Still got family and friends ask you what Twitter is? Send them the video and ask them to start the tweets!

T.R. Harrington, Director of Strategic Direction & Product Development of Darwin Marketing, Shanghai spoke about search behavior and internet marketing in China.

Unlike most markets around the world, Google is NOT king in China. Baidu has 68% of the search traffic with revenue growth up to $234 million USD. What makes Baidu unique is that it shows paid search ads before the organic results. For very popular searches you might not see a natural search result on even the first 2 or even 3 pages.

China is second in the world for search activity and the search engine market is still very young. Because advertisers are much less sophisticated, they need simple tools. For paid search, there are much higher clickthrough rates. However, this information, is gleaned, to a great extent, by conjecture. Baidu provides no CTR data.

Because organic results are less prominent or non-existent, The CPC (cost per click) prices increase much faster, between Jan – May (70% in select industries). There are relatively few PPC optimization variables. Traffic estimation tools in China are unreliable.

Search behavior has become massive in China. From an advertiser’s perspective, PPC is a great solution in China since the ROI of paid is much more immediately evident and there are fewer organic results anyway. In Chinese SEM agencies, the marketers have very little experience with direct marketing. China has historically been primarily a brand driven environment. After searching on the Internet, there is no question that people are buying offline. There is much lower credit card penetration, even with so called “E-commerce”. Companies who take orders, by and large, still do it by phone.

Search data is very difficult to come by. Search engines and portals do not give out information about impressions or offer CPM data buys. It’s very difficult to “plug in numbers.”

Few Highlights from his recent speech:

China Search Market:

• 254 million users in China July 08, the largest number of users in the world
• Fewer choices in other mediums, like TV. Because of this users are more engaged in the online conversation.
• There is a very little presence of analytics companies in China. Partly because companies are still hesitant to pay for this service, plus many are still not sure what to measure.
• Cost per Click is still the major measurement, understanding conversion and measurement has not reached the China market yet.
• Taiwan and Honk Kong are totally different markets then “mainland” China. All Chinese speaking areas can not be grouped together. Different tactics and strategies are needed.
• Domains with a .CN extension are considered more reputable and give more weight.

• Claims the largest and most active BBS Community
• Baidu is not like Google
• Has 71% Market Share (Google has 23%)
• Pushing the ads to right side, like Google. Historically, they have been at top, this pushing organic listings down
• Introduces 14.5 products a year
• Wants to be the Wikipedia and Ebay of China, as well as search
• Provides no CTR% for Paid Search advertisers
• Faster CPC price increases (as much as 70% from Jan to May)
• Traffic estimations tools in China are unreliable in China

Buying into SEO is a difficult process. Without at least a basic understanding of SEO, it’s really tough to tell the difference between someone who knows their stuff and someone who talks a great game without backing it up with results.

Many companies looking for SEO help — even those with a decent understanding of SEO — try their best to shop around, but they always end up with two simple questions:

1. What is this firm going to do for me?
2. How much do they cost?

When you’re hiring for a particular position in any business, you’re looking at that individual’s background. You aren’t just hiring them based on how much they cost, or what they say that they will (or can) do. You’re hiring them based on their resume, their references, and their history of performance.

For some reason, these basic principles get lost for people when they search for an SEO company (or hire an in-house optimizer). By selecting an agency or employee purely on cost, you could be setting yourself up for trouble ahead.

The “What” of SEO

You need to know what the scope of work is when proposals are put together for SEO efforts. That is one reason why creating a SEO request for proposal (RFP) is important.

If you were designing a Web site, or even building a house, wouldn’t you determine the scope of work? So, too, should you determine the scope of work for SEO efforts.

What needs to be done? What is the competitive landscape? What will the SEO firm do, and what internal resources will you put against the effort? Do you have a blog? Can you create one? Can you add copy to existing Web pages? Can you create new pages of content? Who writes the content? Can structural changes be made to your Web site? Will the SEO firm provide link building? Will social media marketing be part of the project?

The “How” of SEO

So, now that you’ve developed a scope of work, let’s assume that two different firms send proposals that look similar. It’s safe to assume that different SEO firms have a different approach/process to how they work.

Does the SEO firm have a process that they follow? Is their methodology for link building ethical? Does the SEO firm work to help you enhance your Web presence, or are they vague in telling you how they will go about their business?

Transparency in SEO is important. If an unethical individual does something to your site that’s against search engine guidelines, you’re still the one responsible for your site’s content, and it will be your site that’s penalized.

The “Who” of SEO

Let’s assume that you’re still looking at two similar proposals. It’s the individuals working on your SEO who will determine the success of this effort.

This is a major reason why some SEO companies charge $300 per month and others charge $10,000 per month. A recent graduate is going to cost a lot less than a 10-year SEO veteran. That’s just a fact.

If you were hiring for any other position in your company, this would make perfect sense to you. For some reason, this is lost when people are “comparison shopping” SEO companies.

Even after considering the “who,” it also boils down to how much of that individual’s time you can afford. SEO companies are a service-based business. They’re selling their time.

