Dorte Knights-Branch
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Email design guidelines - a bit geeky
There are a whole host of ingredients that contribute to a good email marketing campaign. Permission, relevance, timeliness and engaging content are all important. Even so, the biggest challenge for designers still remains building an email that renders well across all the popular email clients.
Future Jobs Funding opportunity
You might have heard us mention the “Future Jobs Fund” at recent events. This is a scheme run by the IBA and it has just been expanded from just covering
Via this scheme you can have an additional employee in your business at no extra cost for 6 months. This will add value to your business and give valuable work experience to the individual.
SEO benchmarking
Once again thank you to the
And we had food this time, bonus :o)
Bjorn Le Roux was our guest speaker talking about SEO benchmarking and he is of course one of the excellent trainers from the Axis Centre in
The point of SEO
Bjorn started out by explaining that the point of benchmarking your SEO efforts against your competition is to get a clear picture of why some sites are ranking better than yours. Based on this knowledge you know what to change in order to improve your position.
We looked at two sites from eBusiness Champions on the programme and compared with their competition.
The first thing is try to establish how fierce the competition is overall for the phrase you are looking at and then look at how well optimised the competing sites really are. You need some tools for this…
The tools available
There are a range of free tools available for benchmarking SEO and Bjorn showed some of the most popular ones:
Google operators and moderators (some of them)
allinanchor:search phrase inanchor:search phrase
allintitle:search phrase intitle:search phrase
allinurl:search phrase inurl:search phrase
Domain tools
- Look at the site age, when was it registered
- Look for any DMOZ, Yahoo listings etc
- Look at where the site is hosted, is it in the
- Shows some of the key search phrases used for your/the competitors sites.
- Will give you a bit of demographic info about your visitors (sex, age, time of visits)
Google External Keyword tool
Look for other long tail search phrases that you might be better off competing for.
The important factors to look for
We suggest you use a table similar to the one we used in the presentation which has some of the most important areas to look at. It is a good idea to create a table for each of your key phrases and compare against a couple of competitors.
Improving your position
When you have completed your benchmark table consider the following:
- Be realistic about what you can achieve against large established sites. It will all come down to time and £.
Would you rather have 0% of 60,000 searches or 40% of 2,000 searches? - Do you keyword research, make sure you aren’t missing good long tail opportunities. Target specific phrases.
- Try to get listed in the same industry relevant directories that the competitors are in. Ensure you get good deep-links, not just to your home page.
Commenting on forums and blogs and be a good way to build up in-bound links and raise your brand awareness. - Match your title, h1 and opening paragraph to the competition - are yours equally strong?
- Be on top of your stats, use both Google analytics and webmaster tools for gaining insight.
- Create a schedule for measuring your SEO efforts. Don’t make too many changes in one go or you won’t know exactly what caused the change in ranking position.
Other points and conclusions
We looked at two different examples and came to two very different conclusions.
www.dentaldesktop.co.uk vs. www.tabdental.co.uk
Yes, dentaldesktop has some work to do, but they are chasing an achievable goal and a couple of quite easy changes to make were identified. Their title, h1 and opening paragraph isn’t as strong as the competition. They need to try and get a good amount of more inbound links. And the are some coding issues worth addressing. But, with a bit of tweaking and a bit of time, this is a battle worth pursuing without having to spend lots of £.
www.giftwrappedandgorgeous.co.uk vs. www.notonthehighstreet.co.uk
unfortunately the conclusion wasn’t quite as straight forward for our second example. While we love the look and feel of the giftwrappedandgourgeous site it is facing so much competition from old established sites that have big resources behind them. We suggested they go and have a good look at the Google External keyword tool and identify some more specific and longer tail phrases to chase. The more generic “Gift ideas” phrases are possibly not really realistic for this business at this stage. This is a great example of how a “small fish” needs to be a bit more clever and think out-side the box in order to beat the “big fish”.
Is DMOZ important or not?
Bjorn suggested there is less importance to DMOZ these days. We had Gavin Walker attend our
Is the geographical location of your hosting important?
Bjorn advised that if you have a country specific domain name, for example .co.uk it will automatically be index by the
It you have a .com, .eu or similar you should set your geographic targeting in your web masters tools.
