As a result of a sudden opportunity, I am moving to Turkey soon. By the end of July, Future Searches will be operating from Ankara, Turkey. I will be exploring Turkey search market closely and helping companies to show off in the first pages of search engines result pages.

I know the Turkish internet market is evolving and there are many opportunities out there. I am so excited and can’t wait to sort things out, settle down and start my Turkey SEO journey!

I am open to any profitable opportunity on the internet so feel free to send me your business ideas if you would like to work with me and grab a bite of this raw market. Please see below figures of Facebook users by country to assess Turkey market better.

(Data from http://www.nickburcher.com/2009/07/latest-facebook-usage-statistics-by.html)

Last week, on 25th of June I went to Facebook and saw one of my friends flash post about Michael Jackson’s cardiac arrest. What a shock! As a fan of M.J. since I was a teenager, I felt so sad and hoped he was happy in his last minutes.

Anyway, I made a search and found out there were not many posts yet on the internet, especially in Google.com.tr news page. There was only one news about Michael Jackson’s death so I thought it is a good time to implement some tests on line.

I create a post on my Turkish bookmarking site Linkopedi and avoid using the main keyword for M.J. death “Michael Jackson öldü” and used synonyms instead. Next day, my post ranked #1 for “Michael Jackson vefat etti” term in Google.com.tr, which is another synonym of “Michael Jackson öldü”, although I never used that “exact match” in my post but used other synonyms instead. I guess if I have used both terms in my post and used the most common terms “Michael Jackson öldü” in my title, I would have traffic coming from the main keyword and synonyms.

After one day, I created another post with the main keyword and content but it did’nt get any traffic from search engines cause it was too late!

From this experience, I came up to the result that timing is very important for SEO. If you want to rank high for any upcoming event or news, make sure your website will feed search engines before other websites does. Secondly, using synonyms generates good traffic. Use your main keyword as the king but apply your synonyms whenever possible.

Rest in Peace Michael Jackson! I love you.

I don’t know if you already know this or not but you can set up your own social bookmarking website for free by using Pligg CMS Solutions!
About a year ago, I started a Turkish website called Linkopedi where I was intending to give links for social bookmarking websites and easing link building process for my visitors. After some time, I saw my users were eager to send their website data and asking me to publish them on this website. As a very curious person, I really love experimenting new things so I said why not and added a directory folder under my website and started building links for my visitors; it was very risky I accept but at the end of the day my visitors were happy and it was increasing my traffic as well.

Turkish Social Bookmarking Website Linkopedi

Recently, I came across to Pligg and I am so happy to announce that my Linkopedi finally became a social bookmarking website where people can submit their stories, save their favourite websites, vote on other’s stories, create groups, discuss anything they want and communicate with each other by the help of this free CMS. I am still in process of translating the CMS but the main features are working in Turkish so the website is alive!

I just started experimenting Search Engine Optimization for Pligg and write about my suggestions for other Pligg users in the future.

I would love to hear from you if you could check out Linkopedi to see how Pligg works and send me your comments!

Today, I will give you a brief summary of my presentation about search marketing in Turkey. Hopefully it will give you some insights and projections for the coming years.

Internet is evolving and marketing on the internet is growing rapidly day by day. In a developing country like Turkey, the market is very new and open for development and know-how.

Most internet specialists have limited experience in terms of SEO, PPC and Affiliate marketing in comparison to developed countries in Europe and USA and they put the same type of issues on the table such as the difficulties of explaining their clients the benefits of SEO or PPC and evoke awareness of the opportunities on the internet when it comes to drawbacks of doing business.

Hovewer some agencies take the advantages of this illeteracy and concentrate on unethical practices such as offering PPC campaigns with uncertain pricing, hiding their service fees and cheating their clients. In terms of SEO, those type of agencies do nothing more than some black hat link building and mess up the client’s rankings in the long run.

There are a few Google Adwords Professional Companies and Individuals. The numbers are expected to increase soon as the projections of spend on internet marketing for 2010 is $200M, means 400% increase compared to today’s figures.

Today, in terms of pricing, SEO service costs will depend on the web site’s size but say approximately starting from £150  for a web site of 10 pages. Most companies charge only once and they don’t get a good deal in terms of monthly contract.

Outsourcing SEO and PPC services from Turkey can be a good deal as Turkish Lira is weak against Sterlin, Euro, Dollar.  There are enthusiastic specialists looking forwards to gain experience in foreign markets. I believe internet marketing will be one of the major marketing mediums in Turkey soon. People love internet, they love social networking and shopping on the internet. Ebay have seen online sale opportunities and acquired “Gittigidiyor.com” in 2007.

If you have any questions or enquiries about internet marketing services in Turkey please get in touch with me. I would be more than happy to help.

Tesekkurler…:)