Online marketing professionals concerned with innovative software may wish to be aware of a new upgrade of Pardot, the popular automated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program.

Previously, Pardot was mainly used as web-based software suite used by professionals looking to create and track online marketing campaigns. Now, for the first time, it has added new search engine optimisation (SEO) marketing tools to assist small businesses, with features for monitoring the performance of keywords and those of your company’s closes competitors.

The data is harvested from various online sources and online marketing professionals can access it all from the Pardot system’s dashboard. Website rankings on Google and Bing can be tracked, in order to keep precise tabs on how well a SEO marketing campaign is going.

Online marketing analysts can also see the ranking status of each keyword, the average cost per click if they are thinking of bidding for the keyword in Google AdWords and the word’s approximate search volume on Google.

Using the competitor monitoring tool, online marketers can see how their SEO ranks against their rivals, tracking key components such as their competitors’ Google PageRank, inbound links and indexed pages.

Leeds plays host to an important gathering of experts from across the online marketing sector later this month, when ionSearch takes place at The Carriageworks in Millennium Square.

The one-day event, on 18 April, will be focusing specifically on search engine optimisation, or SEO marketing, with over 20 speakers from a range of companies leading discussions on the best SEO strategies out there.

The headline speaker is Google’s advertising agency relationships manager for search engine giant Google – Matt Bush. Attendees will be listening with interest to what he has to say, as the Holy Grail of all SEO marketing efforts is a first page – and preferably first entry! – ranking in Google’s search results.

The event has been organised by local firm ionSearch, whose managing director Fergus Clawson told the Yorkshire Post that Leeds was rising above Britain’s overall economic conditions thanks to the effectiveness of its online marketing sector.

“Leeds has become a hot bed for SEO with a thriving digital community despite the gloomy economic outlook,” he declared, noting that since 2008 Yorkshire has enjoyed a 240 per cent increase in the number of online marketing jobs available, “with many traditional full-service agencies expanding their in-house marketing teams due to demand.”

The difference between this region and London is clear, when you consider that over the same period online marketing vacancies in the capital have only risen by 157 per cent, he pointed out, adding that “typically clients will receive the same quality of work, but at a much lower cost, both in terms of business overheads and wages.”

photo credit: anitakhart

New research by Econsultancy has revealed that the British SEO market is growing rapidly.

SEO is one of the cornerstones of online marketing, with businesses anxious to be ranked as high as possible on Google and the other search engine’s results pages.

Researchers estimated that the SEO industry in the UK was worth some £512,067,800 last year, compared to £434,703,600 in 2010 – an impressive 18 per cent increase over 12 months. The sum includes online marketing agencies’ fees, paid search, publicity on SEO, plus optimisation of SEO for mobile browsing.

Econsultancy senior research analyst Jake Hird noted that SEO experts are working hard to incorporate as many innovations into their methodology than ever before, especially thanks to the rise and rise of smartphones, tables and other mobile devices.

“It’s a complex landscape, but one that marketers are clearly engaging with,” he added.

The research also found that Google remained far and away the most popular search engine in the UK, with more than 90 per cent of searches carried out on it. The report noted that any changes made by Google have “significant impact to existing SEO efforts.”

Online marketing professionals from the UK may wish to take a note of the date and put their names down for a special webinar on the combined potential of Google+ and SEO next month.

The event has been organised by US company Search Mojo, and is being hosted by its CEO Janet Driscoll Miller and its Social Media Specialist Sarah Lokitis. They will be looking at the best practice in online marketing for creating Google+ profiles and managing pages. Many people believe that Google+ is the next big thing, and cite the success that Facebook fan pages have had in boosting online marketing campaigns.

“Google+ is rapidly growing with over 100 million users so it’s a great opportunity to interact with your customers and potential leads, especially since businesses have been slow to incorporate Google+ Pages in their marketing initiatives,” Ms Lokitis said. “This allows for a great opportunity for early adopters to establish a Google+ presence before their competitors.”

The webinar begins at 19:00 GMT on Thursday 5 April.

We’re going all the way back to 2007 this week, and the original Edinburgh seminar that gave the internet the well-received 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing.

As you will see from the film, the seminar leaders have identified 13 key principles for effective SEO and online marketing, which they believe can be applied to most businesses seeking to improve their internet advertising and marketing methods. Follow the topics in the seminar video as they cover:

Pillar 1 – Keyword Research

Pillar 2 – Website Design

Pillar 3 – Blog Technology

Pillar 4 – Auto responders

Pillar 5 – Paid Advertising

Pillar 6 – Press Releases

Pillar 7 – Link Building

Pillar 8 – Article Submission

Pillar 9 – Group Interaction

Pillar 10 – Viral Marketing

Pillar 11 – Visitor Analysis

Pillar 12 – Continuous Content

Pillar 13 – The Evolving Web

photo credit: joe.ross

Good news for SEO online marketing this week, after a poll of Google users in Britain and the USA showed that they prefer the search engine to all its rivals.

A massive 83 per cent of respondents to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said that they thought Google was the best of its kind, with just 6 per cent opting for the second place choice, Yahoo, which is actually powered by Microsoft’s search engine Bing. Some 59 per cent of respondents said that they used search engines at least once per day – a doubling of frequency since 2004.

When it comes to online marketing and SEO in particular, these poll results show that boosting your Google rankings should remain the top priority for any business with an online presence.

However, Google needs to ensure that it maintains its overwhelming popularity. Despite its unchallenged position in the poll, respondents also spoke as one when they expressed their dislike of its recent announcement of its intention to gather all data on users’ personal preferences and online searches to tweak the search results and target internet advertising.

This handy video offers some small – but highly useful – tips for making the most of your SEO-based online marketing. As the host explains, small tweaks aimed at improving your SEO efficiency can be almost as useful as paying attention to the bigger strategies, since much of SEO revolves around competing with all the other sites out there desperate to clamber up the Google rankings. With large companies hard at work on the big picture, there is a lot of scope for sneaking through their defences with cunning improvements of your own. Let’s take a look at the five tips:

1. Include images – Try and ensure all images that you use work for your SEO strategy. To this end, when uploading copyright-free shared pics, change the filename, title and alternate text to match your SEO keywords. Doing this makes Google realise that the picture in question is relevant to the search strategy and helps it to show up on Google Images.

2. Decrease the number of the words in your permalink – by condensing the URL for your post and increasing its keyword density you will gain an edge over the competition, since your URL will be more SEO-optimised, and also easier to remember!

3. Consider a Google+ page for your website. Facebook fan pages are increasingly being seen as the excellent opportunity for online marketing that they are, but SEO-orientated marketers should also consider creating a Google+ page. Not only is this the premier search engine’s own social media page – and social media and sharing is becoming ever more important – but it is relatively new, and thus represents an excellent opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

4. Create a YouTube channel for your site. Videos, such as the one above, are good for SEO in their own right, but by creating a YouTube channel you can showcase your favourite videos and add links back to your own commercial site, making it all the more attractive to Google and other social media.

5. Tweak any affiliate links on your site. Ensure that these are ‘no-follow’ links, which tells Google, while crawling through your page, not to count these links when assessing the site for its algorithm. This keeps your SEO “juice” focused and sharp, and should push you a little further up the rankings.