Posted by Tom Sykes on Wednesday, June 23, 2010,
In :
SEO
If you need to set up a new website or a one-off promotion, you'll need to dream up a domain name that is fit for purpose. Here are a few considerations.
Keep it fairly brief. The longer the name, the more people will get it wrong, or simply be put off entering it in the first place.
Use relevant search words If you want to be found through search engines. The domain "cheap-beach-balls.com" for your a shopping site will probably pick up Google searches for "cheap beach balls", which is good. Bu... Continue reading ...
Posted by Tom Sykes on Monday, January 4, 2010,
In :
GENERAL
Happy New Year to you all.
There are some things in marketing which are so fundamental that they need to be reviewed on a regular basis. For most firms, who make plans in the autumn for the following calendar year, it should probably be late summer. But there's so much activity then, preparing for the autumn (when there's more exhibitions, more web traffic and more of just about everything). So let's resolve to review things at New Year.
Posted by Tom Sykes on Friday, December 18, 2009,
In :
GOOGLE
Google has made available a simple tool which provides an interesting insight into what people see when they visit your web pages. You can look in your analytics and see a breakdown of the screen sizes of your visitors (e.g "1024 x 768"), but the size of their browser windows will be substantially smaller than this. They may not be maximised to fill the whole screen, and they'll probably have toolbars and other clutter making the actual view of your site a lot smaller.
Having provided a wide range of services to construction industry clients in 2009, we've decided to focus on the ones where we can offer the most added value in 2010. These are the three things which we think every marketing manager in the industrial sectors should have as priorities in their online marketing, indeed in all of their marketing, next year.
1. Understanding Online Marketing It may sound vague, and organising that stand at the next big trade show in March is probably more pressing... Continue reading ...
Posted by Tom Sykes on Monday, November 30, 2009,
In :
ADVERTISING
Three things which you shouldn't do in 2010. If you've got some sort of a marketing plan in place for next year, and any of your expenditure is targeted at things which tick the following boxes, well …all we can say is, it's your budget, and there's still time to change it.
1. Don't buy anything which doesn't have a good return on investment Why? Because there are enough things which do have a good return on investment to soak up anyone's marketing budget. Now, we'll be the first to admit th... Continue reading ...
Website Grader is a free seo tool
that measures the
marketing effectiveness of your website. It provides a score that incorporates things
like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also
provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
Posted by Tom Sykes on Wednesday, November 18, 2009,
In :
GOOGLE
We are all so desperate to do well in Google. Google produces a huge software black box of algorithms, which must have grown and grown over the years. Trying to predict what Google do next is next to impossible and the only way to "tweak" things is to make the changes and see what the result is.
Google constantly adds and amends its rules to improve results, but they often have unforeseen impacts in other areas, which is why you'll often see pages on your site jump up or down the Google resul... Continue reading ...
Posted by Tom Sykes on Tuesday, November 17, 2009,
In :
ADWORDS
For almost all of us, Google AdWords is currently the best value way of generating targeted visits to a website through advertising. Our Customer's often forget how daunting the whole thing is when you first try it. There must be a lot of companies who've never used it because it seems like hard work, or who tried it when Google sent them a free £50 voucher, but thought they'd never have the time to develop and maintain the campaign, so they left it.
Much of what is written about search engine optimisation assumes that you're writing a blog, or a news story, or the next great 'how to' article" …but of course it's just as likely that you're writing that all important product page. So how do you make a page full of technical specifications work in the search engines?
Of course, such pages are critical: no one will buy anything from you if they don't understand what you offer. It's just that, no matter how creatively written and carefully ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Tom Sykes on Tuesday, November 10, 2009,
In :
EMAILS
Anyone who stays in touch with the latest IT news will probably be aware of a new application called "Wave", which is being promoted by Google. Could it be the next big thing? We know that Twitter caught on because of its simplicity, but the prospects aren't good for Wave, because the concept behind Wave is not for the fainthearted. However we feel it might succeed for the simple fact that it's a great idea.
Nearly everyone with a computer uses email, so much so that we ignore its drawbacks. ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Tom Sykes on Wednesday, November 4, 2009,
In :
GENERAL
Yes.
