To really promote your products and services online, you’ll need to make the most of a few various professional services that are available to help build your online presence.

5 of these services are:

1. Conversion Optimisation – ensuring your website is best placed to convert visitors to customers
2. Electronic Direct Mail Marketing (EDM) – marketing your business through regularly emailing a database
3. Search Engine Optimisation – optimising your website to best perform in search results
4. Social Media – promoting your business and providing customer service through Social Media networks
5. Internet Advertising – running paid advertising through various online channels

You can read more about these services in our Website Resource: Online Services to Market Your Business.

Pages with videos embedded on them not only provide more interesting content for your visitors, but the pages themselves have a higher chance of being shared through social networks and even of appearing higher in search engine rankings. Encouraging people to interact with your website and to stay longer on your page is always appreciated by Google and goes towards the large number of factors that help your content to rank.

When it comes to video sharing services, there are very few people that haven’t heard of YouTube. Boasting over 800 million unique visitors each month, it’s easily the most popular video hosting service.

However, despite providing a wide range of customisation and editing facilities – such as the new ability to select a royalty-free song to add to your video, or the ability to add post-upload special effects – there are still some alternative providers that offer some unique extra services that make them worthy of investigation.

Amongst others, these extra providers include the ever-popular Facebook (through Facebook videos), the more funky and creative Vimeo, and the unique and clever Howcast video sharing services.

Read more about the great features that these three services provide and compare them with YouTube’s own offering over on our Video Sharing Services Website Resource.

There’s a good reason for this – social media isn’t just for private users. This online form of communication and networking is becoming a huge player when it comes to marketing any business to a growing audience.

Should your business be involved in social media?

I remember when I first came across a website for Kelloggs and I remember thinking “Why on earth would anyone want to visit a website for a breakfast cereal? But today, it’s almost expected that any business will have a website.

With more and more young New Zealanders (ok maybe not as young as this photo would suggest!) using cellphones and tablets on a daily basis, and with some schools even demanding that their pupils be equipped with iPads as standard, our population is becoming more and more connected and there’s a reasonable chance that one day almost every business will have some form of social media account.

With that in mind, without any form of social media presence for your business, you could be missing out on a huge marketing opportunity.

To get started, you don’t have to be an Internet marketing expert and there are even methods by which you barely even have to devote any time to the cause. Check out our Website Resource on Social Media for Business to learn about four different methods that can help you get started in social media.

Flickr image credit: cc511

However, before you go investing in getting more visitors, it’s essential to make sure your website is best optimised to convert those visitors into customers (or subscribers, or members, or whatever it is you want from your website).

A while back we had a great question on NZS.com Answers from Ann who asked “How do I convert web traffic into sales?“. This question attracted a range of great answers from some top web professionals in New Zealand, including SEO professionals such as hairyLemon, Double Black Media, Avatar, MediaCore and PogoStick. MediaCore also contributed a resource that discussed graphical conversion techniques.

If you haven’t looked through their responses yet, be sure to spend a couple of minutes going through them as you’ll find some great tips.

Before you head back to your website to start putting these tips into action, it can help to understand the full process, and beyond, when it comes to a person’s decision to become your customer.

Check out our website resource on The 5 Step Conversion Process to find out how to maximise the results from each step of the conversion process.

To briefly re-cap, when you carry out a search in Google, the personalised search function means that you’re more likely to find websites that have been shared by people in your social networks.

Armed with this knowledge, in less than a minute you can share your Site Profile which could increase your company’s presence in search results substantially for people within your networks.

Why Share your Site Profile?

Your Site Profile supplements your own website perfectly by not only displaying your contact details and description, but also displaying all of your latest blog posts and social media updates, all on one page.

It’s all positive content about your business and this makes it an invaluable snapshot of your company that appears on the Internet, other than on your own website. There’s an added bonus in that you have control over the content that displays.

For that reason, sharing your Site Profile results in a win-win scenario for you and your business. This helps to get more positive content related to your business in front of people that are connected to you through the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

NZS.com integrates with social media to make sharing your Site Profile a breeze. Simply follow this process:

1. Log in to My NZS.com and click on My Websites to view your stored websites.
   If you haven’t claimed yours yet, now is the time to do so!
2. Check that your details are up to date.
   If not, you can edit your details before moving on to the next step.
3. View your business details and click on the sharing options.
   On the right of your Site Profile you’ll see a number of sharing options under your website’s thumbnail. Simply click those to share your Site Profile on the relevant social networks.

Not only will those in your social networks now see that you have posted a link to your Site Profile, Search engines will also pick up on the fact that your Site Profile has been shared and so may increase your ranking in search results leading to more traffic for your website.

Find more tips like these in our Online Marketing resources.

• People surfing the Internet often have a shorter attention span than those looking through a magazine or newspaper.
• When writing for the web, you need to consider search engine robots as well as the human reader.

