Ok so we all know about online marketing, SEO, SEF, keywords, Meta data and numerous other acronyms that if you are anything like me drive me totally insane, but are we (that being the royal we) taking full advantage of the tools and platforms that we have readily available to us already.

Long gone are the days where Search Engine Optimization is a “Black Art” and only specific companies charging equally mysterious amounts in fees can help with your search engine optimization, search engine positioning and page rank.

Google has to be one of the most recognized search engines in the world, to such a degree that we actually use the term “Google It” instead of what we really mean which is to search the internet so I will base my comments and thoughts around them.

Google inc make no secret on how you can achieve good website position and page ranking in their search engine, they obviously don’t tell all but provide some great tips on what they see as important. They describe one of the most important steps to improving your website’s ranking is “Relevant Content”.
Google’s newest release “Caffeine” highlights the importance of marketing techniques such as blog articles, news articles and even forums posts. Caffeine web indexing means that new content will now be indexed faster and your website updates will appear in a more “real time” way.

So I guess what I am saying is Google just made the Social Web, Business Blogging, Forums and articles on our websites an even more effective way to promote your business.

Word Count – 263

Copywriters are talented people don’t get me wrong, but writing copy for the web is different than writing copy for print and using copy in your web page that has been design specifically for print could spell disaster for your online effectiveness.

In the cyber world it may seem like the programmers and designers have the ultimate control and power of either the success or the failure of our website, yet if you look closer it is the words, and placement of those words that drive user interaction. The specifically designed logo or the clever section of code that work seamlessly behind the scenes are all major parts of a successful website but it is the words that bear the weight of how we influence our users, convey our marketing messages and convert the sale.

Here are 5 Tips to improving your Website Copy

• Use Effective Headings
• Your headings should be eight words or less.
• Don’t use vague headings – remember you have only a few sections to grab your user’s attention before they move on.
• Include keywords in your heading text.
• Remember you can use your headings as links to more information within your website.
• Title, Title, Title
• Don’t under estimate the power of the title tag of your web page – this is another area that you should be looking to use keyword rich phrases.
• Use different titles, don’t just copy and paste, this is another opportunity to shine brighter than you competitors.
• Drive, Guide & Help Your User
• Drive your user to take the steps that you want them to take.
• Breadcrumb incentives are a great way in influence activity on your website.
• A clearly labelled activity path will increase activity along you “Customer Experience Path”.
• Stay Connected
• Make your pages and content naturally progressive, use links to expand on information and products
• Linking to relevant content or being linked to as the source of relevant content will be beneficial to your page rank.
• Know what you’re Selling
• DON’T babble on about what your widget is capable of by providing a huge list of features, it’s probably of little interest and is a poor way to fill what is prime Real Estate space on your page.
• DO tell your user how the widget will benefit them, how it will make them look or feel, be brutal and tap into the users “needy” side – we all have one.

This is by no means all there is to writing web copy, but maybe a few pointers in the right direction.

Word Count – 448

Blogging is a great way to share anecdotes, information and ideas in an informal setting, but writing for your business is a slightly different task. What you write will affect your business, if it didn’t then why would you write it, so you need to make sure that the effort you put into blogging translates into a positive effect.

Blogs are designed to be written by opinionated individuals, they are by nature not simply the imparting of impartial information, so you have to walk an interesting line of being able to share information and opinions, keeping your audience engaged but not alienating them.

So here are 5 quick tips to simple blogging. 

1. Develop a Good Writing Style

Use good grammar and spelling and don’t use text abbreviations. If your writing is sloppy then this will be reflected on your organisation. If you sit at a table in a restaurant and its sticky and dirty then your opinion of the restaurant is going to go down. If the blog is haphazard or poorly written then this is going to reflect badly on your organisation. You use an informal, relaxed and laid back style, of course, it’s not going to be a marked essay, but it does need to obey the rules of good written English.

2. Be Consistent and Write Regularly

Google likes regular content. Your readers will like regular content. If you regularly write 10 posts per month and then stop for a couple of months any readers you have will drift away and Google will stop visiting as well. Blogs with big holes always look like the company concerned just had better things to do that look after their customers, like a shop with no-one at the till. So pick a number of blog posts per month you have time to write and then stick with it. If you can’t keep it up then lower the number of posts, but keep going and try to be consistent.