The last two press releases we have issued have ended up in newspapers and on TV and local radio.
I know what you thinking....That the stories were really big or we had good relationships with the media involved.........Well Your wrong !
The first one was about Hayward House. A large house in Highworth we are selling for the owner. We issued a press release talking about the house and it made it to the front page of the housing supplement in the Swindon Advertiser.
Here's something to play with on a Friday: the new Free
Keyword Tool from Wordstream. If you're a purveyor of power tools and think
that your website only needs to work well in Google for the search term "power tools", try seeing all the other related search terms which this little tool
will highlight.
A recent client of ours said:
"it should be easy, we only sell [xxx], and I think the only other way you could
describe it would be [yyy]." After a bit of brainstorming and playing around,...
Posted by Tom Sykes on Tuesday, October 27, 2009,
In :
TWITTER
If your like me you really haven't had much interest in Twitter. You suspect it might be vaguely entertaining but you can't see how it can be relevant to a serious company like yours.
Have you noticed more and more about Twitter being used in the business world.
Grab yourself a coffee, and Goldeneye Creative will have you up and running in a few minutes. By this time tomorrow, we promise you'll "get it". And by this time next week, you'll understand why your business might want to start "twit... Continue reading ...
You may think these are obvious but they really do work in our expereince.
We've put a cost next to each, based on what we'd charge at the moment. And before you say "where am I going to find that much money from?", I'd ask: "instead of continuing to slowly cut down on things which stopped working years ago, like exhibitions and magazine advertising, isn't it about time you just stopped them completely?" You are allowed to, you know.
Posted by Tom Sykes on Tuesday, October 6, 2009,
In :
ADVERTISING
Property Marketing
Marketing a property is a challenge for even estate agents and in the current climate it is even harder to sell your home.
We were approached by Jean Branston of Hayward House in Highworth and asked if we could help her sell her 10 bedroom house.
Having never marketed a house
before we were a little unsure of the right way forward but have now
delivered a bespoke and cost effective package and the house is in the
public eye and doing well.
Posted by Tom Sykes on Friday, August 21, 2009,
In :
GENERAL
We believe that if you have the marketing skills you can promote almost
anything and a few months ago we were approached by a lady who wanted
to sell her 10 bedroom house, located in Highworth.
She had looked into the traditional ways of marketing the property but wanted something more cost effective and different.
We designed www.hayward-house.co.uk and have now started a detailed marketing campaign to help sell the house.
Posted by Tom Sykes on Thursday, August 13, 2009,
In :
GENERAL
We are due to be on the BBC Oxford's Evening News tomorrow night (Friday 14th August) between 6:30pm and 7pm on BBC1.
We are going to be talking about a project we run for the community called www.coleshillhouse.com and although we have been
given a tiny window we may appear on another programme later in the
year.
If you live outside of the Oxford area and have SKY you can watch it on sky channel 985.
We will try to get a copy of it on the Coleshill House website site over the next week.
Are you one of those people who occasionally studies their website traffic quite
seriously but doesn't keep a more general eye on things on a more frequent
basis?
Take a look at Polaris,
which is a really great little application which sits on your desktop and shows
you all your headline website traffic statistics from Google Analytics, with some of the
most beautiful graphs ever. It's free too. Continue reading ...
Posted by Tom Sykes on Tuesday, July 28, 2009,
In :
SEO
"Should I respond to that
emailed request from some website owner to put a link to his site on mine, in
exchange for a link back?" The answer is "almost certainly not". But that
doesn't mean that "reciprocal" links are a bad thing. Let us
explain.
There are two reasons to get links: the traffic they generate directly, and
the incremental boost they give you in the search engine rankings. Now, the
amount of boost each one gives you in the search engines is related to the
"quality" of t...
Posted by Tom Sykes on Wednesday, July 22, 2009,
In :
SEO
I recently found this post on the internet and it is really valid and true advice. Its well worth a read. It was posted by Pete Caputa on this site.
A while ago, I wrote an article about link building. It is one of the most read articles on our blog.
It explains how to do link building the right way and provides a
path for newbies to get started and progress to master link builders,
the right way. The way that Google wants you to build links--by
attracting and earning them.
