Cisco  today announced the launch of a Cisco(R) Networking Academy(R) at the University of Management and Economics, expanding the program further into Cambodia. UME will integrate the IT Essentials course into the core curriculum for students at the provincial campus in Battambang.

Not Phnom Penh. Battambang!

Ranking well, however, is just the means to an end. And the best SEO gurus will tell you that SERP rankings are a poor measure of success.

What Web site owners really want, or course, is more traffic, more leads, more customers and, let’s be honest, more payola.

But how do you get there?

Social media provides one of the easiest ways to kick start your online marketing. While there are literally thousands, if not millions, of sites and tools out there that fit the “social media” definition, there are only three that matter: blogging, Facebook and Twitter. (Tumblr, so sayeth The Times, may soon make it four.)

A blog is the closest thing to an online marketing panacea that the interwebs have to offer. A good blog guarantees your Web site has fresh content. (That alone is worth two gallons of Google juice.) Blog posts filter out through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, and posts can be effortlessly pushed out to blog trackers such as Technorati, Google Blog Search and IceRocket.

A blog guarantees your site gets an RSS feed. And a good blog improves your site’s chances of reaching people interested in knowing more about your offerings and your industry. A really good blog can establish you as an expert in your field, or define you and your organization as thought leaders. And a blog gives people who reach your Web site something worthwhile to view, instead of lamo stock images or worse, completely irrelevant content used simply to take up space.

With a little focus, keyword rich blog posts can also improve your visibility in the rankings.

All of that and more from a single, regularly updated blog. And there’s a whole cottage industry of site-makers out there developing tools to make it all one-click simple. Twitterfeed automatically publishes your blog posts to Facebook and Twitter. Ping-o-matic updates more than 20 search engines. That means blog once and hit Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other smaller players with a single click.

A recent blog post (what else?) from Marketing Sherpa titled “Blogs are Becoming the New Front Door for Prospects: Is Yours Open?” highlights the skyrocketing importance of the blog. Although the story is aimed at business-to-business marketers, the same concepts hold just as true, if not more so, for B2C sites.

In Marketing Sherpa’s research, many businesses reported that their blog page had overtaken their home page as their site’s No. 1 entry point. One company reported a 4x increase in traffic, a 3x-4x increase in the amount of time viewers spent on the site, a huge jump on Google rankings and a 70% increase in inbound leads.

Payola!

The Web site for Pagoda Rocks Boutique Guesthouse in Sihanoukville recently launched. The word guesthouse often carries budget connotations. But Pagoda Rocks is far more an upmarket  get-away than a mid-range flop-house. Many of the guesthouse rooms are actually standalone bungalows, with air-con, hot water and ocean views.

From a Web design standpoint, I riffed a lot on what the guesthouse’s local print designer had done, and used a little jQuery for nifty photo presentation. Like every Web site, it’s still a work in progress, but so far, it’s coming together nicely.

Visit: Pagoda Rocks Boutique Guesthouse

A snappy user experience beats a glamorous one, for the simple reason that people engage more with a site when they can move freely and focus on the content instead of on their endless wait.

Preach it, brother.

Short version: It rocks!

For users, WP 3.0 offers a new default theme, Twenty Ten, that allows for customizable  headers and backgrounds and support for drop-down menus out of the box.

For developers, WP 3.0 provides three ginormous new features that make WP 3.0 significantly more powerful than earlier versions.

• custom page and post types
• custom taxonomies
• multiuser support

WP was already a pretty robust content management system, but one of the things it lacked was support for custom content types. Users were limited to only pages or posts. While you could often fake it using excerpts and/or custom fields, solutions were often unwieldy, and managing them were troublesome for both users and developers.

WP 3.0 changes that. Now, in addition to posts and pages, you can create you own content types — movies, for example — with their own associated fields, such as actors and ratings.

Six Revisions has a run-down of what’s new. Mashable has the highlights.

A client calls to say their web site is broken. It doesn’t look right anymore. The layout’s gone bonkers. The pictures have gone missing. Or something like that.

So you do what a web designer is suppose to do — you open Firefox. Then, in turn, Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE8 and, lastly, IE7. And the web site in question looks fine. So you wonder: What browser are they using?

Listen, people. Internet Explorer 6 is suppose to be dead!

And for good reason. It’s a terrible browser (voted top 25 worst tech products of all time): insecure, standards non-compliant and full of bugs. There are blogs and web sites dedicated to its suckiness. The world and the interwebs will be much better places as soon as its finally buried.

Do you part.

Google has. On March 1, the search giant officially stopped supporting IE6. And even Microsoft, after admitting that IE6 was the source of the Great Google China Hack, has begged its customers to upgrade.

So upgrade already.

Or far better.

Get a browser that doesn’t suck.

The Phnom Kulen Program Web site is the latest  release from K4 Media. Still in beta, we put the small, 8-page site out to members of the program and the Google alt.html.critique group (here).

The html.critique group is an excellent place to get honest, unabashed feedback on work. The comments can sometimes bruise the ego, but the sites are always the better because of it. Of course, feedback — both good and bad — is always welcome. If you see something you like, or don’t,we’d love to hear it.

After getting feedback, and making changes accordingly, The Phnom Kulen Program site is scheduled for launch by month’s end.

You can check you Facebook privacy at http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/.

And Quit Facebook totally at http://www.quitfacebookday.com/