Times are hard at the moment for many sectors, however there are still many opportunities to do good business. Some businesses are drawing right back on their marketing spend. In my opinion this is a serious mistake. You do not sell more by telling fewer people about what you do and what you sell. Being judicious with your marketing spend makes complete sense. You should demand that every penny be accountable and deliver a return on investment. There is no more accountable form of marketing than online. A well managed website should enable you to understand who is coming to your website; how they are finding it; what they are doing there and most importantly, how much it costs you to get them to do what you want them to do. This might be to purchase a product or fill in an enquiry form or even make a phone call. As a starter, we have put together 10 simple pointers to ensure your website is managed well and will start delivering an improved ROI despite the credit crunch.

If you are intending to get a new website or your first website, research it, plan it and write it down. Deliver your chosen website developers with a written brief and work with them to develop something truly appropriate and suitable to you. You’d be surprised how often we meet business who have spent thousands based on a verbal brief and not got quite what they expected. Writing a website brief

Ensure that your website is W3C compliant. The W3C define standards for the coding behind websites. If a website is standards compliant, it means that search engines stand a very good chance of finding and understanding all of the valuable content on your website. There are tools online you can use to test your standards compliance
HTML Validator
CSS Validator
Ensure that your website is accessible to people who are blind, partially sighted or disabled in any way. You have a responsibility to make sure your website is reasonably accessible to all parties. You risk prosecution otherwise. Happily, an accessible website is one that usually works well in search engines

Make sure that you have some form of analytics properly installed on your website. Measurement is essential. Google Analytics is free to use and is sufficient for the vast majority of businesses

Make someone senior responsible for the website. All too often the website isn’t an “owned asset”. And make sure that this person has time to work with the website and understands that their work is valuable, perhaps critical.
Understand the keywords and phrases that people use to find products and services like yours. There are many more relevant terms than you think. You can research search terms people are actually using

Make sure each and every page on your website is optimized for perhaps keywords or phrases that are relevant to that page. This is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Wherever you can, ask relevant businesses to link from their website to your website. Suppliers and customers are ideal as they are likely to be thematically relevant to what you do. Don’t get links from or to anyone who you would not be comfortable being associated with in real life. Search Engines like links from other websites. They are like votes of popularity.
Add content to your website regularly. People like it. It gives them a reason to keep visiting your website without getting bored. Search Engines think in a similar way. One way to achieve this is to add a blog to your site. This is a very simple tool that just about anyone can use to publish content to the internet.
Blogspot
Wordpress
Don’t be bamboozled by sharp sales people who offer you 5 page 1 Google rankings, guaranteed. There are no guarantees in search. Search Engines can change how they work at any time. Rankings are merely a tool. It is no use ranking well for a search term if no one uses that search term and you do not generate any business from it. It is conversion into business that generates an ROI.

Finally, if you’re serious about wanting to make sure your website is working for you, PushON will happily provide you with a free website MOT that will give you a simple overview of how well your website is working for you

If there’s anything else you think should be added, then please comment below.

We estimate that RSS died on the 27th February, and you can see the dramatic effect on the results for our blog:

There has been a huge drop in organic search engine traffic.

RSS can be a really useful tool to help make your website work harder.

There are a number of business uses for RSS technology, I’ve jotted a few for you here:

1. Communicating to your website visitors, customers and employees. RSS can be delivered through a range of tools, for example:
• Using portal home pages such as iGoogle, My Yahoo and My MSN. Your users can add RSS newsfeeds from your website and view the latest news each time they visit their favourite portal page.
• Via email. Feedburner gives publishers the option to publish email newsletter versions or RSS newsfeeds, and services like SendMeRSS.com or RSSForward allow users to enter a feed to convert it to an email newsletter.
• Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 now have RSS Newsfeed management built in.
• Other RSS Newsfeed readers include: Bloglines, NewzCrawler, FeedDemon and SharpReader.
2. RSS can increase your traffic by improving your search engine rankings. Your RSS newsfeed may be re-published on other websites, with a link to your original post.
3. Taking in industry newsfeeds can help keep you informed of relevant issues. You can then comment and keep your website, blog or email newsletters fresh, relevant and up-to-date. Increasing the value of a subscription to your service.
4. Some RSS services (publishers, RSS readers, or email services) offer advertising space. You can use this space to increase the prominence of your brand, or generate revenue by offering this space below your news as advertising.

To check whether you have RSS on you site, have a look in the address bar of your browser. For example in Firefox you should see a small RSS feed icon next to the website address:

or Internet Explorer, you should see the same icon in orange on the menu bar:

(If it is grey, then there are no feeds for that page)

Blog systems, and many modern content management systems have RSS built in to their functionality. But if you don’t have it already, speak to your website manager/developer, as it’s relatively simple to implement and can be very effective for your long term online marketing plans.

For a definition of RSS, have a look at the BBC’s explanation, it sums it up really well.

