Millions of people user Twitter everyday, and as many businesses are jumping on board to promote and connect for free, the Tweet phenomenon continues to grow.

All that free promotion isn’t flying under the radar of the head honchos at Twitter though, and the powers that be have announced plans begin charging users for premium accounts.

At the moment the popular micro-blogging and social networking site doesn’t charge for its service or run ads. Co-founder Biz Stone says Twitter will not charge users for existing usage habits.

Instead the company will launch a set of premium marketing and promotion services, such as more detailed analytics or deeper CRM services, for which companies using Twitter may be willing to pay. The accounts will also include ID verification so that businesses don’t have to worry about having their brands hijacked by impostors.

One of the most interesting new APIs Twitter is working on are programming languages companies can use to create apps geared specifically toward business customers.

The premium service is expected to bring in US$140 million in revenue next year.

So what do you think? Would you pay for a premium service with Twitter as part of your business development and strategy?

NZS.com has dedicated a lot of time to finding New Zealand online content. It’s become evident to us that a lot of Kiwi sites are jolly hard to find. We regularly meet people at events etc that hand us their business card with their Web site on it. You take a look and see the site has no Google PageRank. This is generally because their site has no links to it from anywhere on the Web at all!

It’s a real shame to see this, because often they’ve spent thousands of dollars creating a site that looks pretty swish. It’s just marketing money down the drain, and in the end gives the Web a bad rap. I can imagine them saying at some point “We’ve spent a lot of time and money developing this site, but we get nothing much out of it, the Web is a waste of time.”

To stop your Web site being invisible, make sure you get it linked from high profile directories and content sites. What’s the point of having a site if people can’t find you?! Also, if you’re a bit more serious about it, then commit to an ongoing Web site promotion program – for most Web sites this is the key to getting a good return on your investment.

In my last post, I talked about some of the things search engines like about the websites they rank highly on their results pages. One way I mentioned was to get votes from 3rd party websites. Here’s more on how you can get ‘votes’ for your site.

Getting other website owners to ‘vote’ for your Web site is all about getting them to publish a hypertext link on their website, which points to one of your Web pages. The more links pointing to your website not only means ‘more votes’ but provides more ways for people and search engines to reach your Web site.

Presidential link bait
The best way to get links from other websites pointing to your website is to publish content (link bait) that is so mind-blowingly brilliant that another Web site owner just WANTS to link to it.

Linking leg work
You can also ask website owners to publish a link to your site. Start with friends and associates, then move onto specialist, national and international directories. Spread your wings further by seeking out websites (preferably relevant to your business) that also publish links or ‘resources’.

The online back-scratch
Some website owners will only publish a link to your website if you publish a link to theirs in exchange. This mutual back-scratching is called, unsurprisingly enough, link exchange. NZS.com offer a FREE bold listing for link exchanges – it’s well worth checking out their link exchange offer.

You can read more about some of the best practises for link building and link exchange, in Link Building Made Easy.

That’s all from me for now folks. Cheerio!

By now, Internet junkies and casual Web surfers alike will have heard of a lil’ thing called PageRank.

PageRank is a tool used by Google to rank all pages on the Web. The higher your PageRank, the better. A high rank indicates that the great G views your page as more important than a page with a lower rank. The Google-meister describes PageRank as: “using [the Web's] vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.”

How does it work?
In a nutshell, Google reads all the inbound links to a page. For instance, if page X links to page Y, Google sees this as a vote, by Page X for page Y.

Sounds like an online democracy?
Well, these elections aren’t 100% democratic. Google doesn’t just go by the number of links to a page; it looks at the importance of the page that has cast the vote. Votes cast by pages with a high PageRank have greater weighting than those cast by pages with a lower PageRank. Google also takes into account many other factors: how long the links remain active, the rate at which your site is gaining links, click throughs to your site from Google searches and the stickiness of your site (how well you can retain your visitors).

And the winner is?
After analysing a page’s inbound links, Google assigns the page a rank out of 10. To see the PageRank of your site and others, simply install the PageRank reader on your Google Toolbar.

