It's All About Beers! - Digital Campaign Case Studies

Today, many beer brands are very active online and take a serious focus on digital marketing. They try to use different tactics and tap on various touch-points to capture wider attention and brand new experiment from the target audience. It could be vary from impressive 3D projection mapping, highly interactive YouTube takeover, socially driven campaign with gamification or purely social promotion for both online and offline activities. Here are some recent highlighted campaigns from Carslberg, Desperados, Polar Beer and Guiness.

1. Carlsberg global digital campaign 

• Agency: Skive
• Big Idea: All echoing the new tagline, ‘That Calls for a Carlsberg’, its new brand positioning.
• How it works: It’s Carlsberg’s first global digital initiative and features content for YouTube and Facebook.Carlsberg has kicked off their new campaign in UK with a couple of pretty big 3D projection mappings on the iconic White Cliffs of Dover and the famous Liverpool Street Station. On their YouTube channel the TV ads and other video clips produced for the launch are available, along with the YouTube Takeover experience. On Facebook Carslberg have gone for something different with an app that invites users to type in a transmission, upload a photo – and send a message to your mates from the moon using text-to-voice and face mapping. 
• Take-aways: The digital campaign will support the new television advertising, ensuring that it reaches audiences who spend their time online.

2. Desperados Beer YouTube Takeover 

• Agency: Dufresne Corrigan Scarlett and MediaMonks 
• Big Idea: Create a pretty cool and ambitious YouTube takeover by integrating the Facebook Connect functionality as part of the experience. 
• How it works: The YouTube campaign for beer brand Desperados is different to most by letting you interact with the story as it unfolds instead of the 99% that just break up the YouTube interface in various ways. Additionally, the Facebook Connect functionality is a neat way of socalising the whole experience, with the takeover bringing your FB friends into the party by pulling in photos on the fly.

3. Polar Beer scores a socially driven campaign 

• Agency: Almap BBDO 
• Big Idea: Tapping into peoples unyielding fanatacism to their favourite football team and the general win-at-all costs attitude of sports fans
• How it works: They created a groundswell of engagement, facilitated by Polar Beer, that engaged tens of thousands of passionate fans from two opposing football team fan bases and endeared them BOTH to the brand for significant periods time (avg ion site was 11mins plus). A true WIN-WIN that managed to align the brand to two opposing audiences and deliver a positive branded experience to both.
• Take-aways: The campaign shows how a powerful call to action based on a real passion point (in this case Football – a religion in Brazil) can motivate online action, participation and engagement.

4. Guiness rises to the top in Singapore

• Agency: BBDO Proximity Singapore 
• Objective: The campaign was developed for the Singapore market where engaging and attracting young consumers to Guinness is a major focus in order to drive a groundswell of engagement on Facebook within 8 weeks.
• How it works: Using a simple but compelling promotional idea to give Guinness’ Facebook fanbase a major boost with its Rise to the Top Social media campaign. The highly partcipatory campaign had a strong viral element and was activated online, and offline. Offline activation was enabled via an innovative iPad app that the agency created allowing brand ambassadors to engage and enrol consumers in bars and in trade outlets.
• Result:The campaign caused explosive growth in fans on Facebook page, achieving 21,000 in only a few weeks, making it the #1 beer and spirits brand fanpage in Singapore. This socially activated short term campaign is the first step of Guinness’ social media engagement strategy in Singapore with even more innovative and engaging content and promotions in 2011 and beyond.

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"Yellow Tree House" & "Mini Gateway" - Digital Campaign Case Studies

How can your digital campaign stand out of the crowd? Thanks to the Internet and its growing role in our lives, agencies have come a long way in the past decade, and they’ve begun to hone in on and innovate in the realm of digital marketing. There are more evidences of the growing appetite of  brands to really get behind innovative digital ideas to get more interaction with the target audience. Therefore, from now on, I would like to share about the case studies of innovative digital campaigns around the world that I've known recently for an overview of the scene.

