I’ve traveled a fair bit in my life and I have, in fact, lived on three continents. So I know a great travel guide when I see one. One of the best parts about travel guides is that they now have online counterparts, which means that if you left your Lonely Planet guide at home by accident, but if you have internet access, you can access the information that way. It’s definitely a far cry from gas station maps and word of mouth from my parents’ day.

So I was tickled the other day when I stumbled upon Chris Sherman’s article “The Thirteen Best Online Travel Guides” and in the spirit of summer vacations, I had to share his first 6 picks and their overviews with you.

1. Arrivalguides.com: is entirely web-based, and all of its guides are available as free PDF downloads. This website is available in either English or Swedish, but some of the individual destination cities have options to download their guides in different languages. Arrivalguides.com doesn’t have a mobile version, but does offer free downloads of its most popular guides in the iTunes app store.

2. Concierge.com: provides guides to more than 200 destinations through publisher Conde Nast, including content from the Conde Nast Traveller magazine. Exploring for destinations by interests and ideas turns up some offbeat travel suggestions that you might not find with other guides. Concierge.com doesn’t have a mobile site but does have a “postcard” app.

3. Fodor’s: offers interesting perspectives of destination because its guides are written by people who live in the location they write about. The guides on the website don’t seem as complete as the print guides, though there are about a dozen free downloadable guides available. Fodor’s has an extensive mobile website at m.fodors.com.

4. Frommers.com: from the company that published one of the first travel guides, Frommer’s now publishes over 300 guidebooks as well as the Frommers.com web site. Founder Arthur Frommer still actively blogs on the site, offering unique perspectives on the travel industry sharpened by decades of observation. Frommers doesn’t have a mobile version of its website, but has published a number of iPhone apps.

5. Let’s Go Travel Guides: publishes budget travel guides, written entirely by students for students. Let’s Go guides focus on off the beaten path locales that other guides tend to overlook. Its video gallery is a YouTube-like collection travel of videos—an interesting way to preview a destination. Let’s Go does not have a mobile site.

6. Lonely Planet: advocates “responsible travel” and is still a great “alternative voice” even though it is majority owned by the BBC. Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler pens an interesting blog with lots of perspective from many years of personal travel and editing guidebooks. Lonely Planet doesn’t have a mobile version of its website but has several iPhone, iPad and Nokia apps available.

It’s fun to see what we can find on the internet, but as people interested in web development, it is even more fun to see what can be developed. As Sherman points out, “Surprisingly, for sites that offer information about travel and moving around the world, many don’t have mobile versions of their websites, though some do have apps or iBook versions.” It will be interesting to see how that changes over the next few years.

I was just remembering my 9th grade work placement. We were each sent to “work” for a week in a career that interested us, and I went to an architectural firm (yeah, I know it’s pretty far from where I ended up). Our teacher visited each of us over the week and we talked about what we had seen and done. I discovered an electric eraser during my week and was giggling about it. My teacher told me that those were for people who made mistakes, which I didn’t do. I still laugh, thinking about it. Well, even in SEO there are mistakes made.

I can stand up and say that, because even SEOmoz admits that they’ve made mistakes along the way. Here is a list of their top five mistakes, according to a whiteboard Friday video by Rand:

1. Blocking outbound links: At one point Rand had a “tactic involving offering reciprocal links but blocking the outbound links via robots.txt/meta robots so that he could get all of the link value.” Eventually other webmasters figured out that he wasn’t linking back to them, which didn’t make him any friends in the SEO world. He did remove this tactic from his site, but did end up doing a lot of work to ingratiate himself into the community again.
2. Buying links for clients: It seemed like a good idea to increase rankings by getting more links, but it turned out that there was never a good way to figure out if those links were helping the clients. Worse, as it turned out, Google wasn’t even counting these links and in some cases it hurt the client’s ability to rank.
3. Ensuring keywords were in the H1 tags: I know Rand was not the only one to recommend this tactic; it was pretty common in the middle part of this decade. It turns out that having your keywords in your H1 tags makes no real difference between having them “in normal text in bigger fonts”.
4. Not using XML sitemaps: The theory was that XML sitemaps can make it hard to find information architecture problems, but they also have a great impact on traffic to your site and site rankings in general.
5. Redirecting Linkscape to Open Site Explorer (OSE): OSE is a better reporting system for SEOmoz’s clients, but the original conversion wasn’t done well and it resulted in a huge loss of site traffic. It’s fixed now though.

