Good news

Other firms' suffering has bolstered the public-relations business

Jan 14th 2010 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

Illustration by Claudio Munoz

THE past year or two has tested the idea that all publicity is good publicity, at least when it comes to business. Undeserved bonuses, plunging share prices and government bail-outs, among other ills, have elicited the ire of the media and public--and created a bonanza for public-relations firms. The recession has increased corporate demand for PR, analysts say, and enhanced the industry's status. "We used to be the tail on the dog," says Richard Edelman, the boss of Edelman, the world's biggest independent PR firm. But now, he continues, PR is "the organising principle" behind many business decisions.

According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year. PR's position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage, such as outreach to bloggers, is included. Spending on such things increased by more than 10% in 2009.

Not all PR firms did as well as IPREX, a global consortium whose revenues increased by 14% last year. Many had to shed jobs, and some estimates show the industry's overall revenues declining, although not nearly as sharply as those of most of the businesses it serves. According to a survey by StevensGouldPincus, a consulting firm for the communications industry, nearly 64% of participating firms saw revenues slide in 2009 and only 23% saw revenues increase, perhaps because businesses put their faith only in the biggest and most established firms.

PR has done well in part because it is often cheaper than mass advertising campaigns. Its impact, in the form of favourable coverage in the media or online, can also be more easily measured. Moreover, PR firms are beginning to encroach on territory that used to be the domain of advertising firms, a sign of their increasing clout. They used chiefly to pitch story ideas to media outlets and try to get their clients mentioned in newspapers. Now they also dream up and orchestrate live events, web launches and the like. "When you look at advertising versus public relations, it's not going to be those clearly defined silos," says Christopher Graves, the boss of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. "It may be indistinguishable at some point where one ends and the other begins."

PR has also benefited from the changing media landscape. The withering of many traditional media outlets has left fewer journalists from fewer firms covering business. That makes PR doubly important, both for attracting journalists' attention, and for helping firms bypass old routes altogether and disseminate news by posting press releases on their websites, for example.

The rise of the internet and social media has given PR a big boost. Many big firms have a presence on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, overseen by PR staff. PR firms are increasingly called on to track what consumers are saying about their clients online and to respond directly to any negative commentary. When two employees of Domino's, a pizza chain, uploaded a video of themselves apparently sticking ingredients for dishes they were preparing up their noses, the firm responded by posting a video of its own online, of a senior executive apologising for the incident.

Blow-dried blogs

That sort of content is proliferating. A PR firm called Ketchum helped IBM start a blog about sustainability, complete with posts written by the technology firm's executives. It also created cartoons on the subject that it uploaded to YouTube. Edelman recently worked with eBay on the launch of a web-only magazine, "The Inside Source", which provides articles on shopping and tells readers what is selling well on the online retail giant's website.

VSS forecasts that spending on PR in America will surpass $8 billion by 2013, with much of the growth coming from online projects such as these. According to Miles Nadal, chief executive of MDC Partners, a media holding company, investment in digital PR accelerated during the recession "and will go forward in perpetuity" because clients became more focused on measuring the impact of their efforts. The internet offers various yardsticks, from traffic to cheerleading websites to numbers of Facebook fans, whereas the number of people who see a conventional advertisement is much harder to gauge.

Perhaps the best indication of PR's growing importance is the attention it is attracting from regulators. They are worried that PR firms do not make it clear enough that they are behind much seemingly independent commentary on blogs and social networks. In October America's Federal Trade Commission published new guidelines for bloggers, requiring them to disclose whether they had been paid by companies or received free merchandise. Further regulation is likely. But that will not hamper PR's growth, says Jim Rutherfurd of VSS. After all, companies that fall foul of the rules will need the help of a PR firm.

Internet Retailer Article:

Speed Sells

Nice overview from The Economist:

Clash of the clouds

Oct 15th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The launch of Windows 7 marks the end of an era in computing--and the beginning of an epic battle between Microsoft, Google, Apple and others

Illustration by Ian Whadcock

DO YOU have plans for next weekend? If not, don't worry: perhaps a friend will be throwing a party to celebrate the launch of Windows 7, Microsoft's new operating system, on October 22nd. You'll get help installing the program and be shown how to use the new features. To maximise the fun, your friend will get tips from the "HostingYourParty" video on YouTube or go to the dedicated website, complete with downloadable party favours and a trivia quiz (sample question: "The Microsoft Pretzel Hunt is an annual pretzel hunt held at the Redmond campus. True or false?").

This is not satire. It is a toe-curling attempt by Microsoft to create some buzz for its new software. Fortunately for the firm, it will hardly matter, because Microsoft dominates the market for operating systems. After the let-down that was its predecessor, Windows Vista, Windows 7 is certain to be a success. There is plenty of pent-up demand, because Vista's aged predecessor, XP, is still widely used. Reviews of Windows 7 have been positive, some even glowing, although the software is sometimes hard to install.

Windows 7 is not just a sizeable step for Microsoft. It is also likely to mark the end of one era in information technology and the start of another. Much of computing will no longer be done on personal computers in homes and offices, but in the "cloud": huge data centres housing vast storage systems and hundreds of thousands of servers, the powerful machines that dish up data over the internet. Web-based e-mail, social networking and online games are all examples of what are increasingly called cloud services, and are accessible through browsers, smart-phones or other "client" devices. Because so many services can be downloaded or are available online, Windows 7 is Microsoft's first operating system to come with fewer features.

