Desire lines are those well worn paths that get us to where we really want to go – in sheer defiance of the official paved route.

Blogs gives small businesses an easy way to rapidly adapt web content according your visitors’ desire lines: what they actually want, rather than what we expect them to do.

I attended a presentation by Eileen Brown, Microsoft’s Technology Evangelist, where she applied the idea of desire lines to blogging.

One common sense way to discover your visitors’ “desire lines” is to review your web statistics and analytics. Your analytics can help you to learn about your audience:

• Which of your blog postings or web pages get the most hits from the search engines?
• Which of your recommended links do visitors follow most commonly?
• Which postings or pages hardly ever get viewed?
• What path do users most typically take through your site?
• And by extension, what do they really want?

Accommodating the your visitors “desire lines” in your blog is easily done and will provide satisfaction for those readers who want to go a different way, rather than being led:

• creating the types of content visitors most commonly read
• providing links to other credible sites
• tagging your content to faciliate discovery of related material
• comments from your readers with links to other interesting sites

On the one hand, blogging can be a powerful business tool to push key marketing messages to your readers.

But it can also act as a valuable instrument to learn more about those clients who want deviate off your planned route. Your visitors don’t always want to follow the path (read: navigation) that we lay out for them, and they don’t act the way we expect.

Learn more:

Peter Meholz (who invented the word “blog”) explains Desire Lines

Keeping up to date with latest trends in search marketing means a lot of reading. Here are some suggestions to help you burn the midnight oil:

If I only have time to read one thing, it is my Search Engine News subscription. It’s a monthly update, comprehensive, authoritative, practical, of what’s new in in the world of search engine marketing. I’m afraid it does cost real money, but with the dollar so weak, the price tag of US$144 for a whole year amounts to less than 80 squid. Warning: this website looks big time American cheesy spammy, but the quality of the subscription is excellent.

If you are looking for free info, then blogs has to be the way to go. The BigList of SEO and SEM blogs by TopRank lists more than 400 blogs. Awesome, in the literal sense of the word. It’s arranged alphabetically which can make it difficult to get to grips with, but it is a great launch pad. It is interesting to note Danny Sullivan’s Sphinn is the editor’s pick; Sphinn is getting a lot of profile, but it wouldn’t make my personal top 10.

Along the same lines, take a look at AdAge Power 150 media and marketing blogs.
You won’t go far wrong if you pick a few to read out of the top dozen or so.

Happy reading!

RSS feeds. Wikis. Blogs. Pocasting. Social bookmarking. XML. Webinar. Cookie. Avatar. Web 2.0

How many of these Internet buzzwords can you say you really understand? And how many are you actually using for the benefit of your business?

Or are you irritated by all these Internet buzzwords?

Within Internet marketing, there is still a tendency to talk about the underlying technology, rather than the benefits the technology brings. There is a residue of geekiness that puts normal people off.

And as a result there is resistance on the part of businesses to adopt these new technologies. Business owners don’t understand the jargon, and frankly, they just don’t care.

But when these technologies are demonstrated in a real live working environment, then the penny drops for many business owners. They can see what the technology can actually do for their business.

They understand the benefits.

They may think the word blog sounds vaguely rude, but they are very interested in telling people what’s going on in their business in a cost effective way.

They may not care what Web 2.0 is, but they want to convert more sales on their website.

Internet marketing is still at a stage where the jargon and geekiness is still hindering adoption.

And as a result, so many small businesses are not reaping the rewards of relatively cheap, easy to implement solutions.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’ve re-enabled the Comments facility on this blog.

Once upon a time I allowed comments, but the nasty blog spammers filled it with adverts and horrible self-serving links to their own sites. And so I turned Comments off.

But I have had a number of requests from genuine readers of this blog asking for the ability to contribute to the conversation, and stop it being a one-way stream of verbage from me.

So, comments are back on, but in the interest of protecting my own business and sanity, I’ve resorted to creating my blog comment policy.

• I welcome comments because they are the heart and soul of blogging space. Please feel free to join into the conversation.

• I always delete spam and am forced to moderate your messages by hand because Blogger does not offer a proper anti-spam tool. This means your comments may take some time to appear on the site.

• I reserve the right to edit or delete comments that I consider to be offensive, rude, off-topic, hateful, or using bad language.

• Go ahead and include links in your postings; relevant links improve the conversation and help us all to keep learning.

• Links in comments will not add to your inbound linking campaigns; all links will automagically use the rel="nofollow" tag, so they’ll receive no PageRank boost in an effort to stop blog comment spam

I’ll be working on the layout of the blog to improve comment legibility, and your comments and suggestions for layout would be most welcome.

How long does it take for your site to make an impact on the Google search results?

