There are so many buzz words in the Internet Marketing industry that you almost need your own special pocket dictionary to translate all the jargon. But don’t let the seemingly complex world of Internet Marketing or Search Engine Optimisation overwhelm you.

So what is the difference between Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Internet Marketing, etc?

Let’s break it down…

Internet Marketing refers to any kind of marketing that involves the Internet, such as banner advertising, social network marketing (such as Facebook), viral marketing and of course Search Engine Marketing.

Search Engine Marketing consists of any marketing that involves Search Engines. Such as Pay-Per-Click advertising like Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves giving your website the best chance of ranking well in the organic (or natural) listings.

So how do I rank well on Google?

Firstly, Search Engines aren’t linear. You don’t simply “rank well on Google”, but rather you rank well for particular search terms. Search Engines looks at many different factors when determining how relevant your website is to a search term. For example, they look at the keywords on your site, your domain name, your meta tags, the age of your website, what sites are linking to you and with what wording. SEO involves doing what we can to make sure the Search Engines consider your website relevant to particular search terms.

So how do I optimise my webpages for Search Engines?

There is no such thing as a “perfect website”, in fact if you try to over-optimise your website, the Search Engines will likely detect this and penalise you for trying to manipulate them. But there are many things you should do if you’re not doing them already:

1. Get a domain name with relevant keywords in it.
2. Try to spread your keywords/phrases naturally throughout your website - but don’t over do it. Search Engines will be able to detect if your website doesn’t ’speak naturally’.
3. Make sure your heading tags (such as <h1>) are relevant to the topic but try to include a keyword or two.
4. Be sure to include Meta Description - eg. <meta name=”description” content=”A blog dedicated to Internet basics, the web and online marketing - by Ecreate”>
5. Check that your HTML and CSS validates - Read my post on “valid xHTML, valid CSS - What does it mean?“
6. Avoid link farms and heavy link exchanging. If a website is relevant to your page and it will be valuable to your readers, then by all means link to it, but avoid linking just because somebody is linking to you.
7. And finally, the most important aspect of Search Engine Optimisation is… produce quality content. If you are truly providing something original to the web, people will want to link to you and Google will want to list you.

That’s all from me today on this topic. If you’d like to read more about SEO and get a few link building tips, here’s a website that’s quite good for the beginner Internet Marketer - www.kksmarts.com. It talks about SEO, link building, Google Adwords and a whole lot more.

As usual, email me if you have any questions

There are still a few more features to add to the Ecreate website but it has already boosted our search engine rankings considerably - we’re in the top 10 for “internet marketing perth” on Google.com.au and #1 on Yahoo.com.au! Oh, and if you’ve ever wondered which website developer will make you a “very happy client” - just ask Google (yes, we’re #1 for the keywords “very happy client”).

The portfolio for the Ecreate website will soon be expanded to feature some of our branding work as well as past conceptual designs. We will also be launching new websites very soon for a Perth Boat Charter company, an Environmental Management firm and one of Perth’s leading resources companies.

But don’t worry, this blog won’t turn into a quarterly Ecreate update. I’ll still be posting useful articles on Internet marketing and Internet basics so if you have any requests, email them through to me at brent@ecreate.com.au.

Cheers,
Brent!

Recently we undertook a considerable amount of research on different marketing techniques for restaurants, and we found one particular site I consider a marketer’s gold mine - www.profitablehospitality.com. There are literally hundreds of articles on every imaginable topic within the hospitality industry, not just restaurants. Here are a couple of freebies:

• Using Facebook to Market a Restaurant, Cafe, Hotel or Bar
• Understanding Menu & Wine List Engineering
• How to put your cafe, restaurant or club on the 1st page of a Google search

Profitable Hospitality was founded by Ken Burgin. Ken is based in Sydney and has a reputation as a successful restaurant and cafe operator. He’s managed hundreds of thousands of customers and now commits himself to being a hospitality marketing guru. His articles are well written and typically contain information and ideas he has personally implemented.

There are a lot of free resources available, but to get maximum value out of his Website I strongly encourage you to sign up as a 1st Class Member. It’s only $99US (plus $9.90/month) and for any business owner in the hospitality industry, it’s money well spent.

If you’re a restaurant, club or hotel owner, or just want to impress your boss with a few good ideas - Visit www.profitablehospitality.com

We’ve tried all of the following:

• Bank wire transfer
• Cheques
• Western Union
• Paypal
• Xoom
• Moneybookers

Lets quickly break them down:

Bank wire transfer

Possibly the most secure, but definitely the most expensive. It costs us $35 with Westpac to make the transfer, then I believe it cost the receiver roughly $20 USD to access the funds. I’d say fees vary depending on the country you’re sending to but $35 is ridiculous. We made one wire transfer, and that was enough to set the Ecreate accountants on a research mission to find an alternative method.

