Katrina Blog

Fab Resources For Web Designers & Developers

Katrina Gallagher — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:30:28 +0000

I literally Stumbled Upon this blog post, in which Jean-Baptiste Jung has pulled together a nice array of sites and tools to help web developers…

Some great functionality and inspiration -

I’ve picked out some of my favourites:

ColorCombos

LIpsum

What the font?

BgPatterns

Test Everything

Load Impact

IconFinder

TypeTester

Definitely worth a visit for the full details: Cats Who Code

Digital Collaboration in Manchester – The Sharp Project

Katrina Gallagher — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 16:51:14 +0000

We’re doing a bit of work with The Sharp Project, which is a offering office space for small creative businesses. This would normally be tricky to promote, because of the hugely competitive arena they reside, particularly in Manchester.

However, The Sharp Project is a bit different – it’s not just office space – it’s an environment which has been designed to promote collaboration and creativity. And they’ve released a video which has been put together with some of the agencies who are setting up shop there. I think this demonstrates a taster of the types of projects made possible with this creative batch of small businesses.

This could become quite interesting…

Google AdWords – Optimise Ad Rotation for Conversions

Katrina Gallagher — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 15:28:53 +0000

Now and again, when tinkering with adverts I’ve looked at the options to either show your adverts equally, or show the advert with the best click through rate, and thought how nice it would be to show the best converting advert most…

Well, there must have been a number of people thinking the same thing, because you can now set your ad rotation to optimise based on the top converting advert.

This is ideal, particularly if you’re testing the same copy with multiple landing pages.

More details here from the Google AdWords blog.

Automated PPC Management

Katrina Gallagher — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:43:26 +0000

I’m really pleased that Google AdWords has added this new feature -

Automated rules to manage your PPC campaign.

It’s something that still needs some human interaction (you may wake up to find an entire campaign paused), but it will help if you’re setting something live over the weekend, and haven’t time to check up on it regularly, it can prevent some major disasters.

Some good examples of rules include:

Pause keyphrases when the cost goes over £x and there have been no conversions
Lower bids on certain keyphrases when the cost per conversion goes over £x
Pause ad groups when cost per conversion goes over £x

You can receive email alerts, and decide what to do with the poor performing elements of your campaign.

Watch this video with an alarm clock campaign and cheesy lift music to find out how to set this up for your account:

Local Search Engine Optimisation – Bing Tips

Katrina Gallagher — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:06:01 +0000

Bing has put together some fab information to guide webmasters on local optimisation, with details about how they determine which location a website belongs to.

In order of priority, they use the following bits of information:

Metadata embedded in the document
HTTP headers
Top-level domain
Reverse IP lookup

Full details:

1. Metadata embedded in the document

Use the “content-language” meta tag to embed a document location in the section of your documents:

The “content” attribute is comprised of a 2-letter ISO 639 language code, followed by a dash and the appropriate ISO 3166 geography code. For example:

de-at: German, Austria
de-de: German, Germany
en-gb: English, United Kingdom
es-ar: Spanish, Argentina

Alternatively, embed the document location in either the or the element using the same format: <ul> <li><html lang=”en-us”></li> <li><title lang=”en-us”></li> </ul> Keep in mind that the priority order for these tags is: <meta>, <html>, <title>. In other words, the document location set in the “content-language” meta tag will always supersede the document location indicated in the <html> or <title> tag. Its best that you use one option, instead of multiple options here. 2. HTTP headers For host-wide location tagging, embed the document location by using the “content-language” HTTP header and follow the language-dash-location format. For more information on setting HTTP response headers : <ul> <li>In IIS7: <a href="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753133%28WS.10%29.aspx" target="_blank">http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753133(WS.10).aspx</a></li> <li>In IIS6: <a href="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732442.aspx" target="_blank">http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732442.aspx</a></li> <li>In Apache 2.2: <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_headers.html" target="_blank">http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_headers.html</a></li> </ul> 3. Top-level domain The country code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) influence the document location – e.g. if it’s a co.uk domain. Top level domains other than ccTLDs, including .com, .net and .org, don’t influence the document location. 4. Reverse IP lookup For each document we add to Bing’s index, a reverse IP lookup is performed to determine the document’s location. </article> <article> <h1>View Inbound Links To Your Website With Bing Webmaster Tools</h1> Katrina Gallagher — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 15:59:55 +0000 Well, Bing have a shiny new feature to track the backlinks pointing to your website. Their toolset is getting better and better, but individually this feature pales in comparison to the data available in Majestic SEO; but is does have some nice information about anchor text. It can only get better though… we just need to watch out for when Google actually gives us all the data… now that would be powerful! Here’s the <a title="New Inbound Links Feature in Bing Webmaster Tools" href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2010/12/14/new-inbound-links-feature-in-bing-webmaster-tools.aspx">announcement from Bing</a>. </article> </main></body></html>