I wanted to talk about something which is perhaps quite controversial in this blog. Does the new business start up and small and medium enterprise actually need a website these days.

For a marketing company who provides websites as our core business, this is a controversial subject.

However, I felt it was time to review the case against a website to see if you could use some existing and new web based tools. This is what we see looking than the marketplace in the UK at the moment. Today it is possible for online businesses to win client enquiries and profitably sell their products by using eBay to present their products, or portals like the well regarded Craigslist.com to advertise services.

With eBay you can create a product entry, price it up along with a description, and present it to people to buy. With the newer Craigslist, the online version of classified ads, you can do something very similar. Or you could rely on e-mail marketing backed up by Pay Pal as a very simple way to get your product messages out there, and accept online orders. Closer to home, one of our clients in fact started their business selling disco equipment on eBay and were surprised about the success they had.

You might also consider advertising on specialist portals, i.e., you could be a small holiday home provider, advertising on vacation portals, such as www.stayinbeds.co.uk and have your customers contact you direct by phone or e-mail. You might be a head-hunter recruiter looking to looking to fill a position for a client. Craiglist’s job advertising could handle attracting enquiries for you, avoiding the need to investing in an employment website. And would there be a use even for a large organisation? Absolutely. Another valuable business objective could be served by using these alternative methods to market test something very quickly. A Website investment would be an unnecessary time constraint as well as a cash investment that would have to be justified. Blogs can also act as substitute websites. With the rising phenomenon called Web 2.0, featuring at it’s heart blogging and social-book marking, today’s blog can not only share your point of view, but also has links to take readers to place where they can buy a particular product that the blog might be discussing. In fact there are a number of examples of what is called A-List US bloggers who are making a good income through blog related sales.

So yes a controversial statement is particularly for a small or medium enterprise just starting out is that in some cases a website is no longer required. There are viable online facilities that a straightforward to use without you needing to spend too much time in understanding Web on how to make it work for you.

Self Help Corner

So should a business look to operate long-term without having a website? This is a much bigger question, something I’ll discuss in the next blog in the next couple of days. In the meantime, may I wish you a very good New Year and hope your business profits and targets all come true in 2007.

With Warm Regards

Chris Clark is an internet marketer who helps clients phones ring more frequently, increases email enquiries for their services, and makes on-line cash tills ring up more transactions. Catch Chris at chris.clark@clarkmarketing.co.uk, web www.clarkmarketing.co.uk.

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People often speak of learning as a lofty ideal empowering, energising and doing more. But often it’s the practical applications of the little and practical things that make the fastest and biggest impact to your business.

For example, did you know that simply by using the rules file feature in Outlook to route all the emails to your website’s ’enquiry@...’ address to a special Outlook folder marked ’Enquiries’ pretty much guarantees you will never miss a new lead in amongst all the daily email traffic.

Or that one strategically placed Capital Letter in a Google adword could double it’s pulling power and reduce it’s cost per click.

Measure the Practical Value of Learning this week. Listen out for a hint in an email or newsletter on a Monday, or a piece of mentors advice on Tuesday, and see if applying an idea from the combined learning could reward your business in some way by Friday. Happens every week for me.

Chris Clark

Chris Clark runs Clark Marketing Ltd, www.clarkmarketing.co.uk. We are an Internet Marketing Company that Makes Your Phones Ring More Often, Increase Emailed Enquiries to Your Business from Pre-qualified Visitors with Needs, and Increases Your E-commerce Website Revenues. And We Always Measure Your Results.

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The attempts used by the fraudsters are rife and they clearly made a big impact on the UK buying public. Banks and e-commerce sites have been working swiftly to unify standards to increase security.

On June 30th 2007, a new regulation, PCI Compliance, or, to give it a full name, The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, will come into force in the UK. It applies to ALL merchants who store, transmit, or process credit card transactions and requires them to conduct a security audit, normally in conjunction with a qualified independent vendor tool to ensure your website is secure. This takes the form of an annual on-site audit done by an Independent Qualified Security Assessor or an Internal Audit signed by a Company Officer.

There are 4 Merchant Levels, Level 1 having the highest number of Visa/Amex transactions per year, and requiring the highest security, and Level 4 having under 20.000 per year. Levels 1 thru 3 need to have quarterly scans carried out by an Independant Vendor, and this is recommended for Level 4.

However if any Level 2- 4 vendor suffers an attack and account data is compromised, they are then required to undergo quarterly security scans to Level 1.

What are the benefits of PCI Compliance?

Firstly, you may have an insecure website, which whilst it hasn’t been compromised, you can prevent hack attacks before they happen. Avoiding the considerable business disruption a hack attack might cause is highly desirable. You are able to display trust seals, or seals indicating your site has been independently assessed, which will have an impact on conversion rates.

But I have a WorldPay or PayPal payment Gateway?

