If not, you are missing out on some great SEO

Most Business owners market their products to a specific geographic market / location. This can be done in a number of ways; direct marketing, snail-mail, coupons, word of mouth etc. Depending on the business you may even create TV ads, buy radio time, hand out flyers, or pay for billboard space. If you are doing 1 or a number of these things, that’s great, you’re probably doing more than most do to market their business. More and more people are using the internet as their main source of advertising, and consumers are using the internet to search for and evaluate local businesses.

Studies show that most people under the age of 40 (and of course many over 40 years old), never use the yellow or white pages anymore (or any kind of book based directory). Google has stated that 73% of all online activity is related to local content. Also, according to a study done by TMP Directional Marketing, 61% of the local searches are resulting in purchases.

So what does this mean for your business?

Basically, it means you need to develop a quality web presence. This means a nice, functional, straight forward website. You have to remember that people who do use the internet to browse businesses will judge your business from their first impression: Your Website!

Another great thing to have is customer testimonials. Consumers want to know how reliable your business is, so testimonials that speak about the quality, services, and the products you have to offer are great. Obviously if you have such testimonials you should be showing them off everywhere you can!

Great photos are a must. Think of it this way; when you walk into a food court, there are always a few dodgy looking places with iffy pictures of food, so you are usually drawn to the nice classy, professional looking photos. Well the same goes for websites. People browsing will remember a nice professional shot of your products, as apposed to a digital camera shot in poor light. The “Before and After” shots are always a great touch!

Another thing to remember is when you have a website, you want to get inbound* links to your website. Local search is a good way to do this. Also, when you search a search engine for your business, even if your actual website doesn’t show up on the first page, the local business listing might, and that counts for a lot!

If you need help setting up your Google local business listing, contact us for a quote!

* = Inbound links are websites that link to your website. The opposite to an Inbound is an Outbound link; which is when your website link’s to a page outside of your website

What is ‘Search Engine Friendly’ web design?

Search engine friendly web design is web design that is planned around known search engine optimization principles. If ranking well in the search engines is important to you then the first step towards this goal should be a search engine friendly web design. Fortunately, search engines like much the same things that users do - great content, clean layouts, easy navigation - so it’s well worth the time it takes to carefully plan your website page by page.

A ‘Search Engine Friendly’ website is one that search engines can easily scan and understand; it allows search engines to easily jump from page to page of the website, read content, determine what keywords are relevant, and then deliver search results accordingly. Although there are other factors that will affect the search engine success of a website (in particular, link popularity) - search engine friendly web design is a very important element of search engine optimisation.

Some of the points below contain some technical details that your web developer should be able to take care of for you.

How to achieve a search engine friendly web design:

1. Well structured and keyword rich content
   As you’ve probably heard time and time again, content is king. There’s nothing more important than content. Just like users, search engines like useful heading tags, bullet points, highlighted words and keyword rich content. Here are some tips to writing good web copy.
2. Make sure all title tags are unique
   Title tags should uniquely identify the content on any given page - title tags give search engines the first clue as to what a page is about. With ecommerce websites, every single product page should have a unique title tag, it can make a big difference to ranking well for individual product names (ask your web developer to have these generated automatically for you based on the product and category names).
3. Avoid keyword cannibalization
   Following on from the 2 points above, when structuring content make sure you target different keyword combinations on each page. Keyword cannilbalization is when the same keywords are targeted on many different pages of a website. This dilutes the value of the keywords on any one page and makes it harder for search engines to decide which page to display in search results.
4. Update often
   It’s worthwhile investing in a CMS (content management system) or asking your web developer to setup a blog for you (WordPress is fantastic, and free!). There are many of benefits to updating your content often, including:
   • Keyword Count
     It boosts your keyword count and the potential for getting found via web searches for an ever increasing number of keyword combinations (long tail searches: search phrases that are typically longer and more specific than normal)
   • Natural way of building links
     Every time you add relevant content to your website you increase the likelihood that other websites will link to yours, thereby increaseing your link popularity. There is nothing more powerful from a search engine optimisation perspective than incoming links, particularly if they come from relevant and/or valuable sources. Why not get involved in some related forums and other social media avenues (facebook, twitter etc) and announce to your audience each time you release new content along with a link straight to it!
   • Search engines will pay regular visits
     The more often you update, the more often search engines will visit your website to check for new and upated content.
5. Clean layouts work best
   The cleaner the coding of your website, the easier it is for search engines to access the website content. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) should be used for design implementation and all scripts should be contained within external files.
6. Easy navigation
   Navigation should be obvious (near the top of the page) and clean (avoid flash menus or javascript for hover effects, use css instead). Search engines (as well as website visitors) need to be able to easily navigate from page to page of your website. If your website has a lot of deeper level pages then make sure you setup a sitemap and link to this from your home page so so that search engines can them.
7. Meaningful directory and file names
   Something like: www.clothes.com/jeans/levis/ is a lot more meaningful to search engines than www.clothes.com/index.php?cat=10&subcat=12. Your keywords should be included in directory and file names wherever possible.
8. Avoid the excessive use of FLASH.
   There are many obstacles to achieving search engine friendliness in Flash websites, so use it sparingly. Flash can be great for creating some eye-catching ads or dynamic flair to your website but should not be heavily used.
9. Avoid embedding text in images
   Search engines can’t read text that appears in an image - so you’re better off displaying your content in real text wherever possible. When it is necessary to embed text in images then ALT tags can be used to describe the content to search engines
10. Link to your domain, not index.html (.asp, .php etc)
    Every-time you display a link to your home page, you should link to your full domain, not the file name. The number of pages linking to your home page (both external and internal) is an imporant element of seo, you don’t want to divide the total number of incoming links to your home page between 2 different links! You can read more about link popularity here.

