As you are growing and developing your business, often you’ll only be thinking about one or two steps down the road, even if your five or ten year plan is much more complex than that. When planning your content management system, you can save yourself, your company, and your employees a lot of hassles and headaches if you approach your plans with best practices in mind for international expansion.

Andy Atkins-Krüger covers this topic in his article “My Dream International Content Management System”. I’m going to talk a little bit about these three topics in his article:

- World character sets,
- Managing content across local domains, and
- Translation and SEO workflow.

When it comes to world character sets, remember that there are a wide variety of characters and accents not used in the English language. Instead of getting a translation that gives a question mark or a box in the middle of a word – which is at the very least distracting and also has the potential to cause huge problems with your clients’ ability to understand your content – you want your content to be seamless, no matter what language you are using. Atkins-Krüger recommends using unicode or UTF8 for your online character coding. If you start with this standard, there will be no need to backfit or work out other solutions in the future.

With international expansion comes the issue of managing your content across local domains. Sometimes your company will be able to do this from one main location, but in that case, your resources will need to be shared from site to site. The key to success according to Atkins-Krüger is that “You also want to be able to manage the internal linking of the sites from that single interface and to manage the geo-selection tool which links one domain to all others on one single URL linked to from all pages.”

Of the three topics related to international CMS that we are talking about today, translation and SEO workflow can be the most difficult to navigate. In some cases, your company may need to rethink your online organizational strategy when going into different markets. “The best way to do this is to link it to a keyword map of all pages, so you know what needs to be targeted where and to link those keywords to glossaries to be used by the translators that support your SEO initiatives.” according to Atkins-Krüger’s article. It’s most important to note though that making web pages accessible for clients in other languages does not start and end with translation. Content may need to be different for a new market and your keywords may need to be refined, which can result in a slightly different SEO strategy.

International expansion can be a big project for your company, but if you incorporate some of these ideas into your original content management system, your company can come out ahead of the game when the time comes.

Just this morning I was listening to a radio interview about the change in how the news is done on television. They talked about the fact that many of us no longer watch television in the conventional way – the advent of PVRs and online television have paved the way for changing habits – and how television news sees that there is a change, but it seems no one can quite see what the new landscape will look like for news. It reminded me of the change of business on the internet too.

It’s really not been that long since we’ve been able to buy things online. And less time since social media became a huge consideration. A few years ago, the question was not if you had a website, but how big and splashy was your business website. And yet, changes are happening again, because people like Chris Crum are asking if a business does indeed need a website in his article “Is it Becoming Less Critical For Businesses to Have Websites?”.

Before you start letting your brain go into a tailspin over whether or not your business ought to have a website, know that Chris is not saying you shouldn’t have a website. In fact, he claims “having a site gives you a more stable foundation, and still creates more opportunities than if you didn’t have one. When you have a site, you have control.” He also says, “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have a site, or even that you don’t need one, but I think it’s an interesting discussion.”

Like Chris, I think that it is interesting to discuss how other opportunities online may make a website a little less critical – and thus opening up the possibility for including changes in the internet landscape into your business plan – and other options a little more feasible for building your business. Here are the two main ideas from his article:

- Facebook: Are you surprised? Facebook is a great way to increase your web presence. Some data shows that Facebook can be a bigger traffic source than Google, and Facebook does not demand that you have your own website. Plus, often Facebook pages are found on search engines and rank in the top results. Facebook may be a great place to start gathering a web presence or to enhance your company’s current presence.
- Google’s Place Pages: lists local business results at the top of a search page, making it a great place for your clients to find your business. With increasing functionality for mobility devices, making sure your business is listed in Place Pages is a good bet.

Although you could provide a web presence for your business through these methods and others, without having your own website, the key point to note is that these methods are changing the way we look for information. Clients may not find you just by finding your website, so including the other potential electronic avenues in your business plan is a wise choice for savvy businesses.

