Archive for April, 2010
“My Website Has a Dream…”
Apr 29th
One of the most critical parts of a SEO & web marketing campaign is the goal you have for that particular site. Without a goal, you can spend many thousands and never see any return. Today we are looking at some different goals that your website might have; keep yours firmly in mind to get the best out of your web marketing.
To fill out a contact form
In many businesses, contact needs to be made before any sales can occur – in that case you would optimise your web marketing to reflect that.
Register/subscribe to the site
You could also sell subscriptions to your site, if you have a lot of valuable, unique content. As this makes you money, it is an end in itself.
Buy a product or service
An obvious primary goal!
Subscribe to a mailing list
This is a secondary goal – you may want people to give you permission to market to them in future, to increase your chance of achieving a primary goal.
Read your content
This can be either a primary goal (like for blog sites), or a secondary goal (for blogs affiliated with corporate sites, for example).
You have to know what you want, before you tell the customer what you want them to do … and before your web marketers will know how to help you!
How Has the Internet Changed Our Lives? Pt 3
Apr 27th
This could very easily have been a 50-part series, rather than just 3! Today we look at some more of the ways the internet has changed our lives … for the same of a little bit of nostalgia, and a little bit of perspective on the importance of internet marketing!
- We can talk to people overseas for free. Skype and other VOIP programs are making global business and other contacts not only possible, but affordable.
- Services are available at any time of day. Here we don’t just mean the possibility of buying something at any time of day (only to have it delivered when it suits the post office). There are also services we can access 24/7 – online libraries, netbanking, etc. Service based business need to take note – internet marketing is not just for ecommerce!
- People have access to undesirable information they wouldn’t have had before. Information about explosives, drugs, and all sorts of illegal activities is now on the net .. and very hard to police without infringing free speech, or running into practical barriers.
- Youtube! There’s no other way to explain the mostly pointless, sometimes hilarious, occasionally very useful phenomenon that is Youtube.
Despite the negative aspects of the net, we know we could never do without it!
How Has the Internet Changed Our Lives? Part 2
Apr 22nd
Last time we began our look at how the internet has changed our everyday lives. Truthfully, it’s hard to imagine how the internet, Google, and therefore SEO haven’t had an impact on some aspect of life! We continue to nut out the specifics.
- Business is now often conducted with no physical customers. Ecommerce couldn’t have existed before the internet – now some of the biggest companies in the world don’t actually have a storefront that people can walk into.
- Businesses are often run with no physical employees. Okay, maybe not completely – but telecommuting and freelancing have seen an unprecedented explosion since the internet became commonplace in people’s homes.
- Copyright has become much easier to violate, unfortunately. The music and movie industries are suffering especially with the invention of peer-to-peer technology, after the first incarnation, Napster, was successfully shut down.
- People are now able to publish their own thoughts about something, and have it accessible to a multitude of people at the same time, via Blogger and WordPress’s free platforms.
It’s amazing – and we aren’t finished yet! Stay tuned.
How Has the Internet Changed Our Lives? Part 1
Apr 20th
There is little question that the internet has changed our lives. But sometimes, when you’re looking from afar at a forest, it’s difficult to see the trees! Today we begin a multi-part look at the specifics of how the internet and web marketing have changed our lives, right down to the nitty-gritty.
Things were very different before the internet...
- The word “Google’ entered our vocabulary as a verb – to “Google” something
- The net has made it possible for us to buy whatever we need, from pretty much anywhere in the world. As long as you’re willing to pay the delivery charge, of course.
- We can now hunt down (no, not ‘stalk’!) old friends from school, thanks to the one social networking site that just about everybody on the planet uses – Facebook.
- We can also keep in touch with people we have no interest in stalking far more easily via any social networking site.
- The internet has made the world seem a lot smaller. Prior to the real development of the online environment, we depended on the television news (or the little-read ‘World’ section in the Saturday paper) to get our overseas news. Now we can get intimate details about almost any other country’s politics, culture, challenges and people.
It’s amazing to think of a world without internet and web marketing now – we continue our overview of life pre-W3 next time!
Great Website Content – Google’s View, Visitors’ View
Apr 19th
Look at any search engine optimisation or web marketing guide, and they’ll all tell you that you need great content before you do anything else. So, what makes great content? Turns out there are two ways to make great content – Google’s way, and the visitor’s way. The two SEO tactics overlap more than you’d think, though.
Great content: Visitor’s view
Visitors like website content that is:
- Easy to read
- Easy to understand
- Short and succinct
- Bulleted (!)
- Regularly updated
- Focused on a single topic
- Explains benefits, not just features
- Focuses on THEIR interaction with the product, not the company’s
Your visitors will also appreciate content that includes your keywords – after all, they are usually what brought them to your site, and it’s nice to have that validation of knowing that the page is about what you expected.
However, visitors generally DISlike keyword stuffed content.
Great content: Google’s view
Google likes content to:
- Include keywords
- Not include too many keywords!
- Be regularly updated
- Be unique – not copied from another site
- Be fairly well-focused – one concept or product per page
You can see that both Google, and your visitors, dislike keyword stuffing. Both of them like to see fresh content (it tells them the site is current), and each likes the content to be fairly tightly focused. And the rest of the points are definitely not mutually exclusive!