So why should a business blog?
There are many reasons. It’s a very dynamic way of speaking to an audience regularly. And not only speaking to them, getting very relevant feedback from them on a regular basis. It turns business communications from a one way diatribe into a conversation. And if your clients and other interested parties are reading what you say, the chances are that they are telling other people about you as well. This also opens up the floor to other interested parties, they may not be customers or suppliers but they have some interest in what you have to say and very possibly something valuable to add to the conversation. Consider the general website: It is very static and is rarely updated. After the initial visit, there is little reason to visit it again unless some particular fact or figure is required., however due to the dynamic nature of a blog, it means that there is often a good reason to revisit, or in fact have the content from that blog sent straight to you, which I shall discuss later.
As an example, a company blogs about their marvellous product “Wonderthing”. They blog about a new service variant they are considering called “Wonderthing Lite”. Because they have been diligent bloggers making regular posts that are relevant and engaging, they have an interested audience. So one of the audience comments on the blog “Hey, we’ve been thinking that something like that for quite a while but we had it in our minds that “Wonderthing Lite with bits on” would work really well in our sector. A need has been identified very simply. ” Someone else from the audience elaborates, and so on; delivering very focussed market research whilst stimulating demand.
Blogging about issues affecting your industry is a great strategy. If your point of view generates sympathy or even controversy, then over time, the blog can become established as a point of reference. Consequently it becomes apparent that blogging has direct relevance to market research and public relations.
The very nature of the blogging process develops an element of personality. It shows something about the way that the company and the people within in it operate. It is just about as close as you can get on the web to generating the ‘feeling’ that is the root of so much business. Business is not always a price decision. It is often based on the thought “Do I want to do business with these people?” and the personality expressed via blog can go a long way to establishing a company as the people to do business with.
RSS and News Feeds
One of the most powerful but harder to understand aspects of blogging is “RSS” or News feeds. RSS is colloquially known as Really Simple Syndication. It is a means by which people who are interested in your blog can have the latest updates from it delivered straight to their desktop. People who consume RSS feeds use a tool known as an aggregator. This basically pulls the headlines from the blogs that it is subscribed to making up what is in effect a highly customised newspaper. It is an enormously powerful concept; a consumer inviting you to put your thoughts directly in front of them on a daily basis. Two examples of easy to use RSS readers are:
Google Reader

Bloglines

The BBC are great advocates of RSS and have some excellent information on the subject

Blog Strategy
When running a business blog, it is important to consider the policy of how that blog should be run, what sort of voice it should have. We strongly believe that the following criteria act as a sound basis for developing a blogging strategy. The blog should be:
• Honest
• Regular
• Relevant
• Open
• Responsible

It’s important that anybody who blogs from within the company should be aware of the companies blogging policy which should be based on the above criteria. Too often the roll of blogger is seen as being one person within the company, one who is perceived as being “qualified” for the roll: a figurehead. However, all too often there are passionate and eloquent advocates of the company who make excellent blogger given guidance. We would perhaps suggest the following policy guidelines:

• A bloggers comments don’t necessarily represent those of the company.
• Confidentiality should be respected
• No flaming
• Moderation and not censorship should be applied.

Who Should Be Involved In The Business Blog?

The question of using various people from around the company is often a sticky one. We often find that the figurehead does insist that they take on the spokes person roll but very quickly finds out that they do not have the time to deliver on the commitment. Whereas an involved and enthusiastic employee often has the time, enthusiasm and knowledge to generate excellent content for the blog.

Above and beyond the interpersonal reaction with real people online, blogging also works superbly well with search. Search engines absolutely love the fresh and thematically coherent content that blogs so often produce. It goes towards the core theme of search which is relevance.

Business blogging is possibly the most important activity that a company could undertake online right now yet fraught with unnecessary fear. With a little training and the right setup, a company can be gaining online competitive advantage very quickly.

As we’re nice folk here at PushON, we’d thought we’d put together some fairly simple advice appropriate for business of any size that will go some way to making any website an owned and understood asset. Which is what it really should be.

