The SEO (Online Marketing & Media) Expert UK

Marketing Tips For Your Business

2011-08-08T14:35:00.001Z

No matter how good your business, it will never succeed unless you are successful in getting the word out to the paying public – which is why marketing is so important. For entrepreneurs looking to break into business, negotiating the marketing minefield is an important part of the initiation – but mastering the available means can make all the difference.

Using Professionals to Market Your Business - One option open to those entering the world of business is to employ a marketing professional to handle the promotion of their product or service. In much the same way as those who do not possess a great head for figures might choose to outsource their payroll control to a PAYE payment company, those with little understanding of advertising, press and PR may wish to employ a marketing manager to deal with this side of business. A marketing manager will be able to create and implement a promotional strategy for your enterprise that will best publicise all that you have to offer to those who may wish to purchase.

Marketing your Business Yourself - If you do decide to carry out your own marketing strategy it is important to ensure that you have covered all available angles. Areas that you may wish to consider include:

Free press and PR: A clever media strategy can gain a product or business valuable column inches without any initial outlay. Try and build a relationship with the relevant press, whether that be local, national or specialised media and ensure that you keep them informed of any citing or newsworthy developments and undertakings.
Paid advertising: If you are going to splash out on expensive advertising you must ensure that your efforts are clearly targeted towards your target audience – carry out extensive media research to clarify which outlets will give the best return before committing your cash.
Online advertising: Advertising on the web can give great returns and there are a range of ways in which this can be done. If you have money to invest in an online campaign then you may wish to consider a PPC (pay per click) approach which allows you to carefully select what kind of online audience your marketing materials are displayed to, as well as ensuring that you only pay for leads generated by the advertisements placed. Alternatively you may wish to try a more social or viral approach to your online efforts – pushing your product or service through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in order to build a better web presence and drive traffic to your own website.
Direct marketing: When you begin your business it is important to gather details for any customers or potential customers with whom you come into contact. Creating a database of enquirers, together with their demographics and other details can allow you to create carefully targeted direct marketing campaigns tailored to those customers’ specific tastes. Consider asking customers to supply their emails or addresses in order to be able to keep in contact and build on their business.

The Best free CMS options - Drupal v Wordpress

2011-05-10T22:50:00.000Z

I am not sure about you but I tried wordpress as a CMS (Content Management System) and I just do not enjoy the interface and some of the restrictions. Having said that, wordpress now accounts for over 10% of all websites on the Internet, so there is definitely a large following for wordpress as a free and effective CMS. It is certainly worth considering.

I have started using Drupal and I find the layout and ease of adding in objects (called modules in Drupal) makes Drupal a far superior CMS compared to Wordpress. many might disagree but so far I find Drupal simply way out in front in all ways.

Drupal templates

If you want to easily build a dynamic website and be able to include everything from modules for contact forms, online shopping, catptcha verification, adsense blocks and just about about anything that can be programmed in PHP, you can grab a free programmed module and plonk it into your drupal site.

One excellent way to get started is to grab a free or to buy a nice pre designed Drupal template. The best template site I have come across so far is Theme Shark Drupal templates and these are paid templates but are well designed. Wondering what on earth I am on about when talking about Drupal? Take a look at the Drupal Modules that you can add in and you will find almost 8000 modules (small programs) you can add. You can now build highly dynamic websites and without the need for a programmer at all.

Quality and Original Content: SEO Strategy

2011-03-31T19:38:00.000Z

Following on from the last blog about SEO Strategy, a further look at the key areas that you should focus on when building your site. The Google Algorithm changes recently have had a huge impact on many websites and webmaster efforts but only those who have continually ignored the advice from Google themselves, will have been affected. You can read the Google Blog at any time and you will find that the key to success in search results is NOT a hidden secret.

Google are clearly pushing for people to share links and not to hoard link juice. In addition having quality and original content on your website is a key! There is no reason to copy other people's text as it does not take a huge effort to write about your chosen subject and in the long term, you will gain far more by taking the time to generate interesting and fresh content, as opposed to copied content.

Google can instantly tell instantly tell if your content is originally and so can you. After adding a new webpage (or in fact before adding it is even better) can easily be done by for example checking the content via a site such as www.copyscape.com.

Quite simply, follow a few straight forward rules and already you will have avoided what many webmasters have failed to so and you will avoid the penalties which they have experience:

Build fresh and original content. Do not waste time trying to auto generate trash content. Eventually it will catch up with you.
Include social media buttons so that people can bookmark your content.
Do include some outgoing links from your site. Sites which do not share do worse than sites which do (this is one of the changes seen with the latest algorithm changes).

SEO Strategy

2011-02-28T13:27:00.004Z

Your SEO strategy can define not only how your business does in the short term but how you do in the long term as a business and for this reason, think carefully about your online marketing strategy. Building links only to one page on your site will mean that the computerised Google spiders will see a lop-sides website in terms of incoming links.

If link building is natural, then links will have a variety of link text and the links will come in to various parts of your website i.e. include deep links in addition to ones pointing to your homepage and other main pages.

A long term strategy to do things as naturally as possible will help to protect your site against future Google algorithm changes. Google are continually striving to push genuine sites higher in the searches and one sample of how they have done this seems to be to give a higher rating to sites with their keywords in the top level of their domain.

If you are buying a domain based on London holidays for example, make sure to have the work 'London' in the domain name. Take a look at the top 10 results for London holidays and you will see that most sites in the top 10 for that term, have the word London in the domain.

Usability should always be considered in SEO

2011-01-20T14:06:00.003Z

It potentially can be very easy for website owners who are optimising their own site to get carried away in that they might lose site sometimes of Usability. You have to keep your end goal always in mind and if you are selling a product or service through your website, you need to always ensure the users can easily navigate your site, do not get distracted from the core products and services with gimmicks added to your site etc. A nice fun game on your site might make people laugh but will it make them buy your product? If yes then add a travel game onsite if you sell vacation rentals for example. If the game is a distraction then leave or remove it.

The old 3 Click Rule never goes out-of-date and I always keep this in mind when designing and optimising a website. Every page on your site should be accessible within 3 clicks of the mouse. If a page is not then your site structure is wrong in some way. How will users find the contact or page in question.

Make 'Contact' buttons EASY to see. Make contact details such as email or support and sales easy to find - preferable always visible site-wide on the top of the site. Makes forms as simple as possible if you use one for the contact page. There are so many forms I quit halfway through as there are so many drop down menus and I find myself having to enter details such as phone numbers, country and a whole of information which is completely unrelated to my enquiry.

Talking about usability - let us know you feedback on the new chocolate website which a close friend has put live. What has he done right and not right?

Is Social Media important for Online Marketing

2010-12-17T19:41:00.002Z

Over the past two or three years, social media has grown into a crucial tool for online marketing firms and advertisers. Social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook are used by millions of people all over the world, and are an excellent platform for companies to advertise and spread word about their new products.

One industry that has embraced social media is the film industry with viral marketing now becoming a standard advertising strategy for each new release. Whether it's music videos, websites, online trailers, posters, polls, articles or exclusive interviews, Facebook and Twitter are fully utilised to inform as many people as possible about upcoming releases. It is no coincidence that all new films have Facebook pages and Twitter profiles so people can find out the latest information.

Companies are also realising that those that embrace social media technology are also prime advertising opportunities in their own right. Stephen Fry, for example, has a massive Twitter following where he blogs about his thoughts and concerns. He is also a massive fan of Apple technology. In the build up to the release of their iPad, Apple sent test products to a host of technology blogs and websites, but they also sent one to Fry, realising that if he liked it (which he did), he could influence millions of potential customers.

Today, it is considered a major misstep by companies not to include social media in an online advertising campaign and as a result, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have never been more popular. If you want to ensure you have a strong online presence, ignore Social Media at your peril!

Why having an Online Presence is Essential

2010-11-03T14:10:00.003Z

Before the days of the Internet, if you started a company and wanted to advertise your products, it would cost you large amounts of money for TV, print and radio ads - this would increase if you wanted them nationwide. If you wanted to go global, costs again increased exponentially. Today, people run their own companies from their homes, promoting everything from selling Hotels in Vegas, through to sauna and massage products and services and to a global audience anks to the internet.

The internet has allowed companies and entrepreneurs to sell their wares to a global market, easily and efficiently and this is why having an online presence is so essential. Of course, there is more to it then simply having a website and/or an eBay account. Depending on your product and services, there are a number of ways to reach potential clients.

As well as ranking for specific keywords and phrases and optimising your website for certain search engines, companies often advertise on affiliate or similar sites to attract a certain client base. However, this requires time, money and the right technical know-how to do it properly. Of course, new methods of establishing yourself online are appearing all the time.

