With so many forms of online marketing now available to you the key to making the most of everything that you do is to fully harness the potential of each and every piece of material you produce.

Keep in touch – the power of RSS
Make sure that everything you produce has an RSS feed link so that anyone who wants to be kept up to date can get the information they want automatically. This applies to all social media (blogs, social networking sites) as well as your website information. Don’t make people have to find you again. Make it easy for them.

Effective Keywords
Choose the most effective keywords and key phrases to use accross all your online marketing. This will make all your efforts more targeted and effective. Who are you audience? What have you got that they want the most at this moment in time? This is the basis for your keywork search and online marketing campaign.

Social Networking
Are you a member of social networking sites? It is very easy to send information to social networks. For example if you write a blog post you can easily send a link to Twitter and Facebook to let your contacts there know about the new information.

Do you have easy links on all the marketing material that you produce so that people can pass your name on to others in their social networks?

Press release
Announce your press release on your website. Make this the link back target so that when people read about you on other sites they link back to your company website or blog.

All information
When you produce a piece of marketing allow people to follow you in the way that best suits them by having all your contact information available: your website, blog, Twitter, Facebook and site information.

Break it down
Think creatively when using multi-media. Your time and money investment can go further if you look at all the options. For example, if you create an online video, then break it down – use the script as a pdf download, use the audio as a podcast on your site.

Conventional Media
If you use conventional media marketing whether its print, radio or TV advertising, add your online details. People like to look you up.

Blogging is one form of social media marketing that can enhance your company. But why and what is the best way to go about it?

The Why?

A shop window
By providing a platform via which your customers can get to know you and your products and services. Like your website, its another shop window but one that is ever changing and dynamic.

Creating links to you website
Blogs can help you to create inbound links to your website. Search engine’s like inbound links from authoritative and content laden sources. If your blog is rich with useful information for your visitors then the search engines will treat links from there as ‘good’ and they will help you to increase your search engine ranking. Creating inbound links is a big part of search engine optimisation so if you are serious about your ranking in the search engines then a blog will definately help.

Communication
Blogs that allow comments from its readers enable your audience to communicate with you. This can provide useful feedback for your company.

Advertising
Advertising your products on your blog and linking straight to them on your website will provide extra traffic for your shopping cart. A good blog can generate lots of traffic and enable you to increase sales directly.

The How?

Posting often and regularly
It is important to post often and regularly when it comes to blogs. ‘As often as you can’ is probably the best phrase to have in mind when it comes to blogging.  Its also important not to leave large gaps between posts.

Great content
Your blog posts have to be informative or interesting or funny (or all three). But seriously, keeping good content going is the most important thing. When you are writing, just think about your target audience. What would they like to hear about? What would they find interesting? What are their interests?

Keywords
Use your main keywords and keyphrases to enable the search engine robots to search through your writing. Optimising your blog for the search engines is important if you want to rank well.

Write naturally
Search engines are looking for natural patterns of writing. This means no formula’s but natural, informative writing. This can seem like a contradiction: You are told to focus on keywords but then you are told to write naturally. It can be done. Focus mainly on writing naturally but keep the keywords to the forefront of your mind whilst you are doing it.

Natural writing is also varied. So write posts of different lengths and intersperse text posts with photos and video.

Patience
It can take time to build up a following on a blog. Just be patient and keep going.

According to a recent interview with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, Matt hinted that speed of a site may now be taken into account in the ranking of pages on their search engine. And what a good idea this is.

Some would argue that we have reached a ridiculous stage where we are not prepared to wait even a few extra seconds for a page to download. Often is the very creative and visually full pages, often with moving elements, that take a long time to download and sometimes what you see is a disappointment. But simple sites can also be visually appealing and deliver the same results.

Wonderfully rich and creative but slow sites are often led by creatives. This is fine but in business we have to face consumer facts -people do move away very quickly when a site takes too long to download. There are too many other sites for us to see. Its only if we particularly want to see a site that we are prepared to wait.