Google Analytics - An Overview

Back in April, 2005, Google acquired “Urchin Software Corp” a company renowned for it’s web analytics software. Since then, Google has continued developing and expanding upon the software, which comes to you today in the form of  “Google Analytics”.  Google analytics is powerful software, it’s free of charge, and it produces comprehensive statistics about the visitors to your website, making it an important marketing tool.

Google Analytics can track how someone has found your site, whether they’ve come from a link on another website, whether they’ve come from an online add, what search engine they have used, the keyword phrase they typed into the search engine to find your site and much more. It’s a fantastic marketing tool because you can use it to really measure results on your website. You can find out what pages are most popular, what keywords are bringing in the traffic, what pages visitors are leaving your site from, how long they are spending on each page and so much more.

Another great thing about Google Analytics is that although there are many features, and some very in-depth day by day reports, the main points are displayed in a user friendly “Dashboard”. The Dashboard is great for beginners to the program, as seen below it displays the main points someone would want to know about the traffic to a website. From there, you can view detailed reports, see which links are being used the most, and more useful tips like that. Note that all these sections have a “View Report” section, which is far more information.

How can you get Google Analytics for your website? All you need is a google account, and some tracking code placed on your website pages. Contact us if you would like help setting this up.

Note: Most actual stats and percentages have blanked out.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Tourism Queensland’s ‘Best job in the world’ campaign by now - $150,000 for a six-month stint as caretaker on the Great Barrier Reef’s Hamilton Island.

What’s involved? Key responsibilities include snorkeling, swimming, exploring neighboring islands and wildlife and reporting back to the world on your adventures via a blog and video diary… Sounds too good to be true? It’s not - this is a genuine job advertisement.

How do you apply? Send a short video explaining why you’re the best person for the job.

This is a brilliant viral marketing campaign that has gained enormous exposure across the globe since it’s official launch just 10 days ago in 18 countries. Since then, over 2000 video applications have been received and it is expected that more than 10,000 people will have applied by the February 22 cut-off date. The hype that has been generated appears to have even taken Tourism Queensland by surprise - the flood of visitors applying for the job caused the official website islandreefjob to crash on Wednesday.

They couldn’t have got the timing any better either - with bleak wintery conditions across much of Europe and the United States coupled with an even bleaker financial outlook, who could resist a dream job on a tropical island?  This is a really great example of viral marketing (’word of mouth’). Whilst a lot of money was invested to kick start this campaign (with a fantastic website and an international launch) - it was viral marketing that really made the difference.

So how can you use viral marketing for your business?

1. Make sure your customers enjoy a positive shopping experience.
   Perhaps this goes without saying, but people talk. Some statistics tell us that a user will tell around 12 people about their online shopping experience. This is viral marketing in action - you want to ensure your users enjoy a positive shopping experience and spread the word.
   
   
2. Offer incentives to your customers to refer their friends
   If you offer an incentive, there’s an even better chance that your customers will remember to refer you to others.

Preface

This report aims to provide recommendations for a multi-threaded online political campaign within the Australian political climate. These recommendations will take into account the current state of online technology, the proliferation of this technology within the Australian online community and the implementation of guerilla marketing strategies.

We will begin by examining the phenomenon of online campaigning in the 2004 United States Presidential election which have redefined political campaigning forever. Most notably through the use of weblogs (commonly known as blogs), Meetups, social software, and online fundraising.