1. Award-winning “Yellow Treehouse” Campaign 

• Brand: Yellow Pages Group (New Zealand)
• Agency: AIM Proximity and Colenso BBDO (NZ) for true integrated work
• Big idea: Using Yellow Pages book and website can help you achieve any task, no matter how big or small.  
• How it works: The Yellow Treehouse program is all about putting Yellow to the test. Tracey, like everyone, has a mission, hers is to build a restaurant in a tree. The test is that she can only use the Yellow Pages, yellow.co.nz and Yellow Mobile to do it. She’ll need to find architects, builders, restaurant suppliers – everything using just Yellow. Even though it’s a brand campaign you can only take the planning so far – what happens from one day to the next can change very quickly.
• Results: The power of the insight and idea lived well beyond one campaign, and successfully led to the second generation of the campaign – “The Taste of Yellow Chocolate” , which achieved the same heights of success for Yellow in terms of business results, and the chocolate bar created went on to outsell every other chocolate bar in NZ in its first week of launch.
• Takeaways: The campaign leveraged a multitude of touchpoints to deliver spectacular business results for Yellow and it also demonstrated exactly how digital can be seamlessly integrated into a campaign, rather than being an afterthought (as we still see so often today).

2. Mini Gateway Stockholm Campaign 

• Brand: MINI Countryman (Sweden)
• Agency: Jung von Matt Stockholm
• Big idea: From the “Gateway” global concept and the specific challenge in Sweden was to create MINI evangelists, the idea behind is to create the world’s biggest reality game on iPhone – transforming Stockholm city into a living game board.




• How it works: You used an app where you could see the location of the virtual MINI within the Stockholm city border. All locations were updated in real time so you could easily follow how everyone moved.
If you got closer than 50 metres of the virtual MINI you could take the virtual MINI with your iPhone.
Then you had to get away, because anyone within 50 metres could take the MINI from you. The person in possession of the virtual MINI at the end of the 7-day campaign gets the car.  
• Results: The buzz started spreading within minutes after the app was put up on Appstore. Hundreds of thousands discussed it in social media. People from everywhere followed the game on the website.
The campaign created astonishing interaction with the MINI brand. During  the game week  11413 people participated and transported the virtual MINI nearly 1 500 physical kilometers. Average gaming time was 5 hours and 6 minutes per person. 
• Takeaways: Mini has successfully ultilize digital and technology platforms to create a fun, relevant and engaging experience, rather than just being there for some buzz.

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Mobile Marketing: Facts & Figures

From mobile commerce and text messaging campaigns to location-based services and augmented reality, mobile marketing is, without a doubt, essential to an integrated communications campaign. Tech-savvy consumers have adopted mobile communication and use it as a preferred method of communicating. As more and more people use mobiles on a daily basis, businesses have to adapt to mobile commerce with various platforms, strategies and marketing ideas. The insightful infographic below by Microsoft Tag displays the breadth of the mobile market today.

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Facebook 2011: Facts & Figures

The World is Obsessed with Facebook by Alex Trimpe, a student at Columbus College of Art & Design, shows some interesting stats about Facebook use in 2011 and goes great with the insightful infographic wrapped up by Online Schools.

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Social Media Trends 2011

Social media changes from month to month. Trends come and go quicker than the seasons change. Having said that there are some trends that I think will continue over the coming year and with that in mind I wanted to share them here. All in all it should be an exiting year in social media with these expected trends escalating and expanding in 2011.

1. Social Commerce: 

Group buying + Facebook Commerce + Mobile Commerce

It’s all the same thing: new ways to leverage your social circle to help you shop or share your haul. Social commerce with the end goal of increasing conversions, leads, and sales started to gain attention years ago with consumer reviews and began to escalate in different methods. The connection of social media to sales, sales indicators, promotions, and other measurable or valued marketing and sales conversions, including couponing, is fueling the investment in social media as companies begin to prove the capability to drive commerce.

