Oh, those competition-crazed aussies

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey.

Competition-crazy Aussies hain't got no chance (already)

IF THE race has started to develop really fast broadband in the Asia-Pacific area, Australia has already all but lost, a leading telecommunications analyst says.

And if that situation is to change, the Government has to encourage investment in taking optical fibre cables not just to street corner nodes, but all the way to homes, he says. (The Age)

No kidding. Most of us in the technology and media trades have been saying that for .. 5-7 years?
Leith Campbell makes a legitimate point though: "..The political will to invest in broadband isn't there..." Political will? Australia has politicized a fear of the Internet. Internet-phobic as become a syndrome of every election.

Helen Coonan has illustrated repeatedly that she is lost when it comes to understanding the Internet. The numbers seem meaningless to her. Even easy ideas such as the rest of Asia, US and Europe already enjoying broadband speeds of 100 times or more what is available here, seem to just make her eyes glaze.

Telstra has called on the Minister for Communications, Senator Helen Coonan, to cease and desist distributing misleading and incorrect information, and is demanding she put the record straight.

In letters being sent out to 500,000 households throughout the country spruiking the Government's OPEL sweetheart deal, the Minister is incorrectly claiming there is no wireless broadband service in areas where Telstra's Next G™ wireless broadband service is clearly available. (07 Sept)

Telstra went out to the addresses the Minister complains about, and found broadband available. One city she mentioned had been funded for broadband through her own Communications Ministry!

And, the raving debate, - like hyenas to a corpse - rages on: the ACCC has been accused of retarding investment in infrastructure by imposing upon Telstra to share its infrastructure network cheaply.

The ACCC's justification for giving competitors cheap access to Telstra's copper lines was the "stepping stone" theory - allowing new entrants to gain sufficient marketshare to invest in their own infrastructure as they step up the "ladder of investment". That theory has been completely shot down - if the evidence of the low levels of telecommunications investment in the chart below wasn't enough.

The fact that government leadership failed for years to cause the problem doesn't seem to be a popular topic. Or is just that soppy-eyed leadership is taken for granted? Maybe a little more coffee will help...
Sheesh, how am I supposed to make a peddling websites in Australia? Folks gotta be able to see them first. Sphere: Related Content

Spinning WiMax in Oz

The SNAKE TALES shows a red biplane burning out as it swirls one way then the next. The snake and the doggy look up. "Spin doctor!", says the doggy.
Obviously a political commentary, it could as well describe the problems of the Howard campaign as the debate about WiMax technology in Australia. 'Course, it's alll sorta tied in anyway.

Howard caught flat-footed
The Internet caught the Howard government. In the last year, Labor candidates Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard used FaceBook to kick off their team candidacy for PM. Rudd and Gillard are far more attractive onlne than Mr Howard, who seems to have a very hard time giving a straight answer.
In 2000, John Howard resolved all of Australia's questions about the Internet with: "The Internet in Australia is just fine." --and that, was that.
In those days, only 30% or so of Australians had access to the Net; and nearly all of those were on dialup. Dialup over phone lines that needed to be replaced, either because they were old or because they were poor quality when installed.

NBT
The NBT (next big thing) in Australian politics is always either the 'Bush' - referring to regional Australia -or the Aboriginies. References to anything positive in those directions are good for a short polling bump, at least.
Internet access to the Bush is an active debate right now because big name competitors are looking to supplant Telstra's highly politicized and outdated efforts.

Behind the scenes, a lot is going on.
Telstra wanted in 2002 to dismantle its CDMA and HSPA systems without offering the 3G alternative. That would leave millions in the outback without reliable access to the Net. For once, the regulators stepped in for the consumers and forced Telstra to keep the old system running until NextG was available.
Telstra owns about half the exchanges in regional Australia; the rest belong to AusStar.
OPEL (Optus-Elders consortium) has won the $959 million tender to provide WiMax to the Bush, and urban areas. Telstra was pointedly forbidden to be part of the bidding, and has launched a public campaign against WiMax.

