A new report in the Financial Times suggests that Google and Intel, in partnership with Sony, will unveil their new "Smart TV" platform later this week at Google's Develop I/O conference in San Francisco.

Details on the "Google TV" platform are still thin, but according to reports in Bloomberg, the new technology, which will be used on set-top boxes, TVs, and other devices, will be powered by Google's Android operating system and run on a revamped version of Intel's Atom chip.

The FT suggests that Google may be unveiling the "Smart TV" technology at its developer conference on May 19 and 20 in order to encourage the Android developer community to "create applications for TVs."

Sony will be incorporating Intel's chip into a line of upcoming products, writes the Wall Street Journal.

Bloomberg describes the "Smart TV" experience as one where "the Internet access will be integrated with advanced television guides, personal content libraries and search."

"The revolution we're about to go through is the biggest single change in television since it went color," Intel's chief executive Paul Otellini said to analysts last week.

The companies have not officially confirmed that the web TV platform is in development.

While  most of the factors have decreased in relevance, the concept of domain trust is having a greater importance than ever. What do we mean by domain trust and how can you get Google to Trust your domain?

Domain trust is an expression that's commonly used these days in SEO circles. Widely recognised as being of significant importance few people are able to offer a clear definition of domain trust and how it can influence search placements.

Here's an explanation of domain trust, what it means and what you can do to build it.

TRUST

The search engines work tirelessly in the pursuit of relevance. The name of their game is to match queries with the most suitable returns. The better they are at it, giving people simple stress free online search experiences that deliver the goods, then the more people will use them. In other words, the more value search adds to users' lives the more value they add to their market price.

Google runs hundreds of tests against websites and checks numerous signals in order to establish relevance. One of the most important qualities that a web site can exhibit is domain trust.

The more domain trust you have the better you rank.

Domain Trust - Who links to you?

To a large extent domain trust is down to proximity. Google loves high quality websites. Well designed, well structured web sites bursting with great content and blessed with large numbers of satisfied visitors - these are Google's trusted domains.

The closer you live to trusted domains, in other words the more direct links your site has from trusted domains, the more trust you gain.

Sites one link removed from the trusted domain network will generate 0.01% web spam. Two or more clicks from the trusted domain network and you are moving in circles that deal in unacceptable levels of spam - levels of 1.2% or more.

Domain Trust - Who you link to

It also matters who you link to. If you link to low trust sites, expect this to damage your domain trust. You're in bad company. Link to trusted sites to boost your own domain trust.

Reciprocal links directories? Don't do it. Why would any credible website link to a site that spams? It wouldn't. Google is wise to this.

Domain Trust - Registration information

Google has been official registrar since 2003. Why? So that it can look under the web bonnet and access important web registration information. Being able to identify the owners of websites  means Google can spot themes. If you own 100 sites and Google spots that 75 of them are spam sites then expect this to be reflected in search placements  through

Domain Trust - User Data Signals

Google collects huge amounts of information about what users do on the web - through Analytics, through the tool bar, free wi-fi and through third party relationships. Signals reveal how naturally a domain is behaving. If the data signals are unusual the domain might well be penalised. Normal behaviour indicates a trust.

Follow Google guidelines, prioritise quality design and quality content and allow domain trust to grow naturally.

• Domain Age - it takes time to build trust and the past history of a domain may effect domain trust.
• Link Profile - essentially looking at the range of sites that you link to comparing the good links compared to the bad links.
• Domain Trust of other sites in a PageRank type relationship.
• Social networking (not yet but maybe in the future)
• On page information such as stop words?
• Links from a white-list of sites which is periodically checked by hand for quality? A list of manually checked sites that are unlikely to become untrustworthy overnight, Wikipedia (this rules out being correct as a factor), BBC, CNN, etc.
• Contact information on a page.
• Rate of link growth, natural growth - number of links grows as  a function of time and the number of pages in a site. More content should mean more link growth.  Is there a natural rate of growth for links depending on site size?
• Duplicate Content - a site that steals content from another site would be more likely to be dodgy.
• Bounce Rate - noisy but could be a secondary factor. It has certainly been touted as a possible ranking factor for a long time. A good site would satisfy the needs of its users but this could still be acheived in one page-view.
• Link distribution - how are the links distributed on the  site. Are there any deep links or is the entire link structure concentrating on the home page?
• Long-tail rankings - sites that appear for many long tail search are more likely to have good content than simple web sites.

