http://archive.aweber.com/uk-webmarketingMy list of UK-based (or English) web marketing recipientsTue, 03 Jan 2012 03:41:05 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/uk-webmarketing/8MiDM/h/2011_on_the_web_and_things.htm December 2011 News - Issue 28 How 2011 will shape 2012 on the web. You only need to see the company results for Google, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Walmart to understand that the word recession is relative. When we review 2012 in a year's time, we will see the watershed 2011 will turn out to have been on the web for many of the reasons I list in the linked article. I list what I believe to have been the key determinants of the digital market in 2011 and those that will shape 2012. This is based on my experience in clients vast and tiny; on my participation and increasing recognition in key marketing forums including Mari Smith's Inner Circle - and she has just been voted #3 most influential woman on Social Media in the world. I also read - lots. I believe Briquesetclics's rise to within the top 750,000 websites in the world in 2011 (and still rising) is reflective of what I have learned and contribute - with both my clients' and my network's (your) help. For that I thank you all, and wish you the very best in 2012. More... What is the relationship between Websites and Social Media? 2011 has been a year full of client requests for website work and social media strategy. But as much as having an effective web presence is far more than just having a website, an effective social media strategy is far more than just being on Facebook (Twitter, LinkedIn etc). A good spade does not an effective digger make! I have warned clients and even PR companies that a successful Facebook Strategy is not a given. There's more you need to do to survive in the swamp. More... Client developments this month More energy! I mentioned last time that Green Energy's websites are now attracting more than 5,000 visits a month. The chaps report turnover this year is x9 last year's and thank in large part the work of the websites - as well as the huge oil and gas price rises this year! Green Energy remains a very exciting proposition to watch in 2012! Briquesetclics in top 750,000 websites in the world. I am delighted that my own site Briquesetclics not only made it into the top 1 million websites in the world by end of November but is now in the top 750,000. This surge was due to some specific activities I started performing with the site that I am now replicating on a couple of other sites - with the same effect. A little lesson learned from recent Google changes. Health food supplier I performed a digital marketing review for a Health-Food supplier in the UK. Hopefully this will lead to follow-on work in the new year. Up and coming... What is Facebook Edgerank and why is it important? Edgerank is Facebook's equivalent of Google's PageRank (which determined how sites are represented in search results). Edgerank is a grading of a person (and consequently their posts) according to a number of different factors. Why is it important? Because as peoples' networks grow, it is impossible both to show - and show in order - all the updates one receives from everyone's friends. Consequently, in fact, Facebook therefore only displays the Edgiest posts from the Edgiest people in newsfeeds. (Did you know that?) Like Google's PageRank, it is not only to keep the quality of peoples' Newsfeeds high (so the overall quality and quantity of interactions increases) but it maximises Facebook's ad relevance and exposure which benefits them commercially. I will write a proper article on this at some point - but in brief, the factors affecting Edgerank are: - The Affinity developed between a post's recipient and its creator over time. i.e. numbers of Likes and other interactions between the two people. (It is no good - as happened to me recently - someone telling me I liked your post - without actually pushing the Like button! Every vote now counts.) - The weight given to a particular interaction - for example a comment carries more weight than a Like. - The age of the activity - the older an interaction, the less Edge it has. People who can maintain threads over a long period of time, develop more Edge. Did you know? iTunes apps for Fitness, Health and Medical have now exceeded 6,000! There were 201 billion online video views in October. YouTube is the 3rd most popular site in the world. Can any business aford NOT to have a presence there? There were 282 million unique visitors to Amazon in November (i.e. doesn't count the number who visited more than once). 