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”.

Just because it’s old news doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. Traditionally Google’s has a history for being silent about SEO, and many experts were often left to theorise and test. Last year Google sent a pretty loud signal hitting the PageRanks of paid directories, a move Somewhat confirming basic white-hat SEO tactics.

In her post, Ohye espouses the virtues of naturally gained, editorial inbound links and directly denounces links that might appear not “merit based” or appear as “spammy”.

Ohye offered four bullet points on how to earn merit-based links, paraphrased below:

* Provide useful products or services.

* Be interesting. Be a teacher.

* Start a site-related blog, writing or video, research or entertainment.

* Participate in the community surrounding your industry-social media, blog comments, user reviews.

The message is quite clear: content, content, content, a little participation, and the links will come; but go and get those links.

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.

With such strong growth in this form of media advertising, opportunities exist for many businesses to investigate how they can better market their products and services. Most SME businesses have yet to fully embrace the use of this technology as part of their overall marketing strategy.

Many see Internet Marketing as simply running Google AdWords or AdSense campaigns. Some more pragmatic advertising agencies, marketing consultants and Internet Marketers are recognising the new opportunities with some well developed advertising campaigns and clever use of technology for developing online Ads. A great example of this type of work is being done by a Melbourne development company called Net Directions Services (/).

An aspect often overlooked is the effectiveness to be realised from not only direct response advertising bu also in brand advertising. In more traditional media such as print and television, brand advertising is quite often too expensive for many businesses but we are now seeing instances where smaller businesses are starting to use the Internet for such brand marketing.

It is my belief that we are about to see the next generation of online advertising delivered with the same sort of impact TV advertising very quickly had on everyone.

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

Research shows that only 40% of websites are indeed effective. My personal experience would put the figure MUCH lower. How do you measure effectiveness. As the owner of the website you can answer that question by asking yourself – To what extent does my website positively contribute to the way in which I conduct my business.

As to what constitutes a positive contribution and what you can do about that is another matter. Contribution is most often measured in terms of bottom line revenue, be it direct or indirect. You should measure this after all you have most likely put a heavy investment into your business website and unless you are in the practice of throwing money away I would suggest you conduct an audit of your website to clearly determine just how effective it really is.

In the mean time you may wish to consider the following points:

1. Treat your website with respect – You have spent a lot of money putting it together. You continue to spend money keeping it active. You pay far more for a salesperson who invariably is involved in activities that can be achieved through your website. Be smart, use your resources effectively and deliver better results your
2. The website is not the domain of your IT Manager of PA – This is a corporate tool and impacts every part of your business. Get your whole management team involved with decisions made about the look and feel, the functionality and the support. Be sure to involve the marketing people by the way!management
3. Document the processes – This is no different to any other aspect of your business. Every aspect of your site and its operation and support should be documented and managed to a plan. This is a valuable business asset. The review of its effectiveness should be conducted on a regular basis and in accordance with a documented plan. Be sure that your operational staff have an input to the design. Whilst web developers are good at creating terrific looking websites they are not business people and have little understanding of such so do not be lead by them in how your business should operate its website.your
4. Designing to meet the needs of those with disabilities – Whilst it may sound strange to expect blind people to read your website this is in fact a requirement under W3C standards and in fact a disabled person apparently took the Sydney 200 Olympic website to court because they could not read it as a visually impaired person and won their case. A few websites now have the ability to be read aloud as they comply with the W3C standards but I would venture to say this is a small minority.
5. Does your website address your entire market – How many websites seek an international audience yet are only delivered in English. In Australia we are particularly notorious for this and so of en such websites seek out our Asian partners as a key target market. Even matters as simple as providing phone numbers without international codes or giving out 1300 or 1800 numbers without the local number. We sometimes overlook the fact that terms in our own country are not understood overseas.
6. The last aspect to consider is the integrity of your code – Be sure that all program code is without error and that all links go to an actual page. Misusing links are one of the greatest downfalls in websites. A number of websites provide free testing tools to verify W3C compliance, missing links or poor page upload speeds.

Responsibility for an effective website belongs with you as the business owner. Engaging suitably experienced Web Architects can assist in delivering an effective design that will provide functionality that works with your business and an Internet marketing strategy that will promote your website responsibly.

A common issue with all the hype around social media is that most things that are popular on social media sites do not actually build credibility, and that you’re going to have minimal success building your brand if you start by concentrating on these broad 3rd party communities instead of YOUR TOPICAL COMMUNITY.
I can actually remember when there was no Digg. If you can make yourself comment-worthy many other people suddenly think you know what you are talking about and that you are trustworthy.