Internet Retailer Survey: Search engine marketing remains a top priority as new engines and techniques arise

Things are looking up for retail marketers searching for customers online.

28.0% of merchants report more than 25% of their site traffic stems from paid search advertisements while 51.5% say more than a quarter of their traffic comes from natural search. In the past year, 44.9% of merchants report that the conversion rate on pay-per-click search advertising went up, 16.3% say it went down and 38.8% say their conversion rate held steady. And 47% report more than 25% of their web sales stem from search engine marketing, according to Internet Retailer's new search engine marketing survey of 102 web-only retailers, chain retailers, catalogers and consumer brand manufacturers.

On top of that, 44.6% increased their paid search budgets in the past year and 49% say they will increase it in the year ahead.

"2009 was a peculiar year for search engine marketing. The first two quarters were exceptionally slow. It wasn't until back-to-school season that things really picked up, and then the holiday season was very strong," says Udayan Bose, founder and CEO of NetElixir Inc., a search engine marketing firm. "For the year, for our more than 60 online retail clients, the overall average conversion rate was up 15%. And January this year was a very strong month. All of this positive movement has resulted in exceptional confidence among search advertisers today."

The fundamentals

Search engine marketing is one of Internet retailing's fundamentals. It's the way a huge chunk of online shoppers find retailers and the products they're looking to buy. This is why web merchants keep pouring money into advertising on search results pages and on search engine optimization projects to move up in natural search results.

37.7% of respondents spent more than 50% of their online marketing budget on search engine marketing, both paid search and search engine optimization combined, according to the Internet Retailer survey of IRNewsLink e-newsletter readers conducted last month with e-mail marketing and survey firm Vovici Corp.

24.8% of respondents spent 5% or less of their online marketing budget on search, 3.0% spent 6% to 10%, 7.9% spent 11% to 15%, 2.0% spent 16% to 20%, 6.9% spent 21% to 30%, 13.9% spent 31% to 40%, 4.0% spent 41% to 50%, 5.0% spent 51% to 60%, 11.9% spent 61% to 75%, and 20.8% spent more than 75%.

And money's coming back. 27.0% report more than 50% of their online sales are attributable to search engine marketing. 3.0% report 41% to 50%, 9.0% say 31% to 40%, 8.0% say 26% to 30%, 9.0% report 21% to 25%, 7.0% report 16% to 20%, 11.0% say 11% to 15%, 9.0% say 6% to 10%, and 17.0% report 5% or less.

"Everything we see from the retail side indicates a considerable interest and investment in search related to the overall goal of driving more online sales," says Shar VanBoskirk, a vice president and principal analyst who specializes in search engine marketing at Forrester Research Inc. "All types of retailers are focused on driving more web sales, and search is a terrific way to drive that online sales goal."

A changing landscape

Google dominates the search engine landscape. 19.4% of respondents to the Internet Retailer survey say more than 90% of their search engine traffic comes from Google. 43.9% say 71% to 90%, 25.5% report 50% to 70%, and 11.2% report less than 50%. Yahoo has been the perennial second-place finisher.

But a relative newcomer on the scene, Microsoft Corp.'s Bing, has been making inroads since its launch in June 2009, and it's gaining increasing attention from retail marketers.

In the coming year, 43.4% of merchants plan to shift some paid search spending to Bing. That's no doubt because Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed that Bing will become the search engine used on Yahoo sites, a switch expected to occur within a year. Bing will then become the clear No. 2 to Google in traffic.

In terms of conversion, Google produces the highest conversion rate, says 69.4% of those surveyed, versus 14.3% for Yahoo and 11.2% for Bing. But some experts say Bing is performing better than those survey results suggest.

"For 40% of our online retail clients, Bing even surpasses Google in terms of conversion rates," says Bose of NetElixir. "And for those 40%, we are seeing a very clear shift from Yahoo to Bing. And the only reason is because the conversion rate derived for Bing is significantly superior to Yahoo and in many cases superior to Google."

And there's more, Bose says. "Bing has a higher average order value in most of the cases compared with Yahoo," he adds. "All of this would prompt me to advise any web retailer to look very seriously at Bing as your No. 2 option to Google. Perhaps those in the survey ranking Bing next to Yahoo and Google rate Bing lower because the overall budget is miniscule in comparison to Google. In 2010, more and more online retailers will shift more and more of their search engine spend from Yahoo to Bing."

