Here are some of the things that many Internet Marketers think are essential:

• WordPress as a publishing platform
• A dot com domain name
• A sitemap
• Meta keywords
• Adobe Acrobat

Let me work through the list and explain why I think you don’t have to have these items.

WordPress

WordPress is great as a blogging platform but it is developed by the Open Source community who like everything to be free and making money is well down on the list of priorities.

A default install of WordPress is not good for Internet Marketing purposes with poor SEO and an ugly default template. So it takes a lot of work configuring plugins to crowbar it into shape. Also, you need a nice theme that will also need some tweaking for SEO. And then you will have every page of your blog linking out to the theme designer.

For a marketing site, it is better to have a lean, purpose built site that is optimized in every way to sell product or rank well to get traffic. This can be achieved via coding the site directly or using a Content Management system such as XPath.

Look at the sites in the top 10 results of Google for product searches. How many blog-powered sites do you see?

A DOT Com Domain Name

These are hard to register for short keywords so I wouldn’t sweat too much if you can’t get hold of the domain name that you want. A dot net or dot org will do just as well for search engine ranking. And yes you can use dot org for commercial sites.

I agree that DOT COM is most desirable since it is what people will remember best, but for SEO, it is not a priority.

A Sitemap

This is to allow a search engine to find every page on your site. However, it may be so thorough as to reveal pages you don’t want to be found such as your product download page.

If your site navigation links can be traversed to find all the pages, then you don’t need a site map.

A secondary use of a sitemap is to submit it to the search engines to say come take a look at your site. But I find that the search engine spiders aggressively crawl my sites when I actively update content and build inbound links.

For large sites, a sitemap can be useful to indicate the relative importance of the web pages. But for our small sites, I don’t think this is an issue.

Meta keywords

Webmaster guidelines published by search engines tell us that these are ignored, so using them can only have a negative effect where you are revealing exactly what keywords you are optimizing for. Most marketers want to keep this information private, especially when they are paying for traffic.

Adobe Acrobat

For reading PDFs I much prefer Foxit PDF reader. This doesn’t keep prompting me to upgrade and reboot my computer.

And for creating PDFs I use the free Open Office Writer which can also padlock the PDFs with a password.

So, there we are. Do you agree that these essentials are not really essential for Internet Marketing? And maybe I missed some more from my list?