Interesting example of usage of blogs to support marketing activity of such company like Hewlett-Packard. Look at the HP Starring at Cannes - the big picture. Blog is supporting hp’s sponsorship support for Cannes festival. Blog is targeted at employees although some initial pages can be seen by general public.

Blog advertised hp involvement and creates positive spirited discussions around Cannes and hp role there. Interesting idea is to create competition on most active participation of employees in blog. This is good example of blog that even if created in such short term, tactical manner - can be good tool to create community and

I used to use my blog as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) playground. I’ve written successful post with review of expedia as flight booking website and optimized it to get high ranking. I kept working on optimization until the moment that I overdid it. I disappeared from Google ranking almost totally. You can read about my experiences in my previous post. In this post you can read about my come-back.

Disappearing from Google was really bad experience. I really felt the power of SEO this way… Suddenly - the traffic and interest in my blog dropped 80%. That was serious blow that was really demotivating. I almost stopped writing posts and running the blog.

I’ve tried also to find way to get back to high ranking on Google. This wasn’t easy thing. However mighty Google allows to do it even for the ones that has went the wrong way of overoptimizing. There is Google form  where you can say “I’m sorry”. You need to acknowledge that:

• Your site has violated Google’s quality guidelines in the past.
• Your site no longer violates Google’s quality guidelines.
• You have read and agree to abide by Google’s quality guidelines.

Then you have big entry form for your confession - what actions have led you to any penalties, and what corrective actions have been taken. And you have really lots of entry place for your confessions…. And only the righteous people can be reindexed. (Remember Ezekiel 25:17 quote from Pulp Fiction?).

Of course - you need to also correct the pages to remove overoptimization. This can be somehow tricky as you need to sometimes guess what made Google consider you as spammer of their index. The experience with 80% drop of traffic humbled me a lot so I’ve tried to remove all changes done recently and revert to previous version of the pages.

Then you have to prove you are owner of the site. You can do it by uploading file to the server or updating metadata on your homepage. Unfortunately I couldn’t do it on my wordpress account - wordpress doesn’t allow you to play with metadata and of course you cannot upload strangely named files to the servers.

So I was stuck at this point. With not much motivation for new posts that few people would see anyway. The good thing is that Google - after some time has reindexed my page and listed me again. I haven’t spoted exact timing of this but it looked like it was about 2-3 months.

Now it’s almost back to normal and traffic from Google is flowing into my site. It seems slightly lower than before the whole accident but the difference is not that big.

PS Is it only me or does this story indeed sounds like one from recovered alcoholic?

One of the ways I use my blog is to test various search optimization techniques. I’ve written successful post with review of expedia as flight booking website and optimized it to get high ranking. I got pretty high in some good keywords and was playing with it a bit. I’ve written two other posts about my experience there - you can see them here and here.

Encouraged by good results (I got ranked first before expedia for “flight booking website”) I continued optimization effort. And suddenly it all blew up - I disappeared from Google rank almost totally. I got detected by Google as spammer and de-listed.

If you are interested what made me there here is it - first read my google optimization updateon what worked for me right before I got delisted.

I haven’t stopped there and tried on. I’ve focused on “flight booking” to improve my ranking there. The way I wanted to do it was by introducing this term as “category” in wordpress. Benefit of such setup was huge - with this there was page created in WordPress listing all articles in category “flight booking”. Link from such great source as http://wordpress.com/tag/flight-booking/ is great boost for rank. That’s at least how it should be…

For me - that was last action - I disappeared then. What normally is big benefit was this time nail to my SEO coffin. Reasons for this:

• this link was from place not related to flight booking - potential hint that it’s spam
• I simply overdo this - keywords related to flight booking within article were very dense
• another possible theory (anyone can confirm?) is that google tracks history of my ranking - this constant improvement, especially via content changes and links from strange places over short time - this may be treated as warning sign by Google.

So - be careful with your optimization efforts. Don’t blew it! To end on more positive note - in next post I’ll write happy end of the story. I’m back in the ranking now. How I get back to SEO business for “flight booking website” - read soon.