One of the most popular methods in recent years has been that of social media marketing, where companies have utilised the large number of people who use services like Facebook and Twitter to advertise their latest products. Whereas most traditional forms of advertising costs money, by advertising your latest services to potentially thousands of people via Twitter or Facebook, you are reaching large numbers of clients for free. Today, almost every company worth their salt has embraced social media networks and use it as a crucial part of their online presence.

Back to the Basics: Meta Tags and Content

2010-10-18T00:17:00.003Z

Even the most practised Online Marketers and SEO specialists often find that it is worth returning to check the Meta Tags and page content. Pages get updated and target terms change for webmasters.

If you want to come high in Google for a term such as 'Paris apartments' then you will need to ensure that the term 'Paris apartments' exists both in your Meta Tags and also in the text on the webpage also. If you are targeting many terms then you will need a webpage to tackle each term.

From time to time, it is always worth revisiting a cross section of your webpages to ensure that the Meta tags and content is still relevant and up-to-date. The target base can change for your business over time, the things you are selling might also have changed and updates to your site might also have watered down the affects of your webpages for search results.

Using white space and menus

2010-05-07T15:51:00.005Z

eMarketing as a whole covers a very wide range of factors and of these SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is just one. At the end of the day, apart from getting good search positions and good traffic, nailing a sale or lead is what it often comes down to. You can have the perfect site and a good number of new visitors each day, but ensuring you have godo usability on your site is what can help to finalise the sale.

White Space - is nothing new in design and has been used for years on people's CVs (Resumes), on Powerpoint presentations and in magazines for example. The same is for design. Take a look at the Barcelona Short term rentals page on the Holiday-velvet.com site for example and you can see how white space has been perfectly used. Clean design, easy on the eye and easy to find what you want. Excellent use of white space.

Use of menus - How you make information available is also key. There can be so much information which you might want to add that it you add too much of it on the same page the user could get confused and sale be lost. Too little information and the same problem. So making buttons which sub-consciously direct and aid the user. Using colour such as on the Holiday-velvet.com site can work very effectively. Take a look at the image shown here for a great example of using menus ands colours to direct users.

Have you also noticed Google Ad center?

2010-02-03T23:58:00.003Z

I was checking my sites in Google Sitemaps the other day in their and one thing I noticed is that Google have now added a thing caled Ad Center. Is it me or are Google semming to be take over the world> Is there anything Google do not offer apart from seling lingerie?

Ad Center is an interesting tool in that it is more than Adsense (Adsense is the opposite of Adwords - adsense is used by webiste owners who are happy to allow ads on their own sites such as what you see on my Vegas site where you will see the tour and helicopter ads).

With Google Ad Center it is for website owners who wish to advertise and the difference from Adsense is that it offers you the chance to include our traffic statistics and extra information to try and entice advertisers. Ad Center ties in your crawl stats and rankings from Google Sitemaps and it gives people willing to spend on advertising extra information.

The strange thing is that 'Google Ad Centre' today has suddenly disappeared and no longer exists. It has disappeared into thin air, only days after it secretly went live in Google Sitemaps? Were Google doing a quick live test of it? I added 2 of my sites to this new service. Let's see what happens.

Learn also aboout gaining a competitive advantage online.

Capturing Video with Snapshot

2009-11-30T13:39:00.005Z

I get a lot of people asking me how to capture video in the form of a photograph and if it hard. It is in fact very easy and here's how:

1. Open up your video player. The very best if VLC Player because it plays just about everything i.e. far more than most players and it is free.

2. When you are playing video right click with the mouse and then select Video --> Snapshot.

3. That is it! A picture will be saved to your computer of video frame which is showing when you click snapshot.

Pay Per Click Advertising - where to start?

2009-11-16T13:55:00.002Z

If you are fairly new to Online Marketing i.e. because you have just built a website for your business and now need to get traffic to your site, where do you start.

It can take a year plus to start getting good search engine positions and thus you might need to get instant traffic and custom online. In this case, Pay Per Click advertising can be your best bet.

By Pay Per Click it literally means you only pay if someone clicks your ad and goes to your website. If you look on Google on a search results page, you'll see these ads on the top and right side of the page. These are sponsored results. You literally bid what you are willing to for certain phrases.

There are 3 main options for online PPC.

Google Adwords (The best in terms of the most structured and developed and best reach online).
Facebook Advertising (Can be much cheaper than Google Adwords but less refined).
Bing.com PPC (Is a very new system from Microsoft and different to get any real significant traffic right now. This will change over time though, quite likely.

My advice is to start off with Google Adwords but with a small budget. Ensure you carefully set your monthly budget to cap the expenditure. You can read more about Adwords PPC and training here..

Twitter site is down - site crashed?

2009-08-06T15:30:00.003Z

Well, I have heard that twitter has been under attack for a while by hackers but it seems maybe they have finally succeeded. Twiter ha snow been down for a few hours (6th August 2009) and there seems little information online and from twitter about when it will be back.

Is twitter can go down then it does not bode well. Watch this space and we'll keep you updated. I have tried caling twitter direct for more information but culd not get through.

Twitter is down but I am sure they will be back very soon!

Analysing competitors links

2009-07-11T22:34:00.003Z

As part of promoting your own website, one way to work out good link opportunities and good sites to build partnerships with can be to analyse your competitors inbound links. So how can you do this?

A very easy way to analyse your competitor links is to do a Google search and enter the term:
link and then the URL you are analysing. An example is:

link:www.cuba-culture.com

if you dealt with holidays in Cuba and wanted to analyse the site www.cuba-culture.com. To analyse the links on Yahoo then you would enter into a Yahoo search:

linkdomain:www.cuba-culture.com

Simply replace the URL cuba-culture with the URL you want to analyse. Once you then start going through the links that go to competitor sites you will start to see partner sites you might also want to consider, article submission sites which seem to work well and the online Directories which you might also want to consider.

Google Ocean and taking a few minutes break from SEO

2009-05-17T17:19:00.005Z

SEO and eMarketing in general is very time consuming and building your sites value up does not happen over days or weeks, but months. So, taking a few minutes out to enjoy what the Internet has to offer, is sometimes as important as just using the Internet for work.

Apart from my favourite sites whereby:

I order far too much from amazon.co.uk and play.com
Enjoy learning about the stock market via the Naked Trader
Am forced by my wife to check her Belly Dance website :(
Checking the latest on BBC's HardTalk
and always booking new holidays

I also cannot help but be fascinated by Google Earth's latest addition - Google Ocean. If you have not already tried it out it is worth doing so. Dive under the ocean and experience 20 layers of visualisation and see what ocean planners see. This is an amazing feature. The only question is - what next from Google. It seems as though Google are taking over the world.

Online Marketing in a recession

2009-04-25T16:41:00.005Z

Paul Symonds, UK SEO and eMarketing expert:

A lot more eMarketing news and ideas coming soon especially for companies ot market in a recession.

URL length problems and issues

2009-02-11T16:58:00.004Z

If you are adding a link to some forum signatures or on other sources, one problem you might have is that your URLs are too long and that the end of the URL gets chopped off in searches.

One of the tools I came across recently which I think is excellent for overcoming this problem is 'Tiny' URLs. I do not work for them and have no relation to Tiny urls but I just think they are an excellent idea and thus am happy to share the idea with you.

Tiny URLs are excellent and incredibly easy to do. All you do is add your URL into a box, click 'Enter' and then they create a very small URL for you. If you take the URL
http://www.promarketingonline.com/adwords.htm for example, it makes it into
http://tiny.cc/fDtFA

This new URL is said to be one which will be permanent and unique and the idea seems good. I just hope that in 10 years time Tiny URLs do not suddenly become unusable. That would mean a whole load of lost links. So if my URLs are short enough I will still use the original URLs.

Online and Internet Branding

2009-01-18T13:17:00.005Z

Online Branding or Internet Branding (according to which way you prefer to say it) is something which is fast gaining popularity and it is not hard to see why. Marketing online means you immediately have a window open to the world and if you get the Internet Branding right, you could do extremely well from it.

There are a number of ways to go ahead Online Branding. To start with, I would advise you to start with an overall eStrategy. There are so many possibilities with Online Branding that pre-planning could literally save you a lot of money.

Once you are ready for Internet Branding the first and most obvious way to go about it is directly on your website. Getting the logo right, positioning your logo appropriately site-wide, ensuring your site is branded as a whole.

Then there is branding through search results. With the Triple Branding Effect (Symonds 2008) you can really gain a presence to open up traffic opportunities for your site. Getting on the top of Page 1 in Google Results for Adwords, Google Local Business Listing and the organic search results, will give you a triple presence on the every same page. As you can imagine, this is powerful branding and very effective.

