B2B companies are failing to make the most of the Internet as a marketing medium, according to new research by B2B Marketing, in association with the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau).

Although online advertising is worth over a billion pounds in the UK, B2B marketers have yet to fully embrace Internet advertising formats with only 39 per cent using display ads, while 39 per cent use pay-per-click search and 29 per cent use online classifieds.

However, there is good news for email, with 83 per cent of respondents using it, largely for product promotion (54 per cent) and company newsletters (49 per cent). Only 47 per cent use email for customer acquisition.

Encouragingly, B2B marketers plan to increase their online advertising budgets in the next 12 months with 63 per cent of respondents saying that the internet ‘will take more of their marketing budgets in the future’. Furthermore, almost one-third (29 per cent) pledged to increase spend by up to 20 per cent in the next 12 months, with 13 per cent saying they will increase spend by more than 30 per cent.

More than one-third (38 per cent) said that conducting business online has helped expand their company, with 35 per cent believing the Internet has revolutionised their marketing communications. Interestingly, only 12 per cent believe that the majority of their business activity will eventually be conducted online.

Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB, comments, “These results suggest that B2B advertisers still have much to learn about online advertising. Email marketing has proved effective for the majority of businesses but it’s our job to educate them further on everything else the Internet has to offer. Online has revolutionised the way we do business and during the next 12 months we’ll see B2B companies wake up to the true potential of the internet as a sales and customer relationship tool.”

Source: B2B Marketing

The Benefits of CSS in SEO

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language that permits web designers to attach style like spacing, color, font, etc. to HTML documents. Cascading style sheets work similarly to a template; permitting web developers to label style for an HTML element and after that apply it to the number of web pages required. Thus, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are collections of formatting rules, which control the appearance of content in a web page. With CSS styles you have great flexibility and control of the exact page appearance; from precise positioning of layout to specific fonts and styles.

There are many benefits of using CSS. One of the major benefits of using CSS is the easy maintenance of the website. Maintenance of a website made with CSS is much easier compared to the ones which are table based. CSS splits the presentation style of documents from the content of documents and makes the maintenance of the site easier. Aside from being able to make site extensive changes with no trouble through one CSS file, the clean code it generates makes it easier to update.

Webmasters can characterize the appearance of a site in one place, and change the whole site by changing just one file. With CSS, when you decide to craft a change, you simply alter the style, and that element is updated automatically anywhere it appears in the site. So, if you have to alter the color of all pages in your site, you only have to edit one style sheet. This saves you enormous amount of time, particularly if you have to edit each page independently. CSS generally requires less code compared to table based.

This makes your code lighter and cleaner. Clean code makes a huge difference in maintaining your site.

Cascading Style Sheets Benefits and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Another major benefit of CSS is that it makes your website SEO friendly. The reason behind this is simple. The search engines spiders are actually very lethargic. They do not go through the bundles of HTML codes to get to the indexed codes. Font tags and tables make the HTML code very cumbersome; thus, reduce the accuracy of the results. If you use external CSS files to design and determine the design attributes; the HTML code will be clean and it will result to better search engine rankings.

With some knowledge of CSS you will be able to change the code layout without destroying the actual visual layout. For instance, you could easily make the main content of your site to show up above the header or navigation menu in the code of your website; thus will help to show search engine crawlers the importance of your content. I personally saw a huge boost in rankings in fully CSS web sites. When I look at someone's website that was built using old school HTML code with tags such as: TABLES, TD, TR, FONT and so on, I feel awkward and immediately convert that site to a fully table-less CSS layout.

There are many tools on the Internet that shows the actual code over text ratio weight of your site. Do you know why? Because modern search engines such as: Google, Yahoo and MSN love light-weighted websites. They want to see your content; the text, not the code. With CSS everything is possible. You practically externalize excessive code into external file, thus leaving the actual page clean and simple.

