I’ve been having a number of issues with bouncing email and such – as most of my life is already in the “cloud” I’ve switched everything over to Google now – pleased to say the process was straight forward and problem free and it seems to have totally solved the original issues.

Go Google!

Sorry having major issues with our email at present, everything is being switched over to Google as we speak might cause lost mail, hope to resolve these issues within 48 hours. Meanwhile contact kalagoo@gmail.com or Skype “kalagoo”

I’m a bit of a NETtrepreneur on the side and run more than 20 sites deliberately for advertising profit. I suppose this is a natural thing for me to do as I have the knowledge and experience to know which sites to launch and how to promote them but, if you are prepared to invest your time in a website, it can only grow over time and growth is good; growth means traffic, website rankings and click-thru on the adverts on the site. Click-thru = Cash.

Running a website isn’t that difficult. Once you have a design, a domain name and somewhere to host your site, you can roll out a fully dynamic website on a CMS backend such as Joomla or Wordpress that allows your site to become a fully interactive experience for your visitors.

1 Simple Rule to remember

Good content brings good visitors; good visitors bring more visitors. Keep your content original, updated and add new content frequently, participate on forums and blog about everything and anything to keep your readers coming back.

Website domains cost pennies these days, hosting can be very cheap, CMS systems like Joomla and Wordpress are Free – with a little guidance, complete return on investment can be achieved in a matter of months by which time the revenue will be growing and, more importantly, residual

Contact us to talk about startup CMS packages and we’ll show you how to make your site profit.

I’ve been playing around with full-page font replacement for websites. Traditionally the limitations of the web mean that you can only use a web-safe font that is likely to appear the same across all platforms and browsers. To combat this, some designers use Flash technology to create more animated sites and “embed” the fonts into the movie that the browser plays – the end result is often very impressive but search engines cannot read Flash movies so these sites are hard to optimise for the search engines. Some bright spark figured out a way to encode True Type Fonts into JavaScript and I have been testing the effects of rendering a blog entirely using this technology. The benefits of this technology are theoretically quite comprehensive:

• Corporate Styles, Including fonts can be carried across all mediums – no compromise required when it comes to online
• Allows for creativity within web copy and could set a website apart from its competition in visual presence
• SEO Friendly, original code stays intact, JavaScript does the hard work

So anyway, with this in mind I converted one of my personal blogs. It all happens in an instant for me, you might see a flash of the original page for a second before all the text is replaced with a beautifully rendered graphical replacement. I’d be interested in rendering times and potential display issues across other platforms but so for this has worked perfectly on mainstream PC browsers, I’ll be testing further.. Take a look at Money Tips Uk.

There was a time, not too many years ago, before people had broadband and before busineses’ realised that a website can posivitely change the future of a business that you could, quite literally, launch a new website, fill in some keywords in the meta-tags and description and hey presto!, within a few weeks you were right up there with the best of them competing for the prestigious #1 spot in Google, Yahoo, MSN (now bing) but, guess what.. times have changed, there is no longer an “easy” path to search engine glory, the search engine algorithms cannot be cheated unless you are prepared to risk your business!

So, those tasked with trying to promote a website in the search engines are called, you guessed it, Search Engine Optimisers (SEO) and search engine marketers (SEM). Often I see design and marketing companies bashing out accronym after accronym in an attempt to sound like they have the kind of extensive knowledge to tackle such a task; thats great, there are many, many good SEO’s/SEM’s out there but you, as a prospective customer, should really take a moment to understand in lay-mans terms, what is involved in the optimisation and promotion process. At least with a little knowledge, you can ask some straight forward questions to pre-qualify the company/person before blowing your budget on the wrong things!

My background has been in search engine marketing, optimisation (SEO) for over 8 years and more recently I have run succesfull Social Media Optimisation (SMO) campaigns, I’d like to explain the essential steps I take when launching a new website (the process is much the same when overhauling an existing site).

Website Design and Coding

Whatever the platform the site is running on (custom designed or content management/eCommerce) or what server type the site is running on, the website code must be fully “optimised” to give easy access to the search engines.

