Blogs The Google ranking algorithm is changing its tuning once again, evolving further and making life a tougher competition for us SEO soldiers. The word on the street and on the lips of Google Engineer Matt Cutts is that your page load speed is about to be incorporated into Page Rank. So if you have a monster website that knocks your competitors out of the park, but takes up to a minute to load. Then you are in serious SEO trouble my friends. The site may be filled with excellent content and optimised pages and still will start to fall down the search rankings because of it. Google wants the internet to be more instant than ever and this means keeping our goldfish attention spans to under 2 seconds per page.According to the google experts (read users) the page load times need to decrease because that is what is felt is necessary to retain interest and not hit that back button so quickly. Nearly half of searches done show that users hit the back button before a site loads. So we know this is the honest factual truth which we can't hide from Google's statistics. The analytics and statistical data has proven that a faster loading site will lead to a significant increase in user retention. Which in turn will tick over that zero point something percent of a user to generate a lead or a conversion or a sale. You can't fault google for continually learning to optimise speed.
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SEO Blog
Thursday, 21 January 2010 09:31
Increase Sales Leads using Conversion OptimisationWritten by Alexi VontasYour website might get thousands of visitors a month, but the bottom line is that if it is not making you money, it is costing you money. How do you make people buy products on a website, or make contact enquiries? This brings to mind the age old proverb, “You can take a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink”. Or can you? The layout of your website and strategically placed calls-to-action are crucial to its success or failure. A call-to-action refers to an enquire button, a contact us link, or anything that engages the site visitor to take some kind of action that you consider valuable. There are various rules of thumb that should always be kept in mind when designing a layout for a site, and aiming for optimal conversion statistics. They are:
Right, now once you are getting all your visitors to the contact or sales forms, you need them to complete these forms before quitting. The conversion rate of any form is inversely proportional to the length of the form or number of required fields. So, the shorter the enquiry form for instance, the more people will complete and send it. A form with fifteen required fields however will have a relatively low conversion rate. Also a two step form will convert less than a single page form.
What this means to a webmaster is that without an increase in the number of visits to the website, we can increase substantially the number of leads we generate from the site using simple conversion optimisation techniques. Making it easier for users to contact you or buy a product, WILL increase conversions. Have a look at this great blog entry posted by the SEO Gurus @ SEOmoz - 11 Conversion Lessons from 2009.
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Conversion Optimization Blog
Thursday, 21 January 2010 08:46
Creating a PDF document from HTML using asp.net and phpWritten by Adrian FitchetI have always struggled to find a simple and easy solution to generate PDF documents in ASP.net.
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Development Blog
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Market Segmentation is an invaluable aspect of most marketing plans, it allows you to target a receptive group of people within the population, thus avoiding the shotgun approach as far as possible and maximising your return on investment. The ideal individual to advertise to is one who will buy your product. So how do you work out who this is and how to target them? Well after reading and going through all the blogs I’ve posted on consumer analysis and giving it some thought you should have a vague idea of the demographics of your target market.
With classical press advertising you would merely target your demographics by choosing your channels carefully, skateboard magazines where a good place to market products designed for teenage boys etc. This has somewhat flowed over into online marketing, in the most basic form it can direct your placement of paid ads on 3rd party websites or through Google’s Content Network especially when utilising the CPM option. Social media sites often allow for far more detailed and specific demographic advertising options. These can be utilised very efficiently if your product appeals to a neatly defined target market. Often the level of segmentation available with most social advertising platforms is quite mind-blowing. Facebook has a well evolved advertising system with a multitude of different dimensions to choose from ad can sometimes yield impressive ROI.
Of course pay-per-click (PPC) search, such as Google’s AdWords, advertising has revolutionarised market segmentation as we knew it as it allows you to only target those who are actually actively looking for your product – the ideal target market. Yet you need to know what you’re doing to squeeze every ounce of selectivity out of it, I’ll go into this at a later stage in another blog post.
For now let me give you a list of some of the commonly used segmentation strata:
Obviously not all of the above would be applicable in every circumstance, but for every target market you have go through the list and narrow down your market segment. Each different market segment should then be analysed as to the viability of the advertising options available and the ROI that it promises. With online marketing you can often experiment inexpensively, which really takes a lot of the guess work out of it.
