Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
Happy New Year Natural Search Geeks!
As some of you know, for the past five years I’ve worked with Stephan Spencer building up the Netconcepts‘ search marketing and SEO technology business. Today it gives me great pleasure to announce a very special event: Netconcepts is merging, through acquisition, with the leading search marketing software company – Covario!
As part of Covario, I’m very excited for our people and our clients to be part of what is the leading search marketing software and services organization. Together, we have nearly 100 combined clients in key industries, including high-tech, ecommerce, consumer electronics, financial services, media and consumer packages goods, with many Fortune 500 brands.
Our combined SEO technologies, which include Organic Search Insight and GravityStream, promise advertisers the first end-to-end industry solution that spans the entire search optimization process: keyword research, recommendations, execution, and ongoing reporting. GravityStream is a pioneering technology for automating the execution piece. And now even more is possible.
Analysts expect marketers to increase their SEO spend by 100% over the next 5 years, to $5.0 billion by 2014. By leveraging our leading technologies and world-class SEO expertise, we will continue to improve performance and ROI for leading brands across organic and paid search, on a global scale.
(And on balmy, single-digit temperature days like today in Madison, I’m also excited to spend a bit more time out at the new San Diego headquarters)
As the world of search continues to evolve, these are exciting times indeed!
Brian Klais
Chief Operating Officer
Netconcepts
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Posted by Brian of Brian on 01/12/2010
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Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
Search engine marketing is increasingly becoming popular with people from all walks of life and businesses of all hues adopting the web in a big way. The global recesssion has clearly thrust SEM into the spotlight as a great way to drive targeted traffic that is measurable and also making a huge difference to the bottomline of any company, the $ generated in revenue.
Search engine optimisation(SEO) and Pay per click (PPC) marketing are being accorded increasing importance as affordable means of tapping the market potential by reaching a targeted audience on the web compared to the traditional TV and/or newsprint advertising which are more expensive and the results are hard to measure. It is all the more imperative that SEO practitioners adopt more white hat creative methods to improve the visibility of their clients’ sites.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 11/01/2009
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Filed under: Best Practices, Content Optimization, General, SEO Amazon, auckland search engine optimisation, backlink profile, Google-Trends, natural search, Netconcepts, on page optimisation, Paid Search, ppc marketing, search engine optimisation, Search-Engine-Marketing, Social-Media, twitter landscape, unique quality content
Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1
SEO consultants spend a lot of time looking at websites. Moreover, like web designers, SEOs definitely “see” websites very differently than the average web user. Some days, it feels a little like the Matrix, where instead of seeing the streaming code, you see the people, cars and buildings that the code signifies. After doing web design, this is heightened even more, although perhaps inverted … instead of seeing shoes, cookware, and dog collars, I see title tags, heading tags, URL constructs and CSS.
Like any skill though, it takes continual honing and refining, along with the education. This is part of the concept behind the 60-Second Website Audit and training the eye to quickly identify key SEO issues and potential issues.
I’ve joked that, after so many audits, SEO consultants could probably do them blindfolded. So, whip out the blindfold and let’s put that to a test.
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Posted by Brian R. Brown of Netconcepts on 10/21/2009
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Filed under: General, SEO, Tools, Tricks, URLs duplication, seo audit, Tools, URLs, xenu
WSJ Comments On Idearc Bankruptcy & Verizon Culpability
A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal’s Dennis Berman commented in his column entitled “The Two Sides of Verizon’s Deal Making” on whether Verizon might have some responsibility for the bankruptcies of Idearc, Hawaiian Telecom and FairPoint Communications. As you may recall, I posted an op-ed piece on the subject, Idearc’s Bankruptcy - Who’s Really Responsible? at Search Engine Land not long back, and now Berman’s take on the issue appears to hold a lot of sympathy for my position that Verizon caused the yellow pages company to fail shortly after it was spun off by requiring it to do so with an unreasonably high debt load.
Berman states that while the market in 2006 may’ve allowed Verizon to take billions in the deal divesting itself of its directories corporation, Idearc, he further states:
“It took too much.”
Will there be any consequences for Verizon’s throwing off these companies with unserviceably high debt loads? Burman reports:
“These things matter greatly to how state and federal regulators perceive the company. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Hawaii each are in an uproar over the FairPoint divestiture, with much of the ire directed at Verizon.”
In a brief video piece, David Berman debates the issue with Evan Newmark, who takes the opposite viewpoint that Verizon should not be held responsible for the performance of its divested companies. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/18/2009
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Filed under: General, Market Data, Worst Practices, Yellow Pages bankruptcies, bankruptcy, divestments, FairPoint Communications, FairPoint Communications Bankruptcy, Hawaiian Telecom, Hawaiian Telecom Bankruptcy, idearc, idearc bankruptcy, M&A, mergers and acquisitions, spinoffs, Verizon
Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?
It is a known fact that Pay Per Click (PPC) model of advertising has contributed the most revenue to the Google coffers in the past few years. The fact that paid search contributes to only 12% of the total search traffic is fascinating with a bevy of tools flooding the market all promising to deliver the ultimate solution in paid search marketing.
