SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SEO COMPANY

So your business has just installed a blog onto its website and you aren’t exactly the world’s best writer. Yet you know how important it is for you to regularly update your website in one way or another. So you spend an afternoon trawling through the Internet looking at your competitor’s blogs, your family blog, possibly even your friend’s Facebook updates - only to realise that you are still out of ideas.

Well have no fear anymore. What I am going to propose for topics and ideas to blog about here isn’t exactly rocket science or the secret of getting hundreds of extra visitors per month. Rather, it is meant to give you a framework of what can be posted that is both useful and potentially interesting to your readers and clients. By being just a little more transparent on the blog about the organisation, you are allowing people to become involved and hence feel a part of what is going on.

1. Introduce new staff members - A great way for people to get to know those who they are dealing with is to announce them online. Now obviously not everyone will be outgoing enough to have their picture and a few bits and pieces about themselves online for all to see. However, even just by letting people know there is a new member of the team (use first name only if you must) and explain the role they will take - you might even find people are coming in and specifically asking for that individual.
2. New product announcement - The first thing you do whenever you launch a product should be to broadcast it online. It is by far the cheapest and easiest way to get the word out. Instead of issuing a press release or distributing it in other ways - the blog leaves all those other methods out to dry in terms of exposure.
3. Share client successes - In your business dealings you will come across many that will truly appreciate the product or service you are offering. It is those stories that can go on the blog and be shared with everyone. These testimonials can build trust in your organisation and the brand, encouraging even new businesses or customers to try your offerings. Trust and new business go hand in hand.
4. Charity & Other Events - For one reason or another, many organisations are afraid to mention what they get up to besides their core product. If your organisation has helped some specific charities or participated in some relief assistance (such as Haiti currently) - that is something your company should be proud of. It is ok to show that you care about the community and the world around you, and people respect those organisations that give back. Even if you participate in community initiatives or join in local festivals or shows - take photos, videos, even Tweet from specific events if need be to prove how active you are. Even if you are attending a trade show or seminar to help you improve, that shows that your organisation is growing and is concerned with bettering itself and its employees.
5. Commenting and giving your opinion on events that affect your organisation or clients - This is another option that is constantly overlooked. For example, if there is some form of new legislation that will be or has been past, where are your clients (even the employees) going to find out? Sure they could go look at some government site in a badly formed PDF - but wouldn’t you rather they came and got their news from your website? I know I would. By being on the cutting edge as well, it makes you an authority for a particular industry or skill set. E-Web on our blog does this by always commenting on what is happening in the search space and how it will affect Australian businesses, big and small.

So I guess the next stop after this is getting out your notepad (unfortunately no iPad as yet) and start brainstorming ideas from this. Then you can go crazy and make sure your website is doing the job you want it too.

Just when you thought there could be no more social networks left to invent, Google joins the social network party again. The reason is they say again is that roughly the same time last year, they made an announcement about a little project that was to become Google Wave
Then there was Google SideWiki which was another social functionality provided by the search giant.

So my question is where does Google Buzz fit into the equation? And the answer I have come to is that I am not too sure.

When Google Wave was announced, I had many of my non-tech friends come up to me and ask plenty of questions about the news. They wanted to know whether or not they needed Facebook, Skype, et al anymore because Google was going to promote this fantastic collaboration tool for both business and pleasure.

Last night however, not one of those people was asking me about Google Buzz.

Now I am not saying it is a guaranteed fail on Google’s part – it’s not really comparing apples with apples. But one of my associates on Twitter (@DDsD) made a very good point:

@BenTortora Not entirely,Google Buzz is like a non-real-time wave.. but that’s what people are used to, wave is too complicated for most.

And I completely agree with that statement. That is the exact spot where the application needs to sit. However, many people are active on one of the following networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Foursquare

And from our research and questioning of social network users, not many want another aggregator or somewhere else to connect with people. With Facebook and MySpace about to launch full-blown email services, taking with them their massive existing user base – it seems Google is on the defensive trying to make their email client social.