Picture this

2010 may also see more retailers getting graphic with their search programs. Images in search results have begun popping up, especially on Google, whose Google Base, formerly Froogle, has been testing the use of product images when consumers search for product-related terms.

Type "wheelchair" in Google and within the high-value area of natural search results one will see under the headline "Shopping results for wheelchair" images of wheelchairs along with their names, prices and corresponding retailers. This service is in beta and select retailers provide their images and pricing to Google Base.

One service out of beta is Google Plus, which adds a plus sign to a paid search ad that consumers can click on to drop down images of products with more information. On a paid search ad for wheelchairs from SpinLife, a click on the plus sign displays images of six wheelchairs along with their names and prices. A click on the image or name takes the consumer to the page on the SpinLife site where they can make a purchase.

In the survey, 36.4% of retailers say they are working with search engines to incorporate images into paid and natural search results. 40.4% say they are not, but plan to; 23.2% say no and have no plans to do so.

The image effect

Images seem to be having an effect on consumers searching for products. 23.5% of retailers using images report a 1-5% increase in click-through rates, 17.6% say a 6-10% jump, 11.8% report an 11-15% boost, 2.9% report a 16-20% increase, 5.9% say a more than 20% jump, and 38.2% report no improvement.

"I find it surprising that 38% can have no improvement. You are boosting the text; an improvement has to be there," Bose says. "Images definitely have a positive impact on the overall return. The overall click-through rate has gone up for our clients 11-15%. As long as they are proving to be helpful to the marketer, images definitely will go up in importance in 2010."

Forrester's VanBoskirk agrees that images can enhance the click-through rate for a paid search ad or natural search result, and that the number of images consumers see in search results will increase. However, she feels retailers can make better use of their time elsewhere.

"There are a lot more sophisticated things a retailer can be doing than just throwing an image in the search results," she says. "How can you better tailor the content of your ad to the users' intent, for example. I'm a lot more cynical on the image front. The ultimate value images will show will be tempered by better keyword strategies and better deciphering of users' intent."

Whether it's digging in and enhancing paid keyword strategies, better optimizing an e-commerce site to appear higher in natural search results, trying out new search engines like Bing or testing new techniques like incorporating images into search results, one thing is clear: Retailers have to stay on top of search engine marketing because it is a marketing channel that not only brings in the customers but brings in the cash.

Do you know who is coming to your website?  Who is buying your product?  Where they are coming from?  What they like and dislike? 

Website Analytics are an extremely valuable asset when it comes to your website and your online marketing efforts. The more informed you are on where and how your customers interact with your site, the more effective (and more efficient) your marketing efforts will be. 

There are three key areas where analytics can help drive your internet marketing strategy:

1.      Keywords

Knowing which keywords bring the most value to your site is essential in the success of any online business. Keywords drive content, messaging and more importantly, the right keywords drive sales. 

Analytics provide you with insight into which keywords are working and which keywords are not. A word or phrase you thought described your product may not be what your customers use to describe your product. There is also the chance you have the right keyword, but the wrong content surrounding it.

To gain a better understanding of how your keywords are performing, ask yourself the following questions:

• Which keywords drive traffic to your site?
• Which keywords drive conversions?
• Which keywords drive traffic but aren't converting?

Once you know the answers to these questions you can start to adjust your focus.  Take a look at which keywords convert the best and analyze why:

• Does the keyword describe your product?
• Is the keyword too broad?
• Does your site offer quality content around the keyword? 

If a keyword is driving traffic but not converting, the content surrounding the keyword could be wrong.  Perhaps the keyword is simply targeting customers earlier on in the buying cycle. Someone starting a business may search "business websites" to gain a better understanding of what they should do for their own website. This doesn't necessarily mean they are looking for someone to create a business website for them right now.

 These are important factors to consider when looking at your keyword set and lead us to the next section.

2.      Landing Page Content

One of the greatest assets of any analytics software is the ability to break down your website page by page.  You can see how many people landed on a page, how many people exited a page, where they came from, what keyword they searched to get there, how long they spent on a page and most importantly, you can see if they converted.

By breaking down the top landing pages, you can determine just how customers interact with your website and how with the right design and content, you can give them a great experience.

When thinking about your landing pages, consider the following:

• What are the top landing pages?
• Which pages have the highest bounce rate?
• What pages do people spend the most time on?
• Which pages lead to the most conversions?

We all know the home page is always (or at least 99% of the time) going to be the top landing page; it typically will also have the highest bounce rate. With the home page, the best thing to do is test a few different designs and messages to find which one offers the lowest bounce rate and drives the most conversions overall.