Rating: 4/10

Cheques

Slightly less expensive than a wire transfer at $20 to send and $20 to receive (in the currency of the receiver’s country) but obviously slower and far less secure. Again this was with Westpac and we weren’t impressed that it cost the receiver another $20 to bank the cheque.

Rating: 2/10

Western Union

Ecreate has used Western Union for a number of years now. They’re reliable, fast and depending on the country you’re sending to, they can be good value. Western Union can be found in almost every country on the planet - their Website says “… 300,000 Agent locations around the world in over 200 countries“. They’re also extremely convenient in that you can make a Western Union transfer at any Post Office in Australia.

In terms of Fees though, they are the most expensive when compared to other transfer agencies, but their credibility and history gives you a lot more piece of mind if it’s your first time sending money.

Security is reasonable, but has been recently rolled back to make transfers easier on the receiver by not requiring so much ID. In some countries, they don’t even check your ID if you have the Money Transfer Control Number - which is a 10 digit number you give to the receiver after “sending” the money. They use this number and walk in to their local Western Union branch and ask for the money.

We still use Western Union on a regular basis just out of habbit.

Website: www.westernunion.com.au
Rating: 7/10

PayPal

I’m not a fan of PayPal. Unlike nearly all other methods of transferring funds, they take a %. So for larger transfers it can get very expensive very quickly. I have to admire PayPal’s business model, but I really don’t want to support it! Occasionally our contractors request we make the transfer via PayPal but we tend to avoid them where possible. They are one of the more secure methods, but again the most expensive.

Website: www.paypal.com.au
Rating: 5/10

Xoom

We have used Xoom a couple of times. They’re pretty good when sending to the US because the funds are deposited directly into the receivers bank account, which is great for security and it’s a little more professional than asking the receiver to collect the funds at a pick-up branch (like Western Union.)

Their fees are great but you never actually know exactly how much it is going to cost you in AUD until it shows up on your bank statement. Unlike other money transfer agencies they rely on your Bank to determine the exchange rate and take of the currency conversion, which I’m not too keen on but I have still found this to be considerably cheaper.

When transferring to the US, and if you aren’t too concerned about knowing the exact amount down to the nearest cent until after you made the transfer, then I would recommend Xoom - good value.

Website: www.xoom.com
Rating: 7/10

Moneybookers

In all honesty, I can’t actually remember ever using Moneybookers, but I am looking forward to giving them a try. They appear to be competing directly with PayPal and by the looks, could be very reasonable in the way of fees. Moneybookers appear to cap the fees at under $1.00 AUD when sending money and charge around $6.00 AUD to receive, which would make them one of the cheapest options. I can’t comment on security but they’re a London based company and have a reasonable reputation on the Web. If anyone would like to comment on their experiences with Moneybookers, feel free.

Website: www.moneybookers.com
Rating: NA

If anyone would like to share their experiences when transferring money or know of any other methods, drop me an email at brent@ecreate.com.au.

Is that how you imagined all those spam emails make it to your inbox? Well prepare yourself for the shocking truth. That overweight, 35 year old eastern European “criminal”… might be YOU!

Alright, I hear you - “Are you kidding me? I’m not the one sending all that rubbish… I spend half my day deleting it!!” But before you fly off the handle, consider this: According to a 2006 survey by webroot.com, 25.6% of Australian PCs are infected with Spyware/Adware or some other form of malicious software (known as ‘malware’). Sometimes that software is used to track your internet useage, collect personal information or randomly load ads onto your screen… and other times, it’s used to turn your computer into a ‘zombie‘.

A ‘zombie’ computer is one which has been compromised by a computer hacker, virus or trojan horse. Generally a ‘zombie’ PC is one of thousands, or millions, in a “botnet” and will be used to perform malicious tasks of one sort or another. Most owners of ‘zombie’ computers are unaware that their system is being used in this way.

While you chat away to your friends on Facebook, watch videos on Youtube, pay for your internet connection and delete all that spam email, your PC is being used to assist in a variety of criminal activities - Attacking websites, taking down servers, hosting child-pornography, and more commonly, send spam email. As of 2005, an estimated 50–80% of all spam worldwide was sent by zombie computers.

Let me just quickly sum it all up so it sinks in - One in four Australian PCs are infected with unwanted software (including ‘zombie’ software) which could be used to send spam!

How do I know if I’m infected?

