As you might imagine, as a Web hosting company, WestHost receives requests all the time from prospective and existing hosting clients for help on how to market their Web site. Attracting exposure for your Web site comes in a variety of formats. On the most basic level though, traffic in any form can really be broken down into two categories: natural/organic, and paid. Keyword optimization on your Web site plays a substantial role in both of these categories.

One of the most common mistakes I see people make on their Web site is the result of lack of knowledge or experience with Internet marketing. The mistake is simply the omission of any keyword optimization on the Web site. Any brick-and-mortar business owner understands the concepts of marketing a traditional business using traditional methods, but a substantial portion of these same real-world savvy people generally have little to no experience with Internet marketing, and little idea of how to proceed once they have their Web site online.

Of course by now, most anyone who has a Web site understands the importance of being listed in search engines, but many don’t generally understand how to rank well for their service/product. There are lots of different ways to optimize your Web site by manipulating title tags, header tags, placement of elements on the Web site, navigation, and more. One of the first methods of optimization though is selecting targeted keywords to place on your Web site to “tell” search engines what your Web site is actually about.

Keyword optimization is really the 101 of fine-tuning your Web site to receive traffic. Lacking relevant textual content on your Web site, you will have a very difficult time coming up in search listings on any reputable search engine. If you’re participating in paid keyword advertising, then you’ll pay more for your selected words if you have poorly optimized pages than you would if you had pages that were optimized well. Determining which keywords to target, initially, is as simple as writing down keywords relevant to the product or services you provide. For instance, if you own a bike shop and you’re looking to optimize your Web site with relevant keywords, you might consider initially basic terms like ‘bike’ or ‘bicycles’. The object after generating your list of basic keywords is simply to begin to fine-tune them into more specialized categories. For instance, you might then begin to list keywords relevant to specific types of bikes, such as ‘mountain bikes’, ‘bmx bikes’, ‘road bikes’. Variants of those terms would be beneficial as well, such as substituting ‘bicycles’ for ‘bikes’ in the phrase ‘mountain bikes’. Once you have your keywords in place that are relevant to the content on your particular Web site or landing page, you then pepper your product/service specific pages with those specific keywords to “optimize” that particular page for a keyword, or perhaps a few keywords. Be careful not to use the term so often that it might be considered excessive on that page.

Good keyword optimization is paramount for your Web site; it has substantial affect on your ability to rank in natural/organic listings with all search engines. In addition to that, keyword optimization is also factored into such things as your quality score when purchasing advertising through Google’s Adwords.

To help with this beginning process of optimizing your Web site with keywords, consider using any of the following tools. These tools help you choose keywords by listing such items as competition among the term and search volume, and also variations of the term, which oftentimes leads to keywords that are relevant to your Web site, but that you may not have thought of by yourself.

KeywordDiscovery

Wordtracker

Google Keyword Tool

GoodKeywords

This certainly doesn’t sound like the title of a blog post you would expect from a client-centric company like WestHost. I was recently told about a new book entitled “The Best Service is No Service.” The concept is very fitting for the hosting industry. The vast majority of our clients want the ability to easily complete tasks on their own versus having to drop us an e-mail or pick up the phone and have us do it. Under the perfect conditions they never have to contact us because everything is easily available for them to do on their own.

A great non-hosting industry example of this is Verizon Wireless. If you go back approximately two years, the process for adding an additional cell phone line and activating it required two separate phone calls. They were miserable long calls, filled with legal contract recordings. While the agents generally offered very friendly service, as a customer it was still a dreaded experience. Today both of these tasks can be completed online in a couple of minutes and I’m a much happier Verizon Wireless customer because of it.

We recently completed a major upgrade to our infrastructure that improved a number of things in regards to this. But there is still a lot more we plan to do inside our control panel and billing system to allow clients to have the control they desire. This is what we’ll be working on over the next year. But what will not change is having our great client service team available 24/7/365 to back you up if you need our help. Expect to hear more details on our continuing upgrades in the coming months.

