At the same time I was fortunate in that my position was in a marketing and not a design department.  That way, I got to learn how to websites needed to work as a promotional tool rather than look pretty.

So when internet marketing became a buzzword, I was already there!

With the growth and importance of web-based search engines such as Google came a whole new discipline - SEO (search engine optimisation).

Search Engine Optimisation is crucial to every business success

Once you have a professional-looking design and the functionality is working correctly, you need to constantly market your business online.  Keep regularly updating your website and business blog. Fresh content keeps both the search engines and potential customers interested and aware of your products and services.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
An ongoing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) program is vital.  Don’t think a one-off ‘makeover’ is going to be enough.  The search engines are looking for your website and blog to continually add relevant, authoritative and good quality in-bound links.

Furthermore, once you start to receive high ranking for popular keywords, your competitors will also be attempting to leapfrog you in the rankings.

There is plenty of help at hand as search engine marketing is big business in 2010 and so it is crucial to setup a good ongoing working relationship with an SEO company you can trust.

Here are five tips to help a small business to set up a successful Google Pay per Click (PPC) campaign.

1. Don’t only use broad match keywords
Google offer three ways in which your PPC advert can be included in a search listing – broad match, phrase match and exact match.  By default the keywords use a broad search.  This will give you the most traffic, but it will be unqualified and result in quantity not quality leads.

Broad match catches all searches looking for one or more of the keywords you have listed; whereby a phrase match will only include your campaign if all the keywords are included in the search.

An exact search will only list your PPC campaign if the search exactly matches your keywords.

Read How to be successful with PPC for a more detailed explanation.

2. Mistyping the URL or Landing Page address will cost you
Be very careful when adding the PPC campaign destination URL or what’s known as a Landing Page.  If you mistype your website landing page address you will pay for the traffic being sent to a non-existent page.

Google will take some time to report this problem.  So always test your links from within the Google AdWords admin.  That way you can be confident the link is working and will not be charged for testing the link.

3. Google’s Content Network isn’t good with a small budget
By default, your new campaign will not only show on relevant Google searches, it will also be included throughout Google’s Content Network.  This means your advert will show on blogs, websites, other search engines and web directories.

Google’s Content Network can work depending on the campaigns, but the traffic will be less focused and therefore more quantity than quality.  Therefore, this is best avoided for campaigns with a small budget or low profit margins.

4. Separate your PPC keywords list & setup smaller campaigns
Setting up one campaign with a long list of keywords is another way of throwing money away.  You need to divide keywords into small associated lists and create several smaller campaigns.

Your campaigns can then focus on a few specific keywords and use those keywords in the title and body of the relevant PPC campaign.

Google will reward your campaigns for relevancy.  More keyword-targeted campaigns will also receive a stronger CTR (Click through Rate); meaning your campaigns will receive a higher percentage of quality traffic.  All of which will increase your campaign ranking.

In many cases where I have been asked to turnaround a badly setup PPC campaign I see one generic campaign with a list of hundreds of keywords using broad match.  In many cases the PPC campaign has been setup using automated PPC software.

5. Target your PPC campaigns by using negative keywords
Once you have created smaller, more focused PPC campaigns with specific keywords you will also need to add a list of ‘negative keywords.’

A negative keyword is a way of further concentrating a search with any keyword matching.  For example, if you were a finance company offering a factoring service, and your keyword list including the word factor, you would want to exclude any searches for, say X Factor or Max Factor.

To add negative keywords to your keywords list you need to add a hyphen before each keyword:
-x factor
-max factor

Negative keywords, along with an effective keyword matching strategy will allow you to focus your PPC campaigns which in turn will offer you much greater success with Google AdWords.

All UK businesses are looking to cut costs, spend less and hang on to their customers. But while certain expenditure can most certainly be contracted or cut altogether, whether a corporate golf day or lunch time visits to Marks And Spencer, there’s one area that many businesses look to cut when I recommend they increase their budget spend, especially in times like these.

Internet Marketing will help your business by attracting more customers through visibility.

Furthermore, as businesses stop trading you will need to be accessible, easily found on the web and listed high in Google, if you are going to capitalise on gaining their clients.

For those of you without a company website – where have you been?

Your business not only NEEDS a website but a professional looking, highly functional website should be at the hub of every business marketing plan.  Not having a company website is almost as bad as having a badly designed website!

