tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363395682008-07-02T14:38:08.686+01:00Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comBlogger65125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-10731716797535484792008-06-30T18:34:00.003+01:002008-06-30T18:43:17.482+01:00

Until now, I've not really embraced social media sites much, particularly Facebook, as I haven’t really been able to see what it would do for my business, plus the time factor of participating on these sites, it’s hard enough just keeping my blogs up to date and finding the time to comment on other interesting blogs I read. Anyway, I recently got lured into trying out Twitter, which is a sort of

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-33794214971376299882008-06-20T18:04:00.002+01:002008-06-20T18:08:45.854+01:00

As you've probably noticed, I've given this blog a bit of a makeover, decided it was time for a jollier template! There's a few to choose from in Blogger, but the process wasn't quite as straightforward as I thought it would be as this template was the one I liked the best (jellyfish), but I found the font sizes were huge. You can edit the stylesheet of the blog, so after a certain amount of

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-49070949138307742642008-06-19T17:26:00.004+01:002008-06-19T17:38:46.460+01:00

All of us suffer from the deluge of spam emails that uses up valuable time in going through and deleting them, clogs up our email and is generally a right pain in the a*se! A little while ago, before going on holiday and feeling horrified about the amount of spam I would come back to, I decided that it might be worth re-setting up my email. Until then I had a catch all email set up, so I would

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-44683908103285561642008-06-17T14:43:00.003+01:002008-06-17T14:51:31.851+01:00

The new edition of Marketing Karma is now out and this month we look at whether your website is trustworthy to your visitors and what you can do to make sure it is. You may notice on this blog that Blogger has now introduced a proper blogroll, rather than just links to other blogs. I really like this feature as you can import your blog feeds from Google Reader to save you typing them in

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-70568867125016778402008-06-13T18:03:00.003+01:002008-06-13T18:23:06.743+01:00

A while ago, I posted about blogging with Wordpress, and have been meaning to update you with more experiences of Wordpress. I got as far as writing about downloading the Wordpress files from Wordpress then the techie bit started and this is where I got a bit nervous. Actually the techie bit wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be, and with guidance from the 'Wordpress for Dummies'

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-3765286196436551752008-06-03T16:51:00.005+01:002008-06-03T16:58:08.910+01:00

On several occasions now I've logged out my Google account from having been in Google Analytics and found myself on a Google account web page in Russian. Most strange! Here's an image of what I was served. It's not the only language that I've ended up with while using Google accounts, I've also been redirected to pages in Polish and German. Must be a glitch somewhere in Google, or they think

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-64634862794666641202008-05-27T17:52:00.003+01:002008-05-27T18:09:09.302+01:00

There's quite a lot of events in online marketing throughout the year now, some free, some paid for, so here's a list of the main ones: Technology For Marketing - took place in February 2008 at Olympia, next one will be around the same time next year, and entry is free. Search Engine Strategies - also took place in February 2008 in London, next one will probably be around the same time next year

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-55266167371336027802008-05-21T14:56:00.005+01:002008-05-21T15:17:14.103+01:00

There's a lot of discussion in online marketing circles as to whether the Google PageRank score is actually worth taking any notice of. If you're not sure what pagerank is, it's a score out of 10 that Google designates to websites and you can see this score if you have Google toolbar installed, shown below. The image shows the Google toolbar which has a Google search box and further along

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-19524045637834474172008-05-16T16:02:00.004+01:002008-05-16T17:35:40.838+01:00

I was watching a video earlier today on SEOmoz's blog, called Whiteboard Friday (they produce a short video each week on a different topic about web marketing) and this week's theme is blogging for higher rankings. It's well worth watching so thought I'd post it here and try embedding a video into my blog at the same time! (PS forgot to mention it's only 5 minutes or so) SEOmoz Whiteboard

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-80349558571241005162008-05-16T15:56:00.003+01:002008-05-16T16:02:18.197+01:00

The latest edition of Marketing Karma is now out and this month we've looked at web analytics and some of the features of Google Analytics to help you measure the performance of your site, which campaigns are working well and how the information can help you. There's lots of web analytics software out there some free, others paid, many of which vary on the quality of stats that they give. Google

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-52821374990660976612008-05-08T16:16:00.003+01:002008-05-08T16:57:10.999+01:00

This is something you need to check from time to time, and the bigger the website, the more likely you are to find broken links. They occur for all sorts of reasons, plain misspellings of hyperlinks, pages that have been taken down or moved and the main cause of broken links is website re-designs. So how do you check your site for broken links and how do you minimise their impact? Firstly,

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-37161604287887935502008-04-23T16:45:00.003+01:002008-04-23T16:52:42.120+01:00

I've written about optimising foreign language and international websites on a couple of occasions, not only in Marketing Karma, but also in this blog. Search Engine Land have published this week, a great 'Search Illustrated' of international SEO which explains what you need do to promote an international site very succinctly using images. Well worth checking out if you're going to be promoting a

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-25291216453638683052008-04-19T16:25:00.002+01:002008-04-19T16:32:50.009+01:00

