Check out the video and VOTE for VendHQ using this link http://launchpad.cloudconnectevent.com/vote-now/ and help a kiwi company get to the finals.

Yes I do the voice overs too

So we have a new mobile network launching, and who would you rather watch on the ads, Richard Hammond, or our very own Rhys? I know who is funnier.

Now, all 2degrees needs to do now is secure the domain name 2degrees.co.nz and their launch would go much more swimmingly. I do enjoy a drop of pinot now and then so no rush there guys

I did the cycle to prove a point, that nothing is impossible. Somethings are improbable but there is a big difference between improbable and impossible. I never thought I would be able to do something like ride a bike from one end of the country to the other, very improbable. So I broke it down, figured out what I needed to do, I came up with a plan and I did it. I took the improbable, removed as much of the risk and uncertainties as possible and boiled it down to a bunch of smaller things I could achieve:

• Ride a bike? check.
• Ride a bike up a hill (without vomiting)? check.
• Ride a bike for a whole day? check.
• Ride a bike for a day then be able to get up the next day and do it again? check.

That was it. I found a replicable formula and then kept doing it until I got to the end. It is often too easy to put up barriers in front of goals, some fickle and no more substantial than a sheet of rice paper, and for you to use these as excuses as to why you can not achieve your goals. Along the way I lost 20kg, met a heap of interesting people, and had plenty of time to just think, something we all deprive ourselves of in our busy lives. The trip was a journey of discovery for myself, and I learnt a lot. Okay, I will get off of my horse now.

So, now that adventure is complete, I have this bubbling enthusiasm running through my veins and I now found myself at the next start line ready for the next adventure, which is pretty exciting. No I am not looking to roller-skate around the Antarctic, or pogo Route 66. As a part of preparing myself for the ride, I cleared all of my commitments from my plate, and now I have one of those rare and exhilarating opportunities in front of me. The opportunity to load my plate up as high as I like with new and exciting things.

So if you have any ideas, or you think I might be able to help you out with something let me know. There are some brief details on my background here. If you know me you will know I also posses boundless enthusiasm and optimism, something I am not afraid of offering about myself. I can’t offer my time free, I have bills to pay. But get in touch I would love to hear from you, before my plate fills up again.

Well, the other day I was given a new SIM card for the new Telecom XT network, which I quickly poked into my iPhone. And so I have come out of temporary hiatus on 8degrees.co.nz to let you know what I found. After a quick change to the APN setting on my iPhone I was away, calling and surfing on the new XT network, and THIS is what I found:

1. Coverage
2. 3G speeds
3. and all from the fringes of civilisation

I must confess I felt like a kid in a candy shop, as I rode my bike from small town to small town with a permanent 3G signal and pretty decent speeds. The speeds I have been getting are obviously not fast compared to a fixed line DSL, so don’t be expecting any crazy crazy speeds just yet, but considering I can do 3G things at good 3G speeds from places like Leigh and Mangawhai, well this is a new experience for me. And if I can get 3G from further up the line as I go, I must say, with only a little hesitation, I would be very very tempted to switch from my 15 year relationship with Vodafone (BellSouth pre Vodafone) and move to Telecom New Zealand if it allows me to make full use of the iPhone that Vodafone sold me, while sitting in my local Kerikeri cafe, where to date even a basic data connection on Vodafone is a rare thing depending on where you stand on the main street and if the sky is overcast.

So Vodafone will bump things up on their own network soon. Well they sure as hell have to, as within minutes I quickly moved (albeit temporally for the moment) onto what so far seems to be a faster broader network and I kept my phone. If I can have number portability to boot, then what’s to stop me? (apart from slightly more expensive data plans). I felt a little hurt that Vodafone let another network provide better toys first. What about all the 10′s of thousands of dollars I have sent their way over the years? Couldn’t some of it gone towards a better network before Telecom got their act together?

What confuses me is why didn’t Vodafone upgrade their network pre XT launch? I have heard from quite a few previously loyal Vodafone customers already saying they are very very tempted to move networks if all Telecom say is true. Well so far I am finding it to be very true, a dramatic improvement on the connections I have been getting on the Vodafone network. Sure it is not all about data speeds and coverage, there is all the other services that you should probably compare to be 100% apples with apples, but to be honest, my needs are pretty simple. I want fast data wherever I go. I don’t care much for voice mail, or the online interface I use to access my bill. I pay every month for fast data and good great coverage, because without those things I cant access my bill online and I can’t check my voice mail from anywhere I might be around our beautiful country.

