We’ve a couple of interesting tidbits to present today on the subject of Internet technology, unrelated but nonetheless interesting. Each affects our daily use of the Internet.

First off, we have a major trunk line latency issue from yesterday afternoon that affected tens of thousands of web sites and general Internet access over a wide area. For those unfamiliar with the structure, and without getting too complicated in an explanation, our Internet is carried over major trunk lines that are supported by such companies as Qwest, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, to name a few.

The signal from your little desktop through your Internet Service Provider (Comcast, or Verizon, or AOL, etc.) passes over lines provided and supported by these major trunks, through numerous servers along the pipeline to get to the server that hosts the web site you are trying to reach. It would surprise you to learn how many different server boxes and trunk lines your little signal, your little request to get to Google or Amazon or YouTube, passes through before you arrive there. Yet, it also takes milliseconds to travel all that distance.

But, sometimes there are traffic jams along the way, or systemic failures or little “brownouts” or speed reductions on those trunk lines. These are referred to as “latency” issues - - signals that are slowed for a multitude of reasons.

Such was the case yesterday afteroon, 12 November, around 4:20. Verizon had some of those “latency” issues, and access to tens of thousands of web sites and servers that rely upon the Verizon trunk line for service were adversely affected by this. If you were on line around that time, you may have noticed that your email slowed down a little, or a site you were trying to get to wasn’t there.

These little “hiccups” in the system happen all the time, more than you might expect. It’s one of the reasons good hosting companies have multiple connections to the Internet instead of relying upon a single trunk line to the virtual world. When one trunk line connection is experiencing those “latency” issues, hosting companies simply switch to another connection line.

In KISS’s case, that switch yesterday was to Qwest and away from Verizon. We use the resources of a site you might find interesting: Internet Health Report. You can see the listing and configuration of the main trunk lines, and you can see where traffic might be jamming up a little when it happens. It did happen yesterday, and for a while those of you who were online might have noticed a little blip.

Verizon is back up to normal speed and productivity today, and there is clean bill of health being given to the Internet as these words are being written. It will happen again, maybe not with Verizon the next time, but it will happen again. And again. And again. But it gets sorted out quickly when it does happen.

The other tidbit to share with you has to do with spam. A “Well Done” shout out goes to a couple of ISPs and federal law enforcement officials in California. A company in San Jose, McColo Corp., suspected of being a major U.S. hosting service for international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via email, had its plug pulled from Internet connection this week.

Immediately thereafter, monitoring services reported as much as a 65% drop in spam worldwide as of Tuesday evening. Seems like a reasonable conclusion to reach that there was a cause/effect relationship here, and a clear indication of some good detective work having been done.

We’ve promoted the most severe punishment for those found guilty of spamming in past columns, and we haven’t changed our minds. Estimates today, or at least before McColo Corp’s plug was pulled, put the number at over 1 billion pieces of spam around the world every day. Those same estimates suggest it might be more than 99% of all email sent each day, too.

For the moment, then, we can report that the Internet health is good today, and, spam volume is down for a while. Two good tidbits to share.

KISS has added a free resource to our site for downloading, a booklet entitled “The Evolution of Writing - a Primer on Web Copy Writing and Search Engine Optimization.”

We’ve helped numerous clients rise in natural rank position on the top Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, following very basic rules of web site content creation. This Booklet is a solid Primer on those basic rules, and will help you understand what needs to be done to help your site’s rank position.

It’s an easy to follow guide that provides not just the fundamental concepts, but also do this/do that instructions. It also includes a half dozen past columns on the subject of SEO and web copy writing.

You’ll find it on our Marketing page in our Services section. We hope you will find it useful.

While the primary purpose of solid search engine optimization work is to improve organic rank on the major search engines, it is not the ultimate goal of the effort. Many website owners loose sight of this simple truth. People will say what they want is a better rank position on Google or Yahoo, but what they really mean is they want to improve sales, whether it is a product they sell or a service they offer.

Let’s break this down a little bit and go through the basic elements one by one. Better rank on Google or Yahoo? Sure, but for which keywords? It’s not hard to achieve a high, perhaps even top 5, rank position on Google or Yahoo for a chosen keyword.  Truly, it’s not.  But, the more important question is whether the keyword for which your web site enjoys that top 5 rank position is the right keyword for you.

