Date: 29th March 2007

Your web marketing strategy is all about Words. Getting information to your customers and prospects, promoting your business in the media, selling to your customers: it’s all about using carefully crafted and persuasive words. It’s just as important as optimising, pay per click campaigns, and other advertising technologies.

This fast moving session is designed to:

• Give you tips and techniques for improving your business performance on the web
• Introduce you to new technologies such as blogs and online press releases
• Providing you with insight and inspiration on how to write great copy for your website

Companies that are:

• Not getting the desired response from their website
• Wanting to communicate better with their customers
• Wanting to get the press coverage they deserve

The workshop is aimed at business owners, managers or marketing professionals responsible for their company’s website.

Learn more about this East Midlands eBusiness Club event here.

How can you promote your website to overseas markets and visitors? How can you get found in the French, German, etc versions of Google?

There are a few simple steps to follow:

1. Create foreign language content
It sounds obvious, but you need entire pages in the language of your choice. My top tip is ensure these pages are search engine optimised including relevant Title Tags, meta tags, and keyword rich content. Don’t forget to include these foreign language pages on your site map.

Do not even consider using those nasty web-based translation sites; this is one time it will be worth investing in a good translation service. And remember to re-use the translated material on other marketing collateral to get your money’s worth.

Your content needs to extend to your foreign office address and phone numbers, if possible. Don’t be shy – put this foreign address information on every page of foreign language content, perhaps in a footer.

2. Domain names
If you want to trade in the USA, get a .com domain name. If you say “.co.uk” to a Yank, they’ll say “dot what?”

If you want to invest in a top level country domain name (.fr, .de) then you will need an address in that country to have entitlement to the domain name.

And how to manage the international language content? If resources can stretch that far, then create an entire site designed for your foreign market. Duplicating content on websites is bad practice for search engine optimisation, but if your content is translated then you should have no problem.

3. Foreign hosting
To stand the best chance of ranking well in the foreign versions of Google (www.google.fr, www.google.de) then you will need content in the language, but also a website hosted in each respective country.

If you want to find out where your website is hosted, then here’s a very useful little tool that checks your website IP address and country.

(and don’t forget that you want your UK website hosted in the UK!)

4. Inbound linking
You’ll need inbound links from foreign partners, and these links should go to your foreign language content. It’s just a mini search engine optimisation exercise.

These steps won’t make a dramatic change in your rankings in Google over night, but they certainly will improve your chances.

What’s worth reading if you want to keep up with the latest developments in search engine optimisation?

Well, why not let other SEO fans suggest what they’re reading?

Google’s personalised home page has a new feature that allows you to define “Tabs” for subjects you’re interested in . Google will automatically populate it with popular content from other people’s Tabs. It’s another step forward in terms of social networking.

So, I created a Tab called “SEO” and the personalised home page gave me these recommended readings:

(… have you also noticed you can now “skin” your desktop with interactive images. In this case, the sun rises and sets according to the time of day…)

The big guns in SEO are all there in my new Tab: Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan, SEOMoz.

But if you own favourite isn’t there, you can “add stuff” to your Tab. Google tracks as new stuff gets added, and as new content becomes more popular it will become part of the standard “I feel lucky” setting.

Take a look at OutOfMyGord’s posting if you want to read more.

I was working in London last week, slogging with the masses on the Tube. Just passing the time reading the posters on the Tube train.

When I saw one poster that was intriguing:

stop the information monopoly
http://information-revolution.org/

Go to the website, and it reads:

Did you know that more than 75% of people in the UK use just one search engine to find information? The same search engine. The biggest search engine. The most popular search engine. Why? It’s not that there aren’t choices, it just seems that most people don’t use them.

The search engine Ask.com is behind the campaign.