Posted by Tom Sykes on Friday, July 17, 2009,
In :
GENERAL
A bit of fun for a Friday morning, but with some serious undercurrent. Take a
screenshot of your website* or test your company's advertising artwork and upload it to www.feng-gui.com.
The site will, apparently, use artificial intelligence to simulate human vision
during the first five seconds of viewing your page. Whether it's accurate or
not, it does give you an idea of what people probably do, and it's almost
certain that they don't just look down the page in the linear order you expec...
Coleshill House was used during WW2 to train more than 3,500 of the general public and Home Guard in sabotage and guerrilla warfare techniques.
The Auxiliary Units formed by Colin
Gubbins were to have been Britain's last ditch line of defence, operating in a network of
cells from hidden underground bases.
What do people expect when they
scroll to the very bottom of the page? It would appear they want "About" and
"Contact" information, some sort of link to an index or site map, and (on long
pages) a "Back to the Top" link. Obvious really, but does your site have these
in place? This information can be added easi...
Posted by Tom Sykes on Thursday, June 4, 2009,
In :
ADVERTISING
Getting customer testimonials can be awkward and even embarrassing. When asked directly by someone to say something nice about them, can you say no, even if you want to? And you don't want to put customers in a difficult position.
Here's a technique which produces results that will bowl you over (and not just the one from the happy customer who asked "You don't have a sister, do you?"). Set up a survey - using SurveyMonkey - we suggest two questions, both open-ended with large text boxes for...
Have you seen websites where they offer a Live Chat service? Is this something you might like to consider for your website? From our experience customers really like the function. Even if they don't use them, it gives off a nice warm feeling that your company cares.
The good news is, it's quite possible to put one of those on your website for free, using Google Talk. If you have a Google account, and your prospect does (and an increasing number of people do), then here's what you need. Continue reading ...
Posted by Tom Sykes on Friday, May 22, 2009,
In :
SEO
When you put something new on your website, you want Google to find it quickly. Not just because you want interest from day one (although that would be nice), but because you want your page to be accredited by Google as the primary one about that product, not the page on What's New in Widgets Online which ran your press release a few days later.
Here's how it works. Google comes to your site. It looks exactly the same as last time. A week later, Google comes to your site again. It still look...
Even if you're writing about something people are genuinely interested in, such as the Champions League Final, or Star Trek, or cute pets, you've only got a few lines to grab their attention and persuade them to keep reading. If you're writing about pressure transducers, or LEDs, or spectrophotometers, they're probably bored before they start, only reading about this stuff because they have to. You're going to have to work even harder to get them enthusiastic about what you have to say.
As you know, generating links to your website is very important. Look, it's May, and in a few weeks' time there'll be no end of self-confident, web-literate students looking for a summer job. I bet that in six weeks, one of these could generate enough links for you that you could increase your Google traffic significantly. Let's say you get 100 visitors a day to your website, and a stronger presence in Google from a few dozen good links increased this by 25%. At £1.50 a visitor (the value yo...
A common scenario in industry is for the sales manager to stick his head around the marketing manager's door and say "Now that we've got the Red Widget 2, I'd like all references to the original Red Widget removed from the website", which leads to the marketing manager doing just that, by deleting the relevant pages.
This is a mistake for so many reasons. Never just delete pages.
Firstly, you'd managed to get your original Red Widget page onto the first page of the Google results for "red wi...
Using video marketing to drive traffic to your web site is an online marketing strategy many small business owners and internet marketers are beginning to embrace, with much success.
Having a traditional website only allows you to reach those people who first find your website. However, combining video, social networking and some simple video marketing techniques can drive hordes of qualified visitors to your website.
First, let's forget the silly videos you'll find all over YouTube of kids ...
If you’d been doing the job you’re now doing thirty years ago, you’d have had a secretary to type stuff up for you, but over the years - in the dubious name of efficiency - it’s been decided that it’d be better if you’re made to type your own stuff up, slowly, and the company can save the cost of the secretary. You’re expected to have those skills, even if you almost certainly haven’t been trained in them. Similarly, more and more marketing people are doing their own copywriti...
