Blogs Google has released the beta version of a new function in AdWords that will allow historical data to determine how likely a keyword is to result in a conversion and raise your bid for a search on that keyword. They are calling this Enhanced CPC beta.Users lucky enough to have this function available to them are seeing this as a mixed blessing. Look at it this way… If Google can predict which keywords are more likely to result in a conversion, it is great that they will raise your bid to allow your advert to show higher in CPC results. However, for people advertising more or less the same product, and iPhone for instance, won’t this mean that all your competitors’ bids will also be raise for the high converting keywords, only resulting in inflated earnings for Google?
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Google AdWords Blog
 Very often people reach a website that may or may not be the exact source of information they were looking for, but because it looks dull, they leave. This is a scenario you never want to find yourself in, and if you use the following advice in your favour, you never will.Flash Banners These can bring movement to an otherwise static, simple looking website and a smartly designed banner can make the entire site seem revitalized. It is important to use imagery and text that make convince the viewer of your product. Animated GIF Buttons Getting people to the conversion point on your website is no easy task, but with the use of nicely animated GIF buttons, drawing the attention of your visitors to your contact page becomes much simpler. Be sure to use calls to action like “FREE”, “NOW”, and “INSTANT”.
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SEO Blog
Monday, 03 May 2010 06:24
CodeIgniter 2.0 – Pushing Web Application Development ForwardWritten by Chris Jacoby If you haven’t been so busy writing your next big thing, then you probably heard about the upcoming major release of CodeIgniter which jumps directly from 1.7.2 to 2.0.For those of you who don’t know what CodeIgniter is: CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP MVC framework built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured and powerful web applications. View CodeIgniter’s website for more information.
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Development Blog
 Explaining SEO to the Unknowing lay-man can be a harrowing task, the small bits of information tend to not make any sense to the Joe Bloggs generation. Just watch the eyes of the person, they will try but surely get lost. Explaining that text, linking and rankings will be the focus of your hard work and improve their traffic might be the best way without too much detail, lets not forget that a huge portion of users purely surf the net for hotmail, facebook, youtube etc.However they can come to us for a schooling in SEO or search themselves to find out a bit more about SEO as you CANNOT have a successful website without it. The essential tools are your SEO companies that will hopefully explain the progression in a timeline. It happens often that month one begins very well and then hopefully increases organically in the SERPS for the months to come. Ranking highly is not the only measure of success as getting client information is the real money-maker.
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SEO Blog
 Google has a plethora of products and tools these days to help the webmaster. The result is a better end-user experience with more hits to your site if you manage to use it correctly. These tools are very quickly becoming the norm.Meaning that a website is no longer a couple of lines on html, it will be the html, optimized over and over and given index’s, efficient linking, fast load times. And all the little demons of code that help us get ranked. Without the help of Google your website will find it extremely tough if not impossible to get the hits and traffic it probably deserves. Since Google has the vast market share of the internet it is essential that you link your website to Google’s index. The clever guys at Google have made this process painless and very easy. A simple sign up and registration is all that is required at webmaster.google.com. To start this process you will have to input a Google file into the root directory of your website so that Google can confirm you are added to the index. Then you will be asked to add a website sitemap, this will give the Google crawlers a list of all your internal links so that the crawlers will index the site very quickly. Once these procedures are done your site is added to the Google index and during the break the crawlers will be running throughout your site looking for content, information, keywords, the description, titles, meta, data, information, downloads, sitemaps, images, alt tags, links inbound and outbound.