I’m pleased to announce that we have recently upgraded plan limits at WestHost! Existing clients on our standard or reseller Web hosting plans have received significant increases to disk space, bandwidth, and in some cases the number of e-mail accounts, for FREE. Some of these plans received upgrades that tripled or even quadrupled their previous amounts.

Dedicated server plans have also been upgraded, and now come with increased bandwidth. Existing dedicated server clients on the same payment options as our current dedicated servers plans will receive the increases to their bandwidth automatically.

In addition to the increase in standard plans, WestHost is also offering our Spring Special through May 31st for new accounts. The Spring Special offers some of the best disk space and bandwidth amounts we’ve ever offered!

With over 60 million blogs in the world, attracting readers can be difficult even if you link to other Web sites and blogs. The reason being of course is that there are simply too many blogs and tens of thousands are added and deleted every day. Thankfully, the online world offers a few tools to help bloggers get noticed. However, before we get to the “how”, let’s talk about the “what”.

First, before you can attract readers, you need to offer something they will be interested in. A good blog is a lot like a product. If you design and market your product to the target market of “everybody,” chances are you won’t be very successful. A reader’s time is very limited (like everybody else) and they will not aimlessly surf the Web in search of any blog. They will rather, conduct narrow searches for information and topics they are interested in. For example, if your blog is very broad and covers a wide range of topics such as your opinions about politics, pet nutrition, and online trading strategies, you will do better to write three separate blogs under each topic. Broadly-based blogs tend not to be very successful unless you are already a popular author or celebrity and people are simply interested in what you think. For the rest of us, the world isn’t all that interested in what we think about anything and everything.

Second, offer something unique. If you don’t know of any other blogs that cover the same topic you do, go surfing for a few hours and chances are you will find several. Become familiar with the competing blogs and make a list of issues they don’t cover or important points they miss. These blogs may also be a good source for traffic to your blog, don’t be afraid to ask for a link. The bottom line on this point is to be unique. Give readers a reason to visit and bookmark your blog.

Third, there is a new Mozilla browser out there called Flock (www.flock.com) that is specialized to social Web browsing and blogging. You can download a free copy at the address above. Flock is currently in version 1.1 and we have identified a few minor bugs in Flock here at WestHost but nothing serious enough to not use it. If you are a serious blogger or social Web surfer, the features will impress you and make keeping track of your social network and many blogs painless. It may also introduce you to many social Web features and sites you were not aware of.

Promoting your blog
1. Make sure your HTML tags (meta, title and H1) reflect your keywords. These may need to be adjusted for every post to include details of what your blog is talking about.

2. Submit your blog to the major search engines and link your blogs together. Submit your blog posts using your narrowly defined keywords, and make sure you are linking each post to other posts. If you would like to boost traffic for a specific post, go back and edit your previous posts, adding a link to the post you are trying to promote. This generally causes a rise in Google rankings.

3. Submit your site to Blog Index sites and other social network sites. Below is a list to get you started but is by no means comprehensive.

• www.myspace.com
• www.facebook.com
• www.stumbleupon.com
• www.zimbo.com
• www.twitter.com
• www.readburner.com
• www.freewebs.com/blogotion
• www.webloogle.com
• www.myblog2u.com
• feedfury.com
• www.rssmicro.com

4. Subscribe to the leading blogs and industry RSS feeds. This will keep you abreast of what is going on in the vertical market your blog addresses. Responding to hot issues quickly will generate quick traffic to your blog.

5. Submit your articles to industry leading sites and request a link to your blog if the leading site uses it. This is a great way to get known.

6. Lastly but by far the most important, post to your blog at least once a week. The Web is littered with abandoned or seemingly abandoned blogs. Let your readers know you’re still actively posting by frequently adding to your blog. This will also keep you ranked in the many blog engines.

If you’ve used pay-per-click advertising to any extent to help promote your Web site, the chances are very good that you’ve been a victim of click fraud somewhere down the line. The level of which you may have been affected though, is what click fraud agencies such as Click Forensics, and search engines like Yahoo and Google, don’t agree on.