You can learn more about Online Branding from promarketingonline.co.uk

Theming and SEO

2009-01-02T14:56:00.003Z

Have you ever wondered why some search results are indented as shown in the image below? Well, this is called Theming and in SEO Theming is an important technique.

Theming is actually something which will occur naturally if your sites theme runs down through the site with a natural architecture. So what is theming?

Theming is where you have a common theme which runs through the site. On the above example if you type in 'Bristol SEO' into google.co.uk, ProMarketingOnline.com will often come 1st or 2nd and also with a result underneath it which is indented. This is achieved by having subpages which also use the words you use on the Home-Page and in the Home-Page Meta Tags. In other words, there is consistency throughout the site.

So to get indented search results think more about theming and how the information flows through your site.

Google Chrome to wipe out SERPs?

2008-12-18T21:46:00.005Z

Some of you might have noticed that starting from a few months ago, google's search page predicts the text you are writing to try and auto-complete the phrase you may be looking for, based on the current search results. There is also a small number of the amount of results that google could display for you on the right hand side of the drop down option bar.

Google's Chrome has gone one step further - including the search bar within the actual address bar. Chrome has had a rapid rise to fame and has been the quickets Google product out of Beta, with over 2 million followers, accodring to Google themselves. There are obviously improvements to be made along the way, considering the fact that it is a brand new concept in browsing, and the direct competition - Microsoft Internet Explorer - is about to release explorer version 8, and this is only from continued testing and correction of problems.

At the moment, a user can write in Chrome's address bar as if it was the search bar, and google with then throw up a SERP, or in some occasions, a result directly. Google is collecting and storing a massive amount of data about search through custom search, Universal search, Google wiki, Adwords and AdSense, and is in the most powerful position with regards retuning search results - even now, certain results are given to you based on your search history, or are "personalised".

I would not be surprised to see in the future (maybe not too distant) to see that the search term you type in change directly into the top result of a SERP - as this is what is considered to be the most relevant result. There is even talk of Chrome being pre-installed on certain computers, almost as an OS which would mean even less use of Google toolbar or Google homepage to show SERPs - bad news for numbers 3-10.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the clever people at eyetools have also shown that 100% of users in a controlled test look at position 1, 2 and 3 for longest and first. This means that people expect to find their answer to their search term in the first 3 results. If Chrome decides which one to show you in the toolbar, too, then this means SEO as we know it is changing.

Never more has conversion tracking, maintianing users onsite for longer, and "real" marketing and sales been more important. What's the use of having huge amounts of traffic if your sales skills or online presentation is terrible? Please feel free to comment on your thoughts and idea regarding this new possible shift.

David Brydon is an expert in SEO and runs Barcelona SEO. The company also offers comprehensive in-house SEO Training in Barcelona.

Google Insights

2008-11-19T21:36:00.001Z

In case you have not yet noticed, Google have introduced what is a fascinating facility which goes by the name of Google Insights and which is in Beta version at the time of writing. This new tool is invaluable if you have a business online and use Adwords and want to further utilise your website.

Google Insights enables you to view a varity of information including:

Seasonality and search numbers.
Geographical Distribution for Google searches.
Search volumes by time, trend and much more.

The statistics available to you potentially could be overwhelming at first but with time and effort there are some extremely handy stats available. The seasonal trends for example can be extremely useful if you for example work with travel and want to spend higher budgets on phrases which change seasonally. Google Insights is free and personally I find ivery useful and thus recommend it.

Bristol SEO Expert

2008-11-14T00:20:00.000Z

For Bristol SEO work and web design just a quick cheeky plug for our friends at ProMarketingOnline.com Ltd who are specialists in Bristol SEO and Emarketing. They have a number of SEO Training Packages now available and these 1 Day in-house training programs include:

Search Engine Optimization
Adwords & Pay-Per-Click campaign Management
Link Building Training
E-Marketing Basics

They also deal with Cardiff SEO. A quick hello by the way to Valeria and good with your new site on Cardiff belly dance. I promised you a quick hello and good luck with the new classes and you owe me a beer from the other night. I am not sure if any of you who are interested in SEo and read this blog are also interested in belly dance but guys do do belly dance as it happens. I think I'll give it a miss myself though :)

Useful SEO Tools

2008-11-11T01:52:00.000Z

There are a number of very useful tools and sites out there for SEO people and Online Marketers. Some of the tool sI find very useful include the following:

Google's Keyword Tool is intended for Adwords but you can use it without Adwords and this tool is great for analysing niche terms and words to target on your site.

The Bad Neighbourhood Tool is also very good and it helps you to ensure that you are keeping your site clean and thus avoid upsetting Google search spiders.

Creating a Favicon can be very simple. What is a FaviconI hear you ask. Well it is the small icon which you see in your Favourites folder and sometimes in the address bar, for sites you have saved as a Favourite. To easily make or create a favicon you can go online to http://www.chami.com/.

How do I market my business online?

2008-10-17T11:15:00.000Z

Words such as SEO, PPC, Organic results, Adwords and many more are words you will begin to hear as you research the idea of doing Online Marketing for your own business and your website.

It can be a bit of a minefield when you get started and it can be frustating trying to learn the differences between immediate impact online marketing with PPC, natural building through SEO and opportunities with services online such as Google Products and Local Business Listings. We have added a new page to cover some of these issues for starting and marketing a business online.

Mindshare and TrustRank

2008-09-02T14:51:00.000Z

Many webmasters completely avoid outgoing links or have outgoing links but add NoFollow code to all of the outbound ones (learn about DoFollow and NoFollow) but there are a number of webmasters who feel that having outgoing links can in fact add value to your site and in fact look good in the eyes of the likes of Google.

Mindshare is what it is about in that Google want webmasters to have outgoing links on their site so why would they penalise them, unless though linsk are blatantly spamming. If you use Mindshare to create a page which links for example, to airlines which fly into a specific location i.e. Rome, if you have a website about Rome, then you shouldn't be pelanised. It might in fact build your rating.

The links you would be linking too should not be too many and in the case of airlines you'd be linking to high PageRank sites, i.e. PR4, 5 and 6 or higher so you are linkng out to Authority and valued sites. Using Mindshare with high PR and trusted site links you can improve your mindshare value and also at the same time, add the content available to users.

Producing Videos for SEO and EMarketing

2008-07-06T21:58:00.001Z

A surprisingly simple way, yet one which is largely unexplored by many people, for driving traffic to their site is to use resources such as youtube.com. Youtube are the biggest video submission website on the Internet and videos tend to get a significant number of visitors particularly over time.

The good thing about creating some videos and highlighting your web site address during the video is that it is very simple to create a video. You do not even need to have video as such because photographs can be used and once you add different effects the video can be surprisingly good. You can pan photographs for example to give the effect that you panned a room with running video.

As well as youtube, you can also submit the link to your youtube video and then include you video in sources such as:

Facebook
Gumtree
Your own website

Here is an example of a movie I made in 30 minutes from start-to-finish.

You can learn more about SEO and Video production from Promarketingonline.com

The DoFollow movement

2008-06-25T21:59:00.002Z

DoFollow is becoming a more and more popular expression as bloggers and people involved with SEO realise that making a blog a DoFollow blog rather than leave it with the usual default NoFollow code.

The benefits of DoFollow are that if you market your blog as a DoFollow blog, other webmasters are going to be much more willing to leave comments on your blog (comments you can still moderate). The highest rated blogs tend very often to have 10-20 comments per blog post and this certainly suggest that comments are part of the algorithm towards creating highly rated blogs.

You can change youe blog in blogger.com from NoFollow to Dofollow by deleting the code
rel='nofollow' in part of the html in the layout. Be careful though what you delete and if possible take a backup first of your blog code!!!

You also need to ensure that 'Expand Widget Templates' is enabled to see the code you need to delete.

Once you have set-up your blog as DoFollow then you can submit your blog URL to
www.dofollowblogs.com

Adwords and Dynamic Titles

2008-06-15T22:26:00.000Z

A lot people who manage Adwords accounts do not realise that it is possible to creat dynamic headlines yet this can be an effective way to improve your conversion rates.

If you have a keyword list in an ad-group for the words:
English red wines
English white wines
wines in English
Cheap English wines

and your ad header is:
{KeyWord:English wines}

then the search term (provided it matches one of your keywords i.e. from the list above) will replace the header text to be the search term you entered. This in effect will make your ad seem much more appropiate to the person searching.

Why not test it out and see how it affects your conversions!

Email Signatures: Missed SEO Opportunities

2008-05-21T23:42:00.000Z

There are so many factors involved in optimising ones website and in E-Marketing ones business and some of these techniques are free, whilst others cost money. The techniques which are free and fairly easy to do, you might as well get done and thus benefit from some free trafic to your website.