1 in every 8 hours spent online is spent on Facebook. Marketing tools I use here are the shortcuts to tools I only came upon by months of trial and expensive error. Socialoomph For Social message management aWeber For eMail newsletters Internet Business Promoter (IBP) For SEO SEMRush For market demand analysis Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Design Suite SpeedPPC (Bulk) PCC campaign manager Likno Java-based menus and tooltips Royalty-Free Photos A great site when you're stuck for a photo. Tabsite Facebook Page creator My Links Use this link to sign-up My brain Articles Newsletter Archive 2008-2011 Unsubscribe Interesting Blog Posts What could topple Facebook and how? Content Management Systems Small Business Beware! Do SEMs make better designers? Are online brochure sites for the birds? Du-Mar Ltd 87 - 89 Park Lane, Hornchurch, RM11 1BE Registered in England No 5018585 Tue, 03 Jan 2012 03:41:05 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/uk-webmarketing/G_cpM/h/A_Web_spider_s_update_.htm October News - Issue 27 Client feedback : the basics of getting found. After last month's update some people asked me What is 'Black-Hat' SEO? Coincidentally, a client also asked me to review their site to make recommendations about their basic searchability. In a third example, I reviewed the guidelines an agency gave their client which were just plain inaccurate. In a fourth example, a client related how their web package was encouraging them to fill out their keywords tags - which search engines stopped looking at back at the turn of the millennium! (And indeed mis-filling this section can actually penalise you). So I thought a small article on the basic do's and dont's of SEO might be useful? Please feel free to forward this to anyone else you may feel would be interested. More... Other items in the news this month The biggest I told you so moment this month attributed to Steve Jobs, is Adobe's withdrawal of Flash from the mobile browser market. Flash is Adobe's proprietary graphical interface that allows for amazing animations on websites. Apple had already withdrawn support for Flash from its iOS devices citing instability and it now looks like Adobe has concluded the same. But it was on the cards: with the release of HTML5 early this year, which supports many graphical transition effects natively from within HTML, I indicated in an earlier newsletter that Flash would increasingly be regarded as yesterday's technology: requiring high skill levels and expense to use it, as well as being totally unsearch-able. The time is rapidly approaching for people with Flash-based websites to consider moving off it. Interesting Client Developments this month Scooter-senior This eCommerce site is still a work-in-progress, but now well under way with the population of products. La Croix Facebook Tabs I have now created a properly Tabbed Fan Page for La Croix Spa, including Activities, Availability and Directions pages. This is my first foray into Facebook fan sites. Great results for Green Energy Eu As well as updating the product set and site look-and-feel, the analytics now show combined monthly traffic for all Green Energy's sites is in excess of 5,000 visits! The guys are seeing this result in a steady number of enquiries and contacts for information and quotes. Vitrinesdexpositions My PPC campaign with Selquin is now in care and maintenance with the client, pending any further review of market demand and monitoring of prices that they may want.They are very busy with new plans of which hopefully more anon. What's more? A mistake turned out well for me... You will have received a message from me by mistake last month. Huge apologies - I was adding some new newsletter recipients and my software decided to send their welcome message to everyone. However, I was very interested by the response of so many of you saying yes please do keep me on, as well as (only) one response asking very politely to come off. Iknow everyone had to opt in to receive these emails in the first place - but I felt after this experience that it might be healthy every now and then to ask explicitly - and check to see if you're getting something of value. Theft of Copyright - What to do This spectre rears its ugly head far too often on the web, although since the Panda update earlier this year, Google has gone some way to diminishing the value of second copies of content. Nevetheless it is theft, and can have serious implications on your business. See an article I once wrote regarding the topic, and what to do. Did you know? The tipping point in numbers of FANs registered to a Facebook Page, before it starts generating regular business interest is considered to be 500. For web sites I have an analogous figure I give my clients of 1500 visits per month - just based on what I see in the stats Vs what they tell me they're receiving in phone calls. emails etc. As a small business you are now more likely to have a Tweet opened by the right people if it is sent to LINKEDIN, than within Twitter itself. Your message won't get lost in the feed so easily as it does in Twitter, and on LinkedIn you can have threaded conversations around a particular topic, whcih you can't on Twitter. Marketing tools I use here are the shortcuts to tools I only came upon by months of trial and expensive error. Socialoomph For Social message management aWeber For eMail newsletters Internet Business Promoter (IBP) For SEO SEMRush For market demand analysis Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Design Suite SpeedPPC (Bulk) PCC campaign manager Likno Java-based menus and tooltips Royalty-Free Photos A great site when you're stuck for a photo. My Links Use this link to sign-up My brain Articles Newsletter Archive 2008-2011 Unsubscribe