3. Stick to the Topic

Stay relevant and on the topic you started with. A blog’s not your life story, it’s a single idea explored in a bit of detail. If you move around different themes within a single post then you are going to lose your audience. Similarly, if you go into too much detail in a single post your audience will not finish the post. If your article is more than a couple of pages in Word (around 1000 words) then I tend to think that you may have more than one blog post there and it is worth splitting it out into a series of posts. You can list them over a few days.  

4. Link to Relevant Additional Information

Links within a blog can offer more information about something you are describing or you might want to point at a product you’re promoting. Also, since I just gave you a max of 1000 words and you need to be concise within your blog, then appropriate linking will help your readership find out more or buy that product if they want to. You can link within your own site or you can link to another (non competitor) site. It all helps demonstrate your knowledge, inform your readership and with your SEO.

5. Have a sense of Humour

When you’re writing your blog, try not to take yourself too seriously. You may cover a serious topic that requires a certain gravitas, but on other occasions, if you can submit your information with a light hearted and laid back tone then your readership will find it easier to digest. Try to bring some humanity to your writing and try to connect to your readership.

So the key to good blogging is, use good English, stick to one topic per blog and keep it short and sweet. Write regularly and write with a sense of humour. Hopefully some new bloggers will find this helpful in their early days, I sure could have done with a few pointers when I was writing my first blog.

Word Count: 755 

The purpose o f this blog article is to try and explain some of the differences (both functionally and cost) of having a CMS (Content Management System) vs Non Content Managed on your website.

Having a Web Developer /Web Designer Create a System that allows you, the non technical user, a method to update your own web pages not only seems like a great idea but indeed is one, however you first need to fully understand what it is you are asking for.

Full Content Management System – means a system that allows the user to create categories, add pages, and sub pages that can then be edited via a web interface. This system requires no intervention from a web developer. Anyone who can use a text editor can model, shape and create a website with an unlimited number of categories or pages within those categories. A system such as this uses a database for its content and structure and is relatively complex to develop and support. Expect to pay significantly more for a system such as this.

Partial Content Management System – usually means a system that allows the user to update a set amount of pages within a site. This type of system also uses a text editor and is straight forward to use but you can’t add additional pages, you can update to ones that are there but you can’t alter the structure of your website by adding categories and pages.

More likely the system will be set up so that you can update some of your pages, maybe your products page, or a page that is date sensitive e.g. Training Courses or Seminars your arranging.
Or perhaps you are happy to let your web developer update certain pages of your site but want to be able to add News & Events.

Although this kind of CMS also uses a database to hold its content it is not so complex, is more manageable to support and therefore you will see the benefits of updating your own pages with a much smaller price tag.

Hope this clarifies a few thing for you, but if not and you want some more details you can always just give us a call, or email us, we are happy to help if we can.

We all know that Google is a search engine but not everyone knows that Google as a corporation has not only shown the world the power of brand, product and service but also offers us some of the most powerful tools in the web marketplace – for free.

It was a stunning stroke of genius the day that the guy’s and gal’s at Google set to offering the world professional, useful web tools for free.

Google Analytics currently has over 52% of the world’s web tracking market and this is only set to rise as Google techies provide us with more and more powerful elements.
Measuring your marketing is no new thing but by providing anyone and everyone with an easy to use tool that collates, formulates and turns the data into a visual representation of what’s working and what’s not in our online marketing mix is in my option a tool that you would just be foolish to miss out on.

We include a Google Analytics Account setup for all our new clients free of charge, but for those who don’t have it set up or could just do with a little extra help getting started:

Go to the web address http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html to sign up or http://www.google.com/analytics/ and log into your Google account. If we haven’t set an account up for you or you haven’t got a Google Account you will need to set one up first and then create an Analytics account from your control panel. [Setting Up a Google Account]
Overview Page: This is where all the websites that you may be monitoring will be held, Click on the Account Name (which is a hyperlink) to look at the data on the individual websites, select ‘View Report’.

This will give you a visual view of your data:

The graph at the very top (as shown above) represents the visits to your site and breaks it down into daily figures in any one given month.
It provides you with Bounce Rate (the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance) which indicates how relevant your visitors found the entrance page, Average time your visitors spent on your site (which helps you judge content quality) and New visits (those that have visited your site for the first time)

The map overlay shows you which areas of the world (yes the world) are showing an interest in your website and the traffic overview shows you how those visitors came to find your site.