So it is still early days yet. As I continue my mad mad cycle up the country I will be comparing coverage and data speeds as I go from my bike, from the tops of hills and down in the valleys. At the beach and in the middle of the towns that until now seem to have been forsaken by GSM networks. And if I decide I’m not going to stop at the lighthouse in Cape Reinga, well at least I have the option as a potential Telecom customer to roam to another foreign GSM network with my phone and continue my ride. Perhaps cycling from one side of Europe to the other… hmmm…

When planning my ride up the country I wondered if I should just leave all the gadgets behind me for two months and go cold turkey, but who was I kidding, not anyone who knew me that’s for sure. And so as I ride the length of New Zealand I will be blogging, tweeting and posting videos to YouTube. I may even chip away at the new start-up project that has been keeping me busy for a bit. The thing is, you can.

When I came back from overseas 9 years ago, freshly inspired by seeing the world and travelling, I set up my first business, which specialised in tele-computing and mobile computing, and at the time you could finally put together all the building blocks to achieve true mobile computing. The technology at the time sucked comparatively to what we have got now, and even what we have now sucks a wee bit and is slowly getting better, but it still let people operate and stay connected on the move. At the time everyone went on about the remote workforce, tele-commuting and the mobile office but people weren’t interested in implementing it. Companies didn’t want people to work from home, not because it was too hard, but because they didn’t trust them and it was too hard to keep an eye on them. This is all another story, which I may well come back to in the near future, but for now my point is that today it is really easy to get away from the shackles of your desk and do business on the road.

At work, we operate the Voom Studio office totally in the cloud. We use Google Apps for email and documents. We use WorkflowMax for job management and time tracking. All our billing and accounts are handled through Xero. The new software product we are developing is SaaS based. Our code repository is totally up in the cloud also so there is no physical reason to physically be in there. The only gear that sits in the office is a printer and an Apple Time Capsule used for storing any large files we are working with, but mainly for storing software, video and any other heavy files (games usually). For collaboration however you cant beat having a chat at someone’s desk or just calling out across the office. That and the fact that customers like to know you “exist” are probably the only reasons we have a Voom office at all.

Here is my mobile office.

My mobile office

This setup lets me do everything I would normally do from my desk, with the added bonus of taking video and photos, neither of which would be very interesting taken from my desk.

There is only one thing that bothers me about my mobile office setup and that is that everything on the left should actually be just one device. If I could have an iPhone that took HD video and let me access the net on my laptop via mobile data then I would be in heaven. In fact I would put money on Apple including fairly decent video camera in the next hardware version of the iPhone, then it would be the single pocket powerhouse computer you would need. Apple, please buy Flip. Samsung and LG are both on the market with a HD video phone, but they are not iPhones are they. The good news is all these devices charge via USB, so I can leave all their associated power cables behind.

The Flip Mino is my latest toy, and I had to ship one in from the US at the last minute when I discovered Flip had removed the off shore sales limitation on their products. It is pocket HD juiciness. I have already in one afternoon put together my first video as an experiment. 30 minutes of footage from a ride, condensed into 2 minutes with voice over and music, thanks to the brilliance of the Mino, and the magic of iMovie. The Mino HD can record on device an hour of video at HD resolution. The brilliance of the Flip cameras are their easy of use and convenience. Smaller than your average cellphone, and lighter, with a single big red button that makes it really easy to point, click and you are recording your next YouTube masterpiece. No fiddly focus rings, or zoom buttons. No back light controls and no on camera effects or editing. Just record. When you plug it into your computer, you can suck off all the video and fiddle with it in your video edit suite of choice. In my case I have a mac so it is iMovie, which does the job just nicely. Today our home computers have plenty of grunt to process video and audio and all we want from a camera is the data.

On my ride, for the mobile data side of things I am using a vodem, and I will pop my SIM card out of my iPhone and use that so as to not have to maintain two data accounts. Hopefully this works. I have tried it out and I could connect from my MacBook, but knowing Vodafone and their screwy data connection settings, my usage may not be billed against my iPhone data allowance.

Finally my iPhone will be my phone, GPS and map, and email and twitter on the go.