For those businesses with a good website, you need to promote it with an internet marketing strategy. Internet Marketing should be responsive to your business and sector requirements, but must always include a strong strategic link building focus and an emphasis on ranking as high as possible in Google for your specifically targeted keywords.  Inbound links, topic relevancy and site authority all go towards ranking your website higher.

Now, if you are already employing an internet marketing consultant or company to manage your online marketing but are not getting a ROI (Return On Investment) or new business from this service, then it’s time to question whether they are doing a good job!

Many so-called SEO companies have sprung up in the past 2-3 years in the UK are not experts in the field of web marketing.  Most use automated tools and send pages of next to useless data showing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), but this is not going to help you or your business without a managed strategy and analysis.

What your business needs is an internet marketing program being managed by experts who manually monitor and recommend what is right for your business to acquire more visibility, more traffic, more leads, and ultimately more customers; and the most important consideration is to analyse the results.  To do so, your online marketing strategy will need to harness the power of web analytics.

Armed with a good website analytics tool and an expert internet marketing team to build, monitor, manage and offer recommendations, your internet marketing program will help you  to beat your competitors and survive the recession.

To help start the year off on the right path, here is some free internet marketing advice to help you get and stay ahead of your business competitors.

Free Advice Free Offers
Entice your website and blog visitors by offering special incentives; and there’s no better way to grab someone’s attention than to include the word FREE!

Offer free advice, free postage, free information.  Things you know your competitors are charging their customers for.  Be honest, and traffic will grow.

Search Engine Optimisation is vital to your business success in 2009

You need to constantly market your business online.  Keep regularly updating your website and business blog. Fresh content keeps both the search engines and potential customers interested and aware of your products and services.

Set up regular Google Alerts for your company name and any products and services with recognisable or trademarked names.  This way you can monitor what is being written about your business, good or bad!

Similarly, www.IceRocket.com & www.Serph.com are websites that allow you to track who is publishing copy that may affect you, your name and your business.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
An ongoing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) program is vital in 2009.  Don’t think a one-off ‘makeover’ is going to be enough.  The search engines are looking for your website and blog to continually add relevance, authority and good quality in-bound links.

Furthermore, once you start to receive high ranking for popular keywords, your competitors will also be attempting to leapfrog you in the rankings.

Target Potential Customers
Always target Google, and continue to use Google as a focus, for all your SEM (Search Engine Marketing) but never forget there is a target audience waiting for you on other search engines and directories such as Yahoo, MSN, DMOZ, AllTheWeb, Ask, Alta Vista and AOL, to name a few.

The Internet is global but don’t forget local business is as important, and in some cases easier to convert. Local search strategies should include geo-targeted paid search and natural search engine optimisation campaigns. Geo-targeted keywords restrict campaigns to consumers in specific areas where your company is looking to improve its reputation and increase sales. Include ‘landing pages’ that are specific to campaigns and promote single products and services to increase conversion rates.

Website Traffic Analysis
All focused internet marketing and website development activity will need to be analysed if you are to maximise the results.  The more information you can gather using website traffic analysis, the better.  Many traffic analysis software programs are free.  But many of these programs offer very little in the way of useful information.

We offer clients a free website stats program by AWstats but employ a much more powerful tool for serious in depth analytics.

Internet Marketing Plan
Finally, it is very important to have an internet marketing plan that you can  refer to, whether you undertake the work yourself or outsource to an internet marketing consultancy such as Buzzin Fly.

An internet marketing plan should set out the aims and goals of the program.  I also recommend a quarterly meeting that should discuss the program and provide results and recommendations for the next quarter.

2009 is going to be a difficult year for many companies, especially small businesses and SMEs.  But if you are looking for more revenue consider an internet marketing strategy as an  essential part of your marketing budget spend.

While I was talking to him, I was checking the shop he had problems with. I wouldn’t have bought from it. Here’s how I checked it:-

1. Check the Page

Open the front page of the site in one browser window and then use another window to get to a page that ought to be secure (the payment/checkout page is my usual one). Look at them both. Do either of them show any logos from well-known payment (Barclays, RBS, Protx, …) or security-checking services (thawte – who else?)? That’s not entirely reliable, but it’s usually a good sign because those companies attack people using their marks without permission.

Look at the payment/checkout page – does the address in the address bar start “https”? If so, is the padlock in the browser status bar (usually bottom right) closed? That usually means it’s encrypted with a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate.