Although it is fun to look at the mistakes of others and compare notes, it is also provides a few lessons for all of us. First, no one is perfect and the SEO process may take a few detours. We may need that electric eraser from time to time! But the most important thing is to learn from your mistakes, correct them as you go, and be smarter about it with the next project. If you learn something, it’s never a waste of time.

Tough economic times call for innovative solutions. I’ve heard it said that some of the strongest companies are started and flourish in economic recessions or depressions. Our current economic climate is no different: the companies that thrive right now are the ones that are approaching their problems with original solutions that allow them to develop greater ways to bring their products to their consumers.

In his article “Local Merchants Utilizing Social Media More as Confidence Remains Flat”, Chris Crum talks about how companies are using today’s internet marketing tools to increase their business profiles, while still keeping an eye on their finances. He points to MerchantCircle’s “Merchant Confidence Index”, which shows that the levels of confidence a group of 10,000 merchants have in the current economy is pretty flat, but that these same merchants are “more prominently using social media as a free online marketing tool to increase their customer base and revenue.”

And why not use social networking? Social networking will cost your company manpower hours to set up and monitor it on a regular basis, but not much more. Large audiences are available to your company through a variety of social media offerings. And with cost to benefit ratio on the side of the merchant, it makes sense to direct your limited marketing budget towards modern solutions. As the vice president of marketing for MerchantCircle, notes “we were pleased to see that most aren’t planning for layoffs or pay cuts for employees. Small business owners are continuing to become web savvy in their marketing by increasingly augmenting traditional advertising with free methods like social networking to generate additional business.”

With growing options in social media tools, it is interesting to watch which ones are growing and which ones have matured over the last few years. It seems like most people know about Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter these days, but merchants are reaching out for even newer solutions. Location-based services are reaching higher levels of familiarity with merchants. “For example, MerchantCircle says today, 16% of merchants are familiar with Foursquare, whereas in Q1 of 2010, the number was only 8%. Likewise, 32% of merchants that are aware of Foursquare are using it to promote their business, compared to 25% in Q1.

It seems that the key in uncertain economic times is to be creative and take a few risks. Merchants are doing just that, as proven by Crum’s observation that “It is worth noting that this is the first time social networking has eclipsed all other marketing channels to become the most popular among survey participants since MerchantCircle has been doing the survey.” So, as a merchant, your can be part of the past or create new solutions with the growing tools of the present.

As a writer, I have been plagued with friends and family who say things like “Oh, you write…I could do that.” I’ve observed on a few occasions that people don’t say this kind of thing to doctors or engineers, but as a writer I am regularly told that what I do isn’t special. That anyone can write. Except that I have read the email messages, letters, and notes from these very same friends and family members, and I can assure you that most of them cannot write professionally. It is a skill set, and just like learning to read the signs of illness in a patient, it takes time to develop these skills to a professional level. Anyone can learn, but not everyone has put the time and effort into honing these skills.

It seems that there is some discussion in the world of website writing and online marketing over the quality of writing and whether it matters to Google now or will matter in the near future. This week, Chris Silver Smith wrote an article called “Google Penalty for Low-Quality Writing?” about just this issue. Chris has been writing about Google’s tools, including their usability testing and page speed diagnostics, and their ranking factors, including page speed and “shifting some ranking factor weighting from keyword relevancy to quality criteria”. It’s no surprise that he is interested in the quality of web writing and how that can affect rankings.

There are ways to cheap out on web writing. In this industry, we all know about those ways. Many of them are primarily relegated to spammers, who often steal content and insert random keywords into text. If you’ve stumbled upon a site that sounds like pure nonsense, likely it falls into this category. However, some business owners want fast, cheap labour and are either not willing to pay for quality writing or just do not see the value in it. Chris Silver Smith points out that some of these companies “resort to copy writing companies that outsource article assignments to third-world countries. Poorly-educated writers result in terrible grammar and bad spelling. And, foreign companies sometimes hire bad translators to convert their pages for English readers.” It’s clear that there is an abundance of poor writing on the web.

However, we still wonder whether or not Google is ranking or will rank based on the quality of website writing. At the moment, we just don’t know, but considering the ongoing development of Google’s ranking strategy, it isn’t a big leap to see writing quality becoming a ranking criteria in the near future.