Sometimes amateur sites are very slow because the developer knows little about how to streamline a sight for speed.

Now it seems that Google are hinting that they may penalise slow sites. Faster sites will be rewarded with higher rankings. This already happens naturally to some degree as sites that are slow to load get less repeat traffic anyway which makes them fall in the rankings.

Google’s Matt Cutts said:

‘Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.

‘I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’

Have a slow site is the equivalent of keeping a client waiting at the door for too long. No one is going to die but its just not good business practice. After all the principle of all web etiquette is to think of your customer first and customers are saying ‘we don’t like slow sites’.

When the vast majority of people search for something online they use 3 – 4 words. However with more and more business and information sites joining the internet it can be harder to find exactly what you want with only a few words.

Most people start their search with one or two words but if they don’t find what they are looking for they increase the number of words that they use until they find more suitable information.

Earlier on in the year Propero reported that online search queries were getting longer and a new survey from Experian Hitwise shows that this trend continues.

Search queries with an average of eight words or more increased by 6% and those that were five to eight words rose by 2%. Despite the fact that 68% of searches contained between one to four words there were 3% less of this length of search.

For online marketing companies longer search strings mean a more complicated and sophisticated approach to search engine optimisation and potentially more initial expense as more keywords are needed to attract more focused consumers. In the longer term the more targeted a keyword campaign is the better the results. The aim is not to get as much traffic as possible but to generate traffic that converts to sales. Ultimately longer searches help search engines to marry up searchers with the sort of information that they are looking for.

It would be interesting to see word length statistics in a breakdown for the main search engines,  Which search engine’s users use the most words for their searches? for example, would be a good question to have answered.  It would tell us a lot about the search engines.  However currently this sort of information is not available.

Microsoft and Yahoo are teaming up. Bing will eventually be taking over all of Yahoo’s search business. Previously search engine optimisation concentrated on Google as Yahoo only had a 9% share of searchers and Microsoft only 6%. The new combination and the likelihood that the new Bing will keep increasing its share means that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has to pay more attention.

A recent document published by Bing for webmasters reiterates the importance of optimising your website for all the search engines. Bing says:

‘If webmasters don’t provide search engines with good, keyword-oriented, well written caption source data, the resulting captions created by algorithm, no matter how hard we try, won’t represent your website as well as those websites whose webmasters did provide this unique and important data.’

1) Keywords. There has been a lot of talk recently that keywords are not as relevant as they once were. Not so for Bing who have reiterated their importance. Choosing and using your main keywords is essential to the correct optimisation of your site but so is making sure that your writing is natural. Keywords should ‘pepper’ your pages not be stuffed in there willy-nilly.

2) Titles. Bing likes unique titles and meta descriptions for each page.

Your page title tags are what search engines use as the link and main title of a page’s listing. Its the first port of call so they need to be good.

Having unique titles enables more of your pages to be ranked for relevance. Your titles need to reflect the content of the pages you are submitting. Important keywords need to be within the page content and in the title tag too.

Meta descriptions should describe what your page is about. Again relevant keywords that reflect your page’s content need to appear in the meta descriptions.

3) Inbound links from sites that have your keywords in the title tag. The purpose of this is so that sites that are linked are as relevant to each other as possible. This provides a relevant user experience. If you are looking for widgets and have found a site that sells them you are more likely to click on a link for other widgets than you are any other link on that site.

Writing well informed and relevant content is a good way to get inbound links. Other sites will want to help their readers by sending them to you. It takes time to build an audience this way but the results are worth it.

4) Ethical link-building campaign. Don’t use spam link tactics or buy links. These are ‘black hat’ search engine optimisation techniques which Bing will not approve of. Black hat techniques are for the desperate or the ill-informed.

5) Submit to Bing. If your site is new or has been altered in anyway it is important to submit it to Bing. This seems obvious but it is surprising how many companies fail to do this. You will still be searched if you do not submit your site but doing so should increase the speed at which you are trawled.

6) Use Bings tools: The Bing Webmaster Center offers lots of information to help with website optimisation.