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.

The Google Browser Size ...
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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...
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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.

Traditional advertising agencies have trie...
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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 ...
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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. ...
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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.

Right, here we go.

1. Rebuild your company website.
Why? Beca...
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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.
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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. 

Even though this...
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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.
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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...

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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...

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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.

However, by setting up Google Alerts for industry topics, you can create a continuous source of ideas for your blog, as Set Up Alerts to Monitor What is Happe...

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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.

But do you suffer from this problem? It’s har...

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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.

So if you’r...

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Google rolled out a couple of updates last week, and here’s my take on the first of them, and how it affects you. If you’re using a search engine optimisation consultancy, make sure you ask them how their advice to you is changing as a result.

The more instantly obvious of the changes concerns the description or “snippet” part of the results. Traditionally Google has served up the title of your page and then two secondary lines of text, which would be your meta description tag if tha...

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