Certainly, they will have tools that they pay for (and these costs are shared among the clients), but time is money. And some people’s time costs more than other people’s time. You should also consider all the time that these seasoned professionals have put into research, reading, studying, attending conferences, and otherwise honing their craft.

The “Who” and “How” are Every Bit as Important as the “What”

If you were to hire a company that was less than ethical (their approach to link building was buying as many links from whatever cheap sources that they could find), or put individuals on your project that had perhaps a handful of SEO efforts under their belt, or work was outsourced to individuals that don’t even work for the company that you’ve hired, that is arguably more important to know than the “what.” Keep this in mind as you’re going through the challenge of hiring an SEO company or an individual.

Check references, see rankings for yourself (against keywords that “matter”), get information on the individuals who would be working on the efforts, and talk to the company about their process. Think of this in the same manner that you might if you were interviewing an individual for any other position with your company.

You want someone with high integrity, energy, enthusiasm, a likeable personality, and a good approach to business. They should have a solid understanding of the job that you’re hiring them for, and a plan for success.

By Mark Jackson, Search Engine Watch, Dec 22, 2009

Website design is important to the success of any business because 46% of Internet users depend on the design of a website to judge the credibility of the company that website represents, according to a Stanford University study on website credibility.

In other words, when it comes to your organization’s presence online, people judge the book by its cover. If your website isn’t meeting your expectations you maybe up to optimizing your web presence by search engine optimization, search engine marketing, or web re-design.  A combination of the three can get you to where you want to be.

advertising network: A service where ads are bought centrally through one company, and displayed on multiple Web sites that contract with that company for a share of revenue generated by ads served on their site.

algorithm: The technology that a search engine uses to deliver results to a query. Search engines utilize several algorithms in tandem to deliver a page of search results or keyword-targeted search ads.

anchor text: The clickable text part of a hyperlink. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.

click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

content network: A group of Web sites that agree to show ads on their site, served by an ad network, in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by those ads. For example: Google AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network.

contextual advertising: Advertising that is targeted to a Web page based on the page’s content, keywords, or category. Ads in most content networks are targeted contextually.

cost per action (CPA): A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs as a result of the ad. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model.

cost per click (CPC): Also called Pay per Click (PPC). A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

cost per thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

geo-targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won’t be shown based on the searcher’s location, enabling more localized and personalized results.

Googlebot: Google uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in the Google.com search engine. Googlebot describes all Google spiders. All Google bots begin with “Googlebot”; for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index.

inbound link: An inbound link is an hyperlink to a particular Web page from an outside site, bringing traffic to that Web page. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algorithms use to measure the popularity of a Web page.

invisible web: A term that refers to the vast amount of information on the web that isn’t indexed by search engines. Coined in 1994 by Dr. Jill Ellsworth.

keyword: A word or phrase entered into a search engine in an effort to get the search engine to return matching and relevant results. Many Web sites offer advertising targeted by keywords, so an ad will only show when a specific keyword is entered.

link bait: Editorial content, often sensational in nature, posted on a Web page and submitted to social media sites in hopes of building inbound links from other sites. Or, as Matt Cutts of Google says, “something interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”

link building: The process of getting quality Web sites to link to your Web site, in order to improve search engine rankings. Link building techniques can include buying links, reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements.

meta tags: Information placed in the HTML header of a Web page, providing information that is not visible to browsers, but can be used in varying degrees by search engines to index a page. Common meta tags used in search engine marketing are title, description, and keyword tags.

pay per click (PPC): See Cost per Click (CPC).

quality score: A score assigned by search engines that is calculated by measuring an ad’s clickthrough rate, analyzing the relevance of the landing page, and considering other factors used to determine the quality of a site and reward those of higher quality with top placement and lower bid requirements. Some factors that make up a quality score are historical keyword performance, the quality of an ad’s landing page, and other undisclosed attributes. All of the major search engines now use some form of quality score in their search ad algorithm.

return on investment (ROI): The amount of money an advertiser earns from their ads compared to the amount of money the advertiser spends on their ads.

search advertising: Also called Paid Search. An advertiser bids for the chance to have their ad display when a user searches for a given keyword. These are usually text ads, which are displayed above or to the right of the algorithmic (organic) search results. Most search ads are sold by the PPC model, where the advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad or text link.

search engine marketing (SEM): The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising, or paid search.

search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

search engine results pages (SERPs): The page searchers see after they’ve entered their query into the search box. This page lists several Web pages related to the searcher’s query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are returning blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERPs.

social media: A category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, and other sites that are centered on user interaction.

spider: A search engine spider is a program that crawls the Web, visiting Web pages to collect information to add to or update a search engine’s index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a “crawler” or a “bot.”

title tag: An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific Web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results.

universal search: Also known as blended, or federated search results, universal search pulls data from multiple databases to display on the same page. Results can include images, videos, and results from specialty databases like maps and local information, product information, or news stories.

Web 2.0: A term that refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services. These usually include tools that let people collaborate and share information online, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.