• Website Code should be optimised to show the main “content” of the page as near the to top of the file as possible. This means:
  • Optimisation of all code removing any spurious inline styles
  • Concatination of CSS and Javascript files into as few calls as possible
  • Optimisation of CSS code
  • Ensure primary page content comes before any site navigation, sidebars, headers etc.
  • Ensure that each page has unique title and relevant meta-tags
  • If this is updating an existing website a full review of the code is undertaken

On-Site Optimisation

Having made sure of the basic coding requirements, the focus is on content, specifically how to add weight to a page on the site for a selected keyword phrase – whooo! there I go, into techy mode.. let me explain why and how content should be used to improve your search engine rankings.

Step 1:

Your SEM should, without fail, always, always, always complete research into which keywords will work for your website, how difficult obtaining top positions for search phrases would be and, if this is done correctly (I wont bore you with the entire comprehensive research I carry out) then your SEM will have a list of 10-15 or so primary keyphrases that will bring traffic and be easier to rank in the search engines than generic terms.

For example. A website design company faces fierce competition when launching a new website for their business. Searching for “website design company” brings back around (wait for it…) 127 MILLION competing websites. However, search for “website design company kent” and this figure drops to 1.8 MILLION still not insubstantial but a lot lower than the generic term plus, the search phrase is more focussed to its target to audience. A good SEM will use a series of online and paid subscription tools (not to mention knowledge) to find the highest traffic keywords with the least competition. I call this “Barrier to Entry” and actually score keywords as I research.

Step 2:

These keywords then become the basis for site content, we create a single page on the site that caters specifically for one or two of the keyphrases, SEO is used to ensure that the code, page title and meta descriptions (hidden code) are optimial. The page content is then professionally optimised to target the keywords in the page copy without detracting from the original message. Density ratio’s for keyphrases vary depending on who you listen to, I use 5-6% density as a general rule.

These two tasks alone would constitute the role of a Search Engine Optimisation company or person. Taking these steps may enlighten you to the hidden battle going on between all those SEO companies and the search engines – without this level of optimisation, your website is not optimised well enough and you might find it harder to compete.

Step in the search engine marketer

Some companies believe this is SEO, I beg to differ, there is a difference between SEO and SEM, as I will now explain.

Where optmisation steps out, search engine marketing steps right in. What does a search engine marketer do?

Well, believe it or not, the optimisation steps described above are not enough on their own to get your website to the top of the search engines. After optimisaiton comes the task of convincing the search engines that your website is more relevant and useful to it’s searchers.

Its all about relevancy

To reach the top of the search engines, your site has to be popular. In the eyes of the search engines, if one website links to another, it may be something of “relevance” to the page sending the link. The traditional and easiest method of achieving relevancy through links to your website/page is simply to write good content, content that is interesting to your visitors, on-topic to the theme of your site and content that will keep visitors coming back for more.

This is still the best way to boost your website in the search engines but a search engine marketer can give you a wee boost to help you on your way. Using a number of techniques, the SEM will develop a strategic approach to gaining position in the search engines. Innevitably, this requires ongoing analysis of site traffic, niche (long tail) keyword opportunities, website competition (including Pay per click (PPC)) and Social media sites.

The techniques a good SEM uses are generally shrouded in secrecy but, whilst there is an “art” to doing things right that can only be learned by launching site after site, I actively encourage my clients to learn more about the SEO and SEM process and take a positive and active stance on being proactive with the website as mass marketing tool.

Here are a few things that I encourage my clients to do as frequently as possible.Â

• Press release everything – Well written, keyword optimised press releases can get you near instant exposure across the internet – hundreds or thousands of 1-way links pointing to your new page as numerous websites syndicate your news item.
• Article writing – Great websites that attract visitors come from great content. I encourage my clients to write and distribute articles on subjects related to their business. This shows both a professional expertise and can gain exposure to your site through syndication.
• Participate in forums and blogs – find blogs and forums related to your business, join them and help people with their problems, make sure everything you post has a link back to your website too.

Some companies have considered these factors in their future marketing plans, that’s why they are getting thousands of new visitors every week – if you have a dormant website or don’t have a website then you are failing your future prospects, now is the time to consider the benefits of internet exposure… Good Luck!