Posts tagged internet
Taking Over the World: Setting up Your Site for Effective International SEO
Feb 18th
The Internet is the great equaliser, allowing small businesses to compete with large, and everybody to put forth their own opinions. While there are some advantages to being a big fish in the WWW pond, there are also some tricky issues to contend with. The first of these is hosting and targeting for international websites – today we explore some SEO based recommendations for businesses that are trying to take over the world! More >
5 Website Essentials for Most Effective SEO
Nov 10th
SEO is an essential tool for the success of your website (unless you’re Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg!). Yet while SEO ‘gets them there’, your website has to ‘keep them there’. If your ultimate goal in undertaking an SEO strategy is to make more money for your business, make sure that your site has these five essentials in place while you’re undertaking your SEO campaign! More >
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!
Why Does the Internet Suck?
Mar 18th
Ha haa! We hear so much about the benefits of the web, SEO and internet marketing… its power to make money, to connect people with other people and with products, to give us more decision-making power and information … etc etc etc. People never stop extolling the virtues of the internet. Today I’m going to tell you why the internet completely, absolutely, sucks! And then, most likely, kiss and make up with it – “Let’s stop the fussin’ and the feudin’!”.
The internet is not impressed at our assessment
1. It’s a black hole for time
We all know exactly how much time the internet can waste. Entire weeks of your life are at stake. Information is fascinating … but not always useful in a broad context.
2. We depend on it … but it isn’t always dependable
Your connection to the internet arises out of a complex array of different factors. Your computer, software, hardware, the phone line, your ISP all collaborate to get you online. If one link breaks … all hell breaks loose!
3. It creates angry, mean people
This phenomenon, I’m sure, arises out of the same mechanism that makes us instantly angrier every time we get behind the tonne or so of metal, glass and plastic that is our car. When there is a keyboard, a screen, and in many cases entire continents between us and other people, human consideration is greatly lessened. Unfortunately.
4. You can’t always trust it
If I had a dollar for every time a Nigerian princess had contacted me, for every time a company had claimed to be able to either enlarge or shrink various parts of my body, and every time I had been told I could make over $40 per hour working at home, I would be a rich, rich lady.
5. Sometimes, we don’t need all that information
One very real effect of the internet on our collective psyche is the way it dispenses us to worry. We now the intimate details of people killed in natural disasters across the world, about exactly how many kidnappings occur every minute, and how often someone is diagnosed with cancer. But SHOULD we?
6. It’s permanent
If you’ve ever bookmarked an awesome link and gone back to find it a week later, only to be informed that the site hasn’t paid their hosting fees, you may dispute this point. But a very real fact is that if you have posted it on the internet, even if it has since been deleted, it may still exist in some form in somebody else’s internet history – or at least, the Google cache.
Our relationship with the internet is definitely more love than frustration … it’s like a marriage. It takes work to have a happy life together, but you know that leaving is not an option!