We often see them when browsing the webpages. Usually more often that we would like to… 404 pages - page with more or less polite message explaining that page couldn’t be found. How should it look like, what should be its core elements. Here are some ideas and best practices.

First - such pages needs to very clearly state that page wasn’t found. You might be surprised to see that some popular website put this in fine print and make the page rather look like little site map. You can see such example on Microsoft site. Visitors need to be aware that this is not the page you were trying to find. Put this in big letters in header and in title of the page.

The page itself should be simple and clean. It should have only the most basic navigation elements.  Consider stripping your regular navigation from this page. The basic elements of the page should be:

• link to homepage of your site
• search box so people can search your site directly from this page
• link to sitemap (provided you have one)
• feedback to webmaster request - and make it sound like you really want to learn on what went wrong. Also - promise to follow up and actually do it!

You can also consider differentiating content of the page based on where visitor is coming from. You can easily check the referrer using JavaScript and then tailor the message to the specific situation. Here is what could happen:

• visitor can come from popular search engine that has old link - then it’s just matter of days that search engine reindex the page and error should soon be gone
• visitor can type in the url or bookmark it - than he/she needs to check the spelling and possible update the bookmark that is obsolete
• visitor can be coming from within your site via internal link - apologize very sincerely, promise improvement and follow up afterwards
• visitor can be coming via link from other external site - you should avoid finger-pointing but politely summarize what happened. If there are lots of such situation (you can see it in your metrics tool) - may be worth to follow up even outside…

When writing this I’ve doublechecked some of the most popular websites and was really surprised. First - not much of the best practices there. What’s more - many of the negative examples.

For some of them - e.g. youtube and blogger - I’ve noticed that there is not even custom 404 page there. Google has page that is very simple - it is very good in telling that page wasn’t found. However it also doesn’t have any single link that you could follow up - not even to Google homepage…

Clearly something that’s worth to address. Especially that 404 page is usually one of the top 20-50 most visited pages on every site. Sad but true! All comments are welcome!

When we hear term viral marketing we often picture another clip that is so funny that everybody passes it to each other. Provided it contains marketing message (brand logo) - it’s viral campaign. And it can be indeed very successful. I’m sure most of you have already seen Berlitz ad about German coastguard (What are you sinking about?).

The problem starts when you enter B2B space. Also - if you want to target higher in the ranks - these busy managers and executives are less and less likely to pass on fun emails. Is it then at all possible to reach them with viral campaign?

Here is my idea. How about sponsoring valuable white paper or industry analysis and survey? If you are webmarketing agency and you sponsor good and complete survey analysing online market in all European countries - I will be happy to get it and I will pass it on to my colleagues and co-workers. Benefits are big:

• you are sure you reach right target (provided you choose your study topic well)
• customers are more open for your message - they got it recommended from their trusted sources (co-workers and colleagues)
• well chosen topic of study can be call-to-action as well
• you establish your company as expert in field

If you have good white paper and analysis of European online market - status and trends - pass it to me. All your comments are also welcome.

Have you seen Chevy Tahoe viral campaign? It’s not very new but it’s perfect example to ilustrate one important aspect of viral marketing. Marketeers - protect yourself! Don’t trust your customers. It may not sound very good but is really must. Lets start with couple of words about Chevy campaign.

The idea was great. There was website with cool interface that allowed visitors to build ads for Chevy Tahoe. You had choice of nice scenes starring Chevy - it’s glamourous interiors, amazing features as well as muscular exterior - in beautiful landscapes, at seaside, in top mountains, in sunset and sundusk. Endless beauty! There was also rich choice of music to accompany these picturous scenes. All this could be combined with text of your choice to make another cool ad for cool car. What’s more - there was competition for nicest of such ads. The winner would see his ad shown on tv in prime time. Visitors could pass their creations to each other advertising the car and the campaign. Sounds like perfect way to promote good car. Right?

