I decided a few weeks ago that I would start taking my fitness seriously.

Sitting at the desk all day is making me very unfit.

I got myself a mountain bike, got myself a helmet, told my wife I would be back in an hour and left to go on my first bike ride in a couple of years.

Two hours later … my wife got a bit worried …

Three hours later she was really stressed …

You see the problem was that I had gone about seven miles from home. As I turned around to cycle back I managed to get a puncture.

Walking back along the canal with my bike in hand I noticed I was getting overtaken by a barge. Those things go pretty slow, so I must have been going REALLY slow. The guy offered me a lift. So I stuck my bike on the front and enjoyed the lazy pace of trundling up the canal.

Why am I telling you this ??

Not sure really…

But i’ll have a go at shoehorning this into a marketing related post.

You see, on the barge, I had time to think and reflect. If i’m honest I don’t do that very often, but it gave me more clarity with why we do what we do with the marketing.

When you have time to reflect on your marketing… SEO is the best place to start.

When you embark on a well thought through and implemented SEO campaign, you’ll start to get more attention and more people coming to your website. That’s when you get the chance to have more communication with prospective clients.

You could have the most amazing customer service in the world. But if no-one can find you, you will never get to practice that service. (I told you I could shoehorn this in).

The SEO Snowball

When we have run SEO campaigns for clients, we’ve noticed that success builds upon success. Almost like a snowball, the momentum keeps building over time. Once clients are in the #1 positions for their main keywords, that runs through onto other pages and keywords.

Sooo… how do you start this snowball moving?

Here’s three quick ideas to get your SEO efforts moving in the right direction:

1. On-site Navigation

You need to make as easy as possible for the search engines to work their way around your site. Make sure that your navigation is not a bunch of pictures, but readable text. Sometimes, just fixing that will have a big effect on your site.

2. Links, Links, Links

It would be great if we just got the content right on the site and then shot up to the first position on Google. It doesn’t work like that though. Google favours the most popular sites that have the most votes (links). How do you get these links? You have to contribute in blogs, forums, and message boards relating to your website. Write articles. Contribute To The Internet.

You need to work out if you have the time to do that, or get someone to do it for you. Doing nothing isn’t an option.

3. Competition

It’s really important to know who your competitors online are. If you don’t know right now, then work out what people would type in to Google to find what you do and see the results. Work out what they are doing well on their site. Check how many links they have to their site. Are they using video on Google? Are they on Facebook?

Only then will you know how much effort you need to put in to beat them.

So, there you go, take a look at those three areas and see how you match up.

If you do decide to manage your own SEO, be sure to make a plan and follow it. If you don’t have the time, give us a call on 0845 0573420

A good friend of mine, Pete Dickson really annoys me each morning. He does so because when I read his facebook update at 8am, he’s always already been for a 5 mile run.

A five mile run!!

Before i’ve had breakfast!!

I’ve known Pete for ages and he wasn’t always like this. He decided a while ago that he was going to run a marathon. He got up off the couch, did the running, got through the pain of starting something new and ran the marathon in a great time.

This new lease of life and renewed levels of energy has spurred him on to keep on running. Now he can’t stop. He feels great and he’s lost a load of weight (he won’t mind me telling you).

Welcome to the SEO Marathon!!

Pete could have given up on many occasions. Running is tough. Running takes sacrifice. Running takes determination.

Guess what? That’s the same with running an SEO campaign.

There’s two reasons that people give up on their SEO efforts. The first is that they think it’s not working, the second is that they think they are done.

Both of these mindsets are wrong!!

SEO is a long-term, ongoing process. If you don’t commit to it, you will lose out to those that do. Sorry.

It’s ok to have a dry run…

Saying all that. We also realise that it can be really daunting to see a whole SEO plan laid out for you to commit to. So sometimes we take clients through a trial process.

HOWEVER... I feel it’s worth sharing here that you should not expect miracles in that time.

You have to think about what you can realistically measure in that time period and then make a judgment about whether you can see your site increasing to the number 1 spot over a period of time.

All the people who rank Number 1 for worthwhile keywords and phrases have been through apprehension, blood sweat and tears to get there… but being there is now making them a whole heap of profit (unless their site is terrible).

Ready to race?

We find more and more that we want to be working with people that are up for the battle of getting to the top.

SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it activity. The Internet never ends and never stops changing. Neither should you.

Google has been changing a lot recently but one new feature that has been trumpeted in the past couple of weeks is its new “+1″ feature which has probably got many people utterly baffled. I mean, what’s it about?

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I’ve got over my rant, time to talk some serious stuff now and this one is about Twitter. You know the one, that thing that everyone has heard about where you can’t keep your injunction secret anymore because it’ll just get spread about anyway. Yup – you know it.

But you don’t know how to use it do you? Nope, you’re rubbish. You’ve got no followers have you? Nope, because nobody likes you and you suck at social media. Wanna learn how to not be so bad? Wanna gain friends instead of all those sycophants who follow you saying “oooo, yeah, good post I really like what you say about the poor plight of the dogs in council care….” or whatever?