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SEO Blog
Friday, 30 April 2010 07:10
The Quick & Intelligent Guide to Using Facebook’s Social PluginsWritten by Dr Peter FishRecently Facebook launched their campaign to further dominate the web and it’s not only going to work, it’s working already! Facebook Social Plugins is an incredible group of plugins that’ll change the way humans integrate with the web. It brings word of mouth, social re-enforcement and peer pressure to any site that’s willing, or clever enough, to add a plugin. These plugins bring a never seen before lebvel of personalization to the rest of the web, and because the content is hosted on Facebook’s servers, it’ll do so whether the visitor is logged in or not to the 3rd party site. So how do you know which plugin or combination of plugins to use? Here’s a quick overview of the social plugins; what they do, where to use them and what you might get out of it:  Like Button What does it do? This button allows visitors to “Like” or “Recommend” a page on your site & will post a link directly into their Facebook feed. Superb for generating awareness. It will also show visitors which of their friends have liked or recommend the page already. There are a number of very powerful, but advanced features to this button – I won’t cover these in this entry. Where should you use it? EVERYWHERE! On absolutely every page on every site you have! What will you get out of it? Awareness, free advertising, free traffic and social re-enforcement, therefore.... More conversions! Like Box What does it do? See which of their friends likes the page, read the posts fed from an existing Facebook Page and like the Facebook Page without having to visit the page. It’s has a similar function as having a twitter feed piped onto your site, yet it pulls info from your Facebook Page. Where should you use it? This is very powerful if you have a Facebook Page. If you don’t, set one up. It’s even possible and maybe effective to set up an entire page on your site to What will you get out of it? More followers to your Facebook page, plus once again - awareness, free advertising, free traffic and social re-enforcement, therefore.... More conversions! Comments What does it do? This will allow visitors to post comments on any aspect of your website and also gives the ability to like. These comments can be shared on the visitor’s walls and their friends streams. Where should you use it? On any page where comments are encouraged. What will you get out of it? Visitor engagement, hopefully some constructive comments and possibly the creation of a talking-point. Facepile What does it do? This is a simple plugin that shows visitors which of their friends have already signed up on a site. The plugin doesn’t render if the visitor is logged out of Facebook or if they don’t have any friends signed up. Where should you use it? This is a useful social re-enforcer to nudge visitors to sign up or stay on a site instead of bouncing. It must be used on busy or very localised sites, where the chance of a visitor sharing the interest in the same site as his / her friends is high, otherwise the plugin will be wasted. The site should be static or have limited content, such a standard business site with only a services or products to choose from. If the site in question has lots of content, or many products I would rather consider the Activity Feed plugin. Say for instance a well known local webhosting company. What will you get out of it? It’ll increase your conversion ratios. If you see your friends did it, you’ll do it. Login with Faces What does it do? Visitors are shown which of their friends has signed up for the site and are encouraged to login themselves. Where should you use it? Any site that has login facilities. What will you get out of it? More logins! Activity Feed & Recommendations What does it do? These plugins shows visitors what their friends recently found interesting, appealing or entertaining. The Activity Feed plugin becomes useful when you want to encourage people and channel them to find content that is relevant to them. Where should you use it? As mentioned above, this is far more beneficial when there is a significant amount of content. Examples would be YouTube, CNN, blogs, online shopping sites or your local news site. What will you get out of it? This is a powerful on-site browsing driver and will keep people on your site for longer and we all know what that does for goal conversion rates! Live Stream What does it do? This allows visitors to see what is being said about a page or event in real-time. The feed displays the comments of friends and non-friends as well if selected. Where should you use it? This is a great tool for pages relating to real-time events; concerts, streaming media, sporting events etc. What will you get out of it? Social awareness and engagement. For more information and the actually plugin code take a look at Facebook’s Social Plugin pages. We've already added the plugins into our blog, just log into facebook and you can like this entry. We'll be extending the service to our client's sites over the next few weeks. Chris Jacoby our resident developer genius will be writing a blog on how to integrate the code, I’ll set up a link to the entry as soon as it’s up. Want to know how Google’s going to play in this realm? Read my blog entry on Google’s Social Search Engine. To increase your social media presence even further, I also suggest utilising a 3rd party social bookmarking button on every page. Look at AddThis. Make sure your on this bus early, it’s going to get more and more important as the world heads in the direction of a social and personalized world wide web.
