Make the Internet Work for your Business

January 12, 2012

Make the Internet Work for your Business in 2012
More and more businesses are recognising the need to actually do something with their website. How many businesses have spent hundreds, or in many cases thousands of pounds on websites that they then do absolutely nothing with. Quite often, the web design company will do little or no Internet Marketing or will try to sell this an additional service to the client – in our experience of talking to clients, sometime after the website went live.

It is not unusual for a prospective client to contact us, as a last resort, and offer us the ultimatum, if the website continues to do nothing for our business we may as well bin it.

In these difficult times, when a business is looking to the Internet for new business, then the process of Search Engine Optimisation and subsequent Internet Marketing should be placed higher on the ‘to do’ list when planning or operating a website.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

Making a Website Work

January 4, 2012

Making a Website Work
Its a New Year and for many businesses it is ever more important to make your website work hard for you. So how do you do this?

In a perfect world, SEO would be developed while a website is still in infancy. While this ideal situation rarely occurs, the following steps summarise the process as it should occur every time.

Key Phrase Strategy and Website Development  
Before building your website, you must have a keyword strategy. Select key phrases that are relevant to your business and receive an acceptable level of traffic. It is often appropriate, particularly for smaller / new businesses, to avoid the most competitive phrases where the level of competition you would be up against would be significant. You can always develop to these phrases as your business grows.

Once you have selected your keywords you can begin to develop the website using basic SEO site structure principles. These include the Meta titles, Meta descriptions, linking strategy, clear site navigation, optimised coding and great content.

Web Analytics
Try to include some web analytics platform that will allow you to monitor users are coming from and what search terms they are using. One free example is Google Analytics which provides a reasonable level of feedback on the traffic levels and sources to your website. This information will enable you to monitor and update your website to try and achieve the best results possible within your market sector.

Driving Traffic to the Website
Obvious really, but look to get your web pages listed in the main search engines as quickly as you can.  You can submit the website, but also look to get your URL linked to from websites already in the search engines. Subscribe to directories and develop a strategy for effective link building. Remember, with links, it’s about quality, not quantity; a handful of links on top-notch sites is worth hundreds of links on irrelevant, insignificant sites.

Incorporate off site and traditional marketing methods. For example, include your web address on your stationary and have it displayed on the side of company vehicles.

Consider employing the services of an Internet Marketing specialist to help with the Search Engine process. At Direct Submit we regularly see clients who have spent thousands on a website assuming, the traffic will just come, only to find their lovely looking website is not SEO friendly and they have no identifiable SEO strategy in place.

Monitor, Evaluate & Refine
After you campaign has run for a time, review and look to assess how the project has been working. Are your keywords receiving the most traffic and bringing in the best ROI, is your website listed in the major search engines and do you need to update /refine the website content.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

 

Happy Christmas & a Prosperous New Year

December 22, 2011

Happy Christmas & a Prosperous New Year
We at Expressly SEO would like to wish everyone a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

 

Google Chrome

December 4, 2011

Google Chrome Passes Firefox In Global Browser Market
Chrome has moved past Firefox to become the world’s second-most popular Web browser after Internet Explorer, according to StatCounter. Chrome grabbed a 25.69 percent share of the global browser market in November — a major increase from the 4.66 market share it held two years earlier, the Dublin, Ireland-based Web metrics firm said Thursday.

In the United States, IE currently holds a 50.66 percent market share, a slight increase from one year earlier. By contrast, Firefox usage among U.S Web users is 20.1 percent — down from 26.75 percent in the same month last year, StatCounter said.

Google’s popular browser — which held a 17.3 percent share of the U.S market at the end of November — is clearly benefiting from Firefox’s slide. At the beginning of 2011, only 10.9 percent of all U.S.-based Web users were using Chrome.

“We can look forward to a fascinating battle between Microsoft and Google as the pace of growth of Chrome suggests that it will become a real rival to Internet Explorer globally,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen Thursday.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

Datawright ERP Software

November 28, 2011

Datawright ERP Software Launch New Website
One of Direct Submits clients are now launching their new website. Datawright ERP Software systems are a specialist North East based company offering invoice accounting software. Their software provides invoice management and accounting for businesses throughout the UK. Direct Submit are working alongside the client to develop innovative and successful Internet Marketing strategies.Internet Marketing strategies.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

Pay per Click Landing Pages

November 23, 2011

Landing Pages for PPC

Understanding Landing Pages for PPC
Do not invest large sums of money into PPC advertising, such as Google Adwords, without first thinking about landing pages. A landing page, often referred to by PPC systems as the target URL or destination URL, is the page that people are sent to when they click a link to your site. In this context, of course, a landing page is a page that a PPC ad points to.