As one window closes...

The launch of Windows 7 coincides with the closing of the book, after more than a decade, on Microsoft's antitrust woes. The company got into hot water in America and Europe mainly for abusing its dominance of PC operating systems to promote its web browser. On October 7th the European Commission said it had all but reached a settlement with Microsoft. The firm has agreed to give Windows users in Europe a "ballot screen" that allows them to choose a rival browser in place of its own Internet Explorer.

Windows is not going to disappear soon, but cloud computing means it is no longer so important. Other products, some being launched this autumn with less fanfare than Windows 7, represent Microsoft's future. Last month the company opened two data centres that between them will contain more than half a million servers. This month it released a new version of Windows for smart-phones. And next month it will launch Azure, a platform for developers on which they can write and run cloud services.

The rise of cloud computing is not just shifting Microsoft's centre of gravity. It is changing the nature of competition within the computer industry. Technological developments have hitherto pushed computing power away from central hubs: first from mainframes to minicomputers, and then to PCs. Now a combination of ever cheaper and more powerful processors, and ever faster and more ubiquitous networks, is pushing power back to the centre in some respects, and even further away in others. The cloud's data centres are, in effect, outsize public mainframes. At the same time, the PC is being pushed aside by a host of smaller, often wireless devices, such as smart-phones, netbooks (small laptops) and, perhaps soon, tablets (touch-screen computers the size of books).

Although Windows still runs 90% of PCs, the fading importance of the PC means that Microsoft is no longer an all-powerful monopolist. Others are also building big clouds, including Google, a giant of the internet, and Apple, renowned as a maker of hardware, with a market capitalisation that now exceeds those of both Google and IBM, its original arch-rival (see chart above).

Granted, there are hundreds if not thousands of firms offering cloud services--web-based applications living in data centres, such as music sites or social networks. But Microsoft, Google and Apple play in a different league. Each has its own global network of data centres. They intend to offer not just one or two services, but whole suites of them, with services including e-mail, address books, storage, collaboration tools and business applications. They are also vying to dominate the periphery, either by developing software for smart-phones and other small devices or by making such devices themselves.

These three giants (for their vital statistics, see table) are already preparing for battle. In July Google mounted a direct attack on Windows by promising to launch a free PC operating system, Chrome OS. Rumour has it that a basic version may hit the market on the same day as Windows 7, or soon after. Microsoft's new operating system for smart-phones represents its latest effort to catch up with Apple's iPhone and Google's operating system for handsets, called Android. On October 12th Apple and Google severed a tie when Arthur Levinson, a member of both boards, resigned from Google's. In August Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, had quit Apple's board because "Google is entering more of Apple's core businesses," in the words of Steve Jobs, the gadget-maker's boss.

A taxonomy of giants

Despite the growing similarities among the three, each is a unique beast, says Michael Cusumano, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. They can be classified according to how they approach the cloud, how they make money and how openly they approach the development of intellectual property.

Google, you might say, has been a cloud company since its birth in 1998. It is best known for its search service, but now offers all sorts of other products and services, too. It has built a global network of three dozen data centres with 2m servers, say some estimates. Among other things, it offers a suite of web-based applications, such as word processing and spreadsheets. Lately it has branched out, releasing Android for phones, and its Chrome web-browser and operating system for PCs.

It took Google a while to come up with a way of making money, but it found one in advertising, its main source of revenue. It handles more than 75% of search-related ads in America. Worldwide its share is even higher. Google is also trying to make money from selling services to companies. On October 12th it said that Rentokil Initial, a pest-control-to-parcel-delivery group, would roll out Google's online applications to its 35,000 employees, making it the biggest company to do so.

Google's reliance on advertising explains its open approach to intellectual property. Giving Android and Chrome OS away as open-source software not only makes life difficult for rivals' paid-for products but also increases demand for Google's services and the reach of its ads. Its openness has limits: Google says little about the architecture of its data centres and search algorithms, because they give the company its competitive edge. The way it organises R&D internally is open and decentralised: self-organising teams come up with ideas for most new services.

If Google was born in the sky, Microsoft started on the ground. Office, its bestselling suite of PC programs, is almost as ubiquitous as Windows. But the company is less a stranger to cloud computing than it may seem. It has built a network of data centres, and is starting to gain traction after losing billions developing online services. Its Xbox games console has powerful online features. Bing, its new search engine, has gained a shade in market share (though it is still miles behind Google). It is even preparing a stripped-down web-based version of Office, and it now offers much of its business software as online services.

However, most of Microsoft's revenue and all of its profit still come from conventional shrink-wrapped software. But the company cannot leave online advertising to Google, because consumers expect cloud services to be free, financed by ads. Hence Microsoft's efforts to convince Yahoo!, another online giant, to merge its search and part of its advertising business with Microsoft's. The deal, sealed in July, means that Microsoft will handle 10% of searches, against Google's 83%, says Net Applications, a market-research firm.