Wrong! Some customers used it to pass message on how crappy and polluting the car was. Combination of professional looking ads with beautiful landscapes and music with such negative messages created really fun ads. And then the viral effect really started - people passed to each other these funny and negative ads. You can see example of such ad here below:

I don’t know whether anyone was fired for this campaign but I’m sure it was very hard lesson for Chevy marketeers. Lets learn from this lesson to.

Bottomline is don’t trust customers. If you make campaign where people upload photos or movies so everyone else can see them. Make sure that someone looks at them prior to displaying on the site. If visitors can put text that they pass to the others - consider preparing choice of such texts instead of free form. All this may be discouraging for visitors so needs to ba balanced. But… Keep in mind Chevy Tahoe case.

Can viral marketing campaign boost sales? If I would need to provide simple yes or no answer than my answer would be no. The biggest problem with most of viral campaign is how to balance viral effect with expected business results. You need to make message so attractive to the user that she would decide to pass it on to her colleagues ad co-workers. Internet users are bombarded with messages - to stand out they need to be very strong, fresh, often shocking or extreme.

People are also more eager to pass to friends if they don’t see them as advertising message. The less-advertising like the message is - the better chance for viral effect. In the chase of optimizing the message to get strongest viral effect marketeers often loose sight of objective of campaign.

It’s not that difficult to achieve strong viral effect. Consider following message: “I will give $50 to every single person that will contact me by email. You can contact me yourself, you can tell your friend about this offer.” Provided that you trust that message is real - I bet you will take offer and pass it to many of your colleagues. Perfect viral campaign - right? It depends on what do I want to achieve - if give away all my money than yes.

It’s the most difficult in B-to-B world, especially when the target are managers and executives. Even if the message is attractive, it may create interest from people that are not your prospect customers. Then - the interest and traffic created by campaign will be of very low quality and will not boost sales in any way.

Good and quite rare example of balanced viral effect with effective embedded marketing message is campaign of LiveVault company. The Backup Trauma Institutecampaign that is starring John Cleese was discussed and presented often as marketing case study.

It’s done in Monty Python style that is often appealing to the target group of the LiveVault customers (IT managers, age 30-40). The movie which is core of the campaign is presenting in fun way the benefits of the LiveVault backup solutions. The marketing message and attractive movie is joined perfectly.

Even for this succesful campaign I bet that majority of the interest is coming from people that will never have interest in buying such solution (I know I’ll not buy myself). With this in mind it’s important to construct call to action right. Make sure that it’s appealing to the people that are your real target. It also needs to be easy to manage from your side for all the people that are not prospect customers. So - don’t ask everyone to call your call center as part of your campaign - you may have problems coping with load and customers that should call may not reach you.

More about other pitfalls of viral marketing coming soon. If you have good examples of viral campaigns - successful or unsuccessful ones that share similar traits - please share them. Your comments are very welcome.

There are lots of opportunities for banner targeting and I don’t plan to catalogue them. I want to share with you ideas that I’ve found very useful and is often overlooked. It’s targeting at specific customer. Especially if you are working in enterprise market where you have limited number of key customers that can be highly effective.

Typical enterprise customers are seen as coming from single domain or range of IP addresses. Both are easy to target within ad server. Now - put yourself into shoes of employee of corporation. You would be nicelly surprised seeing ad that features your company imaginery and message that speaks very directly to you.

It can be holiday greetings (for Chistmass or Hanuka) or highly targeted promotion or special offer. Imagine you are coming to your bank or flight booking engine seeing such tailored message and offer. It can also create viral effect as the employees can be passing “See this!” messages to each others. Especially if you make it light, fun and appealing.

Do you have your own examples? ideas? feedback? Comments are welcome!

I usually write about things I understand and know pretty well. I share my feedback and ideas. Here is something I’d like to get your opinions on. Do you know search engines well? Do you know Google well? Does the term - Search Engine Optimization ring a bell for you? Here is my situation…

I do blogging for some time now and am quite activelly posting, commenting and linking. When I’m commenting I put link back to my blog. Recently I wanted to check the pages that link back to my blog. As part of their blogroll but also all others. So I’ve turned to Google for it.

