In the early days of search engine optimisation it was a case of every man and woman for themselves as the algorithms that search engines used were not as sophisticated as they are today. This of course is no longer the case and the old nutmeg 'Content is King' is ever more true.

Unfortunately though, as in any industry, there are always people who will try to cheat the system. In the short term they may even achieve good results but eventually these techniques will always be found out and it is then that your site can run into real problems. Here we will quickly focus on 'Black Hat' marketing and the things to look out for when prospecting for help with your online marketing.

Gateway/Doorway pages.

These are web pages that are not designed to be seen by the web user because they redirect very quickly to the main website. They are web pages that have been stuffed full of keywords that wouldn't actually make any sense to the casual observer. This excessive use of keywords is just one example of a practice known as spamming. This is highly frowned upon by the major search engines as it is seen as trying to cheat the system.

Link Farming

This is where a company will promise to build inbound links into the website for a set fee and all they do put you onto websites whose only purpose is to list links to as many different sites as possible all of which have no relevancy to each other whatsoever. It won't result in receiving any extra traffic and will only end up with your site being penalised. The only way to build links into the website is through the writing and distribution of quality copy and submission to relevant directories.

Keyword stuffing

One of the favourite techniques of optimisers in the early days of SEO was to put a load of keywords onto the page of the site but set the font as the same colour of the background so, unless you clicked over it with your mouse, it would be hidden from the viewer. Of course things have become a bit more sophisticated but essentially the same is being done but it is in the back end of the site rather than the front. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to spot these kinds of underhand methods except by someone who knows what they are looking for.

The 3 examples above are just some of the many ways that 'Black Hat' marketers will try to cut corners and try to achieve quick short term results to justify their existence and make themselves look good. The important thing to remember is that online marketing is very much like building a house. If you lay the foundations on solid ground the structure will last for years to come but if you build on sand......

Ultimately if you employ a company who are always happy to be upfront and open about how they go about your online marketing and explain the associated processes that go with running a solid campaign you should be okay. However, if you are promised the earth by a company but then they get a bit cagey about the methods they employ to deliver it, then this is the time you maybe need to start asking a few more questions.

It is estimated that 72% of search engine users still only use the natural listings when conducting a search online. This leaves only 28% (less than a third) using the paid advertising solutions. This begs the question as to why there is still more spend overall by online marketers for Pay Per Click (PPC) management than for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

The answer of course lies in cash flow. If you are in charge of online marketing and you need to justify a large online budget (in relation to the size of the company) then the quickest way to balance the ROI is of course PPC.

Results can be instantaneous and the management systems offered, with the ability to run multiple campaigns, analytics, geographic and keyword targeting, as well as many other features, undoubtedly appeals to the online marketer who can easily feel that the element of control remains firmly in their hands.

But an element of caution needs to be expressed. By becoming so enamoured by the ease and rapidity that PPC can provide are we missing a few tricks and digging ourselves into a hole that becomes harder to scramble out of the deeper it gets.

Firstly there is the issue of quality and relevance that all websites should try to achieve. These can be easily overlooked by someone who only sees the results brokered by the paid option. Because it is so simple to edit and manage keywords, the marketer may not feel the need to update the content or pay much attention to the experience of the user once they have landed on the site.

The overriding issue though is the one mentioned at the beginning of this article. By relying heavily on paid search you are neglecting over 2 thirds of your potential customers who may never get the chance to see your website.

It is true that Search Engine Optimisation is not yet a precise science and that early on in its implementation results are slower, especially in relation to investment (it can take between 6-18 months depending on budget and industry) but the benefits to the website and the business in the long term can be immeasurable.

Now, please do not misunderstand the message I am trying to convey here. Pay Per Click is not a bad thing, but I believe that the best marketing strategy should be one that compliments the use of PPC and Search Engine Optimisation, hand in hand, to reach out to all your potential customers and that your long term budgeting plans should ultimately reflect the true statistics for optimum results.

Despite many contemporary experts fearing the credit crunch may affect the gaming industry as a whole, because of the obvious concerns that people wont have the disposable income to use for gambling, one area in particular is actually beginning to rise in popularity belaying recent worries.

Card games are on the up according to a survey by leading Playing Cards Company Waddingtons Number 1. It suggests that because people are more likely to stay indoors due to the economic conditions, rather than going out in the evenings, helps to explain why sales of playing cards are up by 75% since last June. The survey even went on to show that Poker is now the nations favourite card game with 39% of an online vote.