So immediately you can see the data that Google Analytics captures for you can help you track ROI, and help create a targeted and informative ‘next move’ strategy.

Totally Free and growing all the time ……

Look out for more blogs on this topic and feel free to add a request.

Ok, so by now we have all heard about Social Media how it works, how much time it takes and what’s involved, but maximising time for such web Marketing remains a challenge.
We were brain storming the other day during a meeting on how we could increase our productivity within the company’s networking activity. How we could still be active on our twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blog accounts while:

• It doesn’t consume all of our time
• We get a ROI on the time we do commit

Here are some of the suggestions that we came up with and thought we would share them:

• Be firm with either yourself or your staff’s time. Allocate an amount of time that you are going to participate in networking/social media and stick to it, there comes a point where ‘you can do no more’ to increase effectiveness so don’t waste valuable time.
• Don’t be shy at offering links, interaction buttons or even invitations wherever possible.
• Send out an E Newsletter to promote, publish and round up the months networking activities.
• Link your networking together with apps like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/
• Don’t *over do it*. Blogging, tweeting and profile updates that are done too often, seem to lose credibility quickly. Post often (@ least once a week), and post quality.
• Give things away. Don’t worry we’re not suggesting you give away a secret formula just give away enough to make your followers a) keep following and b) recommend you as a valuable/credible source.
• Measure! See our previous article. The above will all be totally pointless if you don’t.

Setting up an account is simple, but if you are still having a few problems then here are some pointers to help you on your way:

1. Open a Browser of your choice and go to web address https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
2. Fill in the details, accept the terms and conditions and create your new account.

3. Google will send you and a verification email (so make sure you use a valid address) that contains a link.
4. Click on the link – hey presto you now have your very own Google Account.

You now have access to an array of tools including Gmail (a free email account), Calendar, Analytics, docs, webmaster tools …..  The list is quite extensive.

The dreaded Google First Page Guarantee. I have to get into this a few times a year with different customers and occasionally with the firms offering this guarantee on behalf of a customer. We all want our website to be on the first page of Google so you can see why people get sucked into wanting to believe it. The problem of course is that with Search Engine Optimisation there are no guarantees.

It’s usually pretty easy to find out where the scam lies. It’s usually that the guarantee doesn’t actually mean anything and you only find this out after you’ve been tied in for 12 months. Sometimes the guarantee is based on really low competition keywords (like your business name or a really long tail) and sometimes it is a pay per click deal where you end up paying loads of money in clicks for your keywords (and if you wanted a Pay Per Click Campaign then surely that’s what you would have asked for). Whatever the catch is, any company offering a Google First Page Guarantee is rarely a search engine optimisation company you want to anything to do with. 

A Helpful Sham

 I find that the Google First Page Guarantee is such a sham that it is actually a really good way of working out the scam artists early on. If they offer you a guarantee then scratch them from your list of companies that you want to work with.

This is new but if this is the first time you’ve come across this then you can Google search ‘Google First Page Guarantee’ and you’ll find loads of articles explaining in great detail why any guarantee is basically worthless. The short version as to why the guarantee is worthless is.
Google controls the algorithm that determines which web pages are listed at the top, and no one can change that. Google’s objective is to deliver the most relevant page to the user. They make billions doing this. Why would they want your page at the top if it is not the most relevant?
 

Nothing New?

This is nothing new, of course, so why am I banging on about this now? Last year I had to get into this for a customer who is well versed in SEO and how it all works, but thought they had found the exception to the rule.

The Offer:
You select whichever keywords you would like and depending on the competitiveness they will give you a price. For that price they will guarantee that you will be in the first 10 listings on Google. If for any reason you fall out of the first 5 then they will set up a paid campaign to get you back on the front page. There is a contract and it is for 12 months.

How It Worked:
They would use one of the websites that they owned that had sufficient juice with Google and graft a keyword rich page onto it for you. They had clearly built up the page rank on a number of sites over time for this specific purpose. The page would look like your own site and would also have your navigation on it and this would be how visitors would go to your site.