Am I covered because I don’t store my clients’ credit card details on my website? Apparently not, you still hold customer information on your site, and that is sufficient to bring you within scope. However, there is no doubt at all that an external payment gateway presents the hacker with a much harder challenge, and today is to be highly recommended over web-based or offline verification systems.

How much does an independent audit cost?

The price ranges from an affordable $149 to $199+ per electronic audit, and are offered by companies such as ControlScan, The Logic Group, Ancoris and others. Some companies including ControlScan offers a free trial which may be useful.

So is PCI Compliance another burden or a sensible precaution for SMEs through to large companies? With data security breaches causing so much damage and a very determined group of hackers, the answer has to be a resounding ’Yes’.

For more information, resources, lists of Qualified Independent Security Assessors, and other information, visit the PCI Security Standards Council website.

Chris Clark

I've been playing with some tools on the web that measure in vanilla terms, very general trends for keyphrase searches looking back 24 months.  One of them, Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends, records the counts by region, and you can even add in up to 5 generic key phrases and compare all the trends. 

So if a Hypnotherapist wants to review how much time they should put into their future activities, they could use Google Trends to see if they might be more busy helping people quit smoking, learn about well-being, or lose weight. 

And that's not all.  Because Google Trends quite clearly shows that everyone is interested in losing weight and stop smoking on the run up to Christmas, and the interest continues into the new year before smoking drops away.

One point I am very unsure about, is that many key phrases show a steady year on year downward trend.  I don't understand this at all.

However, give Google Trends a try. Especially if you are a Hypnotherapist, a Well-being practioner, or a Gym, all looking to be full for December and January.

Chris Clark

Over the summer, the now infamous Google Quality Score Algorithm raised some advertisers' costs per click hugely, making previously successful campaigns for some become unviable loss makers, whilst for others, higher daily spends became the order of the day.

Whilst Google still maintain a business can buy clicks for as little as 30 pence, this is far from reality for the majority of UK companies. A recent Marketing Sharpe report illustrated that Google was now the most expensive of the Google/Yahoo/MSN PPC triumvirate.

However, the story does face both ways, because the new Google Quality Score algorithm was focussed on getting people to improve their websites and creative advertising to give browsers a better experience. As a result of this, expect to see improvements in the websites you visit in the near future.

So if after this Summer you are facing paying higher ad bills to Google, is there anything you can do?

Here's our 5 step formula that will help you get control of your spend.

1. Assess your website landing page. Is it really relevant to your campaign? Does it make its offer early on, or do visitors have to search high and low to find it?

2 Are your adverts interesting and relevant, with a good call to action?3. When is the last time you reviewed your Keyphrases, and their competitive landscape?

4. Is your website in good shape? Does your Contact Us page work correctly? Do you have your business’s Terms of Service, Privacy, and now a Spam policy on the site? If not, you risk a Quality Score penalty.5. Lastly, consider – if you rely on Google, why? Have you tried Yahoo PPC, or the new MSN Live Search PPC Service? Results will vary in effectiveness, but you will very likely find the click traffic you do get will be both relevant – and priced to keep Google on their toes.  Try these 5 approaches out, and I'm pretty sure you will see a change for the better from your online ad spend!

Chris Clark

The importance of this question has been a low level unresolved issue for at least 2 years.  Site designers said it makes no difference.  Web-users weren't really sure either way.  It was only with the onset of Google's more natural search related algorithms looking more closely at quality copy and clear language links that the question got thrown into sharp relief.

I have been working on understanding why a new client's database driven catalogue site was performing so badly in the Google rankings, and has now dropped out of site, when I discovered they had another database driven catalogue site that was fairing rather better.  Both of them were large sites using the '.jsp?' format, but clearly there was a big difference.

I checked both sites for search engine spidering, and found Google could only index 49 pages (10%) of the poorly performing site, but indexed most of the better performing site - 571 pages, (50%).  The difference, and you might have guessed this, was the position of the '?'.

The poorly performing site had the '?' close to the home page URL, with villa names after the '?'.  The better performing site had the villa names before the '?'.  Google couldn't fully index both sites, but the further away from the home page URL, the better the result.

I then ran site maps for the two sites.  The results were dramatic.  For the better performing site, the site map that the search engines would see was clear, logical, and well structured.  Villa names were cleanly presented, and 'availability, book now, were relegated to the bottom of the map.  On the low performance site, the villa names were mostly buried.

My conclusion was that the use of the '?' is wholly undesirable.

It is possible to re-write recent database driven sites to excude the '?' completely.  However,if your  website designers are not in-house it may take some persuasion.

Self Help Spot
If the use of the '?' in your site URL is causing poor indexing (this can quickly be shown), then approach your web-designer or in-house team, and ask then to modify the site to remove it.  Database sites without '?' will index correctly. 

