We will get you ranked #1 in the Search Engines guaranteed!!

There are a bucket load of factors (more than 250 some say) that influence rankings within the search engines, no singular company can even remotely claim to control each. Good rankings are best achieved with great research and flawless execution, but there are simply so many external factors involved with getting a site to #1 for a certain key term, to make such a claim from the outset is completely misleading.

Search Engine Land‘s news editor, Matt McGee states: “The only way to even possibly come close to guaranteeing rankings is if you’re doing it on the paid side and happen to have a term that you’re willing to bid high enough on and to get high enough click through to sustain top spot. Also, personalisation comes into play: what you see might be different to what I see, so there’s absolutely no way to guarantee a number one ranking on Google“.

SEO is a competitive landscape, that is constantly changing, not a one off project. As with any other form of marketing, a company needs to keep the fly wheel spinning. Continually tweaking and iterating for improvements, while monitoring the results of those changes with professional tracking, and reliable metrics. Let me outline that again for you, just incase you missed it: SEO is not a ‘one off’ project, it never ends. As an SEO Company that charges a low monthly fee, we would question as to how any agency could possibly charge a one off fee for a service that effectively requires resources to be allocated on an ongoing basis.

Should you be of the thinking that all your SEO objectives have been met, then we would be the first to put our money on the fact that you are not making the most of the investment you made in your website & your ongoing marketing initiative. There’s always more that can be done, and always a wider audience to reach. Adding new or improving existing pages, or targeting more terms each month is far better than waiting for your competitors to trump your previous efforts. Gaining rankings is step 1, maintaining and expanding those rankings is a whole other ball game.

Readers, please, if you take only one morsel of knowledge from this very short and abrupt post – it is to question your SEO Company (including us) about their methods, their promises, and their guarantees. Only hire a transparent agency, that is happy to guide you through the process & execute each and every task with complete clarity.

Don’t fall for the shallow promises, there is simply no such thing as a Ranking guarantee. Period.

The primary purpose of CRO is to assist you in expanding your online business and reaching your goals in relation to revenue and profits, market share or site membership levels. If you own and promote a special interest website, your main objective is most likely that of increasing your user base and membership. For these reasons, conversion rate optimization data is based on real business metrics, not simply on abstractions such as click-through data and bounce rates. Currently, most Internet marketers using CRO as a tool to generate better returns from their online investments, agree that strongly increasing website conversion rates proves to be the fastest and most dependable method of making the most of the visitors you already do have.

What Are Some the Simple Mathematics Related to CRO?

The conversion rate of a domain or webpage is equal to the percentage of visitors who achieve a particular goal during a given time sequence. Usual goals include making purchases, requesting services and joining newsletter distribution lists. In order to improve your site’s homepage conversion rate by 25%, you must accomplish a 2.5% improvement involving ten of these elements: company tagline, main headline, introduction text, photographs and graphics, product and service descriptions, offers, usability, guarantees, site navigation, call to action, site layout, pricing, testimonials, and product return/refund policies; just to name a few.

When performing a basic A/B split test on a webpage, the Google Website Optimizer software does the math for you. Half of your site visitors will view Headline A while the other half view Headline B. Each visitor will be shown a different combination of site elements, such as text, images, banners, prices, and special offers. Afterward, the software will compute an average of the top performing site components. These results can be a great help in creating the ultimate dynamic presentation and Web presence for your site and business interests. This comprehensive method of site testing is known as multivariate testing.

What Other Kinds of Testing Are Common in CRO?

A number of different kinds of testing and analysis are commonly used in conversion rate optimization, including the following:

- Web analytics. The basic site overlay feature of Web analytics reveals where on your website visitors click, where they don’t click, and at what point they exit the site. In other words, this useful feature reports what your site traffic is doing.

- Usability testing. This highly effective test lets you know why site visitors are doing certain things.

- Eyetracking. This CRO component alerts you to which site elements visitors see without clicking, and what items people fail to click because they simply don’t see them. For this, you will need specially designed hardware. Currently, a startup group, GazeHawk, offers discounted eyetracking by using normal webcams.

- Clickmapping. There are two main areas of this CRO activity, Crazy Egg and Click Tale. Crazy Egg helps you monitor which areas of your website visitors choose to click and just how far down the page or into your site their degree of interest takes them. Click Tale enables you to see flash movies revealing the individual activities of each visitor to your domain.