In terms of free SEO, some things you might want to do include or do are:

Sorting out your Meta Tags
Submitting articles online to sites such as ezinearticles.com (and including 2 links to your site/s)
Trying to get into Google Images
Adding an Email signature to your work and/or personal email account.

Adding a signature to your email account is very easy, regardless of whether you are using Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail or some other work email account and the benefits for something which takes only 5 minutes are worthwhile.

Getting traffic through a source such as Google Images or from click throughs via your email signature will never be your main traffic, but they will supplement it and its free. There are a few things you should consider though when creating your email signature.

You want for example to consider the link text because if you are aiming to achieve good search engine results for a certain term, let's say 'Cardiff SEO', you are best off including the keywords in at least one link. You might want to have one link as your Company name, for branding purposes and then one with specific keyword link text.

Below you will probably see example I have on my own personal email.

-----------------------------------------------

Online Marketing, SEO & Adwords & Online Marketing blog.

Chocolate, Travel Photos & Sicily Villas.

Branding, SEO and PPC (Pay-Per-Cick) advertising

2008-05-07T13:59:00.000Z

The idea of using Pay-Per-Click advertising as part of your E-Branding might seem a slightly strange idea but it can make a lot of sense and it can be powerful. Even with good natural organic search results, if the PPC costs continue to create a good ROI (Return on Investment) and Conversion Rate, you might want to keep the PPC going. Consider how powerful your branding and presence will be if for a given search term, and if you come:

In the top 5 for the organic search results
You also show in a good position for the PPC ads, and
You also happen to show in the Google Maps and local business results (for free as well).

Having your companies name, site and ad sat in 3 key positions on 1 search results page, and if you do this for several keyword expressions which are key to your business, it can be a very healthy way for you to start branding your company using PPC and E-Marketing. For tips on building your natural search results we will soon we going through the top 20 considerations on the next blog (so you might want to subscribe to this blog via the icons on the right side menu) and you can learn here how to get added to Google Maps.

Want to learn more about using EMarketing, SEO and PPC for branding.

PPC using Facebook - Part 2

2008-04-29T21:47:00.000Z

Having used and tested out Facebook Pay Per Click now for a few weeks, it has become clear that there are some definite advantages and some definite disadvantages to using Facebook Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising over Google Adwords PPC.

Overall I have to say that I do like Facebook PPC and in the long-term one has to remember that it is very likely that Facebook will improve and greatly add to their present PPC system. This is very much the beginning I am sure, for the PPC set-up with Face-Book and such is the increasing popularity of this Social Network site, that I can no longer ignore it. Anyway, the advantages I have found so far with Facebook’s PPC advertising is that:

You can as mentioned on the first blog, target people for PPC on Facebook with geo-demographics i.e. by location, age, marital status etc.
You enter a keyword/s and this keyword with the words a person enters in their profile
The CTR (Click Through Rates) so far for me have tended to be a 3rd of the price of CTRs in Adwords. This is logical in that Facebook PPC is so new compared to Adwords PPC and thus there is far less competition right now (although reading this blog might change that a little J).

On the negative side of Facebook PPC:

The reports and statistics available at this time are nowhere near as detailed as those you can use with Adwords.
There appears also to be no way to set conversion tracking.
There are more limitations on writing the Ads than in Adwords.

I would love to know your thoughts so feel free to comment on this blog in the comments section to share your own experience with PPC.

Using Facebook Groups and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising for your company (Part 1)

2008-04-13T17:27:00.000Z

As well as getting involved with areas such as free advertising with Google Maps and offering free gadgets to build traffic, another area which it is essential to consider these days is Social Book Marking and Sharing. Social Book Marking and Sharing are now said by some sources to be accounting for almost 40% of online traffic; a significant amount of traffic I am sure you agree. If you have a business or company which you are looking to promote online and to generate more traffic to your site, you cannot ignore Social Book Marking and Sharing.

There are many such sites and some well known ones include:

FaceBook
Del.icio.us
MySpace
StumbleUpon

So how can you utilise a site such as FaceBook to build traffic? What some companies are doing and which yourself can do, is build a FaceBook or a profile. For a profile people can then choose to be a 'Fan' whilst in groups people can become group members. Many companies now are pushing products, show-casing their business and building client lists via Facebook Groups and profiles. You can read quite a bit more about building traffic through Facebook Groups and in the next blog more details about the way in which you can target specific geo-demographic groups with Facebook Advertising and how to do it.

Free SEO and Google Maps

2008-04-01T21:52:00.000Z

If you have a business and website whose business is based on the local area, then you would be mad not to submit your details for free to Google Maps. This is a free form of advertising and can give you coverage on the top of search pages and it only takes a few minutes to set-up.

A sample of Google Maps is shown in to the left in the image. All you have to do is go to http://maps.google.com/ and set up your local business listing and then you need to validate the listing by receiving a code by SMS which you then enter online or by receiving a postcard to your business address.

Dot.Asia Domains

2008-04-01T21:43:00.000Z

In addition to dot.cn (China) domain suffixes, dot.asia's are another domain you might be interested in. Dot com's are without doubt the best domain to have and are the most universally accepted so if you are involved with business in Asia, you might still want to aim for the dot.com version of the domain you would like.

Dot.eu's have been around in Europe for a while and despite the initial excitement, dot. eu's have now lost mass appeal as people aim for the dot.com suffixes. Dot.asia are thought to be being bought quite a bit at the moment so the choice is really yours as to how valuable you yourself feel this suffix may prove to be.

More than anything, if your business is really aimed at the whol eof Asia an asia suffix might be more of a marketing ploy more than anything for you. One company dealing with this domaoin suffix is www.ASIAdots.com

SEO and traffic via Gadgets

2008-02-06T00:23:00.000Z

New ways of caturing web traffic are continually coming into play and Gadgets is one way which can get you large traffic to your site.

Article submissions, blogging, one way inbound links are all still extremely useful and effective, whilst social networking is becoming helpful. Gadgets though is a form of traffic building which can involve the need for some programming work but in return you could find the traffic gained is huge.

Google Gadgets is one of the main sites worth checking to get an idea of the types of gagdets you can create and what they are all about. In essence, you create some feature of mini-game etc which people are likely to want to put on their site. You are in other words link baiting with a link to your site being in the code of the gagdet you create. Gagdets include things such as:

Mini clocks
Mini aquariums
Scoreboards
Finance news ticker tapes
Photo of the days

Keywords in Link Text: Looking to the future

2008-01-28T00:48:00.000Z

One way links are widely accepted as a crucial factor in having high PageRank for the site. Quality inbound links are not the only factor by far, but they are probably the single most important factor.

With the importance of one way inbound links, webmasters are gettign more creative and getting in a variety of ways including via blogs, article submissions, press releases online, and also the renting of links and buying of links.

Google and other search engines are thus always looking for buys to eliminate link buyers and one way of doing this is to devalue links which have exactly the same links text to the same domain. If you have 50 links with the exact link text to your homepage which say "Sauna and home living products" then in the future Google might count only one of the 50 links because there will only be one unique link.

The solution as we look to the future is to begin thinmking about natural lik building anf using a variety if link text. Mix up the link text so that your links have a variety of keywords in the link text. You can study Link Building and SEO with ProMarketingOnline if you wish. Are you looking for SEO or Emarketing work in Cardiff?

Keyword rich Articles writing Service

2008-01-07T23:12:00.000Z

Just a quick note to inform you of an update on ProMarketingOnline. There is now a Keyword rich articles SEO writing service available. Submitting articles of about 400 words in length to sites such as Ezinearticles.com is a great way of building quality one-way links to point to your own site.

You can find out more by visiting http://www.promarketingonline.com/articles-sales.htm

The Latest Google update

2007-11-14T20:56:00.000Z

Three weeks ago did another massive Google Update and this last one sent shivers through many companies with some big companies falling fowl of the Google algorithm changes. So who was affected and what can you do in the future to try and ensure you are not badly affected by future algorithm changes?

In this latest change, Google clearly seem to have clamped down on blogs and sites which were and are sellign lots of links. There were some big players such as major newspapers, who lwent from PR5 down ro PR2 for example. Peopel with home pages which had had high a PageRank, began to look like link sites with tonnes of links starting to be sold at the bottom of the page.