2. Check the Certificate

Open the certificate details. In Firefox-based browsers, double-click the padlock, then click the “View Certificate” button. Then pick “Subject” in the second list box. Usually, it looks like this:-

Basic Certificate Screenshot

Some shops now use Extended Validation certificates and give a bit more information. Here’s one from a train company:-

Extended Validation Screenshot

3. Check the Registrations

By this point, the payment processing and actual transaction are looking pretty good. Finally, I check the recipient. Find the business details on the web shop. Does it include a geographic address? If it contains a company registration number, look it up on the Companies House website.

Then I find the business details on the domain names – you can use CoolWhois to look up domain names. If any of the addresses or numbers don’t match (Website, SSL Certificate, Whois), then I call them to ask why their website says they’re based in Bristol but their domain name is registered to Bolton. If they don’t answer messages, or – worse – the domain name says “Non-trading Individual” and the address has been omitted from the public listing, I give up on them and look for another shop. There’s no point securely paying someone that you can never reach if there’s a problem.

4. Buy Stuff and Check the Statements

All being well, I then buy stuff and check my credit card statement each month before I pay it. I think any web shop owner (or webmaster – I help some people with this sort of thing) should be taking care of the basics above. Do your shops measure up?

Despite the above checks, I can only remember not buying something online once in the last year. A couple of times, I’ve worked through the above steps and it’s changed which shop I bought from – and I’m pretty sure it saved me from losing £400 on one purchase.

For the technically-minded, Changes in Spam Levels this week Posted by simonw illustrates the level of disruption and may grow an interesting discussion from server managers – it seems the reduction is less than the 75% reported in some news services, but still significant.

This is great news for all good internet users. It’s disappointing if the spam hosting service won’t have to pay any of the costs they’ve inflicted on other computer users in some way. The only practical negative that I’ve noticed so far is that much of the stopped spam was pretty easy to identify and filter out, so the reduction in spam reaching my “unsure” mailbox hasn’t been anything like 50%. Still, less spam hitting the filters means less computer power used, which means less electricity and network data transfer used, which means lower costs for us. Yippee!

And finally, I smiled at this comment over on the WebmasterWorld discussion:-

“Our spam email has dropped so much in the past 2 days that I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with our email accounts.”

“Expat-like terms” – made available in a way that is freely sharable, modifiable and redistributable, similar to the Expat software package, whose terms are published at http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt – this is often used as a clear, simple example for encouraging wide distribution of electronic resources (software).

“clandestine Google Analytics” – Google Analytics is a service from Google, Inc for tracking users through a website in various ways. I believe the Data Protection Act means that English websites should obtain informed consent from users by publishing a Privacy Policy on their site which discloses what the GA service will be used for and linking through to GA’s own Privacy Policy. Some websites attempt to run Google Analytics on users’ computers without explaining why and without any Privacy Policy. That is what I mean by “clandestine”.

“valid xhtml” – validating against the eXtensible HyperText Markup Language standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – the underlying language of the web. There is a test service provided at http://validator.w3.org/ and passing it is a key stepping stone towards making an accessible website. There’s not really such a thing as “invalid xhtml” – if it doesn’t pass validation, it’s not xhtml. So I guess I’m guilty of using a tautology sometimes – sorry about that.

Is it worthwhile knowing those three phrases? Are there other key technical phrases which you think site owners should know?

In general, it’s a little disappointing when you get a “null pointer” from a private company, but it’s particularly annoying from a university. University mistakes like “technology transfer programmes” (that stop software becoming free software available to social enterprises) are justified by a need to get more money – but clearly this particular university has money to waste. How about others?

If there was a way to subscribe to email or blog news of their research publications, I probably would have subscribed. Instead, I’ve just ranted here (without rewarding them with a link) and now I’m going to recycle the flier. I’ll probably have forgotten the three-letter acronym by next week. It’s simply bad marketing. It’s paper spam. Please, if you are putting things into conference handout packs, ask yourself why? What are you hoping to get out of it? How are you going to measure its success?

In most cases the design company have delivered exactly what they had agreed to do.  Most website design companies are simplt that – design companies.  They don’t offer or include any form of post-launch marketing, and is some cases the ‘design’ of a website doesn’t even include much time or consideration to the correct development of a commerically viable website.

