Summer has arrived, so why does it still feel like winter?
Despite all the doom and gloom of the media, the onset of summer and the holidays has come as something of a welcome relief from what has been a pretty dreadful nine months in the macro economy. As a result, it has been a worrying time for many - the cost of living seems to spiral well beyond government inflation figures, mortgages are increasing in cost at a time when you would expect them to fall, and jobs are disappearing in certain sectors and industries in their thousands. Businesses nearly everywhere are watching their costs and are nervous about future sales.
Definitely a time to consider, in one of those rare peaceful moments, what has been going right on your website and what has not - are there some really cost effective ways of improving this key sales and marketing tool? Compared to the cost of employing a new person or advertising in traditional media the internet pound for pound can still offer fantastic value. We would always be happy to have a chat with you about options and opportunities for improving perfomance during difficult times.
Despite everything out there - we wish you all a great summer!
Web Marketing Seminar, 9th September at 4.30 pm
Our September seminar will focus on the key issue of visitor conversion, site performance and its measurement.
Securing those visitors is of course important but of equal importance is getting visitors to do what you want them to do - it may be, for example, to fill in a form, purchase a product, or phone a telephone number.
The seminar will take place at our offices near Guildford - although if numbers grow too large we may reorganise to another location in the Guildford area. E-Mail us to reserve a place!
Digital Marketing
Summer News and Views 2008
(in brief)
Flash becomes search engine friendly - or at least some indexing is now possible with Google and Yahoo. This involves configuration of the SWF file - not straightforward but at least Adobe has started the ball rolling on this important weakness of Flash. However, Flash is still a no-no insofar as we are concerned unless it is used as a small part in a site's look and feel.
Google Street View comes to UK - Google Maps will not only incorporate UK satellite images but in future ground level photographs of all the UK streets. A landmark court case recently confirmed that this is not an invasion of privacy - your home and its front garden will be on the Internet whether you like it or not.
Brand Theft - competitors are now able to use each other's brands to trigger Pay Per Click advertisements. This may be illegal but the search engines will no longer disallow it. Brand protection is an increasingly important part of search engine strategy - so beware of your competition's dirty tricks.
Time to Buy Google shares?
This is the claim of the Wall Street analysts. With the share price at 480 dollars at the time of going to print in August 2008, most analysts see the share rising to a median level of 630 in the short term. Virtually all of these investment analysts rate Google a BUY. Which for the canny investor probably means you should steer well clear. It will be interesting to see what happens later on in the year.
Our own anecdotal impression is that business is cutting its spend with Google, but that the price per click seems to be rising - so Google may well end up less affected by recession than you think and the Wall Street gurus could be right.
Adwords Now on YouTube
Following the acquisition of You Tube by Google, this high volume website now shows Adwords advertisements next to, and indeed superimposed over, the videos themselves. Advertising on YouTube was formerly restricted to those wishing to spend a minimum of $50,000 per quarter. Now it is available for less than $1! Google treats YouTube as part of its content network so you can elect not to appear on the site if you prefer. It will be interesting to see how the quality of visitors from YouTube develops - at the moment we prefer not to advertise there.
Apple's sneaky tricks in browser war...
Were you one of the millions of surprised PC owners to find Apple's Safari browser on your PC? Without realising it millions of people who use Apple ITunes as their music and video downloader for their IPods were required to upgrade their programme - the effect of which was to also install the Safari browser on your PC.
The impact on browser share will, we are sure, be considerable - and the impact on your website could be too. The fact that your site works well on Internet Explorer and Firefox does not mean that it works well on Safari - given that Safari is no longer limited to a small number of Apple "geeks" but now the more mainstream market has access to Safari the implications are clear.
Test your website out using Safari - available you will recall either with the latest version of Itunes or a separate download.
Changes to your site can ruin your search engine rankings!
A warning to all our clients that you should always let us know before you make any significant changes to your website. Your high rankings can completely disappear unless changes are managed with search engines (as well as your human visitors) kept carefully in mind.
Upgrades and improvements to your website are an important part of website development and are to be welcomed. Changes can often be used as an opportunity to improve your search engine positions and spread - so please let us know so that your improvement extends to the all important search engines too.
Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft - merger talks collapse
With Google's US market share now at some 70%, according to Hitwise, and UK market share even higher than that, it is frustrating for those who work in search that we cannot offer serious alternatives to Google and its range of products. We know that when our clients talk to us about their rankings they are understandably only thinking about Google.
We continue to find it extraordinary that there is no new entrant on this scene. Even more amazing is that Google has not been investigated by the EC and US regulatory authorities for having an unfair advantage due to their size.
It seems strange that Microsoft gets blasted by the Competition Regulators and Google seems to have slipped through the net...
Why incoming links matter....
In the early days search engines looked just at your website and then ranked it according to the content. Search engine optimisation experts focused exclusively on the website, planting absurd concentrations of keywords throughout the website in the hope that this would lead to high rankings. It often did.
It was clearly going to end in tears - sites were ranked not by their quality but by the most absurdly and artificially optimised sites - great for search engines but useless for human beings.
Larry Page of Google introduced his Page Rank system which also assessed the quality of a site by the number, relevance and quality of people who linked to the site - the best sites would have the highest number of great links.
A new service industry has been born - link building - but beware of the generation of links through artificial methods such as so called "link farms". These farmers own hundreds of websites whose sole purpose is to link to your site - most of these sites are known by the engines and links from those sites are normally valueless.
The best method of having good quality incoming links is to have a great website and approach relevant website owners individually and request a link. Start by approaching customers and suppliers and then extend by using a professional link building service that uses ethical and transparent link building systems.
The benefits of an ethical link building programme can be to radically improve a site's rankings and well worth the energy and cost.
Web Results Direct Limited, The Old Corn Store, Peper Harow
Godalming, Surrey GU8 6BQ, Tel: 01483 429 222 E-Mail us here