How will Your Online Traffic Perform in 2008?

Free Report on the Current State of Online Traffic in Australia

I have prepared a report about some recent trends and some of the big challenges you will be facing in 2008. You will probably planning your online marketing at present and be faced with some of the following problems:

• Traffic prices are increasing
• Banner advertising isoverpriced
• The quality of rented databases is decreasing

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CommBank Hacking on Sydney Morning Herald Website?

CommBank, Who is Your New Online Marketing Agency?

If you see the current banner campaign on SMH and a Commbank banner comes up you will notice a request to fill in your banking login details pops up over the screen. I almost filled in mine!

If I were the media agency for Commbank’s online marketing I would be expecting to look for a new financial services client. The creative agency sends the banners to the media agency. The media agency is the last person with them and therefore should take responsibility because they put them live.

Plan for Search Trends In Advance

For many websites the Christmas/New Year period is a quiet time of year and most people managing them look back at how well they did in the last year.

Take advantage of this by looking forward. Try to predict upcoming trends for the new year and use these trends to build related content to attract visitors to your website.

For example the Simpsons movie was a big release in 2007.



As you can see above there were several important events for search trends about the Simpsons movie (source: Google Trends):

• A: First newspaper previews of the movie


• E: Movie released to theatres worldwide


• F: DVD released for sale

If you had a website with lots of movie related content the way to attract lots of visitors to your site would have been to be the first to publish a really indepth article about the Simpsons Movie, ideally several months before event A (newspaper previews).

Even if your article is mostly rumour and innuendo if it has:

• Plenty of often updated text content


• Using targeted keywords


• Images of Simpsons characters with proper alt attributes etc

Than being first to publish will mean your page will already be ranking well and be "reputable" to search engines by the time event A occurs and will still rank well compared to the big movie review sites when the movie and subsequent DVD's are released.

Have you had success using Google Trends for content ideas?

Want Free Cricket Tickets

Free Cricket Tickets!

We just launched a new competition for 3 Mobile Cricket where you can win a free cricket ticket for each of the one day international tests! Its Free to enter.

Other prizes to be won:

• A bbq with Gilchrist and Brett Lee and 4 signed cricket bats for you and 3 mates.
• 100 Signed 3 mobile hats
• If you refer a friend you could win a Australian cricket team signed cricket bat
  

Google's Matt Cutts explains ALT attributes for images

Google's Matt Cutts recently posted a video about how to use ALT attributes for images

The ALT attribute provides alternative or substitute text, for use when the image cannot be seen by a visually impaired person or by a search engine.

In both cases they can't see the image so you have to describe it in a way that tells them what the image shows. For example if it's a photo of a Siamese cat than you might use:

<img src="cat.jpg" alt="siamese cat">

This is great for the visually impaired person and also for SEO purposes because the search engine engine has a label to attach to that photo for use in their Image search.

For more information, I'll handover to Matt's video (3min 10sec):