- Both customer surveys and cooperative competition (offering the products and services of competitors for sale on your own domain, often as an affiliate) are additional good aids to learning more about the conversion rates achieved by your market competition. Live chat sessions can also be eye-openers in this area.

What is the Role of CRO in the Course of SEO Campaigns?

While the major focus of SEO campaigns is directing as much targeted Web traffic from the search engines to your website and business domain as possible, the purpose of CRO is to increase your conversion rates appreciably. Simply put, SEO drives visitors to your site and CRO turns them into valuable customers or website members. Most online business owners are familiar with the primary aspects of effective SEO—professional level site construction by experienced Web content writers and designers, and then authority building from the greater web pointing in. Additional resources such as top placement in search engine directories, use of Google Adwords and other online advertising and keyword aids, pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns, and building a presence via social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and search engine social media sites like YouTube are highly efficient and proactive elements of expert SEO. However, in order to transform all the new traffic this finely-tuned SEO has driven to your site into conversions, what is then needed is the uniquely combined creative and scientific effects of CRO.

What CRO Methods Are Most Often Recommended by Web Marketing Experts?

The majority of CRO system experts highly recommend various testing methods to find the most accurate and productive way to achieve higher website conversion rates. There is, however, a second school of thought which is more focused on studying and interacting with a target market by means of remarketing, remessaging and retargeting (attaching cookies to site visitors to later serve them with site-and-product-related banner ads and messages long after they have left a website without conversion). At this point in time, the general consensus is that while different varieties of behavioral targeting can lend a valuable boost to SEO-CRO campaigns, results of comprehensive CRO system testing will undoubtedly lead to the highest conversion rates possible.

One of the common misconceptions however, is the value of a back-link originating from .GOV or .EDU domains. As a means to simply debunk the myth, pasted below is an exact transcript of the latest chat we had with a prospective customer, about this very subject.

We have also added the video mentioned in the chat, so as to obtain clarity direct from Matt Cutts (ala Google’s Web Spam Team). Be sure to listen in at the 00:50 mark and also the 02:00 position.

