可以看到 Google 的蜘蛛每日都會到訪我的網站，但你會發覺有時會逗留久一點，有時會逗留短一點。影響 Crawl Budget 的原素不少，但不在今日討論範圍，留待下再寫。
其中一個可能的原因是 Google 找不到你全部網頁，你可以想像內容連結就像血管，把 Google 的 crawler 帶到網站的不同頁面。
內部連結對 SEO 非常重要，除了剛才提過的收錄問題外，更重要的是內部連結會告訴 Google 每一頁的重要程度以及關鍵字是那個。
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Google 會根據一個頁面被連結的數量決定一個網頁的重要性，一個頁面被連結的越多，重要性越大。因此，我們的主頁通常都會有很多連結 (不論是內部或外部連結 backlink) ，重要性最高。
假設你的網站有 Page A 及 Page B 兩版主力產品頁，同一網站內亦有為數不少的其他頁面 ( 以上例子是 4 頁)，這些其他頁面分別連到這兩個產品頁。上述例子，Page A 有3條內部連結，Page B 則只有 1 條內部連結，在這個簡單的例子上，Google 會認為 Page A 的重要性較大。
在執行 SEO 工作時，除了外部連結外，也要注要自己網站在其他網站的表現及評價為何，明顯地 Google 會視為其中一個參考指標 ! 因此，你可以叫訪客或顧客到第 3 方的網站為你服務及產品評分，對 Google 來說會是一個參考。(在香港，包括 Yelp、Google My Business 可以先作登記)
Google 在 2018年8月1日的更新，主要針對 YMYL 類型網站，如果網站沒有清楚例明資訊來源，或來源是由權威機構、人物提供，網站排站排名便有可能被大幅調低。(可以細閱 <<首次針對行業性的 Google 更新>>)
你可以見第二格會出現搜尋結果，我們叫它做 Results Block，主要是 Google My Results 而來。Google 認為這個結果接近完全滿足大部份人的需要，因為解決了這個人當前的需要，結果提供了最就近的咖啡店、亦提供了客戶評語。再一次強調 Google Mark-Up 的重要，對於地區性的生意十分重要!
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.透過曝光管道來吸引對的陌生人（你的目標群眾）到你的網站，並且了解你的服務、產品與品牌。有了關於你的品牌與產品的良好內容，搭配社群媒體、網路媒體平台曝光、SEO操作，甚至是網路廣告，都可以達成目的。
轉換 (CONVERT)
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.你是否有想過，你的潛在客戶透過曝光管道進入網站後，如何在你的網站上找到聯繫你的資訊或購買的方式？如 Airbnb 主張入站到完成訂房只要三步驟，你的網站如何幫助潛在客戶只透過三個步驟就認識你的服務，並且認同你的品牌優勢，並且做出消費的動作呢？
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.在領域裡做生意久了，你可以感受到不同管道的、不同背景的客戶，成交難易度或可以掏出的消費金額有所不同，但傳統廣告來的客戶，想要分析，卻難以下手；有賴於數位行銷工具的數據分析功能，在 “吸引” 與 “轉換” 階段，你都可以看見這些管道來的客戶背景與含金量，透過精細的分析，你可以更加聚焦在帶來收入或潛在客戶數最高的管道，並且妥善分配投入資源。
對 Google 或普通人來說，一張圖片越早出現、越大、越佔據中心位置，理論上應該越重要，跟報章的道理一樣，這個不難理解!
內容新鮮度
網站內容越新，對圖片的排名亦有影響
優化圖片SEO – Alt Tag 的優化
「img alt」 屬性功能是建立圖片替代文字，這個圖片替代文字與 img title 頗為類似，但不同的是 img alt 用在當圖片出錯或圖片失效時（例如圖片被移除或伺服器權限修改），讓瀏覽器顯示出替代文字，但是當滑鼠移到圖片上的時候，並不會顯示替代文字，因此 ALT TAG 等於是圖片的備案，假設文章中的圖片失效，網頁設計師可能不會希望出現一個 x，如果有設定「img alt」 屬性，就可以顯示出可閱讀的文字。
<img src=”puppy.jpg” alt=”Dalmatian puppy playing fetch”>
一定要避免
<img src=”puppy.jpg” alt=”puppy dog baby
dog pup pups puppies doggies pups litter puppies dog retriever
labrador wolfhound setter pointer puppy jack russell terrier
puppies dog food cheap dogfood puppy food”/>
Do you have any difficulties in picking the right SEO company in Hong Kong?