Listen up…

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re having a look around the internet for ways to get more people onto your website, or if you go to one of those marketing type seminars, you’ll probably hear a lot of people saying that SEO is the free way to get traffic.

This isn’t true at all. But here’s why people think it is:

SEO seems to be free compared to paying to advertise on Google (PPC), placing a banner on someone’s site or even paying to be on a directory like Yell.com. All of these cost money, straight out your pocket and straight to them.

The thing with SEO though, is that it still takes someones time and skill to implement correctly. The more competitive your market, the more time and skill that is required.

It’s not free if you do it yourself.

Knowing that it can cost quite a bit of money to get someone to do this for you. A lot of companies approach SEO from the bootstrapping mindset of doing it themselves.

There’s one little issue with this. SEO takes a long time, a long time to implement and the rules change every week.

It’s a bit like being in the premier league as a footballer. You train hard at taking free kicks, you get better and better at curling the ball in from the half way line like David Backham. Then one week, it’s decided that you’re only allowed to throw the ball…

The game is still football, but the rules changed. (Not the best example in the world, but you get what I mean).

Your time has a value. So all the time you spend learning this will cost you money.

Your IT department will kill your SEO.

For those people that know they haven’t got time to do the SEO themselves, they have two options.

1. Use an SEO company (like us)… or

2. Use someone on their time … like the IT department.

Let’s just get this straight. SEO is part of a marketing strategy. It’s all about driving people to your site so you can sell to them.

I have met a load of IT people in my time and i’m sure they will admit that selling is not part of their job role.

When SEO is free

Ok, i’ve been banging on about SEO not being free, but there will come a time when it is.

Let me explain.

When you choose an SEO company, you should be asking them to help you work out the “return on investment” of your SEO activities. For every pound or dollar you are spending, what can you expect to get in return?

This is not the easiest thing to work out because at the start of your SEO campaign you will probably not see a huge return in the money you spend. Especially if you are starting from scratch.

However… when you reach page one of Google for your keyword, you will be able to look at what you are spending each month versus your sales. If the keywords you chose are profitable and your site has a great way of selling and capturing leads, then your SEO is essentially free.

That, however, is a lot of ifs and buts. So if you are serious about making SEO work for you, give us a call on 0845 0573420

Although I speak a lot about using a blog to get customers to engage with you and your company or organisation, you should consider the technical aspects of blogging too. Google is unfortunately not clever enough to understand a witty remark when it reads one, it’s still a relatively dumb beast when it comes to ‘understanding’ content so you need to feed it stuff in a way that it understands and that means sticking to a few, fairly basic, SEO rules.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging can be a lonely marketing activity when you get started. You write something that you think is important, you post it on your blog and you sit back and admire the content you’ve created.

The thing is… is anyone reading it?

One way to tell is by checking your site analytics. You can see exactly how many people have read your blog post.

Then, along comes a comment. Receiving comments on your blog is post is great.  Not only do people read what you’re created, they also have an opinion about it.

The problem is, not all comments are good comments.

Spammers seem to have really jumped on the fact that bloggers like comments. They know how to write comments you’ll like, then they add some dodgy web address in the URL field.

If you don’t know what to look out for, those comments will start to appear on your blog. Unknown to you, people could be browsing your site and then suddenly end up on a site they really don’t want to be on. Because they came from your site, some people will unfortunately associate that content with you.

So how do you spot a spammy comment?

To start with, you need to install a tool on your blog called Akismet. You can do this yourself, or ask your web developer. Akismet screens out a large chunk of spam comments for you.

Secondly, you need to look out for what I call ‘blanket statements’. These are things like:

“Good Post!”

“Thanks for sharing this wonderful thing”

Thirdly, click on the links in their comment and be sure you’re happy with them. If it’s dodgy, or you simply wouldn’t want to be associated with what they are linking to, delete the comment.

Keep your site’s reputation high.

You should reward people for putting some effort into their blog comments. You can build a community of people around your blog if you allow people to add quality comments to your blog posts.

Don’t forget, people will read the comments as well as your blog posts.

When you are starting out with your first website, it can always be a temptation not to spend much money. Let’s face it, you need to spend money on all the other stuff like an office, stationery, a good accountant, networking events …

It’s really not hard to find someone who will offer to build a ‘cheap’ website. There’s plenty of bedroom startups looking for their first client.

We could do cheap websites, we’d probably get a lot of business if we did. But we don’t. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a whole new shift happening in the way people interact with and query the Internet that few web designers or site owners are taking notice of and less are exploiting to their advantage. For years we have only been able to access the Internet by using a PC or laptop that is tethered to a desk with a network cable or trapped within the coverage area of a wireless bubble. Even in cities with lots of wireless access, whipping your laptop out to search wasn’t an easy task and even though netbooks made it a little easier, holding it in one had whilst typing with the other was, to say the least, a little clumsy. Read the rest of this entry »