As you can imagine, it’s a rather predictable scenario. Search engines claim that the amount of click fraud is relatively low (Google claiming less than 1% of click fraud they don’t reimburse for, and Yahoo 2-5%). Consumers and third party agencies specializing in click-fraud, of course, cite numbers much higher, generally in the 12-18% range, with some claiming as high as 60%!

How to combat click fraud has been a hot topic for years. Certainly there are methods that a business can implement to help minimize the potential affect of click fraud both before and after the click. Most PPC advertisers, however, calculate click fraud as simply a cost of doing business, and take little to no measures at all. An alternative is to hire someone to manage your PPC advertising for you, who also specializes in minimizing click fraud, but these services of course cost money and eat into the return on your PPC advertising.

A change is soon on the horizon for PPC and click fraud, which should be very beneficial to consumers in the long run. Yahoo has recently partnered with third party click-tracking firm Click Forensics. The partnership at first does seem slightly shocking, after all, it isn’t too often in any industry where a business voluntarily partners with someone whose specialty is keeping them honest. The partnership is a measure that could significantly reduce Yahoo’s revenue through refunded fraudulent clicks if fraud rates are as high as Click Forensics believes them to be.

On the other hand, this partnership potentially offers Yahoo a new platform in which to compete with Google on. Yahoo isn’t driving the traffic that Google is, but if the quality of traffic is better by reducing, minimizing, or at least accurately identifying fraudulent clicks that come through the network, that’s really one more step in the direction of people using Yahoo in addition to Google (rather than just Google), or even using Yahoo exclusively.

For more information on click fraud, and help eliminating it, have a look at these sites:
Whosclickingwho.com
Click Forensics

Have you ever struggled with your product images in osCommerce? Why are they so distorted? Why do they look pixelated?

Lets look at getting these images under control. After all, bad product images are not going to help sell the product.

First, keep in mind that you want to upload a decent size image. The majority of problems I see with poor quality product images in osCommerce result from the images being too small. This causes them to be blown up by the browser where they are displayed on the site. To avoid this, be sure to upload an image at least as large as the largest it will be displayed. By default in osCommerce this is 100 pixels wide by 80 pixels high. The image pop-up window will display the image at what ever size is uploaded so we don’t need to worry about that here.

*Getting rid of the distorted, or stretched image:
This is probably the easiest of the fixes. The product image sizes are handled within the osCommerce administration area. You will want to go to Configuration > Images in the admin. The ‘Small Image Width’ and ‘Small Image Height’ are the fields that control the product images (everything from the new products, the product information page, to the shopping cart). For starters you will want to decide if you want to restrict images by width or height. Restricting the images by both is where a lot of the problems come in to play. In most cases I think it works out best to restrict by the width. To do this simply edit the Small Image Height value and delete it. Then set the Small Image Width to the maximum width you want to allow, between 150-200 is usually good for the basic osCommerce store.

Now when you check out your store front you will notice that the images will no longer be distorted or stretched. The height of the image will be automatically figured based on the width that you entered in the administration area.

*Making your ’shrunken’ images clearer
You will notice when you upload a nice size product image (300 x 300 or larger) for the product image pop-up, that the other places it is displayed smaller are ‘fuzzy’. This is a result of the browser shrinking the large images to the smaller size. Another problem with this is that the browser is actually having to download the larger image, and then display it smaller. This obviously can hurt your page load times. There are multiple modules available that offer an array of solutions to this issue. I will briefly touch on two different kinds.

You will find modules that create the thumbnail images on the fly (‘On the Fly’ Auto Thumbnailer using GD Library for example). Essentially when the image is needed the module creates a temporary smaller version and serves that to the browser. This option effectively eliminates downloading the larger image and then resizing it. Another benefit is that it does not store cached thumbnail images on the server taking up space. On the same note, a down side is that it creates these thumbnails on the fly each time the image is requested.

