Don’t be Confused be negative!

Posted on May 2008 in Adwords

How being negative can save your clicks.

We have just created an AdWords campaign for KA Horse Insurance. The campaign has allowed them to get on to page 1 of Google on the same day the site was released.

During our Internet marketing research we noticed that when you Google ‘horse insurance’ other irrelevant Adwords appeared such as Confused.com (the car insurance comparison site) who don’t deal with horse insurance!

Having your Ads appear when they shouldn’t isn’t a great way to setup and run an AdWords campaign. So make sure you use negative keywords. In this instance if Confused.com use horse as a negative word their Ad wouldn’t appear.

Andy.

Broadley-Speaking Goes Live

Posted on May 2008 in Latest websites

A content-managed website for Broadley-Speaking has just gone live. Broadley-Speaking offer their ‘Intelligent Sales™’ approach to create new business opportunities for their clients. Typical business development activity we would undertake on behalf of their clients include Telemarketing, Telesales and
Lead Generation.

To promote their ad-words campaign, Broadley-Speaking requested landing pages for their main services, These were created as static pages (telemarketing, telesales, lead generation), with a little bit of dynamic content for good measure using shtml to include common content.

The project involved migration from their existing website to the new website including the migration of a database supporting the site. I was pretty impressed with myself in achieving a smooth migration from old to new with less than 15 minutes overlap. As usual I put up a banner informing visitor that the site was changing, still allowing them to contact Broadley-Speaking whilst the change was being made. Now that was thoughtful of me!

The site features a content management capability. Four Degrees West’s approach to search engine optimisation is pretty ethical in that the web pages are named sensibly and accurately to reflect the page content and in turn the content is the subject matter of the page and nothing but. I reckon that Google’s page ranking algorithm’s respect this as does the reader when visiting the site. So the content management system has to be clever enough to work with properly-named pages, whilst sill giving flexibility and power to create new pages “on-the-fly”. The answer to this is our menu-driven page-maintenance approach as well as a little bit of code in each page to find the right content from a sql database. Pretty handy having about 20 years of database development behind me then!

You can visit the new site: www.broadley-speaking.com

Dave.

1-2-1 with a Copywriter

Posted on May 2008 in Articles

This week I had the pleasure in meeting a Copywriter from Devon. A referral from Business Link put the Copywriter in touch with us who was interested in learning more about how to write text for search engines.

A strange coincidence considering I’ve been shouting to website owners the week before about how important it is to concentrate on the text, not just the website design and development as search engines couldn’t care less what your site looks like as it’s primarily looking at your text.

To find good copywriting services is a must for anyone looking to create or redevelop a website, combine that service with a copywriter who knows where and how the text should be laid out and you could finally see yourself in the organic free listings.

Before you start thinking or planning a website find yourself the best copywriting services and make sure your website development agency or your copywriter knows how to make it search engine friendly. Once you have your content covered start planning your website!

Andy

Kerry Andrews Horse Insurance Services

Posted on May 2008 in Latest websites

A horse insurance website for Kerry Andrews Horse Insurance Services, has been developed by Four Degrees West Limited. The site features online forms to enable potential customers to complete online quotation requests for horse and pony insurance, horsebox trailer insurance or rider only insurance.

The new website is a redesign and Kerry hopes the new look will be even more successfully then it’s predecessor.

You can visit the new site: www.kahorseinsurance.co.uk

Andy

2nd time around for Ecommerce sites

Posted on May 2008 in News

We are currently redeveloping the websites for three ecommerce customers in Devon and Cornwall. Although theses ecommerce websites were developed over 2 years ago they all feel it’s time to upgrade and refresh. Not that they look particularly bad or don’t function very well, the true is they are successful.

Our latest source code is developed by Zencart, a fantastic piece of code that has an amazing administration area, Zencart doesn’t look particularly great but combined with our website design skills the sites looks great and function brilliantly.

