Incentivising datacapture with existing customers – does anyone have evidence as to which reward will drive a better response: multiple smaller rewards for all respondants vs. one big prize draw

Look at the long haul, instead of throwing money in the wind.

Build a substantially growing community around your brand through a unique strategy, upon which you’ll get a very responsive crowd down the line.

The comparison that comes to mind is that of SEO and PI – yes, PI brings you immediate results, but the initial investment in SEO will bring you lasting results.

Plus, the community you build will increase the value of your organization should it ever come to a merger or acquisition.

What SEO tools are worth the money?

You should not use paid tools at all, at least not for the page naming, etc.

That should be a native part of your CMS system or design crew.

If they don’t have that on the scope fire them immediately because they’re wasting money.

As for determining keywords et. al. you’ll want to go to the platform you want to put most focus on, which would be Google.

The big G has a free keyword tool that allows you to determine your competition etc.

Next step is link building. That’s a bit of a jiffy because you’ll have to find the right pages associated to your field of business.

Irrelevant links will not be rated as high as above mentioned will.

Why do people say that writing for the web is different? Writing copy is writing copy.

That’s because most copy professionals THINK – despite better knowledge – that copy is copy.

Copy for the web has to sales oriented PLUS include aspects of search engine optimization, including a certain density of relevant keywords in context to the pages general keyword primaries, etc.

I especially love this question from “SEO copywriters” or “blog ghostwriters” which imply that they have understood SEO and related aspects when they’re just cheating people out of their money.

Looking to learn more about “geo tagging” and search engine optimization

Google does not reveal all its secrets. Any why should it? The thing about SEO is that you’ll probably want to look at it as a part of your whole web strategy. My experience from consulting several clients around the globe was that the real SEO power came from regularly reoccurring articles. That is why I’m a bit fan of corporate blogs and implement them where ever I get a chance to. As for the positioning of your business on Google Maps et. al.: Manually implement them there with what is now called Google Places. That way you’ll be registered for sure and have control over that entry. Hope I was able to help.

BOOK MONDAY: Search Engine Optimization

Here we go for another Book Monday in which I reveal excerpts from my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) which was recently published.

While last week we touched the topic of corporate online reputation management, this week we’re going to focus on a more technical topic called “search engine optimization” and why it’s so important to understand it.

So here we go:

I guess you are familiar with the fact that Google has become the most used search engine in the world with far over 40% market share in and over 1 billion searches submitted daily.

What you may be wondering about is why your company’s website does not show up on the search results for certain search terms and what you can do to influence this to show up before your competitors.

The practice involved here is referred to as search engine optimization, short SEO. Actually it is not a practice but more of a science that relies on the try and error principle.

A lot of search engine specialists have evolved from nowhere and proclaimed to have understood Google and their algorithms, which is partially true.

Only partially because a lot of them are complete idiots who will try to draw money out of your pocket for doing close to nothing in regards to making your company appear first on the Google search result for the query of your companies name.

This is complete bullshit because if you submit an explicit search for your company name on any search engine you have to show up first.

If not, you have seriously done something wrong choosing your web design firm who should have created the site in a search engine friendly manner.

Search engine optimization means understanding Google and learning by doing because their search methods are almost as secret as the recipe for Coca Cola.

If Google were to reveal their algorithms and the search techniques they use it would not only diminish their market position but also open the gates for everyone to influence search results, which would have a disastrous outcome.

So why should you optimize your website for Google and co.?

Simple: the return of investment (ROI) of your website increases with the amount of business you draw from it.

This requires you to have a certain amount of visitors to it, which will convert from prospects to leads to business, which consequence means more business generated from it. And hey, you have already invested lots of money into the design of the site itself, so why not make this investment worthwhile?

While we’re at it: you should immediately dispose of the thought that you will be on the first search result for every term you wish to have. It’s not going to happen simply because there are other competitors of yours on the web who will have had a similar idea and it’s going to be hard and cost intensive to replace their positioning with your own.

You should rather seek innovative ways to reposition yourself for search terms, which are not as frequently used, but therefore increase the number of search terms.

Logically, this will get you higher positioning for these terms.

Since you’re not going to go for the one big fish, but plenty of little ones, you’ll not starve and don’t have to waste your breath trying to keep up with the big guys.

Note: Please do not try SEO yourself since it’s highly unlikely you will get the same results that a professional firm will be able to achieve for you.

Like I have mentioned a couple of times before it is inevitable that you combine all efforts to really get the most out of your eBusiness campaign. And eventhough my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) may sound like the howto guide on achieving market leadership it simply isn’t.

This book shows you strategic approaches analyzing the current situation and how you can execute plans which have derived from your analysis.

Stay tuned until next week when we’re going to lay hands on our last topic “Customer Information Management (CRM)”.

So long,

Lars

As the web industry continues to push for compliance…who’s listening?

In your question you point out that amazon.com, disney.com, google.com etc. don’t have compliant websites. 
First of all – and to state just one more rumor – compliant websites are to be beneficial for the SEO score / PageRank. And some say they have proven to be more successful because (of course) bots have an easier time crawling them. The good things about the companies you have pointed out is, that they don’t need to be indexed because they have such heavy traffic, so many backlinks on the web, and are just “found” without any complex SEO strategy implied. If you want to visit Disney, you enter their URL; if you want to search something, you enter Google’s. 
Second: let’s face it… if your company would be that successful with a PR8 or higher, would you give a damn if your website was compliant? If your name was branded that good and everyone knew it? Your primary concern would be to have the website appealing so that your billions of visitors come back regularly. 
The focus shifts from SEO to retention of customers as your company reaches a certain size and your efforts for third party validation in associated publications are taken care of because of the media’s interest in your endevour. 
Further more, you point out that we don’t tell Nissan how to build a car. I don’t really concur with you on that because we very well do. It may not be as publically known, yet the automobile industry does heavy market research to determine the people’s request for the spend a considerable amount of time about whom they are going to entrust a huge pile of money they have worked for pretty hard for the last couple of years in order to be able to afford a new vehicle in the first place. 
What you are totally correct about is that the users don’t give a damn about whether the website its self is compliant or not. Just as long as it looks good in their prefered browser on their, exceptionally distinct operating system. 

Lars Hilse on a free-to-join webcast about “Understanding Search Engine Optimization”

I was honored when I was invited by the Founder of ConnectoringR Stellars (click) to speak about search engine optimization on a webcast.

The mission seemed simple – at least perceivably. Yet there are certain challenges out there, so the assignment was to keep the content as easy and understandable as possible. The result is an online presentation that is to break down the term SEO to a very basic level so that even newbies can understand the value and how to utilize SEO basics to make their online appearances more successful.

This event is free for all attendees to join.  Stellar Connections (organizer of the Stellars) has taken all the costs.

For more information please contact Erika Hanson Brown (click) and for direct sign up use this link (click)

The event is free of charge and will be held on

• Wednesday, April 23rd 2008
• at 17:00/5:00PM MDT/GMT -7  (click here for your local timezone)
• toll-free numbers from around the globe are available so that attendees encounter no phone costs (access will be sent to you after the registration)

Kick ass SEO… or: Internet Content Rating Association

One tool – in context to search engine optimization – I want to briefly describe is the internet content rating association, which has lately become a member of the family online safety institute.

And why is it valuable to Search Engine Optimization?

Read more >>