Posts Tagged ‘website’

• The BBC website is…down???!

  Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

  This is not a sight you are likely to see very often.

  Twitter is alive with the hashtag #bbcblackout as it turns out that our seemingly infallible Aunty has lost her DNS.

  The BBC has engineers on the task, but it will be interesting to hear from ISPs tomorrow whether the absence of the ubiquitous BBC has affected traffic usage during the downtime. iPlayer has been seen as responsible as putting a considerable strain on some players.

  We now have high level BBC Execs apologising on Twitter – good crisis management. Let everyone know as quickly as possible what is happening, or just that you are aware it is happening and are looking into it.

  Steve Herrmann, Editor of the BBC News website just tweeted:
  

  We will keep you updated!

  A tense 45 minutes later – she’s back, seemingly unharmed.

  Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC Tech correspondent) deserves the prize for best tweet:
  

  Tags: bbc, DNS, down, offline, website
  Posted in Blog, Online PR, Social Media

• 5 easy ways to keep in touch with customers

  Saturday, December 5th, 2009

  Customer acquisition carries a far higher cost than customer retention, so it is vital that you look after your customers once you have found them.

  However, it is surprising how many businesses, particularly small business where the resources are often limited, fail to keep in touch with their customers.

  There are multiple ways to do this, and it need not be expensive. Here are 5 quick and easy ways to make sure your customers remember you.

  1. Have you sent all your existing and past customers a Christmas card yet? It needn’t be at the expense of trees – send a digital Xmas card. It’ll also give you a chance to clean up your e-mail distribution list for 2010.

  2. Write a regular newsletter and email it out. When we say “regular”, it may only be monthly, every three months, or even annual, but make it regular so your customers expect it.And don’t forget to archive it on your site as extra content, and include links in your email so people visit your website. It could include news about new products, clients, exhibitions and shows you have attended, or discounts and special offers.

  3. Add a blog to your site. This means that you will need to come up with regular content, but that needn’t be difficult. Pick a time schedule you can keep to, eg every Thursday or the first week of every month if you have limited time and resources.

  4. Use the social networks and tools that are available. For instance, create a fan page on Facebook, use Twitter to inform your customers about sales or special offers, join Linkedin and add your news to your profile or discussion groups.

  5. Send a present. It might just be a pen with your company logo on it, but every little reminder of you is good. Especially when the present is useful. (I love receiving dongles/memory sticks. And I often watch and read the content before deleting it

  

  Tags: business, CRM, facebook, LinkedIn, marketing, Social network, twitter, website
  Posted in Blog, CRM, Online PR, Small Business Resources, Tips & Tricks

• Stop doing SEO!

  Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

  Are you spending time worrying about SEO? Or worse, spending untold money trying to move up the search engine results pages only to find that for no good reason your website has vanished from the top 100 pages?

  If you find your days and nights are haunted by keyword research, writing META tags, hunting down keyword density tools, aching over whether the copy is sufficiently optimised……

  Then, STOP!

  Open your website right now and ask yourself these simple questions:

  1. Does my website look good?

  2. Does it tell a prospective customer everything they need to know about my products and services?

  3. Does it include useful, helpful, valuable, content about my products and services eg how to manuals, articles, links to other resources and so on?

  4. Does it include full contact details that are easy to find from every page?

  5. Does it sell? Or, from a customer point of view, is it easy to buy?

  6. Have I recently added some fresh content for regular visitors?

  If the answer to all of the above is “Yes”, then you do not need to keep worrying about SEO. What you need to do is find who your customers are and where they hang out – in forums, in blogging communities, on Twitter, in social networks, etc – and go and talk to them. Network. Socialise. Share your experience and help people out. Build your reputation as a good person to deal with and you will find that on its own will encourage people to check you out, remember you, recommend you.

  When you are asked questions and can give a great answer, add it to the FAQ on your site to help someone else.

  There is far more that will attract your target audience to your website than just SEO. Word of mouse is far more effective in finding your target audience. Think beyond the search engines.

