The Lost Knowledge Blog for Web Design

1 message per email

One thing I see time and time again and that is someone trying to squeeze far too much sales into an email newsletter or promotional email. Now there are the rare types of businesses that can get away with this (amazon, dabs etc…), but generally most businesses should focus on one key message or product/service. People have short attention spans these days.

This may mean that you send out your email to a smaller list of customers or prospects that would be interested in it or you could hope that if they aren’t they will pass it along to someone else who is. Regardless try to target niche markets in your industry you should find it increases response rates and hopefully conversions as a consequence.

Bonus tip: Keep your email short and put the real detail on a separate sales page on your website, that way you can hook them in with a snappy quick to read email with only the main benefits to get them interested. This detail will also be picked up by search engines so you should benefit from that as well.

So there’s a new set of reports for Adwords called search funnels, aparently it will make you understand the true value of a keyword in your ads.

Below is a video that explains it quite well and if you want to read more head over to googles own blog to get the details http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-in-adwords-search-funnels.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FtRaA+(Google+Analytics+Blog)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

I’m finally getting back to an eBook I started writing last year titled “The Lost Knowledge – Things your web developer never told you”

What I hope to achieve is to highlight many things that may be within your actual power to improve on your website from Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to improving the conversion rates of your website call to actions. Most of which can be done without any specialist coding knowledge or skills, just your time and effort.

I mean what is the point in having a Content Management System (CMS) to control your website, if you don’t have the knowledge to actually get the most out of it.

What I’m looking for is to talk to people who currently have a Content Management System, but feel they aren’t getting anywhere with their site, and if all you’ve been told this phrase “All you need to do is add new fresh content to your site regularly” then please get in touch there’s a lot more to it than that and it’s not difficult to do once you know how.

I will gladly throw in a couple of hours free consultation to anyone willing to talk openly about their issues, plus I’ll give you and your business a mention in the eBook, maybe even a free copy when it’s completed

Go to our main website contact page and fill out the form and mention that you can help out with our CMS Study & eBook.

Alan

Today I thought I’d share with you this video and site as it should help anyone at the beginning of development and SEO for their own site.

Here is the link to the video and the rest of the article on Googles own blog.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-seo-resources-for-beginners.html

Alan

How does Search Engines, Social Media, Blogs, Directories, SEO, Articles, Video and Podcasts, Networking, Link Building, Newsletters (the list goes on) all relate to your own website?

I’ve had lots of clients that are confused by it all as they can’t figure out how it’s all related to each other. I have also attended a couple of network meetings that had some talks on the subject, these highlighted to me a need for a simplification of the concept. So I thought I would make a visual representation of the most popular abstract concepts.

The image below shows the main/popular methods and essentially how they can relate to your own website. There are many more options that could be added, but these are the ones mostly talked about by my clients.

One of the biggest realisations of the visual below is that Social Media is fast becoming it’s own form of a people and content search engine outside of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Why don’t you make a comment on the post and I’ll try to update it if there is space or I’ll create a second one to cover the others, like say traditional marketing media (flyers, brochures etc…).

If you have a business you’ll really want to get on this directory it takes just 5 mins to sign up and start benefiting from it http://tr.im/wFFw

If you want to get the best source of keywords for your online business, we recommend using this tool. You can sign up for a free 7 day trial and if you don’t think it helps you, just cancel! Plus you get some great freebies!

Just click on the image below and sign up.

p.s. yes it’s USA based but the data is still relevant to us here in the UK, check it out anyway it’s free for 7 days!

Go to this site http://www.seomoz.org sign up even to the free account and be amazed at some of the information you can get. If you feel particularly adventurous, check out the pro account and get access to a wealth of Search Engine Optimisations information. You can even use this to analyse your competitors to see what they are doing to get ahead in the Search Engines.

Alan Fair

I typed up a quick reply to a clients query and thought with a few edits it would make a good topic to share with everyone here.

Back links are one of the most important aspects you can have in your SEO campaign as it makes one of the biggest impacts on your page ranking and therefore your position in the natural searches of search engines, so get as many back links as you can.

However be aware of paid link backs and link farms as these will harm your SEO rankings. Also try to get links from related or associated websites and not just random sites as this again will help firm up that you are a vital resource or business in your chosen industry.

Finally don’t just have all the links go to your home page, you will get ranked better if you post direct links to information pages or products. It also means that the visitor doesn’t have to go looking for the page.

One last thing when you get a back link ask the website owner to not just put click here as the link, try to get them to link with the keywords of the service or product that tie into your Search Engine Optimisation.

So for example “click web design to visit the Contact Multimedia website”

Now go and build your external links!

Alan Fair

Here are the 7 SEO mistakes we find are made a lot:
1. Targeting the wrong keywords & lack of keywords in the content
2. Ignoring the Title tag
3. A full Flash website, where a html one would do
4. Lack of consistency and maintenance
5. Concentrating too much on meta tags
6. Using only Images for Headings
7. Back link spamming
I will elaborate on some of these in future blog posts.

Alan