Inbound Link Advice from Google Staff writer

If you want links, Google says to make your site interesting

Google’s Maile Ohye presented at Google’s Link Week with a tutorial on inbound links. She talked about what SEO experts such as myself, have all been been saying for years and that is “Your content and inbound links are most important, and in that order”.

Online Ad Spend Shocks the Traditionalists

In a report by the Australian Financial Review on 11 August 2008, Neil Shoebridge talks about the surprising trends (to some anyhow) within the On-line Ad Marketing industry of Australia.

A report was compiled for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) by PricewaterhouseCoopers which showed the online Ad market jumped 28.7% to $797M for the first half of 2008. This sector may have slowed in growth overall this year but remains the fastest growing part of the $12B media Ad market (yes that is Billion in Australia alone).  In comparison, the free-to-air TV Ad market only increased by 0.7%. Many Ad executives had only predicted 15 to 20% increase for the 2008 calendar year. Some online executives see the future as being brighter with as much as 30% predicted increases.

Revealed – the online trends of Australia’s Top 50 Entrepreneurial Companies

Australia’s leading business electronic magazine SmartCompany analyses what set the different companies in its list of SMART50 entrepreneurial companies for 2008. It was found that not all companies were being so smart however it was found that the chasm between those who were being smart and making AUS$100 million in online revenue as opposed to those who were not being smart and making no revenue was getting wider.

It was discovered that 13 trends set these two groups apart. You can read the full article here

The short answer is in the following list

1. Become a thought leader
2. Go global
3. Get found on Google
4. Educate your stakeholders
5. Email marketing
6. Let the customers customise the offering
7. Create a sticky site & Information hub
8. Use design to stand out
9. Create a great customer experience
10. The online strategy is the business strategy
11. Go green
12. Build communities

You can read the full article here

Maintaining an Effective Optimised Web Site for Your Business

In order to attract and continue attracting the right sort of visitors to your web site you need to ensure that it is effective in its delivery of information and functionality. If there is no value to your VISITORS then they will not return and to have them return is what you want. You also need to ensure that they take some form of action that leads to business opportunities for you.

Social Media As Opposed to Shaping Thinkers

In most markets worth being in and with most sustainable business enterprise models, sales is not a single event, but a process. You firstly need to create awareness, then from that base, build trust, and only then finally make the sale. Do all 3 happen at one time for some people? Sure, but probably not for the bulk of customers.

The more interesting points to come out of 10 Site Audits

A number of business owners sought assistance in determining just how well designed their websites really were and why they failed to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Though not an exhaustive list this does show up the more common shortcoming in many of the sites reviewed and are common problems with many websites.

How Effective is a Box of Brochures Sitting in Your Car Boot ?

I don’t know about you but if I went out and spent $5000 plus on printing up several thousand quality promotion or product information brochures that I then placed in the boot or back seat of my car to be handed out to people a few at a time when I called in on them or met them at some networking function then I would say that I had made a big mistake.

How do you kill a snakehead fish

Well if you are like me, you just had to find out more – After all who ever heard of a snakehead fish. Well it would seem that for the month of February, “How do you kill a snakehead fish” is the 8th highest relative increase in search engine enquiries for the 4 week period to 23rd February 2008. Who cares? Maybe not you or but do not let this diminish the significance of the enquiry. There are some 15,300 (soon to increase to 15,302) entries in Google’s search engine index that reference this very subject and from what I have seen these fish make a piranha look like a goldfish !

Creating traffic to your website – The Secret

There is only one reason you get traffic to your website (excluding SPAM based initiatives as we do not use or support any black-hat techniques). It is not about functionality, it’s not about good graphics or design. These are important but are all after the fact aspects as they do not come into play until a visitor has already landed at your page.

You might only do minimal market research and analysis and you might even have started form the point of pushing a new idea or product that no one knows anything about.

In a paper presented by sociologist Mark Granovetter in 1973, “The Strength of Weak Ties”, he postulated that when it comes to new things it was not so much the people you knew that best promoted these things it was those you didn’t know who were most important. To explain this very simply, those we know are a close-knit circle of groups and all the information known by these groups as a whole is known by those in the groups. To find new information or to spread such information we need to go to new groups.

Writing Effective Blog Articles

Your blog primarily exists as the vehicle for sharing of information in relation to some particular subject matter. For instance this article exists to share my own views on how businesses can create more effective websites through proper design of those websites around the business and marketing plans as a holistic approach to defining the total business solution. I may choose to publish it directly within my website or as an article in any one of my blog sites.

You write an article and then seek comments from the wider market. You may even open your blog to allow contributions from others so that they too can share their articles (which I have chosen not to do with this blog). Most blog owners will manage the content contributed by others by way of editorial review (strongly suggested that you not do otherwise).

In itself a blog that contains text will do little other than give you a sense of personal satisfaction that comes from writing an article for public scrutiny. What you really want to achieve is to include links from within your blog to your other web site pages. The technicalities of achieving this will vary to some degree subject to where you maintain your blog site.

The name of the game for internet marketing is to establish links from reputable and relevant websites (this includes Blogs) to your own web pages. Yu will note the two keywords, REPUTABLE and RELEVANT.