WEBSITE MARKETING STRATEGIES & SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING SERVICES

Well - its been a busy past few months! Today Blue Freeway listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX code BLU) - and the market has now spoken. BlueFreeway shares closed at $1.35 on trading of over 6 million shares.

BlueFreeway Limited have acquired a 20% stake in Cogentis; with the remainder of Cogentis to be acquired over the next 3 - 5 years.

This is an exciting step for us in the evolution and growth of Cogentis Search Marketing. Cogentis will continue to be a specialist Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) agency - but now Cogentis is the specialist SEO/SEM strategy & services company and brand within the BlueFreeway Group.

BlueFreeway is a group of ten specialist digital and interactive marketing businesses who have come together to offer a seamless, fully integrated suite of products and services in the online and mobile space. BlueFreeway aims to be Australia’s leading “one stop” digital and interactive marketing communications group, and the “go to” brand for top 1,000 corporate and government clients.

Chris Dimmock has been invited to speak at “Search Engine Bootcamp” on November 30th, on advanced website accessibility issues for SEO. Cogentis have found that many websites - especially large corporate sites - have major information architecture related issues which often restrict access to their sites by search engine spiders (as well as many human users).

Chris will be talking about some of these issues - and the core accessibility concepts of ‘progressive user agent enhancement’ and unobtrusive use of javascript - which are fundamental to the Cogentis SEO site architecture approach. You can design a site which is both acccessible to all (including search engines) - whilst still providing an enhanced user experience for users with more capable browsers and plugins. At Cogentis, we have been using our progressive user enhancement site architecture methodology for SEO for over 3 years. And it shows in our client’s search engine results.

Because accessibility and search engine optimisation are often overlooked at the information architecture & site design stage - (and there is no ‘progressive user enhancement’, and often no ‘graceful degradation’ ) - often all there is left for Googlebot to index is an ‘Upgrade your browser’ message….

Chris will cover many of the technologies which limit search engine spider access - and what to do about them - without overly limiting site creativity or functionality for users with enhanced browsers.

We are proud to advise that two more Cogentis staff have passed their Google Advertising Professionals exam.

On October 19th, Kamila achieved a score of 87.4% and today, Janda achieved 89.2%.

Congratulations to both of you!

It’s on again! Cogentis and Upstream are again joining forces to grow Moustaches in Movember to raise money for men’s health issues. This year, the money goes to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and Beyond Blue.

Last year, Movember raised $1.1 million for the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia. That’s more money than the Prostate Cancer Foundation got from Federal Government funding . Prostate cancer is the second largest cause of cancer related death for men in Australia, and around 2,700 Australian men died from prostate cancer last year.

If you’d like to sponsor our Mo’s - the 2006 Cogentis Upstream Team Mo Bro Rego Number is: 352

We’ve again donated our services to run the Search Engine marketing campaigns for Movember 2006.

Google Australia has published a 16 page liftout on Search marketing, titled ‘Discovering Search’. It is available as a lift out feature in the September edition of Marketing Magazine, which hit the news stands today.

It provides information and articles on both paid Search (Adwords) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Cogentis Managing Director, Chris Dimmock, was interviewed for, and quoted in, several of the articles, including:

Chris Dimmock, founder of specialist SEO/ SEM (search engine marketing) agency Cogentis, started providing professional SEO consulting services in 2001 - before Google even had an Australian office. Although SEO continues to be a challenging concept for some, Dimmock says at its core is website accessibility, information architecture, keyword research, descriptive links and best practice web design”

“SEO is defined as the process of building a website in a manner which enables the pages to rank highly in algorithmically determined (or ‘natural’, ‘organic’) search results,” says Dimmock.
“This can be achieved by providing unique, descriptive content, targeting appropriate search phrases and conforming to the published search engine guidelines” he says.

“SEM - Google Adwords, is an ‘instant gratification’ advertising media. You can set up a basic Google Adwords campaign in half an hour and often have your advertisments running within the hour. Try that with other media such as newspapers, TV or radio”

Cogentis are starting our first print based advertising - with an advert in the June 16th 2006 edition of B&T magazine.

BandT is “Australia’s highest circulating marketing advertising and media magazine” - and our advert will appear in their search engine marketing special feature.

A print advert - who’d have thought….