All this fits into a surprisingly small bundle. I have water proof bags so no need to stress about being caught in the rain. So I can be anywhere and do everything I would normally need to do on any given day. Customer meetings will be a bit of a pain, but otherwise it will be just like I am still at work, but with 7 hours cycling each day. Now if I could figure out how to type as I ride then life would be just grand.

First of all I went to https://transact.landtransport.govt.nz/

I selected the option to relicense my vehicle.

I complete the 3 step process of entering details and paying, and then after the “processing your payment, please wait” bit on the credit card payment screen (payment screens hosted by Westpac and Dialect). BAM I got this.

Note in the top right hand corner:

There is no merchant name. Comforting.

Also the broken nature of this page in general, with the text all over the place and strange red “x”s. This is a payment page for a friken government department! Hosted by Westpac! This gives me the heebeegeebees to be quite honest. So I tried it again, and got the same obscure error, and so I rang the call centre, to:

1. tell them they have a problem
2. check to make sure I haven’t paid twice for my car reg
3. pay for my car reg.

I get hold of Jane in the call centre but she cant help me because I can not answer the 10th identity question. I have established who I am, the car rego, date of birth, and trying to establish my address, but I am not giving the correct address, so she cant help. I have got the house number correct, I have the street correct, RD1 okay, post code is correct, but they don’t have Kerikeri as my town. So Jane wont help me. “Do you get your mail?” she asks.

So I have to play Guess-the-address to figure out what town or city they have on record. After a few minutes, I guess Northland. Horray, Jane can help me now as I am obviously not an identity criminal trying to pay for someone else’s car reg.

Phew, so I proceed to tell Jane about the problem they are having with their payment page. She checks to see if the payment has gone through, and luckily it hasn’t. But the broken payment screen seems to be my problem, not their problem, so I get to talk to a supervisor, and give him the run down on what is broken on their site. At this point I have resigned to the fact that I am going to have to go to the post office to sort my registration, so I am only still on the phone trying to help them out, as a tax payer I would like Land Transport to efficiently collect the taxes. I even have screen shots of the error pages, but no one wants them. “Do you have cookies enabled?” Yes I have cookies enabled. “You didn’t take too long entering in the details?” No!

“Can I email you the screen shots of the error page?” I ask

“Hmmmmm, no. Are you using Internet Explorer?”

“No I am on a Mac and using Firefox”

“Ahh. Sorry you can’t pay online with Firefox, we only support Internet Explorer 6 and above” WTF!

So here is what is wrong with that:

1. Internet Explorer 6 is 8 years old. It is good supporting legacy browsers (cause that is what IE6 is), but only supporting IE or better?
2. Internet Explorer accounts for 67.40% of the user share of browsers today, that means everything else is 32.60%. That is a third of all users that are not supported.
3. Internet Explorer is trending down in the browser stats. In the third quarter of 2008 IE was 72.22%, so it has dropped a total market share of 4.8% in six months, and like I said, this is a clear trend so it will keep dropping.
4. If you are only going to support only one browser TELL THE USER AT THE START of the process. Why let the user go through steps 1 through 3 at all. You can easily detect the browser in use, and alert the user that they need to downgrade their browser in order to pay online.

So if this is true, then Land Transport and Westpac are failing at an epic level. I hope it is not true, and I hope Dialect are just having a bad payment processing day and just need to sort out their error messages. But there seems to still be a lot of online services that only support IE, and Wespac themselves seem to be a big fan of it. I can’t use their corporate online without IE. I think it is time some of these online services take a look at how they are not transacting online.

Oh well off to the post office.

UPDATE:

@benkepes tells me via twitter he earlier this week paid for his reg using Firefox. So why does the call centre tell people only IE is supported? Perhaps it is the standard “you are using a browser and computer we dont understand” escape hatch?

UPDATE #2:

Well on return from a very nice stroll to the post office, I find an email from info@nzta.govt.nz

<snip>

I also note you called our Contact Centre today regarding the online problems you were experiencing and were advised that Firefox is not currently supported by the Transaction Centre or POLi payment. I can confirm this information is correct.

Regards

Contact Response Team

So the policy is to not support Firefox. However I am getting mixed info from people some saying that they can pay online with non-IE browsers, and some can not (perhaps a Mac flavour vs PC flavour thing), however it is obviously policy not to support Firefox at least, but it may not prevent some things being “technically” achieved, if you are lucky.