Beyond ranking factors, I’ve written before about how certain factors can alienate prospective clients from your site: including writing for the wrong audience, having broken links, and utilizing a poor search solution. The harder it is to get your message across, the harder it is to keep your clients on your site. Good writing will engage your clients, impress them, and get them the information they need quickly. Good writing makes good business sense.

Do you remember when we used to have to watch television when it was aired? Before even the age of the VCR and “taping” a show. Viewing habits changed as television could be taped and watched later, then again with time-shifting channels, whole seasons available on DVDs, and then PVRs. In the last few years, I know I have rarely watched any show when it is aired on television; most of it comes to me through online streaming done by the channels themselves. I love watching a couple weeks of my favourite shows at a time.

Chris Neal, vice president of Chadwick Martin Bailey, points out that “industry developments like increasingly fast and ubiquitous broadband access, Netflix’s shift to online movie rentals, TV networks making more shows available on their websites, online video services like Hulu, growth in iTunes video downloads and massive peer-to-peer video sharing through social networks are all helping to break down the mental divide between a TV screen and the internet.”

Gadgets, like the iPad, Android based cell phones, and 3D TV, are still of interest to consumers, which makes sense to me (both as a consumer and a marketing professional), since the point these gadgets is to get us the consumables. It’s a bit of the chicken and the egg scenario, really. Only studies like this one show us which options drive our consumers.

Although looking at these numbers and talking about who is excited about what new technological advances merits its own level of interest, it is also important to remember them when approaching your online marketing strategies. Consumer interests drive all of our markets. We’re all here to catch the attention of our consumers and since the bulk of the interest is in the consumable experience at this time, we need to keep that as our businesses’ guidepost.

The same changes are true when you think about gaming, cell phone usage, and internet activities. We’ve shifted with the available technology, so that we can barely remember how it was before this technology became so popular. Sometimes I find it interesting to look at technology from another point of view: from the consumer end, rather than the marketing end. What are people interested in seeing come onto the market? What technology are people using the most?

Mike Sachoff wrote a quick article entitled “Consumers More Interested In Content Delivery Than Gadgets” about just this topic. He talks about a study done by the market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey that asked “over 1,200 U.S. consumers ages 18-65 which of the recently hyped technologies they are most excited about. Topping the list was movie rentals via the Internet with 29 percent of consumers being “extremely excited” by this. Having the ability to surf the Internet via TV also came in high at 24 percent.”

Chris Neal, vice president of Chadwick Martin Bailey, points out that “industry developments like increasingly fast and ubiquitous broadband access, Netflix’s shift to online movie rentals, TV networks making more shows available on their websites, online video services like Hulu, growth in iTunes video downloads and massive peer-to-peer video sharing through social networks are all helping to break down the mental divide between a TV screen and the internet.”

Gadgets, like the iPad, Android based cell phones, and 3D TV, are still of interest to consumers, which makes sense to me (both as a consumer and a marketing professional), since the point these gadgets is to get us the consumables. It’s a bit of the chicken and the egg scenario, really. Only studies like this one show us which options drive our consumers.

Although looking at these numbers and talking about who is excited about what new technological advances merits its own level of interest, it is also important to remember them when approaching your online marketing strategies. Consumer interests drive all of our markets. We’re all here to catch the attention of our consumers and since the bulk of the interest is in the consumable experience at this time, we need to keep that as our businesses’ guidepost.

It seems like not too long ago that web designers were talking about the scroll-down factor for web pages. The short of it being that people are much less likely to scroll to read to the end of the page, so web design began to incorporated much more succinct methods and scrolling became less of an issue. It was about keeping your audience interested and engaged. Good marketing does this everywhere, from the grocery store (who wants to have to compare prices on cans of tuna over three aisles? And, yes, I once encountered a grocery store that did that!) to the organization of books in your local bookstore to our online marketing. The quicker and easier it is to browse for your item and find what you want, the more likely your customer will stay and purchase/use your services. When was the last time that you, as a consumer, walked into a store that was crowded and decided to dig for the one small item you wanted. I know that I turn and walk out immediately. The same is true online.

