Google places is another great FREE online tool that helps promote your business. Most of us are already using Google Place pages for our business. If you are not using it as yet maybe it is something you need to consider. If you are using it, are you using it to its full potential?

Google places not only allows you to plot your business location but it also allows you to give a little bit more information about your business or service in order to entice customers!  You can include a business description, photographs, business opening hours, contact information and a link back to your website. You can also categorise your business to aid your chances of being returned on search. If you have YouTube videos associated with your company up to 5 of these may be uploaded to your listing at any time.
Google collects data about your business, such as reviews from various other websites and combines this information with what you enter on your Google Place page.

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Facebook has now launched the Guide to Facebook Ads. This page was set up to give advice and tips for building effective ad campaigns on Facebook. Learn how to make your Facebook advertisement stand out and attract attention, while getting the best results for your money.

Do you know when to schedule your ads in order to reach your target audience? Do you know how to optimise your Facebook campaign? If not visit http://www.facebook.com/adsmarketing/

The guide can also be found by clicking on ‘Learn more’ in the left-hand navigation of your Facebook Ads Manager.

The long standing questions – What is Flash?  Should we use it and if we do what are the implications?   For years we advised people to steer clear of flash because the search engines just could not get to grips with it but now its quite popular to add a small element of flash to enhance the look and feel of a website.  We do still advise on the best use of flash becuase it can cause problems for users especially if they do not have flash player downloaded onto their computer. So to answer the questions:

What is Flash?  a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages.

Should we use Flash?  What are the Implications? Yes, why not as long as it enhances the sales message and does not take from it.  There are different ways to integrate flash into a website and here are out thoughts:

Flash introductions – pure vanity? You know the scene – floating images combining to form a one image over a few seconds, and you search frantically for the ‘skip’ button. Bad news when research confirms you have only seconds to grab the attention of your visitor.   As well as being almost universally disliked by web users, this combination of Flash and ‘splash page’ can also block search engine crawlers.

Flash built websites -  This was a short lived fad in the late 1990s.  Building your whole website in flash means high costs, poor usability and visibility on search engines.  Some agencies used bad practice to ensure that flash sites were visible to search engines and lets just say, they did not like it much.

Flash navigation - just don’t do it. Bad for usability, accessibility and search engine performance.

Flash banners or embedded flash objects - This option is very popular and does not really affect search engine performance unless it is very heavy, you will need alternative content to remain accessibility compliant. Ensure it does not distract from the most important thing, the sales message. Good if you are selling a moving part that you need to demonstrate.

My colleague was speaking with one of our clients earlier today, Organic Cotton Shop, she had just bought Sophie the Giraffe.  So what’s Sophie the Giraffe I hear you ask?  In short its a Natural Latex Pacifier and Teether for babies and toddlers.

Now I hear you ask, what has this got to do with forums.  Well to make a long story short, someone bought one, mentioned it in Roller Coaster’s forum and since then their sales have increases 10 fold for this particular product and the footfall through the shop has also increases. 

This is a great case study to show how user generated content in forums can help increase your brand/product awareness.  

Be aware that you cannot use forums to promote your self as you will get a slap on the wrists but it is certainly a good idea to keep an eye on whats being said and getting involved in threads that are relevant to your business. Dont forget to read their policies and T&C carefully but most don’t mind you putting your business name and website address in your signature (and don’t forget keyphrases in your post if you want it to help your website optimisation).

I received a call yesterday from a lady who said she was calling from Google. As I am an agent I did not think this was strange so I took the call and listened to what she had to say. It was along the lines of “how would you like to have a top listing in Google and not have to pay the costs of pay per click”. I though great, tell me more but then it clicked. She was not calling from Google at all. I had just received one of those calls; yes you probably have all received one by now. A company (normally from the UK) promising the all elusive no. 1 listing for little cost.

So my next move was to ask her if she actually worked for Google, she then changed to say that she was calling on behalf of Google but in reality she was probably calling from a call centre, had been given a list of companies to call and we were unfortunate enough to be on that list.

I found it strange that they had not done any research on our company, if she had she would have seen that we provide search engine optimisation services so I would know that you cannot promise a no. 1 listing to anyone unless you are going to go down the route of pay per click. Too many factors play a part in getting you a top listing from the density of key phrases in the page copy, meta data to links and the list goes on. When I said this to her, I think she got a fright and stumbled a bit. Needless to say the call ended.

The moral of this story is to ignore calls from people claiming to be from Google, Google are probably the only company making money in the recession – they don’t need to make cold calls.

If you need search engine optimisation services talk to our expert 046 9730147.

“Why bother” “cannot see the point” “takes too much time” just a few quotes I have had from clients recently when I mention using Twitter to help promote their business products and services. So is Twitter loosing the social networking war? The jury is still out on that one but there do appear to be a few jumping ship.

On the other hand there are also a lot of companies using it and quite successfully. The great thing about Twitter is that it is many things to many people. It allows you to keep up with friends and family. Follow local events. Interact with companies and stores where you are already a customer and get questions answered. And even better you don’t have to turn on the lap top every time you want to look at or publish a new tweet. Just set it up on your phone and off you go. So are you using it and how successfully.

Ever wondered where spammers get your email address so they can send in those wonderful emails about enlarging parts of you body that you dont have or trying to flog pills or watches, well chances are they took it off your own website.  Using a programme, spammers can scrape email addresses off websites, hence you get lots of spam.  A few years ago I landed into work with 1279 emails awaiting me, tankfully not all work but I did have to delete all the spam, 1272 of them, which took some time. 

Do you want to ensure your email address cannot be scraped?  Use this Email Address Encoder tool http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html. Its easy and best of all its free.

You may have noticed when searching in Google recently, that listings with Google maps are appearing more and more, they are Google’s business listings which are a great way to get yourself into Google quickly. I have been listing tourism businesses and within 24hours they are getting a page one listing, normally in the top 5 listings.

I hear you ask how do you do this, its actually very simple.  Go to www.google.com/maps, click the link “Put your business on Google Maps”.   Follow the steps. Its really simple.  To ensure you are a legit business they will need to give you a pin number to confirm your listing, this can be given 3 ways – phone, text or postcard.  I would recommend the phone option as its the quickest - just make sure that you are available straight away to answer the phone (this would be the number you added to your business listing) to take down the 5 digit pin number.  One tip would be to try include a keyword in the business name e.g. SitesToGo would become SitesToGo website design

Happy listing.

I heard this last week and could not believe it, Web 2.0, something I am always talking about has now become an official word in the english language and not just any word but the one millionth. Other words bidding for the position included coddies, chengguan, slumdog, fundoo and Jai Ho, but no, they picked Web 2.0. 

The Global Language Monitor (GLM), based in Austin made it official on 10th June  at 10:22 am GMT.  Web 2.0 is a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services.   Isn’t it funny to think that its only the one millionth, I would have thought that this would have been exceeded a long time ago.

Without a great deal of fanfare Microsoft’s new search

engine came on-line this week. No doubt they spent a long time dreaming

up a name that would have the same quirk factor as ‘Google’.

In the end they came up with ‘Bing’ – which, although not completely awful, is

frankly a little bit awful!

In any case, bing seems to work quite well but I just can’t see any

reason why a Google user would want to switch.

Check out bing for yourself