2004 United States Presidential Election – A Case Study

Howard Dean

Howard Dean a Democrat from the state of Vermont was an early front-runner in the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination. Dean denounced the 2003 invasion of Iraq along with Democrats who he felt should have more strongly opposed the Bush Administration. Dean pioneered the use of the Internet in campaigning and showed strong fundraising ability; however, he eventually lost the nomination to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who in turn lost the presidential election to incumbent Republican George W. Bush.

Dean’s presidential campaign was remarkable at the time for its extensive use of the Internet to reach out to its supporters. The candidate’s staff, and occasionally even the candidate, frequently "blogged" while on the campaign trail and even sought advice on important campaign-related decisions — in at least two instances even making decisions through online polls of supporters. By soliciting contributions online, the campaign shattered previous fundraising records for the Democratic presidential primary. The Dean campaign also encouraged its supporters to join monthly Meetups (through the use of http://www.meetup.com), which would lay the groundwork for volunteers at the local level. Dean has been credited with being the first national candidate to play to the strengths of the Internet, in particular by engaging the American public directly in the political process. His Internet success is often attributed to campaign manager Joe Trippi.

"Most people thought we were out of our minds," said Joe Trippi, who midwifed the first online presidential campaign diary as a part of Howard Dean’s 2004 race. "Now I can’t think of a single congressional campaign that doesn’t have one."

The Internet-ization campaign

Dean’s Internet-ization campaign approach proved that the Internet could be utilized as an effective organizing tool. The Dean campaign was open to new strategies and forming an “untraditional” campaign, including creating a campaign blog, developing a massive e-mail list of supporters, using online forums and tools such as Meetup.com and his own DeanLink to organize events, rallies, and allowing volunteers to take a key role in the campaign by developing technology tools and organizing events. These strategies helped Dean collect more money than any other Democratic presidential hopeful, recruit more than 500,000 campaign supporters, and propel him to frontrunner status.
Because the Dean campaign looked at previous Internet success and then incorporated new and emerging technologies (especially blogs and social software tools), the campaign created a new model to reach out to supporters, fundraise, and communicate. Additionally, the media noticed Dean’s Internet success and wrote extensively about his use of technology, creating even a bigger buzz and generating plenty of earned media that none of the other Democratic candidates were receiving. With all of the publicity, the Dean campaign attracted even more individuals to visit his website, participate in the campaign blog, and attend Meetups.

Podcasting Politicians

While blogging in one form or another became a staple of all of the election candidates, few ventured into the realm of podcasting. Podcasting is still fairly new but at the time was barely popularized by the mainstream media. While originally pertaining to audio only, podcasting has now been known to incorporate the posting of video podcasts or vidcasts. Some of the candidates realised the potential of this technology to provide website visitors with audio and video of their campaign trail.
For instance, the Republican Conference, the party’s message center on Capitol Hill, now videotapes news conferences and other appearances by GOP leaders, making them available for downloading. With little publicity, nearly 50,000 people have subscribed to the free podcasts, most from outside Washington.

Redefining the Term Supporter

The idea — and the breakthrough achieved by Dean’s campaign — is using the Internet to turn supporters into stakeholders, as well as proselytizers. To that end, both major parties now use their websites as organizing tools, recruiting volunteers and enlisting them to spread what is, literally, the party line. The Republican National Committee (http://www.gop.org) allowed supporters to type in their ZIP code and glean a listing of local talk radio shows to call as well as talking points for them to use during talk back. This concept not only stirred interest in supporters to contact media about these political issues but also to comment on them with a unified, candidate supportive opinion.

"It’s about building … an ongoing community," Karen Finney, a Democratic Party spokeswoman, said of the dialogue promoted on her party’s website — http://www.dnc.org — which, naturally, includes a blog. "We hope to accomplish buzz," added Josh McConaha, the party’s Internet director (a job that didn’t exist two years ago).
As opposed to television and radio, the Internet is not a tool for narrative but rather for conversation, Boyd said, adding that MoveOn.org selects the issues it get involved in by listening to its participants and looking "to where the energy is."

Campaign Financing

Dean also reinvented campaign financing by developing a successful formula for Internet fundraising: a complete Internet strategy of utilizing his online grassroots network, blogs, e-mail, and web-based donations system. Dean, taking McCain’s fundraising success to the next level, counterbalanced the power of big money in politics with an army of small money donors empowered by the Internet.
Dean maximized his online fundraising strategies with much success. In the third quarter of 2003, Dean raised nearly $15 million — more than any Democratic presidential candidate ever has in a single quarter. Close to 50 percent of Dean’s donations came through the Internet as did the previous quarter when he raised $7.6 million.117 In the third quarter the campaign received 110,786 online contributions from 84,713 supporters, with the average amount of $61.14. By comparison, the Bush campaign raised $50 million in the third quarter with about $1.5 million coming from Internet donations — just three percent of his total.