For future PR changes, the advice is to avoid making your site looking like a links selling page or site. Outgoing links generally mean that your own PR will be diluted. If you want your site to have a high Pagerank, do not get get carried away with selling links on your own site. Learn more from Google Webmasters
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Dropship Marketing

2007-10-24T22:14:00.000Z

Dropship marketing (also drop ship and dropshipping) is an expression I have started to hear more and more recently, so I thought I'd mention if briefly, in case any of you are not familiar with the expression. The popularity of Drop Ship marketing is fast increasing because with the popularity of selling online and E-Commerce, more and more people are looking for opportunities to set up their own small business or business from home.

Drop Ship Marketing gives you the chance to sell online and hold no stock because this style of marketing enables you to take orders, send the order to someone else and they send the items to the buyer. You yourself pay the supplier but only once or after you have the orders. This type of business can be a great way to start and without the need for much investment.

There are a number of sites you can use to learn more including https://www.esources.co.uk/. To read about Dropship or Drop Ship marketing in more details, you can visit ProMarketingOnline.
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Link Baiting and SEO

2007-09-11T18:42:00.001Z

If you have never heard of link building then understanding what link bating is can definitely play a useful role in your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Link baiting can potentially save you a lot of time and be a very effective way of link building if done right.

Link baiting if as it sounds. It is about providing the bait that makes people want to link to you, just like you create the bait to attract a fish. The fish in this case is another webmaster who you hope will put a link on his or her website: A one-way link.

So how can you make others want to link to your site? It is all about content which is genuinely of real interest to people. If you specialise in wines and can explain a lot to people about the English wine market, information which others do not offer and which really does offer an interesting insight, then you might get people point a link at your site. Big companies such as airlines manage to get thousands of links as a result of link baiting. A business such as Cardiff International Arena get numerous people link to them without having to ask. Exactly what content you can write for link baiting you will need to think long and hard about. If it works for you though it will be effective.

Learn more about EMarketing and SEO. Need SEO or PPC in Cardiff?

Website optimisation takes time

2007-07-10T15:42:00.000Z

One thing which you should be aware of if you want to move you website higher in organic website searches, is that it takes time. If you are making a plan or schedule based around the your SEO intentions, be realistic.

The diagram to the left for example shows a sample of the areas which you will need to involve yourself in. You can look at trying to push through short-term imporvements through within 0-6 weeks (i.e. meta tag, alt tag and image name improvements) and then the longer term changes between 1-6 months. These longer term changes will largely include link building.

There are many areas that you will need to cover and at the very beginning take 1 or 2 days to carefully analyse the keywords and phrases you are targeting in searches. These words be make the foundation on which are efforts will be made over the coming months.

If you based in the South-West of England (i.e. Bristol, Bath, Plymouth or Exeter) you can contact paul@promarketingonline.com or visit the South-West SEO and Adwords site at Promarketing.

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Link building with a difference - SEO

2007-06-09T17:33:00.000Z

Link building is getting harder and harder as more and more people become aware of the importance of having quality and related links to one's website. Two way exchange links are beoming less and less valuable in the search engines algorithms and triangular links can be a risk. So what can you do?

Have you considered paying for links to sit on quality and very related content websites. The cost of paying a website owner may not be cheap but this way of linking is more likely to create higher value links and you can better control the type of page it ends up on.

For quality link building, you want to make sure that the link:

on a related site, content wise
as high on the page as possible
on a page with as few other links as possible
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E-Marketing and blogging

2007-05-14T19:12:00.000Z

If you are planning to optimise your website, then you have probably already realised the value of running a blog. The fact that you are reading this very blog, suggests that you are familiar with blogs. But what though, is the advantage of having a blog, in terms of Search Engine Optimisation and what are the tips to blogging?

By writing regular blog posts, you can include links to your website and you can link to different pages in your site. The advantage of this is that you can make sure that your site gets crawled and that deep links are created and pointing at your website.

Be careful though about stuffing your blogs with blatant links to your own site. The nature of blogs and blogging is such that it is intended to be a social communication tool, i.e. not a blatant sales tool. It is fine to use your blog to link to your site but include linsk to other sites which also offer genuine content. If you are writing for example, about flights to Sicily, then maybe include a link to the airport website. If you talking about E-Marketing then why not include a link to some useful SEO tools etc.
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Social Bookmarking (3rd April 07)

2007-04-02T18:28:00.000Z

You will no doubt have started hearing the expression 'Social Networking' more often in recent months when reading up on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and E-Marketing. For a recent client for SEO & web design work in Brighton, UK, I recently included Social networkign as part of the overall SEO strategy.

Generally for SEO, writing quality articles and including links, creating link baiting material and optimising your site are typical ways to improve your site in search results. Now though, social networking is useful also. Social networking does not necessarily though help search results directly, but it helps you to build traffic by creating visibiility for your material, if other web surfers like what they read.

There are several social networking sites which you can use. To start off with for example, take a look at www.digg.com, one of the most popular social bookmarking sites for more information.
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Pay per Click marketing (1st March 07)

2007-03-01T11:21:00.000Z

If you are running a PPC (pay Per Click campaign do not forget that you can optimise the keywords and campaign just the same that you can optimise web pages and web sites. Ensure for exmaple that you:

Spend plenty of time analysing your keywords lists. Spend time researching and carefully analysng the keywords. An excellent tool to use is Google's Keyword External tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal which tells you about the traffic for certain keywords, offers suggestions and also tell you of the competition for each keyword.
Make sure you group your keywords into sections of 3 or 4 together (and no more). Then you can make an ad specific for each group of 3 or 4 words.
Ensure that the landing page is set as perfectly as possible for each keyword.
Remember that you do not necessarily need to be at number 1 in the ads. You might be able to pay half the cost yet still be 2nd or 3rd.

More next time. You can also read up on SEO and Adwords check this page out.
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SEO and Meta tags

2007-02-06T10:51:00.000Z

Talking about Meta tags and SEO may sound obvious and for SEO specialists it probably is. Many people though still miss optimising the Meta title, keywords and description. There are some rules in SEO for these tags and these include keeping:
- Meta Keywords to a maximum of 20 words
- Meta Title to no more than 80 characters
- Meta Description to a maximum of 200 characters

The words used in these tags SHOULD also exist in the webpage itself. Similarly you MUST set the tags specific to each page and not have the tags the same on each page. Optimsing the Meta tags is one of the fastest and easiest ways of improving your SEO thus it is worth spending a few minutes or even an hour or so to take care of this.

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Keyword Analysis and E-Marketing (2nd Jan 07)

2007-01-02T17:34:00.000Z

Keyword analysis is essential when it comes to optimising your website for search engine positioning. In order to know what key words will attract the most and the most appropriate visitors to your site, you need a way to analyse what key words are useful, i.e. which ones people search by. The key words can then be directly used in the website design so that these keywords will be picked up by the search engines. The keywords play a significant role in getting your website indexed with the search engines, with these keywords recognised by the keywords in your meta-tags, title tag, within the x number of words on your web-page, possibly within the whole web-page. Knowing which keywords to use are also essential for CPC campaigns and for deciding on the wording of your links in the link exchanges. Keyword analysis tools can be the perfect answer for working out which keywords to use.
(More in the next blog)

Deep Links (6th Dec. 06)

2006-12-06T15:28:00.000Z

When thinking about your SEO strategy for your website, deep linking is an important consideration when you are thinking about links. Deep links refer to when links whether links from within the site or from external links into your site, take users to places deper in your site, than the homepage.

Deep links are great because they can take users to pages which are more directyl related and useful than what the home page may be. If your site is about Sicilian property for example, having the words Catania real estate and property, linked to a page which specifically talks about property in the city of Catania , is better for the user and for SEO. the pages which the links are goign to are more related in terms of keywords. At the end of the day, it is also better for the user.

Try and use deep links in and to your site. If you write articles and submit them to the article submission sites, do not only link to your home-page. The search engines will like you more :)
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Creating a links/resources page (15th Nov. 06)

2006-11-15T17:43:00.000Z

Creating a links/resources page
A very popular technique for many webmasters is to create a ‘Resources, Partners or ‘Links webpage’ and with this page linked to the homepage. If aiming to get high in Google, then linking with websites of a similar type, i.e. dance sites if you have a belly dance website. By creating some links to start with, it will at least mean that your site will begin to get crawled.
AVOID doing link exchanges with just any site and avoid linking with poorly rated page ranked sites. You can check a sites Pagerank by going to http://www.checkpagerank.com

It is also of great benefit if the wording of the link text, contains the actual keywords which are of importance to your site. Make sure for example if you are promoting Barcelona then you include the word barcelona in the actual link. A good example is to use something such as flights to barcelona.

To actually find these link partners, the link:url idea to view and then copy the link partnerships which competitors have created, can be one effective way of finding link partners. The importance for a Webmaster, designing a new belly dance website let’s say, is that this technique can be used to study and ascertain what link partnerships your competitors have. There is nothing at all stopping a webmaster from setting up link exchanges with the same people that your competitors have.