I have also been reminded by a few people of the horrible online toll payment system (also LTNZ) where to pay by internet banking(?), you need IE and an ActiveX control (note: this is just internet banking, not credit card processing. You can pay by credit card fine if you can find your way through the user interface). I always thought internet banking was something you did with your bank via your banks website? Why do you need to download software that only runs on a PC (note: you can get the ActiveX control to run in another browser using various 3rd party tools, but this may not work and is unsupported)?

Then I found this at http://www.landtransport.govt.nz/transaction-centre/index.html

It is designed to perform best with Microsoft Internet Explorer (up to version 6.0 ) or Netscape (up to version 6.2 ). Other types of browser are not currently supported.

Now when it comes to taking money from customers, I would have thought the first rule would be to have as few barriers in the way that would prevent them from giving it to you. So eliminating one third of the total browser market is not a wise idea. Sure, the majority of that third are windows users, and can fire up IE should they need to. But they choose not to use IE. Plus, they only support up to IE 6. Not 7, not 8. I am beginning to suspect that the policy is outdated, and it possibly suits them that way.

I could be missing something here but there are no technical limitations preventing any other mainstream browser from processing financial transactions online. So why make the concious decision not to support every mainstream browser?

UPDATE #3

Well I have been trying to pay the road toll, on my prepay account, for a recent trip to Auckland via LTNZ’s toll site to no avail. The service has been taken offline due to technical problems. This morning I learn that the service has been taken down due to a glitch where prepay customers were being charged up to 20 times per trip. Hundreds of thousands of dollars was debited that should not have been. No no no no no! This is no way to earn the trust of the public, who are probably not overly entusiastic about a toll road to start with. Not to mention all the other things wrong with the toll road payment systems, and the website itself. LTNZ seem to be dropping the ball both with policy and execution of their online systems in general.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, Twitter is an emerging social networking phenomenon that lets anyone “tweet” in 140 characters or less their thoughts, opinions or just what they are doing, right at that moment. Anyone can follow your tweets, and you can follow others. By tuning into different people, you get a stream of thoughts and comments steadily flowing through to you, and you can participate in “the stream” by replying to people, or just adding your own thoughts undirected to anyone in particular.

If you have ever used a chat room, Twitter is kind-a like a “build-your-own” chat-room, where you choose the members you listen to, but they can’t necessarily hear you or each other. Sound confusing? Sound inane? Well it is a simple idea, which has strange addictive qualities that people all around the world are discovering.

Different people have different reasons for using Twitter. In it’s simplest form it is a tool for participating in conversations with your friends and associates. Some people manage only a small group of people they follow and the conversations are personal and relevant. For others it is a tool to build professional and personal networks. They follow industry conversations. For others it is a path to Internet stardom, and having large interested audiences they can entertain. For some it is a way to tap into the broad social consciousness, to get a feel for what people are thinking and talking about around the world.

Twitter can be many things to different people, but the common thread is that Twitter is a way to have a conversation with others.

Like always when a new idea starts to get traction, and a community builds around it, people inevitably starting to think how to make money through it, how to sell your wares through Twitter, how to “cash in”. If you say this to the early adopter users of Twitter, the initial reaction is “Gawd, keep those bastards out”, the bastards being of course the evil marketers and big bad corporates. Of course no one wants to be spammed through Twitter, along with everywhere else. But more and more companies are discovering that Twitter is a way to have conversations with their customers. Not selling to their customers, but talking with them. After all you can’t stop people from talking about you or your products bad or good, but you can choose to be part of that conversation. Besides, every person, as a user of Twitter, chooses who they want to listen to, so as soon as they get the sales pitch from a company they follow, they have the choice to turn off that conversation. For companies, the best way to engage with existing or new customers is to have genuine conversations that they want to participate in. It sounds pretty simple.

So having said that, is there any threat that Twitter will one day be yet another vehicle to be owned by the marketers? I think right now Twitter is in a bit of an “Age of Innocence”, it is becoming incredibly popular, and it is an interface to conversations you would not normally be a participant of. I can tweet with Telecom New Zealand (@telecomnz) and Vodafone (@vodafonenz), and if I am having a problem with a product or service they are most helpful, due credit to both. They respond with genuine interest but still in a casual Twitter way. To be honest this beats calling their call centres hands down. But then 20 years ago, if you emailed both someone within would have responded the same, with personal interest and enthusiasm because they probably only got one email from a customer each day, and it made a pleasant change. Will it be different when they have to respond to 5 tweets a second? Is the “We have received your tweet and will respond within 1 working day” message inevitable one day?