On the surface, you won’t have a clue. The spyware/malware is designed so that the user has no idea their computer is a zombie. But there is software available that will scan your PC and remove any unwanted programs. Here are a couple of freebies:

• AVG Antivirus FREE version
• HijackThis

These are free versions of anti-virus and spyware detection software, but I strongly recommend you invest in some long term protection. Do you really want to contribute to the spam problem and possibly allow someone to read your personal banking details at the same time? Don’t take the risk, for the benefit of us all:

• AVG Anti-Virus and Internet Security
• KasperSky
• Webroot
• McAfee

So before you vow to hunt down that spammer who implies you need a penis enlargement, take the time to install some anti-virus/spyware-detection and keep your PC clean. Also, if you’re getting alot of spam and want to get rid of it, check out my blog post on “the best way to setup your email“.

But I have finally worked out the best way to setup Email!

Firstly, the undoubtedly best free web based Email service is Gmail by Google. Here’s a quick run-down of why it’s so great:

• Conversation Threads - When having a ‘conversation’ via Email (ie: sending messages back and forth between the same people/person), all of these Emails are compiled under the one ‘thread‘ rather than having a new Email listed for each message sent.
• Searching - Google Search within your Email account (need I say more?)
• Keyboard Shortcuts - You don’t even have to touch the mouse to send Emails and navigate around your account
• Labels - These are like folders, so you can quickly categorise your Emails as they come in.
• Filters - You can filter Emails by address, by name, by subject type and so on. With these filters you can assign certain Emails a label, or forward them to another account or automatically delete them.
• Manage multiple Email accounts - Send and receive from all of your other Email accounts using your one Gmail account (my favourite feature).
• Space - You have 6.5 Gig of space in your FREE account and it’s growing everyday.
• Spam Protection - The Gmail developers are upgrading their spam detection for you all the time, you don’t have to ever worry about it.
• And all the other features: Starring, Chat, Integration with Google Calendar and Google Docs, Archiving, Gmail Software for Mobile Phones, and so on.

Okay, so Gmail sounds good, but I prefer Outlook.

A couple of features I didn’t mention above is that Gmail has POP and IMAP access. This means, you can setup Outlook to download all of your Emails just like any other Email account using POP. But why would you want a copy of your Email in your Gmail account and also in Outlook on your computer? For the simple reason that no matter where you are in the world, you will have access to your Email. You don’t have to be at your computer!

Another cool feature is when you send an Email using Outlook, your Gmail account will have a copy of that Email in it’s ‘Sent Mail‘ folder.

How is IMAP different from POP?

Well with POP access, Outlook downloads the Emails from the server, but if you delete them from Outlook or move it to another Folder or ‘mark it as read‘, your Gmail account wouldn’t automatically know that you have made these changes and the Emails would still be sitting as ‘Unread‘ in your Inbox. With IMAP, everything you do in Outlook is synced to your Gmail account.

If you read an Email in Outlook, Gmail changes the status of that Email to ‘read‘. If you delete an Email, your Gmail account will automatically delete that same Email.

A little more about how IMAP is different from POP (written by Google)

But I don’t want to have an @gmail.com Email address, I want to use my business Email address!

The solution is Google Apps. You can setup your domain on Google Apps which comes with the Gmail Service, plus a whole bunch of other cool services for your business or organisation. As an example, here’s how Ecreate has its Email setup:

• We use Outlook for our Email via IMAP.
• Ecreate staff can also log-in to their email by going to http://mail.ecreate.com.au
• All our other Email accounts (personal, gaming, etc) are managed via this one account.
• Our staff have their Email synced to their mobile phones in the event they are on the road (via IMAP) - So if we send an Email even from our phone, it will instantly show up in Outlook Sent Mail as well as the Gmail Sent Mail folders just as if we sent it from anyone of those.
  Don’t worry, we pull over before sending any Emails from our phones!

So why is this setup so great?

• We get all the Spam Protection provided by Google - Nearly all Spam is caught by Gmail before it gets to Outlook or our Phones.
• Our servers are given a break as they don’t have to handle Email.
• No matter where we are in the world, we can log-in to our Email via the Web and get all the benefits of using the World’s best webmail.
• We use Outlook with Business Contact Manager just like anyone else, with a backup account on Gmail in case our system goes down.
• Our staff can chat to each other directly via their Ecreate Gmail Account, share calendar events, share documents and do everything else that comes with Google Apps.

Outlook 2007 is really slow when using IMAP, please help!