Another reason why I am not completely sold on the service is the same reason why those aggregators never really perform as well as the networks independently – people are connecting with different groups of people on different networks. I know myself personally, I do not add anyone I have not met face-to-face on my Facebook; I don’t have any personal connections – only business – on LinkedIn; on Twitter I connect and share with both friends, strangers, industry leaders and bloggers that I follow. Aggregating all those different status updates and links would add more noise to those networks - the last thing any user wants from a service.

I guess it all boils down to the fact that I am not really a power user of Gmail to begin with, and the announcement hasn’t really swayed me to become one. And if Google wants it to be Wave for the masses, they are going to need to bump their awareness campaign past forcing people to check it out when they sign into their Gmail.

It’s a simple question to ask, but one very few organisations have a clear answer when I ask. The reason I ask this is because of the way web pages are designed. They are designed as pages - not as an entire website.

Most of us when asked to plan the website would first think of what pages need to be included (a homepage, about us, services/products, and contact us is the default). And so you sit down with a designer and a programmer and work out how to build each individual page, and when we mention “page” you probably mean customising templates for each section.

And I am not saying that is not the right way to build a website - in fact, I think it’s a very important aspect that needs to be thought about. However, where you are missing out in that methodology is the fact that you haven’t really given much thought to the user experience.

User’s come to websites to complete an action, not to look at pages.

So when you go to do next revision of your website, or if you are starting one from scratch, rather than design pages, plan on how people should use your website.

Ask questions such as:

• How will we announce to people the special offer our business has each month?
• Where will new visitors/potential clients go to find out about us and what we are about?
  • Then - where do they go after that?
• How can someone make an enquiry?
• How can they find us on social networks? Do we even want that?
• What is the steps I would like them to follow to make a purchase? Where should they go to make it easy to use as well as informative?
• What should I blog about to encourage people to regularly visit the website?
• How will I monitor and track the performance and determine what needs to be changed next?

By stepping into that frame of mind and then have a discussion with your team, you will end up with a much better result.

What Inspired This Post?

Earlier today I was looking to have a discussion and make an appointment with a bank manager about a particular situation. I will not name any particular banks, but there were a couple where it was extremely difficult to find the local number of the branch, whether or not that branch offered the particular service, and whether I could actually make an appointment rather than spend time speaking to a call centre or wait in a line.

Many of the websites were pretty, informative, but severely lacked the ability to give me any direction. I think I’m pretty good at navigating around websites, and yet the simple process of locating the phone number for the local branch proved extremely difficult.

So please consider the experience of your website’s users. Test it on family and your friends (especially your Mum or Grandma) and then make sure they are having an enjoyable and useful experience.

With the big news last week being Google’s announcement to the world their Chromium OS will be ready next year, we are expecting cloud computing to become a major force and the mainstay of the netbook market. It’s impressive to see that Dell’s team recognise the shift in the modern use of the laptop and have already jumped on board and released a customised version of Chromium to work on their Dell Mini 9 netbooks.

Whilst not an official product, and to be able to get it up and running requires a little bit of skills in the Linux platform, it can be downloaded from their website and you can go ahead and replace Windows for Google.

Whilst there are clear benefits of moving everything to the cloud (and we do mean everything), my paranoina gets the better of me. I like my photos/videos and music on my own device (I don’t even keep the good ones on social networks) and I don’t see me migrating all of that across. And with the primary use of mobile computing to check email, chat with friends and get alerts (news, sport, weather, etc) there is no need to dump everything into the cloud.

Either way, businesses should be getting ready because cloud computing is about to explode in Australia with announcements like this. And if the price is right, the platform is stable and reliable and comes backed by a good advertising campaign - your organisation needs to be ready to adapt.

Do your customers have an online portal they can access? Do you have a good response rate on your emails? Can your company be reached on social media? I strongly believe in the next few years those customer services wont be value-adds, but essentials in order to attract new business.

Are you ready?

If you could sum up the latest and greatest buzzword/bandwagon for 2009 (yes, the year is almost over), it would be the whole social web movement. It is the year where Australia really began to take notice of it and ask what it is all about. Everyone was asking everyone for advice, how to setup the accounts, and more importantly, how they could justify wasting time on Facebook/YouTube/et al and still get paid for it.