Top Ten Tips

1. The website should be owned by someone with authority in the organisation. It’s an important asset make someone appropriate responsible for it and responsible for understanding what it does. Even if the website isn’t doing anything much, at least you know that. From a baseline point you can then set:
   1. Clear and realistic objectives for the site
   2. Establish a target Return on Investment (ROI) for the website
2. Set expectations for management of response from the website. If someone mails you from the website, how quickly should they expect a response from you? Tell them. Also make sure that within your organisation, the contact points are all owned and the owners understand the commitment they have to respond to the enquirer.
3. The website should be properly built. There are voluntary standards for building websites set via the W3C. There are many very good reasons for having your website built properly which include:
   1. Search Engines like it. You have a much better chance of ranking well for search terms.
   2. You have an obligation as a business to ensure that your site is reasonably usable by people with various disabilities. If your site is built to standards you are most likely going to be close to achieving this. This avoids you getting sued at some point and the negative publicity that would bring.
   3. Your site will tend to be more usable. If it is more usable, more people are likely to be willing to transact with you.
4. Ensure that the site is up to date. People like change and they like relevance. Search Engines are pretty much the same. If you visit a site one day and think that it looks pretty good you may well visit again in a couple of weeks. If that site is the same, perhaps you wont visit again for, say, 6 weeks. If the site is still the same then, when will you look at it again? How often do you want people to visit your site?
5. Make sure that the brand look and feel is consistent across all your media. Your brochures should look good. Your signage should look good. So should your website. This ensures that the perceived value of your brand remains high.
6. Set up a Business Blog. OK, so maybe it’s not for everyone but blogs are a superb means for speaking to an audience yet once they are set up and with a tiny bit of training they can be managed by non technical personnel very easily. IN fact, they can be managed by several personnel which gives a great insight into your business and also the culture of your business. It makes it personal and despite all this technology we have available, people like to do business with people they have a feel for.
7. Promote your business website using your offline resources. Make sure your website address is on your printed material, letter heads, business cards posters etc. One often missed opportunity is the signature on emails. Make sure you have a standard signature set up and all the people in your organisation do as well.
8. Give things away on your website. Make sure they are things that have value. the benefit is that people start seeing your site as resource and are likely to refer other people to your resources. If you it goes well, people who run other sites will link to you and that will go some way to enhancing your search engine ranking. We used this strategy with one of our clients, Contract Store who give away a free website privacy policy. It’s useful and gains them recommendations and links.You could give away:
   1. Free downloads
   2. Articles/knowledge
   3. Advice
   4. Check-lists
9. Show your credentials. If you are a member of a professional body, put the logo on your site. Let people know that you care about standards and that will go some way to building the trust relationship.
10. Be prepared to invest time and a some money in your online marketing. The Return on Investment over the medium term will certainly be worth having. There are many things you can do for nothing:
    1. Ask people nicely for links to your site if it is relevant
    2. Submit your site to DMOZ.
    3. Send well written press releases via online services like PR Web
    4. Make sure you pay attention to seasonality online and make offers when people are going to be most interested

There is so much that can be done for little online. All it takes is a little ownership and management. treat your website like any other valuable business resource.

If you get to the stage where you need some specialist professional assistance, we can help you realise your business objectives. Give us a call.

What is less known is what he did for the digital sector. Dave Carter captures it rather well. He turned the Big Chip awards into something beyond the back slapping session it could be with a wealth of expletive and Scouse baiting. So all in all, we would have never been mates but thank God he did what he annoyingly did. His legacy is all around but I’m all for a statue in Albert Square.

Tony Wilson’s Obituary in How Do.

I was also preaching the creed of blog. How a blog can be so useful as a means of engaging with your audience wherever it may be. Hopefully they’re going to add comments on here. We’ve also received enquiries this morning via email. For some reason, our website MOT form was broken. We think we know why and it’s fixed now. It just goes to show that a website really has to be an asset that you actively manage, no matter how good you think you are. Even if you are a fancy pants online marketing agency as well.

The presentation is being put online at the moment By the time anyone reads this, it should be live.

Last night was fun. Another one to do on Thursday. We’ll refine the presentation a little prior to that but we’ll still keep it rambling. Interacting with the crowd throughout stops it from getting too dry.

If anyone wants to leave feedback on the presentation, this is the place.

Although skeptical at first, I’ve been impressed.

It really is aimed at new users in particular, as they’ve simplified things, making the experience more intuitive. For example, you can search for files, programs and anything on the Internet from the start button. Simple photo editing is included – you could teach someone the full photo editing features in 2 minutes – so although it’s not advanced, it’s great for what most people need.

Organising files has become less effort, with the more advanced search function, and the tags (very Web 2.0!).

Photos are grouped into categories using date stamps, tags, or the traditional folders. Microsoft are using tags to great effect – allowing users to give photos multiple tags to describe the content, with this they can find all photos tagged with the name John, for example.

Office 2007 has had a massive face lift too; again aimed at making things easier to use – bigger buttons, visual cues, and a webpage like layout.

You can see Windows Vista below:

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It’s easy to see influences from different operating systems and programs, I couldn’t help thinking of the Google desktop application – with the advanced search and desktop gadgets. A lot of people are putting it down to Mac OS X.

Mac OS X

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I came across some video clips of the new Linux operating system, which again looked familiar after working with Windows Vista; particularly the 3D window movement. I found this really impressive, especially as this is an Open Source system.

Linux operating system

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And here, the new operating system dealing with touch screen (disturbingly demonstrated by a naked man):

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We sit very firmly in the white hat camp believing that while black hat SEO techniques might have some short term positive effect, the long term implications can be disastrous for your website and in turn your business.

In this article we’ll examine the top 5 black hat SEO techniques in a bid to help you determine whether the SEO firm you’re currently using are potentially compromising your business website. Then we’ll examine the top 5 white hat SEO techniques that we believe will have a positive effect on your search position without putting your business website at risk.

Read the full article ……………..

Over at Virtuaffinity we’ve been building a site for Restore Foam. Restore Foam wanted to sell their products online so all you good people can buy Restore Mememory Foam Mattresses online and Orthopaedic Posture aids.

We built the backend e-commerce platform using actinic catalogue and built a very nice front end to W3C standards.

2 days after launching the site it ranked number 1 in Google for a handfull of key phrases.

Now if that doesn’t illustrate the power of getting things right from the off, I don’t know what does.

Tags: Virtuaffinity Google Actinic Mattress