Wednesday, 13 Jul, 2011
[23:09] Visitor 372837516 has joined the conversation
[23:09] Richard: Hello, welcome to LoveClients – If I can help with anything don’t hesitate to ask me a question.
[23:21] Visitor 372837516: do you offer white labelling?
[23:21] Richard: We do indeed
[23:22] Richard: Are you looking to resell the service offering to an existing client base?
[23:22] Richard: Or is it a new initiative?
[23:22] Visitor 372837516: what are your methods for link building?
[23:22] Richard: We build links through many different methods including but not limited to, directory submissions, article creation and distribution, through ezines, blogs, article networks, and our own network.
[23:22] Richard: We also have several partners whom own large site networks, that will often assist with an appropriate thematic link where relevant and possible. We do not buy links, though we do request options like guest blog posts, or relevant research and case studies that will include a link back to your site.
[23:23] Richard: Merit based link building remains the single most effective way to assure your site of long term ranking success… ie: It is no longer a numbers game per say.
[23:23] Visitor 372837516: that sounds kind of shady and old school
[23:23] Richard: Oh really? How about you outline as to what you would consider non-shady and new school?
[23:23] Richard: I’m all ears.
[23:24] Visitor 372837516: getting .edu links and links from really high quality sites in my neighborhood
[23:24] Richard: Right. So clearly you haven’t read about the fact that the .edu domain holds no more weight than any other .TLD?
[23:25] Richard: Nor taken the time time read exactly what Google publishes?
[23:25] Visitor 372837516: that is debatable
[23:25] Richard: Not at all
[23:25] Richard: Shall I find you the reference?
[23:25] Visitor 372837516: please
[23:25] Visitor 372837516: so directories are good are they?
[23:25] Richard: What you just mentioned, is extremely old school. Please hold.
[23:25] Richard: Contextually relevant directories? Most certainly they are.
[23:25] Richard: Spam directories or Link farms, certainly are not.
[23:25] Visitor 372837516: and ezines?
[23:26] Richard: if the ezine relates to your niche? 100% perfect.
[23:26] Richard: For example:
[23:26] Richard: If you own a site that sells flowers online.. and you obtain a backlink for an active Ezine/Blog that relates to Floristry. That would be thematicaly perfect.
[23:27] Visitor 372837516: yes but the weight of such a link is quite low
[23:28] Richard: That completely depends on the site, the context, and the page within the site.
[23:28] Visitor 372837516: agreed
[23:28] Richard: We produce results for our clients, every single day, using that exact strategy.
[23:28] Visitor 372837516: how do you obtain your links?
[23:29] Richard: As I mentioned above
[23:30] Richard: Feel free to listen to what Google says about .EDU here:
[23:30] Richard:
> http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp?blend=1&ob=5#p/search/0/UxTmZulcQZ0
[23:30] Richard:
About the 50 second mark
[23:32] Richard: What you may have read or heard on forums about issues like .GOV or .EDU domains pushing more weight to your site than a .COM or any other .TLD is absolute nonsense. And google continues to publish videos and content debunking those claims.
[23:32] Richard: As per the video link I posted above.
[23:34] Visitor 372837516: do you buy any links?
[23:34] Richard: No. Never.
[23:34] Visitor 372837516: why not?
[23:35] Richard: Because it is generally considered poor practice to do so.
[23:35] Richard: Personally, I will admit that in the real world.. it happens all the time.
[23:35] Richard: However, in this specific company; it is against our policy
[23:35] Visitor 372837516: but it is the only way to get really really high quality links
[23:36] Richard: Not in our opinion.
[23:36] Visitor 372837516: okay
[23:36] Visitor 372837516: thanks for your time
[23:36] Richard: You’re most welcome.
[23:36] Richard: Is there anything else I can help you with today?
[23:37] Visitor 372837516: what would I get if I had $1000/ month to spend?
[23:37] Visitor 372837516: would I get noticeable results in my rankings for high competition keywords?
[23:38] Richard: If your total budget was $1k, inclusive of click costs.. Then we would suggest just spending $599/month on the standard SEO package.
[23:38] Richard: It all depends on the key terms..
[23:38] Visitor 372837516: not including any ppc
[23:38] Richard: Well, our packages are $599 / $997 as per the page your on now.
[23:38] Richard: What type of key terms are you looking to rank for?
[23:39] Richard: I’ll try to give you a realistic timeframe etc..
[23:39] Richard: No pressure at all to sign up, though at least you can make an informed decision regardless of who you choose to help out with your campaign.
[23:40] Richard: If you give me a few key terms… I’ll take a quick look
[23:41] Visitor 372837516: conference calling
[23:41] Visitor 372837516: currently I am high on the second page

No doubt, you’re a busy guy & getting your attention was always going to be an uphill battle, so we thought we would write you an Open Letter, on behalf of our small, but very-lovable clientbase.

You see, we are avid readers of your blog though our clients have questions. A lot of questions. And as their agency, it’s clearly our role to ensure we’re delivering the most accurate and honest responses we can to any SEO queries they may have.

As a result, we thought we would write you and your team a short (8?) FAQ, in hopes that you may take the time to respond publicly so as to not only help LoveClients better manage their clients’ expectations, and hence provide value to its customers, but also educate the greater Search Marketing industry as a whole.

So without further ado, your attention to the following would be appreciated by many:

1. What is Google doing to catch the Link Buying cheaters?

Background: A frequent query from our clients, is often “should we just buy links?” As an ethical agency, we consistently outline that they would be far better served spending their budget on producing better content, or better value in their niche, so as to attract real, contextually relevant backlinks as opposed to trying to cheat their way to the top. However, that is a pretty hard discussion to have with a client, when they can open Google.com and type in “buy quality backlinks” and see that Google allows advertisers to blatantly market backlinks for sale via AdWords?  Isn’t that like the New York Times writing a front page article denouncing the consumption of Alcohol, but selling a Page #2 AD to Johnnie Walker?
Matt’s Answer: (To be updated, should he be so kind to reply)

2. Is the Google +1 button now a signal to improve search quality? And what about when you star a result while logged in?

Background: When discussing the new Google +1 button you mentioned: “The primary benefit is that search gets better. It gets better in the user interface immediately, and we’ll look at it as a potential signal to improve search quality as well.” Could you confirm if it is indeed a signal? And if so, we must wonder if +1 has a safe guard to prevent abuse of the tactic?

