Make no mistake. In the kind of ocean the world-wide-web is, it is essential that you learn to navigate if you do not want to get lost. Building a strategy for your online business is going to help you reach your destination easier and faster. In the absence of being strategic, most of these untargeted efforts would only prove to be a big waste of efforts, money and time. Not knowing your way, or the marks that you want to set are a huge disadvantage to begin with.

Looking strategically is big help

Strategy is a lot about how to think more holistically. It enables you to be innovative, lead teams while helping you deliver value tactically daily.  Shouting at people through television ads are actually days of the past when it comes to online marketing, and no more does this work like it used to. The consumers are really looking at different forms of consuming media, the social media scenario is a good example of this changing scenario.

Seeing what you would have otherwise missed

Normally, we are all on the ‘hit’ mode, and trying to work things out in order to generate value. We are constantly working out, planning and making our way through the thick and the thin of the day. Since we lose a strategic eye, there are a lot of instances, which come as glaring situations or opportunities that simply tend to pass by.

The big question is, when you are busy spinning the wheel and trying to get work done, are you really having the time to provide value to the organization?

You’ll miss the bus. This is why, being strategic gives you an opportunity to derive more of value in this marathon. This will mean, halting your daily grind, analyzing a consumer and finding what exactly are they looking for. Understanding the media and developing contacts with them, and giving them a clear picture of what your plans are all about. Looking at data to understand patterns, user behavior and other relevant feeds; this will mean that as a strategic thinker you are providing more value by increasing your customer list, and actively engaging, re-engaging and retaining customers.

Set aside time to think

Set aside time on a daily or weekly structure to think more holistically as a marketer should. Get to know what people really want from you. Marketing is not pushing or advertising products or services, it is about truly understanding what is important in a marketplace. It is a process of creating value in an industry which will eventually lead to obtaining customers and retaining them.

Take professional help

Consultants will be very helpful for strategically thinking over problems in any organization. Firstly, they provide a fresh set of eyes with a wide angled outlook for your business. They are capable and will be more objective about features, content and other aspects. They will externally analyze a business, an industry, and the customer, and suggest recommendations that you can implement.

Moreover, consultants are also tacticians who help alleviate your daily support needs. Whether it is managing communities, managing SEO or PPC campaigns and many other factor professionals can effectively address. The truth, however, is that they will be able to give you that free time, which you needed to think strategically. After all you know your business better than anyone  else ever can.

Your web strategy is crucial

Spend enough time developing your web strategy. It is very important to think strategically as businesses begin to evolve online. Understanding the growing online market is more important now than ever to make that difference which will set you apart. Your web strategy is what will chart your course and help you score for a long, long time.

A diagnostic SEO assessment is the complete troubleshooting of the data of your website .The most important thing is to get a complete picture of how the engines are crawling and indexing your website. Summarize all the keywords and their impact on the search engines, use tools to check the inflow of traffic. In short identify completely the weaknesses and strengths of your website. This troubleshooting is must before kick starting the action. By action here I mean extensive SEO implementation and major site redesign. SEO diagnostic audit is all about gathering the maximum relevant data on your website and analyzing it before the SEO team gets into action.

Image Credit: http://www.siteposition.ca/var

Let’s summarize the major components that come under SEO diagnostic audit.

On-Page Factors

• The website domain should be analyzed in terms of title, Meta tags, code weight and placement. The sections and categories should be scanned to check whether they are related properly to the interior pages.
• The ranking for specific keywords and its relevance to content of the associated page should be summarized.

Off-Page Factors

• The link building of your website should be analyzed here in terms of the quantity and quality of links going in and out of your website. A procedure for thematic link building should be set in.
• The social media impact on your account should be tracked and steps should be used to enhance it in your favor.
• The data of impact of links on the Page Rank should be provided to the SEO team.

Site-Wide elements

• The site architecture and navigation should be checked. The pages should be scanned to take note whether there is any duplicate content issue.
• The dynamic URLs linking the interior pages of website should be found and instructions should be given to make them either user friendly or into static URLs.
• Site latency should be checked to help in keyword analysis.

http://i2.tinypic.com

A search engine friendly CMS has to inculcate the simplicity and management of a CMS and the website optimization advantages of SEO. A CMS atleast should not create content, dynamic URLs and queries that the search engine crawlers prefer to give a slip. The system should let the user create customized Meta tags and use them according to page relevance, static URLs and titles to help the optimization of site.

Some systems allow the user to optimize the content live from URL on the web. The SEO compatible CMS should allow the user to optimize the content as they create it. The CMS should have inbuilt SEO tools to let the user create and optimize content then and there. For this the CMS should allow users to easily use keyword rich static URLs, title tags, customized Meta tags and image alt text.

A few tips to help CMS lure search engines!

• Link Quality Not Quantity That Matters

Try to optimize your CMS to link highly trafficked sites to your website. More the quality inbound links, more the search engine will be interested in your website.

• Meta Elements

It is important to use Meta descriptions and keywords in relevance to your site to pull in the crawlers. Now days search engines do not give that much importance to these but it is better your CMS lets you customize these at ease.