We we very pleased to get a great testimonial from Louise Brockbank, Director of Marketing and Strategy at ninemsn, who said:

“ninemsn has worked with Cogentis Search Marketing on SEO and SEM projects for the past 18 months. In that time our search engine referral traffic to the network has increased by over 100%. This has helped ninemsn retain its number one online position in News, Lifestyle and Entertainment”

Here’s the advert:

Cogentis been working with ninemsn since late 2004, and have achieved some great success in increasing the volume of search traffic to ninemsn’s site network.

It’s suddenly become seminar season!

Google University is coming to Sydney in June. The AIMIA (Australian Interactive Media Industry Association) are running a seminar “An Introduction to Web Marketing” in the morning; and Google are running two ‘Google University’ sessions in the afternoon.

It on Tuesday, 6th June, at the Telstra Auditorium, Sydney

The event comprises 3 separate sessions:

10 - noon: 2 Hour Forum: An Introduction to Web Marketing

Featuring:

• Julian Sonego, Marketing Manager Australia, Google
• Ben Still, Red Ant
• Paul Knight, In My Room Web Design
• Chris Dimmock, Managing Director, Cogentis Internet Marketing
• Moderator: John Butterworth, CEO, AIMIA

1.00pm - 3.00pm: Google Uni: Introductory Course
Google Services for Marketing your website

3.30 - 5.00pm: Google Uni: Advanced Course
Maximising your AdWords Campaign

More details are here

This year Cogentis have been invited to participate at the CeBIT Search Panel. You can come along and view it live - or view it as a Podcast.

Date: Midday, Tuesday 9th May 2006

Location: CeBIT Exhibition, Stand P1, Front of Hall 4, Sydney Convention Centre, Darling Harbour.

The 2006 CeBIT search panel will be moderated by Foad Fadaghi, Research Director – Frost & Sullivan.

Panelists:

• Tim Blackman, General Manager, Local Search – ninemsn
• Andrew Wilkinson, Product Manager – FulfilNET
• Chris Dimmock, Managing Director – Cogentis

Viocorp will be podcasting this event.

We are currently recruiting a Search Engine Marketing Administration Assistant.

This is a permanent role, based in our Epping Office. For more information, or to apply, see our advertisement at Seek.

[Update: 2 May 2006 - Vacancy filled - And a warm welcome to Kamila who’ll join us next week]

Chris Dimmock, Managing Director of Cogentis, will be presenting at iMAT 2006 in July.

Chris will be running the ‘Digital Doctor’ Search Clinic with Julian Sonego, Marketing Manager, Google Australia, on 20th July, from 3.30pm - 4.30pm. We’ll be covering topics including: why isn’t your site indexed, or fully indexed, in search engines? Why doesn’t it rank? What can you about it? Learn about making your site accessible to search engines (and prospective customers).

On Friday 21st July, at 11.30am, Chris will be on a ‘hands on’ Digital Doctor workshop panel with Lachlan Brahe – GM Media from emitch; Oliver Weidlich – MD, Ideal Interfaces; and Jon Maxim – Creative Director & Copywriter.

We’ll be reviewing actual iMAT conference delegates sites, as selected on Day 1 of the conference, during this session. As a panel, we’ll be reviewing each selected delegate’s site in terms of search engine accessibility; site structure; target keyword selection; site style/ layout; usability and copyrighting.

You can Download the 2006 iMAT Conference Program as a PDF file.

Yesterday was the 2006 Annual Search Engine Room Conference, held at Cockle Bay, Darling Harbour Sydney.

It was a great conference - Martin Kelley, Bev and the SER team did a great job. Great speakers - great topics - and a very well run event.

The day started with a Google sponsored breakfast, introduced by Sukinder Singh Cassidy, Google GM Asia Pacific & Latin America Operations. Brian White, who works with Matt Cutts in Google’s Search Quality team, then gave a presentation on Search Quality and Google Sitemaps.

There were many great sessions at the SER 2006 conference - Craig Wax from Yahoo! gave a great presentation on “the evolution of the revolution” of search; and Ren Warmuz from Trellian/ Keyword Discovery gave a great presentation on Keyword research.

I gave a sesssion on Search Engine accessibility, and website accessibility in general - and got a lot of positive feedback. Brian White did a second presentation around lunchtime at the main conference - and stayed around all day to answer questions and speak to conference delegates.

Brian was on a tough schedule - he flew from the US to Australia on Monday - spent the whole of Tuesday at the SER conference (he gave a 7.30 breakfast presentation, and he didn’t leave SER until nearly 7.00pm) - and then flew back to the US on Wednesday morning. He had his ‘little black book’ out the whole time, taking notes….