Matt’s Answer: (To be updated, should he be so kind to reply)

3. Does “Time” based relevancy exist?

Background: In the real world, if you were to ask someone what the “Best Restaurant in Chicago” was in 2003, clearly the answer would be different than if you ask the same question today. Time as a factor of relevancy, would dictate that results would change based on ‘when’ backlinks are created. By way of example, SITE-A receives a lot of coverage, and hence backlinks, in 2003, but since then has hardly received much of a mention, and SITE-B is the new kid on the block, and is now receiving a lot of Social mentions and backlinks, even though it has far less page authority than SITE A. Is it fair to assume that the ‘timeliness’ of backlinks count, and that a flurry of activity may signal more current relevancy?

Matt’s Answer: (To be updated, should he be so kind to reply)

4. Does placing a backlink on an existing HIGH PR homepage, that hasn’t changed in years, raise a negative signal?

Background: Google now has the ability to essentially crawl the web at warp speed, caching versions of websites.  Let’s say that for the last 3 years, Google crawled domainX.com once a week, and the content on that page has not changed at all. Then all of a sudden, one sunny afternoon, the owner of domainX.com decides to sell a link to the owner of domainY.com, and sometime thereafter the Google bot crawls domainX.com to find that the ‘only’ thing that has changed in the last 3 years is a new, keyword-laden, outgoing link to domainY.com. Does that not look somewhat suspicious?

Matt’s Answer: (To be updated, should he be so kind to reply)

5. Is it possible to ‘harm’ rankings, by link building poorly? And if so, what is in place to stop less-than-ethical competitors from using bad link building tactics to outrank our site?

Background: We have taken the time to read your previous response to this very question, though something a wonderful client of ours mentioned just this week (thanks James, from ComeToCapetown.com) got us thinking. I guess we’re looking for a definitive answer mainly due to your response in the video below. You mention that Google may add the capability to report poor links in the Webmaster Tools Console. Does that then confirm, that it is somewhat possible for unethical competitors to take advantage of poor link building?

Matt’s Answer:(To be updated, should he be so kind to reply)

6.  Is Google doing anything to determine what the ‘actual’ best restaurant in Vancouver is? Or the best Dentist in New York?

Background: LoveClients has built a business off of the ability to help clients build more relevant websites with more valuable content and hence garner authority in their niche. However, as a searcher, if I’m looking for the best dentist in New York, doesn’t it seem a tad crazy to rely on the popularity of a website based on back links and on page content alone, to determine which site I land on? The ‘PageRank’ method is so far away from the real world, that it somewhat makes Google irrelevant.

As a real world example, LoveClients.com ranks at the top of Page #1 for “Top SEO Agency” and yet, truth be told, we’re far from the world’s “TOP” SEO Agency (though, we’re not complaining). In reality, we’re a small company, giving it our absolute best; compared to some of the bigger players, we’re nobodies. How is that justifiably a fair result for searchers?”

Matt’s Answer: (To be updated, should he be so kind to reply)

7. Does the CTR of a Search Result effect its future rankings?

Background: Google clearly states that Meta Descriptions are not a ranking factor, and are not used in any of the signals. However, a cleverly crafted meta description (and Title Tag) can make a huge difference to site traffic once a website is ranked high in the engines. Does Google monitor CTR of individual search results? And if one specific result is clicked often enough by individual surfers, is it deemed as a more relevant result?

Matt’s Answer: (To be updated, should he be so kind to reply)

8. Does Google use the the ‘Hours of Operation’ feature in Google Places, to effect the Mobile search results and Places listings?

Many of our clients notice that the Google Places listings change quite often, noticeably more often than organic results.

The proliferation of mobile devices provide searchers with instant access to business information on the go, whether it’s a local restaurant near your hotel or a dry cleaning business in your local area – consumers using their mobile devices to search for relevant business information are ready to make a call, and have a very high level of commercial intent.

However, if it is 8pm on a Sunday and a consumer decides to search for: “Dry Cleaner in New York”  from a mobile device, isn’t it more relevant to feature a Dry Cleaner that is “still open”, higher in the search mobile results, than a Dry Cleaner with simply more reviews and a better places presence? Is Google taking the operating hours, and time that the search is executed into account?

