The mayor of Eu is considering adding syllables to the name of the Normandy town for reasons to do with search engine optimisation (SEO).
Marie-Francoise Gaouyer aims to boost the town's internet presence after tourism officials in the region suggested Eu misses out on visitors because its name gets hidden in online search engines, reports the Times.
Potential tourists are passing it by because the town gets moved down the pecking order by links to European Union-based websites and language-orientated portals.
"We must adapt to modernity, especially in the context of the internet," Mayor Gaouyer told French publication ParisNormandie.
Eu made only €7,700 (£6,800) in hotel visitor taxes in 2008, despite earlier predictions closer to €24,000, she added.
Tips on SEO were recently given at the Search Engine Strategies London conference.
Marketers looking to break into Google News can place images within articles to boost their prominence in search listings, according to SEOptimise. ... read full details »
Marketers now have at their disposal a "standard for consistently and reliably measuring their performance-based marketing efforts", according to Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).
This is because the Click Measurement Guidelines have been released - a document that aims to establish the parameters for accurate transactions involving cost-per-click ads.
It is hoped that buyers and sellers using the new guidelines will be confident that only legitimate clicks are counted, as the framework has been designed to filter fraudulent clicks.
The guidelines "demonstrate our continued commitment to being the most accountable advertising medium and providing marketers with the highest possible level of transparency", claimed Sherrill Mane, senior vice president of the IAB's industry services.
Ensuring the advertising sector agrees on precise definition and measurement of clicks is "critical" to the industry, she added.
Earlier this week, the IAB announced the launch of a taskforce to tackle two of the ad industry's so-called biggest issues - data ownership and media contracts between buyers and sellers of interactive advertising. ... read full details »
Total US search marketing will reach nearly $23.4 billion (£16.35 billion) by 2013, according to a new report from digital market research firm eMarketer.
By that time, marketers will be spending more on search engine optimisation (SEO) than on contextual advertising, the study claims.
It was also stated that SEO can offer long-term results to aid any search marketing campaign.
David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the publication Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics, commented on marketers' attitudes to SEO.
He said that marketers who conduct SEO within their companies are likely to choose this method as a way of keeping costs down.
"Marketers sometimes find the SEO process complex, Mr Hallerman added. "For some marketers, that means full-blown SEO depends on help from an agency."
Last year, the Internet Advertising Bureau claimed UK paid search spending reached £981 million in the first six months of 2008. ... read full details »
Marketers should consider using video and audio content more on their websites to enhance search engine optimisation, it has been suggested.
Speaking to the Times, Ivan Croxford, general manager of BT Tradespace, said that practical videos such as product demonstrations seem to perform particularly well in this regard.
He noted that videos can be a good tool in general to capture web users' attention and potentially drive up conversions.
Mr Croxford remarked: "People who view video will generally click through to other content much more than people who just look at text."
According to the findings of a recent experiment by Forrester Research, video results are about 50 times more likely to make it to the front page of Google search listings than those for traditional text pages.
Nate Elliott of Forrester said that marketers could benefit from using video optimisation techniques sooner rather than later as not many companies have cottoned onto this yet.... read full details »
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