What is WiMax?
Confused yet? You should be. Seems everyone else is.
Intel will introduce chipsets for WiMax in 2008. When something has been committed to mass produced hardware, you gotta think it really is "coming." ('Scuze the sarcasm, pls...)

An information sheet issued by the government says: "WiMax chip sets will be incorporated in a range of electronic devices, including PCs, cams, personal music devices and PDAs.

Chinese techs call WiMax "4G". They're installing it all across the country.

Is it WiMax?
Technically, WiMax is not 802.11n. It is 802.16e. Another source of confusion is 802.11n - incorporating advances for wireless networking devices - covers a similar radio spectrum (bands 2.3GHz, 2.4GHz and 3.5GHz, and 5.8GHz.) Experts are all over the Net saying 11n will make all cabling, even fibre optics, obsolete - and many writers are calling 11n 'WiMax.'
Further complicating the issue is that all of the radio spectrum is regulated in Australia. In the US and Europe, many countries leave these frequency bands open for public use.

Then the fine print tells us the proposed Australian WiMax rose will only encompass the 2.3GHz, 2.4GHz and 3.5GHz bands.

On Friday, (Communications Minister Helen) .. Coonan tried to downplay debate over standards, saying people did not care about the technology, only the service they received.

Too true.
That dog bites both ways, Ms Coonan. Ignoring the technology for spin is not a decision-making process. Someone in the government has to understand the technology and make the right decsions.
Last year, the raging debate over who would provide FTTN (fibre to the node) only served to disgust the public with the whole process. In the end, no one could decide. Telstra and OPEL-lite were further undermined in their submissions by a German company that had already done FTTN for a decade.

Best answer
No matter what technology is employed, it will still mean shared bandwidth. Shared bandwidth means congestion at times. It doesn't seem too hard to see that whatever system is chosen it has to provide for expansion and for high peak traffic.
The fact is no matter what wireless protocol is pursued, it will have to be supported by a reliable connection, and that connection is obviously a fibre optics cable system. This simple fact seems to have escaped the debate somehow.

If dear reader, you want to delve deeper into this morass, I'll give you the link to my search on AustralianIT. Enjoy the great white cloud.

Before Australia can be competitive in the Asian or US-UK markets, the country needs reliable access to the Internet at speeds that make the Internet more than an aggravation.

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey. There is too much room for spin in this debate. It really is like a swirling old biplane about to crash. Sphere: Related Content

IT daws fewer students

The news is always a conversation.
This morning, the Herald Sun reports half as many VCE students have chosen IT compared to last year. As an Internet/IT proselyte, that is disappointing. I can't help feel these decisions are shaped by the government's Internet-phobic attitude in national advertising.

IT less attractive
There is no question IT has become a less-certain path professionally.
Since the dot-com bubble burst, job listings have become miniscule. HR departments are listing jobs requiring a laundry list of skills for much lower pay scales. (Some of the listings are comical: requirements for years of experience in technologies which have only existed for months, or a year or two.)
The media has given a lot of coverage to out-sourcing to India and Pakistan by large institutions and banks. It's a discouraging job market. No one seems to be reminding these banks and financial institutions that there are no privacy laws in those countries. Reports have reached Australia of CDs full of credit card and bank details being sold in open air markets!

TAFE enrolment drops
The same article reports "TAFE colleges are failing to meet the nneeds of the private sector and should be overhauled," according to Federal Vocational and Further Education Minister Andrew Robb. -- It's bloody well about time, Mr Robb.
TAFE enrollments dropped 13% between 2001 and 2006.

Australia's institutionalized vocational training has been centered in the TAFE (Technical and Further Education) system. The system was a good idea initially. A fast-track public-private partnering to produce the skills Australia desperately needed. But the TAFE system has become bureaucratic, unweildy, and political -- incorporating the worst of Australia's mateship and corruption.

