GK – Andy “Safe Hands” Stiles – What can I say, the man is a champion athlete and as quick as a cat between the sticks.  He has saved us on many an embarrassing moment. Pity he’s an Arsenal fan!

Left Full Back – Andrea “The Italian Maestro” Atzori – A wonderful tackler of the ball with a Harry Potter wand of a left boot. He loves good pasta, pizza and all things search.

Centre Half – James “Leeds mad” Shaw- A die hard Leeds fan (God love him!) The lads liken him to Martin Keown – a hard hitting “take no prisoners” work horse of a player.

Centre Half – Toby “The Wall” Olsen – This man is at least 9 foot tall! Very rarely will a striker get past him with ease. Sometimes his touch gets the better of him, but all in all, a class act.

Right Full Back – Richy “The Coach” Quinn – A keen motivator, communicator and serious competitor. He loves long walks on the beach, a good curry, and an occasional red card!

Left Midfield – Nital “Mr Technical” Shah – Nital is all things technical, + a lot more. The go to man in the office when basically anything goes wrong! A brilliant analytical thinker, who embodies everything that is Atomic Search.

 Centre Midfield – Phil “The Enforcer” Reilly – Atomic’s MVP. The man has played for many clubs in England, Ireland and most recently Australia.  We are only delighted to have him on board.  G G G G G G G G G G Galway!

Centre Midfield – Rory “Bend it like Beckham” Heffernan – A robust midfielder with a ferocious shot and adulation for a quality pint of Guinness. Keep up the good work fella!

Right Midfield – Tom “Gifted” Sheppard – A typical old school English midfielder, full of guile and endeavor. Mix this with his SEO skills and you have quite a potent combination.

Centre Forward – James “The Genius” Dixon – The Bossman. James is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for surfing and good coffee. Sometimes compared to Eric Cantona by his footballing peers.

Centre Forward – Marquin “The Magician” Smith – This boy can play! We call him the Messi of Atomic, a box to box midfielder who oozes class and composure on the ball.

Substitutes

 Kim “The Tactician” Leighton – Kim is an indispensable member of the Atomic team. Our part time physio and full time life coach.

Mark “Big Ideas” Addy – The most creative member of the team by a long shot, he influences and creates big bold plays both for both clients and the team alike.

Mark “M Jnr” O’Callaghan – The trendiest gent on the team, with a keen eye for the latest fashion trends and an even keener one for a solid keynote preso. Mark creates brilliant i-books if any needs one built!

Simon “Speedy” Wood – A speed merchant who hails from the English countryside. This man is faster than Usain Bolt. As professional on the pitch as he is off.

Richard “Dark Horse” Quinn -  Rich has brains to burn, and quick feet to match. A lover of the great outdoors, mountain climbing extraordinaire and SEO evangelist.

Susan “Suzie” Fine – Susan is the ultimate omniture expert, probably the best in Australia if the truth be told. She is quirky, funny and an all round delight to work with.

If any team is brave enough to challenge Atomic in a game of football, please contact Richy at richy.quinn@atomicsearch.com.au.

Almost three years since Google announced the acquisition of ITA Software and 18 months after launching its domestic-only service in North America, Google Flight Search has landed in Europe, although not in Australia (as yet). But that doesn’t mean the travel industry can rest on its laurels. Flight Search’s move into Europe has the potential to make a big impact on the way worldwide travellers search for flights and hotels.

Let’s face it; if you are inside Australia and you’re searching for flights between countries outside Australia, it’s a nightmare. Even if you can find a flight comparison site that will help, you rarely know the airport names. Add to that the hassle of working out the currency conversions, and you’re almost ready to give it all up for a trip to the Gold Coast. Or, more realistically, it will result in a trip to a bricks and mortar travel agent for advice.

Enter Flight Search. With the new search engine, you can quickly search for flights between countries in Europe and for flights originating in certain European countries to any other airport in the world – including Australia. So when I’m planning my trip, I no longer need to visit my travel agent to find out what flights are available in Europe. In fact, once I’ve chosen the best flight for my needs, I’m just a couple of clicks away from booking directly on the airline’s website.

