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SEO is simple, strategise and follow some basic structure guidelines.

An effective Search Engine Optimisation Strategy is not a mystery, it is simply part of a well thought out marketing campaign. And if anyone tells you differently, you should check to see if they actually understand that you may not have the time to invest personally yourself, so for a fee will invest their time for you.

A unique market niche can help, but your business needs wider visibility

It seems that the most successful sites, we are talking small business sites, are often getting to the first page of Google or Bing simply by obscurity - by their very creative company names and small location focused activities. In some cases this is a brilliant accidental niche, but hardly a recipe for sucessful business marketing... I mean, who is searching for you, unless you have a well known brand or high demand location specific product?

Developing a Marketing Campaign with clear consistent communication remains the best approach, and this will translate well for your Internet Marketing strategy.

Developing the Internet Marketing Campaign

It will be a process of developing your key brand messages, applying for unique trademarks, advertising in some form of mass-media... or local media. Getting off the ground requires some awareness of your existence. Word of mouth is still a great cost effective method... (see contribution)

You'll need a writer who can formulate a well structured, goal focused and properly presented public document. In the case of Internet marketing, this document will manifest itself as a website, a series of pages linked together by meaningful descriptive structure links or tags .

Structure: Relevant Links, Headings, Paragraphs

I recall in 1994, there were many sites that had links like "Page 1, Page 2...", now that was fine if you knew what you were reading. But, in 1994, there was Yahoo and this required manual submission to the directory... No need for semantic links? Glory days. 

Now, if you used "Page 1" as a link then the subject had better be concerning the first page of 'something' :) Better to use something like 'Search Engine Optimisation', and then link to that exact subject.

The same is to be said about the content of the pages and how to structure your communication.
It may be simpler that you realise...

Heading

Paragraph

Paragraph

Heading2

Paragraph... you get the idea.

This basic structure is all you need, aside from the odd bolded word or semantically correct, <code> or <quote>
If you write your site following this kind of markup  your site will be easily indexed by a search engine website crawler and ranked for relevancy.

If links and content relevancy are the most important parts of a useful document (website), then ranking in a search engine is the most useful part of being a business listed on a search engine...

So, what is our latest technique for further building your business visibility for the purpose of selling products and services?
One word: Contribute

Contribution is a recipe to visibility

We've concluded that to get more visible, as a small business, we needed to be contributing to the community that makes up the Internet, that is 2+ billion users potentially dropping in and checking out your business, products or blog rantings.

Webhaven released a product that synced the Nokia 2730 mobile phone with Mac OS X, isync. We had bought the phone as a basic business model capable of keeping addressbook and calendar synced, but it was not natively supported on OS X. 

After releasing the plugin for everyone, hundreds of downloads started, from Australia and New Zealand to Spain/Italy/USA. It was good to see that people really did find this helpful, I don't wish re-typing an addressbook into a phone on anyone!

But as a practical example of how we gained greater visibility on the Internet, this was an awesome one. And dare I say it, an example of Corporate Social Responsibility CSR . We had decided that this was something our mutual Nokia phone users would benefit from, it cost us time and effort, but a small price to pay to help out others in need.

In terms of results, the visibility and reputation our site gained was not possible without contribution. We have links from high quality forums, blogs and tweets. People now know we cared enough to help others in need, as much as we could... 

More practical ideas on Search Engine Optimisation

So, in the spirit of sharing, we offer another insightful document that you can download for free, and use in your own process of becoming better, faster, stronger and more visible - and you are very welcome to talk to us about getting it done right first time.

There are no magic tricks to a successful SEO, just well planned projects. 

Download our latest Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guidelines

 

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In 1999 there was this IE4 or 5 browser I was grappling with, and I managed to cobble together a nasty 'imgSwap' kind of javascript to do these (at the time) fancy menu image swaps for a mouseover.

It was awesome.

Now, of course, we use CSS to do all of that.

But... I recently needed to do a form checker and decided that instead of just relying on a server-side data integrity check, which we still do, it was more user friendly to help users immediately identify their form completion issues. 

Plus, along came the need to do it faster, which means, giving the DOM elements ID's and testing these elements using a javascript.

Of course it also needed to be really reusable, because not all forms are alike, in fact, none are...

My solution is so easy to implement and therefore time saving, I thought it might be the kind of thing people wished they had in 1999. I sure did, but I have it now so better late than never.

Enjoy  

ps. Don't forget to just download the working example file at the bottom of this post.  

 

The Javascript

<script language="javascript">
var erroronform = "Your own personal message";

function checkFields(element) {
if (document.getElementById(element).value=="") {
document.getElementById(element).style.backgroundColor = "#fff564";
document.getElementById(element).style.border = "1px #8C0444 solid";
return false;
}
else {
document.getElementById(element).style.backgroundColor = "";
document.getElementById(element).style.border = "";
return true;
}
}

/*add your fields to verify in the 'list' var - remember to add the id="" to your html input*/

function verifyForm(form) {
var list = ["firstname","surname"];
var success = true;
for (var i = 0; i < list.length; i ++) {
if (!checkFields(list[i])) success = false;
}
if(success==false) {
alert(erroronform);
}
return success;
}

</script>

Download a working HTML example - zipped for convenience, MIT license

 


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