I get this question a lot, especially as I am doing many more blogs and CMS run sites.

I am definitely not in favour of blogging for frequencies sake. You need to make sure that the content you are adding is of value to your readers.

Think of these options for content:

• Is it new? ie new creative content, stories, artwork
• Is it a new angle on a news story? A new perspective or raises a point that has not been widely discussed.
• Is it well researched?
• Is it an opinion? Controversy is not necessary.
• Is it an experience you can relate?
• Can you solve a problem? (This is a great way to bring in the visitors)

All of these options will help you produce good quality content. If you can build a site that has regular good quality content, you will bring in the visitors.

One thing that Matt discusses, that I have found to be true is that generating new content does bring in visitors. It also feeds your readership. An increase in your subscriptions via RSS can be an indication of long term loyal readers of your content.

So while frequent posting can bring visitors, for SEO purposes write quality content. Coupled with a regular frequency, quality content will also hook your readers and keep them coming back. It’s called being Sticky!

I love the Webpronews Videos, a great source of info, especially from presenters of Search and Marketing conferences.

This one with Bruce Clay, at 18 minutes long, is a great discussion around search, how it has grown, broadened in it’s nature to include Interactive Marketing and Optimisation on many levels.

He makes a few key points:

1. The new first page is actually the top three, especially as results are continually refined and made more personal
2. The distinction between Search and Find, Search being research based, looking for overall information, whereas Find is all about what is around me know, especially on Mobile
3. How Google’s Caffeine update has made the “accidental long tail”, ie those pages that are found for a phrase when that page is not about that phrase, less findable while improving the rankings for intended long tail pages.

Check out the video for some interesting information

More WebProNews Videos

I was asked by a client if he thought getting a .co address was worthwhile. To be honest I hadnt heard of any new TLD that had been created (TLD means Top Level Domain, ie .com, .net plus country codes like .nz)

In fact it is actually the Columbian country code that has been opened up to be registered by anyone.

So what’s the big deal?

In the sales pitch, the people running this launch have this to say: (found as a sponsor post on Read Write Web)

The .co TLD will provide companies with a TLD that represents “company”,
which is a viable and possibly even superior alternative to .com. With
the .com domain inventory nearly exhausted, .co gives businesses the
opportunity to brand themselves online to the fullest extent possible.

LEt’s break that down into it’s parts:

1. .co to represent “company” a viable possibly superior alternative to .com – To be honest, I can’t see much to this, ok it is 1 character shorter and to some areas, like URL shorteners (apparently, Twitter is looking at t.co as an in house URL shortener) it is useful to achieve their requirements. But for the majority, overcoming the habit of the .com is going to be hard to break.
2. With
   the .com domain inventory nearly exhausted, .co gives businesses the
   opportunity to brand themselves online to the fullest extent possible. – Excuse me, the .com space is not nearly exhausted, this is just an excuse for lazy marketers. Agreed, most simple words are already taken, but it is no where near exhausted.
   It also raises the possibility of more domain name disputes as existing brands have to fight again to save their brands form being hijacked.

As I mentioned before, .co is actually the country code for Columbia. I can expect some technical issues with the search-ability of sites with .co as their TLD.

Google bases it’s local and pre-filtered searches based on the TLD and/or the location of the server that a site is hosted on. As an example for a New Zealand company it is important that either the site has a .co.nz domain or is located on a NZ based server. This gives Google an idea as to who to provide results to for this site.

When you have a .com address on a US based server, you need to use Google Webmaster Tools to tell Google that your market is in NZ, if that is the case, as it not necessarily easy to determine this just from your content.

How quickly will this issue be fixed once the .co TLD is released. Similarly, Google will need to be told that your intended market is not Columbia, given that is what .co domain really means.

I believe this is a marketing opportunity, pure and simple. I cannot see any real credible reasons for creating this confusion between the established .com and a new ambiguous player in .co

My advice to people is to ignore .co. If you need a global domain, go for .com. If it is taken, look for creative ways to claim a .com domain, as I expect it will take many years (if at all) for the .co TLD to mean anything to anyone outside Columbia.

Please comment if you have received any correspondence about this, how are your registrars selling it to you?

Internet Explorer 6 is an old browser, in internet terms it is a dinosaur. Released in 2001, it has been the mainstay of peoples internet experience over the last 9 years.

The masses are often reluctant to change unless something pushes them along.

Firstly, Firefox gave users a good alternative browser to use (Better in my opinion)

Then came regular security issues, each time a further section of the browsing public moving to another browser. Most recently was the security hole that caused a breach in Google and over 30 other companies.

The key thing to note about this last issue was the speed and loudness of some governments urging people to look at other browsers to prevent further problems.

Some say that Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer as the first choice in some countries.

However, there are still about 20% of the internet population using Internet Explorer 6.

I have now just read of Googles impending chang in in policy to cease support of IE6 from the 1st of March. This specifically deals with Google Docs and Sites, but shows a willingness to help push the remianing 20% into more modern browsers.

I support this as it has the following benefits:

1. Wider support for the new HTML5 (IE6 would not be able to offer this new technology)
2. Improved browser compatibilty with web standards
3. Speed

It would be great if those 20% could not use Google at all, that would really send a message!

If you want to know more you can visit IE6 No More, a site dedicated to helping it disappear as soon as possible

If you use IE6, why don’t you upgrade?

Well as usual, the run up to Christmas was frenetic with lots of things to get done before the break. It has been quiet for the last few days as many clients in this part of the world are either on holiday, or are in the Tourism industry and are working hard during the peak of the season.