That’s not all. Flight Search is a priceless tool for spontaneous globetrotters. Say you’re in France and you want to book a flight to Greece, but you don’t know which airlines are best and what you should expect to pay. That’s where Flight Search comes in. You simply type in the destination to see the real-time fares available. Better still, it will reveal the cheapest flights at nearby airports, giving you more options to choose from. You can also see the prices and flights across a map.

Another great feature of Flight Search is how it links to Google’s Hotel Finder. When you enter your flight destination, you’re presented with a list of relevant hotels complete with reviews, price and a picture.

The million-dollar question is whether this changes how Australian consumers book their flights and hotels. The answer is not necessarily. It is a fast (really fast) search tool that has the potential to significantly speed up the research process. For the travel industry, it proves the value in improving the functionality and SEO of websites and search engines. Now you need to make sure you are ready for the consumer armed with destination expertise and advice when they want to make that booking.

For more info on Google’s Flight Search visit the Google UK Travel blog: http://googleuk-travel.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/bon-voyage-flight-search-launches-in.html.

This is really the biggest point of differentiation of this investment, Paid Search is unique in its own right.  If you think about any other channel, take Display or even Organic Search it is very rare to see clients expecting to generate sustainable business from these sources and perhaps it is right this way because they play a different role, whether it is to create brand awareness (Display) or to maintain and increase brand visibility (Organic Search), but very rarely you will see CPA and revenue targets attached to these channels.

So why does Paid Search need to be sustainable and what does sustainable really mean?

To answer the second question we can define sustainable as any investment that generates a positive revenue, so where spend X, generates Y, whereas Y minus X minus Z (which represents all costs to run the business) is still a positive number!  This should be a sustainable business.

Because Paid Search is fully accountable and is always transparent with regards to how much money is invested and what is the return (which can be calculated as cost per acquisition, cost per lead, cost per view, etc.) it is easy to calculate the ROI (return of investment).  Therefore Paid Search must be sustainable which answers our first question.

Is it fair to demand that Paid Search is sustainable?  I believe so but it is important that to make sure that we always look at the broader picture and do not disregard the value of Paid Search to also generate brand awareness and drive incremental business because otherwise it would simply become a matter of optimising against brand terms.  So the sustainability has to go hand in hand with a full attribution modeling that looks into real contribution of each channel to every step of the purchase funnel.  Only in this way, giving credit where credit is due, we can really create a fully sustainable business.

As a consumer, I feel I have waited so long for a better user experience. While some marketing initiatives perform better than others in this regard, there are still too many that are fragmented and suffer from a big disconnection between offline and online.

But the time has finally come to change all that, and it is no surprise that Google is at the forefront of these developments.  In the last few years, the company that pioneered search marketing has acquired all the knowledge, skills and experience to fully realise the dream of integration.

It was announced last week at the latest DoubleClick Insights event that after a great deal of hard work, Google is now ready to launch a new digital platform called DoubleClick Digital Marketer, a new and modern ad platform for the web with the user at the centre of everything. This is a unique idea that aims to seamlessly bring together all existing tools to allow management, real-time optimisation and measurement of digital campaigns all through one interface, bypassing the traditional in-silo view of search, display, social, desktop, mobile and video campaigns.

If successful, this will rightfully be heralded as a revolutionary innovation, allowing marketers to move away from single campaigns and finally focus on marketing products or services that aim to help consumers enjoy a better all-round experience. At the same time, this means more scope for true creativity in marketing – something too often repressed by partial measurements aimed at justifying the marketing investment in single channels.

Yes, we are talking about being finally able to measure effectiveness and efficiency in near real-time through more sophisticated models that look at the holistic picture. This will give us the insight needed to take action (again in near real-time), maximise reach and improve user experience.

According to Google, this is accomplished through two extra principles: the delivery of great content and changing the method of measurement from the traditional primary metric of clicks to metrics that reflect user engagement instead.  This will also result in significant online and digital opportunity for brand-activated initiatives.

Now, if we couple this with the announcement of the integration of Google’s own AdMob with AdWords, an announcement that perhaps won’t have the same buzz but it is equally important, we can see how the technology giant from Mountain View is closing the circle and delivering not just a digital platform, but a fully capable, 360 degree marketing platform – it surely won’t be long before the last few elements (e.g. Google TV) will be made available.  This is the final move Google needs to accomplish end-to-end publishing and reporting, but how is this going to impact consumers?

