Australian Internet marketing in 2008 and beyond.

I recently attended two seminars, one by an organisation called AIMIA who presented a two hour forum exploring the future of search engine marketing trends in Australia and abroad. The other was by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C Web standards group). The speakers talked about trends that may shape the face of the Internet. The AIMIA conference main agenda items to discuss they where 'Use of Mobile Internet", Search Engine Optimisation technique, Web Marketing, and convergence.

The speaker talked about how Google and other search engines are available over mobile phone platforms, and how internationally these services are more commonly used than they are in Australia because of Australia's inadequate telecommunications Industry. Using the Internet on mobile phones is much more expensive than it is overseas. This became a bit of a hot topic and some of the audience members disputed this fact. I kept quiet during this discussion, although I agree that it is not practical to use the Internet on mobile phones with any of the telecommunications companies trading in Australia.

Nevertheless, the speaker concluded that the possibilities for use of the Internet via mobile phones is enormous. In the USA people can send an SMS to Google and within seconds get a accurate reply providing the information requested totally free. Everyone at the forum seemed to agree Telstra would not like that in Australia because they don’t provide the best deal for consumers and don't believe in providing free services, and since all the current Telstra Directory Assistance services cost a fortune, they stand to lose a lot of revenue if Google brings the free SMS search service down-under. Thankfully Google could use another Telecommunications provider to carry their SMS service in Australia.

My point here is that the speaker was saying that uptake of Internet use on mobile phones is much higher overseas than it is in Australia. I look forward to a future where using the Internet on my mobile phone is just as cheap as using it on my desktop at home, so cheap I don't need to think about it, like I hear it is in other parts of the World like America or Japan. The fact is that telecommunications industry makes billions of dollars profit.

Widgets were described as being a useful feature on a website, like a calculator for a financial website or quotes for an insurance company. Although I always thought of a widget as a useful small application that sits on a computer desktop via software like Google Desktop or the Mac Widgets. The idea is not that different; basically the point was that developers should build useful functions into websites that people will actually want to use, come back to, and hopefully link back to on their own website for example.

Social Networking sites like Facebook and MySpace seemed to be the buzz-words and all the hype of 2008 and a hot topic at the conferences I attended. The experts said that they think Social Networking sites are still in their infancy and that it’s too soon to see a clear winner in the game. I asked a question about the impact of synergy with things like Facebook Applications enabling webmasters to integrate their website functions into possibility the words most popular non-search website and the speakers answered something along the lines of that they don't think those Applications are very useful yet and that people should focus on creating only useful functions on such sites, like the above mentioned need for a Widget to perform a useful function that people will want to use often.

Unified search and services is one of the new trends with Google merging their search silos so that when you search for something now the search results often include Images, Videos, & News, as well as the normal web results and advertising. The speakers talked about how to take advantage of this to get a better rank on Google. It is very useful to create video content and upload it to a YouTube channel for Internet Marketing. Often a video on YouTube can rank higher on Google Search results then a more popular website on the same topic, it seems like Google might be giving YouTube preferential placement.

Search Engine optimisation techniques have been around for almost as long as the Internet. Link building is a fundamental way to gain higher search results on Google and other search engines as they have robots that crawl the entire web to and cross-reference all the links on sites to other sites. The system works by giving a site a higher ranking for the more links that go to it... It is now also possible to use a service from Google called Webmaster Tools which lets the webmaster see how many links on other sites point to their site.

Using the Google Webmaster tools you can tell the system if you have a XML Site Map for your site, this helps the bots crawl the site and know about all the sections and content in the site. It's important to correctly use a XML site-map to be found online and for usability.

Accurate and meaningful meta-tags should be put everywhere possible in your site, including in Image Alternate text tags and on videos. The meta-tags for Images and Videos helps Google and other search engines know what the multimedia files is, because the spiders cannot see the multimedia content, they only see text. This is also why it is not a good idea to use Images for Links in Menus as the robots can't read the images.

Search Engine Friendly URLs on sites can also help to improve your search engine ranking to gain you a higher position on search results. It also helps people remember your site and makes your site look more professional, advanced and well designed.

Internationalisation was one of the topics of one of the conferences I went to recently. The main point I picked up from the WC3 speaker is that if you’re going to build a website for multiple languages then you need to ensure that blocks places on the site can expand with different amounts of text because other languages are very different to English. A sentence that uses only three words in English could be significantly longer in a different language. Another point was that if the site is going to have an index of languages or a regional selector then the way to get into this and find it should be universal with perhaps an icon that is recongisable in any language.

Web Standards is an interesting topic close to my heart. Personally, I think it is unfortunate that Microsoft successfully mutated the World Wide Web Consortium's web standards for HTML and other standards. It shows how Microsoft has in the past tried to make their own proprietary lock-in formats to push out competition in the market. For years web designers have had to waste a lot of time making their websites work correctly in Internet Explorer. Thankfully after Microsoft lost all their anti-trust court-cases around the world they have started to make their software conform to international standards, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8 are a big step in that direction, they have also released a web design software called Expression Web that's meant to conform to W3C standards.

Having useful services that people will want to use and come back to is the key to generating traffic on a website and having return visitors. Give your users something they want and will find useful, that's not just reproduced from another site elsewhere online. Google’s bots can detect exact duplicate content and only rates the site that first published the content highly and punishes the sites that copied the original. The conclusion is that content is King, as always with SEO, so focus on what your target market is and in producing original content.

Comments

Add New