Although most of us now take what I have come to think of as the scroll factor seriously on regular websites, the opening of the mobility market has us thinking in even smaller chunks, just because the real estate on mobile device screens is tiny. To make mobile online activity more accessible and less crowded some rethinking must be involved. As Doug Caverly explains in his article “Google’s Short Answers Move to Mobile Phones”, Google has “taken an important step, then, by making the short answers it introduced a month ago available to folks who are on the go.” Rather than explaining how this will help mobility users, take a quick look at a visual comparison of search results on a regular search versus the short answers version:

Google’s shorter descriptions for each link provides the mobile user with better selection and a less crowded experience, which makes it a much more enjoyable experience. Sometimes to get the attention of our users or customers, we have to think like they do and anticipate their needs and desires. Google seems to be pretty good at doing just that. When building your own mobile website and implementing your online marketing strategy, thinking outside of the old paradigms may be the key to increasing your own market share.

The other day I was using a site and needed to use their search feature. A good search gets you fast, relevant results. What I encountered the other day was not fast and not relevant. I’m persistent, so I tried a second keyword. Still nothing. I clicked away from that site and went elsewhere. We’ve become an audience that doesn’t want to dig around for our information. Gone are the days of searching card catalogs and pestering librarians for our information. We all want it fast and easy.

Businesses need to remember this point. As an article on search solutions by Shaun Ryan points out, “73 percent of visitors will leave an ecommerce site within one to two minutes if they don’t find the products they’re looking for, 36 percent of which won’t ever bother returning to the site.” You don’t want to do a load of work to get customers to your site, and then have 36 percent of them flee forever because your site search was ineffective.

Since there are many options for site search solutions, here are some points from “How To Choose The Right Site Search Solution” to think about:

- Are the results relevant? Google has some of the best relevant search returns on the market, so as a business, you have to strive for similar results. “The best solutions “learn” from visitors’ site search activity by leveraging information about search queries—the keywords used and resulting items that site visitors actually click on.” If your visitors find what they are looking for, they are more likely to stay, purchase, and return.
- Do you have the resources required to run and maintain your site search? Search can require considerable resources. If you don’t have the resources to support your search capabilities efficiently, consider using a search vendor that has a hosted service. Other benefits to hosted search solutions include no installation and training time and no ongoing maintenance.
- Does your site search give you control? Search can be another method of promoting your products, including simple options like how items are positioned within your search results or adding promotional banners to your search pages.
- Can you repurpose data from your search solution? Being able to reuse data can help your business determine key words, narrow down your SEO focus, and even determine which products and services your customers are looking at the most.
- Does your search solution improve over time? Search has changed drastically over the last 2-3 years, and any solution you choose should not remain static either. Be sure that your solution evolves and fits with your unique business requirements.
- Can you measure your site search performance? Analytics can be used to improve your business and your site, so having access to them is key.
Not only can your business improve its site search solution, with customer satisfaction at stake, it should be a focal point on your business improvements list.

Whether you are a small business or a giant conglomerate, it is fairly common to have some hesitations before embarking on social media marketing. From the CEO and board of directors to the single owner of a small shop, the main concern is “show me how this will make money”. It’s a valid question. After all, businesses want to make money. Marty Weintraub talks about some strategies to address the wary business’s concerns about social media marketing and how to see the results it brings in his article “How to Turn Your Social Media Averse Boss into Your Champion”.

Expand your English-speaking market: there are substantial number of English-speaking internet users who are not American, British or Canadian. Social media marketing is a great way to access this international market.

Build a community by connecting with users: Whether your clients are long-time clients or new to your business, there is no better way to connect to them than by building a place to interact with them. Companies like Pizza Hut have employed social media to grow their markets successfully.

Increase your brand visibility: Expanding your community via social media marketing will increase your brand visibility. As Weintraub points out, “We’ve not met a CMO yet who does not understand the benefit of enhanced keyword rankings, traffic or improved presence in universal search verticals. Most business leaders understand the value of creating measurable syndicated content channels to disseminate information if the result is new and retained users. To many it’s not a very far reach to justify the value of 47,000 Twitter followers, compared to the value of a focused customer email list.”

Drive customers to your customer service tools via social media and PPC: Both social media and PPC advertising can be used to drive traffic to various customer service tools. Your company can use “a moderated fan page on Facebook, Twitter community manager or YouTube video FAQs, the only limit is creativity”. And no one will argue against improved customer service for their company! Happier customers come back again and again.

Social branding increases sales: Paid search campaigns through Facebook and LinkedIn ads can target specific demographics, resulting in big impact for low costs.