Given Microsoft's history, it is hardly surprising that its treatment of intellectual property differs from Google's. It gives other software firms the technical information they need to write programs that run on, say, Windows. Otherwise, it guards the underlying recipes of its software jealously. That said, the firm now supports many open standards and has even started using bits of open-source software. Internally, its R&D is somewhat more centralised than Google, at least in its online division: teams are bigger, work with more co-ordination and get more guidance from above.

Apple, too, came from outside the cloud. Online services have always been a bit of an afterthought to what the company excels at: pricey but highly innovative bundles of hardware and software, of which the iPhone is only the latest example. Its online offerings--the iTunes store for music and video, the App Store for mobile applications, and MobileMe, a suite of online services--were all originally meant to drive demand for Apple's hardware, but the firm's interest in the cloud has grown. It is building a $1 billion data centre, possibly the world's largest, in North Carolina.

Still, Apple's financial health thus far has depended mainly on selling hardware. Gadgets generate most of the firm's revenue and profit. The firm does not reveal its revenue from services separately, but it is not to be sneezed at. Apple accounts for 69% of online music sales in America and 35% of all sales, more than Wal-Mart, reckons NPD Group, a market-research firm. Apple has so far forgone advertising revenue: its services are ad-free, but most of them require payment. Apple's services are aimed at consumers, not businesses.

Illustration by Ian Whadcock

Apple is also the odd one out when it comes to openness. The word does not appear in its vocabulary. It does not allow any other hardware-maker to build machines using its operating system. It blocks iPhone applications it does not approve of from appearing in the App Store. Apple is also secretive about the way it conducts its internal R&D. Mr Jobs clearly calls most of the shots. But insiders say that there is a system of teams that pitch projects to him.

How will this three-way contest play out? The last similar war was in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Apple, IBM and Microsoft fought for mastery of the PC. After much fire and smoke, Microsoft was victorious. Thanks to what economists call strong network effects, which allow winners to take almost all, Windows relegated its rival operating systems to mere sideshows, securing fat profits for its owner.

Such a lopsided result is unlikely this time. One reason is that the economics of the cloud may be different from those of the PC. Network effects are unlikely to be as strong. Much of the cloud is based on open standards, which should make it easier to switch providers. To underline this point and to counter arguments that it is trying to lock users in, Google has set up the Data Liberation Front, a team of engineers whose job is to devise ways of allowing people to transfer their data.

Unfortunately for Google, it is equally unclear whether the most open player will win, as Microsoft did last time. Many of Google's new services have failed to take off. Having control over the software on the PC, smart-phones and other client devices, Microsoft can more easily create what it calls "seamless experiences", for example by keeping a user's address book and other personal information in step. Consumers may also prefer Apple's tightly integrated, easy-to-use devices and services, despite the restrictions they impose. Lots of people buy iPods and download music from iTunes even though it is difficult to play the songs on other devices.

Second, all three giants have reliable sources of cash to sustain them. Windows may be under attack, not least because of the boom in cheap netbooks, which has forced Microsoft to reduce prices, says Matt Rosoff of Directions on Microsoft, a newsletter. Even so, the operating system will keep on giving for some time. Microsoft has other strong divisions too, including business and server software. Google may lose some market share in search (and some advertising) to the combination of Bing and Yahoo!, but it is unlikely to be dethroned. Apple is still able to command premium prices, although others make hardware just as slick.

Full war chests

This means that all three will have ample resources to spend in the main areas of the fight: data centres, cloud services and the periphery. In data centres, Google is ahead, but Microsoft is catching up in size and sophistication. Apple has most to learn, but this, too, seems only a question of time and money. Just as much of hardware has become a commodity, knowing how to build huge data centres may not be a big competitive advantage for long. And data centres can get only so big before scale ceases to be an advantage.

In services too, Google is ahead. But in Bing Microsoft may at last have created a worthy rival. The "decision engine", to use the company's term, does a good job of helping people choose a new camera or book a holiday. The big question is whether Apple can catch up. Its iTunes and App stores are successes, to be sure, but for now they are highly specialised. Its broader suite of cloud services, MobileMe, is nothing to write home about.

At the cloud's periphery, however, Apple has a strong position, thanks to the success of the iPhone. More than 30m have been sold so far, 5.2m in the quarter ending in June. Its share of the American market is pushing 14%. The App Store now boasts 85,000 applications and a total of more than 2 billion downloads. But recently Google's Android has gained momentum. Several handset-makers have released smart-phones based on it, or will do so in the next few months. In early October it received the backing of Verizon, America's biggest mobile operator. At the end of 2012, predicts Gartner, a market-research firm, Android phones will have a bigger share of the market than iPhones.

Microsoft's mobile strategy, though, is in disarray. This could prove to be a serious weakness, as people increasingly use mobile devices to reach online services. Plans to build smart-phones of its own seem to be going nowhere. Its music player, Zune, will remain just that, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's boss, said recently. Pink, a project to develop phones based on technology from Danger, a start-up acquired by Microsoft in 2008, is said to face death by cancellation--even more likely after Danger lost personal data belonging to tens of thousands of its customers earlier this month. And the latest version of Windows Mobile is no match for the iPhone and Android. Some handset-makers, including Motorola, have ditched the software.

However, as with Bing, Microsoft has only recently been getting serious. It has put Windows Mobile under new management. Another version is expected by the end of 2010. Some analysts fancy Microsoft's chances. According to iSuppli, a market-research firm, "Reports of Windows Mobile's death are greatly exaggerated."