As is the way with all these movements though, all the snakes came out of the grass offering social media campaigns that generate a whole bunch of talk, crazy promises and empty wallets. By the time the clients realised that their money disappeared with no return, it was too late - they already had lost faith in social media.

That’s why Olivier Blanchard’s slides are so great about social media. In a fantastic display of biting humor and wit, he calls out all those that launch into a campaign without really stopping and thinking about what is going on. We salute the fact that he has taken the time to make those in charge responsible and being able to restore marketing department’s faith in social media.

So sit back and flick through one of the best presentations on the topic this year.

It is amazing how often URLs are overlooked as part of the web design process. It is probably one of the most important aspects of a website as it’s sole purpose is to match a page on the Internet to a location. You would be amazed at how many development meetings I have been in where they have not even been discussed.

So what I propose with this series of posts is to outline the role of the URL, how they are constructed, and what happens when they change.

The Role of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

If you think of your own house for a moment and how important your address is (number, street, suburb, etc) for people to be able to locate your home, you can begin to grasp why it should be a part of every website development discussion.

Would you ever receive a piece of mail, or a visitor, if your house did not have an address? Think about how frustrating it is when you have taken down an address incorrectly, realizing only when it is too late. Or have you been in a situation where in a particular street, many of the houses may look the same – how do you locate the one particular to your situation?

All those above examples outline that there should be a clear address for your home on the Internet. Wisely, those that were a part of developing the Internet recognized the fact that we as humans remember names and words much better than a string of numbers, so they created URLs (Uniform Resource Locator/s).

What this enabled them to do is mask the true identify of the server computer (identified uniquely by an IP Address – a topic for a separate discussion) with a string of words. So in our case the IP address of E-Web Marketing is something like 122.200.85.129, but that is not what you type into your browser – you type www.ewebmarketing.com.au to find our website. How nice!

Can you imagine the confusion then, if your website has 2 different address that lead to the same location? Imagine if everytime you invited your friends to your home, you gave them 3 or 4 addresses, each with a different name. How would they ever find your house?

The same thing is true with URLs. There should only be one address to one particular page – it really is that plain and simple. So many fall into the trap of having multiple URLs for one particular page, and we as humans can fumble our way through and piece together the fact that we have arrived at the destination that we wanted to be at. But the search engines have a different issue. They follow addresses, and when they find 3 or 4 addresses all leading to the same page, how does it decide which one to choose? That is a very interesting and important question, and many SEOs have their own ideas and opinions.

I personally like to make it as easy as possible for the bots, and have implemented code and redirects to make sure that they know exactly what address they should be using.

What can you do to make sure your website has the same?

Speak to your web development or online marketing firm to implement the following:

• 301 redirects - when relocating old pages and capturing external links so they never 404.
• Canonical tags on key pages
• A standard across the whole website regarding the format of internal linking.

Your visitors and search engines will thank you. I promise.

Next week, we will look at the actual construction of the URLs and how we can change it to help the search engines and your users.

Microsoft have been in talks for a little while now with the purpose of offloading digital ad agency Razorfish as reported by the Wall Street Journal. The real aim of this process though is to secure a lucrative ad deal that would mean that people that anyone that runs campaigns with Razorfish would allocate a percentage of the budget to the Microsoft platform - gaming, search, and publisher websites.

Which makes perfect sense. Since Razorfish was just thrown in with the other acquisitions previously by Microsoft, logic demands that they sell off the asset, but capture the potential revenue and partnerships that will allow it to grow and develop its own systems.

Regarding the issues dealing with bias towards spends on campaigns and networks, it doesn’t seem to be a major issue. Spending a percentage of the budget with Microsoft isn’t necessarily a bad move, especially now that the company has really began to start making waves in the online arena.

Until the sale is actually made, we can watch and wait as the plot thickens and what kind of deal is finally decided upon.

It does not matter if you are a small, medium, large or multinational organisation. The days of calling social media a fad or something your kids are wasting their time on rather than doing their homework are over. In fact I would go as far to say it is just plain bad management of the external factors that affect your business.

