and amend “how people” and “what people” are searching on Google and its site. The insights gained from site search and keyword data (according to head of SEO and International Search Development) has allowed LSBF to improve its visibility for direct questions and long tail search. For example undergraduate vs. bachelor’s degree and how as part of internationalization it uses these terms accordingly.

5.5. The effects of cost of internet, civilization and social developments on results of SEO strategies

It is no news that the world in its entirety has gone digital and as such marketing has followed the trend, as marketing has thus advanced into organization or brand using one or more of the various digital channels or distribution means e.g. computers, smart phones/ mobile phones, and/or other digital devices (Smith, 2012), all driven by the internet. However, the the interview with the CEO of Chert System Solution shows that organisations in developing counrties still lack behind in the technological trend as internet is still expensive in these parts of the world and thereby slowing down the rate and speed at which informationtion is made available to the market via the internet. As much as Chert System Solutions agrees that it is really a big factor, LSBF confirms that the internet, globalization, social media along with digital collectively is directly related to how its SEO and digital strategies are implemented. The LSBF approach to this issue is different though, as stated in the interview with the head of SEO and International Search Development, “In this age of free information and the information overload, we know and need to understand that our content is global, some marketed to specific demographics and geographic areas and as such we make sure we are on the pulse in social media, across multiple platforms in multiple countries and tailored to specific demographics”. However, according to chert system solutions, marketer in developing countries work in an environment where the internet is used, but not very well understood; this it tries to make clear as it explains: Although there is a lot and big usage, but it’s expensive and even those that use it do not understand the main concept of searching, so, they don’t understand how to search effectively, in short there is a lot of stuff about the internet they don’t understand. For instance, if you do your SEO well and you get on a bottom of the first page or even the second page on the organic search result, you are still good. However, because this market does not really understand the significant of the first page, to them if you are not at the very top screaming at them, you don’t get their attention. He further explains: I suppose if you are looking for something in a search, you will take your time to look through the first page in the search result, and possibly the second page; but in our market, you need to be right in their face before they notice you. More so, the level of sophistication of the Nigerian sites (and especially in developing countries) is still under-developed and because most of the sites in these countries are not hosted locally; they are either hosted in the UK or USA which also has an impact on the result the local market get in their online search, so, if you use Google Nigeria (for example) and you try to search for an item, the tendency of you getting results from the UK and USA is higher than getting a local content. Putting all these together, you need to constantly think of how to be at the very top of the search result pages where you can be easily seen through tools like the Google ads; Google ad words and it likes become very important in order to be able to reach the target market.

5.6. My assertions

Online presence or visibility in its maximum for businesses today is more than ever not just the marketing concern and nesessary support to the primary activities or operation of an organisation.  To remain relevant and competitive in business of this age, organisations must be easy to find on the internet. If not, you then can bet that such business is gradually heading to becoming unknown, and thus, obsolete. One of the very important ways to keep a good online presence and be found easily on the internet is to be ranked high in the organic search results of search engines and Google especially. Vinny La Barbera stated in a journal that “Over 85% of all transactions start online and the organic results receive 65% more clicks than the sponsored results, thus making search engine optimization a crucial part of your marketing plan” (www.businessmarketingblog.org, 2013).

 We may need to hold on and think for ourselves, where do we go first whenever there is need for any information? I would most likely go to the search engines and particularly Google. We may then need to ask ourselves how many times or how often do we click on any other thing asides the organic list; or how often do we go click on search results past the first page? If you would think like I would, or like most of the search engines users, you are not like to click more than the first page and in most cases, the top 5 in the organic result. Thus, the reason businesses need a strong SEO campaigns to help their sites get good ranking organically.

5.7. Conclusion

What does Google want?

With about 35 percent of the world population available on the internet (internetworldstats.com, 2012), and millions of marketer competing for (online) space and attention, Google and other search engines have had to set guidelines and criteria to determine how these marketers work their own space and rank for specific phrases and keywords.  The primary purpose of all of its algorithm is to be certain that the best and the most relevant information made are available to consumers during every search and as such made the criteria listed below, amongst others, determinant of how websites are ranked in the top organic results. In other words, the more marketers and website owner are able play by these criteria, the better ranking they get.

Content: Andrieu (2009) did conclude that the act and practice of SEO is all in the reflection of the popular saying that on the web, Content is King, and that whoever is in the pursuit of good ranking by any of the search engines will not underestimate the need to follow couple of rules and give their websites some rich and interesting contents. More so, business marketing blog (2013) puts it that the search results and especially the organic list are all about trust; Google wants consumers to get only most trusted results to meet their queries and information needs. “Anything less may lead to a bad experience and one less user. For this reason, the search engines put a lot of emphasis and weight on how good and how much content a website has. Contents (the actual text, images, links and videos) need to be extremely relevant, high quality, authoritative and unique to a website. Anything less will make it very difficult for the website to ever compete with well ranked websites” (www.businessmarketingblog.org, 2013). This is not farfetched from the interview response of the regional marketing manager at the London School of Business and Finance where she says the organization is very much focused on the kind of questions consumers ask when they search, thereby trying to put itself in the customers’ shoe and as such amending its contents to be relevant to the services it offers and to the need of the customers. 

