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Greig Holbrook, MD of Oban Multilingual, will be making a presentation to a seminar exploring the cultural diversity of web usage at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). The seminar to be held on April 30th at Oxford University, will be attended by sponsors of the Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) the OII’s major study of internet usage in Britain. The OII is recognized as a leading authority on Internet use in the UK, and internationally-recognised through its work on the World Internet Project.

Greig will highlight the findings from Oban’s recent multivariate testing on the Visit Jordan website. The testing software allows a website to automatically serve up variations in content, and then track user reactions to the changes, giving insight into web design elements in a live environment. The results are revealing of unique cultural responses to variations on websites, and initial results suggest the importance of designing sites for different cultures for maximum conversions and sales.

Oban Multilingual, Gomez Travel Benchmark and EyeforTravel Research have teamed up to produce an industry white paper on the online European travel industry. Entitled Maximising your online performance in the European travel market, the paper describes the growth of European online travel distribution, and provides a practical guide to maximising online performance in this market in terms of SEO and website performance.

Language is a key differentiator online and is a major consideration for companies looking to target the mix of cultures located within Europe. The paper looks at some of Europe’s leading travel websites in terms of language, and identifies a range of SEO practices to take advantage of search differences between users of different languages.

To read the full white paper, click here

Oban Multilingual, the specialist in Multilingual Search Engine Marketing, will be in attendance at the ITB in Berlin next week. (March 11th – 13th)

Are you visible online to your global audience? Do you need help with international online marketing? If so

please drop Sinead Comerford a line at the following email address sinead@obanmultilingual.com or call her on +44 7887660600.

Sinead would be delighted to meet with you to discuss all exciting opportunities further.

See you there and see you then

Oban has made it to the finals of the Gatwick Diamond Business Awards, in the International Trade category.

The awards are organised by Cadia, the Gatwick Diamond Business Association, and will be presented by BBC News front man Declan Curry.

Oban are experts in international search engine optimisation, and have offices in 26 countries.

A large percentage of Oban’s clients are multinationals (for example, Proctor & Gamble). Some are local UK companies with an international focus.

In addition, Obanners also consider themselves to be part of one of the most multicultural staff in the UK – over 80 percent of their employees are from abroad, as reported recently in Brighton’s Argus newspaper.

“We’re honoured and very excited to have made it this far in these awards,” says Greig Holbrook, Oban’s MD.

“We are trying to make the internet friendlier to the multitude of languages and cultures that are currently struggling to find online content that caters to them, and we strive to extend our reach even further across the globe in everything we do.”

The winners will be announced at a Gala dinner on March 12 at the Gatwick Hilton Hotel.

Also in the International Trade finals are Aerotron, an aviation supplier, and Genesis Forwarding Services, an independent freight forwarder.

Our FD with some insight on brand keyword bidding.

According to recent research by Forrester European online marketing is predicted to continue growing this year (albeit at a slower rate).

However as you’d expect, clients will be even more scrutinising on getting value for money (and rightly so). Further to this, I noticed that research by the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) showed the cost of bidding on major brands is getting increasingly more expensive. They tracked 90 core brand terms over a 21 month period, which showed a consistent increase in cost-per-click and declines in click-through rate. Not a good combination.

Whilst the decision by Google to allow bidding on competitor terms may be good for the search engines’ bottom line, they need to be careful that the decision doesn’t come back to bite them. Whilst its unlikely that major companies will stop using Google, they might be more inclined to look at other channels if it continues to get more and more difficult to see a payback.

The focus on return on investment for clients is nothing new for us as it has always been a priority for everyone at Oban.

Cheers! Grant.

Sinead gets chatty about Facebook and its privacy/private lives pitfalls.

Today is Facebook’s fifth birthday. With over nine million users, there is plenty to celebrate.

I have never been a fan and was interested to hear the views of Southern FM’s & Sussex radio listeners today.

One user was advising others not to add people they don’t know. He said he made this mistake and suffered written abuse and threats towards his wife.

He was absolutely shocked as he had never met this person before and was worried that the user would have access to his personal information and thus be able to see where he lives.

The man also advised not to give away too much information on your profile page in the first instance.

Another radio listener revealed that after seven months of corresponding with another user, she is now going to travel half way round the world and said that “he is the man that I am going to marry.”