Moving beyond the home page, your internal landing pages can actually be the most valuable. The internal landing pages contain the bulk of the content, i.e. the information your customers are looking for. It's the internal pages that answer your customers' questions and drive them to convert.

Break down the top landing pages and evaluate why they are successful.  What keywords did visitors use to get there?  What type of content is on that page?  What calls to action are you using?  Can this be replicated on other pages?

Knowing what your customers do once they are on your site is just as important as knowing how they got there.

3.      Buying Cycle

How long is the buying cycle for your product or service?  How many times does a customer visit your site before buying?  What are they looking at during that time?  With an online business and website analytics, this information is not just available, it's invaluable.

To begin, answer the following questions:

• How many days after the first visit do people convert?
• Which pages do they visit during that time?
• What content do the pages contain?
• What calls to action are you using?

By knowing where your customers are in the buying cycle, you can really refine your online marketing efforts (this is especially true when it comes to paid search). If you know a typical customer comes to your site and reads 5-7 information-based pages before they convert, you can gear your initial messaging and calls to action around that. Instead of saying "Buy now" you can say "Get more information."

For paid search campaigns, determine which keywords correspond to which point on the buying cycle and drive users to landing pages with the content they need at that point in the process.  Using the same example we used in the "Keywords" section, drive the person searching "business websites" to a page that provides ideas on creating a business website.

Hitting your customers at the right point is extremely important.  A person who comes to your site for information and finds what he/she needs will almost always come back to you when they are ready to buy.

Conclusion

Website Analytics offers online businesses an easy and smart way to learn about their customers and more importantly, learn how customers interact with their website.  By simply taking the time to evaluate the data, you can create an online marketing strategy based on actual customer needs and behavior.  That is the sort of thing marketers have been trying to do for ages! Vayu Media the Atlanta SEO Company specializes in website analytics to drive true ROI to their clients.

Googlenet

A cure for America's lame and costly broadband?

Apr 1st 2010 | LOS ANGELES | From The Economist online

Google-charming in Ann Arbor

THEY plunged into icy waters, swam with sharks, performed aerobatic feats, offered to name their cities, even their first born, after it--all to get Google to pick their communities as test-beds for the ultra-fast fibre networks it plans to start rolling out in the near future. By March 26th, the deadline for submissions, no fewer than 1,100 towns, cities and states across America had put their names forward. Altogether, nearly 200,000 individuals wrote letters beseeching Google to consider their places of residence.

The overwhelming response to the search company's announcement in February that it aspired to build a handful of fibre-optic networks to connect settlements of 50,000 to 500,000 people to the internet at speeds of up to one gigabit a second--over 200 times faster than typical access speeds in America today--showed just how hungry people around the country are for better, faster internet access. By raising the stakes two orders of magnitude, Google hopes to find out what the killer applications will be when speed of access is no longer a constraint and capacity is effectively infinite. The firm did something similar when it launched Gmail with unprecedented storage space at no charge. There is no question that if Google's giganets come to fruition, they will change the competitive landscape of broadband America, and force incumbent ISPs (internet service providers) to scrap their existing business plans.

Two out of three Americans are said to have broadband access, whatever that means. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires transmission rates to be greater than 768 kilobits a second for a service to be classed as broadband. That has not stopped ISPs from delivering far less and charging a hefty premium over the price of dial-up connections to the internet. And do not believe their adverts claiming download speeds of so many megabits a second. The FCC reckons most web surfers are lucky to get half the advertised speed.

For fixed-line connections to the home, the average download speed across the United States is--despite what various ISPs claim--little more four megabits a second. Compare that with download speeds of up to 100 megabits a second available in the more advanced countries of Asia and Europe. In terms of broadband speed, the United States ranks 19th among the 30 industrial countries that are members of the OECD.

Worse, because they have so little choice, Americans pay through the nose for the privilege of going online. According to the New America Foundation, a 100-megabit connection costs $16 a month in Sweden and $24 a month in South Korea. In high-price Japan, your correspondent gets 160 megabits a second for ¥6,000 ($65) a month. That is 200 times faster than the "end of the line" service he gets in California, for only three times the price. Where they can find it, Americans pay $145 a month for 50 megabits a second.