What could disrupt the three-sided struggle? The antitrust authorities, possibly. Now that Microsoft has made peace, the other two are likelier targets. Most observers imagine Google would be first, pointing to the hullabaloo caused by a settlement with book publishers that allows Google to create a vast digital library. But Apple may beat Google to the dock. The firm's tight control over its technology is no problem in markets where its share is small (in PCs, it is a mere 7.2%). But in mobile applications and digital music distribution Apple is by far the market leader. America's Federal Communications Commission is looking into its refusal to carry Google Voice, a telephony and messaging application for the iPhone. Its bar on rivals' devices connecting to iTunes may cause trouble too. Tellingly, Apple recently hired a lawyer with antitrust experience: Bruce Sewell, the former general counsel of Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, which the European Commission wants to pay a fine of more than €1 billion ($1.5 billion) for abusing its dominance.

Then there are market forces. One of the three may come up with something "insanely great", an expression used at Apple in times past to describe the original Macintosh computer. Apple itself may do so with a tablet computer, rumoured to be ready for release as early as January. Others have built such a dream device, but none has yet overcome the problem of input: typing on a screen is difficult and handwriting recognition has never really worked. If Apple has cracked it, it could upend the PC industry, as the iPhone did the handset market. If the tablet is also a good substitute for paper, the publishing and newspaper industries could be in for more upheaval. The blogosphere is abuzz with rumours that Apple is talking to publishers about offering their content on its device.

The final possibility is for another contender to emerge. The obvious candidates are Amazon, the world's biggest online retailer, and Facebook, the leading social network. Amazon already has a cloud of sorts. It offers cloud computing services to other online firms and has developed the Kindle, an electronic reader, which is due to be available worldwide from October 19th. Facebook runs what is arguably the most successful cloud service, with more than 300m registered users. It provides a platform for people to communicate, share information and collaborate online--all things that businesses want to do, too.

Only one thing seems sure about the future of the digital skies: the company or companies that dominate it will be American. European or Asian firms have yet to make much of an appearance in cloud computing. Nokia, the world's biggest handset-maker, is trying to form a cloud with its set of online services called Ovi, but its efforts are still in their infancy. Governments outside America may harbour ambitious plans for state-funded clouds. They would do better simply to let their citizens make the most of the competition among the American colossi.

The key thing to understand about how search engines work is that they index pages, not websites. In that regard, every page rises or falls on its own merits. On-page search engine optimization is an important factor for every single page on your website. So too is off-page optimization or link building.

That means that any inbound links you have pointing to a page are going to be considered by the search engine algorithm for the purposes of PageRank and ranking. While inbound links from other websites will carry more overall weight, if they are good links, you can't discount internal links. Those will often be your first inbound links to every page. But the most important inbound link to your website (indeed, to every page on your site) is that first inbound link from elsewhere.

No web page at all will get crawled and indexed without at least one inbound link. If your site is up and ready and has a great internal link structure but no inbound links from anywhere else then you all you have is a great site in a vacuum. It won't get crawled. You need at least one inbound link from somewhere to any page on your site. Then, that page will get crawled and every page on your site linked to from that page will get crawled as well as any pages linked to from those pages.

Once you get that first page indexed then any inbound links from within your site will get crawled and the other pages indexed. That doesn't mean you should build one inbound link from somewhere else then stop. But it does illustrate how critical that first inbound link is to your website.

After that first link, your internal site navigation links are pretty much like any other inbound link. They'll be judged on anchor text, link age, domain age, page age, relevancy, and all the other factors that every other inbound link is judged by. Do they pass PageRank? Yes. Do affect PageRank? Yes. But if you're sitting at PR 0, how's that going to help you?

When it comes to link building, you need to think long term. Build a diverse link portfolio, but don't count out your own website

Viral marketing has changed a lot over the years. In the early days marketers would write tons of articles and distribute them through article directories, attracting thousands of links in a few days. The reason this worked is because those marketers were able to write great articles that publishers didn't mind printing. And they put their own links at the bottom in the author's resource box. That was good promotion.

Other forms of viral marketing sprung up as we entered into the new millennium. Article marketing still works, but now viral marketers have blogs, video, social media, and a collection of friends built up from doing business online. Even ad networks can become a viral hit if done right.

The way viral marketing works, no matter which medium you are operating in, is you - the marketer - produce great content that gets people excited about something. It can be an innovation in technology, something funny or controversial, or anything that people will respond emotionally to. It's got to have some kind of emotional appeal. That's the attraction.

If you are really good at producing something with emotional appeal then people will link to it. They will also share it with their friends. Soon, it takes on the qualities of a virus and spreads on its own. Good viral marketing campaigns spread so fast you hardly notice it happening. That's when you know you've done your job as a marketer and you've done something to be proud of.

In the past, business used the Web  primarily for Brochure Web Sites. These are  simple web sites which provide information about the business, its products and services.

Even in those early days of the Web, having your web site found and visited was a significant obstacle due to the number of web sites online. Thus the advent of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Today, the user generated content of Web 2.0 has caused an explosion of content on the Internet, making it even more difficult to "Be Found".

Why Search Engine Optimization
Search, using Search Engines, is still the most popular method to find the products, services and information required by Internet users. Therefore, if your web content is to be discovered by Internet users, obtaining good visibility in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is imperative.

