A concerned client has just emailed us about their new web site. The problem is that although their site is the top hit when you search for any variation of their business name, when you search for less specific terms such as their agents or generic industry terms, it doesn't rank so well.

The thing is that it is miraculous that it even ranks at all. It's a brand new web site with maybe two incoming links from low ranking web sites, the company name is fairly generic and they haven't even finished putting in the content!

So how is it ranking? Well, aside from being clean, accessible and standards compliant, it's content focused (with most of the content being text) and was built from the ground up with search engines in mind. We used every trick in the book to ensure important keywords would end up in the right places. Very successfully, if I don't say so myself.

Here's a copy of the email I sent back. Keep in mind that the client is fairly new to this whole thing and I am trying to get it across in a direct and easy to understand way. To this end I don't go into specific details, and it's more about covering concepts rather than explaining exactly how to go about doing anything - that's our job, and that's why they're paying us.

Think of it as search engine optimization basics, SEO 101:

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Getting your web site to rank well on specific keyword searches is called search engine optimization, or SEO for short. It is a constantly changing, multifaceted, multibillion dollar industry that is as much magic as it is a science.

As far as the science goes, ranking well on search engines requires on site optimization, off site optimization and then certain unchangeable properties of a web site such as age.

On site optimization has, for the most part, been taken care of. This includes having a standards compliant, accessible and well coded web site with clean URLs and a logical, easy to follow structure. We take all of these things into account when building our web sites, and so as far as that goes, you're ahead of the game.

Another critical aspect of on site optimization is the all important content. Google analyzes the content on your site to decide how relevant it is to certain queries. The most important part of this is keyword density. If you want to rank well for a certain keyword, you need to be mentioning the specific word, and lots of related words as often as you can.

As you are responsible for managing the content on the web site, this is up to you. The more plain text content you have on a particular topic, the more likely it will be that you will rank high for searches related to that particular topic.

Somewhat related, is the all important text to code ratio. Although the layout of the page is clean and accessible, some of the formatting you have applied to certain pages of the your site is unnecessarily complex. Special codes are required to produce the formatting on a page, and every time you add formatting, the editor adds the required code, decreasing the text to code ratio, decreasing your chances of ranking well.

Another aspect of SEO is off site optimization. This includes things like incoming links, the anchor text of those incoming links, the context of the incoming links, the relevance of the incoming link, and how important Google considers the site that is linking to you.

Basically you want as many incoming links to your site as possible. The more specific pages that are linked the better (this is called 'deep linking') and the more relevant and 'important' the web site is that is linking to you, the better.

You can purchase links from web sites, but you need to be very careful when doing so. Choose carefully when getting incoming links, as there are theories about 'bad neighborhoods' and the possibility of Google actually penalizing you for having a link there. Bad neighborhoods are spam networks or obviously unrelated paid link pages. However, I have seen very little evidence of this, and I would call this 'magic' more than science.

So, as far as organic search results go, there is no way of guaranteeing anything. All you can do is do everything you can to make your site more attractive to Google, increasing the likelihood of it choosing your web site over another when figuring out rankings for your chosen keywords.

After saying all of that though, there is one way of near guaranteeing that you appear near the top of search results for certain keywords, and that is paid advertising.

Google's system is called 'Adwords' and works like this. You bid for certain key words, usually product names and search terms related to your products or industry. The bid amount depends entirely on the popularity of a keyword or term. Basically you could pay anything from a few cents to fifty dollars or more per click.

The more you bid, the higher up the list you go (you can see paid links on the right hand side of most Google searches) and if you've paid enough, you'll be right up the top (usually in a shaded color above the organic search results)

Irrespective of how much you've bid, be it a few cents or a few dollars, if someone clicks on your link, you are charged the amount that you've bid. You can customize campaigns to target the entire world, or certain geographic regions, you can set dollar limits so that you only spend so much per day, and you can target the same keywords to cross over to their advertising network so your add appears on web sites other then the Google search.

This is a great way to get guaranteed, targeted traffic, but it is obviously expensive and unless you're making money directly off your visitors, not all that scalable: the more traffic you get, the more you pay. SEO is the only way to get consistent, targeted traffic but of course it takes a lot of time and effort.

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If you'd like to talk to us about search engine optimization, or require web design or development, please don't hesitate to contact us now.

It's rare these days to encounter someone that disputes the importance of a web presence. The benefits are obvious, it's the first place people look for information and after your initial investment it requires very little to keep relevant and updated and you've got a virtual sales person operating twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

But why does your company need a blog? The advantages of this fancy new way of doing business aren't so obvious, and you could be forgiven for passing blogs off as the latest new Internet meme that will eventually disappear into oblivion.

Although the blog and the "blogosphere" are reasonably new terms, the actual concept has been around for years under the guise of the "e/n site" and the personal home page. Providers of accessible off-the-shelf solutions are the reason for the fairly recent exponential growth of the formalized "blog", providing an accessible way of performing the principle tasks of a blog, namely writing and editing posts and comments.

A little over 12 months ago, the popular blog search engine Technorati put the "blogosphere" at over 70 million blogs, with an average of 120,000 created every day (That's 1.4 every second!) Needless to say, blogs aren't going anywhere, and if you're not going to represent your company and the products and services it's offering, then someone else will.

If that isn't reason enough, here's a few more points to argue the case. Starting a company blog enables you to:

Create a dialog with your customers

Blogs are an incredibly easy and efficient way of getting customer feedback. It's free market research, you can stay up to date with your target audience and everything they need and want.

This dialogue also gives you an opportunity to give your company a "personality" and interact on a more personal level than the regular "cold" corporate presence allows you to do.