• Group buying: You should have heard of sites, such as Groupon, that sell for discounts if you get your friends to “group” together to buy a product or service? Like all kick ass ideas this one is incredibly simple and instantly understandable and there is something in it for everybody. Groupon and like-minded sites are expected to continue to grow, offering a new way to reach different audiences.
• Facebook commerce: 
Facebook has joined the social shopping market by launching its functionality called Facebook Connect. In short, you can now sell on Facebook by letting your customers buy, but also letting them tell their friends. And letting their friends tell their friends. Even if you don’t offer ecommerce on your website, it’s now possible to provide that service through the social network. And it’s overly simple to set up. YouTube has been recently extracted this concept with what was described as the first "YouTique" launched last September, by French Connection.
• Mobile Commerce: Mobile payments enable eCommerce merchants to expand their offerings and create new experiences on the phone, a trend we expect to see continue as mobile blurs the line between offline and online. Shopping will become even more social. Your mobile phone will soon become your identity.

2. Content Curation: Branded Content

Brands are starting to realize that one of the main ways of engaging their customers and offering value is to create content that enriches the user’s social media experience rather than just blasting messages out at them. All companies should become media companies, in that the content they provide is valuable, consistent, and non-salesy. With users starting to get more and more aware of ads and adding their own filters the smart brands will create bespoke content that engages users in a meaningful way and offers value. Building that content in to Facebook and other social sites while all hooking back to their own website will be crucial with video playing a more and more important role in the branded content play.

3. Crowdsourced Innovation

Crowdsourcing as a term and idea is nothing new, but 2011 will likely be the year where it becomes a core part of many organization’s social and customer engagement strategies. Additionally, there is an increased understanding from customers about the concept of Croudsourcing, which means it will no longer just a way of engaing the social media savvy, but rather a much broader audience who will share their ideas and thoughts with brand simply for the reward of recognition and being heard by the brands they purchase form everyday.

4. Niche Location / Location Casting

The ability to drive commerce and hence expand the potential advertising and marketing opportunities is fueling the growth of location-based social networking. Location is a key factor in the future of search, social, commerce, and media, among a lot of other things. It is the most important signal to emerge in the database of intentions since the link. If 2010 belonged to Foursquare and its playful, competitive and sometimes addicting ecosystem of badges, mayorships and specials, it's likely that Facebook will rain on Foursquare's parade in 2011 with its completed Facebook Place.

5. Social Gaming

New media models are being built based on virtual goods and currency, currently connected directly to the increasingly popularity of social games. As a category, social gaming has grown incredibly quickly, becoming one of the dominant drivers of usage on Facebook. The current leader moving this trend is Zynga, which is building a new media model from micro-transactions. From this trend, viable marketing opportunities are emerging, so-called "engagement ads." These are basically an exchange between a player and an advertiser, where players earn points or currency to raise or extend their game play in exchange for some brand-related activity like taking a quiz or sharing an ad on Facebook. The power of gaming to drive revenue and marketing benefit for advertisers, as well as its increasing capacity to catch mass engagement, is driving not only new offerings but also new partnerships, startups, and other innovations.

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Vietnam's Social Media Landscape

“A lot of brands jumped in and said, ‘I need a Facebook, I need a MySpace, I need to do SEO, I need to share all of my content everywhere.” But often it’s lacked of a brand tone of voice. And it’s just created some form of presence that’s not based on strategy at all”, said Daniel King, director of digital, JWT Melbourne. In the emerging markets, which are quite young in onine marketing, the moves might be even slower and lots more problems exist. Vietnam is one of thess cases.

Vietnam has a large population (13th in the world) and half of the country is under 30. The young active Vietnamese are all over the Internet. They’re watching videos, listening to music and reading random news. They’re spending and they’re talking. But there’s little connection that companies here want to cement between those two actions. You could say Vietnamese Internet usage is almost caught up with the world. If the US and Europe are in 2011, then they are in 2008 or 2009. Yet Vietnamese online advertising is still 2002. 

1. Deny acknowledging the trend and taking the lead.

The biggest problem in Vietnam is not that brands or companies are incapable of understanding the fact of the increasing online media power. It’s just that they don’t need to. Understanding online and social media is acknowledging that online could propel an existing brand to greater heights, or it could take a nothing product to become the new star. And though there’s incredible opportunity online because no one is really strong here, no one really wants to consider what that means. 

2. Lack of knowledge 

The second problem is the proper understanding of online media landscape with its current trends and insights in order to furnish the brand strategy and motivate the business to find a real effective communication channel with the target audience with less competition and more cost-effectiveness. Many businesses in Vietnam do not fully understand how social media works and how they could use these channels effectively to benefit their brands and companies. Many marketers or managers in Vietnam may ask you what Twitter is.