Wikipedia has a pretty elaborate entry on Market Segmentation if you'd like to read more.
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Marketing Blog
Thursday, 10 December 2009 08:43
Advertising a Trademarked Term in Google AdWordsWritten by Alexi VontasGoogle has just published that it now allows AdWords advertisers to display adverts for any keywords they wish, so long as trademarked terms submitted by the owner are not used in the adverts title, body or display url. This means that you can show your Google pay-per-click advert to anyone searching for any term, trademarked or not.  The problem comes in, when your adverts are not attracting the searchers attention due to it not being specific enough to their search query, creating a situation where your click-through rate becomes very low, pushing your quality score down and your average cost per click up. Eventually you might give up on advertising for those terms, as the ROI form those ads are just way too low.The solution is getting permission to use the trademark in your ad text, but how do you go about it? Simple... Ask the TM holder to submit an online form granting you exemption of the trademark restriction, and supply them with your Google AdWords Sustomer ID. They can find the form online at this address: https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmauth . Once the company submits the form, Google will notify them and you of the exemption, allowing you to use that term freely in your ad texts.If the trademark holder doeasn't want you to use it in the fear of damge to their brand or loss of revenue, they can of course deny you the use of the term. Let's hope they don't...
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Google AdWords Blog
Thursday, 10 December 2009 03:54
Google Launches Latest Results Real-time SearchWritten by Dr Peter FishGoogle launched its Latest Results search which brings real-time results right into your Google search results page in the latest results box. These results are fed in from various social media sources such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Indenti.ca, Yahoo Answers, blogs and forums amongst others. Have a look at the screen shot below:
The results scroll within the box as they’re indexed in real-time. If you click on the Latest results link you’re navigated to a new, dedicated, latest results page. Here’s another screen shot:
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Social Media Blog
The buying process has 6 steps; each one plays an important role in any marketing strategy. Most of these steps can be targeted with a cleverly designed online marketing plan.
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Marketing Blog
Before you can decide whether your product is a high or low involvement product you need to understand what a high or low involvement product actually is!
These definitions are taken from LEGAmedia:
High involvement products - products for which the buyer is prepared to spend considerable time and effort in searching.
The marketing strategies for these products are very different. For a low involvement product all you need to do is merely make sure your product is available and easy to find, a perfect example is point of sale marketing – such as with gum, sure you might have your favourite gum, but if you can’t find it you’ll just by whatever’s right in front of you. No real point in spending vast amounts of your marketing budget trying to explain why yours is the only gum the client should by rather butter up the sellers to place yours at the top of the pile!
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Marketing Blog
This aspect of a consumer analysis investigates who users your product and who buys your product, in some cases they’ll be the same person, yet in many instances it may be very different people. A classic example of this is babies clothing and even men’s clothing which are most often bought by females.
I suggest you make a list of the users and the corresponding possible buyers. These buyers will become your marketing targets! Here is a simple example for men’s clothing:
As you can see we’ve expanded our marketing targets to far more than just the user opening up many more potential marketing avenues. By thinking outside the norm a bit here you can often drastically increase your sales!
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Marketing Blog
This aspect of consumer analysis answers the following questions:
What does your product do? Why would a customer benefit from using your product? How does it improve your client’s life? What needs category does your product fall into?
So how do you start? Well ask yourself the questions above and write down the answers for each product or service... Our Silver Package is a reasonably holistic online marketing package; it offers AdWords account management, organic growth management, monthly stats analysis & reporting and amongst others it also includes 3 hours worth of website maintenance. Of course you can break each component down further to the exact details, but it’s not necessary for this article. At the end of the day, simply put, our packages do one thing: Bring our clients more clients!
Once you’ve got a good idea of your product’s customer benefit you can have a look at what needs category it falls into. Needs categories where first described by Maslow in 1943, there are 5 different hierarchical tiers: Physiological, Safety, Loving / belonging, Esteem and Self-actualisation. See the image below and read the wikipedia entry for more details.
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Marketing Blog
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