TAFEs take on the affects of colleges and universities. The names chosen for these for-profit businesses are at best deceptive. There may have been the intention to encourage entrepreneurship originally, but by putting 70-85% (depending on source) of government funding into the TAFE system as opposed to spreading the funds around for small, better-focused organizations, the TAFEs have become as much a hinderance to flexible learning as examples.
Because large TAFEs are publicly well-funded yet remain private businesses, these institutions become competitors in the open market with an inordinate advantage.
Projects which would be funded on their merits privately are subsidized by using (not employing, using) students. Instead of paying for skills on the open market, the TAFE lets the government and the students pay for the right to develop entrepreneurial projects.
The result quashes new ideas and entrepreneurship, especially for Internet entrepreneurs.

TAFE means business
Public funding 'initiatives' are formed based on the submissions from TAFEs to suit the TAFEs. TAFE executives and employees sit on the decision-making boards, and direct the funds from private initiative to the TAFEs. (e.g., WiMax technology is planned to provide broadband speeds for regional Australia in 2008.)
Business entitites are formed specifically to take advantage of this public trough feed.


SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey. Sphere: Related Content

Australian IT: Bad Form

Sometimes playing with research tools is a little sobering.
I love a good cynical laugh, especially at the expense of some ignoramus in the law around Australia more than most, but this article from AustralianIT is just headline grabbing nonsense. Most of the article has nothing to do with the headline, "Judge says Keep IT simple, stupid". The rest of the article is just loose change about a new MySpace for dogs, Florida electoral machinery, and other fluff.

The excerpt about the judge is taken (supposedly) taken from Annova. Yet there is no link. Annova functions in Australia as a distributor and an eBay store. They are an electronics retailer from the UK.
The story did the rounds in the UK and then got picked up by The Australian and even an aussie student's forum post.
The student's forum post and the AustralianIT story have an important point in common: Neither indicates that this is a UK judge. What is sad to find is this man is also a very learned QC who even writes regularly for medical journals. For a man who doesn't know what a website is, his career is all over the Internet.

This sort of loose journalistic effort only feeds the fires of those who see the Internet as the enemy. And I resent this sort of thing even more coming from AustralianIT, which has been an important resource for me to learn about IT and the Internet in Australia.

Now this is from Annova, picked up by TimmyB on Oreilly, and it is wryly funny.

Just a raw plug for my first SEO clients:
Short Cut Computers belongs to Steve Trim, a friend who actually paid me to learn this stuff and put it to work for him.
And Steve Trim's other business, Barcode Solutions., which will be my second project. Sphere: Related Content

Telstra takes to the mattresses (or blogs)

Telstra has drecided to join the rest of the blogging world. In the usual Telstra style, the new blogs are professional looking and full of user-unfriendly bugs. A massive array of corporate blogs, all carefully edited to put the company's best foot forward.
Too bad the company's policies prevent most of the country from joining the free world.

Buggy
Most of my customers are small businesses. SME's (Small- to Medium-sized Enterprises to the rest of the world); "small business" to the ATO. Considering that these businesses employ 85% of the workforce and are 96.4% of the registered businesses in Australia, I was particularly dismayed to find the new 'Small Business' blogger was the former soppy 'Lifestyles' blogger.
She goes on and on about her fascination of the insects she calls 'nerds', but the nerds at Telstra have their revenge: neither the RSS feed nor the Comments on her blog work. (She may not want the Comments to work.)
You can almost hear the gnomes chuckling.

You have to read the news like a conversation.
When the person blogging about small business in Australia keeps citing studies done by large retailers in the US; and calling Internet entrepreneurs "nerds", it's not hard to conclude she wishes she lived somewhere else. (Hint: She certainly needs to work somewhere else...)
One thing is certain: She has little or no idea what it means to develop the Internet as a resource for a small business in Australia.

Her first article was for 'Breast Cancer Day' at the Telstra Dome. Laudable, but hardly 'News you can use'. (A leftover from her former project?) She is far out of touch with the needs of small business in Australia.

A few of the other blogs have undefined RSS feeds, too. And Telstra wonders why it's losing money? I did find a useable feed on the homepage.