  If your answer to any of the above is “No”, then you need to resolve some very basic issues with your website before anything else.

  And when you feel you have got enough customers from being social, then you may wish to have a look at your needs for SEO again. And you may find it is no longer required because satisfied customers and people you have met in your ‘socialising’ are doing more than a little on-page SEO could do by linking to you, recommending you in blogs, on Twitter, to their networks and so on.

  

  Tags: Blog, Keyword density, keyword research, Search engine optimization, SEO, Social network, twitter, website
  Posted in SEO, Small Business Resources, Social Media

• Phone calls are the next big thing in online marketing

  Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

  I know you won’t believe me, but it’s true.

  Recently, we wrote about phone call tracking. The point being that it gives very strong data about conversions from landing pages when the call to action is to ‘p.p.p.p.pick up the phone’.

  Interestingly, this has now cropped up again as a subject for discussion on SearchEngineLand.

  Let’s ask why consumers might call a number, rather than send an email or complete a form. The article above fails to address the issue from a consumer point of view, instead looking at all the reasons why the industry has ignored phone calls to date and why there is now a resurgence of the humble call.

  As a consumer, how many times have you emailed an enquiry to a company and then not received a response? Not received a timely response? Or not received *any* response? Ditto with forms on websites. You complete the form, which is often far more lengthy than it need be, and you hit ‘submit’. You get an error and are thrown back to the previous page, yet now all the fields are blank. UGH!

  Having cursed all coders under the sun for that last primary school error, which are you most likely to do:

  a) just return to a search engine and seek another company offering a similar deal?

  b) start all over again completing the form and pray that this time it will actually be delivered and that there isn’t another bug in the system that has failed without informing you?

  Now, let’s look at it a different way, but still from the consumer’s point of view.

  You are looking for a particular item, to be delivered by the weekend, and the first website you fall over clearly has the item in stock (great landing page, BTW, it took you straight to what you were looking for!), they can deliver in 2-3 days guaranteed (force majeure excepted), and have the item at a price you are prepared to pay.

  You have Skype or similar installed, and the only call to action on that page is “Call this number and order today”. No alternatives. Just call. No email address, no online web form, although there is obviously clear navigation to the rest of the site.

  You click and the phone call is initiated. Within moments you are through to a lovely receptionist who, within literally moments, has taken down and double checked your address, your order and removed a reasonably substantial amount of your money from your account on your instructions.

  Two days later, the item you wished for is on your doorstep and is precisely what you had anticipated.

  Next time you try online shopping, having been more than happy with your last purchase, and less than happy with other companies’ failures to answer emails, respond to forms etc, will you be:

  a) More confident using the phone to order

  b) Less confident

  Each time a company gets it right by having well-trained staff to answer the phones, a back-end system that confirms the product is in stock, processes the order, and ensures that is sent out to the customer’s spec, that customer will use the phone.

  Any company who starts ensuring that their phone answering process is up to scratch, and PROMOTING THAT FACT publicly, will begin to win out as customers feel let down by technology and revert to the one thing that they can rely on – the goold old telephone.

  

  Tags: email, forms, Landing page, marketing, search engine, telephone, Web search engine, website
  Posted in CRM, Online PR, Small Business Resources, Stats & Trends

• A/B and Multi-variant testing for websites

  Thursday, November 12th, 2009

  Multi-variant testing (or multi-variate, multi-variable testing) is often used to discover how consumers, site visitors and so on react to different layouts, colours, and so on. A/B testing is testing two options against each other.

  In the real world example, we know that supermarkets use different layouts and place products in certain positions to encourage people to buy the msot expensive goods, to make snap purchases and so on. And it works! How many times have you spontaneously bought something from the displays near the checkout? How often do you look above and below your eyeline to find the cheaper products rather than those the supermarket chain wishes you to buy?