You always have the ability to find out what link exchanges your competitor sites have. You could look at the links into the Home Sauna Page at uknat.com by entering a search for links:www.uknat.com

A second way can be to simply surf the Internet, looking for appropriate websites – looking for a Links or Resources links page. Once the Webmaster has found a resources page (preferable with links which are of a similar category i.e. home sauna the Webmaster can simply email the Webmaster of the different belly dance sites on the other sites.

Checking incoming hyperlinks (18th Oct.06)

2006-10-18T09:41:00.000Z

In order for a Webmaster to check and analyse the inward links of the site he/she is designing, there are different ways to gather this information. Two such ways are:

1) Via a log file analyser program. A free online program such as the McDar Keyword analysis tool. Just simply enter the url (without the http://) and then enter the keywords/expression which you want to analyse the site for and then simply click enter.

2) You will see a list of results and additionally, a list of all the links into your site. Click on the link numbers and you can view all of the links into your site from Google and from Yahoo.

3) You can go to the Google search bar and type in your
link:[Your domain here]

4) On Yahoo search bar type
linkdomain:[your domain here]

Learn more about links and SEO.
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Inbound links for you website (9th Oct. 06)

2006-10-09T10:44:00.000Z

Page-rank and SEO

Building up the number of links into your own site is essential for SEO because search engines count the number of inward links that you have. Yahoo and Google analyse these links differently, with Google generally being far more specific about which links they accept. A search for one phrase I searched for, for example, returned 63 links with Google, yet 3250 with Yahoo.

'Pagerank’ is Google's grading of your website, measured via a combination of factors including the number of inward links, the keyword density of your page, how often your pages are updated etc. A site with incoming links from other high Pagerank valued sites, will itself be rated higher. A link which comes from the MSN homepage for example, will be considered more important than a link from a person's personal homepage. Additionally, some search engines rate certain factors higher than other factors. A dot.com for example, may have a higher weighting in one algorithm, than a dot.de for example. Additionally, a link with fewer backslashes in the URL, will likely have a higher weighting than one with more backslashes. An example of this is that travelphotos4u.com would get a higher weighting value than travelphotos4u.com/links/morocco.html

Many people attempt to score higher with Google searches, by submitting there website URL to Link farms so that they can automatically create many links. The complex Google algorithm though, will often penalise a site for irrelevant links. Yahoo on the other hand will usually accept all links, hence the higher number of links which Yahoo will always have compared to Google, for a given website. For the Webmaster, creating links into your own site are essential, in order to move up the search engines. Valeria Lo Iacono of a new article submissions site reports that she is aware from previous experience that link building is essntial to get her started. To get started you have to be linked to at least one other site before Google will even recognise your site.
(More on the next blog)
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SEO as part of an E-marketing campaign (29th Sep.06)

2006-09-29T14:45:00.000Z

Once a Webmaster decides to design a website, and in designing the website wants to make the website optimised for SEO, there are many considerations and techniques to consider. Here we begin to focus on the considerations that can benefit small business websites such as a site for a belly dance business.

With roughly 70% of users web time spent with search engines, according to some authors, and with competition to get to the top of search engines result extremely tough, deciding on which search engines to target as part of a SEO campaign, can help a designer. There are also many techniques such as ensuring that the ‘Title Tags’ are worded correctly and building up incoming links to ones site. Deciding on which search engines to aim for though, can help to clarify our SEO strategy. Yahoo in one survey, turned out to be the most important search engine, with Yahoo included in the results of 14 mega search engines. From this author’s experience, Yahoo will pick up on all links into your site from all sites, no matter what type of website is linking to your site. Google on the other hand, do not pick up on all links thus Google’s secret algorithm clearly finds way to select the incoming links. One’s approach to SEO should thus, also include pre-planning with regard to a clear idea of what search engines one is targeting for the optimisation, even though many of the techniques below benefit many search engines. If targeting Yahoo then more time and attention can be put onto incoming link partnerships, for example.

The next blog will go into the juicy details about using things such as pagerank, incoming links, building link exchanges, IBl's, article submissions and using electronic Press Releases to increase your sites IBL's (one way inbound links). In the mean time, to learn more about SEO and Emarketing strategies...
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Search Engine Optimisation SEO (20th Sep. 06)

2006-09-20T11:18:00.000Z

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a major technique used in e-marketing and a lot of literature and attention is beginning to be given to SEO. If we take the 4 P’s in the traditional marketing mix – product, price, place and promotion, SEO can be considered to have an impact on all of these except for the product itself. Getting a website promoting belly dance items high in the main search engines for example, will affect the promotion. The directness of e-marketing via SEO will also potentially lower the price, whilst the Internet (affected directly by SEO because it produces visibility for the product) can act as the place.

The product itself can be affected, although not directly as a result of SEO. Having the website high in search engine results will not change the product but the product can be affected more generally though by e-marketing books. An example is when a book is turned into an e-book. If the owner of a belly dance website for example, had written a book about ‘Belly Dance’, that owner would have the option of not only selling that book in traditional paper form, but also as an e-book which can be downloaded. (This paperless version in effect, enables the seller to lower the price of the product).

Making sure ones site comes high in the search engines, in light of the benefits that can be accrued in the marketing mix, is clearly important. The fact that people using search engines though, will usually only look at the top 10 or 20 results, makes clear the challenge facing a Webmaster in using SEO. If someone for example, is looking to find information about barcelona conference facilities, it is essential that when entering the words ‘barcelona conference facilities' comes up either on a CPC advertisement (i.e. via Adwords) comes up on the 1st or 2nd search page; or that the website comes in the top twenty of the search results. In order to get ones site high in the search engines (unless instead using a keywords CPC campaign to gain visibility) SEO techniques become crucial. Interestingly, studies have shown that once people get a hit they stop, thus placing even greater relevance value on using SEO for ones site.

The complexity of getting ones site high in the search engines becomes clear when we consider that the algorithms for ranking websites, are not public. Google for their ranking of web-pages also admit that their results are automated and determined by more than 100 factors. Consider also that there are dozens of different search engines, each with different ways of classifying pages. SEO as a part of e-marketing, is looked at in next blogs.
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Part 2 - The website itself as a part of E-Marketing (12th Sep 06)

2006-09-12T10:30:00.000Z

Complexity
Another example of a simple to use menu structure is the Yahoo homepage (i.e. yahoo.co.uk) whereby despite there being over 100 menu choices, the layout is such that the complexity of the site is not overpowering and confusing. Complexity can enhance nterest and can sometimes benefit a sites e-marketing effectiveness. Generally though, complexity interferes that clutters a website page and for this reason, as a general rule, complexity should be avoided unless it definitely offers a benefit.

Functionality
In addition to site architecture and navigation, the download speed of a site can be essential. With the mass use of broadband, this is becoming far less of an issue, but it should still be considered. Bad download speed, can lose a customer. A customer, who has problems with the download speed of a given site, will often not hesitate to start surfing for another alternative site.

Software packages such as Photoshop offer you the option to save a copy of a picture/photo as a web optimised, lower file size version (using the ‘File à Save for Web’ menu option). By trying to keep all pictures to below 50k where possible, a website will load far faster and the affects of this site design, will have a direct impact on the e-marketing of the site.

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The website itself as a part of E-Marketing (4th Sep 06)

2006-09-04T09:15:00.000Z

In E-Marketing, the website experience itself is vital. Website design can affect the final outcome of online transactions with the aesthetics of a website, completely affecting the whole credibility of a business. This in turn can affect the feeling of security and resulting decision on purchases. In other words, the more a website is liked and appreciated, the more it improves a visitors attitude towards the site. In addition to the effects of the aesthetics of a website, Navigation, Usability and Complexity all affect potential effectiveness of a website and in turn a sites e-marketing ability.

Navigation and Usability
Being able to find information fairly easily and creating a 'state of flow' whereby the user without too much effort is able to surf around your site comfortably, is the basis of good navigation. An example of good navigation can be to have a static menu which is visible on every page, in the same location. The picture to the left for example, shows a website with a static menu which remains is the same site-wide. The menu across the top of web-page is exactly the same on every page in the site and this allows the user to easily access any area of the site with one click of the mouse.