There are few things you may take note before picking your SEO company in Hong Kong.
Competition of SEO market in Hong Kong
Compare with US, SEO is not that noticeable in HK and it is not the 1st online promotion strategy to most ofHong Kong Companies. With the limited time required in getting positive ROI, business in Hong Kong are more focused on SEM and Social Media Promotion (Facebook ads, Facebook Marketing).
Truth to be told, numbers of SEM agencies in Hong Kong are much higher than SEO agencies. So there is a good chance for business leveraging the search engine, especially Google, to put their business into next level.
Culture Difference
In Hong Kong, although most people speak Cantonese, their searching customs may include English as well. Sometimes, they will mix both English and Chinese together for queries .
For example, when they are searching Hong Kong company who help people optimizing their website, they may use both ” 香港seo公司” , “SEO香港” . “香港” is the Chinese of Hong Kong.
When you are doing both SEM and SEO, there are lots of slangs that may not be simply translated from English to Chinese. You may need a local person handling these culture issues.
SEO Targeting
Make sure you are targeting the correct search engine. Recently we watched the movie SKYSCRAPER by The Rock, and one interesting scenario showing the Police inside the movie use Baidu as the search engine, but in reality, people in Hong Kong use Google only for local search.
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Google and Baidu use different algorithms for their rankings, and the skill sets required for optimization are totally different as well.
There are still some people using Yahoo as the search engine since Yahoo dominated Hong Kong market before, and some people still set Yahoo.com.hk as their homepage for reading news.
And at the moment we do think that 1 out of 10 searches is performed in Yahoo. And our findings show that users of Yahoo are a bit elder than in Google.
SEO Pricing Model in Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, most of the SEO companies are on subscription model, usually charging clients in monthly basis. Depending on project size, keyword difficulties and targeting , monthly rate can be ranging from HKD 8,000 to HKD 30,000.
Based on experience, most Hong Kong SEO companies will provide a timeline for the optimization work. For the first two months, focus will be put on the technical SEO part while after that it will move to the link building stages.
At the link building stage, beware that some Hong Kong SEO companies may use grey or even black hat link building strategy in order to achieving the SEO goals. However, this strategy is really dangerous and not recommended, as Google emphasized few time that such strategies may offend results on Google Penalty.
Here you go an independent rankings for Hong Kong SEO companies, you may take reference on their performance.
Guarantee of Google Ranking
There are some companies in Hong Kong who provide money back guarantee for not reaching the pre-set SEO goals. These goals are like “30% of keywords getting page 1 in 3 months”, sounds good right?
However, when you take a detailed look on it, you will find that those page 1 keywords may not have any search volume each month, and those keywords are not picked by you nor your company. And the worst case scenario is, you got 4 keywords that are ranking in page 1 but with no traffic from them. So, be careful of these claims!
Do they really understand your business?
As a SEO consultant for quite a few years, I always find that people are just focusing on ranking, but not on conversion. Truth to be told, ranking is just part of the online campaign goals, what business needs is conversion (including inquires, sales leads, free trial and so on).
For a campaign with better SEO performance, we suggest you to proactively notice how your business works and what are the ultimate goals.
The above are just simple tips from my observation, feel free to comment or get in touch !
