A couple of days ago I drew your attention to Google’s Knol website, and the opportunities which it might give us as B2B marketers. In Google Knol - Google’s Latest Attack on Copyright, respected search engine optimisation specialist Aaron Wall is getting rather worried about the whole venture, as are many other people. However, his criticisms, especially that “house content is favoured by the Google algorithm” are also a reason to investigate Knol. It makes sense to cover all the bases.

Today’s article won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, because I know many marketing managers in industry don’t like “big picture” marketing, and indeed can’t really get their head round it. But for those of you who think it’s important to ask yourselves the fundamental questions, have a read of Questions Every Manufacturer Should Ask about Their Marketing on the Branding & Marketing blog. If nothing else, it’s always worth reassessing how customers view your company.

Whether or not Google’s Knol will be the new Wikipedia is anyone’s guess, but regardless, it’s something you should consider in your marketing plans. Using Google Knol as a B2B Marketing Tool from the WebMarketCentral Blog explains why and how, and gives you some links to examine Knol further. As the article says, “now, the SME can write a Knol page - with full authorship credit for the writer and company - and publish it for the world, with no pressure to write on a regular basis.”

You really should get in here early on.

There are regular independent updates on each search engine’s share of use, such as June 2008 Search Engine Market Share | Nielsen // NetRatings in E-Marketing Performance, but you need to be careful with these statistics and read the small print. Firstly, they’re usually from the US, and things are different here in Europe. Secondly, they cover all web users, and search engine use may be (and indeed, is) different amongst professional users.

In fact, Google is even more prevalent than its competitors in Europe, and the lead is extended even further in trade and techinical markets. So if your site analytics are showing that 90% of search engine traffic comes from Google, don’t be too concerned that you’re underperforming in Yahoo! and MSN/Live Search. It’s probably about right.

You’ve got to hand it to lab equipment specialist Eppendorf, the It’s Called epMotion campaign is a triumph. (You’ll need your speakers on).

I really couldn’t guess what it cost them, but as B2Blog points out, it might only be the equivalent of a page ad in a lab equipment magazine for a few months. And in return, Eppendorf will be getting massive numbers of links from around the internet (like this), as well as loads of “viral” traffic as customers in that market pass the link around amongst themselves. The result will surely be worth far, far more than a page ad in a lab equipment magazine for a few months.

The company has missed a few tricks: it doesn’t seem to have given the page a simple URL which people can quote and remember, and (worst of all) it’s failed to offer an obvious link to the page from the company’s home page (to account for the potential visitors who are just told “have you seen that thing on the Eppendorf site?”). But in general, I can only applaud the initiative.

Here’s something you might like to know more about. Sitelinks in Google results are those entries (normally just the first one) which have a series of smaller links underneath them. For example, you’ll probably see them for the first result if you type “Microsoft” into Google. (You might also see a separate “search Microsoft” box, but we won’t discuss that here).

So what are these “sitelinks”? They make your result look much more substantial, so it’d be nice to have them. But how do you qualify to get them? Search Engine Journal tries to answer these questions in 6 Educated Theories Behind Google SiteLinks. It might give you food for thought.

There are so many aspects of internet marketing where we business-to-business marketers say: “Well, that’s straightforward enough for consumer marketing, but…” and we’re right to say that. But there are also aspects where we have advantages too, and one of those is in generating content for our websites. Getting more content on a site is a huge draw for traffic, both via search engines and external links. And I suspect that your company has a lot of useful expert information it can impart as great content.

Seven Types of Expert Information, part of the Seven Building Blocks of a Destination Website series on Search Engine Guide, discusses some of the information you might be able to create for your website which isn’t sales and marketing material. I bet there’s a lot more than you’d think.

I like analogies, and I especially like them when the analogy is something closely related. In Web Site as Trade Show? on the B2B Insights Blog, author Russ Green looks at the extent to which most of us will go to make an exhibition stand work, and then asks if we “put the same amount of effort and investment into creating a great web site experience for customers and prospects”.

Best of all, however, he touches on all the elements of a successful exhibition stand, and discusses how each of these has an analogy in your website. My own approach might be to get someone junior to attend your next exhibition, and create a series of pen pictures of actual visitors to the stand. Then, afterwards, discuss each of these real visitors (their nationality, requirements, urgency, etc) and see how your website would have dealt with them should they have taken that route.

If you do “pay-per-click” advertising on the web (like the ads on the right hand side on Google results pages), then you’ll find loads of good advice online about making these really effective. However, as Online advertising creative tips on Dave Chaffey Internet Marketing points out, there’s far less advice available on more conventional display (banner) ads. This is a shame, because “pay-per-click” advertising is probably more easily optimised (by changing the ad and testing the results), whereas banner advertising is used as much for branding, making the peformance less measurable. So the article is a useful read: if your ad is breaking the rules listed here, you might want to check if there’s a reason why.

There’s a whole consultancy industry called “search engine optimisation”, or SEO, which has built up around the understandable desire of companies to “get us to number one on Google” (to which I say: “number one for what, precisely?”). And the most frustrating thing for most of these consultancies appears to be the inclination of clients to just ask them to do all the “technical stuff with the code”. That’s a relatively easy piece in the jigsaw, but it’s not going to get significant results on its own, and so often, the consultancy exercise is considered a disappointment.

Another activity is essential: link building. This appears less technical, and clients are less likely to want to pay consultancies to do this. That’s all very well, if they actually do go ahead and do it themselves. But they rarely do, as Link Building and SEO: Time to Get Back to Basics? in the B2B Web Strategy blog explains. Don’t you hate it when customers only let you do half the job, when you know you could do so much better for them? Don’t fall into the same trap.