It was also great to catch up with several of the guys (including Shor, ProjectPHP and edit_g) who post at Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch forum, and Brett Tabke’s WebmasterWorld Forum.

Nearly 300 people attended SER 2006 - which I suspect makes it the biggest Search Conference held in Sydney to date. Look out for SER 2007 next year.

Movember is a fundraising event held during November 2005 that raises awareness about male health issues, and raises money for the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia.

We’ve put up some further information and pictures of the Cogentis Upstream Movember Mo Bro team. We’ll add some progress pictures as Movember (and our Mo’s) get underway.

If you’d like to sponsor our Mo’s - the Cogentis Upstream Team Mo Bro Rego Number is: 304

All you need to do is go to the Movember site, enter our Mo bro team number (which is 304), and enter your contact and credit card details.

Alternatively, you can call Mo Sista Janda, at Cogentis on (02) 9869 4773 for other methods of sponsoring Cogentis Upstream Team Mo Bro’s.

We think this is a worthwhile charity to support. Every year, around 10,000 Australian men are diagnosed with Prostate Cancer, and more than 2,500 die of this disease, making prostate cancer the second largest cause of male cancer deaths (after lung cancer).

Cogentis has also donated our Search Engine Marketing Services to Movember to help raise awareness of the event.

We’ve been attending the Web Essentials 05 Conference in Sydney for the past few days - September 29 and 30th.

There was a great line up of web standards illuminaries - Doug Bowman (who also spoke at WE04), Eric Meyer, Molly Holzschlag, Tantek Çelik, Jeffrey Veen and many others. It was great to actually meet many of the people whose writings, ideas, and skills have influenced the devopment of web standards, and changed the way many of us work.

Tantek - who I first encounted through his ‘Box Model hack’ - told attendees the story of how he came up with this famous CSS hack - and how it really didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. Of course - by fudging widths which allowed IE 5 to actually display CSS designs correctly - it was a breakthrough which made CSS design a viable option from a mass market browser perspective. I had first used Tantek’s box model hack on a tableless, all CSS site design which went live back in late January 2002.

I even bought a brand new copy of the 2nd edition of Eric Meyer’s ‘Cascading Style Sheets - The Definitive Guide’ to get Eric to autograph - I was too embarrassed to ask him to sign my now dog-eared, coffee stained, highlighter pen marked, post-it-note ‘tabbed’ copy of the earlier edition of his book….

Eric’s presentations were just fantastic. His presentation on ‘rapid design prototyping using standards’ was a real eye opener!

There are Podcasts of many of the presentations from WE05 now available for anyone who didn’t attend.

Thanks again to Russ, Peter, Maxine and John for bringing so many great international speakers to Sydney for another terrific Web Standards conference!

Cogentis turned 2 years old on September 24th - so we celebrated in time honoured Australian fashion with a long lunch!

It was a real personal milestone for me - having been told by more than one ‘Agency’ person when I founded Cogentis that we just wouldn’t succeed. Instead - by specialising in our field - we’ve grown and flourished. Cogentis now has some of Australia’s most successful web properties as our clients. Some of our Birthday guests included friends from ninemsn, Google, Frost & Sullivan, MarketingFX, and Caxton Group.

Janda organised pre lunch drinks & nibbles in the office - and a wonderful lunch at Nero’s in Epping - complete with balloons, menus, and more food than we could eat!

24th September was also Danny Sullivan’s 40th Birthday. Love Nacho’s photoshop card with most of the SEW moderators. Cogentis’ 2nd birthday lunch also coincided with Yahoo! Australia’s 8th Birthday - so they had their own lunch to go to!

Cogentis is one of only a small handful of Australian Search Engine Optimisation Agencies to be listed in the 2005 Marketing Sherpa Buyers guide to SEO firms. We are pretty pleased to have been included in this the 4th edition of the guide, which reviews 126 SEO firms from all over the world.

Anne Holland, Publisher of the Buyer’s Guide, writes in the introduction “We selected the ‘rules’ you should judge SEO firms by, using a combination of common sense, client-side feedback, a search engine’s own publicly published guidelines, and also input from many, many firms in the field.”

The report is $US199 and is available directly from Marketing Sherpa.

As part of the three day 2005 Cebit Sydney exhibition, Viocorp are hosting a series of live webcast panel discussions. These discussions cover topics including Search Engine Marketing, Wireless Broadband, and Security.

The panel discussions will be webcast live from CeBIT Hall 4 stand S39.