Today you can follow your favourite celebs, and tweet with them. You can quite often even get personal replies from them too. Is it the fan mail of the new century? Stephen Fry @stephenfry has a whopping 52,000 follows, and he is in the top ten twitterers worldwide (by follower numbers) so you may not get a personal response from him, but he does write his own tweets. But when Twitter reaches critical mass will it be harder to participate in conversations with these people, and will they be less genuine?

It will be fascinating to watch what happenes over the next 24 months, and to watch as different market segments adopt Twitter. Will it be the beginning of the end when after a TV news article, they invite you to “talk back” on their twitter address? Will print advertising invite people to follow products on Twitter? Will it be good or bad? At the end of the day, I feel it will be the Twitter users who will decide.

Today I get my news headlines through twitter, I follow interesting celebs, I get information about new product releases (not sales pitches) from companies I am interested in, I get blog feeds and finally, the random thoughts of many many different people (but mostly technology geeks). All my choice. My Twitter motivation is to connect with like minded people, and have genuine interesting conversations with them. As soon as the conversations stop being genuine and interesting I may turn them off. But right now, Twitter is the wild west/new frontier phase. No rules, no barriers, and find your own way.

So what are your Twitter motivations? If you don’t currently tweet, what would (or wouldn’t) you use Twitter for?

Tourism is our biggest export earner right? We love people coming to our little bump on the edge of the planet, and as Kiwis we love hosting people and telling them how great our part of the world is.

Here is a really smart and free idea (if any are in fact free) I was toying with while CTO at Vianet. This is for Tourism NZ, or any one who wants to make NZ shine on the world tourism stage. A “My NZ” social media site. Here is how it could work.

• The site, say www.mynz.com is a place for New Zealanders and visitors to New Zealand to have conversations about how fantastic NZ is.
• Let everyone have a say in their own space/page, in their own words and in their own way, about why they love NZ.
• Let them upload their NZ in pictures, audio and video. Identify the places they love in maps, favourite samples of life in NZ, music, culture, poetry, film.
• Link off to other social channels like Twitter and Facebook, YouTube channels, Blogger and WordPress. Every time someone contributes with why they love NZ, channel it with tweets and posts out through their other networks, to their friends and associates. Make it easy for people to have conversations about NZ with the rest of the world.
• Connect with great kiwi companies promoting NZ through technology, like ProjectX Technology/Zoomin, Vianet.travel, EventFinder, Bookabach etc. Connect it through www.madefromnewzealand.com, Tourism NZ
• Get people blogging on mynz.com. Invite prominent kiwis to write.
• Get Tourism NZ tweeting and twitpic-ing on twitter.
• Give New Zealanders ownership, and make them a part of bringing people to NZ. Offer bookings of trips, accommodation, activities through mynz.com. If you bring someone in through your profile and network, and they book travel through the site, earn points, commission, tax credits, jelly beans or a ranking based on how many people you connect with and brought to NZ.
• Make every kiwi a sales agent for New Zealand. Start tourism activism, actourvism!
• Make it fun. Make it infectious. Spread NZ like a virus!

You could almost start it with a little bit of work for relatively low cost by using established social networks and free tools out there. You would just need to build the central cog, the glue, the brand.

It might sound wacky, but I think it would work! Think about it. Don’t you love telling the world how great our country is? What is the best form of promotion? Through word of mouth via people you identify with and trust.

Now I am no naval gazer so here is one thing that I would like to point out (and do quite often). In New Zealand we have some of the worlds brightest, most experienced, hard working entrepreneurs and technologists. I would wager that per capita, we have a better saturation than anywhere else in the world, and you know as kiwis we can do a lot with #8 fencing wire, old parts from a ZX spectrum and a couple of jet engines. We don’t usually give up, and we have oodles of common sense practicality that we all learnt as kids (playing with #8 wire, ZX Spectrums and … well sky-rockets cause we didn’t have Martin Jetpacks).

So why is now a good time to invest and develop great kiwi technology companies? Simple. We know how to put our heads down and get things done.