  Multi-variate testing for SEO and websites has infinite possibilities, but it is often ignored, except for landing pages and so on where it tends to get more attention. Whilst it is never a good idea to expend considerable amounts of budget testing for the sake of it, the impact on sales or enquiries of a simple change to website layout, or even the colour of a button, can be astounding.

  Today’s great site is Which test won? which offers a wealth of results from tests conducted across a huge variety of the options available to website owners, site designers, search engine marketers  etc.

  Some of the past tests are worth examining to see what results can be achieved by changing the position of a button, using a different layout, experimenting with photos, landing page formats, multi-page forms vs single page forms, and much more.

  If your website is attracting visitors but not converting to sales, A/B and multi-variate testing might be well worth considering. But remember, what works for another website’s audience may not work for your own. You need to test with your target audience not rely on the results from A.N.Other company.

  

  Tags: A/B testing, Landing page, multi-variate testing, Multivariate testing, Search engine optimization, website
  Posted in SEO, Small Business Resources, Tips & Tricks

• Getting backlinks the easy way

  Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

  Take a look at your website.

  On every page, and every piece of great content, how many ways of sharing that content do you have? None? One? Many?

  Do you make it easy for a site visitor to send out a link to that content? Can they tweet it, add it to Digg, Facebook, delicious? Is there a retweet or reblog button? Is there an RSS feed to syndicate the content not just to RSS readers, but also to sites that accept RSS feeds? Have you added your RSS feed to sites who cater for your target audience? Is your blog RSS feed listed everywhere it can be? Are you on authoritative blogs’ blogrolls? Can your video content be embedded in other people’s sites?

  Do you make all of the above as easy as clicking a mouse?

  Take a look  at this video (which is quite amusing!) and note the simplicity of sharing the video, embedding it on your own site, tweeting, adding to facebook, digging etc.

  Is your content this easy to share? Or are you still manually seeking out valuable links rather than letting your users do it for you?

  

  Tags: backlinks, Blog, Digg, facebook, link, links marketing, twitter, website
  Posted in Content, Link Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Tips & Tricks

• Checking for content plagiarism

  Sunday, July 26th, 2009

  One of the growing problems on the Web is the plagiarism of content, usually through content scrapers or similar.

  If you want to check whether your content has been stolen and is being used by another website, we recommend  using either Copyscape, fairshare, Plagium, or for a particular article, a free service such as article checker.

  Copyscape offers both free and paid services. With search credits for individual page searches starting at only $0.05 (minimum buy 100=$5), it is an inexpensive and efficient way to check for anyone plagiarisng your content. And Copyscape is the gold standard for copy checkers.

  Fairshare is a newer service but does offer an interesting beta recompense scheme for those whose work has been re-used elsewhere.

  Plagium requires you to paste in the text rather than the specific URL (as Copyscape does), but seems to give more detailed results because it does not check any of the navigational elements on the page.

  If you suspect that your work is being re-used, or have evidence that it is being, there is a practical guide to dealing with Plagiarism by Copyscape which includes details of how to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) infringement notice with the search engines.

  

  Tags: content checker, copyscape, Fairshare, plagiarise, Plagiarism, Plagium, Web page, website
  Posted in Content, Small Business Resources, Tips & Tricks

• Creative website revenue idea for SEO

  Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

  If you are using Twitter, then you should also be using Tweetlater, which allows you to automate many of the processes which you need to do to make the most of Twitter eg send a welcome message, auto-tweet, auto-follow, auto-unfollow and so on.

  

  Even if you are not using Twitter and tweetlater, a quick look around the tweetlater site reveals an interesting idea for banner ads and raising revenue from your website.

  At the top of every page, above the fold, is a featured user banner. This reaches a large audience, both through the website and inclusion in 30k emails that are sent out. In order to feature here for 24 hours, all you need do is bid in the auction.

  This is an interesting idea to deal with unsold inventory, raise money, and also promote your website as anyone who wins an auction will also mention your site in blogs, tweets etc. Particularly if they see an increase in followers from being featured.