3. Lack of attention to detail

Another problem is the lack of attention to detail indicate attitude of most of Vietnamese businesses when go online, especially in customer service. If social media is anything, its core is at customer service. If customer service is not important, then social media cannot be important either.

4. Lack of strategy

Although the rising power of social media, SEM and mobile services, is obvious in all over the world and rising strongly in Vietnam, most of Vietnamese businesses still got very simple reactions when going online, just like the age before social media:

“Let’s put up banners and count the impressions”

“Let’s make a microsite, spend a ton of money to fuel registrations and gather personal data, and then what we’ll do is never use that data and never follow-up. And we can do this all over again next year too.”

Traditional media channels, such as TV, print, radio, outdoor, have been here for ages and intensively competed. But online is completely open, waiting for someone to think and innovate. If you can dominate in this, you could just completely take over – no one else is here or cares. Or they just not care enough to take the lead.

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Facebook Social Inbox - The Email Killer?

Everyday I have to write tons of emails in a similar boring pattern with “Hi Mary”, “Dear Lily”, “Best Regards”, “Cheers”, whatsoever. Is there anyway to make our conversation more simple, connected, time-saving and just “to-the-point”? Suddenly, the Social Inbox idea raised by Facebook few months ago came back my mind. With all the myths, debates and its recent activation. I am so much looking to find out how it could change the ways of communications we have currently by bringing a social world to your inbox. Will it be a revolution or just another Google’s ill-fated Wave? I'm longing to find out...

For those who have no idea about this social inbox, here is a quick wrap-up. Pls be noted that it is just available recently by invitation for limited users.

• A combination of the most popular forms of communications (e-mail, text messaging, Facebook's own private messaging and instant messaging) into one convenient and flexible feed.
• This Social Inbox has convenient features such as storing coversation history by contact, dividing inbox into two parts to filter emails from whom you don’t really know.
• The benefit for Facebook is that it already has 500 million users who are addicted (on some level at least) to the social network’s messaging system, and many of them are probably like the high-school students, and don’t use email. 

A few things for discussion:

• Email-killer? - On the face of it, having just one place to communicate with everyone from coworkers to family members seems like a good idea. But is Social Inbox considered the future of email or online communications? 
• Individual identifier? - Now everything we have on Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, blogs, discussion forums, etc. are linked via email, by default. That is, it comes back to that unique identifier that marks me out as an individual. But will this social inbox really work when it comes to the integration with other channels?
• Privacy? - Even Mark Zuckerberg told people that Facebook will protect users’ information in this social inbox and not use it for any advertising purposes, people are still always skeptical about the privacy issue on the social environment. Will this be another challenge for Mark on the ongoing privacy debates?

Your opinions?

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The Top 10 Creative Viral Campaigns by The DigiWave

There are a lot of factors to measure the effectiveness of an viral ads or campaign. Personally, I have an appreciation for those that inspiring, creative and entertaining, obviously the one can touch the audience's senses, without showing too much the commercial side. Although most of the campaigns in my fav list are successful in terms of increasing brand awareness and driving sales, it doesn't mean that a creative viral campaign will guarantee commercial success. In most of the cases, it's more about hitting the right target to link the online message into real-life buying action. And that's another story. Digest the list first. It's delicious!

1. Carlton Draught - Big Ad




2. Trojan Condom - Trojan Games




3. Way back home – Red Bull




4. Transport in London – The Awareness Test




5. Berlits – What are you sinking about?





6. Axe – Clean Your Ball




7. Eepybird.com – Diet Coke & Mentos




8. Honda – The Cog




9. Volkswagen - The Fun Theory




10. Nike – Cross Bar

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The Top Ten Successful Viral Ads of All Time by AdAge

Today, viral campaigns become more popular and part of many marketing campaigns. You should have watched a video with over 1 million views in YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell this video get so many views?”. In the past, at the beginning of YouTube era, this could happen naturally but nowadays, most of these hits are touched by companies and advertising agencies. It’s the time of viral era. Let’s have a review of top 10 viral ads of all time announced recently by AdAge and Visible Measures and discover the stories behind.

