SearchPath has today launched a new website for auctioneers and surveyors, Kidson-Trigg.

The website is designed for users to easily navigate between Kidson-Trigg’s two business areas of auctions and properties.

The auction pages includes fully illustrated auction catalogues, online bidding, historical auction reports, sale calendar, bidding forms and a guide to autions.

The property pages display all properties for sale, for rent and recently sold. Property details include a slideshow for property images, PDFs and an enquiry form.

The whole site is managed through a bespoke and easy to use ASP.NET CMS built by SearchPath. The simple property management area greatly eases the admin process for Kidson-Trigg – for example, all properties are managed through just one screen, whether they are for sale, for rent or sold. As soon as a property is marked as sold, the system automatically removes it from the Buying page to the Sold page.

In the last few years a division has occurred in the marketing/media world between the different types of media out there. The division was initially made by execs inclined towards making new marketing models, but has now been picked up by the marketing mainstream. Hence why I’m blogging about it.

So the various media out there have now classified into 3 categories:

1) Paid media – this is the traditional paid advertising of TV, billboard, radio and online display. This media has been criticised for being simply “interruption marketing”, whereby the user experience is hijacked by an advert for something the user doesn’t want or need. Paid media has also been criticised for being too “one-way”, and for not encouraging a conversation (however this may not be true – see below)

2) Owned media – this is the “owned” property that the brand completely owns and has total influence over. A brand’s portfolio of Owned media can include a website, a YouTube channel or a Facebook page. What makes Owned media distinctive is that the brand has complete control over it. But, as we shall see, just because there is total control doesn’t mean that it isn’t influenced by other media.

3) Earned media – This is the channels where you have little or no control over, such as blogs, SEO, forums, social media, and, most crucially, word-of-mouth. Earned media is where the conversation about your brand takes place; in a low trust world, it’s where the real brand equity and value can be acquired. Earned media has been suggested as an alternative name for “SEO”, since many SEOs are now concerned with the all the channels of unearned media not just SEO. Despite this suggestion, inbound marketing is considered a more accurate description for the expanding SEO role.

So these are the 3 media types to be used, or attempted to be used, by the 21st Century marketer. So what is the key to understanding them? IMHO it is that despite the differences between them, they are all linked.

So, for example, if someone mentions Facebook in a meeting, do they mean community (Earned media), FB ads (Paid media), or FB pages (Owned media)? Or all three?

Or how about advertising (Paid Media)? Traditionally advertising was intended to drive visitors to the product/store/website (Owned media). Now, a clever, shocking or downright entertaining advert (Paid media) can stimulate conversation about a brand in many different channels (earned media).

An example of this is BMW cars with their April Fools ad campaigns. If you look at Google Insights online, you will see a spike of searches for BMW at the start of every April. Why is that? It’s because BMW have become known for their funny April’s Fools jokes, such as the M3 Royal Wedding Edition last year, which came in Royal Blue… The conversation about this year’s BMW April Fools ad was played out in the Twittersphere.

This is an example of Earned media, that is: buzz and conversation, being converted directly into search engine traffic for the BMW site. Did they get any sales out of it? Probably not immediately, but in terms of branding, the exercise was very valuable.

So there is a feedback loop going between all three types of media – Paid, Owned and Earned. Positive Earned media coverage is the gold that all marketers are currently searching for, but have we have seen, all three types can interact and interdevelop in ways that are still emerging.

Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, posted a 8 minute video on how Google search works. From crawling, indexing to ranking, he gets into a brief overview of how Google’s search engine does its job.

Matt explains how PageRank is used, crawling timelines, frequencies, priorities, indexing and filtering processes within the databases.

Here’s the video:

An update to the Google search algorithm will go live over the next few days, targetting websites that Google considers to be ‘over optimised’ and instead promoting those offering ‘high quality content’. It suggests that around 3% of websites will be affected by the change and could see large falls in search positions.

Sites that will be affected will be those low quality sites that we all dislike – sites with little content, or content that’s irrelvant to your search, sites that repeat keywords to the extent that the copy is almost unintelligible – and those using ‘black hat’ techniques, including keyword stuffing, links schemes (paid, excessive reciprocal, link farms) and article spinning.

Google is quite clear in its message that it wants site owners to focus on creating high quality sites that deliver a good user experience and employ ‘white hat’ SEO techniques, so create great content, improve usability, improve site speed and that of creative marketing campaigns that make your site more compelling.

For those following Google guidelines and doing the ‘right thing’ this algorith chnage is good news. Or as Google puts it: “We also want the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded.”

Are you looking to widen your choice of web fonts from the standard Arial, Georgia, Verdana etc? Then take a look at Google Web Fonts.

This is a great directory of over 250 fonts that you can include on your website with just one line of code in your CSS file. You can now even include Google Web Fonts in Photoshop

In the past, we’ve had to either lose the SEO benefit of text on a page, so that the client could keep their designer’s specified typeface, or we’ve had to compromise design for search engine placement. With Google Web Fonts, you can have both!

This post lists the 10 best fonts from the Webfonts directory.

Various communities have sprung up in the SEO space in the last few years to serve the needs of SEOs worldwide. These communities generally have a monthly fee, and provide access to tools, training and general help with the day-to-day activities of the internet marketer. This post is designed to lay out the options for signing up with one of these communities, and perhaps give a little advice as to which one might be the right one for you. Some of these sites may have basic free options with limited features, but this post is about the paid memberships only. Here they are:

SEOMoz Pro Membership – http://www.seomoz.org

•    From $99 a month
•    Full access to their link analysis tool, Open Site Explorer
•     “Campaign” website monitoring – crawl diagnostics, on-page errors, warnings
•    Ranking monitoring
•    Pro Webinars – advice and info on different aspects of inbound marketing
•    Q + A forum – community answers questions from the community
•    Keyword difficulty tool

Smart Insights Expert Membership – http://www.smartinsights.com/

•    £197 a year
•    Consists of training and advice rather than tools
•    Comprehensive e-books on all aspects of digital marketing, from strategy and CRO to PPC and email marketing.
•    Many training videos on all aspects of DM
•    Templates for all aspects of DM

SEO Book Membership – http://www.seobook.com

•    $300 per month
•    Over 100 training modules covering aspects of DM including: keyword research, site structure, on page SEO, link building and PPC.
•    Quick start checklists
•    Training videos
•    Advanced flowcharts
•    Monthly newsletter
•    Private member’s forum

Majestic SEO – https://www.majesticseo.com

•    From £29.99 per month
•    Access to the Majestic Site Explorer link analysis tool
•    Backlink History Tool
•    Bulk backlink checker
•    Neighbourhood Checker