Measure the results of your social media efforts: There are a number of ways to measure your efforts and prove that social media marketing works. Weintraub provides us with these measuring tools:
• Measure new and retained unique friends at measurable CPUF (cost per unique friend).
• Measure proclivity to become a customer.
• Measure e-commerce lift without branding compared to e-commerce lift with Facebook and LinkedIn Ads branding in different geographic areas.
• Measure SEO prominence as indicated by traffic to social assets and feed from universal organic search.
• Measure customer service usage on social assets.
• Measure engagement in participation threads, both on and off site.
• Measure inbound traffic to and from the feed and divisional site (churn).
• Measure socio-global expansion as indicated by traffic, sales and support tool usage.
• Measure whether users return on any of these nodes.

It turns out that most Americans do not know the speed of their internet connection. Do you know the speed of your internet connection? In the interest of honesty, I had to poke around and ask a few questions to find out. And our family has had everything from mid-range to turtle-slow to smokin’ fast connectivity over the years. We’re a little above average these days, but that’s due to a lot of work done from home.

I was not the least bit surprised to find out from Mike Sachoff’s article “Majority of Americans Don’t Know Their Broadband Speeds” that the Americans surveyed were woefully lacking in knowledge on this front. (Don’t get smug if you are a Canadian reading this, because I would bet our numbers are pretty similar.) Before reading the article, I guessed that younger people and men would have a handle about this statistic, just by virtue of what kind of information interests those groups. And this thought seems to be true: 29% of men know their broadband speed, compared to only 10% of women, while 27% of people in the 18 to 29 age range knew, versus the 12 percent in the 54 and over age category.

The most striking news is that the knowledge or lack of knowledge of broadband speed does not seem to impact the satisfaction rates on connectivity. As Sachoff points out, “Most Americans are satisfied with the broadband speed they are getting. Ninety-one percent of broadband users say they are “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with the speed they get at home.” The crux of this is that most people are unlikely to seek out increased bandwidth any time soon.

It comes down to this: most of your customers don’t know their broadband speed and they generally don’t care. Most of them are happy with what they have. What does that mean when you are making online marketing plans? You have to keep in mind that your clients have to be able to access your online marketing. There is nothing worse that trying to load webpages that take forever (read: more than a few seconds) to load on your machine. If the PPC link you’ve developed leads to a page that takes the intended audience more than a moment or two to load, that audience will click away before the load is done, rendering your marketing useless.

I’ve talked about specific steps that make for good online marketing practices, there have been times when I’ve talked about knowing your audience, but even more basic than that is that it is important to not be part of the crowd that is ignoring broadband speed. In this business, it’s all about having your message accessible and seen. Your customers aren’t concerned about their speed, but you need to think about it and make sure that your audience can see your messages.

Have you ever played the what if game? What if I won the lottery? What if there was a phone that did my laundry? What if we could effectively merge television and the internet? That last what if is a dream that many companies have strived for (and many geeks long for), but Google is making a good stab at it right now.

Although the information about Google TV is pretty new, we do know a few things about it. If you are interested in a basic FAQ relating to the topic, then I suggest reading Greg Sterling’s article “FAQ: What We Know So Far About Google TV”. The biggest questions are what is it and when will we see it? And Sterling answers that concisely with “an open platform that unites TV programming and the internet. It supports Flash and makes the full internet available…on TVs.” The general consensus seems to be that Google TV will be available in the fall of 2010.

Some of the bigger questions for those in the online marketing sector are: will it replace cable TV? and will there be advertising? and will there be tracking like the online sites? Like with any new product, we will have to wait to see how successful it will be. So no one can predict whether or not it will replace cable TV. I know I would bet that Google if planning and hoping that its long-term success will include being a serious contender for cable. However, we do know that there will be advertising and that Google TV include “tracking and data collection, partly for personalization and partly for ad ROI accountability and targeting” although they are also offering an “incognito” option as well.

Knowing that advertising and tracking will be a part of this new initiative for Google means that we are already thinking about search and how this will fit into our marketing methods for online search. As Chris Crum points out, for now we can only focus on a few concerns when preparing for Google TV:

- Optimize your video content, both by making the quality of your video top notch and by ensuring that your videos come up in search results for Google and YouTube.
- Make sure your site looks good on big screen TVs.
- Ensure that your search results are top-notch for Google. “If you thought Google had a great deal of market share before, imagine how many more searches Google would get from the TV set, if this thing really takes off.”
- If you haven’t begun to incorporate Android apps into your marketing plan, now is the time, as Android apps will be accessible through Google TV.

Although most of this is a wait and see game at this point, there are some angles to consider and preparations we can make for Google TV.