Here comes the A-list launched this year:

1. Blendtec – Will it blend

What was the best way for Blendtec to demonstrate the might of their blenders? Gun for product placement in films? Leverage food channels? No, all they needed to do was blend an iPod, a broom, golf balls and a multitude of other things. This one is a bit surprising. What this really speaks to is the mad scientist in everyone! People love to see things like crazy experiments, and this is just fun to watch for that reason. What's amazing is that a lot of the people who commented on the video online didn't even realize it's an ad for a blender -- they thought this is just some crazy man who put his iPhone in a blender for fun! These videos are effective because they do something that very few viral videos do – they drive sales. Blendtec has created a video series that is not only entertaining but also demonstrates the power and utility of their product. Sales of Blendtec blenders increased by 800% because of this cheap yet moreish campaign. Pure genius.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg1ckCkm8Y

2. Evian - Live Young

It's well known that people love babies in ads. Babies, animals, and humor are three major appealing factors in ads, and this ad combines babies and humor. Whoever planned this out knew it would be a home run because of the babies, the fun music, and the great product placement. This ad was actually great for the brand in terms of getting the message out about the product. However, what makes this campaign stand out from the others is Evian’s use of social networking sites, most notably Facebook. They created Facebook profiles for the video babies, allowing fans to befriend these beloved rollerblading munchkins while inadvertently befriending the brand. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQcVllWpwGs

3. Old Spice - Responses

There is no denying that the campaign was a huge success for the brand, catapulting them into the number 1 spot for men’s body wash and making Old Spice a legend in the world of online marketing. Old Spice’s ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ began with a single video, which started out online and then went to television. It was an instant success, with Old Spice accounting for 75 percent of all conversations in their category for the first quarter of the year. But the real success of the campaign came later on when Old Spice launched their response campaign, a more personalized digital campaign, in which ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ interacted with fans via an onslaught of YouTube videos. Simply send Mr. Old Spice a message - through Facebook, Twitter or YouTube - and wait for his visual retort. The campaign goes hand-in-hand with the Old Spice worldwide promoted Twitter trending topic. This was one of the biggest winners in the Cannes Ad Festival, and got many accolades. It really appeals to young men and, while it seems a bit ridiculous and over the top, it works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFDqvKtPgZo 

4. Pepsi - Gladiator

Soft drinks brand Pepsi recruited a teamsheet of international A-listers to appear in two big-budget TV ads, using the themes of pop music and football as part of its global promotional push for 2004. 'Pepsi Gladiators' starred Beyonce, Britney Spears and Pink singing We Will Rock You in a Roman amphitheatre, while 'Pepsi Foot Battle' featured Real Madrid stars David Beckham, Raul and Roberto Carlos slugging it out in costume. These ads went viral and hit the public as there is a truth that people love entertainment, they love to see faces they know and, at the end of the day, it's an ad with good music, pretty girls and handsome guys.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Hp1l5s7hM

5. Microsoft - Xbox Project Natal

This one is purely functional. However, the video is visually attracted and entertaining. With something like that, it's interesting that people would watch it the whole way through, but if you think about it, for families to invest that much money, it's important that they know what the product does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2qlHoxPioM

6.Dove – Evolution

Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, used time-lapse photography to show the transformation of an normal woman into a glamorous billboard model using beauty stylists and Photoshop enhancements. The clip was released under the slogan “No wonder our perception of real beauty is distorted”. Dove Evolution then took top honours in both the Cyber and Film categories pointing to the colliding worlds of consumer-powered digital distribution and brand building. It is fast becoming one of the most watched videos on the internet. In the two years since Dove decided to brand itself as the beauty company that celebrates real beauty that strategy has rewarded the company with double digit sales increases.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U

7. T-mobile – T-mobile Dance

Saatchi & Saatchi created this fantastic viral ad for T-Mobile in Liverpool Street Station with hidden cameras. Why it’s effective. Sure T-mobile weren’t the first to film a flash mob, but they still hit this one out of the park. This video is clever, energetic, human, beautiful, entertaining and just plain fun to watch. It has huge numbers at over 17 million views and it does a great job of supporting T-Mobiles ‘Life’s for Sharing’ marketing campaign. T-mobile has smartly followed up with a sing-along video in Trafalguar Square and will undoubtedly continue the ‘Life’s for Sharing’ viral video series – a wise decision, but it will be tough to beat the magic of this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ3d3KigPQM

