Marketing Posts
Beware the adwords cowboys
August 27th, 2009
In addition to the SEO link building scam there is the Adwords scam. I have no problem in calling it a scam because that’s what it is. They are taking money on false pretences and delivering a wholly unsuitable product. Adwords is free. If you follow the many tutorials and articles you can set up a successful adwords campaign for nothing and turn a profit on day one.
Unfortunately there a number of companies whose high pressure marketing convince the unwary that they need to spend a lot of money running an adwords campaign. The trouble is it’s a based on a pack of lies.
How to avoid the SEO link building scam
August 23rd, 2009
Link building isn’t easy. It takes time and effort to research and create the links that will make a difference to your ranking. And it’s not the number of links that matter, it’s the quality of those links. Much better to have one link from a respected site than 1000 inbounds from spammy free-for-all directories.
There are however any number of companies who do sell link building services. Some are very good but most are a waste of time. What’s worse is the way they market their services, fail to deliver and scam you out of a wodge of cash.
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Tell us where you are if you want to be found
August 4th, 2009
There’s this amazing new restaurant,it’s local, has good prices, atmosphere and excellent food. The only problem is the marketing. They advertise in Australia when the business in England . And the cook lives in Peru .
You may snort with derision and say that nobody is that stupid but this is exactly what people do with their websites.
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Entice me to click, don’t leave it to chance
May 22nd, 2009
When you visit a website there’s really only two things you can do: absorb the content or click on links. If you own you own website you really want your visitors to do both. Getting then to absorb your content just needs some good copywriting but getting them to click on your links is another matter.
So how do you do it? How do you get your visitors to click on your links?
How to save your site from the death of the directory
October 29th, 2008
For ages and ages google advised that you should submit your site to DMOZ, yahoo and industry related directories. This guidance has gone from the google webmaster pages. So all of you that spent hours and hours seeking out directories as part of your link building strategy were wasting your time.
You don’t need visitors to be a success
July 25th, 2008
We all get excited when we get visitors to our websites. We pour over the stats and look longingly at those sites that get thousands of hits each day. But does it really matter? If all those visitors pass by without availing themselves of your services then it was pretty much a waste of time.
So if the number of visitors doesn’t matter then what does? I shall reveal all.
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How to make your website effective
April 9th, 2008
The whole aim of this site is to help people build effective websites. But do you really know what an effective website is? Is is the design, the coding, the technology, the images, the copy? The answer is much simpler, an effective website is one that meets the customers needs. A visitor to a website is looking for information about products or services, to be entertained or to socialize. The layout, the colours, graphics and even the speed of loading are secondary to these needs.
To how can you make your website effective? (more…)
Use your page titles to increase traffic
March 28th, 2008
Hopefully one of the aims of any website is to get a decent ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). To achieve this to need to provide the search engines with something to index. And the very first thing a search engine look for is the page title. The page title should describe the content of the page: if you are selling widgets then the title needs to word widget in it. Sounds obvious but many sites fail this simple test.
But there’s more, if the widget is blue then you need ‘blue widgets’. If you offer free delivery then you need ‘free delivery for all blue widgets’. Some people advocate the inclusion of the company name, I don’t for the simple reason that people don’t care who you are, all they want is a widget.
Targeting the search engines
The page title will always appear in the results of a search. It follows that it’s the first thing visitors will see when they use a search engine to look for something. So you need to make sure that the page title attracts their attention, instead of a having just a couple of words, make a sales pitch. For example:
Go from this: cushion covers.
To this: handmade silk-screen printed cushion covers.
You are now fully describing the product which will hopefully pick up people searching for:
- cushion covers
- handmade cushions
- silk-screen printing
- printed cushion covers
and so on.
Remember as well that the search engines only display about 60 characters in the snippet so if you make is too long then the last bit will will get chopped off.
I could go on but this excellent article on page titles from SEO logic does the job far better than me.
But don’t think that writing stunning page titles is the end of the story, keyword placement is at the heart of a successful SEO campaign.