Another module solution is one that creates a cached version of the thumbnail image on the server and uses that image file instead of the large version (Automatic Thumbnails for example). The main benefit here is that you are not recreating the thumbnail on the fly each time it is requested. The module simply creates the thumbnail image on the server the first time it is requested and then uses that for each subsequent image request. I guess you could argue that the downside to this is that it creates images on your server and therefore requires space.

With either option the end result will be much clearer, better looking smaller product images in your store. Let’s face it, product images go a long way to selling a product. They need to be the correct proportion and they need to be clear.

As a growing company we are always looking for talented professionals to join our team. Over the past 10 years we have added many new employees to WestHost. We have expanded our company by adding new departments, as well as growing existing departments. It has been exciting to see new talent enter our company and help us to continue to provide industry leading Web hosting services to clients from around the world. With this tremendous growth over the years we have come close to reaching our building capacity in terms of office space at our corporate location. Because of this we have recently expanded our office locations. One example of this is a new satellite office in Salt Lake City Utah. This office expansion will help us to bring on experienced professionals from areas outside our corporate location.

As we work towards our main goal, to help businesses and individuals harness the power of the Internet, we desire to meet our growth needs with employees who have the knowledge, experience and character to meet our company goals and client expectations. Many of our clients have commented about the great support they receive from WestHost. In many instances, the quality of support they receive from us is unmatched within or without the Web hosting industry. In order to continue to meet these expectations, we will continue to grow well into the future. Surely our growth over the past 10 years in business has prepared us well for the next 10 years to come!

As someone that works extensively in online marketing, and as someone who works as a Web master for a number of sites, I’m always on the prowl for innovative and helpful tools that automate the processes of Web site maintenance and optimization. If you’ve ever had the task of maintaining one or more Web sites, you probably have your own slew of tools that you have acquired over the years that do the same thing for you.

Previously, I blogged about the SEO for Firefox plug-in, which I find to be a particularly useful tool in quick analysis of Google search results. Another great tool I’ve taken a liking to is Tilman Hausherr’s Xenu. This little tool is a download, rather than a browser-based client, that essentially spiders through your site checking all the links to images, Web pages, plug-ins, backgrounds, style sheets, applets, etc. If you have a broken link on your site, the tool reports back to you the location of the link so you can fix the problem. Xenu is a handy little tool for any sized site, and not only is it easy-to-use and good at what it does, but it’s also FREE!

More information on Xenu

Early adopters to Web 2.0 will be richly rewarded as is typical of all those who move before their competitors in new opportunities. Those who wait will most likely be doomed to a lot of head-scratching as they try to catch up to the new leaders. The most difficult part about being an early adopter is uncertainty. Companies who typically like to have all the data and all the answers before making a move will find it very difficult to be an early adopter in Web 2.0 technology and strategies. The truth is; so much is still unknown about how the market will respond to socially enabled companies and how consumers may use or misuse the new medium?

More than anything, the fire beneath the boiling pot of Web 2.0 is about freedom and honestly. The history of commerce reads much like a communistic community of tight controls and rigid rules fueled by the insatiable lust for power and dominance, where the consumer (the source of power) was treated with suspicion. You’ll find many companies out there today still trying to operate under the old rules which is most evidenced by the phrase, “We can’t do that it is against our policy.” What companies like this are saying is that they have decided to create rules to limit and control their customers… at any cost. For years, the commercial world has been saying the customer is king and the customer is always right. Web 2.0 philosophies has changed that hollow slogan and pointed it back to the corporate world in the form of, “I am the king and the bringer of all your power and if you don’t think I’m right, I will take by business elsewhere along with everybody I know and everybody within my social network.” In some cases, that social network can include the world.

During the 1920’s in the U.S., one of the hot issues before congress was how to break the bank trust and limit the control of big corporations. Perhaps born out of that era (and arguably due to some of the bad decisions that were made), the world public has grown more suspicious and cautious of large corporations.