If there are any of you who don’t already use Google Alerts, you’re missing out on one of the web’s great free resources. Just type in a relevant search term, and every time something new pops into Google’s index, you get an email. Simple as that. At the very least, you must have a Google Alert set up for your company’s name.
Posted by Tom SYkes on Saturday, April 18, 2009,
In :
ADVERTISING
Many regional newspaper titles are being forced to fold, 60 in fact in the last year, as the recession forces unprecented cuts in the local print industry.
Even before the recession, newspapers were changing their ways of working - altering structures and embracing the web and video.
The pace of change has now quickened in the fight to survive and advertising most follow suit.
It would appear gone are the days when you can advertise in the local rag and the prefered method is now advertising ...
If you’re wondering if (or to what extent) your company should get involved
in social media, there’s a good article called Is
social media effective for B2B lead generation? on the Sales Lead
Insights B2B Marketing blog which suggests that there’s not much
evidence (to the author, at least) that it can produce sales leads. And for most
of us, that’s what this marketing lark is all about.
I agree; I’ve not seen much evidence either. The likes of Twitter, Facebook,
LinkedIn etc ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Tom SYkes on Wednesday, April 15, 2009,
In :
SEO
Plenty of aspects of search engine optimisation are contentious. When it
comes to page titles (that’s the title which appears on the top of the browser,
not the headline on the page), I always recommend that you keep things to 70
characters or fewer, so that Google will reproduce the title exactly as you
wrote it, in full, in its results. However, there’s evidence that Google does take into account what
happens after that point in longer titles, even if it doesn’t show them in full...
The most important, yet most often neglected element of a B-to-B web site’s home page is its main “billboard” messaging. A user will decide whether to stay on a site or leave within 5 seconds.
While a typical site will serve multiple objectives (e-commerce, marketing, customer service, employee optimisation/intranet, public relations, investor relations, channel partner relations), in most cases, the focus is on NEW LEADS AND PROSPECTS.
This being the case, we can never ASSUME a visit...
Posted by Tom SYkes on Wednesday, April 8, 2009,
In :
SEO
If a page on your site can be accessed with more than one URL (http://….),
this can cause difficulties with the search engines, which might consider you’re
repeating the same page over and over again, even though you’re not intending
this to happen. The search engines may divide up the “strength” of the pages
between the different versions they think they can see, and indeed, external
links may be divided between the versions too.
Posted by Tom SYkes on Friday, April 3, 2009,
In :
SEO
I’ve been playing with a tool called Linkscape a lot recently; although it costs money, it provides some fascinating insights into your website, and it’s the sort of tool which is essential if you’re undertaking any “search engine optimisation” (aka “get my site ranking better in Google!”) programme. One of my favourite reports from this tool is a list of the Top Pages on a Domain, i.e the ones which probably carry the most clout with the search engines.
Posted by Tom SYkes on Wednesday, April 1, 2009,
In :
SEO
Not sure about all this “social media” stuff when it comes to your business? Are things like Facebook and Twitter really relevant to selling blue widgets to serious-minded industrial buyers? Don’t worry, I’m as sceptical as the next person, although every time I see someone doing something clever with this stuff, I get just that little bit more open-minded.
So, can we use Facebook to our advantage? The Hallam Internet blog suggests it’s easy enough to give it a go that it might b...
Posted by Tom SYkes on Wednesday, April 1, 2009,
In :
SEO
Unless you’ve been saddled with a really unlucky company name, you’ll be top in Google for that search. This is very important, because a large proportion of the people who want to find your company website nowadays just type your company name into Google, rather than type in your website URL in the address bar at the top of their browser. That’s why, if you look at your website stats, the top “search term” for traffic coming from Google is probably your company name.
Posted by Tom SYkes on Wednesday, April 1, 2009,
In :
EMAILS
You know those really irritating emails where the sender tells you what you need to know in two lines, and which then have pages full of corporate legal mumbo-jumbo which appears to say that nothing in the email can be trusted anyway? If you think that the sender’s company has insisted on all this garbage being added because they’ve got in-house lawyers and want you to know it, you’re probably not far wrong. But you do need certain information on every business email, and looking throug...
Marketing a property is a challenge for even estate agents and in the current climate it is even harder to sell your home. 