• The Google search returned 0 results. That was really strange. Especially that I know many of the links back as I got traffic from them - I see them within my referrers report.
• Google report was especially surprising as on Google’s own blog search I got some links back. Not too many but certailny they were missing from regular Google search. What does it mean? That blog links are not regular links?
• As a test I’ve searched also MSN and I got 75 results. The number sounded more reasonable but still I haven’t seen links which were coming from comments I’ve made…

Why do I care? Number of links pointing to my site makes difference when Google ranks my site in natural results. If Google sees many links - my site should show up higher in results.

Any ideas why this is happening? Why Google doesn’t see links that they even see in their own blog search? Why the links from blog comments are not recognized by search engines? All comments welcome!

Answer came from Matt Cutts blog - Google updates links and refreshes web all the time. However updates of PageRank and uploads of new links happen roughly every 3 months. See more on this in Matt Cutts post.

In one of last posts I’ve checked the prices on Google for buying keywords related to web-design and web-marketing. Back then I’ve looked also at the keywords related to web 2.0. To  my surprise I’ve found that there is hardly anyone interested in purchasing them.

Out of around 100+ related keywords proposed by Google there were only 3 that have any kind of interest from advertisers. They were: “web 2.0″, “mobile web 2.0″ and “web 2.0 conference”. Even then the interest was minimal. All the others were almost free to grab (for the lowest google price = 5c) as there was noone buying them.

It’s a bit surprising as the interest in web 2.0 shown by search traffic on google is increasing. It’s not exponential growth but steady growth is there. You can see this trend on the right - screenshot taken from Google Trends.

Still - clear advice for those of you who want to make living out of selling advertising on your bolgs is - stay out of web 2.0.

I invite you to read also my older post on buying keywords related to web-design and web-marketing. All comments and feedback are welcome!

You don’t need very sophisticated analysis to see whether your banners will fare well on certain site. A lot you can tell by taking good look at the site itself. Here is couple of things to consider:

• is the page loaded with graphic?
  If it is than you will have hard time getting noticed. Your banners will not stand out and will not be noticed. If google.com would serve banners - they would be very effective as there are hardly any graphic elements. On the other hand - www.msn.com is quite loaded which makes it easy to miss the banners
• how task oriented are site visitors
  Banners are most effective on the sites where people are not very focused. If you have website where people check stock market results - they are very likely to not pay attention to distracting signals. Same would likelly happen on the sites where people play online games. Better for spotting banners are portal where people are coming to check what’s new and interesting. In the middle are search engines - in some cases people want to find something quickly, in some others they are just exploring.
• are banners appearing right on first screen
  That one is quite obvious - people don’t often scroll down on the pages. If your banner is not visible within 1024×768 screen - it’s likely to be missed. Pick the sites where your banners will appear on first screen.
• is the subject of the site connected with topic of your ad
  That’s very basic rule of banner effectiveness - staying relevant. If you have site on weight loss than it’s good place for weight loss programs but maybe also also for exercising equipment. Google does it really well with content targeting.
• are banners separated from the content of the page
  If banners appear only outside of the text of the page and are part of the page frame they are easy to ignore. If this is the case your banners will net be very visible and noticed. Blending ads into the main content ensure that visitors see them as part of their browsing.
• does the page has lots of animations?
  animation is asking for attention and distracting from other page elements. Try showing your banner successfully on the following page. Again - on such pages your banner will not stand out enough to be noticed.
• usage of colors on the page
  If you show color banner on black and white page it will be very visible. The opposite is also true - if the page is very colorful than your banner will not be noticed. small idea - big monochrome banner can stand out on colorful site. In general - the sites that use little variety of color are better. It’s easier to prepare the banner that will be noticed.
• formats of banners
  Internet users are more and more banners immune. It means that they learn to ignore things that looks like banners. There are also software packages helping to avoid downloading and showing banners. Your non-standard banners should be more effective and website you are targeting needs to support it.