Over the past year, hopes have risen among Americans that something might finally be done about the third-world quality of their internet access. People tolerated such things when all they used the internet for was e-mail, searching for information and uploading musings to Facebook accounts. But smart-phones and internet-connected television sets have changed that. The future is not simply about watching jerky YouTube clips or episodes from Hulu on a personal computer. Internet-connected HDTV needs broadband access capable of at least six megabits a second if it is to download high-definition programmes from internet sources.

And that is just within the home. In the commercial world, applications like Telepresence (which lets remote participants feel they are all in the same room together) demand rates of 24 megabits a second. Remote surgery needs more than 10 megabits a second. The same goes for video instant messaging. A whole host of applications in education, government, health care, public safety and energy management become possible once bandwidth is no longer a constraint. This is what Google intends to investigate.

The FCC's national broadband plan, foreshadowed by last year's economic stimulus bill and published on March 16th, was supposed to provide a way to drag the country's woeful broadband infrastructure into the 21st century. In short, to give affordable high-speed access to the internet to places in the countryside that cannot get it at the moment, and to boost dramatically the speed of service to those that can.

The report--all 376 pages of it--has, however, been greeted by a resounding raspberry. It calls for 100m households to get 100-megabit access by 2020, while the rest of the country is assured at least four megabits a second. Americans, in other words, will have to wait another decade to get what other wealthy countries now take for granted.

That raspberry may be a little unfair. At least, the FCC recognises that the main reason why prices have remained so high and speeds so low in America is the lack of effective competition. Many countries have devised ways for telecommunications companies to share the cost of building their broadband networks while competing ferociously for customers over that infrastructure once it has been built. Others have achieved something similar by having an independent authority build and maintain the network and then leasing access to all and sundry.

America, by contrast, has put its faith in rival forms of the infrastructure itself--supplied, on the one hand, by telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T and, on the other, by cable-television firms such as Comcast and Time Warner. Unfortunately, the result has not been competition to beat down prices and boost speeds, but cosy duopolies that keep bandwidth scarce and carve the market up between incumbents.

The FCC thinks it can liven things up by giving wireless carriers a better chance to compete in the broadband business. To that end, it plans to release a further 500 megahertz of bandwidth over the next decade and auction it to the mobile carriers.

There are two problems here. One is that the largest chunk of the airwaves in question--some 20 television channels--is owned by broadcasters, who will be reluctant to part with it, even if offered a slice of the auction profits to do so. The other is that the biggest wireless carriers--namely, Verizon and AT&T--are an integral part of the duopoly as it is. It is difficult to see them as lively sources of competition. If anything, giving wireless carriers a greater role in broadband access could make life easier still for the incumbents. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that just days before the FCC released its final report, Verizon quietly pulled the plug on its FiOS fibre-optic "triple-play" of television, telephone and broadband service, the only one in America that came close to rivalling speeds available in Japan and South Korea. A third of Verizon's customers (your correspondent included) will now be left without the fibre option.

Though it cost Verizon a hefty $1,350 to bring fibre into a home, the $19 billion investment in FiOS was considered worthwhile. It stemmed the tide of telephone subscribers defecting to cable companies, which offered faster internet access bundled in their television and telephone packages at the time. In future, presumably, Verizon will offer customers who missed out on FiOS a chance to get high-speed broadband over the airwaves instead of through an optical pipe. The LTE (long-term evolution) technology that Verizon and other wireless carriers are testing is vastly cheaper to install than fibre. And with tweaks, LTE should be able to offer data rates of 150 megabits a second or more--much the same as the DOCSIS 3.0 broadband technology being deployed by the cable companies.

Nevertheless, in the absence of serious competition, broadband capacity throughout the United States will continue to be constrained--and Americans will remain stuck with extortionate internet charges. No wonder there was such a rush for a piece of Google's promised giganet.

It is time a gain to break out of your tunnel vision.  Schedule an hour of your time some time this week. Shut off your phones and laptops. Grab a coffee and ponder the basic 80/20 rule.  This review should happen periodically. We all tend to fall into old habits again and again...

Do you ever notice how of all your customers, typically you've only got a few that cause you problems...but boy do they cause problems!

No doubt you've heard of the 80/20 Rule, which is actually another name for what was originally called the Pareto Principle.

The gist of the Rule is that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts, and likewise, 80% of your problems will come from 20% of your customers.

The question I love to pose to business owners is, "How can you use this principle to your advantage in your business?"