Zencart is also very friendly with Google, so pages are well listed. If you are interested in an ecommerce website don’t hesitate to contact us.

Andy

Schedule your Ads – save money!

Posted on May 2008 in Adwords

Here’s the tip of the day that could say you money on your Adwords. Google starts all Ads by default at the same time 00:01. So, if you are on a daily budget, adverts start to drop off near the end of the day. So why not schedule your Ads to start later in the day, say, 14:00 to 22:00, there will be less competition, which means adverts could cost you less.

Internet Marketing - it’s a science, but there’s an art to it!

Andy

Content is king! Hire a copywriter

Posted on May 2008 in Articles

Designing and developing a website for a search engine must include thinking about the content. It’s not enough to have a great looking website as you’ll find it even harder to get listed. Delivering your message about your business needs to be done quickly and precisely, don’t run around beating bushes, say what it is, if you are a guest house say so in the text! Remember a search engine and people read text.

Next time you think about website design also think about the copy – look closely at copywriting services as well as a website designer, but make sure the copywriter knows about search engines because in so many cases your web designer would not have a clue and your website could suffer a huge amount of missed enquiries.

Andy

Choosing a website designer isn’t enough

Posted on May 2008 in Articles

I’ve recently presented to around 40 hoteliers, guest houses and b&b owners, all of whom have a website. Some of the websites looks great and some suffered from an amateur approach, but 99% of those websites seemed to suffer from lack of the correct keyword content. I pointed out that Google likes sites that have formed a relationship with the master of searches (i.e. itself), which generally means most of the sites had already done, since they’d been around for some time and built up a series of links. Remarkably, nearly all didn’t have enough keyword content, and in one case they didn’t actually say they were a bed and breakfast at all – how did they think they would be found in the search engines when people were looking for ‘bed and breakfast’?

One particular example I demonstrated was a bed and breakfast in Bournemouth, I jumped to page seven of Google and on that page was a well designed website but the text on the page failed to mention they were a bed and breakfast, that’s why they are on page seven and on not three, two or even one!

Next time you think about website design don’t forgot the content, good content means good business for your customers and the search engines.

 Andy

Hope squeezed by an ego in pink.

Posted on May 2008 in Articles

I recently presented a talk on search engines and Internet marketing in Cornwall, in particular Google. The presentation was to a group of people all of whom had a website. The purpose of the talk was to explain basically two things about Google; the importance of text on the page and the page ranking system. In some cases the existing websites did have a page rank as they are long established websites many of which have many inbound links.

During my presentation I talked about and showed the simple concept that although many sites were established in Google they missed the most obvious thing; having the relevant (keywords) on the page! With these two basic elements in place their website should climb at least 2 or 3 pages.

At the end of the presentation myself and other guest speakers did a question and answer session where someone asked the question relating to keywords and free listings – definitely my area I thought, but before I could speak, the question was answered by an Adwords expert, who turned up five minutes before his presentation in the afternoon, missing out on what anyone else had talked about. When he’d finished going on about Adwords and how it wasn’t possible to get on the Google free listings (Adwords was their business by the way), I had my say, at which point I had to explain who I was to the man in pink… a website designer and programmer … yes, there is such a thing … who’s company has successfully and consistently got websites in the free listings in Google using an ethical approach, which not only achieves good rankings but helps the website stay in the rankings for a long time.

After I’d finished talking the man in pink strongly objected, a rather rude interruption considering he’d missed my presentation in the first place, he objected to the fact that with some tweaking your website could climb a few pages, but this wasn’t possible and you had to pay a man in pink lots of money for Adwords.

I have no doubt that in some cases using Adwords works, but why can’t you try to improve your website as well, why do some people in my industry have egos the size of their bellies, and why don’t they listen to what other people have to say? I also reckon that the man in pink is probably a better driver than anyone else including Lewis Hamilton, and his only excuse why McLaren hasn’t called him up is because in wouldn’t fit in an F1 car.

Andy