Organic search is still the biggest driver of search traffic at a whopping 88%. Unlike paid search where results are measurable accurately and instantly, the organic SEO process is a long term strategy with measurable results becoming clearer over time. Yet, the big question in every online marketer’s mind is - Which results do users trust more on search engines - the organic or paid results?
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 08/09/2009
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Filed under: General, Paid Search, SEO, Search Engine Optimization B2C marketing, consumer trust levels, online consumer behavior, online-marketing, organic search, organic vs paid search trust levels, Paid Search, trust organic results or paid results, website usability
Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?
My op-ed piece, “Idearc’s Chapter 11 Bankruptcy: Who’s Really Responsible?” published today on Search Engine Land, and in it I put forth my position that Verizon is responsible for spinning off the company with an unreasonably huge debt load, and the people ultimately paying the bill are the stockholders.
I describe in the article how Verizon spun off Idearc Media (division which publishes print phone books and operates Superpages.com among other online yellow pages), and set that company up to pay back some billions of dollars for its worth. Verizon then turned around and resold those debt instruments to other companies, fully divesting itself of ownership in the new, standalone company.
This sequence in of itself isn’t remarkable - it’s the normal process a company might go through when spinning-off part of itself to form a new company.
But, my contention is that it was done so in a highly irresponsible manner. Verizon had to know beforehand that print directory business was going into shrinkage mode, and that the debt repayment structure would simply be too much for the new company to be reasonably expected to be able to handle. If so, then this could be expected to be a form of fraudulent conveyance, and Verizon could be culpable.
Is my contention outrageous?
Well, even Idearc’s Chief Executive, Scott Klein, has been paraphrased by the Wall Street Journal as saying “Everyone was aware that ‘$9 billion was really more debt than this business could bear’”. So, Idearc was spun off with a majority of this debt from Verizon from the start - clearly set up to fail.
So far, I’ve seen maybe three different law firms filing class-action lawsuits against Idearc and its executives, based on the premise that the stock tanked due to them secretly changing policies, resulting in inflated-looking sales on the books for businesses with higher likelihoods of not paying for contracted advertising. But, I think the real culprit in all this is likely Verizon - they pushed off a part of the company with an untenable debt load, in large part to pay off debts incurred by Verizon FiOS (Verizon’s fiber optic network) expansion.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/22/2009
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Filed under: General, Local Search, Market Data, News, Online Directories, Yellow Pages bankruptcy, chapter 11, directories, idearc, idearc bankruptcy, idearc chapter 11, Idearc-Media, iyp, Phone-Books, superpages, telco, telecomm, Verizon, Yellow Pages
60-Second Website Audit
While your mother may have taught you not to judge a book by its cover, she probably wasn’t an SEO. Mother’s logic is still pretty good to live by, but for as complex as SEO is or may seem, it’s pretty amazing what you can learn about a website’s SEO quality in 60 seconds or less.
Okay, you aren’t going to fully understand the intricate details and you’d obviously spend far, far more time (closer to hours than seconds) on a true site audit, but I’d venture that 60 seconds is enough for a good gut check and for identifying areas that need deep exploration. What may make this most interesting is to compare results that your “team” gets from this exercise since we all have our own approaches, hot buttons, etc.
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Posted by Brian R. Brown of Netconcepts on 06/19/2009
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Filed under: General, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Tricks Audit, Best Practices, SEO
Google Supports Microformats, Rolls Out Rich Snippets
The annual Google Searchology conference held recently revealed some interesting offerings in the search marketing field. Google had introduced personalised search and universal search through the same event in previous years.
Google has stated its support for rich microformats. Yahoo’s Search Monkey has already implemented them. But is still not clear if the search engines read them. Local search results have been rumoured to use microformats but there is no evidence to back this either.
(more…)
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 05/27/2009
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Filed under: General, Search Engine Optimization Google Profiles, Google Search Options, google searchology, hcalendar, hCard, microformats, RDF, rich snippets
Key to Relevance: Title Tags
I recently penned an article at Search Engine Land on Leveraging Reverse Search For Local SEO. In it, I describe how in certain exception cases, one may benefit from adding the street address into a business site’s TITLE tag. It’s not the first time that I have mentioned how TITLE tags are key to relevance in Local Search — I’d previously mentioned how critical it is for local businesses to include their category keywords and city names in the TITLE as well.
Yet, a great many sites continue to miss this vital key to relevance, and they wonder why they fail at ranking for their most apropos keywords. Keywords for which they’d otherwise have a very good chance at ranking upon!
W3C calls the TITLE the “most important element of a quality web page”
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/10/2009
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Filed under: Best Practices, Content Optimization, General, Google, HTML Optimization, Keyword Research, Local Search Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Tricks key relevance, Keyword-Positions, Keyword-Rankings, page-titles, SEO, title-tags, w3c
Brief Posting Hiatus
As some of you likely noticed, I took a brief hiatus from posting here on Natural Search Blog. We had some technical difficulties here, and I changed jobs in the last few months.
However, the generous folx at Netconcepts have encouraged me to continue as one of the group blog writers herein, so you can continue to expect to see articles from me coming through this pipe!
Hope everyone had great holidays and here’s hopes for a Happy New Year (with increasing commerce, too)!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 01/14/2009
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Filed under: General
