Andy Atkins-Krüger covers this topic in his article “My Dream International Content Management System”. I’m going to talk a little bit about these three topics in his article:

- World character sets,
- Managing content across local domains, and
- Translation and SEO workflow.

When it comes to world character sets, remember that there are a wide variety of characters and accents not used in the English language. Instead of getting a translation that gives a question mark or a box in the middle of a word – which is at the very least distracting and also has the potential to cause huge problems with your clients’ ability to understand your content – you want your content to be seamless, no matter what language you are using. Atkins-Krüger recommends using unicode or UTF8 for your online character coding. If you start with this standard, there will be no need to backfit or work out other solutions in the future.

With international expansion comes the issue of managing your content across local domains. Sometimes your company will be able to do this from one main location, but in that case, your resources will need to be shared from site to site. The key to success according to Atkins-Krüger is that “You also want to be able to manage the internal linking of the sites from that single interface and to manage the geo-selection tool which links one domain to all others on one single URL linked to from all pages.”

Of the three topics related to international CMS that we are talking about today, translation and SEO workflow can be the most difficult to navigate. In some cases, your company may need to rethink your online organizational strategy when going into different markets. “The best way to do this is to link it to a keyword map of all pages, so you know what needs to be targeted where and to link those keywords to glossaries to be used by the translators that support your SEO initiatives.” according to Atkins-Krüger’s article. It’s most important to note though that making web pages accessible for clients in other languages does not start and end with translation. Content may need to be different for a new market and your keywords may need to be refined, which can result in a slightly different SEO strategy.

International expansion can be a big project for your company, but if you incorporate some of these ideas into your original content management system, your company can come out ahead of the game when the time comes.

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It’s really not been that long since we’ve been able to buy things online. And less time since social media became a huge consideration. A few years ago, the question was not if you had a website, but how big and splashy was your business website. And yet, changes are happening again, because people like Chris Crum are asking if a business does indeed need a website in his article “Is it Becoming Less Critical For Businesses to Have Websites?”.

Before you start letting your brain go into a tailspin over whether or not your business ought to have a website, know that Chris is not saying you shouldn’t have a website. In fact, he claims “having a site gives you a more stable foundation, and still creates more opportunities than if you didn’t have one. When you have a site, you have control.” He also says, “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have a site, or even that you don’t need one, but I think it’s an interesting discussion.”

Like Chris, I think that it is interesting to discuss how other opportunities online may make a website a little less critical – and thus opening up the possibility for including changes in the internet landscape into your business plan – and other options a little more feasible for building your business. Here are the two main ideas from his article:

- Facebook: Are you surprised? Facebook is a great way to increase your web presence. Some data shows that Facebook can be a bigger traffic source than Google, and Facebook does not demand that you have your own website. Plus, often Facebook pages are found on search engines and rank in the top results. Facebook may be a great place to start gathering a web presence or to enhance your company’s current presence.
- Google’s Place Pages: lists local business results at the top of a search page, making it a great place for your clients to find your business. With increasing functionality for mobility devices, making sure your business is listed in Place Pages is a good bet.

Although you could provide a web presence for your business through these methods and others, without having your own website, the key point to note is that these methods are changing the way we look for information. Clients may not find you just by finding your website, so including the other potential electronic avenues in your business plan is a wise choice for savvy businesses.

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It’s true that when most of us search for something online, be it through Google, Yahoo or Bing, we’ll investigate the top few search results, start our search over again with new keywords, and abandon it from there. Since becoming involved in SEO, I admit I have become the rare person who will look onto page two or three if it is something I am interested in and the search results of the first page don’t satisfy me. And I am persistent, so I will try different keywords repeatedly. However, I am the minority.
The race for top internet rankings is a fierce one, and one that garners a lot of attention in SEO circles. Many different theories have been tested. Some of them get short term results, which may last or not. Some get long term results. Still others get no discernable results. With that in mind, might I suggest going back to the tried and true with organic search. If it works (and it does), then perhaps it is wise to use the simplest and most reliable methods to ensure your company is on the top of your client’s search results.