Links: “Just as, if not more important than content in some cases, is link popularity. This is basically a gauge of how authoritative and relevant a website is as seen by other websites” (www.businessmarketingblog.org, 2013). www.amazon.com has about 993,980 sites liking in (according to alexa.com) and ranks 8 in the world, little wonders why it is an authority in international electronic commerce industry. Vinny La Barbera further explained in her study that “The more links to a website from other relevant, quality and authoritative websites, the higher the link popularity becomes and thus, the higher the organic rankings will climb. As the first pages of the search engines’ results continue to get more competitive, websites absolutely must have solid link building plan to continuously build its link popularity” (www.businessmarketingblog.org, 2013).

Good website Architecture: “Website architecture, as popularly defined is an approach to the design and planning of websites which, like architecture itself, involves technical, aesthetic and functional criteria. Site architecture is one of those things that traditionally never happen more than simply writing a few words about having a homepage, categories, products, job done e.t.c” (www.spottedpanda.com, 2012), more so, there are certain elements that must be in place for a website to be considered as a candidate for top natural placement. Some of these elements include optimized title tags, meta tags, image tags, and much more (www.businessmarketingblog.org, 2013)

Basically, getting it right at the start is crucial to the long term strategy of a website. A good website structure that is user friendly, easy to navigate and designed with passing link juice in mind will all aid in increasing rankings and driving conversions later down the line (www.spottedpanda.com, 2012).

Domain Authority: According to MOZ domain authority is the “prediction for how a website will perform in search engine rankings” (www.moz.com, 2013), Brick Marketing also puts that it is the “measure of the power of a domain name and is one of many search engine ranking factors” and it is based on factors like the age, size and popularity. It also explained that “domain age is an indicator of trust because it proves to the search engines that the website has longevity. If the website owner has maintained registration of a website consistently and has generated an increase in traffic to that domain over time, the search engines conclude that it must serve a purpose and be a trusted source”. Domain popularity is measured in part by the number of inbound links from quality sites that a domain has. Inbound links to a domain are a signal that that website has useful information that is worth sharing. This is why a white hat SEO link building campaign is so important. Tactics such as blogging and blog commenting, press release distribution, directory and profile submission, article marketing, and social media help to build inbound links to a domain and generate traffic over time.

The size of a website on a domain contributes towards its authority because the number of pages that exists on a domain correlate with the amount of content that can generate inbound links. A larger website with quality content on each page will have more inbound links than a smaller website.

Website Accessibility: To some, website accessibility means having equal access to web-based information and services regardless of physical or developmental abilities or impairments (John Hopkins University, 2008). As much as this is true, it is also about how much search engines are able to find and read contents on the website and making sure that there are no hidden contents, incorrect use of robots.txt files or “noindex” tags or implementing any other barriers that may prevent search engines’ free crawl on websites.

Usability: This refers to how much a user can interact with a website which is one of the things to consider in the process of building a new website; furthermore, websites need to be attractive enough to it users to want to keep looking at it.

According Thomas Churm (2012), “usability is comprised of learnability, memorability, efficiency, satisfaction and errors. Learnability is how easy it is for a new user to accomplish tasks the first time they visit a website. Memorability is how easy it is for someone to come back to using your website after they haven’t used it for a period of time. Efficiency is how quickly users can complete tasks on your site after they are familiar with its use. Satisfaction is whether users enjoy the design of the site and errors refers to the number of errors users make when they use your site, the severity of the errors and how easy they are to recover from it” (Churm, 2012).

On-Page Optimization – “As smart as the search engines continue to get, they still rely on proper on-page optimization of websites to determine how relevant certain web pages are to specific key terms and phrases. Using keywords correctly in the proper places (title tags, urls and anchor text links) continue to help web pages to perform well” (www.businessmarketingblog.org, 2013). 

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Appendix

Dear Sir/Madam,                                                         

Re:      Research Participation

Let me take this opportunity to introduce myself, my name is Yomi Fajemidagba and I am currently studying for MSc – Strategic Marketing from London Metropolitan University at LSBF-Manchester Campus. As part of my degree program I am required to undertake a Thesis, which is research based study.

I would really appreciate your valuable participation in my research study on SEO strategies from Google.  The purpose of this research is pure academic and the results will be kept highly confidential and will never be shared with any one. The aim of my research study is to understand how professional marketers follow Google algorithms and how they affect their organisations online marketing strategies.

The letter is to secure your consent by signing at the bottom to indicate that you have understood the purpose of the interview and that you will voluntarily take part in the series of interviews for the mentioned purposes.

Thank you very much for participating, it really will help me in my research study!

Student’s Signature & Date            YOMI FAJ 4/11/2013

Interviewee’s Signature