Matt’s Answer: (To be updated, should he be so kind to reply)

In closing:

We’re sure you have much better things to do than reply to our clients’ queries, though you do seem like the type of guy that we would love to crack a cold Beer with – so should you ever be in London, Vancouver, or Melbourne, do drop in to one of our offices, and we’ll repay the favor!

Cheers,

The Crew @ LoveClients

Much like the world of SEO, there are gurus and consultants out there with a ton of tricks up their sleeves, ready to help the big and the little guys alike. In fact, the parallels abound — the really big contenders, the 3-star restaurants with the celebrity chefs — they do their own menus, study the psychology behind them, and put everything into them. Just like big corporations have in-house SEO teams, top chefs take a direct hand in their menu preparation.

Restaurant menus are a psychological exercise. People make decisions about what to order for lunch or dinner based on the way the text is laid out, the fonts that are chosen, whether or not there’s a dollar sign present, what kind of cents (if any) are used in the price — a whole series of decisions.

So — what can restaurant menus teach us about SEO?

Split Testing Works

For one thing, it’s fundamental to split test. Restaurants that really take advantage of the psychology of their menus realize that every customer is a living, breathing survey, and that even the most rudimentary analytics can determine what dish gets ordered the most often, and how those orders might change if a word is swapped, a price is shown without the cents attached, or the menu item is placed next to a more expensive one.

While analytics might not tell us everything about why a menu item isn’t doing so well (some people probably just don’t like brussels sprouts, and maybe not everyone loves the product you’re selling, either), they certainly give us a better handle on the reasons behind a consumer decision than, say, our own intuition. Use it to your advantage.

Context For Buyer Psychology is Crucial

The reason specialized consultants exist in the restaurant industry, specially devoted to menu copywriting and design, is because consumer psychology isn’t just a blanket discipline that can be applied easily to every corner of the market.

People make different decisions when hungry, when in a restaurant environment, when they have someone serving them, and so on — than they do, say, in a retail store.

The same goes online — if your site fosters an anonymous, cold feeling, you might have the best product in the world, but you’ll never break through to your customers, and all the abstract psychology in the world won’t help until you fix that one fundamental. Context matters.

The Best Copy in the World Can’t Hide a Bad Product

A mediocre restaurant can improve its completely average breakfast by referring to “country” ham, “farm-fresh” eggs, and “smoked” bacon, even though every single piece of ham, single egg, or strip of bacon is always all of those things. But in the end, that restaurant will never really take off, never get that top review in the paper, and never have people telling their friends about it with true passion.

Good, persuasive copy can drive sales up, but even the finest copy in the world can’t mask an underwhelming offering forever. If you’re selling something that’s so/so, good copy will do all it can to hide that fact. And if your site is selling something truly phenomenal? Then it deserves the best copy around. There’s a reason all the top restaurants have descriptions that seem right out of a classic novel — the food is worth it.

Make sure your website’s product or service is, too.

At Loveclients, we do a ton of work trying to improve our customers’ sites so they make real conversions, and increase their sales, or visitors, or — well, let’s just say we’ve got lots of different clients with lots of different goals, and we’re constantly working to hit them all.

But here’s one thing that’s consistent for all of our clients — if you have good content that leads your visitor towards what you want to do, you will convert them into a customer much quicker.

This is broken down into three things:

1. A Clear Value Proposition
2. A Call To Action
3. An End Result

Whether you’re trying to improve your own rankings or have called upon us to do it, these three fundamentals are worth understanding.

#1: Make a Clear Value Proposition.

You need to tell your customers what you offer. Don’t just blindly list features and characteristics of your product, hoping that one of them will grab the visitor. Instead, explain why this product will fill a need, will solve a problem, or will be necessary in the customers’ life.

Sometimes this means setting up a problem/solution type of proposal, which is quite simple:

1. The customer has a problem.
2. Your product solves that problem.

It works for any business model, but you need to put a little work into it, to make sure your copy reflects — as easily as possible — what your product or service can do for the customer. There are no secrets here — this is exactly what we’ve done with our primary Loveclients page. We know what we do: get small and medium businesses real results online. So how does that fit into this model? Like this:

Problem: It’s hard to increase your traffic and have your site found. It’s complicated, there are dozens of steps, and it takes a lot of consistent work.

The solution? Hire us. Simple as that.

#2: Write A Single Call to Action.

The call-to-action is how that solution becomes a conversion. On our site, we don’t have a massive ‘sign up’ button leading you towards entering your information and immediately starting to work with us.