An article by the title of “Organic Search Still Reigns” confirms the importance of organic search. The article compares the results of Google, Yahoo and Bing and discovers that organic search results still get the top rankings “across the big three search engines, with at least 95% of traffic from each originating from the first page of results after a nonbranded search”. With numbers like these, it is no wonder that organic search and search optimization efforts remain on the top of the lists of recommendations from online marketing experts.

Instead of spending time, money, and effort on complex marketing strategies or paid advertisements, it is much more cost effective to go back to simple search engine optimization tactics. And this common sense tactic is being used by professional marketers who “recognize the importance of investment in search optimization so they will appear in those results and benefit from the huge portion of clicks that go to the top hits. The Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) found that search optimization was the third priority of senior marketers worldwide, after social networking and improving digital infrastructure.”

In spite of my own extensive browsing of search engine results, the numbers clearly show that your clients are most likely to not go beyond that first page, so this is a case where instead of marching to your own drummer your seo company should follow current online marketing trends. It’s hard to argue with the solid results achieved by organic search.

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So just what are small and medium sized businesses managing these days? Social media, websites, search engine rankings, and lead capturing are four of their top issues. In larger companies, there can be several people or a whole team to manage these projects, but smaller companies often have one person doing it all or several people adding portions of these activities onto their already full workload. While accomplishing these tasks is important to the overall health of the company, managing them well is also key.

Depending on which online tools and features your company uses, your efforts can be focused to produce excellent results in a minimum time frame. Let’s think about social media sites: it’s easy to get swept away in all of the possibilities of your social media. On Facebook alone, you can have online chats with your friends, play games, schedule activities, become a fan of different groups and businesses, post your own updates, and read the updates of all of your friends. A person could potentially spend an entire day navigating Facebook.

In Chris Crum’s article “Look for Ways to Manage Your Social Media Time Better” he lists a few great ways to cut down on the noise crowding out your online time, including

- Use the list features for Facebook and Twitter to organize the feeds you are getting and view from a single group of people at a time, rather than wading through all of the feeds from everyone on your list.
- Use browser plug-ins to make your online tasks smoother. This may take up a bit of time to research and implement in the beginning, but that time and more will be recovered in the long run by using the right tools for your browsing habits.
- Organize your news feeds too.
- Use down time, like when “waiting for your food to arrive at a restaurant, waiting at the dentist’s office” to check on your social media through your mobile devices.

However you manage your online time, be sure to do it mindfully to ensure that the internet is working for you, rather than allowing yourself to get swallowed by internet activities. For small and medium sized businesses, where managing tasks is even more crucial, these recommendations can be the line between success and failure.

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Apple got the good marketing memo a long time ago. We’ve accepted their branding and their assurances that they are one of the best companies out there for music and computers. There are people who will use nothing but a Mac for their computer needs, and the iPod brand has taken off in spades. It seems like everything they touch in the electronics age is golden (though the fate of the iPad remains untested as of yet).

I hardly think about advertisements for this company. In fact, other than the catchy PC vs Mac commercials of a few years ago, I can’t recall any of their marketing that has jumped out at me. Nothing online or in print. It’s that seamless. However, with a brand name that is so strong and prominent, I do know that their marketing team is working hard to keep them on top, and I have to admire that work.

Now, what brought these thoughts to my attention? Well, I was reading an article by Mike Sachoff that talks about Apple’s newest contest. Turns out that Apple is holding a contest to celebrate the download of their 10 billionth song. Imagine: 10 billion songs sold.

Apple says: “Seven years later, we’re about to celebrate our biggest milestone for music, yet – 10 billion songs downloaded. Buy a song, and if it’s the 10 billionth download, you could win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card. It’s our way of saying thanks.”

The Apple marketing team should be proud. All of Apple should be proud of this milestone. 7 years for 10 billion songs sold. Never mind the number of iPods that were sold in the same time frame. Amazing. And their marketing has been subtle and effective.

Sometimes it is nice to just stand back and admire.