This took me a while to learn. Outlook 2007 isn’t that great at all, in fact it’s rather slow … but it can be tweaked to give it a performance boost. Here are a couple of articles that I used to tweak Outlook on my system. Performance has definitely improved:

• http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/solutions-for-slow-gmail-imap-with-microsoft-outlook/1761/
• http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/03/microsoft-outlook-2007-running-slow-fix.html

I found that the main thing that helped my performance was setting Outlook to only download the ‘header‘, rather than the entire Email when it does a ‘Send-Receive’. A ‘header‘ is essentially everything your computer needs to know about the Email to deliver it, plus a little more. It contains who sent it, the date sent, the size, the subject, who it was sent to, but not the content or attachments… so obviously a header is considerably smaller and thus, much faster to download than the full Email.

Summary

• Setup your domain on Google Apps.
• Add any other Email accounts to your new Gmail account.
• Sync your desktop Email software (such as Outlook) and your Mobile Phone with your Gmail account using IMAP.
• Tweak Outlook 2007 to give it some performance.

If anyone wants any further help setting it all up, feel free to shoot me an Email… have fun!

An RSS feed is essentially a live, regularly updated summary of the content on a Webpage. They’re widely used on news sites and blogs, like this one. Using Feed Reader software, you can automatically take RSS Feeds from any number of Websites and display them however you like.

For example, if you subscribe to a News RSS Feed, lets say “Headlines” from theage.com.au and displayed it on your Webpage, here is what you would get:

You don’t have to display a Feed in a Webpage like this. You can use software to gather the RSS Feeds and display them on your computer. Some web browsers have a built in function that allows you to subscribe to a feed so you can read the latest content without having to visit the actual site.

This image below shows how to check and directly access my blog posts, using RSS and without visiting my Website:

Another way to read this blog is to visit the Ecreate Facebook Page. We used RSS to display our blog post on this Facebook page.

RSS is undeniably powerful. If you want to learn more, check out RSS on Wikipedia, or watch this video called RSS in Plain English.

Enjoy!

• valid xHTML
• valid CSS

So what do they all mean?

Let’s begin with the W3C - World Wide Web Consortium.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organisations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C’s mission is:

To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

(http://www.w3.org/Consortium/)

A website is typically programmed (aka: coded) in a computer language known as HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and many of those standards (or “guidelines”) provide recommendations on how you should program your website. And just like every other language, there are rules which govern its structure - such as with English: vocabulary, grammar, syntax and spelling. The W3C has an online program which can check if a website has been coded correctly and has followed all the rules of that language. This program is called a ‘validator’ and after checking a website, it will give you a result: typically “this website is valid” or “this website is invalid“.

A website author/owner often puts a link, such as “valid HTML”, which links directly to the W3C Validator. The W3C Validator will check the code of that website and tell you if it is valid or invalid.

OK, so that covers the “valid” part, but why does it sometimes say “valid CSS” or “valid xHTML 1.1 Strict”?

There is more than one language a website can be programmed in (I won’t go into which is the better to use), but one of those languages is xHTML and it comes in several versions. This blog uses xHTML 1.0 Transitional [click here to check the validity of this blog's xHTML]. Another language used to help render the webpage is CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. The W3C can check the CSS for validity and again there is more than one version of CSS [check that this blog uses valid CSS].

Side Note: If you have read a previous post on this blog - Web 2.0 “… linking people”, you will know that a ‘Web 2.0′ webpage should have its form separate from its content. xHTML and CSS were invented to serve this very purpose. xHTML is supposed to define the content and CSS is supposed to define the form.

There you have it. Now when you’re walking down the street and someone stops to ask you what those little icons on a webpage mean, you’ll have an answer for them.

Side Fact: Tim Berners-Lee is the W3C Director and also the inventor of the World Wide Web (no, the Web isn’t a miraculous gift from the heavens, in 1989 a guy named Tim actually invented it). Read more about it here…

The program is doing amazing things and we’re very excited to be a part of it. Our Creative Director has come up with an incredibly vibrant and stylish website concept for this project. Here’s a sneak preview of the homepage:

Did we accept the challenge? Of course we did!
How did we do? Well, this is what the client had to say:

Ecreate’s efforts and service were over and beyond our expectations and they were able to deliver a fantastic website while meeting our strict deadlines. Brent even reconfigured our email setup so we were no longer getting any spam, which we didn’t even ask him to do.

The service was very friendly. They were highly attentive to detail and we are delighted with our new website. It was a pleasure working with Brent and the Ecreate team and we would highly recommend them to anyone looking to have a website developed.

Hans Näslund
Leather Interiors

I am incredibly proud of the Ecreate team. A lot was asked of them, especially our creative director who lived on coffee for almost 36 hours straight. The completed project is here: www.leatherinteriors.com.au