Internet Marketing and SEO tips for Australian webmasters » Local Search

Australia Map

Rory Mackay — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 02:30:59 +0000

map of australia the outback way

Not sure where the image came from but it was posted in our corporate news letter as “Australia photo of the year” potential candidate.

Follow the rules for a good website!

Rory Mackay — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:07:57 +0000

Last week I spent Thursday and Friday at SMX Sydney. SMX Sydney is the premier search engine conference for Australia and New Zealand. The conference itself was located at Lunar Park just under the harbour bridge, which was a fantastic setting for the two day event.

There were a number of international speakers from America, Canada and UK who talked on a whole range of different topics including the following.

Copy writing for Search Optimization
Analytics Overview
Understanding Search Behaviour
Building Search Engine Friendly Websites
Essentials of Social Marketing
And much much more

A good comprehensive overview of some of the sessions can be found at Neerav’s Blog. SMX Day 1 and SMX Day 2

On the last day the finale session was a walk through of various sites focusing on suggestions for doing things better. At this session Discover Tasmania.com was reviewed. During the review it was found that Flight Center had copied some content from Discover Tasmania illegally and then to make matters worse employed a tactic called cloaking which is as good as spamming Google itself. The consequence for what Flight Center was doing is that their subdomian that they were using has been removed from Google’s index and if you search for those pages they will not appear in Google. Plus they have had the embarrassment of being caught publically for doing something that is prohibited specifically in Google’s rules.

What I take away from the learning’s of Flight Center is how important it is to stick to the rules when trying to market a website on the internet. There are rules that are important not to break and there are rules that are important to keep. These rules do change, and keeping up to date with some of these rules is probably rule number one.

A few of the rules that I think are important to keep

Correct Title, Meta, Alt tags as well as the use of Heading tags – this is really easy to do and if done correctly can only improve a websites opportunity to rank well.
Creation of Good Content – this speaks for itself. With out good content what is the point of the website? People come to the internet to solve their problems and what they are told and the way a solution is offered makes all the difference.
Easy, quick loading pages – even though the internet access speeds have increased it is still important to make sure that a websites page loads as fast as possible. Slow loading pages can mean that a visitor never gets there.
Promote a website – tell people through various methods about the website, for example PPC, business card, side of car, link building and friendships across the internet

A few of the rules that I think are important not to break

No Spamming – no one likes spam and the search engines are fighting back for us. If they detect a spammy web site they will penalize that site.
No trying to trick the search engines- Flight Center got caught and part of their site banned.
No dead links (links that go to missing pages) – although this wont get a site banned it is horribly off putting to a visitor as well as the search engines.

There are many more rules that will keep a website reaching its full potential and not getting kicked out of the search results. As a site progresses it is important to keep improving on knowledge even if it is slow. That knowledge and slow work may help put your website ahead of your competitors.

HTML title tags need to be used by Tasmanian businesses

Rory Mackay — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 04:51:57 +0000

The title tag on the pages of a website is the first step in telling people what an internet site is all about. Many Tasmanian businesses ignore the title tags on their website, and do so to their sites detriment. Understanding how easy it is to add in a relevant title tag and how it will help increase search engine rankings for normal search as well as local search is important.

Local search is where a places name is directly placed into the search query for example “Hobart web designers” If some one was looking for a Hobart company to design their web page and they saw a listing which read “Hobart web designers” they will be more likely to see what that listing has to offer.

It is therefore important that Tasmanian companies start using correct title tags in their search engine optimization efforts.

Title tag Example

Web design for Hobart businesses

Some of the rules when using title tags are

Use Keywords
Maximum of 63 characters
Describe the page
Don’t just have a list of keywords
Each page should have a different title tag
The code goes in the header section of the page
Don’t use the business name unless you are ‘Nike’

Do you think being cybersquatted is OK?

Rory Mackay — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 01:04:13 +0000

Being part of a community should be about the community, or is it about the individual?

Wikipedia’s community definition is as folows
A community is a social group of organisms sharing an environment, normally with shared interests. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

ZDnet is featuring a news item about cybersquatting – which is where an individual takes a corporate or large organization’s web domain and with a bit of a jinx registers a similar domain. They then use their similar domain to publish negative or inflammatory information about the organization

The two examples quoted in the news report are tasmania’s tourist government arm discovertasmania.com.au and Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London. In both cases, disgruntled individuals have taken the time to put together a site and promote the site, in order to have a shot at what ever organization they are unhappy with.

What I found interesting is that both these examples are about individuals targeting services which are primarily community organizations. Granted these services may be able to do a better job then they currently are, but they do offer a service that benefits many people.

The international courts have ruled in favor of these disgruntled webmasters, and I would agree. In keeping the internet a place where we can all have our say I believe that the court came to the correct decision. I do however disagree with the way these webmasters have gone about having their say.

Tell me what you think is the best code of conduct