_ vs - (for example page_name.html vs. page-name.html)
We use to say that Google ignored _ in file names but they have changed this a couple of years ago, so today it doesn’t really matter what you use. It is more important to keep your file name keyword rich and to the point.
A couple of questions that came up in
How about all the new fancy domains like.tv, .co, .travel etc?
Gavin advises that once upon a time there was a rush to secure your domain in all available variations, but this is no longer the case. Also, don’t rush into buying the new ones until they are a bit more “tried and tested”.
Laura from Magnetic north has recently set up a .travel site and she actually feels it confuses some users as they as not use to this extension yet.
Another word on this topic, make sure your form validation will accept the new extensions, for example it typically won’t allow .travel as a website and email format.
Should you spend your £ on buying links or improving on-page?
Gavin suggest if budgets are limited you should first and foremost focus on getting your on-page stuff right first and go for the free inbound links. Don’t rely on buying cheap inbound links.
Is it a good idea to buy additional key word rich domains and redirect/link them to your main site.
Gavins advise is “no”, not worth it unless you plan on putting genuinely good and unique content on each site. He also added to watch out for putting too any sites of the same server and interlinking them too fiercely as it can start to look dodgy.
Slides
SEO benchmarking
If you missed the May event in
Thank you to everyone who came along, and especially thank you the good number of new people at this event. Great with all the questions, and apologies for having to stop the session… Gavin will be back at our September event for another Q&A round!
Once Bjorn has convinced the poor pole ladies to give up the room, he moved on to talk about benchmarking your SEO efforts, and together with Gavin Walker from Optillion they did a big Q&A session.
The point of SEO
Bjorn started out by explaining that the point of benchmarking your SEO efforts against your competition is to get a clear picture of why some sites are ranking better than yours. Based on this knowledge you know what to change in order to improve your position.
We looked at two sites from eBusiness Champions on the programme and compared with their competition.
The first thing is try to establish how fierce the competition is overall for the phrase you are looking at and then look at how well optimised the competing sites really are. You need some tools for this…
The tools available
There are a range of free tools available for benchmarking SEO and Bjorn showed some of the most popular ones:
Google operators and moderators (some of them)
allinanchor:search phrase inanchor:search phrase
allintitle:search phrase intitle:search phrase
allinurl:search phrase inurl:search phrase
Domain tools
- Look at the site age, when was it registered
- Look for any DMOZ, Yahoo listings etc
- Look at where the site is hosted, is it in the
- Shows some of the key search phrases used for your/the competitors sites.
- Will give you a bit of demographic info about your visitors (sex, age, time of visits)
Google External Keyword tool
Look for other long tail search phrases that you might be better off competing for.
The important factors to look for
We suggest you use a table similar to the one we used in the presentation which has some of the most important areas to look at. It is a good idea to create a table for each of your key phrases and compare against a couple of competitors.
Improving your position as a result of benchmakring
When you have completed your benchmark table consider the following:
- Be realistic about what you can achieve against large established sites. It will all come down to time and £.
Would you rather have 0% of 60,000 searches or 40% of 2,000 searches? - Do you keyword research, make sure you aren’t missing good long tail opportunities. Target specific phrases.
- Try to get listed in the same industry relevant directories that the competitors are in. Ensure you get good deep-links, not just to your home page.
Commenting on forums and blogs and be a good way to build up in-bound links and raise your brand awareness. - Match your title, h1 and opening paragraph to the competition - are yours equally strong?
- Be on top of your stats, use both Google analytics and webmaster tools for gaining insight.
- Create a schedule for measuring your SEO efforts. Don’t make too many changes in one go or you won’t know exactly what caused the change in ranking position.
Other points and conclusions
We looked at two different examples and came to two very different conclusions.
www.dentaldesktop.co.uk vs. www.tabdental.co.uk
Yes, dentaldesktop has some work to do, but they are chasing an achievable goal and a couple of quite easy changes to make were identified. Their title, h1 and opening paragraph isn’t as strong as the competition. They need to try and get a good amount of more inbound links. And the are some coding issues worth addressing. But, with a bit of tweaking and a bit of time, this is a battle worth pursuing without having to spend lots of £.
www.giftwrappedandgorgeous.co.uk vs. www.notonthehighstreet.co.uk
unfortunately the conclusion wasn’t quite as straight forward for our second example. While we love the look and feel of the giftwrappedandgourgeous site it is facing so much competition from old established sites that have big resources behind them. We suggested they go and have a good look at the Google External keyword tool and identify some more specific and longer tail phrases to chase. The more generic “Gift ideas” phrases are possibly not really realistic for this business at this stage. This is a great example of how a “small fish” needs to be a bit more clever and think out-side the box in order to beat the “big fish”.