Viral Marketing
Creativity is a big element of online fundraising. In August 2003, when it became known that Bush was interrupting his summer vacation for a Portland, Oregon fundraising dinner with a goal of raising $1 million, the Dean campaign created the “Raise a Million against Bush challenge,” urging Dean supporters to send their donations as part of a virtual fundraiser to equal the amount Bush was expected to raise. Within a week, Dean collected more than $1 million from nearly 18,000 Internet donors, averaging a donation of $50.135 After the challenge, a Dean blog posting completed by Teachout declared victory:
“You made the million dollar challenge, you got your friends to give, you brought the rallies their power, you are recreating American politics every minute. This week, you proved that the Dean grassroots can win this election and take back the White House.”

The Clark campaign in November 2003 launched the “Clark04 ZIP(code) Drive” challenge. This fundraising challenge was described on Clark’s website as follows: Do you want to meet with Wesley Clark in your community? Get started today by making a contribution to Clark for President! Then, recruit and challenge other supporters in your community to contribute to Clark04.com as well. The ZIP code that generates the largest number of online donors will earn huge bragging rights AND a visit from Wesley Clark during the upcoming primary season!
Symbols are also popular in fundraising challenges. The Kerry campaign brings a hammer down when a goal is reached, while the Dean campaign uses baseball bats for certain fundraising challenges, and the Lieberman campaign has the “JoeMobile” asking supporters to “help fill up the tank”

Where it’s Headed

The Internet has proven to be a breakthrough in tool in presidential campaigning. Citizens are embracing the Internet to connect to the political process. But like any technology, the Internet cannot replace a person’s motivation to become more politically active; it can, however, help educate, inform, and activate citizens. As the Internet grows in importance, campaigns must adapt to this new technological environment. Candidates who fail to recognize the power of the Internet will be left behind.
The LA Times predicts that the 2008 election will feature the rise of Podcasting Politicians, as strategists from both parties try to ride the latest trends to secure a victory in 2008. ‘You’ll not only be able to text people with messages, you’ll be able to raise money, deliver video, audio, create viral organizing — where one person sees something really interesting and it gets passed on and on,’ says Donnie Fowler, a Democratic strategist.

The State of Australian Politics Online

Existing Australian Political Websites
The first thing to look at in assessing Australia’s online political landscape is to visit the websites of the major online parties and parliamentary individuals.

I visited a long list of websites for various parties and their affiliated groups and concluded that while some of the larger parties were using some modern technology many had not adopted anywhere near the amount of technology available to help promote their content; and some had websites which seemed to belong to the internet of ten years ago. One thing the major party websites did catch onto was the concept of taking online contributions via credit card, and many offered secure payment facilities.

I visited the Australian Democrats (democrats.org.au), their website was fairly nice in comparison with many others and easy to use. A call to action drew my attention which read:

“Sick of goverment abuse of power? Want more accountablilty? Concerned about human rights? 4 things you can do today:
1. Join 2. Donate 3. Subscribe 4. Volunteer”

The Australian Greens (greens.org.au) also sported a decent design which and media pages which contained links to video and radio multimedia files as well as RSS feeds.

The PM’s website (pm.gov.au) was well designed, and provided media files and press releases like some of the other sites.

How They Stand Up
The majority of the websites seemed to lack call to actions and seemed to simply serve as online repositories for press releases. Voters aren’t interested in press releases, they want to contribute, to interact with websites.

A huge factor in the Dean success was the fact that he let his contributors create the content. Through the ability to comment, vote using online polls, speak their mind in forums. While there are issues regarding spam and the posting of offensive material onto forums and blogs, these things can be dealt with. Promote discussion by allowing people to publish their own ideas on human rights and other important issues on your forums and Yahoo Groups.

For example take a look at the action list on the United States, Republican National Committee (gop.com) website:

While not all of these are relevant to the Australian political climate, many of the concepts are the same and these are the things you want your supporters actively participating in.

In short, I found the majority of Australian political groups’ websites to be fairly uninteresting and difficult to navigate and use. This should provide an advantage in constructing a superior online presence.