Interesting Blog Posts What could topple Facebook and how? Content Management Systems Small Business Beware! Do SEMs make better designers? Are online brochure sites for the birds? Du-Mar Ltd 87 - 89 Park Lane, Hornchurch, RM11 1BE Registered in England No 5018585 Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:35:48 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/uk-webmarketing/6oyW6/h/Facebook_changes_a.htm Potted Summary of Facebook Changes With apologies, the link to the article on recent Facebook Changes did not work in my last email. Here is the correct link. I am grateful so many of you wanted the correct version, but apologies again for the mistake in the original - I seem to be experiencing some unexpected behaviours with my email software at the moment. As thanks for your patience, you may also be interested to see my recent articles about Social media, published in eZinearticles: Social Networking - is this all there is? Part 1. Gaps in the Market Social Networking - is this all there is? Part 2. Why do we network? Marketing tools I usehere are the shortcuts to tools I only found after months of trial and expensive error Socialoomph For Social message management aWeber For eMail newsletters Internet Business Promoter (IBP) For SEO SEMRush For market demand analysis Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Design Suite SpeedPPC (Bulk) PCC campaign manager Likno Java-based menus and tooltips Royalty-Free Photos A great site when you're stuck for a photo. My Links Use this link to sign-up My brain Articles Newsletter Archive 2008-2011 Unsubscribe Interesting Blog Posts What could topple Facebook and how? Content Management Systems Small Business Beware! Do SEMs make better designers? Are online brochure sites for the birds? Du-Mar Ltd 87 - 89 Park Lane, Hornchurch, RM11 1BE Registered in England No 5018585 Mon, 24 Oct 2011 03:56:05 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/uk-webmarketing/5Cgmc/h/Web_spider_s_update_.htm September News - Issue 26 Social media frenzy? The direction of Social Media has been called into question this month. A number of articles have appeared dissing Google+ before it has even hit mass rollout - which is the main problem. Google+ is still limited release and many of us can't even get on it yet. Unless Google can open their doors wider (they cannot admit they released it too early) it will conk-out before it has even started. People are already calling it a fancy new tool for geeks. The other area causing a stir is the level of Facebook changes underway - overtly to Google plus-ify itself. People are struggling to keep up with the changes. I will be summarising the recent Facebook changes and how to get back on top of them in a follow up post in about a week's time as I am going to a webinar about them tonight. For my own views on the state and roadmap for Social media as a whole you might like to look at the series of articles Social Networking - Is this all there is? I am now writing on eZinearticles.com. My Second article in the series: Why do we network? is just awaiting approval and I'll send out a link when it is approved. Timing should coincide with the Facebook post. Want to know more? Follow this link to access these articles. My view? eMail is still the web's killer app. Client Successes Pipeline: Last month I had 3 potential client opportunities under discussion. The European Truck Dealership and the Carpets Supplier were both implementing Black Hat SEO techniques. I had to tell them I could not help, unless they took steps to rectify these first. Unsurprisingly I have heard nothing more from them, since... The Yacht Brokerage shows promise and I have given my client some basic advice about next steps. However this venture is subject to funding. Watch this space. Existing: Holiday Activities France I lead with one of my own sites which shows holiday activities available in our corner of France. I have just completed a major overhaul to populate all the available tourist data onto Google Maps which I have then integrated into the site. I also took the opportunity to bring the look and feel right up to date. Over the summer, this site was attracting more traffic than my two holiday rental sites combined, but was easily their inferior in terms of user experience. I have loads more information to add. This is an un-branded site. Anybody is able to link to this site for their own use as my feeling is the more people we can attract here, the better it is for everyone. Mobilité Dynamique This eCommerce store for mobility scooters is now just waiting for my client to pass me their product information so I can tailor the product pages to each of the specific types of product. (As goods range from whole scooters down to individual tyres and batteries, you have to display different things in different ways.) Pending receipt of this information, we only need to complete the financial services hook-up, finalise the look-and-feel (once we have the whole site available in front of us) and we will be ready to go. All the eCommerce functionality works beautifully - but I'm just stuck using dummy product data at the moment. Vitrines d'expositions I continued with