Is DMOZ important or not?
Gavin Walker says DMOZ listings can give you a high number of inbound links as other directories feed from it, so it is still is a factor to look out for in your SEO benchmark.
Is the geographical location of your hosting important?
If you have a country specific domain name, for example .co.uk it will automatically be index by the
It you have a .com, .eu or similar you should set your geographic targeting in your web masters tools.
How about all the new fancy domains like.tv, .co, .travel etc?
Gavin advises that once upon a time there was a rush to secure your domain in all available variations, but this is no longer the case. Also, don’t rush into buying the new ones until they are a bit more “tried and tested”.
Laura from Magnetic north has recently set up a .travel site and she actually feels it confuses some users as they as not use to this extension yet.
Another word on this topic, make sure your form validation will accept the new extensions, for example it typically won’t allow .travel as a website and email format.
Should you spend your £ on buying links or improving on-page?
Gavin suggest if budgets are limited you should first and foremost focus on getting your on-page stuff right first and go for the free inbound links. Don’t rely on buying cheap inbound links.
Is it a good idea to buy additional key word rich domains and redirect/link them to your main site.
Gavins advise is “no”, not worth it unless you plan on putting genuinely good and unique content on each site. He also added to watch out for putting too any sites of the same server and interlinking them too fiercely as it can start to look dodgy.
_ vs - (for example page_name.html vs. page-name.html)
We use to say that Google ignored _ in file names but they have changed this a couple of years ago, so today it doesn’t really matter what you use. It is more important to keep your file name keyword rich and to the point.
Slides
Twitter goes commercial
What does Twitter's recent introduction of Promoted Tweets mean for the online business community?
Highlights from the Internet Conference in Nottingham
We went to Susan Hallam’s Internet Conference on the 14th of May and can report back that it was an excellent conference and definitely worth going to next year for any business who is serious about keeping up-to-date online.
Here are some of the key points we picked up from during a couple of the sessions we attended.
Social media begins with your employees
Social media intensifies customer and potential customer relationships. But building social media connections is more than enabling staff to access Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
Here are the first steps to consider when looking to your employees to engage with your customers:
Jonathan Green and the Axis Centre
"The Conversation - what has everyone been up to"
Location: Cape Bar, Hockley, Nottingham
Date: Thursday 29th April, 2010
Thank you to everyone who came to this event, and thank you to everyone for their great participation in the conversation – we have had some good feedback from this evening and it is excellent that people really got talking! Particularly people have said they like to see examples of other businesses involved, so we will do our best to keep showing these – hence, do keep telling us what you are up to!
This was a “conversation” event and a bit of a “catch up session” showcasing what different businesses on the eBusiness Champion programme have been up to over the past 4 months.
Ares covered were:
Traffic and conversion
We looked at some sites that have recently been re-launched, sites that are currently being re-developed and sites that are making some smaller changes to improve their search rankings and conversion rates.
Google Analytics
Lots of businesses have installed Google Analytics, and 29 businesses are currently sharing their data for benchmarking in monthly reports.
We looked at how a couple of sites have used Google Analytics to spot issues with people actually searching for perfect phrases and landing on the sites but then bouncing at 80-100% - how to respond to this!
We also touched on how Google Analytics have flagged up that traffic is only coming into the homepage on some sites and visitors are not seeing the (more important) other product pages.
Optimising for universal search
We showed a great success story of a business sending out a press release (after the Susan Hallam event) and getting 1000 visitors in a day as a result. We had requests to run a PR copy writing workshop and we will be looking into this.
A couple of businesses are trying out Google Merchant, and Rob Gale was there to tell that he is already seeing sales from this. Rob also made the great suggestion of using a csv feed for your Google Merchant and to ask your suppliers for the details. Your suppliers typically already have all the product details and images in a database and it will save you hours of hard work!
