The Digital Marketing Institute (DMI) officially launched in South Africa yesterday. The opening address was made by Mr. Ian Dodson, the CEO, in which he promised to ’build the digital economy one person at a time’

Present at the launch which was held at the Balalaika Hotel in Sandton, was a delegation of the Irish Trade Commission, and a number of South Africa’s top Digital Agencies. Also present was Blue Magnet, the 1st of 5 accredited training institutions that the Digital Marketing Institute has partnered with to roll out its wide variety of course material to the local market. With its flagship course being the Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing, they offer theoretical training with practical outcomes.

The DMI promises to introduce a number of standards over the next few months. These are set around the standards in the industry and training of Digital Marketing, through the planned advisory council.

Globally, the DMI spends considerable time working with its partners around the globe to maintain these standards, formalise, and rollout education.

The DMI promises that through its dedication to educating professionals in the field of Digital Marketing, career growth and competitiveness in a global jobs market will increase.

“The Digital Marketing Institute spends considerable time working with our various partners at the Advisory Council.  This ensures that the syllabuses for our various courses are exactly what is required in order for you to further develop your career.  We get input from organisations such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Universities and other Educational Institutions as well as some of the world’s leading Advertising and Marketing Agencies” says Ian Dodson.

With online marketing being the core focus for businesses across the globe, DMI hopes to improve the current standard of quality within South Africa and worldwide. The focus on education and training means that we will be able to develop the digital industry in South Africa and through that, reach and target foreign investors.

CEO, Ian Dodson introducing the Digital Marketing Institute

The answer to this question is to focus any efforts on content marketing rather than a pure link building strategy. This can easily be achieved by targeting your content marketing into quality communities such as blogs, social media platforms and forums. Using a variety of link baiting techniques, successful and natural “link building” is achieved without focusing purely on link building as a whole.

In conclusion, your internet marketing strategy should focus primarily on good, quality content with clean and natural content distribution platforms. With quality content, you will find that link building will become automatic and natural as long as your content stays relevant to your targeted communities.

What are some of these things?

There are a few but here we will discuss how SEO copywriting as a style of writing achieves those results. SEO copywriting is unique from other forms of writing such as magazine writing or a newspaper writing. SEO writing focuses on specific “key words or phrases” that make your website or specific web page on your site emerge on the first page of a search list – which is essentially where you want to be. However this is only possible provided the writer has adhered to specific SEO protocol which includes:

• Finding the correct search term or phrase for your product or service (there are a few online tools which online Copywriters use for this)
• Using the search term or phrase only a certain amount of times without over using or misusing it
• Avoiding very long words (words with multiple syllables)
• Not writing very long sentences
• Having an appropriate and appealing topic if writing an online article
• SEO copywriting must still be readable and persuasive like any other style of writing

Styles of SEO writing

Online writers write articles, press releases and “optimise” existing web content. The copywriter must keep in mind all the above mentioned SEO “rules” when writing articles. Press releases are similar but cover more than just one topic. Optimising web content is simply increasing the use of a specific key term or phrase on a particular page of a website with the hope of making that page rank higher during a search.

Writing for magazines, news papers, pamphlets or even bill boards, the Copywriter writes easy to read, enjoyable and compelling copy with the aim of persuading you into taking a certain action. Whilst SEO copywriting is steered in the same direction, the online Copywriter has a goal of making a company’s website or specific web page on the site rank highly in a search.

The foremost goal of SEO copywriting is to produce succinct, effectively persuasive text for a well-written web page and to make it rank highly during a search.

I caught up with Ceri James, the founder and Marketing and Sales Director of Talooma Digital Marketing Agency. Talooma has been in the digital marketing space for over 12 years and continues to set benchmarks.

Talooma Digital Marketing Agency by user8601966

The secret to Talooma’s success lies in its leadership and the quality of its staff. “Team dynamic, passion, a common purpose and unlimited potential to learn” this is what Ceri had to add to the ingredients of his company’s success.