If a website includes transactions, then the ability to access the ‘Shopping Basket’ and ‘Checkout’ facilities should be simple, perhaps with a static menu which is also always accessible on every page. A very popular concept in web design and by Internet strategists is the ‘Three-Click Rule’ and this rule is that anything you need to find on a website should be within ‘three clicks of the mouse’. If a user has to go through more than 3 pages from any other given page on a website in order to find something, then the navigation needs to be improved. Several books have even been written specifically about this rule, including the book ‘Three Clicks Away’ which you can find on Amazon.co.uk
In the next blog, more about this same subject, as we look at the website complexity and E-Marketing. In the meantime to learn more about Online Emarketing strategies

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Viral Marketing (28th Aug 06)

2006-08-28T15:15:00.000Z

Viral marketing uses word-of-mouth to create rapid growth of a brands awareness online. The idea of viral marketing is much like a virus, in relation to the speed and way in which the message of information moves ten-fold and without the need for involvement from the original creator. There are different forms that viral marketing can take and one common example is when a uses the ‘email a friend’ facility on a news article online.

Large companies sometimes even go as far as creating a small game that can be emailed from person to person, with the companies website address and/or logo visible. Even smaller companies can use some forms of Viral Marketing to promote their website. One very simple method is to create an Email signature for all business related emails you send out. An example for someone with a belly dance website might be to include the following at the bottom of every email message.

*********************************
* Exhibition Stands Displays *
* www.clipdisplay.com *
*********************************

Another easy electronic Viral Marketing technique is to visit different online forums and discussion boards, and to leave links to your site in the message text you leave, (in addition to leaving your email signature.

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Blogging and E-marketing (21st Aug 06)

2006-08-21T11:05:00.000Z

Blogs (short for neologism weblog) are a new phenomena and one that is now beginning to form a part of many people's E-marketing strategy including for smaller websites (due to the personal/journal style of blogging). A blog can perhaps be described as an electronic journal which is updated regularly and which is usually on one long html page. Links to external sites can be included in blogs, hence many people write blogs as a way of ‘gaining exposure’ and for ‘brand building’.

By starting a blog and then creating links to different areas of your commercial website, in different blog entries, your site will become more visible to more people. The importance of Blogs is that Blogs are the fastest growing sector of the Internet and blogs are emerging as an invaluable communications tool. Blogs are free thus it is a very cost effective way of creating links and visitors to your website, although writing blogs can be time consuming. If though, for example, you are genuinely interested in belly dancing, and you are happy to spend an hour or so a week writing some journal entries about local belly dance events and news etc, it can be an interesting yet effective tool. Sites such as http://www.blogger.com/start make blogging a very easy form of promotion. An example of a Belly Dance blog can be found at http://bellydance4u.blogspot.com/.

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Customer trust, retention and CRM (16th Aug 06)

2006-08-16T10:41:00.000Z

Building a relationship and gaining the trust of a customer, particularly when transactions may be involved at some point on the website, is an issue also worth consideration. Trust is a “central issue” which should be considered when building and designing a website. By offering a subscription area and by sending out regular newsletters on a regular basis (i.e. monthly), a relationship of some sort can be developed and an element of trust and familiarity can be established.

A subscribers list can also have the effect of allowing one to retain visitors - something that can be expensive. Retaining traffic is profitable, thus collecting subscribers can clearly be very beneficial. As a result, it is often advisable for sites looking to go beyond a static (information portal) website, to consider data collection methods. By collecting subscribers, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) opportunities will also be created. Similarly, feedback and contact forms can be used to capture data. A contact form can include questions with pull down menus asking questions such as ‘How did find us?’ and ‘What is your country of residence?’ Such questions begin to give the website owner invaluable information for future e-marketing. The great value of using CRM in e-marketing and the benefits it can bring in sales.

E-Newsletters, subscribers list & feedback forms (7th Aug 06)

2006-08-07T15:15:00.000Z

Data Collection and subscribers
When we consider the idea that a person will go through 3 stages before getting to your site via a web search (i.e. search by keywords, analysis and then click on your ad) we can add on one more stage if we look at how a persons email and name end up in your subscriber’s list – if going via search engine. After clicking your keywords link and going to your site, stage four would be if the user then also decides to enter his/her details into the ‘Subscribe area’ of your website. For a website owner, knowing that if a user has gone through 4 stages of choice in order to join your mailing/subscribing list, then the user must have a definite genuine level of interest in your site/product.

Data collection is a very useful and important part of marketing and electronic marketing is no exception to this. Collecting information from customers/site visitors can be extremely useful in attempting to create a relationship with the customer/visitor. A list of subscribers can become a valuable asset and with a basic website, a small belly dance website can collect subscribers just the same as a larger business would.

The benefit is not just in being to dissect and analyse the customer data for buying patterns and geo-demographics etc, but also in that these same customers/visitors can also be targeted for future sales. Data mining techniques aimed at analysing the data i.e. for Tesco to analyse sales patterns for the different products, are a technique practical only for large companies: Small companies though, including worldbellydance.com, can benefit from a technique such as creating a subscription area and feedback forms. A site with a permanent subscription area on the left menu, can mean that a business begins to collect people one can target and without any cost outlay whatsoever. By including a subscription area as part of the web design process (and using a scripting language to process the data) companies regardless of their size, can create newsletters to target potential customers. One point of note is that a newsletter or email campaign should only be sent to people who have chosen to subscriber to your newsletter, in order to avoid meet the requirements of the 2005 E-Privacy directive, i.e. by avoiding sending unsolicited emails.
For more information about online e-marketing and e-newsletters visit Promarketing online.

Affiliate Marketing and SEO (1st Aug 06)

2006-08-01T14:28:00.000Z

Affiliate marketing is when one site sells items for another site, with the person selling the item on behalf of another company, being called the affiliate. A commission/fee is usually paid to the affiliate for any sales or leads. A classic example is Amazon Books affiliate program, which offers anyone online the chance to add affiliate links on their own website, to Amazon's site. There are thought to be over 400,000 people actign as affiliates for Amazon online, and the reason is easy to understand. Affiliate marketing is a win-win situation in that the seller stands to sell and the affiliate stands to make commission or fee, so both parties benefit.

For small companies with a few items to sell, and with less elasticity in terms of price (meaning that there is less money you can pay an affiliate), it is much harder to find affiliates to sell your product. Setting up and administering an affiliate program might also well be beyond the practical resources of a small e-commerce site, particularly for example, a one-person belly dance site. Setting up an affiliate program can be time consuming, with many affiliate programs using automated payments to the affiliate, as part of the set-up. Setting up a database and transactional tools for an affiliate can make the process unrealistic.

Setting up a keywords campaign - SEO (24th July 06)

2006-07-24T10:38:00.000Z

In addition to Google’s ‘Adwords’, Yahoo’s Overture also offers a popular program for keyword promotion. The various keyword campaigns are nonetheless similar to set-up and what makes it even more effective for small companies online, is that for the same cost as a big company, one can also select:
- Regional targeting
- Language selection (even to the extent that one can chose for your ad to only come up in geographical areas by mileage from a destination). A garage for example, can choose to only come up in searches for the local community area and to choose which languages it taregts when an Adwords campaign is set-up. (See the graphic to the left to see how you select customers by language and location). .

Keyword CPC works with the advertiser choosing words which he/she wishes to sponsor and then deciding on how much he/she is willing to pay for each click on that keyword or key phrase. If another person has bid more, than your ad will come up below theirs. The statistics in the Keyword campaign set-up will show you clearly what words are being clicked on, most often, and how much you are paying for each word. If you sponsor the expression ‘belly dance bristol’ for £0.20 a click for example, and the next highest bidder is £0.10, then you will only be charged £0.10. Tweaking the best words to use and optimising the words such that you are attracting people with a genuine interest but without paying any more than you need to – is time consuming in the few month. Setting up a keywords campaign thus can involve changing the words and sponsored cost around, many times in the first few months.
A few final considerations regarding keyword campaigns are:
You can set the maximum limit of how much you spend per day, on a keyword campaign, thus the concern that you could suddenly find yourself with a bill for thousands, is not an issue.
How exactly to choose keywords for your site and for advertising in discussed in detail in the next blog. For further information you can also visit
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/ You can also visit http://www.promarketingonline.com/adwords.htm

8 Adwords campaign Tips (21st July 06)

2006-07-21T14:58:00.000Z

1) Make sure you research your keywords on www.nichebot.com. If you enter the words exhibition stands for example, you can then get a good idea of different keywords/expressions which you can use in your Adwords campaign.

Analysing what keywords to use and compiling the best possible list is something worth doing before setting up the Adwords campaign. As well as nichebot.com, you can also simply do a Google search and see exactly what words your competitors are using in their Adwords campaigns. Compiling this list of keywords and expressions before starting the campaign will save you money.

2) Similarly, before setting up your Adwords account, spend a day or two writing all of your advertisements. You will need to write one for each set of keywords.

3) There shouldn’t really be more than 3 or 4 words/expressions in each ad group. Even though this means it is time consuming, this is quite important. This means that the ads will be much more specific and this will enable you to hopefully get higher CTR;s (Click-through-rates).