5 Golden Rules for Writing PPC Ads
Apr 16th
They’re only 140 characters … not a lot to squeeze an offer into! You can’t write a PPC ad for web marketing without a set of rules and best practices – today we check out 5 essential guidelines.
A big box of golden rules
- Include your keywords
Google tells you to do it, and if Google says, we do! Including your keywords in your ads means they appear in bold, and people are much more likely to click on them. - Consider your audience
Your audience is not ‘everyone’, or even ‘everyone who has enough money to buy my product’. Your audience will often be quite specifically defined in terms of age, gender, income level, geographic location, and perhaps other features like ‘physically fit’, ‘computer savvy’, etc - Features and benefits
Every ad needs a feature and a benefit – something the product does, and some way that it benefits the users. - Call to action
TELL people to click through … or they might not! - Look at the competition
Then, do something completely different to what they’re doing.
Still finding PPC isn’t working for your business? View our SEO Packages to see how we can increase your traffic for less and our Web Design that is geared to sell.
Misspelt Domain Names – a REAL Internet Marketing Tactic?
Apr 15th
There is a lot of traffic in common misspellings. That is probably what prompted Google to implement its ever-so-handy ‘Did You Mean?’ feature for searches! However, browsers aren’t so smart – they just take you to the place you typed in, and a lot of domains with common misspellings of popular sites get a lot of traffic that way. It’s called typosquatting – and is it a real SEO tactic? No … and yes!
Typosquatting
Typosquatting might take several different forms:
- Using an almost identical domain – for example, www.fotlia.com instead of www.fotolia.com
- Using a different domain extension – .net instead of .com
- Different domain phrasing – for example, www.intelligentdesigns.com instead of www.intelligentdesign.com
Why should I typosquat?
You can pre-emptively typosquat, to ensure that nobody else decides to do it for you – this would protect your business assets. You could also typosquat simply as an addition to your main site. Make it obvious that you own the site as well, by using the same branding, design, logos and navigation – otherwise people may well be scared off your site, thinking that you’re an illegitimate squatter!
Why shouldn’t I typosquat?
Well, unless you acknowledge it openly, having misspellings in your domain or through your site just makes you look unprofessional. You might get traffic, but will you meet your internet marketing goals – will people actually convert? It’s a tangled web … one that you should talk to an expert about 
.
Top 3 Accessibility Tips for Web Pages
Apr 14th
90% of the world’s web searcher use Google when they need to find something. It is tempting to forget about that 10% in your internet marketing … until you realise exactly how many individuals that percentage translates to! The same is true of designing accessible web pages. The number of people who don’t access the web ‘normally’ is small percentage-wise, but enormous in terms of pure numbers. Today we look at the top 3 tips for creating accessible web pages.
Can your website speak to everybody?
Use alt tags
Having alt tags allows people using screen readers to know what an image on your page is. It follows that your alt tags should ideally be descriptive of what the image is!
Include a text-only version
Create a text-only version of your website, which will not only make the page load faster and work better with screen readers, but help you identify semantic gaps that you may not have realised existed when the page has its graphics and Flash elements.
Include descriptive text for audio and video files
This one is great for non-impaired users who prefer to skim-read as well! Of course, for impaired users, this is a critical step, whereas for able-bodied users it is an option.
The Legalities of Linking
Apr 13th
If you’re a website owner, then linking out is probably almost as big a part of your SEO marketing strategy as getting inbound links. Today we look at some of the legal issues around linking. The internet itself makes things difficult to enforce, so people are often tempted to forget about the law. Today we show you why it pays to be wary of your legal position when you link out to a site.
Will they break down your door for linking out?
Simply linking out is not illegal
There have been a couple of cases in the States where people have challenged the idea that anyone can just link to anyone else’s site. Fortunately, these have been overturned in every instance. If you ‘just’ link to a site that is publicly accessible, there is little to no possibility of legal action. Thank gosh!
Content in frames
It is possible to link to sites so that their actual content is displayed on your site. Unless you clearly state on your site that the content displayed doesn’t to belong to you, and note the owner, there could be legal issues. This is usually done with frames or iframes.
Libelous links
It’s a well-known and very valid SEO practice to use anchor text for links rather than just typing out the web address. This anchor text shouldn’t contain any defamatory opinion or untruthful claims, though.
So, you shouldn’t write: “This incompetent moron thinks that Google is something you use to see in the swimming pool”. Not cool – and the basis for a libel lawsuit.
Diagnosis: Link Farm
Apr 12th
Ask what a link farm is on any forum or message board, and you’ll draw hundreds of comments doubting that you have the necessary intelligence to stay alive, if you don’t know such a basic fact! Actually, it isn’t always clear what sites would be considered link farms and which would not (and therefore which ones would kill your SEO rankings!), so we review the definition.
The link farm can be identified by its occupants!
The basics
Wikipedia defines a link farm as “any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group”.
How do you know if a site is a link farm?
One of the major clues is that they will ask for a link on your own site to theirs, in order to consider linking out to your site.
Another major clue will be their Pagerank. If the site has zero Pagerank (install the Google toolbar and you’ll see a site’s Pagerank in your browser), it is likely that Google considers them a link farm.
If the site has little content in relation to the number of links on its pages, that’s another big clue towards a diagnosis: link farm. If you can’t read 100 words without encountering ten or more links, Google probably considers it a link farm.
The links will be almost exclusively external (to other domains) if a site is a link farm.
And if you value your SEO dollar … stay away from them!