Built using CSS the website is standards compliant and is styled to comply with Rotary Club branding guidelines and match the look of the organisation’s Rotary in London (Rotary District 1130) website. Webzeppelin also registered the domain name on behalf of the club and provides maintenance and web hosting on a monthly arrangement.

Visit: www.kenningtonrotary.org.uk to see this website.

To find out more about other websites we have built, visit: www.webzeppelin.co.uk

The Bing/Yahoo search alliance is gaining pace and is expected to become an even greater influence on search in the UK later this year. If your website has been optimised solely for Google you could miss out. Yahoo will integrate Microsoft’s mobile, organic and paid listings in north America this Summer and anticipates that its search will be fully powered by Microsoft in August or September. Subject to the success of this, further integration will be rolled out globally.

Even now, some businesses claim to see better results from Bing searches than they do from Google and when Yahoo has fully incorporated Bing for search, Bing’s share of the market will grow dramatically. Particularly as it also powers the search in Facebook which has more than 300 million active users, 50% of whom are logged on in any given day. What’s more Bing is now offered as a default search engine on the new iPhone operating system.

From the webmaster point of view your site should use Bing Webmaster Tools and you should submit an xml sitemap to Bing. (Webzeppelin provides this as a free service for all websites that we build.) A new Bingbot has been developed to crawl sites and it will replace the existing msnbot in October. So ensuring that your site is optimised for Bing is essential.

If you want to increase site traffic (and who doesn’t) there is no question that Bing/Yahoo should now be include in the search optimisation strategy of your website.

If you would like to know more about this email: info@webzeppelin.co.uk

We designed the site, built and tested it off-line, registered the domain name for the client and also provide web hosting. Standards compliant and styled with CSS the site features downloadable forms for exhibitor attendance and an on-line booking form for visitor pre-registration.

Visit: www.essentialinstalllive.com to view the website.

To find out more about other websites we have built visit: www.webzeppelin.co.uk

email: info@webzeppelin.co.uk

Well this is an interesting and widely discussed issue. Is the most important element of your website the content or is it SEO? It’s a classic chicken and egg question. Should you spend your time and money getting visitors to your site or should you concentrate on content and conversion?

Of course the real answer, if you want to increase the effectiveness of your site, is to find the balance between both. But if I had to pick one above the other my money is on SEO. Why? Because if no one knows you are there, however much you polish web page copy and carefully construct your site navigation it will not lead to sales conversions because no one will be visiting your site.

My view is that you should develop a longer term strategy and do one thing after the other. Firstly build site traffic through on and off-site SEO (and ensure the site has Google Analytics embedded to monitor this). And then optimise the website content (and again Google Analytics can help with this) to push the traffic to your conversion/sales pages.

Of course, the next question is – how do I build site traffic through off-site SEO?

Contact webZeppelin and we can help.

<< Here’s some free computing advice from webZeppelin (we specialise in web design for Surrey); Stop whatever you are doing and back-up your entire hard disk this instant. I mean it!

If you have just done it! Do it again. And if you haven’t done it recently (or worse still you haven’t done it at all) do what I say and BACK-UP RIGHT NOW!

You may well ask do I or have I backed-up? Well the answer is no. I admit it. I used to back-up regularly but I got lazy, my resolve weakened I started hanging out with the wrong sort (people who didn’t back-up) and I let things slip.

I missed a back-up here and there and pretty soon I wasn’t backing up at all!

I thought, ‘I’ve been using a computer since the writing was green and I’ve always managed to get away with it.’ That was until a few weeks ago! The hard disc on my Mac vanished along with 80GB of data and and about ten years work! I couldn’t believe it – this was something that only ever happened to someone else. But ..it happens! And it happened to me.

I couldn’t work for two weeks, had to buy a new computer and had several sleepless nights. Fortunately I got the data back with the help of Retrodata (and I can’t thank them enough) but the whole process has left me psychologically scarred and a born again back-up evangelist.

So don’t ignore my advice. Your health and psychological well being depend on it.

Back-up, back-up, back-up. Back-up right now and if you haven’t got another disc to back-up to. Go out and buy one. A good size external drive will set you back less than  £100 and will be money well spent. >>

The interesting thing is – it’s two years on and I have been too busy at webzeppelin to take my own advice….

Not long ago all you needed was a website and you had a shop window to display your goods to the world. It gave you access to a vast audience that, through search engine technology, actually came to you, pre-defined with an interest in your particular market sector; well targeted warm leads, seeking you out.

Times have changed and so has the web. With internet traffic doubling every two years the web has become hugely overcrowded and now a website has to be promoted and optimised to be found at all. However, as bandwidth has increased to compensate for the extra traffic, so has the functionality of the web. And this has provided website owners with new and improved ways to realise the marketing potential of their sites. Your website now has the capability to act as a travelling salesman – to go and find and interact with prospective sales targets.

Social networking provides this opportunity and it’s the most exciting thing happening on the web, representing a shift from outbound to inbound marketing. It provides control to the publisher and tools to webmasters that enable them to be more pro-active in marketing their sites. If you adopt social networking as a ‘route to market’ your website can seek-out and interact with a relevant, targeted new audience.

Del.icio.us, Facebook, Linkedin, Digg, and Technorati are just a selection from a raft of services that you can subscribe to. When you provide a profile (of your business) on these sites it increases the exposure of your website/organisation to a selected on-line community (that have expressed their specific interests) and drives targeted traffic to your website. But in addition the diverse references to your URL this generates can greatly contribute to the importance a search engine attributes to your site. And this can improve your search engine results and page rank.

Typically you will set up a blog that can be used for news and PR items (or as a separate events calendar) which can also be implemented as an RSS feed on your main website. You’ll have a profile on Facebook or Linkedin and much more. You would promote your blog on Technorati and use Digg to push the latest news items or pages from your website. All these channels can have links back to your main website and give it further penetration on the web.

It takes a bit more effort to get the travelling salesman on the road but with the volume of potential customers on the web it has to be worthwhile and webZeppelin can help.