Posted on Oct-19-2008

Keep Drinking

That’s the take home message from the latest big brand to build on .Asia

KeepWalking.Asia is a touching media piece that takes visitors on the journey of a successful architect who is encouraged by his friends to pursue the dream of becoming a movie director. Throughout the adventure, the message is clear. Keep walking, keep dreaming, keep working hard, keep sharing……but most importantly, keep drinking. Hard liquor is best.

Welcome to .Asia Johnnie.

Domain king Rick Schwartz talks about the feeling he had when walking through Times Square and realising it was wall to wall .coms. So when I’m kicked back in a Singapore hotel room watching cable TV and see the emergence of big brands pushing their .Asia over mass media, I see hope for the .Asia name space as well.

Keep Drinking

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Posted on Sep-26-2008

Feed Restored

Following a domain name transfer the Blog RSS feed was down for a while due to technical issues. Apologies to previous subscribers who lost the feed. Subscribers are also welcome to register for email updates.

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Posted on Sep-26-2008

Adwords Qualified

Guru is now Adwords qualified. Click on the logo to see more info. Good to have some kind of qualification from Google. I feel like their mouthpiece in Asia most days. I’m always saying to one business or another “Hey have you tried this Google product?”.

Feel free to contact me to arrange a Google Adwords consultation, campaign reviews or new campaign development.

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Posted on Sep-05-2008

Full House

Guru is fully booked for SEO consultation and development services in the month of September. Due to a few new project acquisitions, i’m currently working through a backlog.

I will still be available for clients looking to launch PPC campaigns or review current paid search strategies.

If you are seeking SEO consultation feel free to contact me to arrange a meeting in early October.

Guru

Posted on Aug-30-2008

Honda builds on .Asia

Honda makes the quick switch to honda.asia. The below image can be found at http://www.asianhonda.com. The companies quick decision to abandon their .com is a positive for the .Asia space. It goes without saying the new name is a lot cleaner, shorter and more memorable. Hopefully the brandability of .Asia names will drive corporates in to the space and speed up adoption. Also check out ing.asia

Honda .Asia

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Posted on Aug-20-2008

Case Study: Bearing Fruit

Disclaimer: The following case study is an overview of results a client experienced after contracting Guru for one 20 hour consultation period. The results are specific to the businesses demographic, location and search space and can not be guaranteed to all clients.

Camp Undefeated is a New York Mixed Martial Arts Training Center. Before contracting Guru, Camp Undefeated had their web site completely rebuilt. The new site (as you can see) looks great. The web development firm who have produced a number of high profile media sites, did a great job of projecting an image that suited the business.

But there was a problem. The site was not bearing fruit. Web leads were few and far between.

The clients expressed some concerns that their web rebuild may have been a waste of marketing budget. That spending on a flashy site wasn’t going to have been productive.

So when a business is at a point where they don’t know if their site is working for them, there are many potential courses of action. Invest in advertising? Invest in SEO? Invest in pay per click? Invest in mass link submission? Invest in content production? Invest in affiliate marketing?

Which approach to take?

Here is what we did in stage one on the Camp Undefeated site:
- Setup analytics services
- Improve site code to allow search spiders to crawl all pages.
- Standard SEO page title and meta writing
- Use of industry standard SEO tools to measure pages target to specific search terms
- Basic keyword research to measure search volume for businesses key terms
- Improve site information structure
- Add additional landing pages so the website better represented the services on offer.
- Add contact form and conversion tracking services.
- Acquire links from key industry sites including sherdog.com, stevequadros.com, and wikipedia.org

After the initial consultation was complete and the appropriate course of action pursued, the site experienced significant growth in organic traffic.
Fruit: Graph shows leads in 30 day period.

Conversions

The above graph shows lead conversions after the initial SEO consultation phase completion. 43 leads generated in just under 30 days. In terms of cost per lead, that translates to approximately $15.11 per lead over the 30 day period. In this case the clients organic rankings are likely to stay quite stable with little maintenance. 12 Months with similar search rankings and conversion rate would equate to $1.25 per lead. Over 2 years, .62 cents per lead.

The bulk of these leads are coming directly from relevant search terms we targeted and achieved 1st page rankings for on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Below is some client feedback as the consultation period was coming close to completion.

wow - that contact form is fantastic!!! I must have just answered 15 emails!

Thanks Guru! (real name concealed) we had about 6 walk-ins tonight too and most of them are finding us on the internet.  you are doing a fantastic job.

In A later email.

we are very happy with your work. it’s really made a difference and saves us advertising money b/c now the word is out and we can let the website work for us.

So their investment is accurate and well directed SEO knowledge saw the businesses website bearing fruit in just a few weeks. The reality is, they have only scraped the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be achieved with investment in SEO / SEM.

How about your company?

Time to invest?

Contact Me.

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Posted on Jul-20-2008

First 6 figure .Asia sale.

As the dot Asia auctions come closer to completion, the .Asia registry has seen it’s first six figure sale. Discover.Asia closes at auction for just over $112,000 US. The domain industry thinks .Asia is worth nothing, someone out there with a spare 112K seems to disagree.

Some signs are appearing of adoption of the .asia extension with major corporates introducing .asia names just weeks after .asia launched.

One example includes www.levis.asia

This morning I was in a Japanese coffee shop drinking an Ice Lemon Tea, and noticed one of the local magazines had already replaced their old url with .Asia

All seem like positives for .Asia, possibly even more positives than .eu

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Posted on Jun-27-2008

Trending SEO

An interesting graph that show the growth of SEO as a mainstream industry. No doubt there is a great deal of growth to come.

SEO Search Volume

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Posted on Jun-22-2008

Waiting for IE6 to die.

Every month without fail I check the w3schools.com browser usage statistics page to see how much IE6 usage share has declined.

IE6 usage is is slowly dropping, however because of the poor response to Microsoft’s less that popular Vista OS, IE6 is dieing a slow slow death.

Current usage of IE 6 is 27.3% of all web browsers with IE7 coming in at 26.5% and FireFox at 39.8%.

Each month it is dropping at just a little over 1% meaning it will still be over a year before developers can consider dropping support for IE6. In desperation I checked my Analytics in the vein hope that IE6 users were concentrated in another part of the world and don’t hit my sites at all. Somewhere like Ecuador. Not the case. The blue section in the graph below represents IE6 users.

IE 6 users in Blue

So why do I care? Anyone who has developed a site and gone through the cross browser testing process knows how painful IE6 can be. There is a list of well know bugs including the IE6 box model bug and probably most notably the lack of native support for alpha transparent PNGs. Just last week I spent a whole night trying to iron out IE6 bugs in a transparent image roll over on a clients site.

Hopefully the recent release of Mozilla Firefox 3 will speed up IE6’s decline :)

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Posted on Jun-10-2008

House Keeping

Some major changes taking place at the Guruplex. Spent the last day (and night) upgrading the blog and hope to upgrade other site pages soon. Its hard to squeeze in site upgrades between client work.

Feed subscribers may loose the feed over the next few days, so please subscribe again in the next few weeks.

Apologies for any broken links you may encounter.

Guru.