A good landing page helps sell. It’s the first step in the process of convincing the visitor to your site to buy from you. Thus, when you point a PPC ad to your site, in many cases, you won’t want to simply point to your home page. Why? If you sell 100 products and your ad is pushing a particular product. Pointing to your home page may not effectively promote the product and may result in you losing a lot of potential customers.

For further information on developing a succesful Pay per Click  and online marketing campaign contact Direct Submit Internet Marketing.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

I Survey Property Software

November 18, 2011

I Survey Property Software
Direct Submit are pleased to announce they are working a new client. I Survey are a leading online provider of property management software for PDA’s in the UK. They have recently released their Property Inventory Software and the Property Inspector – the most comprehensive iPhone app in today’s marketplace for managing the complete Inventory process.

Direct Submit will be working to help the business achieve success in the search engines. For clear advice on the range of Internet Marketing Services and Search Engine Optimisation Services available from Direct Submit call now on  0191 2673030.

‘H’ Tags & SEO

November 13, 2011

Using ‘H’ Tags & SEO

The ‘H’ tags & Search Engine Optimisation
Using the ‘H’ tags with your search engine optimisation can make a significant difference to the success of your Internet Marketing campaign.  So what are they? ‘H’ tags are used to denote section titles in your content.  <H1> tags are normally used for the main title of the content and then lower ‘H’ tags (such as <H2> and <H3>) are used for sub-headings within your webpage content.

HTML has six heading elements: <Hi> through to <H6>. Use <H1> for your main page heading, then <H2> for sub-headings and so on. Remember when using these tags to prioritise your website content accordingly.  Search engines view the <Hi> tag as the most important title of the page and then <H2> as the next most important and so on.

You should always make sure your <H1> tag contains your most important keywords. Try to make sure your <H1> tag corresponds to your page Meta Tag Title. This highlights to search engines exactly what your page is about, and helps identify the most important key phrases.

Don’t overuse your these tags though.  Just use one <H 1> tag with your most important content, then use as many <h2> and <H3> tags as you need alongside your content.

Guide to Effective Website Optimisation

November 5, 2011

A Quick Guide to Effective Website Optimisation

Overall design.
Try to include effective search engine optimisation concepts when planning and designing your website. There are certain design issues that you need to be aware of. These include trying to avoid frames, FLASH driven sites or designs with a lack of textual content.

Create an effective title.
Make sure that your title has keywords that represent your site effectively. For the most part the title should be short but always include your keyword(s).

Include important content in your pages.
The actual text on your website is very important. Search engines (spiders) read this to determine rankings. Some engines will place a higher rating of importance based on where they find the text in your page. Closer to the top is usually better, but having keywords throughout your page develops a “theme” and that too is important.

Good Content should be your number one priority.
Your quest for high placement must start with a good website. It is important to have a lot of text describing what you do. Use your keywords in the content, but don’t repeat them over and over. Many search engines rate sites based on ‘keyword density’. This is usually a formula that looks at META Keywords, words in your TITLE, words in paragraph text, words in links to other pages, and even words in the ‘ALT’ text on your images.

Don’t include too many images.
Many web pages are almost all images driven with little or no textual content. Search engines will typically only see the image name, for example ‘yourimage.jpg’, and ‘yourimage.jpg’ doesn’t go far in terms of content and relevancy.

Add Links to your web pages.
We can’t emphasis enough the importance of links, both from your page to other pages. First consider links on your pages. Make sure they relate to what you do (and keywords that are important to you). Links from others website’s. Some search engines place a very heavy rating of importance on how many other sites in their index have links to your website.

Finally and very importantly, don’t try to fool the search engines.
This is probably the biggest trap people fall into. People will always come up with ways to try and ‘fool’ the search engines, which may work for a little while. Eventually though the search engines wail discover these tricks and write routines that penalize sites that use this practice. Examples of this include, but are not limited to: repeating keywords over and over; using invisible text (white text on white background); using very small text to jam the keywords in a small area.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

Direct Submit & I Survey Software

October 21, 2011

Direct Submit & I Survey Software
Direct Submit are pleased to announce another new client. I Survey Software are a leading provider of Property Inventory Software applications for the property services sector throughout the UK. Direct Submit will be working to help the business achieve success in the search engines.

For clear advice on the range of Internet Marketing Services and Search Engine Optimisation Services available from Direct Submit call now on  0191 2673030.

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