In our opinion (and as Google believes), user experience will certainly be richer and easier when consuming media across various devices and at various times.  There will be more consistency of message, with marketers able to deliver more specialised stories and brand experiences rather than linear creative, or ad formats specific to the marketing channel used.

We will see personalised brand stories delivered to individual consumers or social groups, tailored to them and taking advantage of the multitude of touch points through different devices.  No more will we see the current nonsense that often blights (re)marketing, with the same ads served over and over. Instead, we will have a personalised and evolving engagement between brand and end user (think about how world-leading brands such as Apple and Nike have already mastered this).

Importantly, it is likely to be an opt-in experience, so users will be able to choose the ads and brands with which they want to interact, and decide where and when this happens, according to the relevancy of the content. So, these are not just exciting times for marketers; consumers too can expect to enjoy a rejuvenated and vastly improved connection between them and their brands.

AtomicSearch are looking for the Brightest Star in Search Engine Marketing.

• Do you want to work on the best brands & accounts?
• Do you want to get paid more and rewarded for your talent?
• Do you want to work with the best international Search minds?
• Do you want an environment you’ll love working in?

AtomicSearch is one of Australia’s best and we have clients like Nike, SBS, MLC, Ferrero Boutique, ACP Magazines, AMP and OO.com.au to prove it.

We believe Search is the gateway to users entire online experience and brands online performance. As a full service Search Agency we pride ourselves on premium service and thinking beyond just click-throughs and numbers.

Offering insight driven SEM, SEO, Analytics and Strategy at our core, our extended service offering has evolved to include display placement through Google Ad Exchange, Conversion Rate Optimisation, device and place specific Optimisation and Proprietary Search Technology.

What we are looking for is Australia’s best up and coming SEM manager with an intuitive love and understanding of all things online. We want you to passionately lead a portfolio of high-end clients who are genuinely great to work with but demand the best.

To secure the role you have to:

• Be a born presenter, communicator and confident, natural manager
• Possess 18-36 months experience in Paid Search
• Totally understand the current and future direction Paid Search and Technology and the influences surrounding, affecting and working with it
• Have superior detail, organisational, analytical and strategic Search skills
• Believe in passionately striving to deliver on client expectations and goals
• Have an understanding of Brands and the wider Media and Marketing industry and Paid Searches role within that context

This starring role offers genuine rewards including above average remuneration, bonus and incentives, two extra long weekends per year, scope to progress, grow further and help lead our future. Think this is you? Lets talk.

To apply please send your resume to Andrea at a.atzori@atomicsearch.com.au

There are millions of hyperlinks, blogs, and websites, so search engine software was designed to help Internet users find what they are looking for most efficiently. Tweaking that software is done continually to ensure that users are served up the best results for their searches, though the algorithms are closely guarded secrets. Recently, Google changed its algorithm (this time deemed Google Penguin)  and many websites were penalized for link building that they deemed as “blackhat” or cheating; since then, websites and blogs have rushed to correct issues with their linking and do things to make Google happy.

It is important not to overdo inbound links for your anchor text, and instead be sure there is a wide mixture of links. Exact match anchor text performed well prior to Penguin, but it will kill a website’s ranking now as it spells link manipulation to Google. What are the best link building practices in a post-Penguin world?

•   Use “naked URLs” for some link building to make the inbound link profile more natural-looking. These are some variations of the site’s actual URL—for instance, http://www.woolworths.com.au/ and woolworths.com.au are naked URLs.

•  Use brand anchors like Woolworths, Woolworths Australia, and Woolworths Pty Ltd often. Note that small variations, like capitalization and abbreviations are noted by search engines, making it appear that the links are more diverse.

•   Brand and keyword hybrids are becoming more important as search engines work towards latent semantic indexing (LSI), which is another way of saying they are related and relevant. For instance, Woolworths supermarkets and Woolworths stores are LSI keywords for Walmart.com.

•   Universal and junk anchor texts are things that blog and website owners spent years ridding themselves of, but they are important once again. Things like, “click here”, “more information here”, and “visit this site” do not pass any relevance to the site, but make it look very natural to search engines.

