Way back in the 1970s, Douglas Adams created the “Hitchikers’s Guide to the Galaxy”, a science fiction book that was quite ground breaking. Not only for the style it was written but also for the subject matter it addressed and much of what he wrote still resonates today. Like many historical novels (and dare I say it, The Bible) it actually contains thought provoking views on life and I want to discuss one of those today.

You see, one of the stand-out sections of the book for me is the bit where the white mice (it’s more detailed than that, but you can read it yourself!) create a computer called “Deep Thought” with the sole purpose of coming up with the “Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”.

After seven and a half million years of calculation it cam up with the answer: Read the rest of this entry »

Many people think this whole SEO lark is a bit of a joke pushed by crazy geeks with their ‘dark arts’ learned by spending far too much time on the Internet whilst watching The Wire on their second monitor. It’s true that the bedroom of the common nerd is a smelly place but to say they’re practicing the dark arts is very wrong – they’re just getting involved in standard good marketing practice whilst the rest of the world sneers.

It was Chris that said “There are 13 year old kids who know more about Internet Marketing than many UK company directors” and he’s right. If you’re a company director and your website isn’t a good lead generation tool then you’re probably being beaten by some kid eating pizza which he just picked up from Domino’s. He went to Domino’s in his Fiat Grande Punto Abarth (he’s got money, not taste) which he paid for with cash.

His neighbours, knowing that he doesn’t go to school or college and only leaves the house to pick up fast food, are convinced he’s dealing drugs or downloading porn to sell at car boot sales. But he’s not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Google is always changing the way it does things in order to ensure it’s providing people the most relevant results possible for their searches. It’s OK having the biggest database of web sites on the planet, but how does it decide which one should be displayed at the top when someone is looking for “waterproof slippers” for example?

Well, I’ve always maintained that it’s down to links as links are what tells the big G what’s popular, but there are more subtle changes a-coming to the way Google does it’s thing and you can prepare by being ahead of the curve. Here’s how…

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 »

As most of the people that have followed this blog for a while will know, we are pretty transparent on this blog. We are happy to give away our SEO and web marketing secrets (well, most of them) and we often give you some behind the scenes of what is going on at Calloway Green as a company.

This year we’ve decided to lay out some of our goals as a business. One reason for this is that if we tell you what we’re going to do, it’s puts a bit of pressure on us not to let you down.

Some of the stuff we do 2011 will no doubt happen unplanned. Let’s face it, this industry (and many others) moves so fast and Google changes so often that who knows where we will be at the end of 2011. But here’s some of things we are committing to.

A Better Blog

Blogging has been important to us as a company. We tell our clients to blog as much as possible, but we don’t blog as much as we could. When things get busy, activities like blogging sometimes go by the wayside.

The thing is though that we think that blogging is becoming more and more important. It’s an awesome way to give great content, help and guidance in your market and become what some marketers call “the trusted advisers”.

So, we are committing in 2011 to building this blog into a phenomenal resource for anyone looking to get more business leads (and direct sales) through their website.

Brand NEW SEO Seminars and Webinars

We have been running SEO seminars for over 20 months now. We’re really pleased with the feedback we’ve had and the hundreds of people that we have been able to help out.

Some of the people that come along have ended up as SEO Services, which is great.

We aim to do at least one seminar a month and we’ve had offers to talk at other people’s events as well. Lots of new content and ideas that you’ll be able to take away and use in your business.

As soon as we have dates, we shall announce them on this site.

Better Social Media Integration

Although Social Media is a term that is banded around by many, it’s becoming more and more important. We meet loads of people that have had a dabble with Facebook and Twitter and either got fed up or stopped. The thing is that you need to plan your activity and your reasons for using all this new technology.

Part of our SEO Seminars will cover this, but as with most things, you have to model the behavior to teach it the best. So keep an eye on our Facebook page for upcoming ideas on getting more business from social media. We may just try and work out exactly what ‘social media’ means too.

Better Managed Websites

Our development team have worked very very hard in 2010 to build a new Content Management System for all the websites we create for our clients. In 2010 we met a lot of people that were fed up with how much of a pain it was just to keep their site up to date and looking great. We have taken the pain out of this and we intend to help many companies this year have awesome websites that convert visitors into customers and clients.

That’s just a few of our goals. How about you?

You barely get chance to take a breath these days before Google releases yet another new feature that is meant to help us in our daily search. A few weeks ago it was ‘instant search’, last week it was an enhanced ‘local search’ and this week we’ve now got website preview. What’s going on?

