Eric Edelstein

…is definately NOT approaching maturity!

Before starting my talk at the “Brands in the Digital World” I asked the 40 strong crowd, who had a Search Marketing campaign in place for their company - not if they were doing the Search Marketing themselves, but if their company had a strategy for driving traffic from Natural or Paid Traffic.

I think 1 company is actively trying to get visitors from the Search Engines.

And I was going to speak about Affiliate marketers who used Search (either via landing pages or paid traffic) to send visitors to the advertisers. So I asked a follow up question about who was running and affiliate program.

Not a single company in the entire room!

Want Traffic from the Search Engines?

Get Natural / Organic / Free Traffic (the left hand side when you do a search on google)

1. Get your structure right - code you use, domain name, where you host, age of domain, H1 Tags, Title tags (and still put in Meta Tags although most search engines don’t rate them highly)

2. Write content - lots of 300 to 500 word articles, with 3 or 4 Three or Four word phrases per article

3. Get other sites to link to you - submit press releases, get blogs and other sites to link to you, and maybe even buy links (although in South Africa the link purchase market is almost non existent)

You don’t have to do everything - but do something. Write a few articles, get a few links and you’ll find you will start getting visitors for free from the search engines.

We haven’t done much optimisation on our Cell Phone QandA site, but with a little effort we are getting thousands of visitors for free every month.

I just checked Yahoo.com and typed in “cell phone forum“. There were 61 Million Pages. Our cell phone forum was Number 2.

You can be getting extra calls, leads or sales on your business with a small amount of work…It’s time for South African’s to realise Search Marketing should be a channel for generating extra calls, leads or sales for their business. But I keep saying it, and change is happening REALLY SLOWLY…

PS: Even though I’m devestated about the level of Internet Marketing knowledge when I attend conferences in South Africa, it’s always amazing chatting to the wonderful people that speak and attend the conferences…

Here’s some of the incredible people I’ve been hanging out with toda…

Warren Griffiths from Gloo Digital Design, Arthur Goldstuck from World Wide Worx, Mike Stopforth from Cerebra, Allan Kent from Saatchi & Saatchi AtPlay, Patrick Collings from Sagacite Brand Agency and Faris Yakob from Naked Communications - I’ve privileged to be spending the day with such awesome speakers…

And was also good to sit next to Steven Ambrose from World Wide Worx.

And fantastic meeting Daryn Smith from Verizon and Louise Marsland from Bizcommunity. (Louise - awesome to take chatting in virtual Facebook into Real World)

We have some AMAZING talent in South Africa.