Robert's web marketing for his glass display cabinets in France. I am now turning my attention to putting together a proposal for him for eMail marketing to his existing customer base. Existing customers are a huge resource that businesses typically have already worked hard to sell to or at least interest. A newsletter with a product offer or example of good use, or latest news goes a long way to promote referrals business or repeat sales. Green Energy The guys have just been in touch with a large set of updates to their Infrared products - which is great news. On the Solar PV side, they had decided - rightly I think - to concentrate on larger solar projects rather than smaller domestic installations. And although the lead times and working capital requirements for these have been consequently larger and more challenging to meet they now have a number of such projects finally coming through and have a feeling things on the solar side may finally be under way. Tools I use and recommend: Socialoomph For Social message management aWeber For eMail newsletters Internet Business Promoter (IBP) For SEO SEMRush For market demand analysis Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Design Suite SpeedPPC (Bulk) PCC campaign manager Royalty-Free Photos A great site when you're stuck for a photo. My Links Use this link to sign-up My brain Articles Newsletter Archive 2008-2011 Unsubscribe Interesting Blog Posts What could topple Facebook and how? Content Management Systems Small Business Beware! Do SEMs make better designers? Are online brochure sites for the birds? Du-Mar Ltd 87 - 89 Park Lane, Hornchurch, RM11 1BE Registered in England No 5018585 Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:59:48 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/uk-webmarketing/DL8W2/h/Summer_web_news_Richard.htm Summer News - Issue 25 Web Design Trends in 2011 Having written search trend predictions in my newsletter back in January, here is the way the market is diagnosing web design trends so far in 2011. With market forecasts saying that sales of smartphones alone will finally top the PC market in 2011, the trend in site design consequently appears to be in sites adapting for mobile - with all that that implies to use of graphics, colour schemes, use of Flash, use of QR codes etc. With that: here is my view of trends this year. More... Client Successes through the Summer In the pipeline: 3 Exciting potential client opportunities are currently under discussion: 1) A European Truck Dealership; 2) A Speciality Carpets supplier (e.g. car mats, red carpet events etc.); 3) A Yacht Brokerage. This represents a very exciting pipeline. I would like to win them all - but am delighted just to have so many opportunities in play. Existing: Vitrines d'expositions I continued with Robert's web marketing for his glass display cabinets in France. PPC is now well tuned and working well for him. Organic SEO enhancements have been applied to all pages. The site is about to be migrated to a Content Management System (CMS) and I have written the designer a series of considerations to implement during the conversion. Mobilité Dynamique To be honest, things went very quiet over the summer - my client flat out for all the right reasons - meant we simply didn't get together as much as we should. I am hoping to get things stoked back up again in September and finish this site. Nearlyheaven My work with Sue and her increasingly well recognised brand continues with enhancements little and often. Sue has just been on the Telly again - I'm hoping we might get a link to add to the site and I'll refer to it here! La Croix Spa This proposition has worked so well for us against all the odds this year I am about to get external help (I know that sounds bizarre when I'm talking about my own trade) to give me a second opinion and a plan of action for the French site and the Holiday Activities site. I just don't have time to do these myself and still react to these other pieces of work coming in. I know what I want to do, but I now need some help! Green Energy At the moment we're just keeping a watching brief on things here. The current investment environment and government dithering over the future of Green Energy funding in the UK plus bank reticence to lend to small businesses is making it a tough place to be at the moment. The guys have got the best proposition and the best websites :-) but we all knew 2011 was going to be a tough year for strategy and development. Tools I use and recommend: Socialoomph For Social message management aWeber For eMail newsletters Internet Business Promoter (IBP) For SEO SEMRush For market demand analysis Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Design Suite SpeedPPC (Bulk) PCC campaign manager Royalty-Free Photos A great site when you're stuck for a photo. My Links Use this link to sign-up My brain Articles Newsletter Archive 2008-2011 Unsubscribe Interesting Blog Posts What could topple Facebook and how? Content Management Systems Small Business Beware! Do SEMs make better designers? Are online brochure sites for the birds? Du-Mar Ltd 87 - 89 Park Lane, Hornchurch, RM11 1BE Registered in England No 5018585 Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:53:05 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/uk-webmarketing/AHOfE/h/June_web_news_Richard.htm June News - Issue 24 Google launches its social network Google+. But can it challenge Facebook? Having last written about What could topple Facebook and How? which prompted a good deal of interested response from my news network, Google obligingly announced the launch of its Google+ social network (currently available by invitation only) the following week. And whilst Google is publicly saying that + is not a competitor of Facebook... er, it is. So what is Google+? How does it work and could it topple Facebook? More... Sites of interest this month Mobilite-dynamique My client and I sat down and worked through colour scheme options until we reached a mix they felt they liked and which would suit their clientele. Probably bar tweaks here and there we are there with colours now. I continued to translate the Actinic (Ecommerce) software from English to French, and my client went away to draft me the copy for a sample of their products so I can finalise the product template design. At that point we really need to upload this all onto the target website and start testing! Vitrines d'expositions I continued with Robert's web marketing for his glass display cabinets in France. I have been working on increasing Click through rates of the advertisements- since this metric is the best indicator of the relevance of the advertisement to what people are searching for. Attention is now also turning towards improving organic search results, as these are of course free! My Links Use this link to sign-up My brain Articles Newsletter Archive 2008-2011 Unsubscribe Interesting Blog Posts What could topple Facebook and how? Content Management Systems Small Business Beware! Do SEMs make better designers? Are online brochure sites for the birds? Du-Mar Ltd 87 - 89 Park Lane, Hornchurch, RM11 1BE Registered in England No 5018585 Wed, 06 Jul 2011 13:30:04 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/uk-webmarketing/AFGv./h/May_web_news_Richard.htm May News - Issue 23 Why is Microsoft buying Skype? Well, apparently each one of us subscribed to Skype is worth $1,000 to Microsoft according to its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype (pending regulatory approval). What does this acquisition signal if we don't just suggest it was to stop anyone else buying them? Microsoft's history of large acquisitions is not earmarked by Brand Permanence of anyone save Microsoft - see a run-down here. Was this therefore a defensive or aggressive move? Who is the enemy? And what does this mean to you or me? More... Sites of interest this month Green Energy Solar I put this site live in early May and Mike and Jonathan seem to be very pleased with it. I now need to play catch-up with Mike's other websites to bring them up to the same look and feel, integrate the navigation and catch up with other product news. Mobilite-dynamique The new site framework with both Dreamweaver and e-commerce content (supplied by Actinic) is now in place and in June we shall hopefully be populating the product content and finalising the colour scheme. The above is just a screen shot of one iteration of the layout and possible (conservative) colour options using Adobe Kuler to help colour-matching. Flying in France It has been a year since I remodelled Sue's site(s) to split out the three different businesses she had into three separate sites and integrate with her very successful blog. Well with a year's experience and market feedback (some of which was very, very useful), I did a major update to the home page contents in May and also simplified the navigation and de-cluttered the overall look and feel of the Flying in France site. A great improvement. Vitrines d'expositions I continued with Robert's web marketing for his glass dsplay cabinets in France. In May we reduced the bids for the Google advertising campaigns in order to bring the overall Rank down from 1 to position 2. Position 2 is in fact the optimum rank for getting clicks and we were suitably rewarded with an increase in clicks and decrease (by one third) in costs! Conversions of visitors to the site into actual sales remains a challenge - as it does right across Retail markets at the moment. My Links Use this link to sign-up My brain Articles Newsletter Archive 2008-2011 Unsubscribe Interesting Blog Posts Content Management Systems Small Business Beware! Website content syndication Do SEMs make better designers? Are online brochure sites for the birds? Du-Mar Ltd 87 - 89 Park Lane, Hornchurch, RM11 1BE Registered in England No 5018585 Wed, 01 Jun 2011 10:08:05 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/uk-webmarketing/1nR96/h/Richard_Martin_Where_did.htm April News - Issue 22 Web Marketing - some context Do you feel at the moment - whether you work in the physical world or on the web - that everything has become a flea market? Every activity in which you engage now is like standing in the middle of a million other people all shouting I have the best product; choose my CV - other people only say they are the greatest - but I REALLY AM! And if