While the markets are recovering and the recession bites, we need to be building the tools and solutions that businesses and consumers will want as they start to pull themselves out of the crater and realise that there is blue sky up there. The talent is here, and the desire is here. The only thing missing is the smart money who is not knee jerking with the rest of the financial world.

Who is the smart money? Well if you are reading this and have an appetite to invest, are an angel or an institutional investor, then this is you if you can look at the market and see that it has never been better for investing in the development of new clever businesses and technology, because:

• PEOPLE – There are more skilled people available in the pool out there right now. To boot there is no shortage of wise minds around who like to help New Zealand businesses succeed like Sam Morgan, Rowan Simpson, Nathan Torkington, and Seeby Woodhouse. For good businesses it is not hard to get good advice.
• COSTS – Costs will be down. Everyone knows its time to tighten the belt a notch or two. After getting the right people with the right motivation, you can do a lot with a little. If you take a stake in a company, they will be pretty reasonable with current valuations.
• ADVANTAGE – Businesses will be looking for better ways to do things that save them money. We should be building more businesses like the Xero‘s, the PlanHQ‘s, the Nexx‘s or the SilverStripe‘s now in the down time and be ahead of the game when things get going again.
• MATURITY – The kiwi tech sector has been mature for some time. Our people are damn good at building world leading clever things. We are not just kicking around in the garage any more.

What needs to happen? Smart investors need to invest now. The New Zealand Government needs to free up cash for developing great NZ businesses. Entrepreneurs need to take some deep breaths and keep going, knowing that the rewards will come with a recovering market.

So this is what I tell everyone who asks me about the recession and my plans ahead. It’s nose down for me, preparing for the sun that will shine in 18 or so months. I am working on a couple of great projects that are everyday increasing their potential for success. All they need is time, energy and resources and they will succeed. Just like the tens of dozens, if not hundreds, of great businesses who know that now is the best time to build their chances of success.

Tip #1 – Understand why people will want to visit

The first tip is really about understanding your audience. Yep, good old fashioned marketing! You must first understand why your customers will want to come to your site. Of course, there will be some very good reasons, and these will be your products, services and the information your website provides about them. By understanding what your customers are looking for, you are better able to explain how your company will fulfil their needs.

This seems obvious huh? In fact this is not really anything specific to search engine marketing, it is more about good marketing. And so if you understand your customers well enough, this will be reflected as clear effective communication of what value you provide to them, your customers, in your website. This is important not just because clear communication is good communication, but because from this will come your most important piece of market intelligence, the best keywords to use for your search engine marketing.

Getting your keywords right is one of the most important achievements you can make on the journey to effective search engine marketing.

Bob owns a cheese company that makes a variety of delicious cheeses. At Bob’s Cheese they have just launched their new on-line shop for premium cheeses at direct to market discounted prices. They have a brain storming session for keywords and decide that one of their key phrases for on-line search engine marketing is “delicious Gruyère on-line”.

Now their cheese may in fact be delicious, and selling it on-line is indeed a bonus, but in reality most people can’t spell Gruyère and more often than not their target audience is actually looking for “discount premium cheese”. But how do they work this out?

There is a number of ways to work out the best keywords for your site. You and (if you are fortunate enough) your marketing team, are the most qualified people to figure that out. Think about your market and how they think. Here is a sure-fire way to get some good ideas on keywords if you get stuck;

Get together a group of people who represent a good sample of your target audience. Get a broad spread of people, from computer literate to first time Googlers if you can (if they still exist). Give them a simple task. Explain a product or service (without explicitly suggesting YOURS) and get them to imagine they are looking for it online. One by one get them to bring up a search engine and then watch. See what they do and what they search on. Take note of all the words and phrases used and the success the people had with each. At the end, ask them why they searched on the words they did. You may be surprised at the terminology and phrases they search on and their explanations why, but out of this exercise you should find some patterns, and a common set of words used. These will become your keywords.

Tip #2 – Use your keywords and phrases throughout your site

This is the most common approach to search engine marketing. Search engines actually “read” your pages, and so if you use a lot of keywords in the pages that people search on then the more relevant your website will appear. The more the search engines think your site is relevant, the higher in the search results you go.

Build up a collection of well thought out and relevant keywords (as per tip #1), and be sure your website talks about them. Don’t come up with too many keyword phrases, as you will need to use them all consistently throughout the content of your website. So work out your best phrases and keywords, and incorporate them into your site. Not only will this give you better chances of search engine success, but it will generally keep your website “on message”.