The right keyword?  Yes, choosing the keywords for which your web site will be optimized in order to achieve that high rank position is crucial to the end game purpose of the exercise. Begin with a list of keywords (single word or phrase) that you believe a person is likely to use in a Google or Yahoo search for which you want your web site ranked well.  That’s where you begin.

We have a client in Massachusetts in the telecommunications business.  They sell, install, service and consult on telephone systems and VoIP.  We also happen to be a client of this business, too.  Assembling a list of keywords for Mark Worster at www.askunitel.com was a fairly easy task.  The company installs telephone systems for SMBs (small and medium size businesses); it installs VoIP systems for SMBs; it consults on telecommunications, telephones and VoIP systems.

The keywords for which we optimized his home page copy included:  “telecommunications company massachusetts,” “telephone installations company massachusetts,” “voip systems company massachusetts,” and “voip consulting company massachusetts.” The point to be made is we decided first what we wanted Mark’s site to be ranked highly for, and it had everything to do with what we thought SMBs would type into those little windows on Google and Yahoo.  The Ask Unitel web site is ranked in the top 10, if not the top 5, for each of these keywords and multiple variations of them on Google, Yahoo and Ask, by the way.

The more important point, though, is that these are keywords actually being used in searches by those SMBs, and that those searches are being made by companies looking to buy a new telephone system or hire a VoIP consultant, and therein lies the most important part of this practice.  High rank positions for the most appropriate and important keywords will bring visitors likely to convert to customers.

How do we know that?  We review the Ask Unitel site statistics, among which are the search strings (actual searches) bringing visitors to the site.  Real searches conducted by real people.  We also look at the number of page views per visit (how deep into the site they went beyond the home page), and the average length of visits.  These stats tell us whether the home page’s “call to action” was clear and easy to follow; whether the content elsewhere on the site is effectively presented and sufficiently informative to hold their interest.

Visitors who go deeper into a site beyond the home page, and who linger on those deeper pages, are exactly the type of visitors a web site owner wants.  Beyond that, he wants just one other thing - - a sale, or a telephone call for an appointment, or a contact form submission - - he wants the visitor to become a customer or a client.  That’s the point of the exercise.

Being able to brag that your site is ranked #1 on Google means nothing if it does not help your business grow.  What keyword you rank #1 on Google for, and what the site traffic as a result of that #1 rank does when it gets to your site, are far more important.  If you are enjoying a high conversion rate (visitor becoming a customer or client), we know a couple of things:  you are ranked well enough on search engines for the right keywords to get you the right traffic; and, your site is ready to receive that traffic (strong home page call to action, easy to follow process, well presented content elsewhere on the site, etc.).

So, #1 on Google?  So what?  Are you getting more business from your site?  Only if the #1 rank is for the right keyword(s), and brings the right traffic.  Optimized copy and a good rank are only the beginning.  The site performance data thereafter tells you what you need to do next.

Don’t think it stops at newly optimized copy, because it doesn’t.  Or, at least it shouldn’t.  Listen to what the site stats are telling you after that, and continue adjusting.  Measure those conversions to find out if you did it right, and if you didn’t, make the necessary changes.  It’s a perpetual work in progress, and you can’t take the chance your competition will sit on its hands.

SEO is only the beginning, and business growth and a high conversion rate are better bragging rights than a high rank on Google.

KISS has had a long and very enjoyable relationship with the Wellfleet Oyster Festival, and with its sponsoring organization, SPAT (Shellfish Promotion and Tasting), that dates back to 2003. We were pleased to be asked by SPAT once again for assistance earlier in the year, and the result is the launching of a new website at Wellfleet Oyster Fest.

The site was given a revised look and feel, as well as a new site map. It is not uncommon for a website to grow a little like topsy sometimes, and it becomes necessary to wrangle in the tentacles and orphaned pages, and develop a new site map. In addition, we installed a new image uploader for photos to be submitted by revelers at the festival in October, as well as an online shopping cart for SPAT clothing and gear. The cart will be available online in September, and will serve as an excellent resource for Christmas shopping, as well as preparation for next year’s event.