I hope that answering these questions will help you to decide whether to advertise on the site or not. All your comments are very welcome!

It’s been 5 years from Sep-11 and WTC attack. I remember the day very well. When I’ve learned about this I was in the office. It was really strange moment when news broke out. Normally I would say that the world should speed up in such case. But not here - it seemed like everything has stopped. People started to crowd in groups and tried to search for information on news websites. But all the Internet seemed to crash.

The websites were so overcrowded that you couldn’t see almost anything. When people tried to refresh and reloaded - little pieces of information were revealed - sometimes chapter of story, some title, shocking image. It only increased the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.

It was long and slow day - I couldn’t do anything but search for information and try to understand what happened. Despite the issues - Internet was clearly the best place to get news and start getting picture of the situation.

In the pictures that you see right in this post you can see screenshots of websites - BBC, CNN, New Your Times - that were so difficult to see access at that tough day. Click on them to see the full size screen. Thanks to www.archive.org and its wayback machine we can look back into that day - from perspective of main websites.

It’s out there already for some time but still worth to remind. I’m referring to Alexa which is offering rich choice of metrics and statistics of websites all around the world. You can use it to check traffic of your site as well.

Alexa is gathering data via special toolbar that people install on their machines that gathers data on their browsing behavior. This way Alexa has neutral way to see and compare traffic on sites worldwide. Due to nature of this method it’s not 100% bullet-proof. However for majority of sites with significant traffic it provides good estimation and ranking.

I was happy to see that Alexa provides some data on my blog traffic. It’s good sign of Alexa coverage of Internet browsing actually. You can see my traffic data here.

Starting with Alexa is easy - just type in the site you are interested in and click on “Get traffic details”. There is nice opportunity to include other site traffic on the same chart and compare. You can also browse categorization and see top ranking in each category. Check out most visited travel sites out there. I was very surprised to see how traffic is declining for all travel sites. I can imagine that Sep-11 tragedy has hit the travel industry. Interesting enough the decline is quite rapid this year as well…

Enjoy comparing and bencmarking! All comments and feedback is welcome! 

Have you ever asked yourself - how much money does search keyword in your business area cost? This cost is important if you sign up with AdSense to start earning money from your blog/website… Also if you want to purchase ads to lead people to your site… In these cases the cost of keyword determine how much you earn or spend.

Well - I’ve checked it for my area - web-design, web-marketing, business-blogs, search engine marketing related. Here are some results that might be interesting also for you.

Background - how it works
Google AdWords mechanics of selling keywords makes it difficult to get simple cost number. Majority of keywords can be bought for as low as couple of cents and at the same time for couple of dollars. When you order keyword you set maximum cost you want to pay per click. This cost is used to determine your ad rank (how high your ad will appear on the list of paid ads). You don’t pay the max cost but rather lowest possible cost to achieve this rank. Max cost is not the only factor to determine rank - also ad quality is used there (click through of your ad and quality of destination page).

Results
Here below are 10 keywords best matching subjects of blogs, search engine marketing, we design and web marketing. First table shows the list of prices that will allow you to get the top rank for the keyword. Paying this money will give you top spot:

Table below shows keyword and minimum pricing that should allow you to get into one of the top 3 position. This will not give you top traffic but at least decent one.

Keywords related to blogs are quite cheap (50c to get into top 3), followed by web design ($0.7 to $1.1 for top3) and web marketing ($1-$1.5). Most expensive is search engine marketing ($1.5).

The most expensive are keywords with specific geographical info - “florida web design”, “web design boston” or “oregon web design”.

Web 2.0 case
During the cheks I’ve also looked at popularity of keywords related to web 2.0. I got some surprises there - I invite you to my post on web 2.0 keywords.

You can play around with the keyword analytics checking it for your industry and space. Google has tool open for public that does just that. Google documentation for AdWords is pretty good and helps to start as well. All your comments welcome!