What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of fine tuning web sites, Blogs and other online content to achieve visibility by obtaining rankings in the first three pages of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for a particular keyword or keyword phrase.

The Black and White of SEO
Search Engines have "Terms of Service" which outline the techniques which are acceptable to improve the visibility of web site content in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Black Hat SEO are the techniques used by unethical companies and consultants to trick the Search Engines into giving web content high visibility in the SERPs, when in actual fact it has not gained the required relevance and authority for inclusion. Black Hat SEO can actually get you unlisted and banned from major search engines like Google.

White Hat SEO are the techniques used by ethical companies and consultants to improve the development and quality of web content so it will obtain high visibility in the SERPs within the guidelines set out by the Search Engine's "Terms of Service".

The Search Engine Algorithm

An Algorithm has been defined by Princeton University as "a precise rule (or set of rules) specifying how to solve some problem".

Although the Search Engine Algorithms evaluate numerous On-page (located on the web page itself) and Off-page (not located on the web page itself) elements to determine SERPs placement, the two primary elements of the Algorithm's evaluation are Relevancy and Authority.

Topical Relevance
Search Engines determine Relevance by evaluating the keywords and phrases used in the Search Query and comparing those keywords to web pages indexed in the Search Engine's database.

On completion of an analysis process which evaluates numerous On-page web page elements, the Search Engine delivers the results considered to be most relevant to the searched topic.

Topical Authority
In addition to Relevance Search Engines also factor in how authoritative the web content is perceived to be.

The Search Engine Algorithms evaluate numerous Off-page elements to determine how authoritative an item of web content is. The two primary factors determining authority are the number of links leading to the web content and the age of the Domain Registration.

On-Page Optimization
The purpose of On-page Optimization is to develop web content that is highly relevant to a specific topic through targeted keyword use.

The fundamentals of On-page Optimization are Keyword Research and the integration of keywords into web content in a Search Engine friendly manner. Although you are developing content which is Search Engine friendly, the first consideration must be for the human users.

The principle of On-page Optimization is the development of high quality topic relevant content which captivates the web site visitors' attention.

Off-Page Optimization
The purpose of Off Page Optimization is to increase the Authority of your web content. Increasing the Authority of your content is much more difficult and time consuming than optimizing for Relevancy. The primary technique used to improve Authority is developing a network of inbound links to your web site and content (Backlinks).

Search Engine Algorithms view Backlinks as a vote of confidence in the web site and its content. Similar to an election, the more votes, the more perceived confidence in the candidate, which in this case is the web site. In many cases the content with the most Backlinks has the highest visibility in the SERPs.

Search Optimization - Process Outline

A brief outline of the major considerations of any Search Optimization Program includes:

Web Site Analysis: A review of the web site's development code to ensure web sites are easily accessed and indexed by the Search Engines.

Keyword Research and Analysis: Research into the terms used by Internet users to find products, services and information. A couple of tools you can use for this are WordTracker and Google Insights for Search.

Keyword Research and Analysis also investigates the competitive environment surrounding the keyword or phrase such as:

How many web sites are targeting the keyword and phrase

The strength of the currently ranking web pages

Content Development: Developing well structured, keyword rich, content is a primary function of Organic Search Engine Optimization. The On-page Optimization of your web page with topical well integrated keywords is the most powerful Search Optimization technique you control.

Link Building Program: Link building is one of the most time consuming Search Engine Optimization tasks. However, it is a task you cannot do without. A Link Building Program includes numerous methods to obtain inbound links to your web site:

Giving other web sites a reason to link to you is imperative to the success of your Link Building program.

Web sites link to good content which is relevant and beneficial to their own web site visitors.

Developing high value, highly relevant content in Blogs, Online Press Releases and Article Submissions is the most effective Link Building technique available.

Other Link Building techniques include:

Directory Submissions

Social Bookmarking and Social Recommendation Sites

- Digg
- Stumbleupon
- Delicious

Request links from complimentary but non competitive web sites

Naturally, you want to link your Website to your Blog and your Blog to your Website. In fact, you want to link every element in the Web 2.0 marketing graphic to every other element possible building a spider web of links and cross-links.

Word of Caution: Beware of so called "SEO Experts" that promise you hundreds of links in a short period of time. Although they do exist and can get you short-term increases in the SERPS, "link farms" can get you unlisted and banned from major search engines like Google.

The Search Engine Optimization Program

The Search Optimization process is complex and time consuming. How you approach your business's SEO Program will depend on the human and financial resources available to your company.

Out Sourcing SEO
Out sourcing your Optimization Program to a Search Engine Optimization Consultant is often the most cost efficient and productive method to achieve your desired Online business objectives.

There is no denying Search Optimization is complex and ever changing. SEO Consultants work in the industry on a daily basis, noting the changing search environment and developing the experience and knowledge to recognize the problems and opportunities for business web sites.

It is this experience that only a SEO Professional can offer, the average business owner may have the will to develop, initiate and complete an Optimization Program, but rarely has the insight into the industry to ensure a positive result for the time and resources required.

In House SEO
In many cases the expense of a SEO Consultant may be beyond the budgeting constraints of the business. In these cases completing the SEO program In House or using a Hybrid In-house/ Outsourced combination may be the solution.