Well let’s look at it first. If you do a search for, say, ‘news’, we get our normal bunch of results but they now include a little magnifying glass icon next to them:

Click on the result (not the title) and blam – a nice picture of the website you may want to go and take a look at. Is this a great new feature?

Well Bing has had this for a while and I never really saw people say “I prefer Bing because it’s got previews” and I’ve got to admit, I’m not sure it’s an amazing revalation to be honest and I really don’t know how it helps.

Google has always been ahead of the crowd and they made a name for themselves by keeping things simple, this really doesn’t keep things simple and it could actually make the search results a little complex for some.

I’m not sure. What do you think?

If you have a website, chances are that you didn’t create it to sit there and look pretty. We have pets for that.

Your website should have been created to attract more sales, leads or business enquiries.

The problem is that most people I speak to aren’t getting any real results from their website.

Here’s why your site (probably) fails

• Your site doesn’t allow people to connect with you.
• Your site doesn’t provide information and ideas.
• Your site doesn’t help people find answers to the problems they are having.
• Your site doesn’t showcase your skills and how effective you are.
• Your site doesn’t show what your clients think of your services.
• Your site doesn’t have any reasons why people should call you.
• Your site looks a mess.
• Your site is too salesy and puts people off.

Here’s how you fix it

• Allow people to connect with you.If people like what they see, make sure they can subscribe to your site. Maybe you could also link to your twitter and facebook pages too.
• Your site doesn’t provide information and ideas.
  Most companies have a blog and it really isn’t that hard to set up. Some people tell us they can’t find any interesting information about their industry. The answer to that is, they just haven’t looked hard enough. Check out what others in your industry are blogging about.
• Your site doesn’t help people find answers to the problems they are having.What do you help fix? Make sure you tell your readers about the problems and how you go about fixing them.
• Your site doesn’t showcase your skills and how effective you are. Your site doesn’t show what your clients think of your services.
  To cover both of these, you could utilise a portfolio on your site or some really effective testimonials from clients. If you can get them on video, even better.
• Your site doesn’t have any reasons why people should call you.Why should people call you? Spend some time thinking that through.
• Your site looks a mess.
  If you are a design agency, then you should be ashamed. If you do not have the skills to design and construct your site in a way that is very easy to
• Your site is too salesy and puts people off.Just remember, people don’t like being sold to, but they do like to buy from people they like. Take off the obvious over the top salesy bits of your site and create a more useful authority site that people will want to keep coming back to. When the time is right, they will become customers.

Hope those tactics are useful. Try tackling one at a time and tell us how you get on.

Anyone still using Twitter? Ahh, good. Then I’ll carry on…

With the sort of fanfare that only used to happen when a Pope arrived or England won the World Cup (so I hear, I’ve never seen that happen), Twitter has rolled out an update to its front page that has got everyone all a flutter.You see, lots of people had pretty much given up on using the Twitter front page due to its unmitigated dullness and lack of anything even approaching useful functionality. It was basic in every way and this fuelled the development of bucketloads of applications that made people’s online Twittering a pleasure rather than a chore. Applications like Tweetdeck and Twhirl made the most of the Twitter failness and people downloaded them in their hundreds of thousands.

But now Twitter have gone and updated their front page a bit and it has to be said, it’s much better. Much, much better.

It’s all about size these days

Have you noticed that many websites now expect you to have a pretty wide screen in order to view them in all their glory? Although we keep getting told websites should work as well as a thumbnail as they do when on a 52? screen MacBook Gigantica, us web designers have decided enough is enough and websites are generally all one size now with a nice background to fill out the space. Well, the new Twitter is no different with a nice, wide screen format meaning those of us who aren’t horizontally challenged can see far more information.

Of course, this is all pointless if it doesn’t offer functionality upgrades and that’s where it actually excels because along with the eye-candy, they’ve also made it much easier to use.

The site now works well in its own right and if you wanted to, you could have it open all the time and use it as a proper dashboard. Tweeting is obviously easy (just pop your latest snippet in the box and hit ‘Tweet’), updates are announced by a little box, click on it to see them all and suggestions on who to follow next appear at the left of the screen.

You can also now click on a tweet to see information about the poster appear without having to leave the page. This is extremely useful because in the past, if you were not sure if you wanted to follow someone and decided to check them out, you had to go to another page, or force open a new tab.

Exciting stuff. If, as I say, you still use Twitter and if you don’t, in a few days we’ll have something very special for those of you looking to boost your marketing with Twitter.

There was a big announcement yesterday from the guys at Google, and it was all to do with how we will now search for stuff. No, they’re not introducing mind reading technology (not yet anyway), they’re actually using their combined knowledge of previous search and trending topics to give us search results whilst we type. Read the rest of this entry »