Now that you know how much keywords cost - you can check my post with calculation - How much money can you earn with Google AdSense?

We had some very hot days this summer and I’ve started to think about buying air conditioner for my house. What’s better place to search for suitable one than Internet. As I know almost nothing about air conditioner myself this was to me good way to check how company website can look like for someone that is not subject expert.

I’ve picked Samsung as company big enough to offer lots of products that also sells air conditioning machines. www.samsung.co.uk was my place of start.

The homepage is not too cluttered considering how broad the Samsung offer is. The link to “Products” is quite nicely visible. Product categorization seems quite natural and air conditioning is available as last item on list of “Home Appliances”.

Issues started when I click to the page on air conditioners. I’ve got 3 groups of conditioners - Home & Work, Built-In Air Conditioning, DVM Systems. I want to buy it for home but maybe “Built-In” ones are good as well. I guess I would need to check what they are built-in in. DVM ones sound sophisticated but have no clue what DVN means. I have possibility to choose specific model. However the choice is between names like SH12AWH, MH052MDEA and about 30+ similar meaningless one.

I try Home & Work and have bad surprise - “Page not Found”… Than I try built-in ones and luckily get the working page with list. You can see it here on the right - it even had photos. However - all photos looks exactly the same and names are again meaningless lists of digits and letters.

I miss here right categorization of products and names that mean something also to user who is not expert in field. I miss also “help me choose” kind of tool and/or advisor that starts with question - “what place do you want to air condition?” and then asking couple of simple question that helps to pick the right one. I’m guessing that these question could be about size of the room, is it system for whole house or just one room, do I sleep in this room, do I want to have heating as well…

I miss also comparison tool that would allow me to get side-by-side different models so I can check their differences when I start to understand my options better.

Enough of the wish list! I pick one of the model and go to the product page. There is no description. There is list of features - I attach it here on the left. Most of the features doesn’t mean a thing for me. The only one that I can understand is “Slim and lightweight design…”. Most important is capacity range but all it sais is “5,1 kW to 14 kW”. It doesn’t tell me whether it’s sufficient for my place or not.

None of the product pages tell me how loud the machine will be. Can I put it in my room where I sleep? It also doesn’t tell how much money can it cost to run the whole thing during hot summer. When features list is prepared - it needs to be around customer questions and needs.

Well - I failed in understanding Samsung product range or knowing what I do need. I’m not closer to the purchase that I’ve been. In this case - even if I would new the industry and understand these products better - Samsung website wouldn’t be helpful - difficult to compare and understand features, no pricing info for products. We could go on but I hope you get my idea here.

I encourage you to do similar exercises. Pick industry you don’t know. Start browsing the site of vendor and see how often you will find it unfriendly and unclear. When cursing it silently keep in mind your website and your market. That’s how many people feel on your site. Kinda reality check! Good luck!

Great communication with customers is online newsletter. You add it to your website… You make subscription form as visible as possible and as smooth as possible, you give bonuses and benefits for signing up. And then you relax counting how tons of people start signing up.

But are they actually reading your newsletter? The survey done by Marketing Sherpa with CNET tried to see what happens. For frequent newsletters customers start to get bored after about 60 days. Then they often stop reading you newsletter. The question was - what do they do then?

The bad news are:

• more than 10% will report your newsletter as spam to their spam filter. And they will do it even when they clearly opted in for it first place. Wach out for this as it can mean - especially in business environment that your newsletter can get picked up by company filters and you don’t only loose one individual customer but rather whole company
• 9% just ignores than - most likely becoming more and more irritated with your company. Also - you may have false stats of how many people receive and read your emails

There are also some good news luckily. They are:

• 34% of people still occasionally scan it quickly when time permits - for them if you do good content you can try to win them back
• more than 40% tries to go through your unsubscribe process - make sure your unsubscription is easy - otherwise you may get into anti-spam filters or get annoyed customers that curse you every time they need to remove another copy of your newsletter

You can see other good advices from Marketing Sherpa  in the executive summary and samples of this good report here or purchase the whole report in SherpaStore.

