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what is seo and why optimize?

Posted by simon ashwin On Friday 23 May 08

You spent a good deal, worked hard for many days and nights and built a great website, but alas! it doesn’t get enough visitors. There are millions upon millions of pages of web content out there and your website is totally lost in the shuffle, like the proverbial needle in a haystack. When search engines ignore your site, your site becomes non-existent in the cyber world. The real problem with your website is that it failed to harness the most cost-effective and powerful Internet marketing strategy: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)!

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your site appear at the top of search engine results for your domain-specific keywords and phrases. The higher your website ranks in the results of Google, Yahoo, MSN etc., the greater the chance that your site will be visited by many, which in turn would skyrocket your sales.

Simply put, Search Engine Optimization is about making your website visible on search engines. Its commercial purpose is to be the first to hit a customer base effectively.

Why Optimize for Search Engines

Everyday, millions of people search the web to find out what they look for. If your website doesn’t come up top in the results, you lose your business to your competitors. SEO is important not only because it brings lots of visitors to your website, but also because it helps to increase the return on investment, if harnessed properly. Say for example, you have a website that...

7 tricks to viral marketing

Posted by simon ashwin On Sunday 18 May 08

Viral marketing (word-of-mouth marketing) is a really cool thing. Just think about it… instead of spending an insane amount of money on newspapers ads, TV commercials or banner ads, you spent nothing - and let your fans do all the work for you.

With viral marketing, your campaigns will suddenly get a life of its own - and start to spread like a virus. Everyone want to see it, and when they do, they all want to share it.

It is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what you get from regular advertisements.

But how?

There are a lot of tricks to viral marketing. Here are 7 important ones:

1. Make people feel something

The most important trick of all is to create a very strong emotion. You need to have an opinion, to express an idea with commitment and dedication. You want people to:

be filled with love or hate.
be very happy or insanely angry
be an idiot or a genius
be deeply compassionate or an egoistic bitch

You want people’s blood to be pumping of excitement.

Forget neutral, trying to please everyone, supporting several target groups or any of the many ways to be unbiased. Viral marketing is 100% about emotions.

2. Do something unexpected

This one explains itself. If you want people to notice you campaign, you have to do something different - something unexpected. Forget about trying to promote your products as just being great - everybody does that. Forget...

who really reads websites?

Posted by simon ashwin On Thursday 08 May 08

The reality is that we read very little online; we might look at a lot, but that doesn’t mean we’re reading.

There are two reasons for this:

1. Most websites are difficult to read.

2. Most website content is irrelevant for the requirements of those trying to read it.

There a direct correlation between the success of a website and its readability and relevance; if people can’t read your website, they can’t you’re your website. Subsequently, businesses should focus on improving these factors, and can do so with relatively little effort.

Not only will users read your website, but it will leave a very strong impression with them; we all remember and respect websites we like and this will say a lot about you.

Making content readable

We read content on-screen very differently to how we read content off-screen. This is a reflection not only of the very nature of a screen, but our habits and tendencies as users of the web.

We read only that content that looks easily digestible and quickly read; it has to look easy because users have utterly no patience or energy to work for a website. If content looks in any way tiring, it is all over.

We cannot read paragraphs and paragraphs of text as if it were a page from the printer. While this might appear the most straightforward way to layout our content, it is represents arguably the most worst layout approach of all. Even websites such as news websites where...

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