Back in the early 80’s, snowboards rose to popularity and became the choice of the rising X generation over skiing. While the fundamentals between snowboarding and skiing are vastly different, even more pronounced was the attitude of the teenaged snowboarder. The attitude of the snowboarder was typical for most of the X generation which was centered on antiestablishment and distrust, not unlike their parent’s generation in the 1960’s (history does repeat itself).

The most interesting thing about the early, antiestablishment snowboarders was their buying habits. Small start-up snowboard manufactures (in the minds of snowboarders) were viewed as making the best and most preferred boards. However, when the small manufactures became too large and too successful, they were all of a sudden seen as inferior to the new comers. Some of the ski manufacture giants such as France-based Rossignol tried to enter the snowboard market, but failed due to this untrusting mindset. This was also true of even the retailers. Snowboarders preferred the small specialty snowboard shops instead of the sport superstores. Snowboard manufactures quickly learned that they couldn’t appear to be “big” to their customers. Twenty years later, these antiestablishment teenagers are now thirty-somethings and their attitudes, while tempered somewhat are largely the same. Unlike their parents who were also antiestablishment and their grandparents in the 1920’s, these thirty-somethings have a voice, they have the Internet, they have power. And because of the Internet, all consumers now have the same power, which spells huge changes for world commerce. Enter Web 2.0.

Preparing for Web 2.0

Check your internal attitudes
I provided the foregoing to help you realize the nature of change that is on the horizon and what that will mean for businesses everywhere. The first and arguably the most important effect Web 2.0 will have on your company is how your company views and treats its customers before, during and after the sale. In the past, when companies made a sale, it was viewed as the attainment of the goal, and happy hour shortly followed. Today, making a sale is a double-edged sword and while still the goal, it could be the very thing that will cause you to loose that customer forever, and countless other potential (and even existing) customers. In today’s world, consumers talk and everyone listens. Even more important, consumer talk is prized and valued higher than a company’s carefully crafted marketing messages and smooth PR.

To fully embrace Web 2.0, customers need to be viewed as they really are: the provider of all company goals, dreams and aspirations. They are no longer just a means to an end. Stellar examples of Web 2.0 ready companies include JetBlue, Nordstrom, Tesco, Johnson & Johnson and many many others. I encourage you to Google any of these companies and read what industry analysts have to say and especially what consumers say about them. Across the board, you will find a common theme: consumers are people, our scarcest resource and exceptional products and services (especially services) are the only thing that will keep us in businesses.

Appoint or hire a talker
I’m going to make a prediction that within 10 years, we will see a new type of PR manager whose responsibility will be to socially interact with the industry. This person will know all there is to know about the company (the good, bad and ugly) and be expert in dealing with and communicating with others –finally a job description that really requires a “people person.” We will see new titles like, Social Communications Manager (SCM), or Consumer Ambassador (CA) creep into the workplace.

Leave the office
Your new SCM or CA’s job will be to manage the social interactions of your company. They will oversee the set up and manage the day to day interactions with consumers on social Web sites. Start with a company page on MySpace and Facebook or better yet, allow your SCM or CA set up a personal site as an employee of your company. Search the Web for other social networking sites such as vertical social networks specific to your industry. These type of Web sites are springing up almost daily and it will soon be more than a full time job to maintain them.

The goals for your new SCM or CA is to get out of the office in a cyber sort of way, and interact, chat, listen and report to the company what is being written on the walls of the world. In order for your SCM or CA to be taken seriously and not just another polished PR robot, you need to give them license to talk about the bad and the ugly and not just the good, or worse, allowing them to only talk about the euphoric vision you want your customers to believe. Being honest and forthright about mistakes will endear customers to you not drive them away. Remember the Tylenol poisonings in the late 80’s? Though not their fault, McNeil (the parent company of Tylenol) took responsibility, pulled every bottle off every shelf and took the punch square in the chops. The result, they are still in business today and still the industry leader. When polled, consumers said they trusted the Tylenol brand more after the incident, than before. That’s what’s called, turning a very bad, out-of-business situation into a major win.