The latest edition of Marketing Karma is now out, and this month's issue focusses on writing for the web. It's really important that website owners get this right as you only have a few seconds to engage visitors to your website. Writing for the web can be quite difficult when you don't know how and for those who aren't confident in writing engaging content, it's well worth considering hiring a

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-39738563668774779522008-04-09T17:55:00.002+01:002008-04-09T18:08:11.560+01:00

I've written several times before on how important the title tag is in SEO and I'm always surprised by how many websites make no use of it. The title tag is the tag that sits right at the top of your browser in the blue band, and is also the clickable link to a website in the search results pages. Since the title tag is one of the most important tags in optimisation, it needs to include

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-35118052430692572942008-03-27T16:14:00.002Z2008-03-27T16:36:06.992Z

Those of you who read my Marketing Karma newsletter may remember that back in January I mentioned that one of my resolutions was to try blogging with Wordpress, but on a self-hosted site rather than the free hosted version. Well, I've set up my Wordpress site and thought that this blog would be a good place to document my progress. This is what I've done so far and I'll be expanding on some of

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-42824032261883050172008-03-10T16:27:00.002Z2008-03-10T16:48:20.137Z

Over the years that I've been doing SEO I've come across all sorts of problems that have hindered the success of an optimisation project. These hindrances aren't just a question of typical optimisation meta tags etc, but often technical issues that can cause real problems in the search engines. Here are some examples: 1. Meta Refresh tags - these have been used to redirect one page to another as

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-19514395317347786172008-02-29T14:40:00.003Z2008-02-29T15:01:44.675Z

With so many blogs out there, trying to keep up with them all can be a huge task. Some blogs are great, some not so good, but how do keep up with the blogs that you really like without trawling through every so often? The best way to keep up with your favourite blogs is to subscribe to them via what is known as an 'RSS' or news feed. RSS is a bit techie, but basically it's a way of receiving

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-81130867984979520162008-02-22T15:57:00.004Z2008-02-22T16:05:51.669Z

There are loads of keyword research tools out there, and believe me I've tried many of them with varying success from Wordtracker, the old Overture keyword research tool, Good Keywords, Keyword Discovery etc etc. Over the last year, I've been using the Google Adwords Keyword Research tool much more and as far as I'm concerned, it's now by far the best way of researching keywords. Not only

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-11035457824436903752008-02-15T14:58:00.006Z2008-02-15T15:10:56.239Z

I'm a bit intrigued with the analytics stats being recorded on a site I'm working on at the moment and it's not just Google Analytics recording the same thing, but AW stats too. What I'm finding most odd is that for this particular site, StumbleUpon.com is referring more traffic than Google. According to stats, in the last month or so, StumbleUpon has referred about 34% of visits and Google

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-9975016582776019672008-02-11T15:54:00.000Z2008-02-11T16:09:24.763Z

When measuring the success of SEO campaigns with clients, the first thing they usually want to know is where their site is ranking. However, rankings alone are not a measure of success as this article by Jill Whalen explains and I've often explained to clients. You can have as many top 10 rankings as you want but if nobody is buying from you, then these rankings really are wasted. Of course

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-3121453485170510302008-02-09T15:29:00.000Z2008-02-10T15:06:54.841Z

Search Engine Land has a very useful illustration of how social media can help you, and when to use which sites. Not being an expert on social media, I found this particularly useful and something I can pass onto people who've been just as confused about where to start as I have!

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-74740493915640241192008-01-31T15:08:00.000Z2008-01-31T15:33:11.505Z

I was reading this article on the Times website earlier, and have come across several articles on the subject recently as people start to wonder what the impact of a recession might be on internet based businesses. Many of the articles I've seen look at the downturn in 2001 and when the dotcom bubble burst. Interestingly, another article I've been reading talks about how Google's market share of

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-30992947153847745712008-01-22T16:40:00.000Z2008-01-22T16:50:20.238Z

Many of my clients are using Google Analytics for their website log file tracking, it's free and easy to set up so in many respects it's a no brainer. However, it's the functionality that I find really useful and so much better than many of the free stats packages that come with web hosting (such as Webalizer, which is less than useless!) As an online marketer, I'm always going on to clients

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-79340961373814650832008-01-11T17:41:00.000Z2008-01-11T17:47:34.093Z

This may not have anything to do with online marketing but I feel quite strongly about encouraging people to support the campaign to help improve conditions for broiler chickens and encourage more consumers to buy free range. I'm lucky that my local butcher only sells free range chickens and haven't bought a battery reared chicken for some time. If you feel strongly about the welfare of farm

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36339568.post-64038526237622523262008-01-09T16:26:00.000Z2008-01-09T17:06:26.477Z

It's that time of year again when everyone predicts what's going to happen over the next year, so I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon (why be different?!) and tell you what I think will be important in online marketing in 2008. 1. The cost of pay per click advertising will continue to rise This has been going on for sometime, but the rise in costs of pay per click (PPC) doesn't seem to be

Forty Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09791386218553293884noreply@blogger.com