What do you do with unwanted newsletters? What is your response to these study? All your comments are welcome!

Today quick post on the website I’ve dropped by recently. It has very interesting and unusual design that feels fresh and clear. Great way to stand out in the crowd of advertising and interactive agencies. Everything there conveys clearly the message of being innovative and open-minded. The colors, the space, the navigation and visual structure…

The site is veery slow to load at first but it’s worth the wait so check it out.

To put also grain of salt there - the navigation is timeline oriented - great for extended “about us” and company history pages. However the page should clearly spell out the offer and call to action for visitors - making sure that all key visitors segments are properly addressed. The site is also very unfriendly to search engines and to the websites that would like to link to specific elements.

So - interesting fresh concept and approach to site navigation. Food for thoughts for everyone!

You like it? Dislike it? Want to share other interesting examples? All your comments are very welcome!

Couple of days ago I’ve given you story of my article with review of Expedia website called best online flight booking website. It scored very well with Google and ranked very high in couple of important keywords. I did some tests and optimizations of this post to achieve high ranking in Google and wrote post about my efforts. You can read my post on search engine optimization with Google.

Here I’d like to update you on my further SEO efforts on the article since then. Most important was to correct the keywords I’ve chosen for optimization. I’ve stoped mentioning flight booking “engine” and started calling it “website“. I’ve updated it consistently in title and copy of the post as well as the links that pointed to the post.

I’ve also reviewed text of the post to more consistently mention online flight booking through the post (don’t use shortcut but the full phrase instead). Some search engine optimization (SEO) experts claim that being too consistent can actually harm your ranking in Google as Google starts to suspect that page is too much SEO-oriented and too little valuable from content side. It’s called keyword stuffing and certainly Google tries to detect this. However for me all worked just fine.

Beeing with my blog on WordPress gives me quite advantage. One of the reasons for this is the tag directory pages on WordPress. They list the post and provide valuable links into my pages.

One of the often asked questions in your SEO efforts is - when will Google rescan my pages and when my changes will become visible. Everyone wants to see results of the changes ASAP. It depends heavily on the value of the site as perceived by Google. For valuable sites (and blogs in WordPress domains are seen as valuable) you get rescanned at least once per week. So wait patiently!

Result? - TaDaaaa! I’m #1 in “flight booking website“, I’m also within 1st page of “best flight booking“. Of course things even improve when you add “best” to the keywords. However all works fine even in shorter form. Don’t be surprised when you see other results on Google at this very moment - Internet is ever changing.

BTW - I start to get traffic on search engine optimization (SEO) related keywords also now - on my posts with story on how I got ranked on Google so nicely.

Interesting recent study from MarketingSherpa. 1900 marketing people from technology companies were surveyed in June 2006. One very interesting question that was asked was about effective methods of lead generation. And it wasn’t about sheer number of lead - it was stressing quality of leads.

It turned out that survey marketeers pointed to blogs as one of the top 5 ways to generate such high quality leads. It was especially popular for software vendors and ASPs. Other in top 5 included free trial demo (again for software), webcast/webinar, whitepaper and with lower scores - podcast.

Some surprises were also on the side of least effective methods - there were sweepstakes (where someone could win t-shirt or PDA) and viral marketing. These methods can be very good for creating even huge amount of leads. But these leads is often total crap.

You can see the executive summary and samples of the report here or purchase the whole report in SherpaStore.

There are some other very interesting ideas in this report so I’m sure I’ll revisit it in other posts as well.

Here is summary and directory of my series of postson business usage of blogs. They were written over couple of days and here is recap of the series:

• Chapter 1 - basic usage of blogs by companies
• Chapter 2 - should your company start blog, do’s and dont’s there
• Chapter 3 - adverblogs - what they are and when they can be used
• Chapter 4 - when blog can be used as core web activity of company - as company website.

Hope you find this primer on business usage of blog useful. All your comments and feedback are welcome!