3 hours.

Last week’s little experiment optimising for the phrase SEO Lincolnshire Rutland gave some rather outstanding results. It has been a very interesting example of the efficiency of Google spidering.

The blog posting was ranking in third position in Google within three hours, and took top position within 24 hours.

As of today, just one week later, seven of the top 10 positions are occupied with various scrapings and permutations of the posting. An interesting technique for crowding out the competition. Although I’m not very happy about the scrapers.

Nevertheless, do NOT lose site of the fact this is not a great phrase to optimise for, nor is it a competitive phrase that requires a lot of hard work.

But I do have had other anecdotal reports from clients who see just how fast the Google results can change, including this lovely testimonial from Caricaturist Richard Ellis:

And many thanks to Guy Gregory who let me know just how quickly the blog posting was being picked up by Google.

I’m pleased to be involved in the Women 4 Women programme, offering women-owned businesses in the East Midlands free mentoring and subsidised marketing support. The programme aims to boost women’s enterprise for start ups, new businesses, or women seeking to further develop their business.

To be eligible you must be located in an Objective 2 area and you can check your postcode eligibility here. The business must be at least 50% woman owned, and fit the usual SME requirements.

I’ll be mentoring women in the Lincolnshire area, but my Internet marketing training and support is eligible for support across the entire East Midlands Objective 2 region.

Get in touch if you’d like to know more.

If you are interested in search marketing, which blogs should you be reading?

What other people are reading might be a good signpost, so take a look at Top Rank’s listing of the most popular search marketing blogs as measured by Feedburner’s RSS feed with subscriber information.

Sadly, my own blog doesn’t rank up there, but you might like to take a look at:

• John Batelle’s Searchblog (67,450 readers)
• Search Engine Watch (23,294 readers)

So much to read, so little time!

A recent research report from ScanSafe warns that up to 80% of blogs contain offensive content.
The risks range from adult language to pornographic images; and up to 6% of blogs contain malware and other unwanted content.

The risk to small businesses, of course, is that your members of staff could be visiting these sites and exposing your business to viruses, or loss of sensitive business information.

More importantly, you need to ensure your business has the proper safeguards in place to ensure your staff members aren’t contributing to this wave of offensive material using your own business resources.

Read the full ScanSafe Global Threat Report (PDF)

Email subscribers to my blog will see a change this week; I’ve decided to convert my blog into a weekly e-newsletter, complete with branding and formatting. Feel free to send me comments and suggestions.

We already know blogging is a very powerful Internet marketing tool. A well designed blog:

• delivers rich content that can rank highly in the search engines. For example, see how my blog postings ranks well in Google for the new statutory requirements for business websites.
• provides fresh updates on your website which search engine spiders love
• establishes you as an authority on your subject
• keeps you in touch with your clients and prospective clients.

But another benefit of blogging is re-usability. By that I mean “write once, publish many.”

I’ve decided to “re-use” my blog as my email marketing newsletter. I’ve been using the FeedBlitz service to maintain email subscribers, and from today I’m using Feedblitz compile and broadcast my blog postings on a weekly basis.

The benefits?

• I won’t annoy my readers with an individual message every time I write a blog posting, instead they’ll get a weekly round up. If I’m in the mood one morning to write 3 postings then no worries about deluging my clients with messages.
• The e-newsletter has all the Hallam branding and logos
• It gets sent out automatically on the day of my choice (Thursday) even if I’m busy doing something else

The best Internet marketing is always a case of “Test — Learn — Test” and so I’ll keep you posted of tweaks that I make to deliver better blogging.

I’ve had a rather stressful day sorting out a number of less-than-pleasant issues arising from marketing on the Internet.

The first of these concerns folk lifting content from this blog and publishing on their own websites. (You know who you are. And I know who you are.)

I knew this blog was good, but I didn’t realise it was good enough to plagiarise (or scrape, or steal)

I had received an e-newsletter that contained an article that looked suspiciously familiar. Upon closer examination, I found it was a cut-and-paste lifting of one of my articles from my blog.

My curiosity piqued, I searched Google to find if any other sites were re-using my article. All you need to do is select some copy, put it inside inverted commas, and Google searches for your text.

And to my surprise, I found 3 more sites, all happily using my text as their own.

What to do?

I just dropped each website owner a message, saying they were welcome to use my article but that they needed to attribute it to me with a link to my website.

And to my delight, I now how 3 new inbound links. A great contribution to my SEO strategy.

The moral of the story? Keep an eye out for your valuable Internet content. And remember that, like me, you probably don’t have the resources or inclination to fight a legal battle. My grandma always said “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” – and the polite request for attribution worked just fine.

This time, at least….