With mobile internet devices like Smart Phones and Tablets becoming more and more affordable and therefore accessible to most people, the internet has become available to almost everybody these days. As a result of this, Digital Marketing Companies are becoming more and more relevant as most companies realise the huge potential for a great return on investing in online marketing. The future only has bigger and more exciting things to offer for the online space and digital marketing as a whole.

Talooma has grown tremendously as a digital marketing company over the last 12 years but the journey does not end there, in fact this is what Ceri had to say, “in the next two to three years we are certainly going to be a lot stronger in the hospitality industry…our aim is to hopefully be listed as one of the top 500 companies to work for”

The Talooma story is certainly a testimony that hard work and dedication pays off but for Ceri the sky is the limit and there’s still a long way to climb.

Getting your online writing onto Google

Copywriting for the web or SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Writing as it is better known, is the process of steering traffic towards a website. By using a selection of carefully chosen keywords, SEO writers need to ensure that the article or piece of writing will appear among the top search results. Depending on the amount of times the (highly searched) word is used in the piece of writing, it will rank higher.

As the importance of being on the World Wide Web has increased for companies all over the world, so has the demand of SEO Writers. Being aCopywriter of this sort is demanding as businesses want to rank top among other websites within their industry. To ensure that they get there and most importantly, stay there is an ongoing process. There are various types or styles of writing that as a Copywriter, you need to be able to adapt to.

• Articles
• Press Releases
• Blog posts
• Landing Page Optimisation
• Case Studies
• Social media

All of these are very different and hence require a Copywriter to be dynamic and flexible within their tone and style.

Being able to flirt with creativity, whilst remaining informative is key. Readers usually glance through the information they come across on the web and should they not find what they are looking for, they will leave the page. Website visitors read online information for only one reason: they want answers conveniently placed on the page. As an Online Copywriter, it is your job to spoon feed that information to them. This is achieved in various ways.

• An extremely effective heading
• Sub- heading
• Bullet points
• Call to actions
• Links/ back links
• Get to the point
• Provide clearly visible contact details
• Highlight words of interest

As a career, Copywriting can take you on a journey through bounds of research, which is a large part of any Copywriter’s job. With so many Copywriting  avenues to explore, Online Copywriting is a great place to develop oneself. Not only does it allow you to expand on your writing knowledge, it also provides the opportunity to be exposed to various styles and a huge portfolio of brands, topics and trends.

A variety of schemas such as html tags can be used by webmasters so that pages will be distinguished by the search engines. This in- turn will make it easier for searchers to find the accordant web pages.

A number of websites are generated from assembled data which is generally stored in data bases and is formatted in html, making it difficult to recover original data. Search engines and various other applications will benefit from having access to this data directly.

Mark- ups allow search engines to understand the data and information on these website pages and then provide richer and improved results for search purposes, This valuable addition to search engines will certainly make web browsing more useful. Get started here.

What will Schema.org do for your website? Schema.org will assist website owners and improve on where they

rank on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Google has certainly been providing useful additions over the years, Rich Snippets (2009,) Expanded on Rich Snippets and a collaboration in 2006; Common standards for Sitemaps. However schema.org seems to offer more relevancies to the webmaster.

• New markup types (over 100 new types have been added. Popular markups include: Recipe, Movie, Book, TV Series)
• Use of microdata (primary focus to improve simplicity and consistency across search engines)
• Support of existing rich snippets (Webmasters that have already done markup on the pages will still be supported)
• Testing web pages’ markup (Test website pages with markup. Use rich snippet testing tool)

Webmasters are encouraged to start marking up web pages as soon as possible. Currently the schema.org website as well as the rich snippets testing tool are all in English however rich snippets are displayed in Google results around the world.

Schema.org has been launched with hope to extend and improve search engine results and ultimately grow the tool.

What is aspx?

ASP.NET is a web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services.

What is php?

PHP is a programming language used for populating dynamic web pages. It is mainly used in web development and can be embedded into HTML by using PHP code as its input and HTML as the output. PHP is also a part of the popular LAMP environment, but has many other useful applications as well.

We can already see where a lot of the problem stems from. In the aspx definition, the mother of all swear words when it comes toweb development, “Microsoft” is responsible for the aspx language. Many web developers are not firm favourites of anything Microsoft due to the expensive licencing costs as well as the business methodology of keeping all their cards close to their chest rather than following an opensource route like php.