Comment were made about optimising for images… Susan Hallam recommended this and we do think it is a great idea. However the feedback from business so far is that they are optimising their new images going forward but don’t feel they have the time to go back and try to change all their current images.
CMS
A good handful of business are in the process of having new sites done, some bespoke and others using Open Source, so if you are contemplating a new site there are lots of people to talk to!
Lots of the people in Nottingham agreed that for smaller service type sites WordPress is proven really easy for them to manage and up-date.
Hall-fast is currently doing quite a big project on transferring their current e-commerce site to Magento and especially the task of structuring the data is taking up a lot of time – not a task to be underestimated, but we look forward to seeing the great outcome!
John Russell from C&R Enterprises is currently having a new bespoke site done and he had the great idea of asking the developer to set up an import retune so instead of typing in each item individually they will be able to import a spreadsheet of hundreds of items in one go – excellent thinking and good way to save time! Anyone else doing new e-commerce type sites should ask for this as well we think!
Current “buzz words” within the world of websites
We had a little look at what the big companies are current spending lots of money on and two big things are re-targeting and MVT-testing.
SMEs can actually do some MVT testing at home at no budget just by trying out different changes and measuring the effects. Especially if you are doing email marketing it is a good idea to do at least some basis A/B testing on opening rate for different subject lines.
Other comments….
Jonny Green mentioned that there is currently an opportunity for business in Nottingham to get a graduate for 6 months. It is a scheme running where the graduate will be paid by the scheme in order for them to gain some work experience and become more employable. Infero training (eBusinesss Champion) has already got one of these graduates who is currently doing a new website for them. If you have questions about this scheme please contact Steve Wakeling This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Requests were made for us to do some kind of video workshop and we are looking into the possibilities of this and will hopefully be able to offer this in the near future with help from DMU! We also had requests (again) for WordPress and Joomla workshops and PR copy writing workshops – we are looking into all options.
If you have any other requests for topics you would like us to cover, please get in touch This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
"The Conversation - what has everyone been up to"
Location: DMU, Leicester
Date: Tuesday 30th March, 2010
Thank you to everyone who came to this event, once again a good turnout of
This was the first “conversation” event in
Particularly people say they liked seeing examples of real sites instead of just “talking theory” so we will do our best to keep showing the sites off as and when changes are made.
Ares covered were:
Traffic and conversion
We looked at some sites that have recently been re-launched, sites that are currently being re-developed and sites that are making some smaller changes to improve their search rankings and conversion rates.
Google Analytics
Lots of businesses have installed Google Analytics, and 29 businesses are currently sharing their data for benchmarking in monthly reports.
We looked at how a couple of sites have used Google Analytics to spot issues with people actually searching for perfect phrases and landing on the sites but then bouncing at 80-100% - how to respond to this!
Optimising for universal search
We showed a great success story of a business sending out a press release (after the Susan Hallam event) and getting 1000 visitors in a day as a result.
A couple of businesses are trying out Google Merchant, so we await the results.
Comment were made about optimising for images… Susan Hallam recommended this and we do think it is a great idea. However the feedback from business so far is that they are optimising their new images going forward but don’t feel they have the time to go back and try to change all their current images.
CMS
A good handful of business are in the process of having new sites done, some bespoke and others using Open Source, so if you are contemplating a new site there are lots of people to talk to!
We had a question about how you go about setting up and more details about the different available solutions – this is of course a massive question and the answer is it really needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis. If you have a specific case/question n mind please come and see us and we can help put you in contact with good people to talk to!
Current “buzz words” within the world of websites
We had a little look at what the big companies are current spending lots of money on and two big things are re-targeting and MVT-testing.
SMEs can actually do some MVT testing at home at no budget just by trying out different changes and measuring the effects. Especially if you are doing email marketing it is a good idea to do at least some basis A/B testing on opening rate for different subject lines.
Other comments….
Podcast came up and the general comments were positive and most has good experiences of using them, so could they work for your business?
Another suggestion was made to always release a transcript with any video as it is more likely to be usable for PR activities.
Requests were made for us to do some kind of video workshop and we are looking into the possibilities of this and will hopefully be able to offer this in the near future with help from DMU!
If you have any other requests for topics you would like us to cover, please get in touch This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Slides from this event