Before you initiate an In-house solution consideration must be given to the human and financial resources required. Do you have the expertise? How will working on a SEO Program affect your ability to complete the core business tasks required to keep your business running?

Should your business opt for an In-house solution it is imperative from the outset to identify goals and develop a step by step program to assure all elements are investigated and tasks completed in an organized manner.

The Last Word
Search Engine Optimization is an important aspect of your business's online activities. SEO cannot be overlooked and regardless of your circumstances if your content is going to be viewed by the public some form of Search Engine Optimization is a prerequisite.

Contact today Jennifer Dunphy, Vayu Media LLC, (800)-456-1563 , info (at) vayumedia dot com to get more information on our full service SEO services.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a great tool in the correct situation. Regardless of how small your advertising budget may be, it should be considered. As with any of the Web 2.0 marketing tools shown in the graphic below, PPC advertising has its pros and cons. In most cases though, the pros outweigh the cons.

Not Everybody is Your Customer

by Tim Berry

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This is hard to write about, and hard for business owners to accept. It seems so negative. Still, it seems like we all need a fresh reminder. Bill Cosby said it well: "I don't know the secret to success, but I do know that the secret to failure is trying to please everybody."

This reminds me, brilliantly, of how important it is to understand . . .

1. You need customers. The first thing you need to start a business, maybe even the only thing you really need, is customers. It all starts with at least one customer.
2. Who is your target customer. In detail. Not just generalities and demographics, not even just psychographics, but who is this person, what drives her, what does she really want from you, what does she like to read, eat, watch? Where does he live, and with whom? What does he drive?
3. Who isn't your customer. Sometimes the secret to success is who isn't your customer.

I was in a panel presentation not long ago alongside an expert in customer service. At one point, after she'd dizzied us with stories of Nordstrom retail clerks changing customers' tires and taking as returns products that Nordstrom had never carried, somebody asked, with just a hint of exasperation, "But how does a company stay in business like that? How do they make money? Who pays for all that?"

At which point, after a beautifully-timed pause, the expert said: "Yes, that is the question, isn't it . . . and pay attention, because this is the most important thing I'll say all night . . . you have to understand that not everybody is a customer."

John Jantsch, in Duct Tape Marketing, recommends that you start by profiling your ideal customer. Focus for a while on one person, whether he or she is your customer directly or the decision-maker for a business customer. Give that person age, gender, income level, likes, dislikes, favorite movies, songs, magazines, restaurants. Know that person.

If you've been in business, you can think of that customer fairly easily. Maybe it's a composite of several real customers.

A clear example of knowing who is and who isn't your customer can be found in the automobile industry. In theory, everyone who is over 16 years old and has a valid driver's license could be considered the target customer. But, if you take time to appreciate the ads for different vehicles you'll see that the marketing efforts are precisely pitched to narrow target markets.

For instance, the rich, deep, saturated colors, focus on high-quality features and refined accessories, the calm and quiet voice, and the sense of genteel conviviality of the Lincoln Town Car speaks directly to the well-heeled buyer. On the other hand, the spinning tires, clouds of smoke, screaming engine and 150 images a minute visual stimulation of an 800 horsepower, street-legal hot-rod TV spot is crafted especially for the hyper-active, quadruple-shot-enhanced-caffeine-energy-drink-quaffing youth.

Other industries segment their target markets. Some restaurants appeal to people in a hurry, or people on a budget, or people looking for a romantic rendezvous, or people who appreciate and seek out the taste treats presented by culinary masters. Every successful restaurant has carefully decided who their target customers are, and who they are not, and then manage their marketing efforts accordingly.

Whole Foods Market and PC Market of Choice are both grocery stores which specialize in organic prepared foods and locally grown organic fruits and vegetables. Their target market customers choose to spend more when buying groceries to get the benefits from healthier foods. Safeway or Kroger or Publix stores on the other hand focus on selling national brands, and target a different, often budget conscious, segment of the population.

Consider the Trunk Club, Joanna Van Vleck's interesting startup described in "Startup Success Story: The Trunk Club" in Up and Running at upandrunning.entrepreneur.com. How important is it that she understands who isn't her customer? She told me this herself:

• I realized that although I thought my target was women, women are normally closer to style. In general. So they aren't as likely to pay money for style consulting.
• Men have less ego invested. Some, in fact, pride themselves on not knowing style. In general.

• The metrosexual man is not my customer. He loves his own style and spends his own time and effort finding it.
• The man whose partner in a relationship likes to shop for his clothes is not my customer. She wants to do it. She doesn't want me to.
• The younger men on a budget aren't my customer. They can't afford me.

Notice how the "isn't my customer" routine helps define and position your marketing better.

A fast-food restaurant knows that the relatively well-to-do baby boomer empty nesters aren't their customers. On average. The sushi restaurant knows that the construction worker driving a pickup truck who eats at the Texas barbecue drive-through isn't its customer.

Consider Jolt cola. All the sugar and twice the caffeine. How important is understanding who isn't the customer.

Your blog, if you're doing a blog as a business, needs a focus. People don't care about your inner angst, but there are specialty niche areas all over the place. Old Volkswagen maintenance. Arranging dry flowers. The narrower you cut it the better. Sure there are some general blogs that work, but they started years before you did. Nowadays you need to focus.