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Social Media Blog
Thursday, 29 April 2010 07:41
So Google bought Aardvark, but what does that mean for Internet Marketing?Written by Dr Peter Fish Earlier this year Google bought Aardvark, a 3-year old social answer engine. This brings about a whole blog entry worth of questions! So just like Aardvark, I’m gonna try answer them for you!What the hell is a social answer engine? It’s kind of like a search engine, but it’s centred on getting you the answers to your questions, but with a twist – it doesn’t pull the answer from existing online content, it actually asks a number of very carefully chosen human beings. Aardvark uses a carefully designed algorithm to decide which human being in your virtual social sphere might give you the most relevant answer to a question and it asks them. Literally – it sends a number of intelligently selected individuals an instant message and asks them! What type of questions? Very personal and specific questions, like... Cindy asks “What’s the best cocktail at Cafe Caprice in Cape Town?” This is a highly specific question and not a common one, so the chances of you finding the answer in the, albeit, massive amount of data already existing on the web is slim. And if you do, the chance of it being relevant to you at this exact time is miniscule! What is a relevant answer? This is really the selling point... In order to give you a relevant answer Aardvark first has to know who’s asking it. And I don’t just mean her name, I mean: what are her demographics, interests, taste preferences, maybe even what personality type she has, what deeper psychology does her social profile project. Do you see the 2nd dimension? A 21 year old, female, law student, grew up in Randburg, Johannesburg, but now lives in Cape Town in the UCT Residence, likes avo, tequila, Snow Patrol, cats and is often happy. 3rd dimension? Place: Cafe Caprice, Cape Town. And even still the 4th dimension? Time: Now! Recently.
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SEO Blog
There are a few simple rules to follow although above all you should remember to write as if you are speaking to real people because essentially, the people out there ARE real so treat them as such.
I’ve limited this list to what I think are the most important points to remember:
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Social Media Blog
Although social media has been around for a while now, I am still coming across people who don’t really understand what the hype is about. This could be due to a lack of understanding surrounding the concept or due to an earlier encounter with someone in the industry who spoke at 100km an hour about corporate profiles, networking, tweeting http://www.gofishclientcatchers.com/blog/Social-Media-Blog/Twitter , Facebook fan pages, reputation management and a host of other things which you kind of know something about but are still trying to wrap your brain around. So this post is going to explain in non-geek terms, what social media is.
I equate Social Media to real life all the time because in my mind that is all it is, creating relationships online, similar to those relationships you should be creating in real life. When you start a new job what is the first thing you do? I for one first get the lay of the land (office), see who hangs out with whom, who everyone dislikes and why, what the culture is. After a few days I start getting to know people and they start getting to know me, I start spotting those people who I find value in and who have something in common with me. After a few weeks I’m having lunch with people and seeing others for drinks after work, I start feeling at home and like I belong which in turn manifests itself into loyalty not just to my friends at work but also to the company in which I work.
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Social Media Blog
Tuesday, 20 April 2010 08:41
Use these Eight Trust-Building Elements to Increase your Site’s Conversion RateWritten by Dr Peter Fish When dealing with internet marketing of any form visitors will only convert if they trust you. The web can be a very impersonal place and as a breathing, living, money-earning individual with privacy and fraud concerns deciding who you give your details or money to is a massive decision. Over the last few years the conception that you will get swindled if you buy something online is rapidly diminishing. This has laid the foundation for huge amounts of online turnover, which is continuously and rapidly on the rise! So how do you get a piece of this pie? Easy – show your visitors you’re a legitimate, trustworthy company, with breathing, living and money earning individuals! The chances are the visitor browsing your site already knows they’re after what you have to offer, you just have to push them over that psychological “to-buy-or-not-to-buy” barrier. Here are a few trust-building elements to include on your site to drive this process: At first glance visitors should see what country you service; there are a few tricks here:
Published in
Conversion Optimization Blog
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There are a myriad of reasons why a blog is important to have in terms of online marketing but that is not what this post is about. This post is on how to write for your brand new blog, which you already know is uber important for you business but you just don’t know where to start.