It’s true that when most of us search for something online, be it through Google, Yahoo or Bing, we’ll investigate the top few search results, start our search over again with new keywords, and abandon it from there. Since becoming involved in SEO, I admit I have become the rare person who will look onto page two or three if it is something I am interested in and the search results of the first page don’t satisfy me. And I am persistent, so I will try different keywords repeatedly. However, I am the minority.
The race for top internet rankings is a fierce one, and one that garners a lot of attention in SEO circles. Many different theories have been tested. Some of them get short term results, which may last or not. Some get long term results. Still others get no discernable results. With that in mind, might I suggest going back to the tried and true with organic search. If it works (and it does), then perhaps it is wise to use the simplest and most reliable methods to ensure your company is on the top of your client’s search results.

An article by the title of “Organic Search Still Reigns” confirms the importance of organic search. The article compares the results of Google, Yahoo and Bing and discovers that organic search results still get the top rankings “across the big three search engines, with at least 95% of traffic from each originating from the first page of results after a nonbranded search”. With numbers like these, it is no wonder that organic search and search optimization efforts remain on the top of the lists of recommendations from online marketing experts.

Instead of spending time, money, and effort on complex marketing strategies or paid advertisements, it is much more cost effective to go back to simple search engine optimization tactics. And this common sense tactic is being used by professional marketers who “recognize the importance of investment in search optimization so they will appear in those results and benefit from the huge portion of clicks that go to the top hits. The Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) found that search optimization was the third priority of senior marketers worldwide, after social networking and improving digital infrastructure.”

In spite of my own extensive browsing of search engine results, the numbers clearly show that your clients are most likely to not go beyond that first page, so this is a case where instead of marching to your own drummer your seo company should follow current online marketing trends. It’s hard to argue with the solid results achieved by organic search.

It seems easy to let your online time take over your entire life, be it business or personal online time. There is so much we can do now online, from keeping up with our friends to watching television to marketing our businesses, and it seems like the list of things to do in order to accomplish these online tasks is endless. And it can be. However, as Kim Albee of Genoo told Webpro News, it can be “broken into bite sized chunks” and made more manageable.

So just what are small and medium sized businesses managing these days? Social media, websites, search engine rankings, and lead capturing are four of their top issues. In larger companies, there can be several people or a whole team to manage these projects, but smaller companies often have one person doing it all or several people adding portions of these activities onto their already full workload. While accomplishing these tasks is important to the overall health of the company, managing them well is also key.

Depending on which online tools and features your company uses, your efforts can be focused to produce excellent results in a minimum time frame. Let’s think about social media sites: it’s easy to get swept away in all of the possibilities of your social media. On Facebook alone, you can have online chats with your friends, play games, schedule activities, become a fan of different groups and businesses, post your own updates, and read the updates of all of your friends. A person could potentially spend an entire day navigating Facebook.

In Chris Crum’s article “Look for Ways to Manage Your Social Media Time Better” he lists a few great ways to cut down on the noise crowding out your online time, including

- Use the list features for Facebook and Twitter to organize the feeds you are getting and view from a single group of people at a time, rather than wading through all of the feeds from everyone on your list.
- Use browser plug-ins to make your online tasks smoother. This may take up a bit of time to research and implement in the beginning, but that time and more will be recovered in the long run by using the right tools for your browsing habits.
- Organize your news feeds too.
- Use down time, like when “waiting for your food to arrive at a restaurant, waiting at the dentist’s office” to check on your social media through your mobile devices.

However you manage your online time, be sure to do it mindfully to ensure that the internet is working for you, rather than allowing yourself to get swallowed by internet activities. For small and medium sized businesses, where managing tasks is even more crucial, these recommendations can be the line between success and failure.

Even though I do marketing on a professional level, it is easy to let the best marketing slide by unnoticed. Really, the better the marketing, the easier it is to internalize it and not talk about it. Do you remember a few years ago when there were Kellogg’s commercials for Special K cereal that were men talking about being fat and needing to exercise more? It was a spoof on what many women talk about and obsess over. I think the marketing team thought it would be funny, but it hit too close to home and women were offended. It was bad marketing and was pulled almost immediately, the reaction was so strong. But some of our best marketing campaigns are either reveled in or they are internalized and accepted. Kellogg’s got the message, and their efforts, both online and elsewhere, are much more subtle these days.