The other thing your SCM or CA should do is manage your company blog and manage its distribution. New posts to your blog should happen at least every 48 hours or sooner. There are many blogging services and software packages available that make writing and archiving easy and painless. Many will also help manage distribution and set up RSS feeds, which is a must.

Tear down the walls
How many entry points does your Web site currently have? While most Web sites can technically be entered at any page if one has the correct URL realistically, most have one or two home or landing pages where traffic is funneled. Working with your SCM or CA, create new entry points that make sense with the social networks you are participating in. This might mean setting up an RSS feed to your blog, your discussion boards or your internal and external newsletters. Maybe it’s opening links into your picture library, or open feeds (video clips) of a press conference or even your company holiday party on YouTube.

Next, evaluate your search engine strategies and rework them to be more socially friendly. Look at what pages are being indexed and see what you could add to your indexed pages based upon the social networks you are now a member of. Look at what is being spidered by other social networks and make sure your best foot is forward. Lastly, determine if new landing pages or even whole new sections of your Web site need to be created to support your new social initiatives and make sure they are being submitted to the search engines.

P.J. Fusco described what I’m talking about very eloquently when she stated, “Where search engine optimization is about building a solid foundation for building strong search strategies, social media optimization (SMO) is primarily about knocking down your site’s walls so content can be readily discovered, distributed, and shared by diverse online communities and social multimedia search portals.”

Implications of what you’re getting into
The implications of social marketing is putting fear into the hearts of many corporate managers and I suppose that emotional response is warranted for some corporations who have much to hide. However, I don’t think social marketing and Web 2.0 is akin to undressing in public, but it is about coming out from behind the counter, showing what’s in our pockets and talking candidly about what we used to call “off the record” stuff. I believe this can be accomplished with our corporate self respect attached and our dignity in check.

What we all need to be prepared to do in Web 2.0 is first identify what the truth is. Second, be able to strategically tell it and like Tylenol, always do the right thing by the customer. This requires walking the walk and not just issuing a news release. Many things are still yet to be discovered and learned in this new frontier of Web 2.0, but what is certain is one disgruntled consumer can have tremendous power and influence and a company that is not actively participating in that conversation will be assumed guilty. It is an uncertain world out there, but the rewards for the early adaptors are huge. There is also one other thing that is certain about Web 2.0 and that is it will create a new generation of Wall Street leaders, it might even usher in a more mature version of dot com all over again. We can only hope.

Since the advent of the Internet, the English language has gained hundreds of new words and created many new definitions to existing words. Today a person no longer needs an ocean and waves to surf and a browser is no longer someone who aimlessly wanders around a shopping mall. New words and new meanings continue to evolve, for example, if you said you had “Googled” someone just three years ago you would have had a lot of explaining to do.

The problem with this rapidly expanding landscape of new words and meanings is the resulting loss of communication. Most of us have heard of Web 2.0 but at least 80% of the population has no real definition of what it is. Web 2.0 is less about technology and more about how we use the internet. Like the English language, the way we use the Internet has also evolved over the past 15 years. Up until about 2003, the Internet was a very siloed (another new word used to describe a Web site or business that is an island, with marginal interaction with other businesses or Web sites) place. Web sites stood alone with an occasional link to the rest of the world. The only Web sites that offered any amount of links to the Internet at large were directories and search engines, which functioned like the yellow pages. To understand this evolution, it helps to think of the Internet in terms of the brick and mortar retail evolution, since both have evolved along the same lines.

Traveling across the vast open spaces of the United States in 1850, your shopping experience in every town from New York to San Francisco would be the same, the only difference being quantity and selection. In every town, you would walk down a wooden boardwalk and visit each store independently. This was also true when purchasing food. You would have to visit the butcher for meats, the green grocer for produce and… you get the idea. This was akin to the online surfing experience in 1993. Then along came the variety store of the 1930’s and the eventual invention of the shopping mall. This evolution (like the evolution of the Internet) was based upon convenience, price, ease of use, and access. For the Internet, this was the era during the mid to late 90’s where a funny company called Yahoo shocked Wall Street and the fabric of the World Wide Web wrapped the globe. Web sites were still siloed but they were all connected, much like the stores in a shopping mall. Then, some 58 years after 1930, Sam Walton had a monstrous idea, the super center.