But this really doesn’t get to the heart of the problem as there are many aspx developers out there who DO swear by the platform; so what is it about the platform that causes so many headaches for SEO professionals?

So what’s the answer?

Truth be told; it comes down to personal preference… Yip, that’s the answer. There is no definitive answer which points in either direction. In the old days of search, when SEO was but a babe, search engines wouldn’t (read couldn’t) crawl dynamic pages – the heart and soul of aspx. Today though, the major three (Google, Yahoo and Bing) all crawl and index dynamic pages without too much hassle.

The real lesson here is that basic SEO best practices still mean the most :

1. Ensure relevancy between your content, heading, tile and URL

2. ensure that your URL’s are clean – use a rewrite mod to change your URL

3. Ensure that you keep the 3 spheres on SEO in mind : on site; off site and server side.

To sum up in short; if you are an aspx developer; then stick with aspx. If you are a php developer, then stick with php. If you have beef with Microsoft, then so be it – truth be told though, aspx is a very powerful and beautiful language once you get to know it and understand it………. Much like Flemish!

Whether you have a small site or one that consists of hundreds of pages, sitemaps provide an important means of communication with search engines. Ensuring that your sitemap is updated will make navigating through a site easier and it certainly benefits both users as well as search engines with regards to classifying site content.

A sitemap gives your website better visibility to search engines and notifies search engines about each and every change that occurs on your website. This does not mean that changes will be indexed straight away, but they will certainly be identified and indexed quicker compared not having a sitemap.

Sitemaps help visitors to your site. If they are able to find information easily then the chances of visitors returning to your site is greater. Simply put, sitemaps are an extension to navigational aid where you display the structure of the website with links to all major sections and sub- sections of the site. It is vital that all links are correct and regularly updated to keep the sitemap updated at all times.

There are a large number of other benefits to using a sitemap on your website.

• More freedom regarding external links
• Assists with broken links
• Speeds the process of indexing pages
• Assists classifying site content
• Highlights important pages
• Enhances website design (footer sitemaps)

When you consider the benefits of a sitemap, it is easy to understand why they are so useful and necessary to your site. Through assisting you, your visitors, your traffic, as well as search engine rankings, sitemaps play an integral role in the success of not only your website but ultimately your business too.

How is this wrong?

The server that your site is hosted on has more influence on your sites performance than you would initially think. There are a

number of items which need to be checked to ensure that you are getting not only the best value for money, but that it is the best hosting solution to ensure that your site is able to rank well within the search engine results pages (SERPS – see how I threw in that acronym?)

IP Address

When you host your site you need to check if you are on a dedicated IP or a shared IP. The IP address is :

a numerical label that is assigned to devices participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication between its nodes.

and will look something like : 196.55.562.1

The important thing here is to make sure that you are not sharing your IP with any “bad neighbors”. Bad neighbors can be defined as any website that is practicing black hat SEO techniques, is a porn site or a gambling site.

These sites are not valued by search engine robots and spiders and when you share your IP with them, your site could be penalised at the same time. The best thing to do would be to do a reverse IP look up to see who your neighbors are. A great tool for doing this is

Mummy Maze.

The next step would be to make sure that your IP address has not been listed as spam; a great way to do this is by doing a Blacklist Check.  This will help you in working out if your IP address has ever been used for shady doings.

While there is no definitive answer at the moment from anyone at Google or the other search engines; it is not advised that you share your IP with too many different websites. The smaller the neighborhood the better seems to be the general feeling. What’s more if you can arrange it so that the websites you share your IP address with are all similar in terms of the category they fall into, then even better.

Where to host?

Again there has been no definitive answer to the theory that you should host in the country where you intend to do business; but it is the generally accepted norm as far as SEO goes. This line of thinking does make a lot of sense; especially when you think back to neighborhoods : you don’t necessarily want to be sharing your neighborhood with sites that are all in the UK and you are trying to do business in Australia. Although as I said, that is all still up for public debate.

