Yahoo7 launches new portal

Yahoo has always played second fiddle to Ninemsn ever since it launched. Ninemsns greater and more relevant local content tied in with its huge television and magazine promotions have given it more traffic. More traffic leads to more advertising. More advertising means more cash. More cash means a better, fresher website.

Yahoo unlike in other countries is a small player in Australia although its new initiative to integrate channel 7 content and info into the website will surely put the stick into Ninemsn.

Yahoo in the early days was a dominant player with their directory structure of providing content to web "newbies". As the web user has become more and more educated this directory structure has not been as useful because of the weird and wacky requirements for information from the more informed web user. Putting a big Search bar infront of a user these days does confuse them it excites them.

I am keen to see how this changes the online media space and perhaps some day you will see TV media sales packaged with media space on their websites?!?

Comments appreciated.

Search engine optimisation tip #1 - Page titles

Page titles are a key consideration by Google when looking at your website as to what exactly the page is all about. The key is to name your titles with the keywords you are looking to optimise the page for.

Example:
www.lasik.com.au
Laser eye surgery from Laser Sight Centres

Pages throughout this website change title as you move from different content areas. This is good SEO since you are customising each page to particular keywords and not just targetting your generic words.

This also comes back to the principle of 1 page for 1 keyword.

Any questions or comments please post.

N.B. This is a forum I read to get some new insights and opinions to our own search engine optimisation http://www.searchengineforums.com/

What works well online

I have lots of questions and thoughts about what companies actually work online. My answer to this is really based upon objectives and definition of what you mean by works.

Products that work well online are usually ones that dont need to be seen or felt or touched or tried on etc.. low human interaction is required. Good examples of this are:

• Books (Amazon)
• Computers (Dell, newegg.com, techbuy)
• Credit cards (Virgin Money)
• Pharmaceuticals (www.yourchemistshop.com.au)
• Flowers (Roses only)
• gift baskets (www.thebasketcase.com.au )
• Insurance (HCF, NIB, NRMA, QBD)
• Real Estate (realestate.com.au)
• Cars (carsales)
• Second hand goods and auctions (ebay)
• Music (mp3.com.au, hmv, virginmega.com)
• DVD rental (netflix)
• Mortgages (aussies, wizard)
• Software (sourceforge)
• Newspapers (news.com.au, smh, ninemsn)
• Dating (rsvp, match.com, lavalife)
• Pornography and sex toys (... too many .. adultshop)
• Gambling (Pokerparty, Betfair)
• Perfume
• Jobs (careerone)
• Stock trading (etrade, all banks commsec, westpac, st george)
• electronics (xbox, tvs, dvd, cameras)
• Digital photo processing
• Travel (lastminute, expedia, .. too many.. this is huge.)
• Internet access
• Web hosting (Webcentral, ozhosting)
• Jewellery
• Swimwear and lingerie
• Games (Software and real life)
• Free stuff (emailcash)
• Distress inventory (lastminute,Overstock)
• Cosmetics (strawberrynet)
• Ringtones and other mobile (blueskyfrog, jamster)

There are many more categories and many more to be added.

Some key criteria which I think work well are but are not necessarily require to be together:

1. Customer need information about the product
2. Customers are price conscious if you have the best price online customers will buy it.
3. The product is digital in nature or primarily based on technology
4. The product is information. Reports, ebooks etc..

Fun Christmas game

Here is a fun game we just made for one of our clients.
http://www.pmigroup.com.au/Xmas05/Default.asp

You will not believe some of the high scores! How much does that build your brand when someone interacts with your game for hours and hours on end!

Whats new online?

Recently I gave a breakfast seminar on what all the new things are online.

Here are the slides and links that we went through.

Eyeblasters
Video Banners

Emoticons
http://www.kingkongmovie.com/downloads.html

Podcasts
http://www.podcastalley.com

If you have any questions please dont hesitate to email me f.schebesta@freestylemedia.com.au

Prioritising your emarketing

There is no point in driving more people to a website that isnt converting people to customers in the first place.

1. Conversion - Get your website converting traffic into customers. Measure this with statistics. How many people visit your website versus how many people convert into customers is one of the simplest measures.

2. Merchandise - Package up your products to be more appealing to buy. Now that you have your site converting get your customers to buy more products per basket, cross sell, upsell, package products, bundle them and give specials, competitions, promotions.

3. Traffic - Increase it, since you know your website converts bolster it with a mountain of targetted traffic. Easiest and fastest way to do that is buy more keywords. Email market to current customers, offer incentives for referrals, run affiliate programs, content share, banner advertise and build traffic. Advertising in other mediums also boasts online traffic.

This order is critical. The worst thing you can do is send more people to a website that doesnt convert. Its like pouring money into a leaky funnel!

Convert, merchandise, traffic - monitor this continually, one break in the funnel can disturb the whole process.

How is linking better for search engine rankings?

There has been so much talk about linking and how it works with the search engines. I want to first say that my take on this is the more links you get from other websites the better.

A search engine is a beast to be reckoned with, think of the millions and millions of pages it has to search before it tries to get some relevant results when you search for something. In my early years of online marketing I was a web developer and during a couple of weeks one of my colleagues and I decided that search engines werent that complicated and began to write our own. 3 weeks of coding in java and a lot of late nights resulted in a small spider that crawled websites and picked up the links that were on the page. It was easy to find the links and because they were easy to find it was easy to find out which other websites to search.

Now my crawler was very very simple as compared to Google although it illustrated how you should use links. Linking to relevant and high page rank websites is the key. This way when the crawler goes to your website and tries to figure out what the page is all about it will look for other websites that link to it and from it for some answers. If you had a dog food website and lots of other websites are linking to your site with the following link Dog Food, The website will gain relevance to the search engine for that keyword.

The main reason I link back to someone elses website is so other people will link to my websites.