Sure, that’s our final goal (as it is with any business), but we understand that if that were our main Call to Action (people call it a CTA), we’d have some trouble finding as many happy clients as we do.

Instead, we want you to chat with us. That’s the whole point. By using our ultra-simple chat interface, we can explain our service further, give you honest, transparent advice, and answer all of your questions, all with zero pressure, zero obligation — just easy, clear examples.

#3: Have an End Result.

This one is the most simple — if we do our job right, it means you like what we have to say, appreciate our honesty, get something out of the examples we show you, and sign up for our service. And then everyone is happy!

This is how the system works. It’s not secret advice, it’s just good, common sense when it comes to marketing, and these are the same principles we try and implement on your site.

You Can Implement This Right Now.

Let’s say you’re working on the copy (the all-important text, crucial to increasing the search-ability of your site). But you’re wondering what kind of copy you need to get onto that front page; what exactly do your visitors need to see immediately?

Just keep the three above rules in mind. Build out from them, and not from a lengthy mission statement or press release. Now, if you’re a bigger company, you’ll probably need a full content strategy, as it’s not as easy as just splashing some punchy copy on a front page and letting it do all the work for you — but that’s for another article.

This Literally Works for Anyone.

By pushing this angle, you’ll gain more customers. Conversely, a dense mission statement or pointless front page does nothing for your web presence, no matter what your business is.

Really — we can’t count the number of major corporations who would benefit from this approach. Sure, we know they offer literally hundreds of products and services sometimes, but just take a look at a company like Apple, who really understands clean, clear copywriting — they turn over billions of dollars in business, but their website doesn’t hide behind a complicated corporate ‘front’.

It’s just not necessary.

If your site is one of the main ways your business is trying to make money, or even if it’s only a side channel — follow this advice, and get ready for a real difference in how your visitors respond to you.

photo from flickr user dbdrobot.

Of course this isn’t web or blog content, but rather just business or personal emails we send back and forth. But can we ever use any of it as content for our sites?

Indeed we can.

The Value of Author’s Letters.

I’ve been reading Norman Mailer’s letters recently, and it occured to me that he made dozens of great points, observations, and arguments while writing to friends and editors. This is normal–we often say great stuff in our emails, too (probably not as great as his, but hey).

But it’s not really publishable, per se—it’s generally only great authors who get that privledge, and thank god, because reading through people’s random emails would be an atrocious task.

But what about the few times we do write something truly memorable in an email? An anecdote, a product review, a recounted experience—we send a lot of these things to each other. I tell various stories in a ton of different contexts: flickr captions, google reader shared item comments, my photoblog, and in emails, too.

Many of the best things I’ve ever written are likely buried somewhere inside emails. If I were running a business, surely I’d have sent many good thoughts and observations on my business out to various friends and associates. Keep that part in mind while I tell you a story.

My Friend and his Duplicate Emails (He’s Proud of Them).

I’ve got a friend who admitted to a strange practice: when he tells an anecdote that takes more than a few lines in an email, he’ll often copy and paste the whole thing into other emails when someone asks about it.

After a few seconds of personalization, that second (or third, or fourth) recipient gets the great anecdote too.

Why not just make it into a blog, you might ask? Well, a blog changes things: it’s automatically more public, and it has a frontend that requires more work than just firing off an email. This is changing, of course, but updating a blog still isn’t really as easy—for most of us—as sending an email.

How to Keep Track of Your Finest Email Moments.

So let’s say we want to keep track of our greatest e-mails, those moments of prosodic excellence where we’ve written something truly great and might want to see it again in the future, or perhaps even use it. Is there a way we can keep track of this stuff, and quickly and easily turn it into published content?

Tracking isn’t much of an issue with something like GMail: just create a tag called “content” or whatever you’d like, and any time you notice you’ve written something that might be useful elsewhere, give it that tag. Every once in a while, go through your ‘content’ tag and see what you can find.

Getting All That Good Writing Online, Somehow.

So how do we get it online? Obviously we could just copy and paste it to our blog, but there’s a new service that makes this even better: it’s called Posterous. It’s been catching on recently among a few high-profile bloggers, and its mission statement is simple: blogging through e-mail.

It’s microblogging, much like tumblr offers (they too offer e-mail postings), but with a real focus on posting from your inbox as the primary way of getting content online.