要明白，SEO 包括的不僅是 IT 的同事，很多時也包括內容製作同事、圖像設計同事、有時會包括客戶服務同事、銷售的同事，但他們未必可以在同一時間回應及工作，人力資源要預得更充裕點。
網站結構問題
很多公司網站的歷史攸久，經常遇到的問題包括
沒有內容管理系統 (CMS)
網站的程式語言比較舊，不利優化
SEO 很多時都會遇到更改及加入新內容的情況，對於沒有 CMS 的網站，優化過程會變得相當痛苦。曾經見過一個客戶網站超過 300 頁，全部都是逐頁 HTML 更改，浪費時間之餘亦很容易漏掉要改的部份。
可以做的當然是製作一個有 CMS 的網站，長遠來說會方便很多。
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SEO 的工作量可能遠比想像中好，最好預多一點人手及時間
控制內容發佈機制
我曾經對香港其中一間大型報社作出 SEO 咨詢，因為報社網站的內容由很多不同部門的編輯負責，其中可以更改或加入內容的用戶超過 200 人。因此，內容編排及格式並沒有一個固定的模式，有部份編輯理解 SEO 的作法，有部份比較隨心，令不同部門版面的 SEO 表現不一。
接著，我們花了相當大的氣力統一及標準化內容的格式，我們製作了內容編排指引。明白有時要在內容編排及 SEO 最佳化達到平衡，最好的作法除了標準化 (如製作發佈指引)，最好也規定內容發佈者的權限，即不是所有人可以在網站發佈內容。對網站結構相對較小的網站，建議只授權最多 3 至 4 個已受訓同事加入內容。
做好SEO 期望管理
很多時，公司投入資源 (金錢及技術人員) 在 SEO上，往往期望立即帶來立即的效果，很多對 SEO 不甚了解的企業擁有人以為 SEO 是靈丹妙藥，其實似中藥多一點，要時間才會看出明顯的變化。若有任何 SEO 公司跟你說，他們的 SEO 似特效藥的話，那我倒可以肯定的告訴你給你服的是偉哥 (一種壯陽藥)，短時間很強大，但你知其實你根本沒有變強，然後你只能更依賴。
做好登錄頁 (Landing Page)
不論是 SEO 或廣告，搜尋者在進行搜尋時，預期會即時得到所需要的資訊，解聰文 (Martin Hiesboeck) 說﹕
As to compare with US, digital marketing in Hong Kong is not that advance. Although cell-phones penetration are among the highest in Asia, a lot of digital marketing concepts like sales funnel, inbound marketing, marketing automation still not that well-known.
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According to Google, only 50% of Hong Kong’s small-medium businesses agreed that digital is fundamental to their business. This slow digital adoption by SMBs could explain why digital spend is much lower in Hong Kong than its neighbors.
As Hong Kong is very convenient in getting Depending on company scale, Most of the digital marketing strategy in Hong Kong are more focus on the traffic side, only few of them will involve in conversion’s side.
We are going to show you some of the existing marketing platform, strategy that digital marketers in Hong Kong are using.
Fewer Marketing Platform
As to compare with US variety of marketing platform, Hong Kong’s major social media platforms are Facebook and IG. As from a research done by The egg, the most popular digital activities are social media, search and video
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Facebook Marketing
Facebook is the dominating marketing platform for all industries in Hong Kong. Basically, you can see variety of products selling there. Facebook used to be one of the most effective marketing platform, with the decrease of organic reach, advertisers need to spend more for getting similar results as before.
Content is still King among social media platform, we can see that there is a lack of content writers or curators at the moment. However, stickiness of audience in this platform is quite high and time spent there cultivating is well worth it.
SEO
Google is still the most dominating search engine in Hong Kong where people go there for different intents. Company that provide solution to any specific problems must not ignore it. Although SEO is long in the digital marketing industry, unlike Facebook, SEO is still not well-known among different companies.
In general, management level in Hong Kong would prefer instant return for any digital investment, as SEO takes a bit time for getting positive ROI, sometimes it hinder them for taking actions. For digital marketing, there is a bit market share for SEO agency in HK.
Yahoo and Bing still have some usages, and obviously the user age group are higher than that in Google. Because of the earlier adoption in Hong Kong Market, we can see that some people still using Yahoo as their homepage.
Voice search is not that common in Hong Kong Market at the moment, but we can see the growing trend. However, since Cantonese is different from Mandarin, voice search optimization may not be carried out directly on the site.
SEM
Most of the Hong Kong digital agency will help customer carrying out search engine marketing (SEM) campaign. In general, most of them charged based on the percentage of total ad spend, ranging from 14 – 20% of total ad spending.
Blogger and KOL Marketing
Before the rise of KOL, blogger is dominating, especially in the parenting, beauty field. Today, KOL marketing is one of the way where big brands allocating more budgets on. As from my experience, price are varies based on the popularity of the KOL and the job nature, ranging from few thousand to more than twenty thousand Hong Kong dollar per post.