A View Towards Future Success

A Suitable Web Presence

The first step is to build an online presence which not only compares with the opposition but surpasses them is to identify the audience and ensure that communication online meets their needs and expectations.

The web presence should piggyback on other campaign activities such as literature, canvassing and real world advertising to provide a multi-threaded attack.

The ease of RSS has allowed information to spread between websites and users quicker and more efficiently. RSS subscriptions are becoming an alternative to visiting a website and so are becoming an online obligation.

Similarly many of these other technologies allowing easy access to content and user contribution are becoming the norm in the way people use the internet. They facilitate quicker communication and creation of ideas as well as stimulate much more thought and participation in users.

Features of Benefit
A successful political website should contain features such as:

Marketing

Another key element in any campaign let alone a successful one is advertising. As mentioned earlier the online strategies should mirror the offline ones and work together to provide a stronger overall campaign.

In fact being the first to offer certain key technologies might allow you to garnish some Australian media coverage along the lines of: “Politicians go Web 2.0” or “The New Face of Online Politics”.

Another aspect of building traffic to your site and interest in your cause is syndication. Human Rights for instance is a global human issue and doing a podcast covering that kind of topic could bring you listeners and supports from around the world and particularly countries with larger online user bases than Australia’s entire population.

You can syndicate your content to websites such as:
- Apple iTunes Podcasts
- odeo.com
- Yahoo Groups (and other eGroups)

Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing is defined  as “Any marketing technique that induces Web sites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message’s visibility and effect.”

Utilizing this growing phenomenon to your own advantage is a great idea. The application however requires some fairly well thought out ideas.

An example might be to draw attention to important or controversial issues targeted at specific voter demographics.

For instance, the fact that in the United States, innocence panels adopting DNA technology have freed 133 people so far, including some on death row.

Voters should know that if someone is wrongfully imprisoned in Australia they might not receive the same fair chance to appeal as those 133 innocent American’s did.

Getting this information out to the public, on the web, in the form of fashionable concern should work to improve the adoption of these opinions and in turn lead to more sponsorship and votes for ones campaign.

Demographics
Demographics need to be addressed separately. What’s good for tech savvy youth doesn’t always work for their grandparents.

Young adults frequently use the internet so you might be one of the only political forces actively gaining their limited political attention. Additionally youth unable to vote might bring up these controversial issues at the dinner table and further educate their families about your issues.

With the right slogans and spin you could build a series of viral marketing elements to spread around the internet educating Australian citizens about human rights issues as well as encouraging them to vote for you in the upcoming election.

Banners can be used by users to show support for your cause on their blogs, myspace profiles and other online profiles which not only advertise your viral campaign but link back to your website increasing traffic.

One could run competitions encouraging internet users to spread their campaign awareness to reach certain goals. (e.g. for each 1000 signups you will donate $1000 dollars to overseas aid).

Doing these kinds of things could attract some media awareness (or alternatively it could be seeded intentionally to the mainstream media) which could in turn drive additional traffic to your websites.

Glossary of Terms

Blog (Web Log, Online Journal)
Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal (or newsletter) that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.

Podcast (non-linear online radio)
Podcasting, a portmanteau of Apple’s "iPod" and "broadcasting", is a method of publishing files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically by subscription, usually at no cost. It first became popular in late 2004, used largely for audio files.

Vodcast (non-linear online TV)
Video podcast (sometimes shortened to vodcast) is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures. The term is an evolution specialized for video, coming from the generally audio-based podcast and referring to the distribution of video where the RSS feed is used as a non-linear TV channel to which consumers can subscribe using a PC, TV, set-top box, media center or mobile multimedia device).

Odeo (odeo.com)
A free online directory of “Over one million audio files—from podcasts and all over the web. Listen, download, subscribe…”

Myspace (myspace.com)
MySpace.com (or MySpace) is a free service that uses the Internet for online communication through an interactive network of photos, weblogs, user profiles, e-mail, web forums, and groups, as well as other media formats. This all-inclusive service is sometimes called a social networking interface. MySpace is a very active site, and additions and new features are being added constantly.

Yahoo Groups (groups.yahoo.com)
Yahoo! Groups is a service from Yahoo! that provides electronic mailing lists. Over the years, Yahoo! bought several other mailing list providers, including the popular eGroups, and combined them with Yahoo! Clubs into one system. Yahoo! Groups is now the most popular and best-known provider of electronic mailing lists. Its main competitor is Google Groups.
RSS
Rich Site Summary / Really Simple Syndication is a method to syndicate a sites content. This is done by creating an XML document which summarizes specific site content such as news, blog posts or comments and forum threads.