That perception of trust, audience, and personal-brand that someone else has spent years building can in some way be part transferred to you. Are you as well known as they are? Of course not, but while sites like Digg have an audience they tend to miss that perception of trust and personal-brand that channels customers to your site and converting them to sales.

Whenever  someone who has trust and a broad base of readership recommends you that creates immediate sales.  If you get featured on social media web sites it does not extend to many sales. Perhaps that exposure leads to awareness, which can further be heightened by writing about that community, buying banner ads from sites like Lead Back, or by writing other create subscription-desirable content, but broadly in article editorial, links from a trusted expert creates more sales than exposure on a nearly automated social news site.

If your site is new to the market and you need some exposure you have two options

• write a leading 10 step how-to guide on how-to polish widgets, or
• create things that people INSIDE YOUR COMMUNITY will find useful

One of those strategies will get you irrelevent interest , the other will make sales.

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.

The preliminary audit conducted examined only the home page for each of the sites and looked at the page from two perspectives:
a) The quality of site design by way of layout and compliance to good presentation standards for maintaining visitor interest
b) The degree to which the site was optimised around some base criteria being quality of the meta tags, effective use of keywords, site popularity in the search engine indexes.

By way of background to the businesses concerned, they all had been in business for several years at least and each of them, bar one, had a website that was more then 1 year old. The businesses were a mix of distribution, retailers and service based businesses with annual turnovers from in excess of $150K to $1M. All were for small to medium sized businesses privately owned.

The key observations that came out of the exercise were:

• Most offered little more than a “brochure” site that told you about the company, its products / services and the people. Very few actually articulated and achieved any real purpose by way of building business growth.
• Most failed to have any mechanism for capturing details of their visitors into some form of customer contacts database for later follow up.
• Listing of the websites in the leading business directories such as Google Maps, Yahoo or DMOZ was virtually non-existent.
• One site owner had spent almost my years salary on his website by an overseas developer only to realise that his whole site was written in Flash and can not be found in the search engines at all (He had no other sites in place to capture traffic to be redirected to his main site). This site also took almost 2 minutes to load the front banner page over broadband connection and to then find I had to click to load the next flash page.
• No site listed in the first 2 pages of Google for their key search phrases.
• Apart from one site all had very poor links to their home page form other sites and the links they did have were from pages with a PR score of 0.
• Only 1 site had implemented Google Analytics or any other traffic analytic tool for measuring traffic.
• 2 sites made no use of meta tags at all.
• Use of keywords was poor with most using the same keywords throughout their site. A couple of sites had long lists of keywords that were not referenced at all in the page.
• Most had content that was too long and failed to focus on the value proposition that the business offered to its market.
• No one proactively had any strategy for the optimisation or promotion of their website.

The above is as I said not an exhaustive list. It does however show that of the small sample (be it biased I know) businesses have not come to realise how important marketing of their website is to their business and the opportunity that exists for them should they so choose to take this up. To my own satisfaction one has already made the first step and a couple of others are still considering my proposal to correct their current situation.

What appears obvious from these results and anecdotal evidence I have seen is that most small to medium businesses have a website that they do little or nothing with by way of actively optimising it to gain high ranking on the search engines. This is in spite of the fact that they have invested considerably in the development of their site and the ongoing hosting and maintenance fees. Whatever results they achieve from search engine queries is more by luck than good planning.

For any business that seriously embraces their website as a core part of their overall marketing strategy is bound to improve on their position over their competition. With 93% of Australians using Google  regularly the importance of having a good website that delivers to business outcomes as well as marketing the business’ products becomes even stronger than ever.

And I am speaking from experience. Several years ago when I first went into business I did just that  (well not $5000 worth but it felt like it to me). Well here I am almost 4 years later, not only did the business change but I still had them in my cupboard until a few weeks ago. They achieved nothing.

So what has this got to do with websites? Well, quite simply most websites I have observed d little more than that by way of a positive outcome. The business owner created the website several years ago as something not much more than a glassy brochure or worse still they recently paid for their new website and apart from putting it up they have done nothing else.

Right up there with “The cheque is in the mail” sits the other great misconception. Once I have a website the business will come my way. Sorry folks but “that just ain’t gonna happen” !

People will not find you unless your website lends itself to being found by the search engines. And even once you are found unless the content is relevant, it is reputable and it is better positioned than your competitors, being in the index at position 372 is not worth the electricity is cost to see the result on Google.