Forum Marketing in Hong Kong
Forum Marketing used to be one of the most effective ways for marketing in Hong Kong. A lot of companies used forum as a softer way to deliver marketing message, including creating threads that provide customers testimonial and so on.
This method is especially well-known for cosmetic industry and medical-related industry. As you all know, medical-related industry are not allowed to carry out any advertising activities, such soft promotion maybe the only way that they can do.
At the moment, there are only 3 -4 famous forums in Hong Kong, including HKdiscuss.com, HKgolden and Uwants, and most of the digital agency will keep monitoring and publishing posts on these three forums.
Tips in picking the right digital marketing agency
In Hong Kong, there are tons of digital marketing agency which claims they can provide you full scope of services. However, the truth is, most of them are just outsourcing their work to different parties. As a SEO sub-contractor myself for 3 major digital agencies in Hong Kong, I can told that if you want to get the best service provider, you may need to test it one by one.
As digital marketing is very board, the first think you need to consider maybe what service you are really looking for. Maybe your company require a strong social media company that can help you spreading out marketing message via different social media platform or you may simply need lining up KOLs for your branding. You may need to consider what business nature and target audience you are going to reach.
You also need to consider the budget for your whole marketing campaign, as you may know, it will highly affect the quality of the agency. Remember that “Price” somehow equals to “Quality”.
Another tips for choosing digital agency is to avoid one-man-band, usually, you will find them in low price, but the problem is, you will not get enough support if you are facing any urgent situation.
In fact, the best way to observe how a digital marketing company perform will be watching what they are doing for themselves. If they claims they are the best in facebook marketing, why don’t you take a look at their facebook performance? Usually, it can reveals the job quality and it saves you tons of money doing this simple observation.
Conclusion
Based on the above observation, you may allocate your marketing budget accordingly, we suggest company in Hong Kong try to carry out a small budget campaign, as this can let you have an idea on where the audience or target customer located. After getting your winning campaign, you can easily scale up to maximize your return.
There are tons of digital marketing companies in Hong Kong, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is one of the major service provided.
However, choosing a good SEM company is not that easy, here are the things that you may consider:
How to pick a good SEM company?
Recently, we have worked with one of the biggest SEM agency in Hong Kong, which ads buget is around 200 million each year, covering keywords ads, display ads, video ads and so on. We can observe that ad budget on that scale, the mindset, skillset of the people is far different from small or medium sized agency.
Related Industry Knowledge
Somehow, if the agency understand client’s market more, it may heavily cut down the trial and error cost and time. For example, those who are expert in cosmetic field may not that familiar with brick-and-mortar industry.
A good agency with relative industry experience can provide you an expectation on how the ads may perform. For example, We have worked with an agency which only serve cosmetic industry, they are very clear on the client acquisition cost for each service in this field, what platform works well, what ad format works well…etc. These market senses are based on practical implementation, not by guess.
Once you are picking your SEM agency, you can ask if they have similar experience before for your industry and how the ads perform.
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There are tons of work executing your SEM campaign, picking a good team is a must
SEM Budget
Budget scale will highly affect the strategy of the SME agency. In general, small and medium size agency mainly focusing on ROI, which is more like direct response marketing whereas big agency may also need to take care of the client’s branding. (I am not saying big agency don’t care on ROI, just they may also need to take care other stuff)
As a small business owner, you may need to calculate the return for each dollar you spent. The question is, people working in big agency may have different mindset as to small agency.
Skill level and Google recognition
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As long as you have a credit card, you can simply create a Google Ads account and start advertising, and claim itself as a SME agency. People find it difficult to distinguish what is good and what is bad. And Google find a ways to help you out.
One of my friend’s agency recently recognized as Google Partner (Search Ads). To have this recognition, agency need to have a certain amount of spending, a 18-month incremental ads spent record as well as passing the knowledge exam.
Such recognition, although is not 100% accurate, at least it give you some indication on how the SEM agency performance before.