Comments
There are 4 separate blogs complaining about the regulatory requirement to keep CDMA in place until the NextG network is running properly. The blogs are full of people complaining about holes in service. The chief technical blogger advises getting a magnetic antenna; and one comment says it will make a nice paperweight.
No one dares complain about the fees. (I guess they leave that to the Dodo ad.)
Telstra whinges on to make its case. All Telstra has to do is explain that they want to cripple their competitors and are willing to leave 1/2 the population without reliable broadband.
Strangely, most of the Comments on these blogs seem to be Telstra shareholders. The shareholders want to know why Telstra shouldn't be allowed to make the same obscene profits as steel companies.

CDMA divine
Optus, iiNet, and other carriers in the G9 consortium built their business by sharing Telstra's CDMA network. This was mandated by regulations in order to introduce competition into the market. Only 10 years ago, Telstra was a monopoly. The only game in town.
When Telstra dragged its feet (for 7 years overcharging consumers for piss-poor broadband) on the issue of fibre cabling and then wireless internet access, 9 of these companies formed a consortium, excluding Telstra, and filed a competing proposal to do the work.
Here would be a chance for Telstra to let them know why they shouldn't mess with the Mother Country (..or Mother Nature, or God, etc.)
CDMA will go sooner or later. Telstra probably intended to handle the changeover as they did ADSL: charge heavily for the NextG service as it was grudgingly enabled. This is one case where the politicians should be applauded.

When you read these blogs as a conversation along with the other blogs on these topics, the Telstra gang seems to want to dominate the discussion to put the party line forward. The internet marketing of these blogs seem to be towards Telstra shareholders and employees, too, which skews the tone of the response.
I suppose all's fair in love and war, or business, but as an interested observer, you do get tired of seeing people ground up in the conflict.
Until broadband improves to the point small business can see the efficacy of the Internet, SEO and SEM will only be valuable tools for the privileged few.

Notes:
CDMA -- (Code Division Multiple Access): A technology for digital transmission of radio signals between, for example, a mobile telephone and a radio base station. In CDMA, a frequency is divided into a number of codes. A spread spectrum approach to digital transmission. With CDMA, each conversation is digitized and then tagged with a code. Also known as IS-95A or cdmaOne

Just a raw plug for my first SEO clients:
Short Cut Computers belongs to Steve Trim, a friend who actually paid me to learn this stuff and put it to work for him.
And Steve Trim's other business, Barcode Solutions., which will be my second project. Sphere: Related Content

Success,.. sorta

Just a raw plug for my first SEO clients:
Short Cut Computers belongs to Steve Trim, a friend who actually paid me to learn this stuff and put it to work for him.
And Steve Trim's other business, Barcode Solutions., which will be my second project.

I use the excerpt above as part of my signature on this experimental blog to help generate temporal links to Steve's company sites. It's an experiment to see how the rankings are affected.

Steve's main site, Shortcut Computers, had been designed to be easily modified by him and his staff using FrontPage(tm). It had been up for nearly a year when he became interested in what was happening there. -- Nothing.
The site registered about 35 visitors in a year; most of which were probably Steve himself. It was there for him to say he had a website.

After reading a few books on SEO/SEM, we redid the site.
First, it needed to be more dynamic and easier to use. Still experimenting with options, we mistakenly chose PostNuke for the CMS. PostNuke made some things easier, but overall is a programmers' CMS.
Then the overall appearance was reconfigured. The present homepage reflects this step.
It is at least dynamic, but too many of the pages are lost behind long URLs.
Small problems.

During this process, I began researching SEO/SEM.
First step: Wade through a few books.
Second step: Find the resources needed in Australia.
Third step: Apply those resources to accomplish the goals of the business.

I began "internet marketing" back when AltaVista and Lycos were the search engine paradigms. Google and Yahoo in those days didn't exist. The key to internet marketing was, and still is, LINKS!
Step two was an eye-opener. There simply weren't that many directories and search engines. Two industries, tourism and mining, were well represented. Business listings were made on government or telecom sites. The Yellow Pages in Australia had spawned three different access sites; all of whom charged for listings.