To write online content that gets found, draws attention and compels the browser to read on, it’s important to write titles that take into consideration the short attention span of the reader as well as the fussy relevance and quality rules of search engines.

Check out our top 3 tips for writing quality titles that draw the attention of both human readers and search engines.

Tip 1: Use keyword research tools to help you choose a title

Depending on your audience and your website’s unique traffic, you may not have to worry about traffic to your article or blog post from search engines. If you’re already receiving a high amount of direct traffic or traffic that is referred from social networking sites like Facebook, it’s more likely that you’ll have the freedom to write whatever title you like without worrying about appearing in search results.

However, to maximise the traffic to your content, it’s always a good idea to consider specific keywords or keyword phrases that you could include in your title to give your content a head-start when it comes to being found in search results.

While you could simply ask a few friends and take a stab at what keywords might get the most searches, you can eliminate the guesswork by using any one of the many tools that are available online.

You can find three great tools as well as a couple of other keyword-finding suggestions and tips in our website resource on keyword research tools.

Tip 2: Use emotive language to add life to your titles

Obviously it’s not a good idea to get too carried away but emotive language can help to add a human touch to your titles and make them more interesting for the reader.

We could have named this blog post simply “3 Tips for Writing Titles” but it may come across as a little dull and robotic. By adding emotive words like “great”, “love”, “brilliant” or “fantastic”, you could make your content title just that much more interesting to encourage a reader to click on your title rather than someone else’s.

Tip 3: Use numbered lists!

While some people may spend a lot of time reading a piece of content online, most online readers tend to have a shorter attention span than if they were reading a magazine as, with the entire online world at your fingertips and with Flash animations, moving banners and Facebook notifications all competing for your attention, it’s very easy to get distracted.

If you have a long text-heavy page or blog post, it can be a good idea to see if you can break it up into a numbered list, such as this one. You can then reference that list in your title.

Numbered lists can suggest that your content is concise and to the point and also give the reader the option of simply scanning over the headings or choosing to read more about each point.

Common lists include those such as:

• Top 5 tips for …
• 3 reasons why …
• Our 10 best ….
• 3 best methods for …

By combining the above three tips, you’ll be able to create quality and eye-catching titles that help you to place well in search engine results while grabbing the attention of those looking for information online.

Flickr Image Credit: create_up

Rather than trying to figure out every individual factor, it’s often best to simply look at your website from a human point of view and consider what factors would influence someone’s decision to view your website. Draw these up on a list and you might include:

• The website’s menu is obvious and easy to navigate
• The website is visually appealing and not too cluttered
• Text is well written and explains the product or service clearly
• The website’s owner or content creator is trustworthy and credible

It’s fairly easy to see how you can improve most of these elements for your website and so, hopefully, improve  the overall search engine optimisation of your website, but the final point could seem to be a bit trickier. How can you tell human visitors and search engines alike that the content on the website is written by someone that is trustworthy and credible?

In terms of search engines, there is one way that you can tell a search engine that your content has been created by a credible user, and that’s by using the power of your online profile.

Crediting an Author to Improve Search Rankings

Search engines are quite smart. They realise that, from a human perspective, two pieces of content on the same topic could be written by two completely different authors with different levels of credibility.

For that reason, if a page specifically credits an author that has a good profile in social media channels, the page itself has a chance to rank better in search results than if it had credited an author with a minimal profile in social media.

Obviously there’ll be some fairly solid checks in place to stop website administrators simply crediting their own content to individuals that have strong profiles but have nothing to do with the content, but if you write content online in an article or blog post and use the correct authorship methods, you can see how having a great profile in social media has the potential to provide a good pay-off when it comes to getting your content seen in search engine results.

If you’re interested in learning more about website optimisation and social media, be sure to sign up to our newsletter where you’ll receive tips like these and more.

Flickr Image Credit: ari

What is a 404?

Lets start with the Wikipedia definition;

The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. A 404 error should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all. A 404 error indicates that the requested resource may be available again in the future. – sourced from Wikipedia here.

In simple English, if you try to go to a web page and the website can’t find that particular page then it responds with an error saying “that page can’t be found” which is called a 404 error.

Great examples of 404′s

It has almost become a right of passage for a new Internet start-up to have a bit of fun with its 404 page. It’s a nice way to express that the company isn’t all about just making money, they’re there to enjoy themselves while they’re doing it.

Here are some examples of funny 404 pages that can be found around with the best saved to last:

Blippy 404

Digg 404

Techcrunch 404

Twitter Fail Whale

TradeMe 404

Nosh 404

The last one, is the Nosh.me 404. You can view the Nosh.me 404 here. It’s worth watching the video as a great example of what you can do with a 404 page as well as quite likely a real measure of how to build a compelling viral media campaign about your brand!