Website Accessibility

CSS makes your website more accessible. The number of users browsing the web through hand held devices are continuously growing tremendously. It is estimated that by 2008, one third of the world's population will be using hand held devices for accessing Internet. It is always important that your site is accessible to them also.

You can make an additional CSS document particularly for handheld devices like cell phones, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document; which is not achievable with a tabular layout. CSS benefits accessibility chiefly by separating document structure from presentation. By separating style from markup, webmasters can simplify and clean up the HTML in their documents, making the documents more accessible.

Increases Download Speed of Your Website

CSS code downloads faster than tables. Browsers read through tables twice previous to exhibiting their contents; first to work out their structure and then to determine their content. Moreover, tables are shown on the screen as a whole, no part of the table will be displayed until the entire table is downloaded and rendered. Tables support the use of spaced images to assist with positioning. CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables.

All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then stored on the user's computer; while the table layout stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads. Also with CSS, you can manage the order of the items downloaded into the screen. You have the control to make the content appear previous to the slow loading images, which is liked by most of the web users.

Cross Browser Compatibility

For all webmasters out there! CSS makes your website more professional. Taking the benefits of CSS like making your websites load faster and easy to maintain, you save a lot of time and labor. This in turn makes you lots of money. CSS makes links of the website look more attractive and dynamic. Using CSS, you can slot in rollovers easily and effectively, without having to use a single character of JavaScript. Thus, CSS gives your websites a professional look.

It is wise to use CSS to jive with the current trends of the industry. All major browsers like Firefox, Explorer, and Netscape presently recognize CSS and it is definitely safe for web designers to use CSS now.

How Minor SEO Adjustments Can Double Search Traffic

Much has been written about the importance of the title element for search engine visibility. But I'm going to revisit the topic, because there's one point I don't feel has been given sufficient coverage. That point is the value of keyword-rich titles on older websites. More specifically, I'll talk about aligning your title elements with your key search phrases for maximum visibility. But first, let's start with a definition of a title element, just so we're on the same page.

What is a Title Element?

Search engines give a lot of consideration to HTML title elements. The title element is within the HTML code that makes up each of your web pages. To see the title element, just right-click on any web page and select "View Source." This will show you the HTML code that makes up the web page. The title element will be near the top, between two tags labeled as "title."

The HTML title also shows up in the blue bar at the top of your web browser, up above the navigation buttons and the address bar. When your website shows up on a search engine results page, the title will be prominent above the listing.

Your HTML titles should be (A) based on your key search phrases, (B) designed to pull in readers like a headline, and (C) relevant to the actual content of the page. Use a different title element for each page of your website; this gives you more search coverage and less redundancy.

Keywords + Titles + Older Website = SEO Wonderland

Whenever I encounter an older website with poor use of titles -- or not titles at all -- I start to get excited. (In Internet years, an "older" website is five years or older.) I get excited because I realize the potential gains that can be made with very little effort.

Search engines often favor older websites when determining rank. This is especially true of Google. The big 'G' loves older websites, and if those websites are properly built -- with descriptive, keyword-rich title elements and plenty of relevant content -- Google will usually reward them with excellent ranking and visibility.

That's why I get excited when I see client websites with weak or absent titles ... I know it's an opportunity for big gains with minimal effort.

Case Study: Keywords and Titles on an Older Website

I once worked on a website that was nearly ten years old, with an abundance of quality backlinks coming in. The website's owner complained that people weren't finding his site through search engines for certain phrases. He sold mountain cabins and rented them out as well, so there was both a real estate and a rental side to his business. He was doing well in the search engines for the real estate phrases, but we was off the radar for the rental phrases.

Without even investigating the website, I had an immediate hunch this was yet another keywords-in-title scenario.

First, I validated the regional "cabin rental" phrases he had in mind. Yep, they were getting plenty of search volume. And the competition level was reasonable, considering his was an older website with plenty of relevant backlinks.