Therefore, it is very important that when considering your budget for a new website – be it a redesign or brand new, always set some money aside for online or internet marketing.

Marketing your website is essential if you want to attract visitors and get noticed.

There are many low cost techniques you can use to drive traffic to your website, including getting listed in the search engines, advertising to a mailing list or exchanging reciprocal links with other websites.

It’s no good spending £1,000 or £10,000 on a company website if potential customers cannot find your website or are completely unaware of your website or business.  Whether you’re launching a new website, or just want to increase traffic to your existing website, it’s important to plan your marketing activities.

Always allocate a Website Marketing budget & plan for online business success

Choose the marketing techniques which will be most effective in meeting your objectives.

Here are 3 online marketing techniques to consider:

Paid Inclusion – Buy keywords on search engines.  This is the only way to guarantee your website will be listed on the first page of major search engines such as Google

Email Newsletters – Run an email campaign if you want to alert customers to a new product or promotions. But be aware, it is illegal to send unsolicited emails to personal email accounts.  If you are looking to boost sales from existing customers then an email newsletter is a good way to encourage repeat visits and build excellent customer relationships.

Blogs – Start a business or corporate blog.  Write honestly and openly about your business sector.  Try not to overly promote your own products and services but develop an informative channel offering an independent view.  In time, due to the quality of your blog, you will receive traffic and a loyal following; a percentage of whom may then become customers.

I strongly believe that every business can prosper from having a professional website and that either writing for a blog or promoting their business products and services on other blogs will increase awareness and sales.  But to generate online business success you must consider marketing your website or blog as well as building one.

1. JavaScript or other crawler-unfriendly navigation that may impede indexing

This one is best avoided at design-time, by including Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Level A in the design brief, but if you’ve ended up with JavaScript-based navigation on your site (check by doing “View Source” and searching for the code for your home page link and so on – if you can find it, then it’s probably not javascript) and it’s based on some template system, a webmaster can probably do a whole-site edit to put the navigation links in the page properly – or at least add a useful <noscript> tag.

2. Navigation that buries important pages within the site architecture.

The structure of the website’s files and the structure of the link menus do not need to match, so if there’s a page that you feel is important, get your webmaster to add it to the navigation links across the whole site.

3. Duplicate “pages” getting indexed under multiple URLs.

This usually happens for one of two reasons: one is inappropriately-parked domains, which is mistake 6 below and often fairly easy to fix; the other is a misbehaving web application, which you’ll need to get a programmer to fix.

You can do a simple test of your web application by starting at your homepage and following links to a particular page; then open a new browser window and try to reach the same page by different links (or a site search) and compare the address bars (the bit of your browser showing http://) – do they match? If not, you’ve got this problem.

4. No keyword phrase focus in the content or conversely, keyword phrase stuffing

You can use a good word-counter on the text to see how common different keywords and keyphrases, or use the “webmaster tools” section of some search engines to see what they’re focusing on.

Keyword-stuffing can be fairly easy to see. If you “View Source” on a page and there’s a large block of keyword-intensive text somewhere in it that doesn’t appear it when viewed in a browser, then it’s probably stuffing. Many sites regard stuffing as a sort of spam, so you don’t want to be found doing this.

To fix these problems, rewrite the page text appropriately.

5. An optimized home page, but that’s it

Repeat your checks from problem 4 on a few pages other than the home page to discover whether you suffer from this. Also, see whether your website statistics show search engine visitors arriving at a variety of different pages (these are sometimes called “Entry Page” statistics).

6. Additional domains owned by the company are not properly redirected

If you usually use .co.uk, but you also have a .com domain, try visiting a random page on your website, then click in the address bar and replace the .co.uk with .com – what happens?

If the page is Not Found, then your domains aren’t properly redirected and you need a Redirect adding to the second one.

If the page displays but the address doesn’t change itself back, then your domains are probably pointing at the same webspace but aren’t properly redirected, which will mean you’re probably making mistake 3 above. Usually, the simplest way to fix this is with a conditional redirect. On Apache webservers, you can add a .htaccess file containing something like:-

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=permanent,L]

That even works on BT Business web hosting, by the way. If it doesn’t work, try asking your web hosting provider to enable mod_rewrite for you or ask them to suggest how to achieve the same result.

The above list of mistakes was published on Search Engine Land last week. The correction methods are all things used by my webmaster cooperative.