Points to remember for developers and designers

I would like to start with the very basics of SEO.  What is SEO first of all?

SEO is a process and often a guarded method of listing/improving the visibility and ranking of a website in search engines (such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and many others) and in-turn attracting more visitors. SEO can also be described as the activity of optimizing a website to make it more search engine friendly, and getting higher positions in search results.

Now that we have a better understanding of what SEO is I will continue with the first basic SEO methods and tips for when you are building a website.

Basic SEO steps to remember when you build a website:

<HEAD> section:

• Add a <title> tag in your header section. Make sure that the title tag contains your most dense keywords from the particular page that you are working on.  Do not make the title too long. Eg: <title>Pet Zone | dogs | cats | pet food | pet shop</title> Do not use more that 3 or 4 keywords. You don’t count the main name as a keyword in this case Pet Zone. However the name can be used in the title tag. Do not use any punctuation such as apostrophes. Each page should have a unique name and title. The length of the title tag should not be more than 66 characters.
• Add a Meta Description in the header with a brief description about that particular page. This should not be more than 160 characters
• · Add a Meta Robots tag (<meta content="index, follow">) “index” is telling Google that it is allowed to index this page and “follow” is telling Google to follow all links on this page. This is the standard. This is automatically created in CMS systems.
• Add a Meta Content-type tag (<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />) which informs Google of the specific character encoding you will be using on the page. UTF-8 is the generally accepted content-type for SEO. This is automatically created in CMS systems.

<BODY> section:

• Keep the copy (content) on the page between 300 and 500 words.
• Ensure you use the keywords you are trying to emphasis throughout the copy and in some instances make use of the bold and underline attributes for those keywords.
• Keep your title tag (<title>), page name (URI) and your header 1 (<h1>) the same – this gives Google a clear understanding of what you are trying to promote on the page.
  Eg: If the file name is “food-for-pets.html” then your header tag as well as the title tag should be “Food for pets”. This is the general rule, slight variations are accepted.
• Along with the previous point, you should name your images in-line with the topic of the page.
  Eg: Image name “food-for-pets.jpg” (Do not use any uppercase text in your title).
• Include at least one image on each page that will be used on the website that you are building and always make sure that the alt tag and a title tag for the image has a short description of the image (1 – 3 words). Also include the image dimensions in the image tag.
• Use footer navigation.  Add a link to each of your main pages in your footer.

General SEO steps to remember when you build a website

• Add bread crumbs to each page.
  Eg. Pet food – dog food – dry dog food (create a hyperlink to each relevant page).
• Create social media links. Eg: Links to Facebook, Twitter or any other social media accounts.
• Make internal links. If you make reference to information that is elsewhere on your site, make a link to that information.
• Make sure your HTML and CSS code validates! Use http://validator.w3.org/ for this.

Tips for Developers

• When possible (and only in HTML built websites (not CMS)) make sure you include all header tag data in one PHP include file. This makes SEO maintenance and future changes simple and efficient. The same can be done with many other elements of the site such as the footer section. This keeps all the data in a central location and makes life easier for everyone.
• Make sure your CSS code is in a CSS file and not coded into your page directly.
• Avoid building or using frames as search engines do not pick up frames.
• Do not be shy to use Header tags (h1 to h3) h1 being your most important heading.
• Always make sure you added a very short description to alt tags (Images and Links)
• Make sure your internal and external links are working.
• If the site is for a service or company, add the company location on Google Maps.
• Try keeping all JavaScript code and files (.js) in ONE file. This drastically improves page load speed therefore increasing the SEO health of the website.
• Try keeping all CSS in one file for the same reason mentioned above.

Tips for Designers

• Although Google is attempting to read flash files, avoid using flash menu’s if possible. (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html)
• Make sure there is always at least one Call-to-action on the page.
• Images for the website needs to be a small and compressed as possible without the loss of quality.
• Anchor text: Please do not use “click here” or anything similar as links on the page. This emphasizes that the words “click here” are words we would like to rank for. Make sure you use descriptive links throughout the design.
• The logo of the website needs to be a link that points back to the home page. This is a generally understood standard.