Step three was the real challenge though.
The small company's service area was a number of suburbs on the southeast side of Melbourne. Although this area comprised over 1 million residents, it sat on the bleeding edge of broadband availability. Most of his customers were condemned to dial up Internet access.
(Click the 'Melbourne' tab on the iBurst availability map. There are other similar maps - and more timely - but this one tracks very closely and illustrate the point. Then enter 'Dandenong' to see the availability in the company's service area.)

This company, like 90% of small business in Australia, didn't want to market nationally or even citywide.
Links from search engines were good for natural rankings -- "roamers" in SEM-speak -- but to increase business, we needed visitors -- "convertibles" SEM-speak -- who could take use the services. For that, we needed to target a region not commonly defined: PPC advertising.
For Melbournians, the "southeast suburbs" is easily understood. For Google-Aus and Yahoo7, it means nothing.

We established a blog for the company to demonstrate expertise in depth, and to keep up with changes in the business climate of the service area. Fortunately, the changes came fast and furious in the media. Rupert Murdoch announced on a visit that "Internet service in Australia is abysmal." Optus went public with plans to form G-9, excluding Telstra. Then the bubble-heads in Parliament passed archaic copyright law amendments.
Nothing drives Internet traffic like other media.

Avoiding any more of the details, we managed to get 70-90 visitors per day to the site within 3 months. Page ranks from Google (2), and Alexa(about 260,000) gained over 6 months or so. The site rose quickly to SERP positions 1-4 in most of the service area. The blog is cited regularly on other blogs. We even saw visits on the blog from Canberra.

While I was away in Hawaii, things were neglected. The number of visitors held pretty solid because of the natural search. PPC campaigns were abandoned though, and 'convertibles' waned.

Overall, a success. With the caveat that it can only improve with more attention
What was found and learned about SEO/SEM in Australia was to be applied to another of Steve's enterprises: Barcode Solutions. This has to be easier. Its market is national and international. (Hope springs eternal. It wasn't...) Sphere: Related Content

Latest figures just like the first...

Hitwise reiterates the search figures for Australia. These numbers seem to hardly change.
Yes, Google-Aus and Google dominate the search engine traffic with more than 84%. (Google-Aus: 68.45%, Google: 14.81%). If anything, Google has increased its dominance in the last year.

Yahoo7 (Yahoo-Aus and TV channel 7) are really pulling out all the stops to try to gain more interest in their offerings, but for the highly profitable SERP numbers (Yahoo-Aus: 3.03%); they've only managed to fall behind their pricey competitors at NineMSN (8.20%).
For anyone looking to market a website to Australia, Google is pretty much the whole ball game - Or is it?
The sophistication of Google's search algorithm is lost in the shallow Australian market (more on this later), but the power of being the icon of Internet search is overwhelming to the raw Australian user. Ever heard anyone say: "I Yahoo'd it."?

MSN has taken the perspective of becoming the high priced spread to maximize profits from its marginal position. Makes sense. This is really Microsoft, after all.
I don't hate Microsoft. They've made too many smart moves not to respect them. I just wish more people would learn about Linux, and make the whole software marketplace more reasonable.
But pricing an ad on MSN at $20,000 a month is ridiculous in Australia. It limits MSN to only big business in a country where 96.4% of registered businesses are small (under $2M gross with less than 5 employees, as defined by the Finance Minister.)

Lead by an Internet-phobic government, you have to wonder when the Australian public will suss this stuff out. The entrepreneurial search engine industry is already beginning to diminish. No one knows how to interpret the regressive copyright laws, and that has scared many out of the market.
Even some university projects have changed their focus from setting up a search engine to producing the software.

Just a raw plug for some SEO/SEM clients:
Short Cut Computers belongs to Steve Trim, a friend who actually paid me to learn this stuff and put it to work for him.
And Steve Trim's other business, Barcode Solutions., which will be my second project. Sphere: Related Content