Globalisation, the Internet and Recession have arguably created this flea market experience - we are split down the middle, aren't we? As consumers we crave everything it has to offer - cheap prices, readily available goods, people falling over themselves to sell - but as suppliers we struggle to raise our head above the parapet. What does this say now about how we sell our companies or even just ourselves these days? Is the machinery itself at fault? Or more likely, are we just better consumers of marketing messages than we are suppliers? What's going on? Any general lessons for Brand YOU? More... Sites of interest this month Vitrines d'expositions I continued with Robert's web marketing for his glass dsplay cabinets in France. April has really been about looking at the site Analytics and Ads performance and optimising for better results. Robert faces the usual challenge that the French market is diferent from the UK market in such unexpected ways - that we have spent a lot of time making what was really an English site translated into French more Gallic. Interesting challenge beginning to yeild results. Mobilite-dynamique Work commenced in April to Wireframe the potential online store that Catrional wants for mobility scooters. This allowed me to roughly size the whole project, get an idea of how information will flow through the site - what sort of events and decisions customers will have to perform etc. Brought this all back together with the many ideas Catriona also wants to introduceand ended up with a pretty good target design that I now need to go away and produce in May! Green Energy Solar Work continues on a Solar site for Green Energy. (The above screenshot comes from my prototype site - it isn't yet available on the web.) Progress has been slow as there has beewn a mountain of information to pull together in some sort of sensible shape. Nearly there though and hope to launch the first cut in May. As with every website (or should be) the first release is always to an extent going to be experimental until we see how it performs in the real world, and then determine where improvements can be made. La Croix Spa This site of mine was where my interest in internet marketing all started and it was long overdue an overhaul. The makeover is visual with some technical improvements behind the scenes. For this release I kept all the actual content of the site the same as before - as that seemed to be working for us. My Links Use this link to sign-up My brain Articles Newsletter Archive 2008-2011 Unsubscribe Interesting Blog Posts Content Management Systems Small Business Beware! Website content syndication Do SEMs make better designers? Are online brochure sites for the birds? Du-Mar Ltd 87 - 89 Park Lane, Hornchurch, RM11 1BE Registered in England No 5018585 Mon, 09 May 2011 13:42:03 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/uk-webmarketing/rags/h/Richard_Martin_s_March.htm March News - Issue 21 Matching site design to the buying cycle As the Byrds sang To everything, turn, turn, turn. There is a season, turn, turn, turn. The same is true of matching Site design and Search Optimisation to your clients' Buying Cycle. Different aspects of your site and advertising have to meet the different stages your clients have reached in their own purchasing process. So you have to be aware of how your customers take their buying decisions and provide the appropriate content and purchase opportunities. Generically the stages a customer goes through before purchasing are: Information-gathering or self-instruction using Broad search types (loose use of words until they understand their subject. High affinity to knowledge-based results. Easily distracted by wild promises - BOGOFs, Freebies etc); Shopping-around or surfing using Phrase-based search types (combinations of phrases to see who supplies what. High affinity to Comparative search results and idea of price ranges); Transactional or Exact match search types (exact wording that will generate exactly the result required. Low tolerance to irrelevance, side-tracking or bait and switch. Poor fulfillment by the website will prevent a sale. Both your Advertising and Search optimisation, your site structure and fulfillment processes must be tuned to these 3 types of enquiry. More... Sites of interest this month Vitrines d'expositions I was delighted when Robert contacted me out of the blue right at the end of February. He had found me because his need (to expand his markets into France) matched exactly my offering. He therefore found my site directly and contacted me - directly. I have consequently helped him through March set up his advertising campaign - earning him his first two sales within 3 days of starting. This is hopefully going to become a long-term proposition, as Robert has a number of other bsiness lines that he is equally seeking to expand into Europe, depending on the initial success of his sales cabinets. Mobilite-dynamique Last week I was passed a very interesting referral by one of my newsletter readers :-) to Catriona who is successfully marketing mobility scooters in France. In response to opportunity and competition she is wanting to expand her operation here and I have