Posts Tagged ‘digital marketing’

Five Techniques to make a good website a great internet site

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

Anyone can dream up a functional internet site as we all have access to the proper technology. The difficulty is that the majority of the internet sites one comes across on the net are rubbish. These tips will ensure that yours doesn't become part of litter on the internet:

1. Make it memorable

Make sure that a viewer perceives your site to be an informing experience. People tend to retain info and view the source with more significance if they learn something that can be conveyed in a social conversation. This also helps with word-of-mouth and viral marketing if you create something engaging which will leave a lasting impression on your target prospects.

2. Segment your target audience

Remember who your key components are and always don't forget how they may undoubtedly receive a message. If you have 3 broad consumer groups, create visible effects which will lead the internet site user down a particular path thru the site. Make sure you've got the right graphics and brand names on the right pages. It is usually not what one asserts, but how one says it.

3. Don’t go haywire with colo urs

Use standard colours and text. Using complex text and colors makes sense as it draws attention but this is only usable if all computers can display this aesthetic attribute. Some colors are less difficult to read on a screen than others.

4. Make it simple

Don’t start adding 1000 pages if you don't have a clear content plan. If the client has a large amount of information, ensure you agree on page groupings and navigation previously. In this example, it's best to advise the customer about how web site users will see their pages. Readers only skim through web pages until they see something that is relevant to their categorical search.

5. Remember the fundamentals

Some website design experts get so wrapped up in animation, effects and sound that they forget some of the most basic details of building a site. Always have a section elected for contact data. It doesn't matter why individuals need to contact the owner of the site, as long as they are enabled to do so. The interactive facet of the web must be exploited so the positive effects of two-way communication can be made use of.

With all of the sofisticated tools at our finger tips, clients are expecting more from organisations. They desire an interactive experience of the organisation where they can really get a feel of the culture and what an organisation stands for.

Horace France is an Internet Marketing Consultant with WSI – Internet Visibility Consulting in the United Kingdom

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Some Big SEO Issues With Number10.gov.uk

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Alistair Darling last week presented his economic budget to the country, making headlines and stirring up a big media fuss. With such an event you might expect a quick Google search of terms like ‘budget live’ or ‘Budget 2010′ would find the official Prime Minister’s website www.number10.gov.uk but it doesn’t appear at the top, in fact it doesn’t even appear in the top 50 for either of these phrases, outranked by news articles and critical blogs. For something so important with such big public interest this should be a priority, to avoid critics appearing higher up in the rankings and generating political influence against the government.

To recognize what the problem might be, you can take a deeper look at the website from a Search Engine Optimisation perspective; it’s useful to learn from the mistakes of others and try and avoid ever making them yourself.

At closer inspection, the Downing St website appears to have extremely poor SEO, they make amateur mistakes like having no ‘title tag’ or containing poorly optimised articles with no keywords or descriptive text. The website is packed uses techniques like stuffing it with keywords such as ‘tattoos’, ‘piercings’ and ‘polish armed forces’ that are really frowned upon by the search engines and the SEO community. A closer look of the general SEO of Number 10 shows the brand getting lost in translation, the official YouTube channel is located at www.youtube.com/downingst rather than /number10 and both refer to their media content as ‘number10tv’ even though a Google search for that term definitely doesn’t find what your looking for.

On a further note, Gordon Brown’s tweets come from @downingstreet rather than @number10 or @primeminister. All of these mistakes are fundamental basics when creating a digital presence for a brand and you might have thought the British Government could have done a little better than this.

In common SEO practice, most agencies will buy up URLs relevant to their site and redirect to their website or prevent their competition from buying them; unusually both www.number10tv.com and www.number10tv.co.uk are both still for sale. Depending on whether Gordon Brown has an in house SEO or an agency, he needs to get rid of them.

If you are looking for achester SEO, then ask Prodo to improve your Cheshire SEO.

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Which is better SEO? Black hat or White hat?

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Popular search engine optimisation techniques can usually be considered one of two broad categories. The concept of SEO is to improve a website’s position in search term rankings so the search engines take considerable notice to how webmasters go about doing this and to ensure they keep their practices ethical.

Practices referred to as ‘white hat’ are ethical and because of their compliance with the guidelines of the search engines, have longer lasting effects on their search results. Activities referred to as ‘Black hat’ are usually discovered by the search engines which in turn can cause websites to get banned from their results. People who use these techniques do not expect longevity from their results.

‘White hat’ SEO techniques have no intent of deceiving the search engine and are used to ensure that the content the engine indexes and ranks is the same content the user will view. The common attitude of white hat practices is to produce content for users, not engines rather than exploiting the algorithms and tricking the spiders.

An SEO technique that is considered ‘Black hat’ involves the deception of the search engine. One popular technique is to use hidden text filled with keywords that is located off screen or in the same colour as the background as to be invisible to humans. Some developers will provide a different web page depending on whether it is being requested by a human or a search engine, giving the search engines exactly what they are looking for, this is known as ‘cloaking’.

When search engines find sites using black hat techniques they will penalize them by either reducing their ranking or removing them from the results completely. This can usually be done by automated algorithms but sometimes it needs manual intervention. A good example of this would be in 2006 when Ricoh Germany was removed from Google results for using unethical techniques; they quickly apologised, fixed the pages and were eventually restored to Google’s listing.

Want to find out more about SEO, then visit Prodo for the best Search Engine Optimisation in cheshire.

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