Next, I moved on to the site itself. It only took about five minutes to find the problem. His rental-related title tags were too generic. They mostly consisted of non-specific phrases like "Availability" ... "Rentals" ... "Seasonal Calendar" and the like.

The first thing I did was modify those title elements to help people and search engines alike. "Rentals" became "Blue Ridge Mountain Cabin Rentals" and so on. In fact, this was the only change I made at first, because I wanted to judge its effectiveness in the absence of other modifications.

Long story short, after adjusting all 125 of his titles, his rankings rose considerably and within a relatively short time. Where he was on Page 7 for a rental phrase before, we was now on Page 1. Predictably, his search-driven traffic for these phrases more than doubled.

The "How did you hear about us?" form field told the story: Google. Internet Search. Yahoo Search. Google. Internet Search. Etc.

I know it's all technical and algorithmic and what not, but I swear it was almost as if the search engines were waiting to reward this website with maximum visibility ... if it would only do something with those titles!

Search Engine Optimisation That Works

There are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques that work and there are also supposed SEO techniques that do not work. It is up to you to find what will be most effective for the purpose of bringing more traffic to your website. In order to know how to optimise your site you need to know what the practice of SEO really is.

A comprehensive definition of Search Engine Optimisation is the following: The act of designing and marketing a website so that it ranks high in search engine results. SEO is accomplished in a variety of ways.

One of the most important components of Search Engine Optimisation is making sure that each page of a website consists of specific keywords. This is usually done by providing content such as articles or blog entries which contain these specific words. Along with that, it is recommended that site owners or operators only concentrate on one primary keyword (and its synonyms) per page.

All the primary keywords on site pages are the base keywords from which are drawn more keywords. For example, a site owner may write an article that contains the primary keyword "budgeting", and then from there are drawn secondary keywords such as financial budgeting, budgeting software, personal budgeting and so on.

You will even be able research some of the secondary keyword phrases and find even more specific keyword phrases to use on your pages which are drawn from them. For instance, you can derive "personal financial budgeting" or financial budgeting software from the phrase financial budgeting.

The more specific the keyword phrase that you choose for the page the less competition you will have for a spot high in the search engine results for that page. Therefore, one piece of advice is to try to find as specific of keywords as possible which will draw a fair amount of traffic to your website. However, one word of caution is not to put too specific of keywords on your page that no one would use to search for items. Otherwise, that keyword will bring little to no traffic to your site.

Another very important aspect of SEO is the process of link building. Simply put, the definition of link building is the act of acquiring inbound links to your site from other websites. Link building is accomplished in quite a few ways. One of the ways to build links is to join link exchange groups where you can offer your website link in exchange for someone else's.

The trick to making this work for you is to gather as many relevant links from others as possible and place your site on the pages of those whose websites are of a similar subject as yours. Mutual (reciprocal) link exchange is often also though of as a great way to advertise for free as well, and can be done automatically or manually. However, you should do it manually because it will keep you away from bad neighborhoods.

Always try to provide excellent value to your visitors, which in turn can get you links from authority websites. There are also other ways to help improve your site's popularity as well. For instance, you can join free blogging sites such as Blogger.com. When you create a free blogging site you can add links to your other website(s) and this helps increase the number of visitors that view your site pages.

You can also make your site more well-known to people when you list it in e-zines, free and paid search directories, search engines, and newsletters. There is also the possibility of promoting your site by presenting podcasts, streaming video and audio, and other publications which will increase the amount of site traffic you will receive. There are countless other offsite and onsite SEO techniques that you can. Offsite techniques are measures that you take outside of designing your website (i.e. link building) in order to promote your website.

Onsite techniques for SEO are ones that involve designing your site (i.e. providing relevant content and placing primary keywords in title tag) in a way that web crawlers will be able to read it, which increases the likelihood that your site will be listed at the top of search engine results. Make your site valuable for your visitors, keeping search engines in mind; and try gaining links from authority and relevant websites.