Category Archives: Blogging

You might guess that we’re big fans of blogs and blogging as a content and communications strategy here. This category includes all our posts related to blogs and blogging.

Relationship Between Trust And Link Building

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Hi everyone,

Today I am going to dwell on the role of trust and the way search engines perceive it in the light of link building. Trust is a much bandied word in the search engine industry and it directly relates to the trust acquired by a domain.

When a site is penalised, one of the most important things to check is if the site is still in good neighbourhood. In other words, the links pointing from the site to questionable areas (read untrustworthy sites) on the web can be a reason. This is strikingly similar to the societal analogy – You are judged by the company you keep.

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Google Squared – Great Concept From Searchology

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Hi all,
Google Squared is a concept in the anvil and is due for launch under Google Labs later this month.

When you type in a search query in Google, a useful Square is built around the query. For example, if you typed in “small cats”, the first row in the square can have the result miniature cats, a variety of Persian cats. There can be other varieties of small cats returned in other rows.

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Search Options – Google Searchology 2009

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Hi all,
Continuing with the discussion of  latest offerings from Google Searchology 2009, the discussion today is centred around Google Search Options.

Google Search Options is a useful feature that lets you refine your search results using various options. If you do a search for digital cameras on Google, just above the search results, you can see a link Show Options
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Google Ready To Support Rich Microformats

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Hi all,
The annual Google Searchology conference opened up to a select audience with Google revealing their latest offerings in the search space.

In previous years, Google introduced personalised search and universal search through this event. This year is no different with lots of interesting features in the anvil.

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Geolocation and International Targeting Issues – Part 2

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Hi all,
Continuing from where we let off last week, if you have an idea of targeting users in both Australia and New Zealand, then there are a couple of ways you can go about it depending on the circumstances.

If you have a .com domain as in www.site.com, then you can create sub-folders and target New Zealand as in www.site.com/nz and target Australia as in www.site.com/au
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Geolocation and International Targeting Issues

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The subject discussed today is a hot potato in that there is intense debate and discussion whenever this topic comes up. Most SEO professionals would admit that there are several opinions floating around when it comes to targeting an international audience using a single domain and/or using multiple country specific domains.

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Title Tags and Branding-Tussle in the Making?

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It is a well known fact that the Title tag (as in <title></title> tags in the head section of a page) is the most important factor that influences on page optimisation with respect to the search engines.

The title tag is significant in two ways in that the search engines look at it closely to get a good idea of what the page is about. The title tag gets listed in the search engine results pages (SERPs) on which users click to go to the specific page in question. A meaningful title tag increases the click frequency.

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Google Profiles

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Free WordPress Theme

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There’s loads of places to find free WordPress themes, the best is probably the official WordPress Theme Gallery. You name a topic and there is undoubtedly a royalty free theme available to suit.

Our own talented studio head, Karen Rubado, designed this theme for the Online Marketer blog, and we figured we might as well make it available for others to use too…

Download Online Marketer WordPress Theme

Here’s a screenshot:

We have a few customizations live on this site which we’ve had to remove from this distribution so that it will play nicely with an out of the box install of WordPress, but we hope you’ll agree it is a nice, simple, and clean theme…and of course it is pretty well optimized for SEO :)

Installation Instructions:

  1. Download the zip file and extract the contents
  2. Upload the extracted folder to the /wp-content/themes/ folder
  3. Log into your WordPress admin, navigate to the Design administration section and select the Online Marketer theme
  4. Go and make a cup of tea to celebrate because you are all done

Leave a comment here if you have any questions. We’ll try to answer them as best we can, but please understand that we can’t promise to provide installation or customization support beyond informal Q&A :)

Tim Norton, PlanHQ, Using Blogging To Influence Mainstream Media

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Even though it is early days for Tim Norton’s PlanHQ, his team are making quite a bit of traction with their web based business plan software. Below is an iJump interview (thanks Simon!) with Tim in regards to his approach to marketing of PlanHQ using the blogging world as their main driver of referral traffic to their site. I highly recommend to OnlineMarketer.co.nz subscribers that this interview is well worth the watch. The main points of the interview are:

  • PlanHQ participate in the blogger community to drive traffic to their site.
  • They focus on bloggers who will influence main media
  • The data that is generated within their website and software application by its users helps with decision making on future product developments
  • Tim uses PlanHQ himself for their business
  • Finding existing communities to participate online is easier than starting your own community
  • The first phase of marketing PlanHQ was to get people talking about the product which is a “pull” marketing strategy. Tim will now go into “push” mode.
  • Tim typically blogs every 2 days.
  • The main benefits of blogging for PlanHQ are: increasing traffic to the site, high quality engagement with their target market, the ability to test ideas and get immediate feedback and to gain trust.

Tim Norton is speaking at the Interactive Marketing Summit next Monday, 26th May. Netconcepts will also be at the conference. It will be a great day mixing with some of the leaders in the online space in New Zealand.

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