We’re very happy to be a part of the SPAT effort, and are anxiously anticipating this year’s Festival on October 18 and 19.

In the world of search engines, it’s not necessarily the first born that grows up first. It may come as something of a surprise to those who haven’t been into this Internet thing from the start that Google was not always, well, Google.

One of the ways to tell that is to consider for a moment which search engine’s name has become also a verb. We all understand immediately what someone means when they say “I googled it.” How many people have you heard say they “yahoo’d it?”

Yahoo was formed in 1994 by a couple of Stanford University grad students, Jerry Yang and David Filo. By 2000, Yahoo was enjoying annual revenues of $1.1 billion, and was growing at a 90% rate, while Google could muster only $19 million in sales. Only five years later, Google was passing Yahoo in annual revenues, and this year Google will log about $22 billion, while Yahoo will see “only” $7.5 billion.

According to eMarketer, search advertising (the placing of advertisements next to keyword search results) represents about 42% of all online advertising. Google got the jump on annual revenues because it learned how to do that better than Yahoo, and it’s pretty much as simple as that. The figure for search advertising this year will be about $10 billion.

Yahoo is imploding in the minds of many industry watchers, and those same folks are questioning the wisdom of Yahoo’s breaking off discussions with Microsoft earlier in the year about a sale. MS was talking something in the area of $31 per Yahoo share, and today Yahoo shares are trading at around $12.75 per share. What a difference eight months makes, and causes those same minds to wonder how long Jerry Yang should remain at the helm of the company.

While that is not the point of the column, it does point out the extent of Yahoo’s descent in less than eight years. Where once it was the king of the hill, it’s been long ago dethroned by the company whose name today is both a noun and verb.

The point of this column is, though, the size of the market. The two major players represent the bulk of the search advertising market, that $10 billion, and between them take in over $30 billion in total revenues from their efforts. These are companies that did not exist 15 years ago, so the rise, and the fall, have been rather meteoric.

Microsoft’s interest in Yahoo should not be underestimated, even though there have been no public comments of any substance made by either about resuming acquisition discussions. The fact is, $7.5 billion is still a lot of money, and Microsoft has heard Google’s footsteps for a long time. Wouldn’t MS like to take on a little bit more of the online ad market to build up its MSN efforts in the industry? Remember, now, that MSN Search is also a member of the top five search engines in the game, and a purchase of Yahoo makes it number two behind only Google.

It’s quite a story, this Google and Yahoo thing. Rapid growth out of the box, the only show in town, the newcomer overtaking, the distance between the two widening, and all in the span of only 14 years and $30 billion dollars. The next chapter is going to be pretty interesting to watch - - the playground of the overnight billionaires always is.

Search engine optimization and web copy writing are a mainstay of online marketing and web site promotion. We all have a notion in our heads about what advertising and marketing are, and the television series “Mad Men” is closer to that common notion than is SEO. A different approach is required, and too many people don’t get that.

Public relations, marketing and advertising in the everyday on the street world are all about influencing people’s decisions and affecting emotional response. Examples are easy - - use our deodorant or you will smell bad; use our make up to look younger; eat our food because it’s healthier for you. Words are chosen carefully, as are colors and graphics, and in the case of television and radio, as is background music.

On the Internet, though, the dynamic is a little different. With over 120 million web sites and growing, the competition to be found is keen, to say the least. A single web site is going to get lost in that shuffle unless it does something to stand out in the crowd. But how to do it?

We all seem to know that the way to do that is to get ranked highly on Google or Yahoo. I say “seem to know” because while everyone says it, too many web site owner’s actions are not consistent with those words. Too much time and money are spent, and wasted, ignoring SEO “Best Practices” and in particular, by confusing the right audience when creating the content for their web site.

It’s really quite a simple concept, and yet too many web site owners just don’t get it. People aren’t going to see your web site unless search engines send them to it. The most beautiful home page on the Internet is going to be wasted if no one sees it. Neat little bells and whistles, lots of moving parts and pizazz on that home page won’t amount to any good if no one can find the site.

The first audience for home page content are the search engines. Google will tell you that, and even though the words are different, the import of Google’s WebMaster Guidelines instructs you to optimize your site for good search engine indexing so as to help achieve a high rank position for your important keywords.