• Say No To Dynamic URLs

The number of dynamic pages a search engine can index are limited. If at all you use dynamic pages make sure that not every search engine crawl the dynamic and static page. A Dynamic URL like “http://www.yourseite.com/prod.php?id=23485&blt=234″ might be skipped by a search engine crawler as too many parameters included might clash with webmaster parameters. Inbound links tend to be less on dynamic URLs as any user prefers static URLs as they are easily understandable.

• Alt Text

Alternative text must be added to all images other than the purely visual ones. Using targeted keywords inside ALT text and TITLE text parameters in your IMG tags is a widely recognized SEO best practice for increasing page/link relevancy. Plus, it’s a great way to improve usability for the visually impaired

• Get JavaScript’s In External Files

This helps in better management of documents and the page weight gets reduced. The search engines generally do not desire tons of data before actual content. Placing JavaScript’s in external files takes care of this problem.

• Headers And Emphasis On Keywords

Use headers for important text with regard to meaning to increase the relevancy. Single out those keywords only which reflect the content rather than complete inline font sizing.

• Free CSS

A SEO compatible CMS should give a free hand to CSS. IT should allow the use of CSS without restrictions on design or layout.

• Negative Values Concern

A very useful CSS technique but spam alerts to the search engines can be caused due to negative values. The problem here in terms of progressive design has to do with image replacement and the SEO concern somewhat conflict here.

There are so many blogs being created daily on the internet Blogging .CMS platforms like Blogger and WordPress have made it really easy for anyone to start a blog. While some are hosted on separate domain names, others prefer to use the free service (like example.wordpress.com). Every individual or company tries to cater to a niche and blogs about it. But the internet is such a platform that even a niche becomes a marketplace, full of people talking about the same stuff; and the niche no longer niche.

So how do you distinguish yourself from others  blog and share similar interests?

Use favicons!

Favorite icon (favicon) is an excellent free branding tool for webmasters and blog owners. It helps you to create brand awareness by displaying a little icon in the title bar of your blog.

Also, favicons attract more traffic to your blog by standing out against others who don’t sport a favicon themselves. Increased traffic means more readers, more subscribers and this gives you an opportunity to have more repeat readers. No matter, what subject or topic you blog about, you must use a favicon be recognized for your work.

Some other benefits of sporting a favicon are:

Tabbed browsing becomes easy:
When multiple sites are open in a browser, it becomes difficult to switch between the relevant sites. But with a favicon, you add another level of usability to your blog which helps the visitors to find your blog quickly before other blogs.

Site bookmarks are easy to find.
Usually we either bookmark our favorite sites in the browser or social bookmarking sites. Having a favicon for your blog helps in differentiating and browsing through the complete list of your bookmarks.

Maximum visibility in RSS readers.
While we all subscribe to various blogs to stay in touch with the latest updates, sometimes it makes our RSS reader look crowded. With a favicon, it becomes easy for the reader to read updates from your blog before others. And if you have an interesting story to tell, chances are that the reader will land up on your blog.

As you would have realized by now, favicons are essential to be recognized on the internet. Sporting a cool and relevant favicon will not only get more visitors to your blog, but will make those visitors look for it whenever and wherever they can. And that will indicate that you are someone special and standout from the rest of the bloggers.

I have been a fan of Copyblogger since quite some time now and love the way Brian creates great content. One of Brian’s recent post discusses whether blogs are a part of the social media or not. While reading his post, a new thought triggered my brain. The thought was, whether lifestreaming has killed blogging?”

I remember, around 12 months ago, people were crazy about getting a free blog from Blogger or WordPress. Blogging allowed them to express themselves and gave them great satisfaction, since they were sharing their feelings with the world. But with time things change. While some bloggers remained active, others dropped out, simply because they did not generate enough readership to keep the comments and conversation rolling. The resulting frustration was enough for them to never look back at their blog, again.

And today, with tools like Twitter, Friendfeed, Posterous, etc. lifestreaming has appealed to masses. People prefer to use these services because it takes less time to express yourself. It also allows them to track real time updates and helps in establishing a connection easily. Sometimes, there are things which one cannot express on a blog regularly, say like what I had for lunch or at what time do I exercise, etc. But with lifestreaming, all these things are possible as you can pass on the crappiest of your act to the bunch of people who have nothing better to do than admire your updates.

Don’t get me wrong but I have lived both blogging and lifestreaming. And somehow blogging makes me more happy as I can target my posts in such a way that they benefit my readers.

I was very surprised when Steve Rubel quit blogging to embrace lifestreaming. I somehow just fail to understand how someone can get his message through just 140 characters. Maybe that’s one of the tricks that I need to master to increase my twitter following!

Chris Brogan’s explains this scenario by drawing an analogy between the two by saying – “There’s a difference between making a meal and grabbing a snack. Eating only snacks can lead to us getting flabby.“

Lifestreaming does provide more speed and action to a conversation than blogging but sometimes this can go offtrack. Its like somebody starts discussing about a football match, praises the team coach, digs his personal history and the discussion moves on. As you can see in this case, the conversation about the match lost its importance, maybe because the history of the coach was more attractive. With blogging this condition will never arise as it contains a targeted message.

To conclude, I would re-iterate that I prefer to blog than lifestream. What about you?