The super center has been so successful it has almost achieved a religious status. I actually have a good friend who speaks of going to Wal-Mart as “going to church.” Frightening! This era of the Internet is the online experience that we all know and love. Super sites and super networks offer us cheap stuff and it all arrives at our door within days or hours (there was a company in the 90’s called Cosmo that would even deliver products within 30 minutes in larger U.S. cities). A very interesting and perhaps sobering note about our little history lesson here, is the time span. In the offline world, the evolution from the small specialty store to the super center took approximately 188 years (looking at modern retail history from about 1800 to 1988). The online world only took 15 years to cover the same distance. This means the Internet has evolved about 12 times faster. The implications of that statistic for your online business (no matter how you look at it) mean you have to move quickly and stay alert.

Web 2.0 describes the online evolution beyond where off line retailing has been.

After about 2003 is where the online evolution surpassed off line retail evolution with the help of a little Web site called My Space. My Space was actually started in 1999 but evolved to its current state and loyal following a few years later. In 2006, they added their 100 millionth user and today boast over 300 million users. Following My Space’s lead, many other copycat sites have come on the scene confirming one thing, the social network is powerful, extremely lucrative, and here to stay. In a nutshell, Web 2.0 is all about social networks and how we humans have formed our societies for thousands of years.

It’s hard to image off line retail evolution beyond the super center, but that’s because we currently shop in one. Web 2.0 isn’t the super center exactly however; it goes a step beyond it (which is why the lines cross in the graph above). Imagine a super center that has a group of actual consumers and industry experts surrounding every product (sku) in the store –there ready to give you user experiences, manufacture information, official reports, where to find the lowest price and the best service, and all the urban legends and rumors that surround every product. If you can get your head around that, you are beginning to understand what Web 2.0 is all about and how important it is that your product information is in a place and format that enables it to become part of the social fabric of the world.

The future of Web 2.0 and the implications it will have on business isn’t crystal clear but we can be certain it will change the status quo online and that we will also have a few new words to learn. One such term gaining momentum out there is the acronym SMO, which stands for Social Marketing Optimization. SMO is similar to SEO (search engine optimization), which is the strategy of getting high organic rankings in search engines. SMO is about making your site flexible enough to be infiltrated and accessed by many different social networks and serving your marketing messages in such a way that they will be welcomed by your target audience and served to them through the right social vehicle so that they will be valued and trusted.

I believe one more historical analogy is warranted. Route 66 was an old highway built in 1926 in the U.S. that winded its way from Chicago, Illinois to Los Angeles, California. Unlike modern freeway systems, Route 66 often became Main Street in many small towns complete with stop signs and traffic signals. When the modern freeway systems became the standard, many small towns that were once connected by Route 66 and other like highways were literally cut off from the world. The Disney/Pixar movie Cars follows this true to life situation of many small towns in the U.S. and Europe after the introduction of the modern freeway.

Web 2.0 introduces a similar situation for online businesses. The social networks of the world speed word-of-mouth advertising faster than ever before. In addition, marketers can get their messages distributed to their target markets faster and cheaper than ever before. Deciding not to participate in this global conversation could cut you off from your marketing audience and the world at large.

I expect to see many new applications, online services, and strategies evolve over the next 3 years that will help businesses capitalize on the numerous and ever-expanding global social networks. But to wait for these new tools before making your Web 2.0 move could cost you, and there are plenty of history lessons about that.

What is Web 2.0 really? (part 2) – “How can I prepare and capitalize on Web 2.0?”

About the author
Greg Meyers is an Internet veteran of 16 years and an e-marketing expert. Greg is currently the Director of Marketing at WestHost and has consulted for such clients as Microsoft, Novell, McAfee, General Motors, HP, Volkswagen, 3M, United Health Care, and others. Greg currently lives in the Cache Valley (Northern Utah, USA) area with is wife and four children.