So I thought I would list up the latest clients into the Deepweb stable, welcome to all…

• Kerikeri Bed and Breakfast Group – Group of 7 local bed and breakfasts
• Kansai Fishing – sail assisted fishing vessel
• Whangarei Heads Tourism – Accommodation and Activity providers
• Reubens Cruises – Ferry service and other cruises
• Auckland Escape – Out to Kawau Island and other water tours
• Bounty Inn – Paihia accommodation
• Elvis the Voice – Elvis entertainer
• Far North iSite – Visitor Information for the Far North
• Bed of Roses – Kerikeri Accommodation
• One on One Swimming – Swimming Coach in Wellington
• RCToys – Remote Controlled Toys
• Breakaway Retreat – Accommodation on the Whangarei Heads

I have recently moved a site over from an ASP content management system to Joomla.

One of the tricky things was creating the redirects for the pages on the old site to the new.

Normally this is easy enough when you are redirecting a static page to another static page. Unfortuntely the mod_rewrite in Apache that is responsible for doing the rewriting of the URL’s cannot manage parameters after file name in the standard way, ie:

I wanted to send oldsite.com/index.asp?id=1 to newsite.com/news

However, everytime I used the standard redirect:

redirect 301 /index.asp?id=1 http://www.newsite.com/news

I ended up with a URL like : http://www.newsite.com/news?id=1

So I found a great resource here >> http://bit.ly/5WLc8q

It broke down the workings of the redirect and included the followign example

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=1$
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ http://www.example.com/content/page? [R=301,L]

Once I used my own page references it worked great.

A big thanks to Alex Juel ( http://twitter.com/seoholicc ) for this tip!

I have been running workshops on Social Networking, talking primarily about Twitter Blogs and Facebook.

Once of the questions I am asked is which of these are most important, what should they focus on first.

As usual, there is no definitive answer, but it becomes more about :

• What you want to achieve from social media and social networking
• Who do you want to say
• How much time do you want to apply to this

Twitter only gives you 140 characters at a time to talk aobut something, this is OK for many things: announcements, short comments, conversations, but not so good for somehitng more detailed.

This is where Blogs have it over most other forms of social media. The ability to be as brief as you like or as detailed as you like.

Also, your content is more permanent. Twitter tweets are much more “in the moment” as they pass in front of your followers.

Recent changes in search, where Bing and Google have both announced that they are entering agreements with Twitter to provide tweets in search results, means that what you say in Twitter will be available to more than just your followers.

So there is a place for both (or any facet of Social Media). There are plenty of addons that allow you to synchronise your entries across the different platforms (just make sure the duplication is appropriate for each audience)

Here is a video from Webpronews about Blogs (specifically Blogger) and Twitter and how you can get the benefits of both

Will it be Binghoo or Yabing?

With the announcement that Microsoft and Yahoo collaborating on search for a 10 year license term, one of the key outcomes is that Yahoo search will now be powered by Bing, the new Microsoft “Decision Engine”

After Xtra ditched MSN and went to Yahoo, Microsoft is back in the fold.

Regulatory issues in the US could mean we won’t see “powered by Bing” at the bottom of our Yahoo results for a couple of years.

So what affect will this have on the search market in New Zealand?

Not much.

It is pretty hard to compete with a competitor has over 90% of the market. The only thing I could see is that they might actually make an effort to increase their share. With each owning less than 5% share, it was even more futile. So now they have a chance, albeit a very slim one.

Microsoft will have access to key Yahoo technologies to make Bing better (Can’t see how this is good for Yahoo in the long run, past the 10 year license) and in Steve Ballmer’s words, reported by Danny Sullivan from the press conference.

Burden on Microsoft to deliver the goods and enable Yahoo to be successful

I think the key issue here is that Microsoft and Yahoo have finally decided that they will only be able to compete with Google when they stop fighting amongst themselves and consolidate their effort against a common enemy. Again as reported by Danny Sullivan:

Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO: it’s hard to be a long term leader with Microsoft and Google keep stealing your employees

So I expect it will be a drawn out process, no surprise launch like Bing a couple of months back, but it will be an uphill battle for both to finally prevail as the No 1 search engine here and internationally.

This is a real winner, Google is providing $75 worth of free advertising on Adwords for NZ businesses that have not used Adwords before.

Google Adwords Offer

As a response the the current economic climate, the campaign is titled “Google Business Stimulus Offer” and is available till the end of August.

I recommend people take advantage of this offer, Adwords can be a great way to generate business.

Get in contact if you want to know how it works, click here or call on 0800 333 793

With the launch of Bing and some of the responses by Google, Collecta is a new small player, that could actually be a forerunner for Real Time Search.

Using Google, Yahoo or Bing, finding social content has been difficult. Twitter, Facebook and other social sites have not been well indexed.

People often use Twitter for their real-time search, but it only searches Twitter, Collecta seems to get its data from many sources including :

• Blog posts
• Comments of Blog posts
• Updates from Twitter, Jaiku, Identica
• Photos from Flickr

Doing a search for “deepweb” (I had to do some market intelligence ) http://www.collecta.com/#q=deepweb gives up my most recent Twitter updates, which are also some of my latest blog posts, via Twitterfeed, plus an item from Reddit

The major search engines havent really tapped into this area of search yet, it will be interesting to see if Collecta can make some decent inroads before the big boys catch up.

It looks to be a great to for market intelligence so you can see where you, as well as your competitors show up in the social networks.

I have heard of some downtime and teething issues with Collecta, however in my few searches, it has worked fine for me.