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After reading about the features promised in Buzz, I am eager to try it out and see what I think of the experience it provides. Let’s take a quick look at some of the features of Buzz:

- Runs through Gmail
- Permits users to post status updates, photos, and links to their network
- Allows users to pull in activity from other sites, including Twitter, Flickr and Picasa
- Will have a mobile component, which can combine with wireless operating systems to include features like voice-recognition postings and a GPS-enabled ability to attach the user’s location to posts
- Enables real time comments, weighting the comments by other users similarly to Google’s search engine results in order to sort through them in a similar fashion to your Google search
- Automatically sets the people you email or chat with frequently as your friends

Despite how Buzz seems to be trying to replace some social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn, while integrating other sites, like Twitter, into the usability of their latest brainchild, Google claims that they aren’t trying to edge in on anyone else’s territory and are just trying “to listen to their users”, according to Gmail product managed Todd Jackson. However, there is talk of Buzz being marketed to companies as an interoffice communication tool, which is definitely a competitive move against AOL Instant Messenger service.

Only time will tell if Buzz will be a success and to what degree. The success may hinge not on what Buzz can do at this moment, but on the potential expansions – from updating your status by phone to enabling Twitter updates through your Buzz account to linking Buzz to other emerging Google tools – and the reception Google receives in the social media arena. And the good news is that Google knows they have their work cut out for them. Spokesman Bradley Horowitz said, “We’re not launching this today because we think we’re done. We don’t think that’s how a product like this is built.”

It’s going to be interesting to watch the progress of this tool and see what kind of audience it ends up getting.

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One thing that comes to mind is driving the right traffic to your site. If you are selling books and the people you get coming to your site are looking for vacations, the vast majority of them will not be buying what you are selling. Sure, one or two might find a book on their vacation spot of choice, but if those couple of people are your entire purchasing power out of one hundred people landing on your site, pretty soon your company will be broke. Or at the very least wondering why your website is ineffective at driving sales. So, the trick really is to get the right people coming to your site.

Carrie Hill’s article “Two Simple Rules for Fixing High Bounce Rate Pages” and assures us that with her two rules, “you can address 75% of the issues caused by high bounce rate pages”. Even if your exact number is not as high as 75%, there is a lot of ground to be gained by following her suggestions and taking a few simple steps in evaluating your website. It’s a winning situation for any business.

The first way is to check the organic phrases used to find your web pages. Determine if those phrases are really phrases that will drive your business. If a potential customer is looking for shoes and finds that you have books about shoes, that customer will just leave in a flash. Targeting your traffic will net more business. Misleading queries will only contribute to your bounce rate.

The second way to make sure that potential customers continue to browse your site and shop is making their path clear and easy once they arrive on your site. The harder it is to figure out where to go next or how to buy an item, the easier it will be for people to just go elsewhere. Make it simple, clear, and easy.

There are many ways to test the ease of use on your business’s webpage, from complex tools to hiring experienced web analysts to just having a few friends do a quick and dirty test. Your choice will depend on how web savvy your business is and how much money you have allocated to the task. Hill suggests using either Attention Wizard or Click Tale to determine where the eye and mouse are going on your page.

No matter how you go about decreasing your bounce rate, it is important to take a bit of time and allocate some resources to this aspect of your online marketing plan. The whole point of internet marketing is to get people to your site who will buy your products and services.

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Social media is all about connections, but as our abilities with our social media programs grow, so do the demands on networking sites to get bigger and better. Those who do not grow may not survive in this market and mindset. Our electronic consciousness demands solutions to our problems, whether they are perceived problems or real ones.

LinkedIn is responding to this mindset and positioning itself to be seen as an innovative service by allowing its users to edit their profile layouts. It probably seems like such a basic step to make to most of us, but the article “LinkedIn Allows Users to Edit Profile Layouts” points out, “most people like having a measure of control” and LinkedIn is smart to cater to that desire.