A Practical Way to Make This Work for You.

Let’s pretend you’re running a blog and company website that promotes your independent printing shop.

Every once in a while, you write a great email to a friend, extolling the glories of letterpress, or talking about a new printer you just brought in, or talking about what a pleasure it was to finish a particular job.

As you know, getting interesting content (you don’t send deadly-boring emails, do you?) like that online is invaluable for several reasons:

• it keeps potential customers on your site,
• makes your business far easier to optimize for search engines,
• and increases the chances that other people around the web might enjoy something you write and link to it, thereby greatly increasing your traffic—and potential sales.

So try this out: setup a quick blog on Posterous. They’ve just taken the extra step of not requiring even a sign-up in order to create an account—you can just email their post@posterous.com address directly and within a few seconds you’ll have a subdomain and an account.

Then, every time you write something good in an email, take a few extra seconds to forward that to the posterous email address. You’ll already be in your e-mail client, so there won’t be much of a time commitment to speak of.

Then, just feed the posterous RSS into your main blog (you can do this through posterous or—likely—through your blogging platform too), and you’ve instantly got another way to add content to your site directly from your inbox.

If this Posterous Idea Makes Things Too Complicated, Not to Worry.

I didn’t want this article to sound like an ad for Posterous—we’re not affiliated in any way. But I like the site.

And I was just using it as an example of how simplified blogging tools are getting. What’s really important to take away from this article is this: if you are at all a writer, if your emails occasionally contain great bits of information about your business, life, or anything that might serve you well if published online, take advantage of it! Don’t just let that content be for one person—edit it a bit and put it to work for you.

Lots of people are busy extracting their own little lessons out of Iceland, so I’m going to go ahead and do the same, and tell you that Iceland can teach us three fundamental lessons about SEO. And they’re good, interesting lessons to boot.

#1: Don’t Use Non-Experts.

The first thing Iceland did wrong was use non-experts. The people who were responsible for running their banks were simply not smart or trained enough to engage with the insane complications of international financial engineering. And yet they went ahead and did it anyway.

If guys from a tiny island that’s only existed as a country for the last 50 years suddenly felt confident enough to start purchasing football teams and foreign banks, can you imagine the number of shifty-but-overconfident SEO companies out there, thinking they can make a quick buck in this still-wild-west world of the internet?

So beware. If an entire country can succumb to a kind of collective hysteria driven by people who really don’t know what they’re doing, what’s to stop any number of incompetent amateurs from getting into the make-money-from-nothing SEO game?

#2: You Can’t Make Money From Nothing.

Speaking of which, that brings us to our next crucial part: Iceland was making money from nothing. The lack of serious oversight and the complexity of the financial transactions meant that Iceland was constantly borrowing against its own currency, inflating it, and then reaping the profits.

But there was a big problem with all of this: most of these riches were coming from nothing. They were the ultimate bubble. So when the crisis hit and Iceland’s currency was suddenly devalued, they were left with huge foreign debt and no real way to pay it off.

The same goes for ‘black hat’ SEO companies. We all know what happened to those Icelandic profits—they disappeared in a few weeks. Pay an SEO that sets up an artificial traffic network that Google suddenly cuts off with a simple change to its code, and your ‘profits’ and ‘traffic’ have disappeared overnight, too.

#3: Not Everyone Can Do Everything.

Finally, there’ s the fact that most of Iceland’s banker kings were former fishermen. Pure old school. Nothing wrong with being a fisherman, except that it sometimes means you aren’t the best person for a new, difficult job.

Same goes for SEO: that old-school ad agency desperately trying to re-brand themselves an SEO company might not be the best company for the job. You might like and trust them, but do they really know the new market? Have they done the research, and can they give you the analysis down to the last detail?

Don’t Force Yourself to Ask for a Bailout.

There’s nothing like a huge financial crisis to bring into sharp relief some fundamentally unsound practices that we should all avoid, no matter what context we’re working in.

Online marketing is growing and expanding at a rapid pace. But it doesn’t mean you need to throw your ethics to the wind and jump on-board, whatever the consequences. You might gain some short term cash (or notoriety) at the beginning, but take Iceland’s lesson to heart: there is no substitute for real, hard work. Don’t wake up one morning and realize this painful lesson is still ahead of you: use Iceland as an example, don’t get ahead of yourself, and stick with integrity.