So what can I do to get a better PageRank?
The good news is that you can do things to improve your PageRank:

• Fill your site with useful, informative and interesting content that users will want to share
• Exchange links with other quality sites – getting highly ranked sites to link to yours will improve your ranking, so make sure you’re swapping links with well ranked sites. Note: if you link to sites that have been delisted by Google, your site may also be removed from Google’s index
• Submit your site to online directories, like the NZS.com directory
• Let people know about your site by adding your Web address to your business stationery, email signature, press releases and advertising
• Maintain your site, as letting your site become inaccessible for periods of time may affect your rank

Get your rank rocketing today!

Search engines are basically computer programs that search the Internet for Web sites. With over 85% of people using search engines to start their Internet sessions and about 81% of these people finding NEW Web sites via search engines, you can see why search and search engines mean big business.

You may have heard of ‘little-known’ engines like Google, Yahoo! and Live Search (formerly MSN)? Well, as you may have guessed, Google is the big enchilada of search engines with over 80% of New Zealand searchers using it to find Web sites and images. It’s important then, that Google likes your Web site so you can get in front of people online. Your next question is probably something along the lines of, ‘how does my Web site get loved up by Google?’

What search engines like Google go for
There are lots of factors to consider, but here are a few of the things about Web sites that search engines like Google tend to prefer:

• Sites that make their content accessible to spiders or robots (programs that index the Internet)
• Sites publishing lots of unique, relevant and interesting content
• Sites that offer a lot of textual content and aren’t heavily graphic or Flash laden
• Sites with lots of votes from other 3rd party Web sites (incoming links)

View more info about Web site design that’s search engine friendly. Good luck!

It’s great to have the opportunity to contribute to NZS.com’s shiny, new blog. As an optimiser, Web writer and Web marketer, I’m looking forward to sharing info, tips, news and views about each of these disciplines with you.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) – a brief intro
Search engine optimisation or SEO is all about visibility. Visibility on search engines in fact, just as its name suggests. It’s the process of enhancing Web sites with specific content, with the aim of encouraging search engines to feature these Web sites in their results pages. Web sites can then be found and seen by people using search engines (I’ll talk more about search engines in another post.)

Optimisers, like me, spend time analysing the words people use on search engines. We then optimise (or edit) the content of Web sites with these words in mind and promote sites to target specific searchers (and searches).

Getting to the top of the ranking…
If people use the Google search engine to find a Web design company in New Zealand, their search words may be, “new zealand web design”. At the top of the searches, at position #1, is Avatar’s Web site. Now this didn’t just happen… It’s partly the result of a successful optimisation strategy. (Phew! You might just think I know what I’m talking about now!) Tune into NZS.com’s blog for more insight into the wonderful world of optimisation and how it can help you improve your Web site visibility.

I don’t know about you, but last week I sent nearly 200 emails. Maybe I should adopt Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, “to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book”? I must have written a whole book worth of emails in my lifetime! With so much email rabbiting, I was ashamed to realise I hadn’t the first e-clue about where emails had come from…

With a little digging, I discovered that email was invented in 1971 by Roy Tomlinson, whose company was developing computer networking technology in Massachusetts. The project his team was working on would later become, um, the Internet. Tomlinson had the bright idea of combining two of his own projects and, voila, the first email message was sent. At first, Tomlinson kept the lid on his invention because email had been a pet project he’d done when he should have been doing, you know, work. Today, 87 million people use email to communicate every day.

Some of those people use email marketing as a clever promotional tool, bypassing the letter box (pricier, since the increase to 50 cents to send a standard letter) and going straight for the cyber inbox. With email marketing you can:

• Increase sales and bring customers back for more
• Get useful feedback from clients
• Reach people through one of the most popular applications on the Internet today
• Save money (no print or postage required)
• Get your message out there quickly

Beware though, New Zealand’s anti-spam legislation comes into force on September 1st 2007, so be sure to get up to speed on the new laws and get permission from all those on your mailing list.