What does editing your profile layout mean anyway? Well, if you’ve ever had a resume to write that had a special case, like a stay-at-home parent who is returning to the workforce, a career change, a layoff, or even just inexperience, you’ll know that sometimes putting the right information front and center can make the difference. In this case, having tabs that can be dragged and reordered in LinkedIn allows you to do the same thing as reordering your resume. In the resume writing field, people pay substantial cash for a professional to do just this for them. Now you can just click and drag a heading to accomplish the same thing.

According to Aaron Bronzan, an associate product manager at LinkedIn, this change is “just the first of a huge number of enhancements that are coming to your LinkedIn profile in the upcoming months.” Which means that LinkedIn users and social networking gurus will be waiting and watching for changes in the next while.

You wouldn’t send a flawed resume out into the world to represent you, so it makes sense to demand the most from your online networking tools, be they social or professional. It’s good to see LinkedIn stepping up and making changes to ensure that their users are getting better representation.

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To say that I would love a mobile device is a bit of an understatement. I’ve not felt like it was the right time to jump into this market yet. Until today. Chris Crum wrote an article entitled “Firefox Finally Goes Mobile” that has me about ready to throw on my coat to go buy a Nokia N900.

You see, I am particular about my web browser. I’ve tried a few. I know Microsoft will roll over in their fancy corporate desk chairs, but I’ve never been enamored with Internet Explorer. For a long time I was a fan of Netscape, but that ship sailed off a number of years ago. These days I toggle between Mozilla Firefox and Chrome. I’ve been all but a Firefox pusher in the past, but there are some nice features in Chrome too.

All of this is to say that my browser of choice has now gone mobile. Don’t underestimate how happy it makes techno geeks when their tools of choice line up.

So, if you love Firefox and are drooling at the prospect of using it on a mobile device, Chris has summed up its the features well:

• Awesome Bar – Go to your favorite sites in just a couple of keystrokes with intelligent and personalized searching
• Weave Sync – Sync your Firefox tabs, history, bookmarks and passwords between your desktop and mobile device for a seamless browsing experience
• Add-ons – Customize your Firefox by adding small pieces of functionality, like games and news readers, that help make the mobile Web browser your own
• Location-Aware Browsing – Get maps and information relevant to your location
• Tabbed browsing – View open tabs as thumbnails to easily identify and select the Web page you’d like to go to next
• Safe Browsing – Get an Instant Web Site ID and easily access and edit security settings
• Available in more than 30 languages and counting

Better yet, the popular add-ons of Firefox are available for its mobile version, so if you wanted to use geo guides or the TwitterBar on your mobile device (sounds like a great match, doesn’t it!) you will be able to do it. Firefox has over 40 add-ons available for its mobile application, so there should be something for everyone. Even those of us who tend to wait for a perfect moment in technology to jump on board.

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The crux of the article is that many people and businesses sign up for Twitter and either never use it or use it a few times. Even more concerning is that some accounts have never taken the time to build a network of followers on Twitter. Here are the bare statistics that have come to light:

- At the end of 2009, there were 75 million Twitter accounts, with July being the peak month for increased membership
- Each month 6.2 million new accounts are activated (2-3 per second)
- 25% of accounts have no followers
- 40% of accounts have never sent a single Tweet
- 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times

These are grave statistics for Twitter to consider, and surely, there will be growth in the future and changes to address the underlying issues that may be contributing to the statistics that show a large number of users either give up on it before they really get started or just fail to build any network on the site at all. Still, with the growth rate that Twitter is maintaining, there’s no need to throw your hands up and walk away. The fact is that lots of users are employing Twitter: if you just flip around the statistic on how many people are not using Twitter more than 10 times to find the 20% that are using it repeatedly, we see that 15 million users are tweeting. That’s still a respectable number.

For now when assessing your online marketing strategies, it is important to be aware of some of the limitations of social media. It’s not just up to Twitter to fix itself, but up to us to know how we will use these tools effectively. Working creatively with sites like Twitter and Facebook can gain your business followers and sales, but it will still be work to get a network up and running. They won’t run on their own and they do need regular attention. Internet marketing experts can guide you through this process, which may be the edge needed for your business to gain ground in this new realm of marketing.

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