If you succeed in getting visitors to your site with one particular set of keywords, but your site uses different terminology or uses the keywords out of context in the page content, the visitor who found you in the search will end up getting confused and click the back button to the Google search results. This is referred to as a “bounce”, and search engines pick up on this. The more visitors bounce back from your site with a particular set of keywords, then the search engines will rank your site lower.

Tip #3 – Use your keywords not only in the page content, but in the title and URLs of your website

This step requires you to carefully design the names of the pages in your site to reflect the subject matter they are about. Search engines give you “points” for using keywords in the content of your pages, but more weight to keywords that appear in the name (URL) and title of a page. So as an example, our cheese company has just created some new pages promoting their on-line premium cheese shop. By using their primary keywords of “discount premium cheese”, they could name the page that talks about this service something like:

http://www.bobscheese.com/discount-premium-cheese.html

This would work better than say:

http://www.bobscheese.com/index2.html

which says absolutely nothing about what the page is about.

The page should have the title (that appears in the top of the visitors web browser) of “Discount premium cheese” and by using this phrase in the words on the page itself, they would score valuable points with a search engine. A search engine will understand that the page itself is something to do with “Discount premium cheese”.

To go one step further, our cheese shop could include their main keywords in the base website address itself. So instead of using the web address of:

http://www.bobscheese.com

they could register and use

http://www.discountpremiumcheese.com

So the full address to the page would become

http://www.discountpremiumcheese.com/discount-premium-cheese.html

Now not only do the keywords appear in the text of the pages, the title of the page, the name of the page itself, but they are also in the actual website address for the website.

This step may not be practical for some people as their website URL is probably part of their existing brand, and existing website. However in the case of our fictitious cheese shop, they could register a new URL of discountpremiumcheese.com and use this alongside bobscheese.com for their on-line store only, keeping bobscheese.com as their corporate website. They could then link to the new www.discountpremiumcheese.com from the home page of www.bobscheese.com and actually get rewarded for this (see tip #4 below).

This is a good tip to consider if you are starting out a new website, but with some clever thinking you could break off some of your exisitng website content under this new URL if that makes sense for what you are doing, like Bob setting up his new online shop.

Tip #4 – Get other sites to link to your site using your keywords

This is a well known approach to raising the profile of your site and raising the relevance of your website in search engines. The more links there are that point to your site, the better as far as search engines are concerned. Search engines use a technique called “spidering”, or “crawling”. This is where a little search engine software robot called a spider (on the world wide web you see) starts reading a web page. In the page it finds a link to another page or website. The search engine doing the spidering, upon finding a link then sends off another little electronic spider to follow it to find out where it goes. That spider finds more links in these pages, and sends off more spiders. The more links the spiders find, the bigger the army of spiders becomes, and while this army crawls around the web, the more it comes across links to your website from others, and each time the more “points” it gives your site. If lots of sites talk about your site, the more popular it must be, so the more relevant it becomes.

It is vitally important to have your site linked to from other sites, both for search engines and so real people can find your site, but one big mistake most people make is to not get the other sites to use keywords in the link text itself. The search engine spiders may not necessarily understand why another site links to your site. It will just find a link and think “oh here is a link, I will follow it.” But by using keywords in the link text itself, the spider can understand the link in context and understand what the link is about.

If Bob’s Cheese can get other sites to link to his site using good keywords then the search engines will associate these keywords with bob’s site. So a link like click here for premium discount cheese would give the search engine better context than just visit Bob’s Cheese. By doing this the search engine gets the idea that the link has something to do with premium discount cheese, and so associates these keywords with Bob’s site. The more sites with links like this pointing to Bob’s site the more the search engine thinks that Bob’s site is an authority on premium discount cheese.

Wrap up

So that’s it for now. Four simple tips to search engine success. There are, as always, plenty of other things you can do, but these four things will give you the most value. No voodoo or black magic is required to get your site up in the search engine rankings, just some sensible steps and a bit of time and effort, and you will get great results.

Lastly if you want instant traffic to your site then have a look at a paid advertising campaign using Google’s Adwords. You still need to work out your keywords and get your website content right, but Adwords will give you that instant traffic you desire… but more on this another time