Another advantage is that, these recognized agency will have a better support from Google. Whenever you find your ads campaign having issues, these agency can solve the issues in a faster way
Service Level and Follow Up
There are some agencies that will charge a one-off set-up fee for the SEM campaign, however, once the set up is done, the story ends there. In fact, SEM required a consistent observation and optimization, and also require a lot of test before getting a winning campaign.
Even you have a winning campaign, you still need to dig out another winning campaign, and the process should be never end. And therefore, you may need to contact consistently with the agency during the whole campaign so as to achieve more results.
As far as I know, some of the SEM agency may outsource their creatives out to freelancers, their response time may be a bit lower if you need to carry out display ads, that’s also one concern you may need to consider.
Summary
Finding an appropriate SEM agency can highly leverage your ads performance, however, most of the complaint rise because of lacking good communication in the beginning and setting a wrong expectation on both sides. If you do have some difficulties in picking one, we do have some recommendations.
語義 SEO 的操作方法就是在網站內容上提供足夠的資訊 (metadata)，包括語義相關的文字、內容、背景等令搜尋引擎更了解網站，提高網站流量。之前的 <<[網站 SEO 邏輯 ] Google 如何用人手判斷它的搜尋結果>>曾經介紹過 Google 如何用人手判斷網站的質素，部份編章提及搜尋意圖，不妨回顧一下。
你會發現越來越多的搜尋結果都不再只是 10 個藍色的搜尋結果，很多時已經變成一個個框框，例如
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當 Google 清楚了解你的內容，並知道你網站提供的資訊充足，你的網站便有機會出現在「Featured snippets」中文翻譯為「精選摘要」。
或者當你向 Google 提出問題時﹕
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Google 能夠直接告訴你答案，而你不需要再走進網站慢慢搜尋，它是如何做到呢?
其運作原理就是跟 Semantic Web 有關 – 舉一個例子，「蘋果」這個詞語在不同語境下意思會不同，當你想買新手機時，「蘋果」指的是「蘋果」公司，當你想找富士「蘋果」時，找的是一種水果。因此，Google 要知道你的找的是那一種 「蘋果」，同時亦要知道網站內容指的是那一個 「蘋果」。
你可以想像 Google 像一個小朋友，首先從單字學習，進而學習單字與單字之間的關係。例如學懂單字 Apple 及 Orange，然後開始理解它們都是水果的一種。
Google 就是透過龐大數據，去理解及學習如何把不同的字，演變成內容，然後把不同內容建立關係。這種學習方法有一個術語叫作自然語言處理 (英語：Natural Language Processing，縮寫作 NLP)。
2012 年，奇點大學創辦人及未來學者家 Ray Kurzweii 到 Google 進行一個項目﹕「令搜尋引擎理解人類的語言」。由此時開始，Google 進行了多次演算法更新，包括知名的 Hummingbird 更新。2016 年，Google 發佈了 RankBrain，這是一種機器學習的模式，可幫助識別與用戶查詢字串相關，但實際上可能包括查詢關鍵字的網頁，根據 Google 說法，在 200 多個網頁排名因素當中，RankBrain 的意見是 3 大重要因素之一。(資料來源﹕<<未來地圖>> Tim O’Reilly)
為何語義 SEO 越來越重要?
最直接的原因就是 Google 最終的目的是徹底了解人類搜尋的目的 (搜尋意圖)，Google 變得越來越聰明，它再也不只是單憑你網站的關鍵字判斷內容，就像一開始所講的案例，而是研究及理解整個內容脈絡，從而提供最優質的搜尋結果。
曾經在一篇提及未來 SEO 方向的文章中說過，語音搜尋將會變成大趨勢，我們在做語音搜尋這個動作時，很多時是提及一整個問題，而不再單單是一個「關鍵字」，因此，Google 不斷投放更多資源去理解人類說話背後的動機，在理解內容這個能力將會不斷提高。
另一個做法則是在網站中建立 Entity，並把 Entity 連結到外部的公開資料庫 (open vocabulary)，令 Google 更易了解 Entity 的確實意思。
不用把 Entity 想得太複雜，可以想像你為網站部份特別的字詞建立一個獨立頁面去解釋，並把它定義為其中一種資料類型。Search Engine land 的例子，它為 Knowledge Graph 這個詞語建立了特定頁面解釋﹕Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