Most importantly, this dialogue allows you to educate your existing and potential customers, subtly teaching them about your products or services in an interesting and unobtrusive way.

Position yourself as an expert

A blog allows you to position yourself as an expert, and give something away before a potential customer has even picked up the phone.

These giveaways needn't be expensive, and usually come in the form of free advice in your area of expertise. As long as it's genuinely useful and applicable them you'll have a captive audience to which you can subtly emphasize your strong points and easily distinguish yourself from your competitors.

This is an incredible competitive advantage! You've offered something to a potential customer, positioned yourself as an expert and been able to explain why you're better than anyone at what you do, before your potential customer has even seen the other alternatives.

Create transparency and build trust

Even if it's just letting everyone know that you're still alive and kicking, a blog allows you to keep your customers in the loop. Are things quiet around your camp because your in the midst of launching something new? Use your blog to not only let people know, but to build anticipation and excitement around your latest developments.

More serious than the "we're still here, and everything's great!" or "check this out!" messages, is crises management. You're company has received some bad press, and you need a way to put forward your position on the matter before things balloon and get out of hand.

Your blog allows you to do this quickly and effectively, not only enabling you to get your point across, but also to directly address your customers concerns via feedback comments.

Your customers will rest easy knowing you're listening and addressing the issue, you can monitor and even control the situation till things cool down and instead of loosing customers over a bit of bad press, you'll impress everyone with the way you quickly and efficiently handled a negative situation and minimized or completely avoided the potential fallout.

Boost your Internet presence

Search engines love blogs! They're full of juicy key words and because your blog will inevitably include details of your products, services and industry, you'll be be the "lucky" recipient of more high quality, targeted and completely organic (free!) search engine traffic than you'll ever get with the standard corporate web presence.

Naturally, as you're talking primarily about your company and it's products and services, you'll link through to product and information pages so those that are especially interested can get more information.

This is useful in three different ways. The first and most obvious is that you're primary web presence benefits from the traffic your blog is receiving. The second is that with a little foresight you can control the order in which people receive information on your products and services, getting slowly more involved and in-depth, in an effort to inform and persuade without confusing.

The third reason that these links are useful is a concept called deep linking. This topic is best saved for a dedicated post later on, but basically deep linking helps increase your search engine visibility by increasing the exposure of the deeper "levels" of your site.

Hopefully you've already made up your mind: Your company needs a blog. Now, my goal is to convince you that you need to get onto it right away! You should create a company blog right now because:

Blogs have a low entry barrier

Blogs cost next to nothing to set up or maintain. The AustralianBoating Blog is hosted for free on Blogger and you're accessing it via a sub domain which cost us nothing to set up.

Obviously your mileage may vary, but there's plenty of fantastic prepackaged software out there with great support communities, and they couldn't be easier to set up! You can have a completely free, professionally designed, hosted blog in a few minutes using either WordPress or Blogger

Of course there's two sides to every story, and on the other side of the coin is a custom built system, or modification of an existing package to integrate into or interface with your existing site. This is useful if you need to bring modules or widgets from your primary web presence over to your blog. Advertising or event calendars for example.

Blogs are pull, not push

People are slowly but surely migrating from invasive push technology to the much more pleasant pull variants.

What does this mean? If someone chooses to receive updates from your blog they can subscribe to your RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed or if your blog allows it, they can get emailed updates. If they decide against their decision later on and subscribed via RSS, they can simply unsubscribe.

If they chose the email option, they'll more than likely be interrupted at a later date by an intrusive email, and will then have to spend their valuable time fighting with an unsubscribe form. Even if they've successfully unsubscribed from one email list, there's no telling how many others they've ended up on or what else you might have in mind for their email address...

Don't get me wrong, email lists are still very important in any online marketing campaign, but the future is definitely in pull technology. Even now, if you're looking for how many people you've connected with, the number of people subscribed to your RSS feed is a much more accurate metric than the number of people who probably deleted your email before reading it.

Once again, RSS and other so called "pull" technologies are topics probably best left for another post, but if you're keen on learning more about them, remember to subscribe to our RSS feed so you don't miss out :)

If you don't, someone else will

I've already touched on this, but it's not just that unsatisfied customer of yours that you need to look out for. If your competition catches on before you do, you've just given your customers one more reason to go with them over of you.

To finish up, I'll talk about the reason that we created this blog, and why we will continue to publish useful and informative posts like this one.

Our flagship product AustralianBoating.com.au was created for your customers, and this blog was created for you, our customers.

We are AustralianBoating.com.au and we specialize in Internet marketing with a focus on the Australian Boating and Marine Industry. If you have any questions about our business, or how we can help you, please don't hesitate to contact us now.

We are AustralianBoating.com.au, Australia's largest boating and marine directory. AustralianBoating.com.au specializes in Internet marketing, where we have over the years proven our abilities by consistently gaining and maintaining high search engine rankings and substantially increase Internet exposure for clients in various industries.

We've decided to focus our energies on the Australian boating and marine industry because although it continues to enjoy reasonable coverage in the so-called 'old media' we feel there is a lot of work to be done to increase the visibility of the boating and marine industry on the Internet.

We will use this blog to talk about Internet marketing and web design and development, with a focus on the boating and marine industries. From time to time we will also write about feature launches on our flagship product AustralianBoating.com.au as well as other handy tips and tricks on how your can successfully market your boating or marine business on the Internet.

Whilst you're fortunate to have stumbled upon this blog early on, we'd hate you to miss out on any of the free tips and tricks we have planned for the future. We plan on posting at least once a week, but just incase you forget, please subscribe to our RSS feed using Google, Yahoo or your desktop RSS client.

If you haven't already, head over to AustralianBoating.com.au to give context to future discussions, and check this blog later on this week for the first 'real' post!