If you know of any other great 404 error pages, share them in the comments…

1. through performing a search in a search engine, like Google or visiting a directory
2. through viewing links posted by those in your social networks

Traditionally, when you head to a search engine or directory, you’re usually looking for something specific. When you’re browsing through Twitter your social networks, you’re more likely to be looking for simply anything of interest that has been recommended by your friends.

In the past, these two methods of finding content were mutually exclusive. Today, social networks are having an increasing influence on the results that appear in your search results and in modern directories like NZS.com.

In terms of search engines, the influence that your social networks have on the results that appear can be surprising and yet also difficult to detect.

How does Google know who you are connected to?

Predominantly, Google finds out information on who we are connected to through the social media accounts connected to our Google profiles. If you add your Twitter account to your Google profile, Google will search through the people that you are following on Twitter and use that information to personalise your search results.

While this may sound intrusive, it’s actually public information. If you had time on your hands, you could go look at the people that we’re following on Twitter by clicking on ‘Following’ on our Twitter profile. Get a feel for the type of people that we like to follow and you would have a much better idea of content that might interest us. This is exactly what Google is doing with personalised search results.

Just take a look at a screenshot of a search example in our ‘Social Media and SEO‘ resource and find out about the advantages and disadvantages of personalised search results.

Why should I share content online?

After seeing the affect that your own social networks can have on the results that display in search – even so far as displaying websites in the first few results that previously weren’t even on the first page – it’s plain to see the reverse of this.

If we’re part of a large social network and have a number of followers on Twitter or Google+, we may find that when we click on a social sharing button we’re actually influencing the search results of a good number of people.

In that sense, it’s a good idea to share the content that you publish online. Obviously we can only ‘+1′ or ‘Like’ our content once so it’s also a good idea to look for positive content related to your business, services and products and share those pages with your networks as well.

The more content about your business that you can get into search results, the more you will get your brand in front of searchers. A classic example, if you’ll excuse the shameless plug, is to share your site profile on NZS.com. If you don’t yet have one, just complete this form to update your details and once your profile is live use the sharing buttons on that page to share it with your social networks. The Natcoll Design School have a great example of what this can look like.

What’s the catch?

As with most methods of influencing search results, there are, of course, two sides to every story. If we go overboard with sharing our own content and waxing lyrical about our own services, there’s a good chance our followers will start to disconnect.

Raving about your own content on Twitter is like walking into the middle of a conversation and shouting about your latest special offers. The conversation will usually move away and you’ll find yourself in an increasingly lonely situation!

So when updating any social media network, be sure to intersperse updates about yourself and your business with a good amount of general discussion with other users as well as links to other content that you find interesting online. If you’re struggling for time, speak with a social marketing professional to discuss a social media strategy for your business.

Flickr image credit: courosa

If you haven’t heard about IDNs and are interested in the history, NZS.com has covered the development of them over the last few years starting with initial consultation via working group in 2007, the resulting decisions of that working group to hold a sunrise registration period and then the final implementation by the New Zealand DNC of a first-come, first-served publicly available IDN registration on Wednesday 26 July 2010.

With the public registration of IDN’s being available for almost a year now, it seems like a good point to assess the usage of them across the wider NZ Internet.

The most recent domain registration data is from the June 2011 DNC newsletter showing that 440,576 .nz domains were active as at the end of May 2011.

The equivalent newsletter in 2010 shows the end of May 2010 with 399,151 active domains, a total of 41,425 additions over the calendar year. In comparison the calendar year prior to 1 April 2009 – 31 May 2010 shows an increase of 40,592.

So, as a whole the active domains show only a 2% growth in registrations over the calendar year that IDNs have been publicly available.

Active domains that are registered are however not even half of the story. The next things to consider are what % of the registered domains are IDN’s and further to that, what % of the domains are actively used as websites on the New Zealand Internet.

These numbers are significantly harder to find without direct access to the DNC records.

NZS.com completes regular spidering of the New Zealand Internet (well beyond just the .nz sphere) and currently profiles over 160,000 domains that are included in this set as active websites on the New Zealand Internet. It’s another entire blog post and discuss on the details of what we consider is a website on the New Zealand Internet, suffice to say that we’ve been working on the criteria in an iterative way for the last few years.

With this in place, NZS.com is in a reasonably unique position to ascertain how many active websites are using IDN’s on the NZ Internet particularly if we can come to a final figure on how many active domains there are that are IDNs and can calculate our % of active websites against that number.

Being in the same month as Māori language week, it’s of specific interest to also understand how many active websites are using the Māori macrons in the domain, that is one of ā, ē, ī, ō, or ū.

So, at the end of part one in this, we have the basic premise that domain registrations have not increased significantly however we still need to assess if real websites are using these characters or not…

….

You can also find useful tips on the the basics like how to type a macron on your own system on this blog as well.