8. Doritos – Crash the Super Bowl

Crash the Super Bowl is one of many ways the Doritos brand continues to turn control over to consumers. The brand’s commitment to fan-empowerment began with the Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” program, which started in 2007 and has turned the brand’s Super Bowl advertising over to its fans every year. The campaign allowed thousands of normal people, along with ad creatives and film makers create and submit their funniest Doritos ads in an online competition in the lead up the to Superbowl, with the winner, to be played at the main event and the finalists sharing in over $5million in prizes. In addition, Doritos has put consumers in control through a variety of other exciting opportunities, including its “Unlock Xbox” challenge where fans compete to have their Xbox LIVE® Arcade game concept developed and made available for download worldwide; and “Doritos Late Night,” which provided Doritos fans ground-breaking virtual musical performances by blink-182 and Big Boi through the power of augmented reality technology where fans could enjoy and control the performances in the palm of their hand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0EVSP_6XZA

9. Old Spice - Odor Blocker

After the Responses, the hits just keep going with a more insane and awesome Odor Blocker series. This time, we get a bodybuilder who punches, kicks, blocks and generally destroys odor—and everything else in his path—in the service of Odor Blocker Body Wash. This guy's on something, and it's not a horse. Plus, he has these crazy talking abdominals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tI4CbCniBI

10. DC Shoes - Gymkhana Two

Ken Block is a person with two passions. His shoe label (DC Shoes) from which he is the co-founder and his professional racing career as a rally driver. In order to promote his favorite racing sport to the world, the unknown rally sport called Gymkhana, he created a highly viral video to show cast his own brand, his favorite sport and his sponsor: Subaru. By being honest to your viewers – “We’ll give you great entertainment, but mind that it is an advertisement asset” – the video took away the inner conflict among viewers to not spread commercial videos. Next to the honesty mentioned , the video is simply highly entertaining. A beautiful car, slow motion shots, explosives and speed are elements that catch the attention of the viewer. Everyone loves to watch eyecandy. Which makes it a strong branded entertainment video, which people love to watch. Even if it lasts for over seven minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ7R_buZPSo

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SEO Don'ts - The 15 Mistakes You Should Avoid

You do SEO for the future. If you market your site with press releases but don’t optimize it for search engines, then you’ll have to keep writing press releases indefinitely. When the press releases stop, your website traffic is likely to stop as well. Another common mistake is that many organizations think the process completed once a site is launched. They don't realize that the web site needs to be promoted much like any other product or service. That’s why SEO should be continuously kept in mind to enhance your web performance. Last article, we mentioned some good tips in SEO and of course, along with any list of Do’s come the Don’ts. Then here they are…

1. Having no content
Your website needs content. The search engines need something to rank and you need a way to show authority with users and answer their questions. If you want to create a site that is rich in content and a popular resource amongst internet surfers, then adding quality, unique content is a must. Sure, the search engines like it too. It shows them your site is worthy of being ranked because it’s actively growing with information related to the theme of your site.

2. Lack of consistency and maintenance
If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines. If you optimize your site today, you won’t see the results of your work tomorrow. You might not see the results even after a couple of months. Search engine optimization, like building a business, takes time to pay off. Therefore, try to focus on your long-term goals. Be patient, and keep working away at it. Eventually, your SEO efforts can turn into a steady flow of free qualified traffic to your website — potential customers coming to you. That’s a result worth waiting for.

3. Choosing keywords you can’t win
Even experienced SEO experts can make this mistake. People usually choose keywords in their mind that are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. Or people may focus on very popular keywords which may not be relevant to the site. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords. In fact, choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Most of the sites fail to do enough research on keywords. Using good keyword selection tools, such as Google Adwords Keywords and WordTracker, will help you find keywords that are good for your site. Be thorough in your research, don’t just do it once and forget it. Use as many tools as you can get your hands on – look at web stats and look at the logs for the search feature on your site – get a feel for what people are looking for.

