Launched in 2013 as a directory of Canadian dealers and events, World Class Antiques grew into a true online community with interactive forums, nationwide event listings, and a road trip planner for antique hunters.

Now, the entire site offering has been overhauled, expanded, and improved, offering even more benefits and functionality to antique collectors and dealers alike with a more visual and streamlined look and feel.

Here’s a quick guide to all the enhancements:

Design

• Site navigation now includes a global "START" button designed to get users where they need to go, quickly.
• Shortcut icons (left side) follow you everywhere, enabling one-click access to the most important features of the site.
• Fresh new look, including wider screen space, and more visuals.

Global Directory of Dealers

• Directory of dealers and auction houses, once limited to Canada, is now accepting entries from across the globe.
• Marketplace offers another way to promote antiques to a global audience of collectors.

Buy & Sell Marketplace

• Antiques marketplace offers auction-style, fixed price, and classified listings for sellers.
• Buyers can bid and buy online in a secure environment with an easy payment process.
• Items are displayed visually, with handy filters to sort and browse.

Online Appraisals

• Dealers with a premium directory membership can now offer appraisals to interested collectors – commission-free!
• All communications and files are managed in a private and secure system.

Trip Planner

• Road trip planner saw some improvements in terms of speed and user interface.

Bonus Features

• A magazine section with articles,
• Gold and silver prices updated every minute,
• New version of forums that eliminates some past bugs,
• Every page and section is now enabled for secure communication via the https protocol
• Updated and expanded help section.
• All this under a single sign-on user experience (one account to get access to everything)

Dealers, these new features all add up to one thing – your chance to better reach antiques hunters locally and abroad. Register to claim your complimentary listing to promote your shop and collections today.

Collectors, celebrate by entering the Spring 2015 Sweepstakes for your chance to win a vintage Lehmann Wind-up Tin Bird!

While contests are certainly not new to the marketer’s toolkit, they have taken on new life with the growth of the social web. Campaigns create high levels of awareness as they tend to be shared virally.

Gone are the days when you needed to build contests from scratch. There are dozens of platforms (popular ones now include Rafflecopter and WizeHive) that can be used to deploy contests for your business, on your website and/or Facebook and everywhere in between.

While these may make things simpler, there is the key matter of data ownership and privacy. Most contest platforms have third-party terms and conditions that you, and often your entrants, are forced to agree with – and who knows where personal data is being stored.

Single Entry Point’s contest pages are branded for seamless integration in your existing website, and you completely own and control the data, as campaigns are deployed on your servers (or ours).

Our Facebook app also makes it easy to grow your fan base and engage with your audience. The entry mechanism is build right into your page, and gated – meaning users must first like your page to access the entry form. At no time is any data shared with Facebook (or any other third parties).

Lastly, a critical component contest platforms don’t typically offer is front to back strategy and execution. Your checklist needs to include campaign branding, creative, legal, deployment, promotion, project management, entrant support (for tech trouble or questions), winner drawing, data scrubbing, entry validation, reporting, and prize shipment.

Happily, this is what Single Entry Point does best! Plus, you can track individual customer engagement with detailed, visual reports that show entries by source, by day, and by location, plotted on Google Maps for easy visualization.

Get more details and view some examples of recent contests and sweeps to inspire your own!
 

Whether you blog for your company or are trying to go pro with your recipes, a crucial component for any blogger is increasing visitors reading the posts.

The way to do this is through a content that capitalizes that on what people are searching for – and ranking well in search engines when they do.

To this end, you are probably doing some wonderful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) activities like tagging, and didn’t even know you were making a key mistake.

It’s a good idea to tag your blog posts for relevancy, so search engines and readers can find your content. But often, bloggers are using way too many tags.

One problem with over-tagging is that each tag gets it’s own URL, and if you’ve only used that tag once or twice, it appears to Google and Bing as though your blog isn’t to go-to site for that topic.

Meaning? It is not in a bloggers’ best interest to have a bunch of tags on topics that are not regularly written about. Rather, you should tag the post about the meat of the matter, something you talk about a lot.

An example of this is a post related to a current event. I don’t often (ever!) blog about Miley Cyrus at the VMAs, so I wouldn't tag her in this post even if I weighed in on the foam hand. I will tag the keywords “SEO” and “blogging” however, since I cover those topics a lot.

So tag your posts for content people will continue to search for, and that you blog about often. Crate a list of 20-25 tags that are relevant to your niche, and use those repeatedly. But not – I stress – all together in every past,

Simply put, blog tags do have SEO value. Tags and categories can help organize content and give users and search crawlers easy access to posts. However, over-tagging can be a negative. If your tags are displayed on your blog, they can be a distraction, even look spammy.

So use tags, but use them wisely. For more, listen to Matt Cutts discuss the issue, then download Google’s SEO starter guide PDF.