There a few major ways you can use this principle to your advantage in your business:

1. Fire the 20% of your customers that give you more problems than profit.
• Look, the headache you incur just to keep these people happy isn't worth what little they bring in for you.  It's in the best interest of your sanity and energy level to just let them go - they can go cause someone else problems.  You won't even notice the fact they're gone when you look at your balance sheet.
2. Focus on the 20% of your customers that bring in 80% of your profits
• These are your good customers that are a joy to work with and that come back to buy from you repeatedly (which is what you ultimately need if you want to make any real money).
• You'll have more free time to service them now that you're not messing around with the lower 20% that was wasting all your time and energy!
3. Realize that the 80/20 Rule applies to your top 20% all over again
• What this means is that when looking at your top 20% of customers (let's say there are 20 of them for easy math), 20% of those 20 equals 4 customers.  And if those 4 customers (20% of the top 20%) are responsible for 80% of the profit from the original 80%, that means those 4 customers are responsible for 64% of your total profits! (80% of 80% is 64%)
• So if your net profits were $100, 4 customers will statistically be responsible for $64 of it!

Once you've identified your best customers, be sure to create incentives and preferred customer programs to keep those top 20% and top-top 4% happy, loyal, and evangelistic customers for life and you'll enjoy higher profits, less stress, and an overall better quality of life.

Many times owners of small businesses have a hard time letting go of that lower 20% of their customer base, thinking that they'll make more of an impact than they actually will, myself included.

But I speak from experience when I say, "You won't notice a dime of it!", and the peace of mind that comes from not having to deal with yet another email or phone call about issue #3,467 is a wonderfully liberating thing!

How do you know when content quality is good enough? This question is interesting because it's rooted in a mindset of "What is required to get the best SEO results?"

However, this same question can be applied quite a bit more broadly. Here are some of the ways you can evaluate that question.

1. On-page SEO

Years ago, content developed specifically for on-page SEO purposes generally meant some level of artificially inserting keywords into the content. When you hear people talking about SEO copywriting, they essentially mean "What keywords do you want to make sure are included in the article?"

Two problems here: the resulting articles often don't really read that well (bad for users), and the search engines are getting increasingly better at detecting when content isn't written completely naturally. There is little win in having the search engine conclude that your content is either poorly written or written with the intent to manipulate search rankings. Think of this in the light of the search engine's goals to provide a quality experience to their users, and you can see that this easily could be a negative ranking factor.

Those concerns noted, there is a lot of reason to think about on-page SEO in creating a well structured content strategy. It helps feed the long tail of search and can increase the search engine's perception regarding the quality of the pages of your site.

2. Conversion

Content can also be developed with a focus on conversion. This is often done through A/B testing or multivariate testing, using conversion optimization software. A free product that does this pretty well is Google Website Optimizer.

The concept is to do a lot of testing of various versions on your pages, measure which ones convert the best, and then pick the best converting one. Often, simple changes can have the best impact. One common principle that people espouse in conversion optimization is that "less is more," or that one thing worth testing is reducing the amount of distractions on the page (e.g., links to other resources or the presence of much text on the page).

While conversion optimization is extremely valuable, it only looks at part of the question -- how your site converts visitors to a page or set of pages on your site. Also, it doesn't take into account the obvious search engine benefits of having text on your page.

For example, you wouldn't want to increase your conversion by 30 percent but cut your traffic in half because you took the content off the page. Clearly, you want to strike a balance between SEO and conversion optimization.

3. Link Worthiness

When pursuing links to your site (without buying them or doing link swaps), one of the key questions is why someone should consider linking to your site. Recognized opinion leaders and recognized brands (e.g. Coca-Cola) get links because of who they are. If you don't fall into one of those two categories, then you need to fall back on providing something unique and compelling on your Web site in order to get links to it.

Some people use the term "link bait" to the concept of generating content solely for the purposes of attracting links. However, care is needed here too, because if you become too focused on using the content to attract links, you may create content that isn't relevant to your site, or otherwise not good for the image of your site.

4. Social Media Environments

Will users of Twitter and Facebook start sending around links to your content? Will StumbleUpon users stumble it?

On the other side of the coin, you don't want these networks to have a negative reaction to what you produce. The impact of how this will affect your content development strategy is growing. In a few years time it could well be a dominating consideration.

Summary

When you're considering your content development strategy, and how much effort to put into creating high quality content, consider all four of these factors. There certainly can be individual pages on your site where only one or two of the above factors apply, but, for your Web site overall, make sure your content strategy take all four pieces into account.