4) Use Geographical targeting for clearer and cheaper focus. When setting up the account best probably to set it up such that you are only targeting people in Virginia Beach for renting property there. To set regional targeting:
- Sign in to your account.
- Tick the box beside the campaign(s) that you wish to edit.
- Click Edit Settings.
- In the Locations field, click Edit.
- Click Change option.
- Select the radio button next to Regions and cities and click Continue.
- If you are changing the target country, choose a new country in the drop-down box and click Change. Otherwise, skip this step.
- Select the radio button to target either regions or cities, and select or enter one or more target regions or cities.
- Click Continue.
- Click Save All Changes.

5) Change only ONE THING at a time. One word in your headline may get your ad to pull twice as many clicks. Test everything - one at a time.

6) You may wish to use an ‘Exact match’ expression. To do this put your keywords in brackets. For example, [Home sauna]. This will make your ads much more targeted because these ads will show only when an exact match is made with words entered in a Google search.

7) Experiment and tweak (change/alter) your keywords over a month until you gradually perfect the combination of words and sponsored costs per word/expression.

8) ALL information you need will be on Adwords HELP.

Adwords and Overture (20th July 06)

2006-07-20T11:19:00.000Z

One of the most common keyword promotion programs is Google’s Adwords. The beauty of such a promotion technique, and one that makes Adwords as beneficial to small businesses, perhaps more than large businesses, is that it offers the small businesses an equal playing field regardless of the company size

When a person searches the web by entering keywords in a search bar, any advertiser who has sponsored certain keywords with Adwords, can have their ad come up. The process as a whole is far more specific than a banner ad and thus one a small business will only pay under very specific circumstances. For a small business, the advertiser only pays if their ad is clicked and the advertiser has the knowledge that in effect, the user has gone through 2 stages purely through their own recognition of an interest. In addition to Google’s Adwords, Yahoo’s Overture also offers a popular program for keyword promotion.

The various keyword campaigns are nonetheless similar to set-up and what makes it even more effective for small companies online, is that for the same cost as a big company, one can also select:
- Regional targeting
- Language selection (even to the extent that one can chose for your ad to only come up in geographical areas by mileage from a destination). A garage for example, can choose to only come up in searches for the local community area.
- Keyword CPC works with the advertiser choosing words which he/she wishes to sponsor and then deciding on how much he/she is willing to pay for each click on that keyword or key phrase. If another person has bid more, than your ad will come up below theirs. The statistics in the Keyword campaign set-up will show you clearly what words are being clicked on, most often, and how much you are paying for each word. If you sponsor the expression ‘belly dance bristol’ for £0.20 a click for example, and the next highest bidder is £0.10, then you will only be charged £0.11. Tweaking the best words to use and optimising the words such that you are attracting people with a genuine interest but without paying any more than you need to – is time consuming in the few month. Setting up a keywords campaign thus can involve changing the words and sponsored cost around, many times in the first few months.
- You can set the maximum limit of how much you spend per day, on a keyword campaign, thus the concern that you could suddenly find yourself with a bill for thousands, is not an issue.

For more information on Adwords campaigns and Overture click this link

Keyword CPC benefits as opposed to Banner advertising (19th July 06)

2006-07-19T09:31:00.000Z

Keyword CPC promotion is in some ways similar to banner advertising, in that the advertiser is paying for his/her banner (with banner ad's) or keywords (in keyword CPC) to be shown on a website. There is nonetheless, a major difference in that with keyword promotion, the ad will come up as a result of a user entering specific keywords in a Search Engine search. If a person enters the words Villas Sicily Italy into a search for example, when searching for villas in Sicily Italy, and if these words have been included as the sponsored words which the advertiser is sponsoring, then the keywords ad may come up on the right side menu (see image on left). With banner ads, they come up on screen randomly in that if you happen to be on a given website, then you will see the banner ad. With a banner ad you will be on a website which likely is of similar interest to your own but there is still an element of luck involved in you seeing the ad. With keywords though, there is arguably a more definite decision by the user that leads them to come across your ad. The web user shows a distinct need/interest in buying/learning because the user has specifically shown a need or desire for somethienteringterign specific words. For a user thus to get to your website via your keyword ad (and for you to be charged), they will have had to have gone through 3 stages of choice.
- The user would have had to recognise his or her own desire to look for an item or piece of information.
- The user will then have had to enter certain keywords of his/her own choosing, in a search engine.
- The user must then have specifically chosen to click the keyword link to go to your site.We can thus perhaps say that keyword CPC advertising more clearly targets people who are in your target market. In terms of the 4 P's in marketing mix (Product, place, promotion and price), with keyword promotions we are placing the marketing almost at the feet as it were, of the target market. We are allowing potential customers/site visitors to decide what they are looking for by entering words of their own choice and then we are displaying our ad in front of the ones who entered matching words, to the ones we have selected as being appropriate to our target market. It is unique in many ways to traditional sales whereby you set up a shop and hope for passing trade. With this electronic form of marketing, we are letting people walk around anywhere they want to in any city and any country and the grabbing them off the street as it were, to view our ads. This is perhaps a quite simplistic way of looking at things, but it does help to express the way in which e-marketing is so different via techniques such as keywords advertising.
For more information about Keyword Adwords promotion click here

Banner Advertisements and SEO (18th July 06)

2006-07-18T09:35:00.000Z

Banner adÂs (advertisements) are a common sight these days when surfing the larger and more commercial websites. Visit www.yahoo.co.uk, www.thisisplymouth.co.uk and you will see banners galore as these two sites promote various businesses. Surf the internet and it will not be long before you are faced with a banner ad. Some of them pop-up at you and you cannot be see them, unless you have no banner pop-up's set.

The benefits of banner ad advertising though is questioned by people, with some feeling that in order for banner adÂs to be effective, they have to be supported by offline promotion. Banner ads are nevertheless failing to be very effective. Thineffectivenessss of banner adÂs is supported by statistics such as those by Green & Elgin (2001) stating that the click-through-rate is only 0.3% and falling. Banner ads generally seem to be considered as lacking the necessary size, interactivity and visual draw of forms such as offline TV and newspaper ads. Banner adÂs additionally are considered to ad clutter to sites and make a site more complex and sometimes less appealing.

In terms of smaller company/commercial websites, sites such as the Middle-Eastern Belly dance site World Belly Dance.com or Real Estate website Maltaalta, Malta Property are maybe not the best type of sites for banner ads, due to the likely lack of funds for joint offline promotion and also due to the general lack of effectiveness of banner adÂs, as discussed. For a business still interested in using banner adÂs there are different ways in which they work.

A business can for example, agree with another site to exchange banners and thus both companies advertise and are advertised for free, on each others site (although this will use up valuable space on their site). Another alternative, which is quite popular, is CPM (Cost per mille thousand) or CPC (Cost Per Click) advertising. This works with the website displaying these banner adÂs, getting paid for every time one of the adÂs is clicked. With CPC, the website gets a fee for every click, whilst CPM works with a rate for every thousand clicks.

Next Blog: Keyword promotion (CPC and PPC)

Latest E-marketing News UK (3rd July 06)

2006-07-03T09:40:00.000Z

Getting your website higher in Search Engines can greatly increase business for your company. Improving your search engine rankings is thus an urgent thing you should do for your web-site. You will need to improve your search engine ranking, to get more visibility in searches. Below are some tips on getting your site higher in web searches.

1) Create quality content! The content should use your target keywords. You can easily look at your competitors websites and check and use similar keywords. Ensure the the content is well written. Make sure the content does not simply list words (called 'keyword stuffing'). Google will then penalise you for keyword stuffing.

2) Buy a domain name which has your keywords in it. If you are building a property website for example, then buy something with real estate or property in the domain name. This can help in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

3) Use textual content as much as possible, rather than graphical content. If you use graphics ensure that you add in the alt tags.

4) Try to use your keywords in the alt tags. Also name your images correctly. Example, use the keywords in the image names, i.e. property-spain.jpeg.

5 ) The title of your web-pages is very important. Keep it to a maximum of 12 words and use your keywords. Make sure you write these words specific to each web-page. The words in the title should match the content on the webpage.

6) Use niche expressions in your titles. Use www.nichebot.com to help you analyse what words to use.

7) Ensure your links on your web-site are relevant to your site. Use links which have a good Google Page-rank.

8) Ensure you often up-date the content of your web-site. Even if you only make small changes, the Search Engines will recognise that the site is being updated and maintained and this is good.

9) Consider submitting your site to the main search engines MANUALLY.

10) Always keep up-to-date with the forums on SEO.

For more UK online marketing SEO ideas visit www.promarketingonline.com