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

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

The number of search engines in the world continually changes from month to month as companies rise, fall and merge with other search engines. This has been the norm since the first search engine Aliweb came on the scene in 1993. Many search engines have come and gone and come again since then leaving in their wake a very complicated and bewildering landscape for Web site marketers to navigate. The good news is, even though there are hundreds of search engines out there, you only need to be concerned with a hand full of them in order to be successful. Here are some quick tips on creating a successful search engine optimization (SEO) plan.

First of all, many people get confused between paid placements and organic or natural placements. Paid placements are (as the term implies) placements in search engines that get ranked based upon how much is paid for the keyword. The paid placements in the major search engines are very distinguishable from the organic listings. Paid placements in Google appear along the top (usually 3 or 4 listings) and then along the far right side of the page. The organic listings appear in the body of the page. Other major search engines use a similar approach. A paid listing does not displace or affect the organic listings. In other words, you cannot pay Google to have a top ten organic listing. Organic listings are the results of the search engine’s efforts to index the Web and return those results based upon what the search engine creators think are most relevant. How exactly the search engines do that is a closely guarded secret by every search engine. If their indexing methods were public knowledge, people would manipulate the methods to not only secure top positions for their sites but to also block other sites. Theses techniques are known as “spamming the search engine”, and it is a continual problem for search engines. The punishments for spamming are very severe and will usually cause your site (domain) to be blocked and not listed at all.

Getting organic listings is free with most search engines and many will index your site without your knowledge. The search engines accomplish this by sending out what they call a “spider” whose only mission is to find Web sites and send the indexing details back to home base. If you have pages on your site you don’t want indexed or that you don’t want to show up in search engine results, you can place the following meta tag on your page, which will be effective with most search engines but not all.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

While there are many search engines that will find your site, you don’t want to leave your search engine placements to chance when it comes to the top five largest search engines since they account for about 80% of all searching on the Internet. Depending upon what language your site is in, the top five search engines are:

1. Google

2. Yahoo

3. MSN

4. AOL

5. Ask.com

If your site is multilingual (especially Chinese and Korean) the top five are:

1. Google

2. Yahoo

3. Baidu (most popular Chinese search engine)

4. MSN

5. NHN (most popular Korean search engine)

The rules of indexing are a little different for each search engine so it is therefore very important to submit pages that have been optimized just for that specific engine. This requires extra time and patience to get right. Keep in mind that search engine optimization is an everyday effort, not a hit and run. Once you’ve made your initial submission to each search engine, test your ranking regularly. Since search engines get tens of thousands of submissions daily, your rank can change dramatically daily especially if you are in a competitive industry.

The easiest way to find out how to adjust your home page so that it will get ranked higher in a search engine is to study the Web sites who already have top rankings. When studying your competitor’s web pages, pay special attention to the copy and the title of the home page. Most search engines rank higher if the searched keyword is contained in the body of the Web page, but having the keyword too many times on a page can hurt you (keyword spam). Also make sure that all your image tags have the Alt=”" attribute, and place relevant words and phrases there. Lastly, and the most important for Google is links to your site. Google will give your site a higher rank based upon how many other sites link to yours. This gets a little tricky since most people list their sites with Google in order to get links to their site. Start with your friends and suppliers and negotiate links with them. Most sites will share links if you will in like manner provide a link back to them. Do searches on your industry in general and look for industry organizations and such that might be a good source for link exchanges. Another really great place to solicit links is to search for blogs that deal with your industry. Contact the blog owner and request reciprocal links. Stay away from paid linking services and links to your site that are unrelated to your business, such links could be considered as spamming behavior by the search engine (see http://blog.westhost.com/2007/11/paid-linking-takes-a-hit/ for more information).

Keep in mind that some search engines take up to 3 weeks for an initial submission to show up in their listings. Don’t be afraid to submit often. Search engine’s love new submissions since it implies that its indexing information is up to date and it saves their spider the time and effort to index your site on its own.

Finally, remember that a good SEO strategy is a continual work in progress and is like a good investment portfolio. You start with what you have and grow it over time.

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.

When I sit down with companies to talk about their web site strategy, one of the first questions that I ask is “Why did you originally develop your site?” Often, there’s a moment of uncomfortable silence before someone replies, “because our competitors all had one”, or “our customers kept asking for our web address”, or one of my personal favorites “to get our name out there”.

In addition, some companies build a web site for branding purposes, or to provide information to potential clients, thinking that one-way communication is a valid goal. I’m afraid that I disagree. Using a web site merely to provide information is like using an airplane to drive around town without ever leaving the ground - you’re missing the real opportunity to help your business ‘take-off’ by creating leads and sales.

After all, a web site is a corporate resource, and like any other resource it should provide a return on investment. That return should be immediate and measurable, meaning that the bottom line for any website is – how specifically has the web site grown my business today/this week/this month, and so on. Enter the concept of ‘conversion’.

What is Conversion?
For a business web site, there are three primary goals:
- generating leads
- selling products via e-commerce
- generating referrals

The reason that I say this is because these are the only actions that lead to real dollars. So, they’re the only way for your web site to produce a return-on-investment. When a visitor takes one of these actions, that is counted as a ‘conversion’ (as in converting visitors into leads and customers).

I do understand that websites can accomplish other less-tangible benefits. I call these secondary goals. Typical secondary goals might include:
- building credibility
- supporting existing customers
- recruiting partners or affiliates (this may be a primary goal if your business is largely affiliate based)

I consider these goals secondary because if this was ALL that your site did, then you’re probably missing the real potential of a company website.

