NZS.com Newsletter November 2008

Can you believe it's been three years since the last New Zealand election? Time flies in the modern world, and this week we all have a chance to exercise our voting right by making a decision which will affect the country for the next three years.

We've had an exciting month here at NZS.com launching our new Finance section, and this month have some great linking ideas for SEO for you, along with discussing the term 'SMO' and assessing how exclusive your media usage is.

Contents:

• Top Ten Sites
• NZ Finance
• Link to Me!
• SMO: The Latest Development in SEO?
• Paying Attention to Your Computer?

With just a couple of days to go until the 2008 NZ Election, are you primed to make your democratic decision on Saturday November 8? Searches for election-related websites were huge throughout October, check out the top 10:

Top 10 Election Websites:

Rank	Site Name	URL
1.	Elections New Zealand	www.elections.org.nz
2.	Decision 08	www.decision08.co.nz
3.	Policy.net.nz	www.policy.net.nz
4.	New Zealand Election Results	www.electionresults.govt.nz
5.	Labour Party	www.labour.org.nz
6.	National Party	www.national.org.nz
7.	New Zealand Election Study	www.nzes.org
8.	NZvotes.org	www.nzvotes.org.nz
9.	VoteMe	www.voteme.co.nz
10.	DecisionMaker Publications	www.decisionmaker.co.nz

The global financial situation is hot on the minds of most Kiwis at the moment, and with change both economically and politically on the horizon for New Zealand, it's important to keep yourself up to date with the latest financial data.

Last month we launched the NZS.com New Zealand Finance section, with aims to bring all the financial information you need together in one easy-to-navigate section. While a lot of financial information online can be confusing for many Kiwis because of the way it is presented, we are aiming to give you a quick and easy way to check the latest information by day and month, and view comparisons in a straightforward graph or table format.

Looking for exchange rate statistics? You can view and compare this month's daily exchange rates for the NZ dollar against the major foreign currencies, and assess the trends for the 2008 year. We also provide the Trade-Weighted Index (TWI), giving the preferred summary measure which captures the medium-term effect of the value of the New Zealand dollar, when inflation and the current New Zealand economy are taken into account.

Additionally, NZS.com reports the daily interest rates: the interbank daily cash rate, bank bill yields by 30, 60 and 90 day periods, and the secondary market government bond yields up to 10 years.

The NZS.com New Zealand Finance data is courtesy of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and is updated daily at 3.30pm.

Is your site brand new to the web? Or is it established but you are wondering what else you can be doing to improve SEO with links? NZS.com frequently reports on the latest developments in link baiting - while often time is the biggest factor in getting established links, there's always something new you can do to help your website along for SEO.

The first and easiest way to get links to your website it to add yourself to directories. Make sure you add a site to NZS.com to cover your national base, and check out reputable directories such as Yahoo, Joe Ant, GoGuides and Best of the Web (BOTW) for an international presence. Remember that exchanging links with web directories will further increase your website's visibility and give you added credibility when linking back to a well known website. Check the website for Blender Design for an example of adding a reciprocal link which looks great, firms you website's Kiwi-ness and adds value.

Developing videos and posting them on popular websites such as YouTube is a great way to increase your presence in the online world. If you've ever advertised on television, make sure your ads are posted on these sites. You can also make an 'introducing the team' video, 'how-to' videos and so on as a lower budget way to post video links on the world wide web.

We've talked about creating a blog for business before, where you can promote your site and entice interested users to return and become part of a community. In addition to this, you could invite other bloggers, writers and journalists to contribute to your blog while exchanging links with them - and perhaps contribute to their publications yourself. They get to promote themselves on your website, and you'll gain support and reach audiences that you might not otherwise have access to.

Furthermore, it's a great idea to leave well-written, informative, useful comments on others' blogs within your industry to create a name for yourself. Don't use hyperlinks within your comments, they'll probably get marked as spam and never get posted. Instead, just put your website name as your username, and provide your URL in the designated field if offered. Additionally, sign off your comments as John Smith, Marketing Manager of Any Company (or something to that effect).

Make sure you have links to your website in all of your external correspondence, on and off the web. While the obvious are business cards and letterheads, something many website owners forget is providing a link in their e-mail signature and any auto-responder e-mails. This is especially great for getting traffic to specific parts of your site, such as your blog or newsletter.

Outside of the web, join a chamber of commerce, related clubs and industry associations relevant to your field. Many of these will have websites which provide 'useful links', giving a free link to members. These are perfect because the source is related to your website content and with any luck will be seen by search engines as authoritive sources, therefore adding more value to the links they have.

That's right, another online acronym! Moving on from SEO and SEM we now have SMO: Social Media Optimisation. Now considered an important part or your ORM or SERM (check out popular internet acronyms to clear those ones up), SMO is a combination of methods for generating buzz through social networking communities and other online community media.

In many ways, it's a way to make viral marketing easy - where word of mouth marketing increases interest in a link through the use of social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites, and blogs. SMO optimises a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches and more regularly included in relevant commentary.

Top Tips for Social Media Optimisation:

• Increase your linkability by keeping your site fresh with new content. Stagnant web pages do not provide anything interesting to link to, so make sure you keep your blog updated and continually add new content - even if you're just aggregating content through a feed that exists elsewhere on the web and adding to it with comments and opinion.
• Make social bookmarking easy by adding one click icons to popular social networks such as Facebook, Digg and StumbleUpon.
• Reward inbound links to your site's content by providing a reciprocal link with a "Recently Linking Blogs" section on your site, showing those who have linked to you and giving them visibility (and potentially increase your chance of repeat linkings in the future).
• Share and be open about your content. YouTube's idea of providing code to cut and paste so their content can be embedded externally has spurred their growth massively - so syndicating your content similarly and using feeds like RSS make it easy for others to augment your content and drive traffic to your site.

One of the biggest adjustments from search engine optimisation for natural search versus SMO is understanding that a linking presence can be in multiple places without being harmful (because of fears of over-saturation). In SEO, you are often advised to have just one single place that you have direct links to, to give the most weight to it: a page from your own site. With SMO, having links that aren't to your domain benefit you by association. A Technorati profile with others' links can get relevant traffic targeted back at you within the Technorati web space. Linking to a video on YouTube could see a video of your own turn up in Related Videos. The possibilities are endless and involve trialling, but getting amongst the SMO community is a great way to increase your own links by linking and sharing yourself.

When watching TV, or using your computer, how exclusive is your attention? We never really think about how we consume our daily media, so here are a few facts from a 2008 U.S. MediaDay study: only 50% of at-home media use on any given day is done so exclusively, while not doing something else.

Radio use, obviously, is the exception to this, but the study found that 53.8% of internet usage at home is exclusive, with similar percentages allocated to newspaper and magazine reading, and television viewing. The most common non-media activity to take place while using media is household chores. This means half of people clean while they watch TV, or browse the internet back and fourth in between cooking steps in the kitchen.

While 17.4% of in-home internet usage is done while watching TV, usage exclusivity goes out the door while at work, when 62.2% of surfing is done while simultaneously working. Most people sitting at desks all day long take several short breaks throughout the hours of the day to check personal e-mail, browse news websites, bid on online auctions and even shop online, whist being able to flick to another work-related window in an instant (should the manager walk by, of course!).

It would be interesting to see this study done in New Zealand, to see how fully our attention is held to our daily media. Something to think about over the November month; how exclusive is your media usage?

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: Sharing, 3D Full Spectrum, Watch.