  Setting up persistent auctions such as this is not difficult, and could prove to be a valuable revenue generator for any site with a reasonable number of page views.

  From an SEO / Web PR angle, purchasing a banner in such a way and on such a site will gain you a useful backlink, even if only temporary, whilst also getting your name and details out through email marketing to a large number of potential followers, customers etc. And very affordable, looking at the prices of previous successful auctions.

  

  Tags: Auction, email marketing, online promotion, Search engine optimization, TweetLater, twitter, Web banner, website
  Posted in Link Marketing, Online PR, SEO, Social Media, Tips & Tricks

• 10 questions to ask yourself about your website

  Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

  Take a deep breath, click on your website URL, stand back from the screen and ask yourself the following questions about your site. Pretend you have never seen your site before ….

  1. How long does it take you to work out what your website is about? (Remember, you have never seen it before)
  2. Is your site design clean and crisp, is it cluttered, is it too colourful/too drab? Does it work in any browser?
  3. How descriptive is your page title? Does it include keywords?
  4. If you mouseover an image, does it tell you clearly what it is with some funky keywords in the alt img tag? (Hold your mouse over the image and a little box comes up with info about that image. If it says “image374.jpg” shoot your website designer or SEO company!)
  5. How many keywords can you see above the fold ie without scrolling down the screen?
  6. Is your text easy to read, short sentences, with clear messages, or is it verbose, with long sentences that means your average reader has run out of breath and keeled over on the keyboard before reaching the end?
  7. Is there a single clear call to action on every page of the site that directs the user to do “something” that will achieve an objective for them and for you? For instance, complete a contact form, sign up to a newsletter, download a white paper, buy the product
  8. How many links on the page you are looking at are external (ie lead to other websites) and internal (lead users to other pages within your site? Are they relevant to the content that surrounds them? Do they open in a new window/tab? (Or have you just thrown someone off your own website?!)
  9. Does your logo link to the homepage on every page? In other words, is it easy to navigate to the homepage from anywhere in the site?
  10. Do you have a custom 404 page? (It can even be a funny 404.) Do you have a favicon?

  Now, few of these may seem related to internet marketing but every single one is.

  You can drive as many people as you want to your website with paid traffic listings, directory and search engine submissions, complex SEO strategies, Web PR, article submissions, offline marketing, white and black hat techniques, bribing all your friends and family, forcing people in the street to look at your website etc. But once they arrive, you need to be clear that it will do its job in helping to achieve their and your goals.

  Be critical and assess your website from a user’s perspective. Forget the search engines for a moment because they won’t call you up with an enquiry, fill out your contact form, read your email newsletter, or buy your products. Think about the individuals who end up on your website.

  Does your website work for them? Because if it doesn’t work for them, it won’t be working for you either.

  What problems have you faced with your website over time? How did you find out it wasn’t working? Do you encourage your website visitors to offer feedback on the site? How do you solve problems with your website? What have you changed that has really made a difference to you? Let us know.

  Tags: website
  Posted in Content, Keywords, Website Usability

• Growing concern about hacked websites

  Sunday, October 5th, 2008

  There has been considerable online press coverage recently about server vulnerabilities, websites hosting malicious code eg virus in HTML, and hacked websites generally. (Actually, the correct term is ‘cracked’ as ‘hacked’ just means anything to do with coding, rather than nasty code).

  If you run a commercial website, it is vital that not only is it working as close to 100% of the time as possible, but that it is not serving up anything which could put your potential customers off eg content or code posted by someone who has unlawfully accessed your servers.

  Many companies, understandably, use hosting companies to provide all these services, but it is worth regularly checking how up to date your hosting provider is with security flaws, patches, vulnerabilities etc.

  Also, you should use Google Webmaster tools to check that your site has not been compromised in any way. Google have this week updated their webmaster blog about some of the most recent issues they have encountered, and offer some solutions to the problems.

  Tags: website
  Posted in Web Analytics