Never mind how at the moment, as I’ve written about that so many times in the past, and we offer a Free Resource on this site for those interested in the basic steps. By the way, you’ll find that SEO Booklet here. The important concept to grasp firmly is that no one is going to see your web site unless search engines send them to it.

Since search engines are still word value-based systems, that means you need words on your home page - - in the right count, in the right places, in the right structure, with the right keywords incorporated and in the right density, and with the right ongoing efforts of content growth and content refresh. If you follow those practices and remain faithful to them, your web site will be rewarded with a good indexing and a high rank position for your chosen keywords; and, if you have chosen your keywords correctly, the right people will find your site. By “right people” I mean visitors who convert to customers.

Yes, the content on your site generally has to help you close the deal, and that means good products and services presented well and priced right. But, again, you have to get your customer to the site first, or all of that good content won’t be seen. That is such a basic notion, and yet too many people don’t get it.

On the Internet, marketing is about convincing and cajoling search engines to rank you highly so that people find you easily. Convince search engines you deserve that high rank position, and the traffic will come. This may seem obvious to you as you read these words, but a week doesn’t go by that I don’t run into someone who just doesn’t or refuses to get it. Their sites will suffer and their businesses will fail, and they’ll wonder why because the site was so nice to look at, and it had so many cool features, and they had worked so hard on it.

It’s simple, but not necessarily easy. If you know it takes a good rank on Google or Yahoo to help your online business efforts, then go after it. Understand your search engine audience and develop your content accordingly. Be smart.

I was involved in a lively back and forth last week on an Irish business forum we follow. It was on the subject of web copy writing and search engine optimization, and it was also on web site design. The last seven or eight web sites in Ireland I’ve been asked to review and offer comment on had many things in common, not the least of which was the first heading and the first lines of copy.

Every one of them used their first heading, the h1 tag, for “Welcome” or “Welcome to my Web Site.” The first paragraph was thereafter devoted to welcoming visitors and inviting them to have a look. Some of them even went further in the copy to tell the visitor/reader how to navigate the site - - click here, go to, etc. It was such a shame to see all that valuable home page space wasted.

Search engines look at the headings on home pages as a spot where they expect to find a keyword. Now, how many searches do you think will be conducted in the next twelve months for the word “welcome”? Yet, that word in those web sites’ h1 tag, the first heading, would make search engines believe the site was about “welcomes” and that is how it would be indexed.

The back and forth, though, brought out a point not discussed in previous columns, and I thought it worth mentioning. We’ve been involved of late in the development of affiliate sites for clients - - web sites that promote the products or services of a company that are presented on the company’s primary web site. These affiliate sites are small, virtually mini-sites, with just a home page, a products or services page, and a contact page; there’s a spot on the home pages for a blog feed, and a blog that is common to them all. The blog is also a major part of the primary site.

An example of this is for our long-standing client, and friend, Unitel Communications. This Massachustts-based telecommunications, VoIP and IT company installs, services and consults on small and medium business telecommunications systems and needs, and has been our service provider in this regard for five years now. We built a new site for Unitel, customized and installed a blog, and built three affiliate sites for the company, each discussing different products and services offered by Unitel, each providing a rich text link to the primary site.

The home pages of each mini-site contain content that is optimized for good search engine indexing for the keywords Unitel wishes to be a high result for, and the blog on the primary site feeds an excerpt from each new post to the home pages of the mini-sites. We’ve made sure the content is not duplicative of the primary site, but the keywords were chosen with some care.

The point of this exercise was to expand content on the Internet that directs people to the primary site. We maintain the mini-sites for Unitel, and regularly update the content. We installed Google Analytics code on each site so we could measure the traffic, search strings and referrers, and we’ll continue to do so, making adjustments in content based upon that analysis from time to time (another good SEO practice).

Content remains king on the Internet, and this exercise has expanded the content pertaining to Unitel, making it more likely visitors will find the site. We’ve also followed this same practice for ourselves, and this gets to the specifics of the back and forth on that Irish business forum last week.

Our site, KISS Computing Ireland, ranks well on Google.ie and Yahoo.com for the headings that appear on its home page, including “web copy writing and seo ireland.” We had posted some comments on the forum about that subject, and one of the forum members took us a wee bit to task for that keyword. He observed that although we ranked in the top ten for it on both Google and Yahoo, when you de-constructed the keyword, the site was not as well ranked.