Apple got the good marketing memo a long time ago. We’ve accepted their branding and their assurances that they are one of the best companies out there for music and computers. There are people who will use nothing but a Mac for their computer needs, and the iPod brand has taken off in spades. It seems like everything they touch in the electronics age is golden (though the fate of the iPad remains untested as of yet).

I hardly think about advertisements for this company. In fact, other than the catchy PC vs Mac commercials of a few years ago, I can’t recall any of their marketing that has jumped out at me. Nothing online or in print. It’s that seamless. However, with a brand name that is so strong and prominent, I do know that their marketing team is working hard to keep them on top, and I have to admire that work.

Now, what brought these thoughts to my attention? Well, I was reading an article by Mike Sachoff that talks about Apple’s newest contest. Turns out that Apple is holding a contest to celebrate the download of their 10 billionth song. Imagine: 10 billion songs sold.

Apple says: “Seven years later, we’re about to celebrate our biggest milestone for music, yet – 10 billion songs downloaded. Buy a song, and if it’s the 10 billionth download, you could win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card. It’s our way of saying thanks.”

The Apple marketing team should be proud. All of Apple should be proud of this milestone. 7 years for 10 billion songs sold. Never mind the number of iPods that were sold in the same time frame. Amazing. And their marketing has been subtle and effective.

Sometimes it is nice to just stand back and admire.

News in the world of internet marketing is filled with talk about Google’s latest venture: Google Buzz. Although I’ve heard a few negative remarks about how Google is trying to have their hand in every internet venue imaginable, word on the street is generally a tone that is interested in this development. I’m not surprised at that combination, since we all love to have the things we want to do on our computers and on the internet packaged up nice and neat, but then we tend to complain when one company provides it. Finding a happy medium in that situation is a bit of a quandary.

After reading about the features promised in Buzz, I am eager to try it out and see what I think of the experience it provides. Let’s take a quick look at some of the features of Buzz:

- Runs through Gmail
- Permits users to post status updates, photos, and links to their network
- Allows users to pull in activity from other sites, including Twitter, Flickr and Picasa
- Will have a mobile component, which can combine with wireless operating systems to include features like voice-recognition postings and a GPS-enabled ability to attach the user’s location to posts
- Enables real time comments, weighting the comments by other users similarly to Google’s search engine results in order to sort through them in a similar fashion to your Google search
- Automatically sets the people you email or chat with frequently as your friends

Despite how Buzz seems to be trying to replace some social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn, while integrating other sites, like Twitter, into the usability of their latest brainchild, Google claims that they aren’t trying to edge in on anyone else’s territory and are just trying “to listen to their users”, according to Gmail product managed Todd Jackson. However, there is talk of Buzz being marketed to companies as an interoffice communication tool, which is definitely a competitive move against AOL Instant Messenger service.

Only time will tell if Buzz will be a success and to what degree. The success may hinge not on what Buzz can do at this moment, but on the potential expansions – from updating your status by phone to enabling Twitter updates through your Buzz account to linking Buzz to other emerging Google tools – and the reception Google receives in the social media arena. And the good news is that Google knows they have their work cut out for them. Spokesman Bradley Horowitz said, “We’re not launching this today because we think we’re done. We don’t think that’s how a product like this is built.”

It’s going to be interesting to watch the progress of this tool and see what kind of audience it ends up getting.

In the online marketing world, we talk a fair bit about driving traffic to your business site. Getting people there is the lion’s share of the battle, or so we all assume. But what if you are getting traffic to your site and then they leave right away? How do you get people to stay?