What Happened Next:
I played along and gave in some tough keywords for the industry in question. This was nothing as hard as keywords for the insurance industry, but pretty tough. The price came back with a contract and both seemed in order and reasonable. It was frustrating me because I knew that this couldn’t work in the long term (it really was just another form of paid search) but I couldn’t get this across to the customer.

What Happened In the End:
The keywords we had selected were seasonal and so we were set to go live earlier this year. Unfortunately (or fortunately), in between the initial sales call and the go live date, the company in question lost all of their page rank for all of their sites overnight. All the companies with websites who had been made grand promises suddenly found their grafted page was nowhere to be seen, with a possible penalty for their site due to the link from the now black listed site.

The Moral of the Story

There are no guarantees. Maybe this company upheld the guarantee they gave and created hundreds of paid search campaigns using Google Adwords, but I doubt it. I continue to work for this customer promoting their website by helping them create killer content and attracting inbound links. We promote them using Social Media. We help them in their SEO and PPC. In case your wondering, I didn’t stick my tongue out and say, ‘Told ya so!’ and they know about this article and don’t mind me publishing it, hopefully to prevent anyone else chasing Google Guarantees.

Networking -part 1 of 3

Facebook

Founded in February 2004, and currently has over 400 million active users.
Facebook claims to “facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph” and I wouldn’t necessary disagree. Facebook offers photo and video upload, chat, email, a forum (or wall), marketplace (to display items for sale), Event and Groups and additional Pages to mention just a few of its offer’s (full list on the websites fact sheet).
Adding an additional pages or creating groups within your Facebook account is where the term “Become a Fan” is relevant. Creating your own Business Page/Pages is an excellent way to promote you business and keep your “fans” up to date on Events, promotions and marketing info. By creating this community of loyal fans and by making your offerings of interest and benefit you can soon turn a static promotion into a viral one.
* For the few techies reading, Facebook is one of the most-trafficked PHP websites in the world, and utilizes one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere in the world, running thousands of databases.
Want to find out more about Facebook? It’s all here

Twitter

Twitter is the leading micro-blogging site; this instant messaging social tool allows users to blog 140 characters in any single string. Messages can be uploading via a variety of means. Web, mobile app, desktop app, via SMS txt … they really have thought of pretty much everything.
The basic starting point being, you set up an account (which is free by the way), search on areas of interest and follow them or perhaps follow users you may already know that have a twitter account and start micro-blogging about stuff you either find interesting or more importantly others find of interest.
Though all my reading, there seems to be an option that twitter and tweeting your events, announcements and points of interest is the future of PR.
Despite being based on a relatively simple structure (in techie terms that is), twitter allows us to follow others (even our competitors), interact and influence our followers, create lists and interact with the world instantly.
News travels fast, but faster via twitter.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has 60 million members in over 200 countries and with that in mind you can see that this is no small fry as far as social networking is concerned
According to the official LinkedIn press room, a new member joins the networking site, on average every second, with somewhere in the region of 50% of its uses outside the US.
LinkedIn is very much a business social networking tool. Like with the Facebook you are able to link with contacts/friends (LinkedIn call these connections) which can have second-degree connections and then third-degree connections. Within this web of connections you can build an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world. Sharing skills, knowledge, information, and business opportunities amongst your connections and even offering and accepting recommendations that the entire network can see.
With executives from all Fortune 500 companies being LinkedIn members

MySpace

MySpace was launched in 2003 by eUniverse (an internet Marketing Company based in LA). In 2005 eUniverse (and with it MySpace) was bought by Robert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
In April 2008, based on monthly unique visitors, MySpace was beaten by its main competitor Facebook.
In terms of users, the 100 millionth MySpace account was created on August 9, 2006 and on that basis I would guess they are doing pretty well.
As you would expect, MySpace has the standard blubs, a profile page, about me, who you would like to meet etc. What makes MySpace a little bit different to the others is the extent in how much you can change the visuals of your page. With significant editable sections of the site (both by “Profile Customizer” and html/CSS editing), users are able to brand pages making then total unique.

What makes MySpace stand out from the crowd is the ability to add music files to your pages – the music is added to a player which can then be embedded directly into your profile page.
So, it is no surprise that MySpace is the popular choice amongst the music industry.

Watch this space for Part 2 (Blogging) & Part 3 (Photo Sharing +)