I am also not suggesting you post photos or homemade videos of yourself at your brother’s 20 wedding anniversary on the company blog. Or using it to vent about being mistreated by a particular organisation. I am saying that your product or your brand should be represented accordingly - the way you want it to be. Otherwise you could end up in the same kind of hotwater as United Airlines. After a musician watched his prized guitar get damaged without any compensation, he used his talent, his skills, and online social network to generate amazing buzz and turn a whole demographic against a large organisation.

This is much more than as well some “stick it to the man” student rally either. It was an extremely well crafted campaign that was flawless in its execution.

So What Should My Company Be Doing?

Your company should be monitoring what people are saying online. Right Now. 

It’s not hard to do either. Here are a few tips:

• You can set up Google Alerts under your Google account to send you an email everytime a particular name, phrase or keyword that is important to you is indexed. 
• You should have a Twitter account, even if the only purpose it serves is to interact whenever someone mentions your brand. 
• You should keep track of any product imitators or thieves on YouTube and other image/video networks.
• Visit the major blog search engines that cover the leaders in particular niches, as well as the up-and-comer follower blogs.

Why do you use search engines? I know myself I use them for many things, but for the vast majority they are great for research. If I was looking for a review of a movie or latest news or information, I already have a bank of my favourite websites that I monitor via RSS feeds. But when I need something new or have to research a topic, there is nothing like search.

Today Techcrunch reported that Yahoo is launching SearchPad - it’s version of Google’s Notebook. Now I myself have never used either product before, but Yahoo has given me some reasons why.

How it works is by determining the refinement of your repeated search queries. From that it can recognise that you are researching and prompt you to leave notes in your SearchPad. The usual features you expect are there such as reordering, cutting and pasting snippets and email sharing.

Whilst those basic features are both useful and simple to use, they are very basic. I would have been expecting something a little bit more Web 2.0 (*shuddering whilst typing that term). I guess it would be nice to see some delicious integration for my favourite links to share on my network there. Or how about team researching with other uses adding as they find relevant articles - think of a group of you and your friends planning a holiday. Heck, why not throw Twitter in there as well like everyone else is.

I really applaud Yahoo for what they have done and are doing in search, but I think with the upcoming Google Wave, this will soon be forgotten.

Do you know who is visiting your website? It’s a very important question for webmasters and online businesses to know the answer to because it translates into revenue for the organisation. 

However, it is even more important to know the answer when you are buying ads for your clients. Would you like to ensure that your ads only displaying to relevant market? Would you like to decrease your CPM by a significant amount?

Behavourial Targeting is the answer to your questions.

For those that do not know, Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual. Practitioners believe this helps them deliver their online advertisements to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them. - Source: Wiki

What does this mean in terms of dollars and sense? According to Business Week

Marketers can use these tools to reduce online ad costs dramatically. Say your company sells “Bidgets,” a luxury product. Ordinarily you’d run banner ads on FancyOldSite.com, which reaches your target audience of men and women who earn more than $150,000 a year. The ads are expensive—say $60 per thousand impressions—but they reach your ideal audience.

You might instead embed a snippet of code in the banners that run on FancyOldSite.com. This places so-called cookies on the computers of everyone who sees the ad so you can track them when they visit other Web sites. That’s where retargeting kicks in. Every time a former FancyOldSite.com reader who saw your ad visits other Web sites, your Bidget banner ads pop up again. The banner ads reappear because the cookie on that computer flags a retargeting “network” of thousands of sites, saying “This desirable reader is back.” These new ads are cheap—$3 CPM—but they reach exactly the same audience.

So should you be investing in this kind of technology if you are running banner campaigns? Definitely! Not only does this reduce your costs, but at the end of the day, you are sending qualified traffic to your website or online business, which a much higher chance of converting. The only downside of this method are the paranoid web surfers out there that delete or disable cookies all together, because if they do this, the data wont be tracking correctly. Fortunately for advertisers and ad buyers, this practice isn’t mainstream as yet.

How difficult is it to setup? There are many providers out there that provide this kind of service but the key point you want to look for is integration with your CRM system that allows you to see what your clientele are doing on your website as well. Basically, we want to know everything about everyone. Is that too much to ask?

The best news? The price is slowly becoming right for SMEs and not just the big boys. So jump on board!