This would appear to indicate that Poker is now as popular as ever, despite the fears that some sites may have had that its popularity had reached a peak, and is indeed encouraging news for the many websites that run gaming software or sell poker chips and equipment online. Couple this with the fact that Google have now allowed gambling related sites to run Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns it is as important as ever for online marketing executives to have effective plans in progress to make sure they are taking their fair share of the revenues on offer.

One of the areas that Marketers should be careful not to overlook within the gaming industry is the hugely beneficial use of social networking. A lot of gaming sites, especially the ones with affiliate schemes, have historically relied a lot on banner advertising. The main reason for this is to try and get a quick visual message across that hooks the viewer, especially as many of them offer sign up deals where you can get money added to your account if you deposit a certain minimum amount.

This is all very good; especially as with an affiliate you only need to provide the banner itself and is extremely cost effective, but a potentially fresh customer base of more discerning players is maybe being overlooked.

Many of the poker players that have taken the game to their heart in the last few years during the boom of online poker did so because they saw the game on television and wanted to have a piece of the action. However, the people that didnt take to it immediately or, dare I say it, a younger generation who were still at school when the game took off will be more likely to be influenced by word of mouth from friends, virtual or real, who are already involved in the game.

This is exactly why the use of forums, blogs and the syndication of interesting and helpful content on the internet is a must to get your message out there. It is as important as ever, especially in the wake of a couple of high profile scandals within the last couple of years, that online Poker sites are seen as being transparent and communicating with the customer, keeping them updated with the latest news, tips and being totally accessible.

The underlying point is that Poker is an extremely sociable game. Even Facebook have got a Texas Hold Em application to encourage people to use their site rather than their competitors. In the "real world" more and more pubs, the very ones that it has been suggested are being deserted for home games, are having to come up to speed and offer Poker as a modern alternative to the old favourites like darts and dominoes just to try and bring the punters back in. So, dont be shy with your customer base get the wheels rolling on a social networking online marketing campaign today if you haven't already done so.

One question that I have been asked about over and over is why do I get encoding problems when copying text from word to a HTML document? or why do I get strange characters in my text in my database tables and how can I stop this from happening?. A little understanding of the problem helps to get to grips with why this happens, how HTML handles encoding types and what types there are. This has always been a problem but it really has only just started coming to light due to the fact that most web pages were originally mainly English, as now pages can contain multiple languages all with special characters such as accents, encoding types can easily get confused substituting these extra characters incorrectly and causing ugly results.

A basic understanding&.To get some basic understanding a coded character set is a set or collection of symbols and each character set has its own unique ID, this is referred to as a character code point, a representation of these code points is defined by the character encoding set&. Stay with me on this. An example is ISO-8859-1 which is basically referred to as Latin 1, this is an extended ASCII character set that includes some extra characters for some various European languages, also there is a 128bit character ASCII set that contains letters, basic punctuation and numbers for the English language. The largest character set, or what could be classed as the most comprehensive, is the UCS or Universal Character Set which contains over 1 million code points and contains almost all characters for all known, or widely used languages today.

The UCS is often referred to as the ISO 10646 character set, some older browsers may struggle with this character set but most modern browsers support this, HTML supports any character found in this set. However the character encoding between each document may change and this is the root of all character encoding issues, when a missing definition is encountered (a reference to a character that does not exist in the defined encoding) an erroneous character is substituted in its place, basically the browser takes a guess, which is often wrong. This can also occur when different encoding types are used throughout a page as you can only define one.

Okay the old solution&..As you can guess people wanted to use a character that may not have been supported in the current character set of that page (the defined one), so character references in a numerical format was used this was basic HTML character encoding such as for a hyphen, this sorted the problem at first but later the result was a whole host of other issues.

So a modern or better solution was born&.UTF-8, Unicode Transformation Format or 8-bit UCS, this was and is the solution to the problem. This is basically an extension of the old ASCII encoding and contains a lot more characters in its set. UTF-8 supports a huge range of characters by utilizing more than a single byte of storage for the characters that need more, this means that it retains its 8-bit assignment but can use multiple bytes for a single character, In more detail UTF-8 encodes each character in between 1 to 4 octets (8 bits per byte) So for example 1 byte is needed to encode the 128 US-ASCII characters which is the Unicode range U+0000 to U+007F (as before), 2 bytes for Latin letter with diacritics (including Greek, Hebrew etc), 3 for the Multilingual plane and 4 for rest.

There are others that have a base use of UTF-16 and UTF-32 but this should be steered clear of as they dont support the ASCII standard. In English this is a huge collection that should contain all that is needed for a multilingual page.