Your website is as good as that box of brochures sitting in the car boot. Sure you hand out your business card with your web address on it and sometimes people will remember it or even better they have entered it into their customer relationship management system (CRM). Will they remember you 6 months later – probably not. So when they want to find a product that does what yours does they go to Google and guess who they find on page 1? Sorry it wasn’t you. Lost opportunity.

Your website needs to be an integral component of your business’ marketing strategy – you must proactively market your website, you need to work on optimising its content and reputation and when you measure the results you modify your techniques to improve it further otherwise your competitors will get the jump on you.

Anyhow the point of this article is not about killing a snakehead fish. I will leave that to other better qualified. The point I am wishing to illustrate is the importance of examining what is popular in search engines. Marketing yourself on the internet is not about what you think is popular it is all about reading where the market is itself.

Last week I attended an internet marketing workshop for 2 days and heard stories form from rather wealthy marketers who told the story of how they developed the products they sold. Quite simply the checked out Google and the other leading search engines to see what was attracting interest on the search engines then went out and found the product to match the market interest. I suppose its fairly straightforward – it is easier to sell to a market that is looking for what you have to offer rather than convincing that market it wants what you have.

There is another interesting lesson to be learnt here. Gaining higher rankings on the search engines is all about improving the ranking of your own pages. You do this through a number of initiatives of which the following are important:

• Having lots of links to your site from relevant websites
• Having lots of traffic to your site
• Having content to what is of current interest

Now how good is it if you write an article that is optimised on a currently “hot topic”? Firstly it will increase your traffic through the article which in itself improves the ranking of the site containing the article. If that site then points to your own domain then that in itself improves the ranking of your own site because a link in to your site is improving its own ranking. Now by itself it will probably make little difference but with a number of similarly written articles included on your site or in your blog you can do wonders for your own site rankings in the search engines.

You thought this article was all about how to kill a snakehead fish didn’t you? Well as you see I have said nothing about that but I do hope that you have learnt some other useful lessons in how to improve the search engine ranking for your website by building powerful back links.

Oh yeah – if you want to see the list click here

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.

So, to get back to my original point; we want to find “The Secret” of attracting traffic to your website. Well as with most secrets, it is badly kept and in fact it isn’t much of a secret at all, we simply fail to see what is before us.

We have our blinkers on and are so busy looking for the deep and meaningful explanation. It simply boils down to offering something that is of sufficient interest to a group of people that they then want to share this “new information” with others of a similar ilk who also knew nothing of this new information.

This is the principal of “viral marketing” as extolled by Seth Goddin in his book “The Purple Cow” (a must read for everyone – read my review here)

Some of the highest traffic sites for businesses attain such traffic not directly through their products or services but by simply including something on one of their web pages that is highly attractive or of interest to wider community. Many thousands of web sites use this to drive traffic to their sites with offers of free services but make their money from referral traffic. You probably won’t have anything as big as these types of sites but you can create something as simple as having a book available form your site.

So if you need traffic – just think of putting something on your site that is of “viral” interest.

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.

Reputation can be largely attributed to your Google page rank (PR) if this makes it easier for some to understand. The more traffic you have to your blog the higher the PT (do understand that PR incorporates other aspects which I will cover in a separate article).

For the purposes of keeping this explanation simple, you seek to get a higher PR for your blog. You can best achieve this by having increased traffic to your blog (thus increased traffic) or have your visitors link to it from their own web or blog pages. You will however need to ensure that you have articles of interest and RELEVANCE to your target audience.

A key aspect of having good links is that apart form getting them from sites with a good PR (4+) the links need to come form sites that are relevant to the site the link is pointing to. In fact the degree of relevance is extended by the following factors.

• The parent site must deal with the same or related subject matter as he site being pointed to (common optimized keywords is a good indicator)
• The words you see in the link anchor text are in fact found in the text of the page pointed to and preferably are found in the keywords of that page
• Distribute inbound links across various landing pages you have established for your site

As far as the content of your site is concerned, you need to ensure that it is seen as valued by your readers and that it is relevant to the subject in order that it will show up in the search engine results.

You see, the blog articles themselves are spidered by the search engines so by optimizing your content you will have your articles show up in the search results which of course will drive more traffic to your blog which will hopefully drive more traffic to your business’ website.

Are you starting to see the picture here? The business of building a strong presence on the web is about getting people to open pages on your domain or to follow links from other pages to your website. You need to make the subject matter interesting to your target audience and it needs to be relevant to their searches. In building higher traffic and having more reputable links you establish REPUTATION.