4. Keyword Spamming and Stuffing
Many people may already understand is that keyword stuffing is an SEO technique of the past that should be avoided. Piling up the unrelated keywords needs to be reduced because most of the popular search engines including Google go through the content of the whole page. Therefore they index only the relevant keywords. So, just adding unnecessary keywords is useless. Don’t stuff keywords in your meta tags, image alt tags, etc. Don’t stuff keywords in your page footer with lightly-colored or hidden text.

5. Ignoring the Title tag and Meta tags
A common mistake is overlooking the importance of the title tag. More significant than the name of your business is what your business is all about. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your title tag shows in the search results as your page title. Therefore tag should contain the most focused keywords.

Similarly, though you may think that meta tags do no good to your page rank but it cannot be a possible reason to leave your meta descriptions. The search engine research pages vary the description of your web page according to the search keywords. So it’s better to define your web page in the best way you think it will drag a reader towards your site. The tags you put in should be suffice and able to correlate to your page. A good optimized meta description can increase your CTR significantly. Also, a lot of search engines other than Google rely heavily on meta description for ranking your site.

6. Ignoring URLs
Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keyword in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.

7. JavaScript Menus
Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap so that all your links will be crawlable.

8. Poor internal linking
We talk a lot about the power of links in SEO. You want people to link to you with keyword-rich anchor text as a way of telling the search engines that you are relevant to those terms. Well, then why aren’t you linking to yourself the same way? When you’re linking between pages on your site, make sure you’re using preferred anchor text to give yourself a boost in the search engines and give users a keyword-rich path to follow. You may not be able to control how other people link to you, but you can control how you link within your own site. Make it count.

9. Flash website without an html alternative
Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. Great content embedded into a Flash website get invisible by the search engines. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Similarly with Splash pages. A good alternative to both issues is to make use of a flash header. There’s no problem to include a flash animation at the top of your main site, or as a feature within the content area, etc. Because this is an addition to your web site, as opposed to a full separate element.

10. Overusing graphics instead of text
Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Therefore, if you are too graphics-rich, you. Most search engines are not programmed to read graphics but instead look for text. may be bypassed by the search engines. An image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because heading tags and menu links are important SEO items. Whenever you’re using a photo, make sure there is also relevant text to accompany it.

11. Backlink spamming
It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are always better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newsgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need is quality backlinks.

12. Ignoring local.
You’re loco if you don’t do local! Therefore, make sure your site is listed in the relevant local engines or directories. Make sure your site is optimized for mobile! According to a recent survey, 1 out of 3 smartphone users have been led to a local business after finding in through local mobile search. Danielle Nohe, director, technology and entertainment for Compete, is calling on local businesses to optimize their sites for mobile/smartphone users.

13. Ignoring social media/networking
SEO and social media are interconnected in a way that many people don’t want to admit or acknowledge. Social media is not just a passing trend that is a distraction from “real work” – social media does impact SEO and it can increase exposure and traffic for your site. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to do it (if you care about keeping your site on the forefront). If it’s overwhelming, start with getting a killer Facebook Fan Page up and work on building fans, and then introduce Twitter and then move on to YouTube. It’s OK to do it in stages, just make sure you are working towards social media mastery.

14. Ignoring the trends in the industry
Search engines and social media sites make changes often. Staying current is important for many reasons: you want to be sure your site is cutting edge and taking advantage of all strategies and techniques that are proven to work, you also want to make sure you aren’t wasting your time on old school stuff that doesn’t work. SearchEngineJournal is a great place to stay current and hear all the latest and greatest!

15. Over-optimized pages
Sometimes people go off the deep end after learning about SEO. They start creating overly keyword-rich pages in an effort to move their rankings upwards. This can quickly make for a poor user experience, resulting in a decrease in conversion rates and/or the site being less attractive for others to link to.

Even organizations that are aware of SEO's importance have a tendency to start the process too late. The best way to prevent these mistakes from happening is with education. If you need help with putting that together, hire a senior SEO professional to come in and do the job for you. Once they understand the business implications of their decisions, most senior managers will make far better decisions about the website and SEO.

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