So how do I force UTF-8 in a document or creating a UTF-8 application&.In HTML you can define this in the header () or by the various other ways such as response.header in ASP and header() in php. You would assume that that was it&&. Wrong. The largest problem is that most of the string functions in PHP and ASP assume that the string is encoded in ISO-8859 (This uses 1 byte), we have established that UTF-8 can use more than this depending on the character. PHP has a solution for this in the form of the mbstring extension, this supplies PHP with a multibyte version of the standard string function allowing for the UTF-8 multiple byte usage.

As for Classic ASP take a look at Response.CharSet but sticking to a singular character set for a page I have found to be the best answer.

What about my older applications&.Short and sweet answer, try to stick to one character set per page, PHP as above has an easier solution but the truth remains. It will be work and coding to update to support the new characters in legacy code.

Oooh, social media! It seems the first thing people learn, after of course how to turn their computer on, is how to connect on Facebook; how to tell no one in particular what you are doing in 13 words on Twitter; and how to get the most from the audio scrobbler on last.fm. In addition, blogs are, as ever, still on the rise, and consumers are increasingly looking at the comments, reviews and thoughts of others when considering a purchase or engagement with a brand or company.

The truth is, social media is generating a lot of noise and for good reason 78% of marketing pros asked by Coremetrics annual Face of New Marketer survey considered social media marketing to be the principal means of getting one-up on the competition. But, (and its a quandary) only 7.7% of online spend was allocated to it, as opposed to 33% to online advertising and 28% on online promotion design and implementation.

So why are these experts saying one thing to each other, and doing something completely different with their budgets? Well, the bulk of advertising on social media sites like Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace etc. follows the old-school accepted model of pushing banner ad exposure. This does provide cost-effective reach and frequency (not to mention some degree of targeting especially with the likes of Facebooks ad platform), but at the end of the day, these ads arent really doing justice to the social media phenomenon. In fact, the only people really benefitting are the thumping great ad networks such as Advertising.com and DrivePM (who identified quite cleverly that the social media sites had monstrous supplies of unsold ad exposures to include into their packages as part of their network offerings).

So why doesnt the tried and tested display model work with social media? Well, display advertising (or, more broadly speaking, forms of push marketing) isnt going to work with audiences as fast moving or niche as those frequenting social media. Add to this the fact that most social media users decisions relating to social media sites are based upon friends recommendations and referrals, and that the thought-processes of social media users are fuelled by self-promotion and social engagement, and you quickly appreciate what the problem with traditional display advertising is. In order to engage the user, there has to be something that is of value that very same user get that right and you are onto something good.

And, it neednt be complex. Simple solutions that work for social media are advertising funded applications much better to integrate with the community than sit on the outskirts begging for their attention. In laymans terms, were talking about developing applications which run ads whilst engaging the audience, and sharing the advertising revenue with developers. Note though, that this still seeks the endorsement of the user&

So what do we think about social media? Well, away from advertising in the traditional formats mentioned above, here at The online marketing store, we believe the key to good social media marketing is all about word of mouth something we all know is a stupendously valuable resource for the growth and sustainability of any company. Its not directly a marketing channel in its own right of course, being a conversation amongst your customers (potential and existing) about what they want to buy, what they dont want to buy, what they like and loathe and of course where they go to feed these requirements.

Conversations like this give a genuine, rock-solid marketing opportunity, but at no point should this opportunity be (wrongly) translated into the right to gatecrash with a hard-sell pitch.

Integrating your business into this is necessary, with huge potential benefits in research. A blog, for example, can serve as a publicly accessible area where conversations between consumer and company can be published and recorded. By analysing this, it is possible to identify where a company might be falling short with regard to the competition, where they are currently excelling and any additional services/products that their consumers may be interested in but do not have easy access to currently.

Using this, it is possible to engage customers at the mission-critical point of looking for the information about a product or service they are interested in.

Its self-fulfilling too, as consumers increasingly look for reviews and information from others on a given companys products and services leading up to a purchase. And, if they make that purchase, are more likely to join those creating the information in order to help future consumers make a more informed and relevant purchasing decision in the future.

To Blog or Not to Blog

Ok, the internet is awash with guides from people telling us how we should be writing our blogs and how to make them as SEO friendly as possible. Discussion rages as to whether or not blogs make a difference and are relevant in online marketing, so I want to offer my own take on what makes a good blog.