He was correct, to a point. For the keyword “web copy writing and seo” the KISS Computing Ireland web site was not ranked as well. However, another of our sites, MLM Celtic Enterprises, is ranked in the top ten for that de-constructed keyword. The site is, as you might expect, a mini-site optimized for the keyword “web copy writing and seo,” and it does generate good traffic for us. Some of our biggest work in Ireland came to us as a result of that site, as a matter of fact.

You might want to consider a series of mini-sites for the same purpose. It matters far less how traffic comes to you, or how business finds you, than it does you be found. As I said, content remains king on the Internet, and this is another positive SEO technique that works.

Earlier this month numbers became available for search engine company performances in the second quarter of the year. While the money Google, Yahoo, MSN and others made might not be of interest to you, if you are active in the CPC (cost per click) business for your web site, it should be. Google changed its strategy and processes in Adwords earlier this year, and the second quarter performance was the first indicator following those changes.

In case you missed the news, Google has dropped the number of advertisements it will place on a search results page. The average number of ads per keyword shown on Google in the US has declined from 6.5 to 4.0, a nearly 40% drop. That could reflect on our poor economic environment at the moment, but it’s more likely the result of Google’s ongoing efforts to improve the quality of its ads. The theory is not dissimilar to the evolution of search results over the past five years.

Remember a time when Google and Yahoo took great pride in telling you, at the top of your search results page, that it had just presented you with 3,700,000 results for your search? Did you notice how over time that number dropped significantly? It was not because there were fewer web sites - on the contrary, as that number now is well over 110 million. Rather, it was each search engine’s effort to present a higher quality of results, results that were deemed to be more relevant to the search.

It’s the same philosophy Google is employing with its new practice of presenting fewer advertisements in its Adwords program. Google believes it will place more pressure on advertisers to prepare a higher quality advertisement and landing page for the chosen keyword, thus making the sponsored results more relevant to the searcher.

What about money, you ask? Fewer advertisements placed in the Sponsored Results space would mean lower revenues, you say? Google doesn’t think so, and in fact Google believes that because the results will be arguably more relevant to the search, an advertiser’s conversion rate will be better, and therefor would justify higher bid prices. Conversion rate refers to the number of clicks it takes to generate one transaction - - whatever that most desired response might be, whether a sale, a telephone call, a contact form submission, an email address. The quality scoring Google employs in the advertisement and the landing page is something those who have a CPC campaign underway (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing) will need to watch closely.

As for those of us who concentrate on web copy writing and search engine optimization for better organic rank, it means the same thing. It will be important to monitor changes as they occur and their effects on both the paid and the organic results as Google strives to provide the better results they’re targeting through paid search now but at the same time improve their revenue.

There’s one other point worth mentioning here, and that is how one views sponsored results vs. SEO. In earlier columns, I’ve recommended SEO over sponsored results when a web site owner has to choose just one. Sponsored results should be viewed as a temporary means of promoting your web site, and not a permanent solution. The reason is a pretty simple one: once your web site has achieved a good organic rank, it becomes less necessary to spend money on a CPC campaign. So, temporary in the sense that it might be necessary only until you’ve made it to the top 20, or better still, to the top 10 on your Google and Yahoo.

The thing about bought traffic (your CPC campaign) is that it stops when you stop buying it. However, when you’ve become ranked well organically as a result of your SEO efforts, that traffic just keeps coming, or at least it keeps coming so long as you maintain the practices that got you ranked well in the first place.

KISS has launched a new web site in the form of a Political Blog for our client, Harrison Lives. The name of the site, appropriately, is Harrison Lives, and it’s full of columns he’s published on Political and Social Commentary. Although he seems to have something of an edge, a bite, to his writing, the columns are entertaining, informative, and thought provoking. His take is a little outside the main stream of political talking heads, although his writing has fed some of the cable political pundits with some good lines.

We wish Harrison well with his writing. While KISS does not necessarily endorse the political opinions expressed on the site, we nonetheless support his right to write what he wishes. Check it out - you might be mildly amused. Oh, and you’ll have to visit the site to learn where the name comes from.