NZS.com Newsletter : May 2008
By now most Kiwis have experienced their first frost of the season - tough to get used to at first but at least they mean a beautiful sunny day is ahead! Since you are spending more time inside at the moment, why not take the chance to improve your web presence by creating a blog for your business and learn how to name your page files? Read on for NZS.com's tips and other news this month...
Contents:
- Top Ten Sites
- Blogging for Business
- Unbundling Joy
- To Name or Not to Name
- Peer Recommendation in the Online Market
Our top ten entertainment sites this month are everything you need for a great night in or out this winter, whether you are after a nearby cinema, some fast-paced action at the raceway or a hot dinner delivered.
Top 10 Entertainment Category Sites
| Rank | Site Name | URL |
| 1. | Hoyts | www.hoyts.co.nz |
| 2. | Reading Cinemas | www.readingcinemas.co.nz |
| 3. | Altitude | www.altitude.net.nz |
| 4. | DVD Unlimited Online Movie Rental | www.dvdunlimited.co.nz |
| 5. | Academy Cinema, Christchurch | www.artfilms.co.nz/academy |
| 6. | Auckland Raceway | www.aucklandraceway.co.nz |
| 7. | Al Dente | www.aldente.co.nz |
| 8. | Feed Me Now | www.feedmenow.co.nz |
| 9. | Curry in a Hurry | www.curryinahurry.co.nz |
| 10. | Amazing Party Supplies | www.amazingpartysupplies.co.nz |
Blogging in a professional capacity is a growing online marketing technique for many businesses - have you thought about creating a New Zealand blog for your business or organisation?
Blogs are a brilliant way to share your knowledge with others, gain traffic to your website and connect with potential clients, customers or supporters. Online blogging software is easy to use, and is beneficial to write about the happenings within your business, link to your resources, and keep a close, two-way connection with an interested audience.
Blogs are fast to update, and beat using problematic coding and uploading (or contacting web designers) if you have regular news or incite, but are short on time and money.
Top Tips for Professional Blogging:
- Use a sharp, minimalist template. Readability is key to a blog, as you want to sustain a reader's attention. Beginners are advised to stick with a white background.
- Use pictures to dress up your blog. This will give it a more professional appearance, and create breaks from the text in your page.
- Link to authoritative sites. These sites should be well-known and frequently referred to within your industry. When search engine robots visit your blog, they will find these links and your blog will benefit by association.
- Create posts to link to pages on your website. The aim of professional blogging for many is to bring traffic to your website, so make sure you have keywords that link seamlessly to pages within your site.
- Post Frequently. The only way to continue to get an audience is to regularly update, keeping people interested and coming back. Two or three times a week should suffice, but the more the better.
- Create a live feed. It is a good idea to syndicate your blog to allow visitors to subscribe to your feed via an aggregator like RSS. This allows them to be notified of your updates as soon as you post.
Check out the Greenpeace blog for an example of a professional blog with good layout, content and overall execution. You can also check out the NZS.com blog which is updated regularly with news and hot tips for New Zealanders.
Broadband connections now outnumber dial-up connections by over 150,000 nationwide, and while high-speed internet prices have finally dipped to under $20 a month in the last year, many New Zealanders are still struggling with slow download speeds, even those on fast internet plans.
Since the unbundling media fiasco of 2006, little has changed to the average Kiwi's internet connection speed. Unbundling began its first phases in select communities in Auckland last year, but until now little has been publicised about the future of high-speed internet in New Zealand.
Internet service provider Orcon have announced that unbundled high-speed internet and phone services will be available to double the amount of current users by the end of May, with the new service being available in the Auckland CBD and Takapuna areas. Subsequent exchanges to be unbundled are Blockhouse Bay, Manurewa, Howick, Mt Eden and Remuera.
Orcon's new service offers speeds of up to 24 Mbps, while current users of their unbundled service have been experiencing speeds of between 10 and 18 Mbps. Most other current New Zealand connections are well under 5 Mbps.
Further unbundling is planned in other major cities towards the end of 2008 and into 2009. Subsequently, the National Party announced in late April that if elected later this year, it has plans to put $1.5 billion into providing 75% of New Zealand internet connections with an ultra-high speed, fibre-to-the-home network over a 6 year period.
How much attention do you pay to your page file names within your website? Are you putting methodical though into your naming, or letting your content management system (CMS) designate them for you?
In order to optimise your website as best as possible for search engines, providing precise and readable file names are a move to better keyword optimisation and can favourably direct more traffic to your website through search engine listings.
If you have a basic knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) you will know that when search engine spiders are looking over your site trying to determine its validity, they pick up keywords in your headings, subtitles and text. You may not know however, that the titling in your file naming is just as important. Here are three tips on naming your pages:
- Be specific. Instead of using a general keyword, name your pages and headings within your pages to a specified phrase. While you may be used to "yoursitehere.co.nz/maps.html", try to match search queries more closely, e.g.: "yoursitehere.co.nz/maps-of-new-zealand.html".
- Don't default. Your CMS will often automatically name pages for you in a default sequence, rendering the page name useless for search engines. Be sure to change your page names to titles (as above), do not accept "yoursitehere.co.nz/page77" as a file name.
- Hyphenate, do not space. If you put spaces in your page names, your browser needs to put "%20" in that space, which not only looks terrible but can not be processed by some systems. Instead of running words together as the alternative, use hyphens for a clearly readable filename. Also leave out non-alphabetical characters like question marks and hashes.
If you are going to do a file naming overhaul the pages within your site, remember to set up permanent redirects from your old filenames so current links from search engines and users' bookmarks will not come up as pages not found.
Online shopping has become a way of life. Groceries are bought online. Pizzas are ordered online. Cars, houses, furniture - all available online. Globally, more than 50% of the world's internet users have made a purchase online in the last month.
What makes an online shopping website successful? Is it frequent offline advertising like Ferrit has done, or word of mouth like Trademe?
Latest research has concluded that the power of peer recommendation is one of the strongest in terms of selling goods online. Consumers now count on each other, rather than marketers, for insights on purchasing decisions. Recommendations have become the new currency of e-commerce.
35% of online shoppers say they are more likely to return to an online shopping website if that site makes personal recommendations to them - suggestions on what they may like, based on the purchasing habits of others who have bought the same product. Another survey has determined that 66% of New Zealanders regularly buy from one site, and 1 in 4 buyers completely relies on recommendations to find out which website to browse when intending to buy.
With the strong impact of personal recommendations realised, a market gap has recently been filled by social networking websites which link the things one user likes to the online store which supplies them. Have you just listed Titanic as one of your favourite movies? Your friends can now follow the link to buy it on Amazon.
Personal recommendation does not necessarily apply to just products either, but also suppliers. When was the last time you bought someone in an online auction without checking their feedback first from their previous sales?
Next time you click that 'add to cart' button, think about how important feedback and personal recommendations are to you, and how they shape your purchasing habits.
We're interested in your opinion, if you have anything you'd like to hear about in the newsletter, let us know.
Images from Flickr: Plugs, Keyboard, Credit Card.