(photos from flickr users traitlinburke, gudmunda, and de-ve. Used under a creative commons license.)

“The only problem with search is that it’s awful, but other than that it works pretty well.” Tom Chi of Yahoo! Corporation said of current search engines. He was referring to the fact that although search is a wonderful and useful tool, it could also be a little more user friendly and helpful. “People are still doing navigational searches for Ebay.com” he added. This is significant because not only are they getting relevant direct results on their results page, they are also getting lots of other stuff they don’t need – both in direct results and in the ads section. It’s become “flooded with too much noise” as Murphy puts it. People hardly know what to do with the millions of results they get.

As a basic internet instructor for adults I see it everyday. Students look up at the top right hand corner and see that there are millions of results for “Gardening” but I can’t get them past the first page for some reason. If what they are looking for isn’t right there in those first ten results, they just give up. They would actually rather try another keyword than venture deeper in to the website. Occasionally I can get them to page two or three, but that’s as far as they’ll go.

Another problem is unintelligent search results. When users search for “eby.com” they don’t get anywhere, even though what they’re looking for is obvious. Major search engines aren’t compelled to change this because those faulty search results yield the same profits that correct ones do.

Yahoo! has started to take steps to help its search platform evolve through SearchMonkey, which I’ve talked about before. It is essentially a mix between a wiki and a search engine in the sense that it allows website owners, developers and programmers to create applications that enhance the users search experience.

Other search engines like are working on vertical search systems that give more specialized results. Siderean is interested in developing a vertical search for business tools, networking and resources. Both Yahoo! and Siderean are taking a smart step forward since part of the problem, according to Tague, is that search corporations need to solve is how to integrate search with social graphs and networking.

So what’s the future of search? Will change come in an amalgam of search, wiki and social networking? Or in an evolutionary bang in proportion to algorithms? No one seems to really know what the gen-next of search will look like. But don’t worry. Users can rest assured that the experts are on it.

But that’s not all. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in the USA teenagers have astronomical amounts of buying power. Not only do they hold their own part time jobs, but they also have tremendous influence over their parent’s purchases. According to the US National Center for Education (2008), there are approximately 15 million high school students and 8% of them (or 1.2 million) own an iPhone. In spring of 2008 about 9% of teens who did not already own an iPhone wanted to buy one. In six months that number jumped to 22%. Out of all the students who planned on purchasing a new phone in the next six months, 33% of them specifically said they wanted an iPhone.

Anyone in the marketing field knows that technology such as smart phones and the internet have become important parts of teenage life. They are incredibly dependent on these as an intricate part of their lives in school as a learning tool, socially outside of school and for recreational browsing. Granted they aren’t the only customers that businesses should cater to, but they are the immediate future of internet browsing and purchasing. Their habits are the future habits of America.

So the question remains: Do you have an iPhone friendly website?

With phones being so much more than just phones, it’s important that websites and bloggers ensure they are iPhone compatible. By either making your current website iPhone compatible or setting up an additional iPhone compatible website, you are making yourself more accessible to customers. Not only that, but your original site will collect more quality links for it.

There are two problems that iPhone users face when using their mobile browser. The first is a download speed that is slightly slower than their desktop counterparts. The second is the small screen resolution of only 320×480. Website managers need to develop a site that loads quickly and doesn’t force users to scroll through the page as much. They can do this by reducing (or eliminating) any unnecessarily large pictures, Flash or “heavy” content from the new/updated website. Also, many websites are optimizing, coding and configuring themselves to work with iPhones accelerometer so that different content can be displayed by holding the iPhone different ways.

It’s also a good idea to start developing some relevant iPhone apps. Applications for the iPod are relatively inexpensive and they are a huge market right now. In economically hard times, the iPhone apps can be considered a small, affordable luxury and provide the user with news, games, weather, music or whatever. Creating your own application not only helps to drive traffic to your website, but can make you a little extra on the side as well.

There are websites that can help you build apps and configure your website for use on the iPhone as well as other smart phone brands. However, you may at some point reach a point of difficulty that a professional becomes necessary. Whatever you decide keep in mind that the iPhones have been and will most likely to remain the most popular mobile browser in the world. But after the iPod phenomenon, did we really expect anything less from them?