Breaking the scams

I am fed up with watching people scam innocent companies/individuals and take hard earned cash for pointless, valueless internet marketing content and strategies that can be acquired for free. Do not part with your cash, please!

So, today, soandso is going to deliver their apparently unique content for free for the very last time. This is it. Pay now. Or forever lose the chance to benefit from this [supposed] internet marketing millionaire's fabled words.

Or cough, miss the chance, keep your money, learn the same old tosh tomorrow?

I'll let you into a secret. But it requires a little background first.

I was one of the very first people who got involved in this internet marketing world. When I started there were very few websites you could find without remembering a complex series of numbers (an IP address). Domain names were unheard of, email addresses needed 3 toilet rolls to write them down on, IRC and bulletin boards were the only place to be, and your phone bill was HUGE.

So, bearing in mind that I can almost guarantee YOU don't remember that world, let me share the secret.

Oh, and it's for free, but if you want I could put a big Paypal button here so you can part with your hard-earned money...No?!

In 16 years surfing the Net, I will honestly, hands on heart tell you that ****VERY LITTLE HAS CHANGED**. Just because someone is closing down some fabbo sounding opportunity [for you to part with your money] it does NOT mean that the info they are intending to share with you cannot a) be found elsewhere and b) won't be found again and be equally as relevant in 10 years time.

You may want help with your website, you may know you need to promote it but be struggling to understand how, you may be baffled by this interweb thingy, but you do NOT need to part with money before you know what you are doing.

Pay NO-ONE! The information you require is online. And for free.

Want help with your site? I have been helping people for free for 16 years

* in designing a website for their business - We'll get you online to better business wasn't a tagline borne of nothing!
* connecting their company to the outside world and even local communities, with wireless broadband and wifi, FiWi, satellite, and now fibre and FTTH
* helping companies to reach new and different audiences through books, blogs, audio, video, events, tweets, status updates, text/SMS, brochures, guerrilla marketing, you name it

There are very few ethical internet marketing companies. We all know each other. Looking for a recommendation for a company or SEO agency? Ask. Need advice on a proposal or pitch? Ask. Want to waste money? Go somewhere else.

I can't think of anything worse than watching a company burn money on a website design company who don't understand why keywords matter (and you surely don't or you would not have chosen that company) or spending money on PPC bids that could be easily dealt with using a little SEO.

If you want help with your website, please ask. Don't run around 5 different agencies until you know the questions to ask them.

Personally, I don't want your business as we are busy into 2011 so why not ask your questions here knowing we are unlikely to pitch for the job? There's no sales pitch here because, as the recession continues, it is amazing how many companies are throwing money at SEO and internet marketing. We are ***busy***.

Are you? Do you want to be? Do you want your website to deliver results for your company? Don't know where to start asking questions? All I can offer is the chance to ask, for free, an SEO and holistic marketing professional for an answer to your question. And then for you to benefit from other internet marketers viewpoints about your best choices and solutions - that's up to them to get involved!

It's free, you have nothing to lose, what SEO, PPC, internet marketing question would you most like an answer to?

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Synonyms, Google and tildes

When you are optimising your website, and seeking good keywords to use, do not forget synonyms. Those are the related words to your keywords and phrases, and Google et al use them to suss out the overall relevance of your page for your top keywords and phrases.

How to find the synonyms? Well, you can use a thesaurus - there are online ones, or most Word Processing packages include them. Or you can get onto Google and type the keyword that you want synonyms for preceded by a tilde. That's one of these things ~ like they put over an 'n' in Spanish to make an enya.

that's one of these - ñ !

So, if for instance, you want synonyms for "cheap flights" (yes, I really do need a holiday!) you type "~cheap flights" into Google, without the speech marks. And bingo! All the synonyms that Google likes are highlighted in bold ready for you to pluck out and use on your own site.

And that's today's handy little search engine optimisation and keyword discovery tip.

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Checking your newsletter links

Many businesses resort to email newsletters to keep their potential customer base informed about new products, services, news etc.

It can be a cheap and efficient method to communicate, offering special deals to subscribers, testing marketing messages and more. The newsletter can also drive trackable traffic to the website, which gives great metrics on what products are du jour, and what messages work.

However, recently, there seems to have been a slew of newsletters (and not all issued by small companies) where the links to stories of interest lead to 404s (Page not found). This can mean that the whole newsletter fails in its purpose because your average consumer does not have time, cannot be bothered, or does not know how to reformat the link so that it is correct. Or, because your site is insufficiently optimised and spidered regularly by the search engines, they cannot find any link to the product/story/etc that they are interested in when they resort to the search engines to find a link.

A broken link can be as simple as missing out the www (tell your hosting company to reconfig their servers so it isn't even required!), typing the URL incorrectly, or when using a third party forwarding software which doesn't put in the correct link (this is usually a human typing / cut and paste error though!)

A newsletter with one bad link can be overlooked, although not if that link goes to your hot must-have product, but newsletters where multiple links are wrong will mean you have just wasted the money on sending it, and will have placed indelibly into your subscribers' minds the fact that "Oh, last time, nothing in this worked, I can't be bothered to try again".

The search engine optimisation strategy employed by your company should be ongoing. Your site needs to be regularly updated, with current news, new products, blog posts etc and you need to make sure that the search engine spiders are visiting regularly. Check your traffic stats to make sure they are!

In times of economic difficulties, every penny you spend must work for you. Sending out a test newsletter and paying an employee for a few minutes time to check every link, or do it yourself, can mean the difference between achieving the results you expected from your newsletter eg sales, eyeballs on your website, long term loyalty from customers, or throwing money down the drain, and not just in the short-term.

Check your links work! Check your site works before sending the newsletter. Optimise your site properly. And test, test and test again!

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Website Designers' Big Mistakes - keyword inclusion

Gordon Bennett - New York Times journalist, so I am told by my temporarily resident aunt, who is breaking the back of turning the house into a habitable domicile after 5+ years of it not being by sanding, painting and scrubbing - it all puts my efforts to shame. I digress....

Why, oh why, do website designers insist on spending weeks coding up an e-commerce site with full functionality, preparing it for launch, and only then come to the Web PR people? Today, I have battled with a live website, trying to get some SEO and user friendly features on to it.

Keywords? Pah! Barely a one in sight, or in site. "Did you ask the client for a list of keywords before you began?"
"No, they said they'd write the text."

Yes but, guys, the keywords don't just go in the text. That's the whole point.

So, armed with my own list of keywords, painstakingly gathered over the last few hours by indexing the client's own site, searching Google for their competitors and nicking some of theirs, Wordtracker, Google Adwords, Overture etc, I am now working through page titles, META tags, alt img tags, filenames, headings and of course, the visible text, to try and put in some of the keywords that are vital to getting this site found beyond the single keyword phrase the client and designer thought was all that mattered.

Then there are the missing calls to action, the lack of interactivity, CRM, content and all the other things that are required to put a halfway decent Web PR strategy together.

If you are a site designer, or know one, tell them that before they start designing anything, all those important keywords need to be built into their process. Every filename should be keyword rich, and hence every HREF tag, every image needs a keyword rich alt img tag, every heading needs to include keywords, etc etc. Let alone METAs and all that bog standard SEO stuff.

Because after all, those keywords are what your visitors searched upon in the first place. When they arrive on the site they want to know WIIFM (What's In It For Me) and that they are in the right place for they want. And that they haven't just landed on a site whose designer thought a bit of black hat SEO would do the job.

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