Moving forward, blog and site owners and webmasters should not stuff content with keywords, but use the four anchor types noted above. Of course, knowing what your site’s inbound link profile consists of will help you going forward, so check out a link auditing site like Majestic SEO to get some insights and adjust your site accordingly.

One of Google’s stated goals is for those who search for information to have what they have repeatedly called a “good user experience”.  Actually, this has always been openly stated, but the search programming could not and did not enforce a structure on webmasters to achieve this.

But the past year of updates from Google have challenged the SEO community in their previously held assumptions about what it took to get a site into the top ten results and keep it there.

The lynchpin of SEO efforts, prior to the major (Panda/Penguin) updates had always been to build quality backlinks, which were a signal to Google that a particular page was considered by others to be authoritative.  But the most recent Penguin update threw a wet blanket over the certainty that webmasters have had in securing rankings in this way.

So, do backlinks still matter?

Yes, but the key is in how to execute the theory.  Chief of Webspam, Matt Cutts has said that the Google algorithm will continue to use links to determine authority.  In fact, he has intimated that this authority matters more than social signals does.  If that is the case, then SEOs and content creators will need to take a good hard look at the level of resources they are expending on ‘creating backlinks’.  Google will answer the question of how much longer the practice will be effective.

But if old backlink creation methods are made continuously less effective over time, but authority backlinks are still part of the ranking algorithm, how will site owners obtain them?  It may be time for site owners to attain link authority in the way that Google truly intends for the companies that they reward with high rankings to attain them.  That is, that others in the industry (and outside of the industry) who consider their content worth reading will link to it, share it and spend time reading it.

Working from this perspective is more public relations than it is technical.  In other words, it means creating compelling reasons for consumers and industry professionals to get involved on the pages of a site. What is it that a company is doing that is noteworthy?  What is it that the company is doing that adds to the conversation to solve the nagging problems of the industry?

Telling those stories and making them public is a different way of attracting links that the ‘creation’ method.  It will undoubtedly take a higher level of thought and interaction.

However, until Google is no longer a source for over 60% of search traffic, working with them in their stated goals may be more prudent than starting down paths that will eventually need to be undone.

When it is considered in this way, what is the true ROI of creating backlinks?  What then is the true ROI of focusing on social media and PR?

About the author: James Dixon is General Manager at AtomicSearch.

The Penguin update should have spelled the end of the days of calculating “keyword density” for those who create written content.  With the last update, Google’s engineers openly stated that its algorithm would reward good content.

However, executives have said this in the past and it seems that many sites with poor quality writing remained high in the rankings for various keywords.

But the Penguin update was a wholesale slaughter for some webmasters who built their site on the unwritten rules established in the SEO community on the kind of content necessary to attain high rankings.  Sites created content utilizing the ‘old rules’ could have been caught in any of the various new Penguin-based traps set to filter out of the Google search engine what their people thought lead to a bad user experience:

1: The page could have been considered to be over optimized

Since Google did not spell out exactly what they meant by this, it is clearly possible that a page written in a somewhat nonsensical manner with the exception of the targeted keywords would be easy to spot and discount.

2: The page could have been considered to dis-engage readers

One of the most important factors spoken of explicitly is the fact that user engagement would be rewarded.  How easy would it be for search engine spiders to look at the amount of time visitors spent on a page and or how quickly they left it   Pages that have less than quality content leave a very definite footprint.

3:The page probably had little to no evidence of being shared on social networks

Google has stated ever since late 2011, that social signals matter. In other words, did others in a social circle find the content worthy or reposting, re-tweeting or repinning?  While not having these thing probably doesn’t count against a page, but if the page gets what is in effect a zero on its social signals grade, the effect is the same.

So what do webmasters and content creators need to do to craft what the Google considers to be “high quality” content?

1. The content should be written for the reader, and not for a search engine robot.
2. The content should add something to the discussion instead of regurgitating the same points that have already been stated by others.
3. The content should be unique and not posted elsewhere on the web.