The Search Engine Marketing panel, scheduled for May 24th at 1.00pm, comprises:

Mel Bohse, Managing Director, Overture Australia
Julian Sonego, Marketing Manager, Google Australia
Chris Dimmock, Managing Director, Cogentis
Kaylie Smith, Regional Director, DoubleClick
Moderator: Foad Fadaghi, Research Director, Frost & Sullivan

The Search Engine Marketing panel discussion webcast will be available both live, and for subsequent download from Viocorp.

Chris Dimmock has been invited as guest lecturer on Search Engine Marketing at the ADMA Certificate in eMarketing course, on Thursday, 12th May, 2005.

The lecture is for those enrolled in the ADMA eMarketing Certificate course, and the Sydney course is held at 1 James Place, North Sydney.

Chris Dimmock, Managing Director of Cogentis, has been invited to present a paper at the Interactive Marketing and Advertising Trends (iMAT) Conference, to be held 18 - 19 August, 2005 in Sydney.

Chris’ presentation is part of the ‘Converting Your Online Efforts Into Sales and Customer Acquisitions’ stream, and is titled “Demystifying Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing.”

Cogentis is proud to announce it has two Qualified Google AdWords Advertising Professionals as at 15.02.2005

Google announced its ‘Google Advertising Professional’ program on November 11th, 2004, with the first Google Advertising Professionals becoming eligible to be qualified during the second week of February 2005. The Google AdWords Advertising Professional program is designed for professionals who manage multiple Google AdWords client accounts.

Chris Dimmock of Cogentis Pty Ltd achieved this qualification on 12.02.2005. Jeremy Matchett became Cogentis’ second qualified Google AdWords Professional today.

Both Chris and Jeremy were amoungst the first 100 globally to achieve this recognition from Google.

Search Engine Room is a one-day conference to be held Tuesday, April 12 2005, at Dockside, Cockle Bay, Darling Harbour Sydney. The conference will cover the latest developments in Australia’s booming Search Engine Marketing industry, the fastest-growing digital marketing sector.

This event is supported by the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association.

Chris Dimmock, Cogentis Managing Director, will be a panelist in the 2.00pm Panel: Search Engine Optimisation - Black Art or Sweet Science?

The panel will examine the latest trends in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), focusing on keyword research, management and execution. It will cover the creation of an effective SEO campaign and give tips to attract the right customers to your site.

Due to the growth in Cogentis over the past year, we had outgrown our office space on Level 4 - so moving to larger premises has been on the cards for a while. The fitout, cabling and alterations are (almost!) complete - so we’ll be in and operational on Level 1 before Christmas.

We are still in the Activision Building, next door to the Epping Club, just a few minutes walk from Epping railway station.

Our new office address is Level 1, Suite 105, 51 Rawson Street, Epping. Our new fax number is (02) 9869 0391.

Recently it was asked ‘what’s the difference between search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO)’? Generally - there is confusion about these two terms - experts don’t even agree! Here’s our take on the definitions of these two terms - and the differences between the two processes.

Continue reading the Difference Between Search Engine Marketing and SEO

Tim Berners-Lee, (now Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE), as awarded in the Queen’s 2004 New Year’s Honours list) W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web said:

“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect”

Web accessibility is an important issue which many graphically inclined web designers dismiss - to their clients detriment - as ‘too limiting to their creativity’. But one of the core commercial issues of accessibility is that if you make a web site that is accessible to text based browsers - the same style of browser that is used with a speech synthesizer, or braille reader, by the visually impaired to surf the internet - then you have also built a site that will be easily indexed by search engines. In Australia, its not only ‘good business’, and ‘good practice’ - its actually the law!

Continue reading Accessibility, web sites and Australian Law

Congratulations to Search Engine Watch’s Danny Sullivan who celebrates his birthday today.

The Search Engine watch moderators made him a special birthday card.

Coincidentally - Cogentis turned one today!

A recent article in The Australian, Searching for the bottom line contains several insights into the field of search engine marketing from Cogentis Director Chris Dimmock:

• “Search engine marketing has a very high return on investment but it is relatively complex in its own right,”
• “You can run a search engine campaign, but until you understand the process and and how all the tools work, it can be a bit daunting”
• “potential customers who click on an advertisement must be taken to a web page that clearly describes the product and the ordering process.”
• “People who are prepared to pay over the odds at an auction because of ego or emotional attachment will essentially upset the apple cart – but it’s their apple cart at the end of the day … That is why it is vital to estimate the value of each click to a business, and stay within those spending limits".