1. Think Audiences Not Markets

What’s your market? Hire a consultant to help you with your Web-business problems and one of the first questions he or she will ask is, what’s your market? How about eighteen to thirty-four year old, single male college graduates with a dog named Spot; or maybe forty-five to fifty-nine year old married women, who hate their husbands and can’t get their adult children to move out of the house. Maybe, just maybe, they’re asking the wrong question.

The Internet is the single greatest research resource that has ever existed. However, whilst it has solved many of the issues of getting access to information, it has created new issues that have to be addressed. Probably the biggest of these is information overload.
In order to keep up to date with my many areas of interest so I can run my business efficiently, understand what is happening in the online content sector and still have time for leisure activities, I have to be extremely good at filtering information.

do my fair share of web marketing reading on a daily basis and lately I have noticed more and more writers stating that search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer as important for online success. This spin may make sense to those writers (and their financial goals) as they try to push industry cash flow away from SEO, but I disagree wholeheartedly and throughout this posting I will explain why. And I assure you that despite my own inherent bias it will all be very logical and undeniable.

Not As Important? No, SEO is FAR More Important than Ever Before!

There are basically two aspects to SEO, “on page” & “off page” optimization.
“On Page” SEO is easy because it’s totally under your control. It’s simply a case of making sure you have optimized your web pages correctly.

OK, so there is a bit more to it than that, like keyword research, keyword density & frequency, which html tags to use, making sure your site/pages are W3 Compliant, using relative/absolute internal linking structures to feed the pagerank where it’s most effective, using titles and descriptions that encourage people to clíck through from the SERP’s etc.