Conversion Aids Site Development and Management
Deciding that you want/need a conversion web site is actually a tremendously empowering moment. For example, your new goals can actually help you to determine what should or shouldn’t be included on your site (removing much of the politics of website development). In a sense you build your site backwards – start with your site goals and then flesh out the structure and content from there. As you use your goals document as a set of criteria for determining site content, there’s much less room for disagreement.

Secondly, having specific web conversion goals allows you to measure the effectiveness of your site after it’s completed and live. That’s key because if you can’t measure web site performance, then improving it becomes much more problematic. So you’ll find that measurement and improvement are the keys to that ROI you’re looking for.

Tips for Improving Conversion Rate
Here are few tips to increase your conversion rate:

1. Give Direction
To build interest in a product or service, consider structuring your website as a logical sequence of information, rather than a maze of optional navigation. The way to accomplish this is to reduce the number of links, and identify the best next click for each page. Then provide a specific link which is essentially a signpost pointing where you want your visitor to click once they’ve read the page they’re currently on.

2. Trade Value for Value
For lead generation sites, collecting visitors contact information in exchange for something is the desired outcome. The exchange should be high perceived value to the recipient, low cost to the provider, and have a low perception of commitment. Typical on-line exchanges of this sort include free-trials, product demos, and whitepapers. Be careful not to ask for too much information in the exchange (this raises the perceived commitment level). Ask only for information that’s essential to you.

3. The Work’s Not Over
Once your web site is up and running, the work isn’t over! Pay careful attention to the results you’re getting. Establish a baseline of results and then begin making changes to impact your conversion rate. Make sure you allow enough time for changes to show an impact, if your site gets only a few visitors, each test element might be in place for a month or even longer.

About the Author
Mat Greenfield is the founder of Conversion Results, and has been in marketing since 1996. He is recognized as a website conversion expert by a number of industry organizations including Inside Sales, Register.com, and Constant Contact. He is a regular contributor to a number of print and e-magazines, and is a monthly columnist for Practical e-Commerce Magazine.

Visit www.conversionresults.com for a free eGuide to Improving Website Conversion Rates.

The days of meta tags and keyword stuffing as an exclusive means to drive your site to the top of the search results are long gone. Today, webmasters who are serious about attaining respectable search results for competitive keywords have to spend an ample amount of time researching and testing to produce quality results. Fortunately, in the ever increasing competitive environment of ranking well for popular keywords, the online community’s desire to release tools to assist the webmaster has increased as well.

By far one of my favorite webmaster-assisting tools available is the SEO plugin for the Firefox browser. The plugin displays great “at a glance” information appended to the bottom of each of your Google search results. Included in the plugin results are great stats, such as the ranking of the search result, the PageRank of the search result, the age of the domain returned in the search result, and a number of other listings relating to links from outside sources to the domain referenced in the search result.

Using the plugin is easy as well, and requires only a quick download and restart of your browser. You can even customize what information you want the plugin to display, what information you want to automatically display, and what information you prefer to display only on demand.

The plugin is also easily enabled disabled by simply clicking a button in the lower right hand corner of your browser:

SEO for Firefox is enabled:

SEO for Firefox is disabled:

To read more about the SEO plugin for Firefox, or to download this useful application, visit seobook.com.

Those of you who keep yourselves up-to-date on the world of search marketing have more than likely already heard about recent changes at Google to penalize a few sites who have engaged in link buying/selling. Google, for the last several months, has undertaken a campaign to spread a message that many search engine marketers didn’t want to hear; buying/selling links for the purpose of passing PageRank is not a good idea. Still, even though over the last few months an uncharacteristic amount of chatter on paid linking was present among prominent bloggers, and at least one Google employee continued to assert that people should not be engaging in this behavior (and actually going so far as to tell us how to report sites that are buying/selling links), no one really knew what exactly Google was going to do about sites openly buying and/or selling paid links. Over the past few days, some of those site owners were the first to find out.

Google’s argument during the last few months has never been one that suggested buying text links was unacceptable on all levels. In fact, Google is completely content having Web site owners purchase or sell links on sites for the purpose increasing traffic. They’ve also suggested using the nofollow tag as a method alerting Google that while you are linking to the content, it shouldn’t receive the “influence” that a normal unpaid link would receive.

The idea of trying to manipulate your search rankings is far from new. There have been lots of tricks utilized by webmasters since the inception of search to influence their ranking favorably. Using a network of linking, whether paid or unpaid, is just one trick in a search marketer’s bag of tricks to influence a site’s organic rankings. Because a search engine’s core job is to provide search results relevant to what an end user is searching for, Google is not content to allow sites to effectively sell PageRank and potentially skew the results of natural search. In essence, Google is simply trying to make their search engine results more relevant.

Even with all the uproar caused lately by Google’s updates negatively affecting these sites who actively and openly engage in paid linking, the selling of links is far from over. Google isn’t trying to eliminate the process, only the result of some webmasters utilizing this as a method of influencing their rankings. Paid linking isn’t dead, but it can’t be approached the same way as it used to be.

Whether buying or selling a link, follow a few extra steps to ensure you’re approaching the situation appropriately:

1. Relevant Links: If you have a site on rock climbing littered with ads for casinos or car insurance, that’s going to be an easily identifiable red flag. Work on securing a link from a site relevant to your own.
2. Personal Contact: There are lots of link broker services out there. Skip them and conduct your business to purchase a link directly from a Web site owner of a Web site relevant to your own.
3. Position of Link: Look for opportunities to have your link placed within the content of the site you’re purchasing the link from. Don’t purchase a link located in a footer or a “Sponsored Links” section unless you have a good reason for doing so.
4. Do Your Homework: Purchasing a link will require more legwork than it used to, but if done properly, it will benefit your site in the long run.