One thing that comes to mind is driving the right traffic to your site. If you are selling books and the people you get coming to your site are looking for vacations, the vast majority of them will not be buying what you are selling. Sure, one or two might find a book on their vacation spot of choice, but if those couple of people are your entire purchasing power out of one hundred people landing on your site, pretty soon your company will be broke. Or at the very least wondering why your website is ineffective at driving sales. So, the trick really is to get the right people coming to your site.

Carrie Hill’s article “Two Simple Rules for Fixing High Bounce Rate Pages” and assures us that with her two rules, “you can address 75% of the issues caused by high bounce rate pages”. Even if your exact number is not as high as 75%, there is a lot of ground to be gained by following her suggestions and taking a few simple steps in evaluating your website. It’s a winning situation for any business.

The first way is to check the organic phrases used to find your web pages. Determine if those phrases are really phrases that will drive your business. If a potential customer is looking for shoes and finds that you have books about shoes, that customer will just leave in a flash. Targeting your traffic will net more business. Misleading queries will only contribute to your bounce rate.

The second way to make sure that potential customers continue to browse your site and shop is making their path clear and easy once they arrive on your site. The harder it is to figure out where to go next or how to buy an item, the easier it will be for people to just go elsewhere. Make it simple, clear, and easy.

There are many ways to test the ease of use on your business’s webpage, from complex tools to hiring experienced web analysts to just having a few friends do a quick and dirty test. Your choice will depend on how web savvy your business is and how much money you have allocated to the task. Hill suggests using either Attention Wizard or Click Tale to determine where the eye and mouse are going on your page.

No matter how you go about decreasing your bounce rate, it is important to take a bit of time and allocate some resources to this aspect of your online marketing plan. The whole point of internet marketing is to get people to your site who will buy your products and services.

Just like updating your haircut and wardrobe, your website is another good place to do some regular updates. We all know of businesses that never do any updates, some that rarely do them, and then the small percentage who update on a regular basis. Since your website is essentially the first impression many people will have of your business, do you want them to arrive and think that it is still 2001 on your site? Or worse, find broken links and incomplete work? It’s not a great impression, and even worse, it could drive traffic away from your site.

Erica Charney was talking about just this issue in her article “5 Website Tips To Keep Your Brand Image Fresh”. Her main five tips boil down to the following:

1. Fix broken links.
2. Do regular traffic analysis.
3. Do your own site crawl.
4. Keep your keyword list up to date.
5. Continually freshen your web copy.
Some of these tips seem fairly obvious to me, like making sure to fix links, but I know that I find broken links on my own daily run through the internet, so it is not obvious enough to everyone. But a frustrated customer is not a returning customer, so it bears repeating.

Doing regular traffic analysis is another tip that seems obvious to me, but some businesses may need the reminder. The more you know about where your traffic is coming from, the better you can understand what is and is not working in your online approach.

A site crawl can prevent issues from cropping up. Pulling old pages and getting visibility for the newer pages is important. Visibility on the internet is key, so updating your sitemap file and submitting the XML version are important too.

Keeping your keyword list current and freshening your web copy are pivotal activities in SEO. These are the haircuts and new clothes of the web world. Fresh copy gives your clients something new to look at (think about that haircut), but also a good way to get search engines to recognize your site, if done properly. While the keyword list is a bit like your clothing pile: it’s okay to keep some of your favourites, if they still work for you, but new content on your site will need new keywords. Plus, there are tools that show which keywords are being used frequently, so you can align your site’s keywords with popular thinking, allowing better access by the average person using search tools.

Really, search engine optimization boils down to maintaining your image on the internet. You wouldn’t go to an interview in ratty old jeans and a ripped t-shirt, so letting your website’s “clothing” wear out won’t help your business either.

A lot of people and businesses assume that the internet is a place where youth and business professionals work, promote themselves, and play. I have a hard time myself envisioning my 86 year old grandmother exploring the vast expanses of the internet, so if your business hasn’t taken seniors into account, then know you are not alone.

