• Why Reputable SEO Firms Don’t Promise Guaranteed Search Engine Rankings
• Time to be creative — and cost-efficient — in marketing
• Top 7 Reasons Why It’s Better to Hire a Freelance Designer or Small Design Firm Than a Large Design Company
• Do We Need Another Web Browser?
• Traffic trends for Digg vs. nine other social news sites
• I Don’t Have Time for Marketing

Pew found that the use of search engines, both the large generic kind and the small site specific kind, has risen dramatically since 2002. Where the use of email on a daily basis rose just 15 percent, the use of search rose 69 percent.

The best part is Pew gives us the demographic information to go with their study.

Those who are using search engines on an average day are more likely to be socially upscale, with at least some college education and incomes over $50,000 per year. They are more likely to be Internet users with at least six years of online experience and to have their homes wired for fast Internet connections.

Younger Internet users are more likely than older users to search on a typical day, and men are more likely than women to search on an average day, Pew reported. And those who use broadband connections at home are significantly more likely than those who use dial-up to have ever tried using search engines at all, by 94 percent to 80 percent.

With the explosion of content on the web, more and more users are integrating search into their daily activities with the expectation that utilizing this tool will garner the information they are looking for from an otherwise impenetrable mountain of information. Thus far major search engines have been able to answer this call (from the user’s standpoint) and each successful return of relevant information from a search query builds trust with the search engine and warrants it’s use the next time the user is seeking assistance.

As we tell all of our clients, just having a website does not mean it will generate traffic or dollars to the bottom line. Your website must be functional and findable.

Enough websites, business periodicals, and newspapers have written about the benefits of business blogging that business owners and marketing managers with little to no experience with internet marketing have latched onto it as the holy grail of search engine optimization. Those in the business of web development and SEO have not helped matters at all. They continue to push the easy sale of business blogging on every client that walks through their door even though some businesses just have no reason to blog. Other businesses simply have no time to blog. Believe me blogging is time consuming as is often the first thing in our office to get neglected when we get outrageously busy. If you don’t have the time to manage your regular website do you think you will have time to blog as well?

Beyond the question of whether or not your business should have a blog lies the fact that blogging is not the holy grail of search engine optimization. There is no holy grail of SEO. There is no one thing you can invest minimal time in to achieve top rankings. It takes a considerable investment of time, either your own or that of an internet marketing consultant, in all of the items mentioned at the beginning of this article – link building, article marketing, social media marketing, website usability improvements, on-page content optimization and more in order to get top rankings for your chosen keywords.

Many web designers tout blogs as automagically having search engine optimized structure and code. This is a flat out fallacy. On-page optimization is dependent upon the SEO knowledge of the developer and/or designer. I have seen plenty of blogs with horrible on-page optimization. Even prepackaged free templates can suffer from under-optimized structure and leaving the blog engine’s default settings in place is virtually always an SEO killjoy. (Even our blog is not as optimized as it could be. Feel free to comment on it.)

Are we completely against business blogging? Of course not!! If we were, would we have a blog? We know that blogging can be a very powerful tool in any business’s online marketing arsenal. It is a great way to communicate directly and openly with your customers and potential customers. Blogs can give clarity as to what you or your product does and they can help greatly with online reputation management and customer service. They can even help garner good rankings for long tail terms and phrases related to your main keyword list, but it is not the only thing you, as a site owner, should be doing to create a powerful online identity. Most importantly, business blogging is not the holy grail of search engine optimization.

Have a great weekend!

Is the WWW Necessary in Today’s Internet?

The answer – it depends.

It depends on a lot of things including the psychology, demographics and the users’ comfort level with computers among many other things. In the SitePoint article they note the launch of their own site, 99designs.com, as well as the social networking service Twitter.com as two examples without the WWW prefix. However, these two sites are targeted at a younger, more technically savvy, demographic that most likely will not even bother typing the WWW prefix in the first place.

With an older demographic on the other hand I would argue it is a requirement to include the WWW. When I used to do computer training courses for a public entity with a large percentage of older employees, instinctively I would speak domain names without the WWW and inevitably someone would ask if they needed to type WWW before that. Their limited knowledge in this area dictated how they interacted with websites. No amount of explaining the how’s and why’s of the internet would make them more comfortable in their interaction.

Any Ol’ Domain Will Do

While browsing through the comments on the SitePoint blog I noticed an overwhelming majority of people stating they didn’t care either way, but they set up domains to work with both the prefix and without it. They do this by changing the setup of their domain records. Few of the respondents indicate whether they use 301 redirects. While I am a proponent of having WWW and no-WWW take the user to a working website I also understand that if you fail to set up a redirect to one or the other it is possible to create a real search marketing snafu. More and more we are finding this to be one of the most overlooked aspects of web design and development. As an example we just took on a client who has had a website for over 7 years and yet their was no domain preference set via a 301 redirect.