It is imperative that you know your customers, and do adequate market research.

Ask yourself: Who is my customer? Who isn't my customer? Then focus your marketing efforts to reach your target customers most effectively.

Before we dive into site structure in detail, we need to first understand why site structure is important for natural SEO. A common misconception is that when you perform a search that the search engine goes out and quickly searches the Internet and brings you the results.

A search engine sends out agents (a.k.a. spiders, robots, crawlers) to surf the Internet and bring back what they find and deposit that information in the search engine's databases. So when you search, you're actually searching a database that has collected and stored information on the Internet.

Why is this important? Making friends with these agents or robots is a vital part of SEO.

Much of how you structure your Web site will be to befriend these robots, welcome them into your site, offer them something to drink and load them up with "relevant" information that they can take back to their home database. This type of site structure is commonly referred to as "Search Engine Friendly Design."

Search Engine Optimization Friendly Web Design

Developing your site to be "search engine friendly" is one aspect of SEO best practices. The idea is to simply design your site so that the visiting robot can read and take notes (or index) all relevant aspects of each page of your site.

If your site is designed poorly or doesn't have links to all of your pages, then the robot will bypass those pages and only report on what it sees. Designing your entire site with Flash or using images in place of text are great ways to be mostly "invisible" to search engines, because the robots can't accurately read Flash content or text embedded in an image (yet).

One Page at a Time (No SEO Shortcuts)

The first principle to understand in designing your site is that you don't optimize your whole site all at once. You're optimizing each and every page of your site individually.

Many people think they only need to optimize their home page and then they're done. Many times when you click on a link from a SERP, it will take you to a specific page on your site. Thus, SEO is a very time-consuming and tedious ongoing process that needs to be carefully thought out and executed.

Page Structure

So let's look at the most important elements on each page that will require attention. To understand these concepts, it helps to have some basic understanding of HTML. HTML is the language that Web browsers and search engine spiders read and interpret.

The first set of tags to look at are meta tags, which often have the mystique of being the magic solution to get top rankings in search engines. Not. The best value you will get is the ability to control to some degree how Web pages are described by some search engines. So let's take a closer look.

Meta Keywords and Description Tags

The meta keyword and description tags allow you to influence the keywords and description of your page in some of the search engines. These tags are typically located in the <HEAD> section of an HTML page and look something like this:

<head>

<title>Search Engine Marketing Tips & Search Engine News - Search Engine Watch (SEW)</title>

<meta name="keywords" content="search engine marketing, meta tags, top search engines, search engine submission, searchenginewatch" />

<meta name="description" content="Search Engine Watch is the authoritative guide to search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO), offering the latest news about search engines." />

</head>

The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important only for the search engines that support it. That's it.

The main benefit is to help reinforce what your page is about. I recommend no more than two to three keywords in each tag for each page of your site. It's also important that any keywords listed are directly related to the content on that particular Web page.

For the meta description tag, the text you want to be shown as your Web page description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag. Generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed. Again, the idea of good meta keywords and description tags is simply to give the search engine some "help" in determining what a particular Web page is about.

The general idea here is that time is taken to interview or otherwise get to know the visitors that will be coming to your site and anticipate their needs and integrate this knowledge into the design and structure of your site. Search engines love sites that provide a great user experience. So as you consider your site structure please do not leave this out. You will reap great dividends by doing so.

Keyword Optimization

Hopefully you have taken the time to go through a keyword research project and have come up with keywords that you feel will perform to your liking. If not, please take a look at my article on Keyword Discovery 101 for ideas on how best to do this. Armed with a set of 1 to 3 keywords per page, you will embed these keywords on the page to help emphasize what the page is all about. In part 1 of this article, I discussed the proper use of meta tags. Now we will look at the other, more important tags that will help you do this.

<Title> Tag

The Web page title tag is one of the most important places to put your keyword phrases. Many Web sites suffer poor rankings simply because they miss this step. This is crucial to search engines and how they may decide to rank your site. Whatever text you place in the title tag (between the <Title> and </Title>) will appear in the top bar of someone's browser when they view the web page. It will also be the "headline" of the page when it appears in the SERPs.

Keyword Emphasis

Just like the title of a document, header tags contain the main message of what your page is all about. In the html code you can use <h1> your heading here </h1>. You can also use h2, h3, etc., representing other headlines on the page. But h1 is always the best to place for your most important keywords, since that tells the search engines that this is the most important headline. Bolding or italicizing your fonts is another way to place emphasis on keywords. This again works for the search engines and visitors of your site.

URL Structure

When setting up your folder structure, focus on creating descriptive folders and filenames for the documents on your Web site. Not only will this help search engine spiders crawl and understand your site better, it will also create URLs that are easier for others that want to link to your site. For example, if you were a user (or a search engine spider) which of these URLs would you be most likely to link to:

http://www.myreallycoolwebsiteimademyself.com/pages/01bde3assef/x2/1234dse33sew.htm

or

http://www.my-website.com/movie-reviews/Ironman-2008.htm

The content of these pages might be identical, but the second one is obviously better for search engines and Web site visitors, who will both have an idea of the page content from the URL itself. This will lead to better search engine rankings as well as potentially more incoming links.