performed a preliminary piece of research on the market demand for these buggies in order to assess the likelihood of success, what directions we might want to look at etc. Very interesting start and hopefully more anon. (Thanks Rupert!) Green Energy - client references I finally caught up on some of my backlog with Green Energy and produced a site to hold their growing catalog of client references. This site is also trialling a brand-new template I created for them. I probably need to fade the background a tiny bit more but the overall impression is exactly as I want it and forms a great basis for moving all their sites ahead with a more arresting and modern design. As Jonathan, commercial development manager for the company said This site plus all the data pages really sets us apart from any other heating company in our industry. Ecotech I have brought the site right up to date for Jill and Nigel and now reflect all the Eco-friendly products that Ecotech supply. This brings Phase 1 of my original plan for them (to get all the site content up to date) to a close. Phase 2 will now be much more about driving more people to the site - to really get it working for them. My Links Use this link to sign-up My brain Articles Newsletter Archive 2008-2010 Unsubscribe Interesting Blog Posts Content Management Systems Small Business Beware! Website content syndication Do SEMs make better designers? Are online brochure sites for the birds? Du-Mar Ltd 87 - 89 Park Lane, Hornchurch, RM11 1BE Registered in England No 5018585 Sun, 03 Apr 2011 11:56:04 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/uk-webmarketing/1rVuE/h/Richard_Martin_s_February.htm February News Google takes action on Spammy / Low quality sites The wires are currently abuzz with the recent Google algorithm update designed to penalise Content Farms - sites that either plagiarise other peoples' content or just create prosaic content stuffed with highly searched-for phrases in order to outrank competitors. (The point being the content is low quality and therefore of little use to the searcher). These updates were introduced last week. The intention is quite correct, highlighting the conflict between Google's original academic intention (if someone has good content you should CREDIT them for it, not steal it. Alternatively you should produce something better yourself) versus the street reality that allows copying and proliferation of junk without accountability because there are few (?none?), cheap means of securing and proving original authorship. (There's a business opportunity for someone!) The wires are currently up in arms this week with the predictable mix of legitimate and SPAM sites suffering - but see what I think: More... Sites of interest this month Green Energy These guys have been busy since the end of last year when we last reported progress. I am consequently facing a (very interesting) vertical climb to catch up with their huge product developments now in solar power and the new Feed-in tariff that encourages small-scale electrical generation in return for attractive financial incentives. More broadly - after two years of operation the company is also clearer about the market it wishes to serve and I will be re-purposing some of the web content to better reflect that. I am also shortly to greatly expand the communications and messaging capability the guys have to allow them to keep in front of their target audience. It is also time to refresh the site's look and feel - not a radical change as we know what's there works - but it is time to alter some long-standing niggles and bring things up to date with new web standards (e.g. CSS3). International Casting I have been doing some background work - hopefully to bring this much more to the fore in the coming months - to help generate a steady flow of model sign-ups and casting requests for Deborah's model casting agency. We have no stats from their existing site to tell how well they do - other than knowing it does not bring in much traffic and that the overall reputation in Google is low. The prototype site we launched in January is showing about 100 visits per month and is already ranked higher by Alexa.com than the original site. All this without particular additional promotional activities. Just trying to clear other backlog to be able to really help Deborah promote this and move things forward - but very interesting start. The Living Room I created this site for a local business back in January which went live early February. The Riving Room is a customisable function room for business or private use, also hosting themed events. I think it is a great example of local entrepreneurialism - of making markets where none previously existed - and obviously want to watch with interest as things develop. My Links Use this link to sign-up My brain Articles Newsletter Archive 2008-2010 Unsubscribe Interesting Blog Posts Content Management Systems Small Business Beware! Website content syndication Do SEMs make better designers? Are online brochure sites for the birds? Du-Mar Ltd 87 - 89 Park Lane, Hornchurch, RM11 1BE Registered in England No 5018585 Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:44:47 -0500