The problem with this is referred to as canonicalization errors or canonical problems. It is a huge ugly name for something very simple. Basically search engines will count www.domain.com and domain.com as two separate pages. It doesn’t end there either. They will also see all of the variations below as separate pages.

• www.domain.com
• www.domain.com/
• www.domain.com/index.html (or index.php, index.asp, index.cfm, etc.)
• domain.com
• domain.com/
• domain.com/index.html (or index.php, index.asp, index.cfm, etc.)

Having multiple instances recorded by the search engines is a bad thing. Your website will suffer in the SERPs. One quick way to find out if your site is suffering from this problem is to use the site: and link: commands in Google and look at the total number of results returned.

So for example, type in site:www.domain.com and then try site:domain.com

If the numbers vary then you may have a canonicalization problem.

Which One Should You Use?

From an SEO standpoint I analyze all of the potential versions floating around that may or may not have links to them or may or may not be indexed by the search engines before I just hop on board with one or the other. If the non-WWW version has more backlinks and is generally performing better, I might redirect the WWW version there. However, coming back around to my first point in this article, current SEO performance should only be one piece of the puzzle. Usability and understanding your demographic should also play a role, because your domain name will be on everything (remember Integrated Marketing) from business cards to outdoor billboards to email marketing and PPC campaigns and should always look the same. Right down to how it appears in your address bar.

I will agree there are some amazing technologies and options out there for those companies that are truly ready to step up and take advantage of them. However, most small business owners need to forget Web 2.0, Ajax, Blog, Social Network and all the other jargon flying around industry periodicals. Most business owners and marketing managers need to focus on integrated marketing.

From Wikipedia -

A management concept that is designed to make all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting each to work in isolation. In practice, the goal of IMC is to create and sustain a single look or message in all elements of a marketing campaign.

One of the largest marketing problems I see a lot of small businesses have is learning how to leverage all of the available channels and delivering a solid, cohesive message along all of those channels. The main reason for this is budget restraints. Small businesses do not have the budget available to hire a large advertising agency to develop their identity, print collateral, TV spots, radio spots and website all at one time. They often have to piecemeal their entire existence together by hiring company X for the print collateral, company Y for the television spots, and maybe if they are lucky they can hire company Z to build them a website.

The Rise of Frankenstien’s Monster

Just like the monster that eventually destroys its master, this form of stitched together marketing can destroy the small business. Each channel tries to act independently. One agency believes everything should be done one way, the other believes it should be a different way and most of the time the business owner or contact person is so close to the action they don’t see the wild differences in messaging, creative design and brand identity.

Pretty soon the TV spots look nothing like the direct mail pieces and the website still has a 2002 copyright, talks about an award the company won in 2003 and looks like nothing else. The company’s brand identity becomes a fractured semblance of itself. All the touch points with its customers serve to confuse because there is not a cohesive brand and consistent marketing.

Hire an Ambassador

My suggestion is to hire or become your own brand ambassador. Depending on the size of your organization and how many marketing touch points need analysis this could be a full time position or you could hire a consultant for a limited lifespan. The point here is to have one person who can determine if a particular marketing initiative is on or off base with your brand identity.
Ask yourself -

• Does the graphic design resemble everything we have produced?
• Is the messaging the same as other initiatives? Do we use the same key phrases to talk about our business?
• Is the imagery similar across media?
• Does everyone in the organization talk about the company in the same terms?

Pretty simple, right? No one said it had to be hard! When you do find differences talk to your vendor(s) about them. If need be, put one vendor in touch with another. We’re not opposed to discussing the situation with other vendors!

The bottom line is, until you can deliver a brand identity utilizing all or most communication touch points with your clients you don’t need a blog, a wiki, or a social network. Focus on your business and your identity and when you have those things solid then branch out and talk “web two dot ooh” with an internet marketing firm.

Fair Warning! If you are offended by strong language do not click any of the links in this post!

Have a great weekend!

Sphinn.com is, according to the website, “a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others”.

A Sphinn it button, if placed here, would allow you to click on it and cast your vote for this post as a newsworthy search marketing topic.

Think Digg.com for search marketing. It’s a fantastic idea and a great website that is garnishing a lot of attention and praise in the search marketing arena. I believe in the concept as well as the site, heck I’ve even subscribed to the RSS feed.

Which again, is the reason we’re not adding a sphinn button to the blog. You, our loyal and dear reader, are not like me (one me is enough thank you) and you probably could give a rat’s hind end about the ins and outs of search marketing. After all you have a business to run! You don’t have time to become a search marketer, which is probably the reason why you’re here. You are the type of person we want here, the business owner or person in charge of marketing for your company, that wants to take a peak around, see what we’re up to, and maybe get some advice.

We’re not running a blog for search marketers. The search marketing industry at large, much like the design community at large, needs to stop speaking to ourselves and start communicating and educating the business community at large.

Which is exactly the reason why we’re not adding a Sphinn button to our blog.