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First Tuesday Talks SEO

// May 8th, 2007 // First Tuesday // 16,728 views

“Businesses must wake up and smell the coffee when it comes to online marketing or they will be left behind,” says Vinny Lingham, founder and Chief Strategy Officer of online marketing company incuBeta.

That was the introduction by Vinny at the second First Tuesday meeting held at Wanderers this morning (8th of May).

The topic of discussion was centred around search engine optimisation and how it is changing the face of (online) marketing.

Vinny started the presentation by showing us a couple of video clips, Shift happens and the hugely popular Numa Numa dance video.

Some interesting facts about searcing and SEO:

• 88% of web traffic comes from search engines
• Flash or graphic intensive websites are not search engine bot friendly – if the bot cannot find you, your website will not rank high on the search engine directory

There are tons more facts and figures and one just needs to do a search or reading blogposts on SEO to find out more information.  e.g. Return on effort (from Vinny’s blog)

Some examples used during the presentation include:

• Amatomu
• World of Warcraft on Myspace
• Facebook
• how the internet has evolved

I’m quite glad the discussion didn’t delve too much into Cost-per-Click (CPC), Adsense, Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA) etc. as these have been mentioned many times before. 

On the other hand, the discussion and Q&A session from the audience was interesting.  It was refreshing to hear that SME’s are on the forefront of SEO and online marketing in South Africa and that corporates are lagging behind. For example, someone like Elitemobile is giving Vodacom a run for its money in terms of conversion rates.

First Tuesday is also launching a blog to get some discussion going and it will be available at http://firsttuesday-sa.blogspot.com.