I’m going to bang on until I’m blue in the face about this subject, because I will never, ever understand why so few companies survey their customers before making decisions which will affect them. Surveys are fast, and if you already have your customers’ email addresses - free. Yes, of course there are caveats about the responses (you only get them from people who like filling in surveys, and these might not be representative of your customer base as a whole) but the results are infinitely better than just going on a hunch.

Make Marketing Decisions by Using Surveys on the B2B Lead Blog discusses the whole topic and links to two online survey tools which can get you going today. I know of a company which once surveyed its customers in the middle of a marketing meeting, and had results back before the meeting was over. How cool is that?

The first thing to do when trying to improve your site’s performance in the search engine results is to work out what words and phrases you’re trying to improve it for. These search terms are called the “keywords”. Determining what these should be is not as obvious as you think, and we’ll be covering that right at the start in our Business Marketing Online Insider Programme.

Once you’ve done this, you need to work on making those keywords prominent on your pages. Three Ways to Give Your Keywords Prominence on Search Engine Journal gives you a good start here. If the stuff about “source ordered content” seems baffling, it shouldn’t do to your website designer. If it baffles them, get a new web designer.

Increasingly, experts are suggesting that you focus on getting your website visitors to do the one thing you want them to do, rather than impress them with the breadth of options you offer. Having built up a successful online publishing venture myself on precisely this principle, I find that most gratifying. Analysts amongst you will be interested in a recent study which compared the ability to “find a camera which you like” on the Argos, Comet, eBuyer and Currys websites, discussed in Argos beats competition with user-friendly web design on the E-consultancy blog. Click through to the PDF report in the article, and have a read. It’s fascinating stuff.

Ever wondered if maybe you can’t see the wood for the trees on your website? You should have done. Looking into the subject, I found this great post from earlier in the year on the Search Engine Marketing Exposed blog. Why would someone come to your site, how will they find you, why would they stay, and why would they come back? Simple questions to ask, hard ones to answer. But you should. Read Four questions every web site owner needs to answer for more.

Creating an email marketing campaign? Components of a Successful Marketing Email from the B2B Marketing ROI blog gives you a nice checklist of things to consider. According to the article, subject lines, email content, formatting and timing are the key factors contributing to open and conversion rates. You’ll have to do some Googling to get some in-depth advice on each subject, but it’s a good place to start.

How to use Google Alerts to find out if your site gets hacked on Blogstorm is a few weeks old now, but it’s a great idea which will only take you a few moments to set up. Now.

The theory is this: if someone hacks into your website (and don’t think it can’t happen), it’s quite likely they’ll put all sorts of spammy stuff on it like ads for certain pharmaceuticals. Naturally, your site won’t have those words on it. So set up a “Google Alert” (you do use Google Alerts, don’t you?) which will email you if ever certain words appear on your website. The key is to add the term “site:www.yoursite” to the search term on the Google Alert. Neat.

So you’ve got this blank piece of paper in front of you, and probably some dry technical data to incorporate into a really stunning piece of marketing copy. Where do you go from here? In The Secret To Writing Really Great Content from ClickNewz, Lynn Terry lists a few ideas. Nothing radically new here of course, but nicely - er - written, and we can all do with being reminded of some of these things from time to time. Personally, I always find one good way to get things written in a lively way is to get the expert to talk you through the subject, record it, and use a genuine transcription as the very first draft of your piece.

I used to be one of those kids who spent all his exam revision time drawing out revision timetables, and then running out of any time to do revision. Now I read books about online marketing all the time, and subsequently have no time to put the ideas into practice on my own websites. Well, it seems like it. Anyway, I was wondering which books I’d class as the best I’d ever read, so I did the usual thing (this is a good technique, by the way) and entered the names of three of them into Google, in one query. The idea would be that if there was a web page in the world which came up with those three titles on it, the page might well be a longer list of great books compiled by someone with similar taste.

Bingo. 10 “must-have” books (in our opinion) for web marketing on the Conversion Rate Experts blog is just such a list. Something to take on your next holiday with you.

I’ve gone back to an article which is a few months old today, because it might give you some inspiration if you’re wondering whether to invest in your website in the current economic climate (or it might give you some ammunition if you’re trying to persuade someone to let you). In How a Website Makeover Can Help “Recession-Proof” Your Company on the B2B Web Strategy blog, the author argues that in a downturn, “even if you don’t aim for market share growth, you’re likely to find that you need more leads to produce each closed deal. That makes it a very dubious proposition to shrink funding for the marketing activities that produce those leads.”

Worth a read.

Today’s linked-to article is a fairly throwaway piece, but it allows me to bring up an important subject. In Keyword density: How many keywords are too much? on the Industrial Search Engine Marketing blog, the author ponders whether there’s a magic number for keyword density.

Hang on a moment, if you’re thinking “keyword what?”, this is for you too.

Keyword density is the percentage of the copy on the page taken up by “keywords”, or your targeted search terms (the ones you want to be found on Google for). To reinforce that your page is about “red widgets”, and to help your page score more highly in Google for “red widgets”, you should probably include the term more than once on the page. But how many times is too much? That’s something we need to consider carefully.

I bring this up because one or two people have expressed interest in our forthcoming Insider Programme training course and consultancy service, but have asked me if it’s worth it, as their website is controlled by a parent company, and there’s nothing they can do to modify the design. My answer is that even if your input to your own website is limited to providing news and copy, there’s still a lot you can do to improve things - such as considering the keyword density of the copy you provide. We’ll be investigating this a lot further in the Insider Programme.