A gentleman caller informed us that he accepted an invitation to his Facebook friend to join her in the US for a week, whilst her fiancée was out of town. He thanked Facebook for providing him with the best week of his life. (So is Facebook helping people cheat and commit adultery?)

I know it is supposed to be a social website but how social and familiar are we supposed to get..

Sinead and Carol attended the Cadia (Gatwick Diamond Business Networking) members meeting today in rural Surrey. Here, Sinead gives us the scoop…

We were happy to hear that the general mood with local businesses in the area is one of caution and not panic. Cadia was urging companies to try and stay upbeat and to see the glass as half full and not half empty.

We were interested to learn that when the new owner of Gatwick Airport (whoever that will be) will be planning to invest 1 billion pounds into the airport for re-development (Hooray, I yell with glee, let’s give Heathrow a run for its money)!

Cadia had a meeting with the local council and was begging them to enforce that any new development that will take place will be run by Sussex companies and not ones from Essex etc. There will be new council housing built in the Gatwick Diamond Area too and again urges were made to utilise local engineering and Construction Company (keep the money spent within Sussex).

Sinead and Carol struck up friendly relations with other Brand, PR and Marketing agencies in the Sussex region: Midnight Blue Communications, Storm Communications and Preview.

Hello all and welcome to 2009.

2008 was a great year for Oban. We ended it with many successes, before all dispersing off to our various locations around the world - Germany, France, Portugal, Mexico. Our office on this calm first Monday back is filled with treats from around the world, including German coffee and a nice bottle of Mexican tequila

We received cards from the families for whom we purchased llamas, chickens and fruit trees through World Vision, in light of the festive season. It’s nice to be able to give back.

Brighton’s famous Argus newspaper named us the most multicultural internet company in the UK, and we are anxious to maintain our multicultural expert status in 2009.

We’ve built up a great team for this year and now it’s time to really shift into overdrive.

The world is changing - currencies are fluctuating like rollercoasters, leaders are coming and going, wars are being waged and peace being made. But some of the biggest changes are happening online. Research has shown online sales relatively unhurt by the seemingly volative credit crunch. This means those businesses quick enough to reach out to global customers through a multilingual online presence will be the ones who prosper in 2009.

Yes, we’ve said it before, and we’ll undoubtedly say it again.

Keep watch of this space for our newest research, comments, and SEO-related news for 2009.

Cheers and best of luck in this new year.

xKaila

Having been in another meeting with a company who’s having difficulties with their international SEO strategy I thought it would be appropriate to write a quick post about the various international SEO approaches.

Possible strategies include:
- using local domains and/or local hosting
- building inlinks from local websites
- IP delivery
- GWT geographic targeting
…etc.

Unfortunately it’s usually not as simple as this because the client’s circumstances can make things rather complex. Be it technical limitations (CMS, site programming, technical management problems/limitations etc), financial limitations not to mention duplicate content. Or it simply goes against the business strategy.

Below is a great video discussing this further - starting from 3mins to 8mins.

Please note that this is the extreme seo session from a4uexpo which sometimes goes into some gray and black-hat seo. Contains some swearing.

On the panel is Dixon Jones, Joost de Valk, Marcus Tandler, Jason Duke - moderated by Ciaran Norris.

Happy searching
Claudius

Our SEO pro and recently-become iPhone owner, Mo, combines his expertise to perform an SEO-related iPhone app review…

The holidays are around the corner and surely everyone is thinking of buying Christmas gifts. I’m sure everyone has heard a lot about the iPhone and its hype, so I thought it would be a good time to do an SEO-related iPhone app review, so if you are thinking of buying an iPhone or iPod touch for your SEO-savvy friend, this post might help you to make sure these gadgets will be more than just a phone or a MP3 player to the lucky receiver – it might help you justify the price you pay for it a little more as well.

Let’s get down to business. The application I am going to talk about is called proSEO and it seems to be the only noteworthy SEO application in app store till date. You can get to the app by visiting this iTunes store link. First things first: this app costs £8.99 or $14.99 if you reside in the U.S. Below are some of the features this app offers:

- The full HTML source code of the page
- The page’s META data (including META keywords and descriptions)
- The information about <title> tag.
- The anchor tags
- The image alt tags

The user interface is very straight-forward; just browse to the page that you would like to review and press the ‘Analyze’ button, and all the data about the page will be presented to you in the form of 4 tabs: Source, Meta, Tags and Title.

In terms of page content analysis, this app offers two features: the body text listing and phrases window. (more…)