Site Navigation & Internal Links

One of the most important aspects of SEO-friendly site design is the structure of your navigation and internal links. Make sure that there are easy to follow links to every page of your site that you want the search engines to see. A site map can help improve the ability of the search engines to crawl your Web site. Avoid embedding your site navigation in Javascript, Flash or other code that the search engines typically ignore or can't interpret. Include key search terms in your link text and focus on making your site easy to navigate for both users and search engines.

Finally, consider adding an XML sitemap to your site, which can be submitted to search engines to provide "hints" about the content and pages of your site. To get started with XML sitemaps, see: XML-sitemaps.com.

Armed with these basic guidelines and tips, you will be on your way to developing a great site that will bring you in good standing with search engines and also to your visitors. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

E-commerce applications for Web sites can take thousands of hours to build, and require patience and determination on the part of the organization awaiting its "new toy." The end result of such a project can be beautiful, much like a custom motorcycle or hot rod may look to an owner once completed.

Unfortunately, these product-shuffling and category-dealing applications can also wreak havoc for automated search engine crawlers out to index sites leveraging these applications. This can lead to less-than optimal performance for the site's pages within search engine results for related queries.

As with large-scale Web site designs and redesigns, putting SEO off until after the fact can be a costly mistake. An internal case study showed an example where a site owner could have saved in excess of $100,000 by incorporating SEO into the interactive design plan instead of going back and making changes to an existing site to implement SEO best practices.

Over the past few months, our SEO team has worked on redesigns of three sites using IBM Websphere Commerce for e-commerce functionality. We've also advised on Microsoft applications being developed for clients, in order for the end product to be "SEO-friendly."

It's important to clearly delineate between "SEO-friendly" and "optimized," because statements of work have to be explicit in describing the final product. Typically, SEO-friendly means that the application will be scalable should a full SEO initiative be launched in the future. Optimized means enterprise-level SEO was performed during the development of the application, and the finished product is more likely to rank within search engines.

Let's look at three high-level topics to consider if you plan to include SEO in business requirements for the development of an e-commerce application: internal process, out-of-the-box functionality, and content equity.

Internal Process

Unique teams from our Java/IBM Practice and our Search Practice work on all three of the Websphere Commerce Projects, with a little overlap at the management/executive level. Naturally, it's difficult to easily transfer learnings and experiences from one team to another in real time, but the common SEO bond has helped speed up some of this sharing. Post-project feedback sessions are crucial to for future efficiencies.

Each of the project teams has slightly different internal communication dynamics, but one common bond is the use of tracking tasks and their corresponding owners.

Some businesses rely on documentation of business requirements clearly explaining the "what" prior to getting to the "how." If there's no smooth system to ensure that issues are being resolved, it could be a nightmare for a project manager to stay on top of things and properly prioritize. Without this order, it would also be difficult to work in the SEO requirements and best practices because developers who don't have the skill set may overlook SEO ramifications.

Out-of-the-Box Functionality

Some e-commerce applications developers actually pause to consider SEO, and they're often rewarded when they find that many systems, including Websphere Commerce, have some additional functionality that they describe as "SEO-friendly." Using these out-of-the-box (OOTB) features can certainly be very helpful when it comes to designing a more search-friendly application. However, they aren't silver bullets. Our technical engineer has openly questioned some of the OOTB recommendations of some applications as being potentially more harmful than helpful.

If you plan to use the OOTB SEO features of any e-commerce application, run the ideas past an engineer with deep and current SEO technical knowledge. Although many features are helpful, some are potentially risky from a Webmaster guidelines standpoint. Websphere Commerce has an OOTB URL rewrite that, if done properly, makes the URLs look much cleaner than most WC sites. However, in terms of a continuum, the OOTB rewrite is still several stages away from the optimal optimized URL.

Content Equity

Content is still king, albeit sometimes ruled by his queen, linking. At the root, many e-commerce applications simply collect and distribute related products onto a dynamically generated page. Often, there is no consideration made for HTML content that describes the particular product other than the database-driven short and possibly long descriptions.

Unfortunately, in many cases this content is essentially "stock," and already has been published on countless pages across the Internet. Taking the time to create unique product descriptions can be very valuable.

At the category level and higher, place additional descriptive content on each page. This should help you gain traction within the search engine results for category-type terms.

Content equity is an idea I use to describe how this content actually ends up on a page. Most would think that every bit of content should be able to be controlled (as in the physical placement of the content on the page) by one system. Although in some cases this is true, there are often multiple areas on the backend that could be used to enter text onto the page.

Without getting into the technical specifics, it's important to understand that not all content is equal, and that it may need to get on to the site through a CMS or be coded into the page through a developer.

There are hundreds of considerations when building an e-commerce application, and SEO should be on that list, if you plan to rely on search engine-referred organic traffic. Ideally, the application should be at least SEO-friendly, if not fully optimized, when it comes off the showroom floor.

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Vayu Media is the premier company for local internet advertising using search engine marketing and local search engine optimization. Vayu Media is taking advantage of the consumer shift from traditional media to internet based marketing.  The company's focus is local online business marketing and web design services. The company's strategy to get out into the market place and consult with local businesses face to face has allowed it to make local business owners aware of the opportunity that exists online.  In order to stay relevant in today's market every local business must have an online marketing strategy and Vayu Media can help.

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