Interesting studies and conversations are cropping up all the time proving that seniors are not only using computers, but are a significant portion of the online presence. Mike Sachoff discusses the presence of seniors online and breaks down where they are going online and what they are doing. In his article, he presents a detailed table breaking down the activities of seniors online:

Even better, he has a list of the top websites they use:

Two of the biggest contributors to SEO and social media rank in the top 3 of this list: Facebook and Google. Ah…now there’s the connection we were looking for in the SEO field! Since seniors have increased their web presence to 17.5 million people over the last five years, according to Nielson, and are now spending 58 hours a month online in 2009 (increased from 52 hours a month in 2004), then they are indeed a demographic to be reckoned with when mapping out your online marketing strategies.

More importantly, it seems that seniors are doing the same things online as other demographics: getting information, visiting blogs, planning travel, and socializing. Only they have more free time available to them than those of us who are in the middle of our careers and raising kids. What will make you think even more are statistics that indicate 8.2% of all social networking and blog visitors fall into the seniors category, which is only 0.1 percent lower than the number of teenagers visiting the same kinds of sites. We know that marketing is aimed heavily at teenagers, so considering that seniors make up almost the same numbers for social networking sites, perhaps our businesses need to consider them too.

Although seniors will likely find most businesses through their general SEO strategies, it is worth noting that a different age group may search under different key words and key word phrases than their younger counterparts, so planning your SEO key words and phrases to reflect a wider audience is important. After all, while my 86 year old grandmother may have more time to spend online, I’d bet that if she doesn’t find your company at the top of her Google search, then she is unlikely to dig any further and your business may lose out to others who have tailored their SEO strategy to include this demographic.

Have you ever had those days where everything lines up just right? Or you get the same message over and over again through different channels? I love those days! They fascinate me. Not long ago I had one about running. All of my old running friends seemed to be coming out of the woodwork, there was talk of lots of different races, the newest clinic was starting, and it all built up to a level of excitement that just made me think long and hard about my own running.

Sadly, I’d been off my own training for a couple of months (sometimes life gets in the way of running), but instead of taking this influx of running information and hanging my head because I wasn’t running, it catapulted me into thinking about what I needed to do to get out there again. And trust me, starting training up at the beginning of December, right before the crunch of the holiday season, is not the easiest plan to implement. Did I get back into running? Yes, but not just running: I am running, spinning and doing a core class. I do better with extremes, as it turns out, than with gently easing myself into my exercise regime. It makes for a rough and tired couple of weeks, but I know the results will be fantastic and my motivation will continue to expand from approaching it this way.

Turns out that Google and I have a lot in common: they like to take on big projects and through all they have at it too!

Have you done a Google search over the last few days? I did on this morning. Actually, I searched for this website, so I could see what we’d blogged about lately (no need to repeat myself), in order to get a bit of inspiration. And this is what I found:

Turns out that as soon as I did a bit of poking about online (I love that part of my job!) it became apparent that Google has finally launched their Real Time search. What’s interesting about Real Time search is that it gives you results for your search that are new or current. As Google themselves put it, they wanted a “dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web”. It’s really a result of the influence of tools like Twitter and Facebook, where we’ve become used to getting real-time content.

A little more searching uncovered that Google is working on a few projects for their mobility users too. They’ve added more languages to their voice search, with concrete plans to add even more languages in the future. What’s Nearby is being introduced to Google, a feature that allows mobile devices to “launch a the menu whereby users can find businesses and attractions immediately around them” based on a single mapping point. And Googles, a visual search tool that “uses the camera to search on objects/image…take a picture and get information back”, is also on the table.

All of these new Google products are expansions to the success of the original search tool, but Google is taking into account the development of tools, needs, and desires of its users. Google doesn’t work in a vacuum, and their business is smart enough to look at other developments, like Twitter’s real-time content or the need for search features via voice or picture, and apply them to grow their business. It’s smart development work and it keeps internet marketing companies on their toes.

Plus, like my running, they seem to have the resources to tackle many large projects at once and still look like they are having a good time. It’s a model to live up to.