If this can not be done, then it is normally possible to add in highly optimised stand alone .html pages within the website (not external doorway pages, these are seen as illegal), that will act as traffic magnets. These pages can then direct visitors to other parts of your website.  If however, even optimised pages isn't possible, then the only solution may be a new '?' free website.

Chris Clark

Google’s new Quality AdWords Score Algorithm that now assesses a site’s landing page ‘quality’ has continued to provoke reaction from the AdWords User Communities.  And reaction or not with Google’s market dominance and determination to drive out bad practices, for those dependant on AdWords for business, it is a wise advertiser that plays to the new rules.

Reviews on Google Quality Score are still coming in, but this is a Hints and Tips based on the latest industry forums.  It could change, and we can’t be responsible for this.  Thanks go to Jan Manzer for tabling a formidable series of emails and research on the subject, and to Chris and Goran of Keywords Analyzer fame for their widely read forum focussing on the changes.

The new algorithm affects your user profiles in three different ways.  What’s a User Profile? 

i)                    You own your own website and products.  In the main, opinion says you are not likely to be heavily affected.

ii)                  You are an Adsense Arbitrager.  This sector does look to be heavily challenged.

iii)                 You are an Affiliate Product Promoter.  The new rules will require you to do more work particularly on higher relevancy landing pages, and adding original content.

The advice varies slightly by profile.

1. Work tightly to Google’s recommendations using additional suggestions below.  Adopt White Hat practices at all times.  You can find them here at https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html

2. Bad Account History stays with the account.  If you have a long standing account that has been hit by the new algorithm and seen your cost per clicks multiply, the recommendation is that you look to find out where the problems are on your sites, correct them first, and then shut down your Google account and create a new one from scratch. Note, in extreme cases, consider also starting over with a new URL.

3. Google want advertisers to come up with interesting and creative adverts, that use keyphrases linked with the keyphrases in use on the landing page.  Reformat your adverts to make them attractive and re-submit. 

4. Don’t be tempted to have lots of keyphrases on each landing page.  Instead, stick to one to three relevant themes, and have your ads reference these.

5. Is your landing page visually and graphically effective.  The forums believe that Google’s software is now able to interprete a landing page as effectively as the human eye.

6. Do you use Squeeze Pages?  These are pages often associated with sales letter sites you may have visited as a result of clicking on a Google Adword, where you then have to leave a name and email address before you can download the item you were looking for.  Jan calls it the Highwayman Principle – Stand and Deliver.  Opinion considers that Google takes the view that the visitor should be able to get some useful information as a result of the visit. Then consider a real benefit to encourage the visitor to sign an opt-in form for further information.

7. Are you an Adsense Arbitrager, (i.e. you provide web pages full of AdSense ads)?  The new algorithm looks to have hit this sector very hard.  Opinion suggests that you would need to work very hard on theming  new landing pages with AdSense to avoid campaigns being penalised.

8. For Affiliates and Article Writers who may re-use merchant material, the algorithm is likely to mark you down for duplicate content.  We suggest you alter 10% - 15% of the copy before using on your site.  Also, in both cases – change the article appearance.  Different font, new paragraph breaks, all indicate it’s been worked on locally, are thought to increase your score.

9. Use external links carefully on your landing page.  There is a view that Google may interpret many external links as links to affiliate sponsors. There may be future advice about page design in this area.

So there you have it.  Relevancy of Ads and Landing Pages is the new strategy.  This has been a far reaching change, and Google is determined to improve user experience – and drive bad practices out of the industry. 

These 9 Steps may help you recover – or improve – your Google Campaigns and costs.   Any further information I get, I will forward.

Chris Clark

UK and US Sites selling CB (Citizen Band) products, Batteries, Adgroups targetting Web redirect pages, are all claiming to be seeing inactive keywords and 1,000% cost per click increases to reactivate.

I made the point in the last blog that surely it can't be bad news for everyone, and sure enough, looking at all the accounts we manage on one account there are a few inactive keywords, with reactivation still in the 20-30 pence arena.  We couldn't see other discernable effects.

Self Help Spot

So what should you do if you think you've fallen foul of the new algorithm?  Well, Google offers help and advice at their forum http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/07/landing-page-quality-update.html, and if you consider you have a case, they will promise to investigate.

We'll be collecting industry views and issuing a hints and tips blog within the next 7 days - so look out for it.

Chris Clark

All the postings are reporting an increase in inactive keyphrases and steep rises in cost per click rates.  However, whilst presumably this isn't all one way, early beneficiaries of the scheme, with landing pages receiving higher placings aren't talking about it.

There's an excellent article on the Google Adwords blog, with references to useful and related information.

I'd recommend keeping a close look on your cost per click rates and positions over the next few weeks.  If the changes are radical, then email Google AdWord Support and ask for advice.  It is common with major updates for a period of volatility then  reversion back to similar positions.

Watch this space...

Chris Clark