These factors are important because they will lead to the kind of pieces that others will want to share with their personal and professional networks.  It is also the kind of content that people will want to take their time to read, understand and even bookmark.  The experience that others have with the content will leave the kind of clues that will be easy for a search engine robot to pick up on in the future.

Even more recent additions to the ranking algorithm, although less harder to control could also  be measured.  An SEO professional could measure and work to increase the amount of time that visitors were spending on a page.  They could work though issues causing load times to be slow and re-measure them until they improved.  In other words, SEOs have known what to do in order to positively affect change in their client’s site’s ranking.

But measuring the impact of social media has a been a challenge because:
1) Google hasn’t stated that there is a direct relationship between social activity and ranking authority, as they have with the factor of linking
2) Google recently stated that their own +1 system is not a very good social signal right now
3) Google has stated that authority backlinks still matter more than social signals

So when SEOs talk about social signals what are they talking about?  What do social media metrics actually say?  The SEO community has conflicting views.  On the one hand, some studies seem to suggest that social media activity is a way of measuring the quality of a marketers’ interactions and how much trust should be associated with them.  In other words, the impact on SEO is indirect to search.  The more quantifiable social media interactions a site has the more trust that they have earned.  That trust then rolls into the major factors that Google considers to be a relevant webpage or site on a topic.

On the other hand, a study conducted by Searchmetrics determined that there were statistical correlations between social media activity (shares, likes, tweets) and ranking in Google.  Their conclusion was that these activities (even though they are just as ‘spammable’ as links were) seem to indicate that could affect a site’s position in the Google rankings.

So what should SEO professional do?  Should they quantify and outsource social media activity?   Should it be treated like linking has traditionally been treated?  Although the jury is still out, it would appear that the most sensible way to utilize social media is to do so with a mind toward engaging readers.  The indirect measurement seems to indicate a trajectory for Google’s intent even if they are not yet able to measure it in a way that satisfies them.  Multiplying likes, shares and connections is easy to ‘game’.  But when done solely for the multiplication effect, will it give companies the trust that is needed to boost rankings? It is unlikely to do so in the long run.

The first genuine surprise was learning that some of the most disciplined campaigns turn off googles “optimise adverts by click” feature. If you take the “optimise by clicks” feature at face value, it should only run adverts which deliver strong click-through rates, which seems to be true – but is this really a good thing? Qualified adverts should only appeal to those likely to buy, if you are selling B2B products wholesale you don’t want end users clicking on your adverts, only business owners. You achieve this with very specific ad copy, ad copy that will have a lower click-through rate over all. Unfortunately Google bumps you over to the “optimise by clicks” every 30 days automatically, so its somewhat painful run an optimal campaign –  somewhat sad in itself.

Remarketing is surely the most neglected strategy in paid search. Tagging visitors to a website with cookies and then showing them specific display advertisements based on the content they viewed has almost limitless possibilities. One given was to tag purchases, then show display advertising thanking them for their purchase and offering a discount on their next. Another was pushing out improvements to your business – especially resolutions to any common grievances or complaints customers have had, checkout counter improvements as an example. Remarketing can be a form of reputation management if executed skilfully enough.

SEO and SEM are often treated rather distinctly by agencies – there’s a notable absence of strategic crossover between the two. A little exploration into the mechanics of the “quality score” in Google Adwords will show you adwords is reading title tags, headers (H1, H2, H3…), content, landing page speed and more – the bread and butter of SEO.  In execution a keyword in adwords should appear both the ad copy and in the tags on its designated landing page – difficult to do, but powerful if pulled off well. Even more interesting is the relationship between the two, you can’t get there with separate SEO and SEM strategies – you need a meta strategy. A search strategy.

The eMetrics seminar – where the air should have been thick with statistics and regression analysis, was a letdown. Either the presenters were unable to really tap into the science of data analysis, or unwilling to. Still, there were some insights – the use of flow charts to illustrate segment audiences (how one actually executes this was left for the audience to guess at) and the use of spearman’s rank correlation to bind two metrics together. Say, time on site to revenue: if the two are positively linked work to have your customers linger longer. If they were negatively correlated try to streamline your website, and so on. The execution here was non-existant as well, i’d start with SPSS or some other mathematics program – and a degree in statistics, if you’ve got one.