In the beginning when blogs were in their infancy, they were seen as a personal online diary for people to share their thoughts and feelings with people viewing the blog. In fact, in these early days the word blog had not even yet been coined. Instead, they were referred to as journals or diaries. The term web log was subsequently used, which was changed to We Blog by Peter Merholz (www.peterme.com). Finally, this was shortened to the word blog that we now frequently use.

Today, there are several blog sites that are extremely popular. Wordpress and Blogger are the main players with others such as MSN Spaces being widely used too. Blogs are now a worldwide phenomenon that are both integrated into existing websites or enjoyed as stand-alone sites being a source of entertainment, and information. Blogs can also be a great way to convey a business message or to keep customers up to date with a companys goings ons. Even better, they can offer an insight into a companys ethics and provide an outlet for staff members to share their thoughts with the world.

Corporate blogging gives a companys website a community feel, while still being able to increase their online presence. Blogs can link directly to how well (or not) your business lists on an internet search engine, therefore a clever use of content and associated meta can make a huge difference. This is where Search Engine Optimisation (Optimization) comes in to play. Content of course is key; ensuring that people find something within the blog that draws them in will help to build the readership.

Corporate blogs that have done very well include Dell, Sun and Tibco, but for very different reasons. Dells blog is informative and provides news and exclusives on their range of products and services. Suns CEO Jonathon Schwartz provides his own take on whats going on within his company and Tibco uses an altogether different approach with its funny Greg the Architect blog.

One thing that needs to be remembered, both because it is hugely important and can often be overlooked is user comments. Most blogs have the facility for readers to leave a comment or opinion on the subject matter that has been posted. These comments can provide a springboard for discussion that can raise the profile of the blog and in turn your business. A blog with no comments may mean that either no one is reading or your content is not deemed worthy of a comment.

It has even been shown in a study by Forrester Research that a large percentage of the ninety blogs they reviewed are dull, drab, and dont stimulate discussion. It found that 74% of these blogs do not receive comments, 56% of them use articles, news, and press releases that are already present elsewhere on their websites. It is of little wonder then that 53% of B2B marketers approached in the study said that blogging was not relevant to their strategy.

Providing you remember that a blog is a way to offer news, opinions and discussion on your products and services then you are more likely to do well. A blog that is regularly updated with fresh, well written content will attract a regular readership that will not only improve your rankings on search engines but will also play its part in your online marketing strategy. You do not have to be funny, in fact informative blogs do just as well, but rehashing content from elsewhere will not help your cause, therefore is strictly a no no.

As long as you enjoy writing the blog posts and are passionate about the subject matter then the chances are that your blog will do well. However, the fact remains that not everyone has time to write, moderate, and maintain their own blog (after all, we are all busy individuals) which is where online marketing specialists come in. A company that provides SEO services will be able to ensure that your blog is written by experienced copywriters who possess the knowledge to write on your behalf and provide the necessary engaging content.

More information on how a professional SEO company can help you get your blog of the ground or to revitalise an already existing blog, why not pay a visit to www.theonlinemarketingstore.co.uk and find out how they can help you.

The Problem: Link Building.

Link building is perhaps the single most important factor you should be thinking about when trying to improve your online position. It can be an incredibly time consuming and difficult process but high quality relevant links can mean a lot in the online world. The reason for this is that search engines try to qualify the results displayed in the search results.

To do this they track both the number and quality of incoming links to a particular website. If the search engine finds that your site has a large number of high quality links that compliment your site then it is more likely to give you a higher page rank.

There are services available that promise to link your website to numerous others for a set fee. This all sounds well and good until you find that the majority of the links provided have absolutely no relevance to your own business.

These services are otherwise known as link farms or bad neighbourhoods and in reality they can be very harmful to your online business. Search engines consider these types of links to be spam and will give your site a low page rank, if they even bother to rank it at all.

Solution: Get to know Your Neighbourhoods!

Whilst it is a good idea to participate in link exchange programs, be sure to investigate any websites that could potentially become links to your site. Avoid link farms or bad neighbourhoods at all costs and keep an eye out for any websites that have been penalised in the past for reasons such as hidden text or gateway pages as these too are likely to be viewed as undesirable by the search engines.

And finally

Successful search engine optimisation (SEO) relies upon constant research and updates because what works today might not necessarily work tomorrow. Everyone involved needs to be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their marketing campaigns and must be prepared to research and adapt.

By choosing to hire a professional SEO company like Search Logic you are ensuring that your website is in safe hands. A qualified online marketing agency will be in up to date with all the latest techniques and SEO theories leaving you free to sit back and enjoy the rewards of a successful online marketing campaign!