Applied Web Tactics for Implementing Business Strategies:

• SEO: "The Black Art"
  • Surprise: many of your site's users are robots
  • The robots crawling your site represent people
  • Optimizing your site... for what?
  • Thinking long-term
  • Re-optimizing your site (and what may surprise you)
  • Thinking long-term
• Website Analytics: Know Thyself
  • Analyzing your traffic to find out who's visiting your site, what they're looking at, how long they stay, where they're coming from, and much more...
  • Reading the statistical tealeaves of your analytics campaign:
    what's important and what's not
• PPC: The Pay-per-Click Advertising Revolution
  • A great way to lose a fantastic amount of money in a very, very short amount of time
  • A great way to make a good deal of money in a relatively short amount of time
  • Reinforcing your current marketing and sales efforts with PPC
  • Using PPC as tool for market research, test marketing and sharpening your campaigns
• The Holy Trinity of SEO and Web Development:
  • Relevance:  Search engines, in particular Google, have introduced a new force into the Universe:  they now reward websites whose content is highly relevant.  If you are running a PPC campaign, the difference between relevance and non-relevance is not a philosophical argument, it's a matter of continued survival.  Knowing your audience and your niche are key.
  • Quality:  Your content needs to be quality, no two ways about it.  Search engines make their living by being useful to people, and if you don't have quality content then you certainly are not going to be very useful: to searchers, search engines, or to yourself.  For more on what quality is, we like to refer to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig.
  • Accessibility:  A good portion of SEO is actually devoted to implementing a website architecture that search engines can easily discover and get to.  You can't get good rankings if the spiders can't find you.  Interestingly, the same trends towards increasingly accessible websites that are being driven from an SEO perspective are tooled by the same technologies that allow people with disablilities to more easily maneuver the Web.  A very good thing indeed.

A Good Website Is...