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.

As a tourism operator in Tasmania, you can easily claim, add, edit and optimise your website Google map listing.

When considering a destination, travellers need to get their bearings. Without them they’re lost - they won’t make a decision, may not even leave home.

One of the first things potential travellers do these days is consult an online map. If they’ve heard about your business, they’ll look you up. Your job is to be easy to find.

Online maps provide instant orientation, both during the decision-making process and once a visitor is on the ground. And it’s no longer only customers who know your name who can locate you this way.

Imagine you’re a hungry New Yorker standing on a street in Hobart. You may not know the name of the street, but you know you need a steak. You pull out your mobile phone, log onto Google Maps for Mobiles, and in seconds you have details of a range of restaurants within walking distance. It’s that easy.

In today’s connected world, customers are leading, not following. If they want your information, they want it on their own terms. They want to request it rather than have it pushed at them. This means you have to be available to them through all sorts of avenues. You have to be at their fingertips.

Associated with a reaction against heavy-handed marketing is an increasing tendency for customers to prefer the recommendations of people who have already eaten at your café, slept in your B&B or taken your tour. Listing your business on Google Maps enables you to take advantage of both of these trends.

Google Maps is the ultimate in word-of-mouth endorsement. Anyone can list a tourism business and write a review. If you haven’t registered your business yourself, go to Google Maps and search for it. If you’ve made an impression on a customer, chances are you’ll be there. By clicking on your listing on the map, you’ll be able to check your address, phone number and website.

The best thing to do if you find you are already listed is to click on ‘Claim your business’. This will enable you to correct any inaccuracies, add further information and ensure that no-one changes your information in future. Customers will still be able to add reviews, though, and it’s in your interests to read them. You need to know what people are saying about you, and reviews are invaluable feedback. Perhaps even encourage visitors who have expressed their satisfaction to you personally to record their praise on the site.

If your search returns no results, click on ‘Add/edit your business’. Detailed instructions are provided to help you create your free listing.

If you’re not on Google Maps, you’re handing a huge advantage to those businesses that are already listed. Conversely, adding your business will greatly increase the appeal of your entire community to potential visitors making holiday decisions all over the world. And, of course, you’ll be making it easy for your customers to find you – a great first impression in any language.

As a tourism operator in Tasmania, you can easily edit and optimise your website images with free software from Google.

Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you to:

• locate and organise photos on your computers
• edit and add effects to your photos easily, and;
• share your photos with others on the web

You can read about Picasa by going to Google page on Picasa. From here you can learn about features and support, as well as download Picasa free of charge by following the directions.

Features of Picasa include:

Editing:
You can turn a grey sky into a picture perfect day:

With a few easy clicks known as Picasa’s Basic Fixes, you can crop, remove red eye, adapt contrast and change colour, to enhance your digital photographs.

12 New Visual Effects
In a matter of seconds you can turn your images into works of art with easy one-clicks and sliders that offer you fine control. Bring warmth to your photos, try brighter colours or experiment with black and white images. At any point you can undo your changes.

Zoom, pan and tilt
If your image is not quite right, there is no need to worry. You can move the focus slightly to the right and even correct images taken when your camera was not level with tools available through Picasa.

Put Pictures on your site, for free
Picasa Web Albums is an easy way to put your photos on the web. Select the photos that you want to share and click to publish them. These photos will then go directly to your own web page, ready to share with people you know.

Learn more tips and features of Picasa from the article link below: Google Photo Blog

Identifying if your Google ads are showing and for what keywords the advert is being displayed, is an important part of knowing that you are getting value for money from a Google PPC advertising campaign. There are tools and tracking statistics that Google provides to help you identify how often adverts are showing, where they are showing and how effective they are when they are shown.

3 Google ways to see advert data are
• Campaign statistics
• Ads Diagnostic Tool
• Analytics

Campaign Stats
A Google campaign can be tracked for effectiveness through the statistics that are accessed when looking at each campaign that is set up. The important metric in knowing if adverts are being shown is the ‘Impressions’. Impressions are the number of times your advert has been displayed over the date range set.

The date range can be set using the date range tool

To get a good idea of what is happening have a look at your campaign settings over a week and then a month and then three months.

Looking down the column for Impr which relates to impressions it can be seen that for each of the adgroups a certain amount of Impressions have occurred. If the Imperssion number starts dropping over time (change date range) then it can be stated that the number of times adverts are being displayed are decreasing.

Ad Diagnostic Tool

This tool gives the ability test if Google believes that there are adverts in the campaign that are relevant for a particular keyword. If Google finds an advert in the campaign it will display it here as follows.

Having Google identify a relevant advert does not mean that adverts in the campaign are being displayed as regularly as is intended. All it does is identify if Google believes that there is a relevant advert for that keyword. If there is no relevant advert for that keyword then this is the first area to address and create an advert that targets the keyword that is being aimed at.

Analytics
This tool is a separate tool provided by Google. It is free to sign up for, all that is needed is an Google account. Once signed up for an Analytic account with Google a piece of tracking code will be supplied. Place this tracking code at the bottom of each page that needs to be tracked. Some time will need to pass for statistics to be gathered, but there is a feature that helps identify how many times an advert is displayed for a certain keyword in a given advertising spot.

After logging in and under the tab ‘Traffic Sources’ and then ‘Adwords’ and then ‘Keyword Positions’ Google will be able to tell what positions adverts appeared in. Google don’t distinguish between which adverts as there will normally be a number of adverts attached to any one campaign. This information can be tracked through the campaign summary and looking at the ad variation tab.

From all of these sources of information it can be reasonably worked out if campaigns adverts are being displayed effectively. This will help in deciding how to better fine tune a Google adwords campaign, and it may be by improve the landing pages or by targeting keywords better by increasing the number of search terms or improving the content of the advert and of coarse the bit that Google likes, increasing the cost per click.