Gary Price is the director of information resources at Ask.com, and somebody I have admired for many years. Coincidentally (not) Searchenginewatch.com recently interviewed Gary Price, and whilst there was no direct mention of the campaign, Gary said:

“Google is a great product, and I use Google plenty too. I like to take a look at everything, but I think that when it comes to information retrieval, options are very important. It’s one thing if my mom is searching and she has become entrenched with Google. But, it is another thing for people who are in teaching, or teaching younger people information retrieval skills, as these skills are more important now than ever before.

I have to agree with Gary: information retrieval skills are essential in an information society, indeed more important than ever. And Google isn’t the only answer.

It’s great to open the debate, and also to raise awareness of other search tools: each with a particular strength. I’m going to write more about those in future postings.

And now for the final round up of my Top 10 Internet marketing myths. You can see the full list of my 10 Internet marketing myths in a handy fact sheet here.

7. Don’t forget to Resubmit to the search engines regularly

I’m amazed how many small businesses that are sold an SEO package that includes an automated monthly resubmit to the major search engines.

What an absolute waste of money: the search engines prefer to find your site via quality inbound links, and they also prefer to discover your new content by their own regular programme of crawling your site.

It’s a con, trust me.

8. Submit your website to 10,000 directories

Excuse me, but I don’t think there are even 10,000 search engines or directories. Do the right thing and only submit to the main search engines because they got most of the searches in the world.

And beware these service that sell packages of 10,000 submissions. You will be conned into getting your site into FFA (free for all) directories which are harvesting email addresses for spam merchants.

9. Guaranteed Number One Ranking

Any search engine optimisation company that promises to make you number one is either telling porky pies or pulling the wool over your eyes.

Search engine marketing companies don’t own the search engines. And they can’t predict the changes that are happening on a regular basis

What they might do is make you number one for an obscure phrase like “American Internet marketing guru Nottingham.” Phrases like that just aren’t going to help your business at all.

If you hear promises like that, just shake hands and say goodbye.

10. A bit of Black Hat is just what you need.

Danger, danger: warning, warning.

Black hat search engine optimisation is cheating plain and simple. Google has a long memory; that means if you do a bit of black hat now and then stop, Google will still remember your misdemeanours. And track you down.

Google is quite plain talking in terms of what it considers to be good and bad practice. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the principles of black hat search engine optimisation. Spamming on blogs. Link farms. Doorway pages. Keyword stuffing.

It’s just not worth it.

That wraps up my Search Engine Optimisation Top Ten Myths. I’m sure they’ll be new cons and subterfuges to talk about soon, so I’ll provide updates as time goes by. You can find a complete copy of my Search Engine Optimisation Top Ten Myths in PDF format.

Here are numbers 4, 5 and 6 in my countdown of the Top 10 Internet Marketing myths. Take a look at the first three Internet marketing myths here.

Traditional searching on Google focuses on key phrases: words in the Title, words on the page, words in links coming in from other sites.

But when you throw Geography (or “local search”) into the searching mix, then it gets more complicated. The search engines pull other data from other sources – specifically other sources of geographic data.

Here’s an example of a local search for “architect Leicester.” Look carefully at the results above, and see that whilst the first company on the list has a green website address listed, the second and third companies are NOT found by their websites, but rather by Google’s own mapping data.

Also note that here in the UK, entries are listed in order of proximity to the central postcode.

And of course, these Local Results for a search appear at the top of the Google search page.

If you’re interested in getting found for local searches then consider doing the following:

1. Get in entry in Google’s Local Business Centre. It’s free, and it confirms to Google the combination of what your business does and where your business is located.
2. Get links from other reliable local directories: Thomson directory, Chambers of Commerce, city directories like Touch
3. Consider getting localised entries in the major directories like DMOZ and Yahoo.
4. Get listings in specialised directories, also known as Vertical directories. For a profession like an architect, this is entries on sites like BuildingTalk, Building Standards Agencies, Chartered Institute of Building Service Engineers, etc.
5. Make sure your site is optimised for your locality, either by including address information, or mentioning places that your business serves.

Local search is a complex topic, so have a look at this article 10 Likely Elements of Google’s Local Search