Complimentary listings on this custom-built site are offered to dealers and individuals wishing to sell antiquities. The upgraded premium listings allow sellers to showcase multiple stores, feature products, and display a desirable premium badge to antique buyers.

The dedicated listings provide a showcase for antiques sellers and buyers alike, on a website designed to truly be “friendly” for both search engines and users.

Relevant content and updated event listings ensure the site can be found online, while unique search capabilities – including search by province, type of vendor, product category, keyword, and proximity to postal code – help buyers discover new antique destinations.

Responsive Web Design

WorldClassAntiques.com is built to adapt to everyone’s screen size, whether at home or on the go, using responsive web design.

Responsive design detects mobile screens (think smartphones and tablets) and adapts to their screen sizes, enabling visitors to quickly zoom into the pages, listings, or maps; drill down to preferred antiques dealers using a variety of filters such as proximity to postal code; and even access and filter antiques’ event information by province and event type.

A Community-Driven Website

For the antiques trade, World Class Antiques provides expert website design and Internet marketing, through user- and search-engine friendly websites that promote, display, manage and sell inventory online. Custom-built from the ground up, this community-driven website uses Microsoft-centric technologies including the latest .Net platform.

Registered users can use a single sign-on to seamlessly navigate from personalized account management pages, to events, to forums. For easy search, an indexed database provides an almost instant response to keyword queries.

Interested in building a similar community-driven site? World Class Antiques is a division of Single Entry Point, a marketing and technology agency in Toronto, Ontario (that also buys antique toys!)
 

Let’s look at three methods you can utilize to begin their mobile search strategy for tablet, cell phone and other mobile search users.

1)    Take an Responsive Design Approach
Studies indicate that the majority of mobile users close a web page within four seconds if it hasn’t already loaded on their screen. Lack of mobile optimization not only affects audience levels, it also now affects search rankings as well.

Google, for example, is now actively lowering the rankings of sites that are not optimized for a seamless mobile usage experience. Responsive design is device-agnostic, and maximizes load time and functionality.

2)    Capitalize on Local Searching
Techniques adopted for traditional web SEO campaigns can still be successful on mobile. Brands must, however, take note of the differences in the way searchers use mobile compared to desktop.

For example, mobile searchers tend to conduct task-oriented searches such as searching for a specific location or product name. By using mobile-oriented copy and keywords, marketers can improve site traffic from mobile.

3)    Utilize Email Marketing
As much as 20% of email marketing campaigns are read from mobile phones. That’s because email is easily accessible on smartphones, and users respond quickly to notifications of new mail in their inbox. You can leverage email marketing to drive traffic through links within digital newsletters and other email campaigns.

To be successful, focus on adding mobile-optimized calls to action at the halfway point, and again at the end of emails in order to have the greatest effect on campaign performance.

With mobile technology rising exponentially around the globe, SEO campaigns must begin to focus on the mobile market. Is your website ready?

You might lack the financial resources of your larger counterparts, but smaller organizations can still build momentum with their online campaigns by capitalizing on the advantages of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Without optimization, websites can become lost in a sea of similar sites within a field where visitor numbers are currency and ROI is measured in audience engagement. Building an SEO strategy need not be overwhelming – here are three places to start.

1)    Optimize Each Page Title
Add meta titles to your pages to begin the optimization process. This lets search engines know that the website is relevant to a specific keyword or keyphrase (three to four words) being searched for.

It’s important at the inception of any SEO campaign to know which keywords are likely to offer the best returns in terms of clicks. (Not sure which keywords to use? Single Entry Point specializes in improving brand awareness and traffic from search engines.)

2)    Begin Link Building
Link building involves driving traffic toward your website through links placed on other sites. The more popular and relevant the website, the higher the value the link has for your site.

Recently, Google has changed the way in which their search algorithm handles specific link-building strategies such as paid links and anchor text, making it slightly more complex for small business owners to generate traffic. Just remember, links shouldn’t seem like they’ve been forced into content online – they should appear natural.

Really, the key is to have strong content that demands attention. Small business owners looking for link-building partnerships could also contact similar organizations to discuss guest-posting opportunities. Other link-building strategies involve submitting sites to online directories, commenting on relevant blog posts, and linking to other blogs within your content.

3)    Add Descriptions for Images and Video
The words associated with images and video are key elements to driving traffic to those media on a website. Studies have shown that adding video is a great way to improve search engine rankings. But search spiders cannot retrieve information from media that doesn’t have text connected to it.

This means that site owners must be as descriptive as possible when adding captions and alt tags to their media content. It’s an SEO strategy that has helped thousands of small business achieve the high rankings that propel them to success online.

SEO is the great online leveler. It allows small businesses to compete with large multinationals. It also gives proactive firms the opportunity to engage their audience in a way that traditional marketing simply cannot match.

Small businesses following a best-practice based approach to SEO can achieve strong marketing campaign momentum and high level visibility online with a sound SEO strategy.