I digress, as always. Such is the intelligence used in the building of the various platforms we work from, our work is not only creative and emotional, it can be analysed and computed properly. The efforts of a creative strategy session with some insane idea for a virally spread flea-bitten talking meerkat can materialise into a website, email and social media campaign that has full measurability. That is more than most traditional offline marketers can dream of. But it aint all good news.

Financial bods can take the number of pound coins spent on some creative rubbish they don’t really get and in the same spreadsheet look at, how many people interacted with it? How many forwarded it on? How many email addresses did it capture in the process? How many people went on to buy? What were these people buying? The list goes on!

This is part of the beauty of working online. Part of the beauty… and part of the pain. Department heads can run some stats and draw conclusions on campaign success, however, spreadsheets and graphs don’t always hold the answers. Well they do, but they don’t always reflect the complete truth. The number of times I have heard department heads whilst I was working in client-side roles quote figures and consider themselves experts in online marketing.

Let’s take an example. PPC (Pay per Click) advertising. For anyone that doesn’t know what it is, these are the paid ads that accompany search engine results across many engines. PPC can be setup, fully measured in terms of click-through and conversion and from within a single spreadsheet the boss of a marketing team can see what campaigns are working and which ones aren’t. But there is a gap in the stats, not an apparent gap, well not apparent to most of the people I worked with in my last role.

So, you are in a meeting with your PPC stats in front of you. You talk about how many impressions your ad had; you explain that the lower than average click through rate is a result of your clever ad copy which is dissuading clicks from people that are looking for cheaper products than you are selling. You go so far as to explain the balancing act you are playing between dissuading people and keeping a fairly good CTR so as to not hammer your quality score through the floor. You look around; no one in the room understood the last bit. They all nod at you.

Then some questions, “I’ve been doing some research, can you tell me why you have written our ad to say ‘Prices from £30′ when our competitors say ‘Prices from £20′, surely they are getting more traffic? We have some products for £20 didn’t you realise that?”

You look at the source of the question and try to hold onto the urge to batter him with the nearest thing to hand. Maybe a shoe? In fact, you are going to do the right thing, you are going to explain the situation to him, maybe he just didn’t get it when you explained it a minute ago. You spell it out again for him…

“Well [you moron and now my arch nemesis], every click of our ad will cost us money, in this case as much as 90p. We know that a large proportion of clicks are looking for something specific but many aren’t, many are just looking for a product that fits their budget. By stating a realistic minimum cost of product we are attempting to stop people clicking our ad who are not willing to spend less that the cost of our lowest priced products”.

“But isn’t that cutting our traffic in half?”

“Not in half no, but yes, it is cutting off a large chunk who won’t spend with us”

“But what about our promotional items, we always have something on the site costing £20″

“You are correct, we do, however, if one item meets their budget and 200 others don’t we stand a small chance of converting them”

“I see”. [They don’t]

You continue with your stats and move onto the conversion rate. You explain that the conversion rate has improved since changing the ad copy to weed out the low spenders. You reference the moron’s attack a moment ago and you hammer home the fact that conversion rate climbed by a whole percent after making the changes and for the sake of your MD at the end of the table you quantify the saving in pounds for the last month. He nods. He seems to get it. Moron didn’t get it.

Then, moron comes in for another go.

“I had a chat with someone last week who is seeing an 8% conversion rate on PPC traffic. That’s 3 percent up on your figures here.”

You pause, you look around the room and with your best ‘that stat on its own doesn’t mean anything’ face you say, “Great, let’s focus on this in more detail and see what we can learn. What industry are they in? What do they sell? What is their URL?” Moron smugly looks at you and says,

“It’s actually a guy I know who used to work for our major competitor”

Ding ding, round two. Everyone suddenly seems interested.

“OK, that’s really interesting, was this a consistent conversion rate they saw or a result of a promotional period?”

[Again so smugly you contemplate forgetting the shoe and going to work on him with a biro] “No, no, that was day in, day out.”

“Fantastic, good for them. Let’s take a look at their site. [You bring up the site on the big screen in the boardroom] OK, well let’s try and do some comparisons with our own, see if we can take some intelligence from this”

“Yeah I think we should.” [He is smirking now, not knowing how close he is coming to a pen in the eye]

“Ok, I can see that they stock Brand X like us. I do notice though that they seem to have a lot more lines than us. Hold on, is that right? [You circle the price with your mouse] I’m sure this is selling on our site for £49?”

“£47.50 actually”

“OK, is it definitely the same product, they have theirs listed as £37.99?”

“Yes well they discount most products don’t they? It is them that will lose in the long run when their brand takes on the persona of a pound shop.”

[Ignoring his comment] “Actually, all of these products look cheaper.”

“They are, this brand doesn’t care about preserving their image.”

You look around the room and then back at your stats. You offer up a question to the room…

“If you were the average consumer would you be buying a product from us or the same from this site for ten pounds less?”

Low murmurs from the sheepish Product Manager who is now studying his notes. You wonder aloud how your PPC conversion rate would be affected if your prices were brought in line with this other site. You weigh it up in your mind and then across the table you offer your opinion…

“I would imagine we would be converting a hell of a lot more people if our prices were on par with those we compare our stats with.”

You go back to your stats, you feel pleased with the way you handled it but you wonder how much of it will sink in, how many members of the marketing team (who cannot measure the effectiveness of their offline campaigns so well) will blame you again next week. You decide to go out guns blazing; you are going to go Dirty Harry all over their stupid faces. You are going to “make your day” right there in that boardroom and you don’t care who gets injured in the cross fire.

You whip out your .57 Magnum and go back to the screen, you count out loud the products in their range, you flick to the other tab and count your own (half as many). You add a product to your basket and go to your checkout; £5.99 delivery seems a little steep but you’ve seen higher. You flick back to the competitor site, £2.50. You say nothing but instead look around the room. People are nodding, they are actually starting to get this. You flick to the homepage of each site. Yours looks better, you say so and give the Head of Design a nod. He smiles. He’ll buy you a beer on Friday night. You have a wing-man, good tactical work. You hope he doesn’t turn out to be Goose. You turn back to the moron and then without directing it straight at him you ask generally why there are no promotions in place, no free delivery banners, no BOGOF call-outs, nothing to grab the reader. No response.

You’ve emptied all six rounds, smoke is still clearing in the boardroom as the sound of gun fire fades and people’s ears start to ring. You’ve taken a few down along the way and whilst you have a minor flesh wound there are a few around the table who are looking at you like a warrior gladiator returning victorious from the arena. You feel like scheduling a game of volleyball on the beach. You suppress the urge. For now.

You study your stats carefully, gather your thoughts and provide a summary to the room, you direct it at everyone but you return to your boss at the end of each sentence with a pause. Your words are considered, the words of a pro, the words of someone who “works with computers” and isn’t afraid to stand his ground when confronted by Agent Smith in the Matrix…

“As you can see, the conversion rate has improved nicely over the last month following the changes to ad copy. We are stopping people who will not find products of a certain value from clicking our ads and as a result we are spending less and converting more. However, what Mr ‘Moron’ Smith here is saying is spot-on. We are restricting traffic to our site. We are actively telling certain people not to come here and at the same time, those that do are not converting. I can provide you with numbers and tell you what percentage of people buy from us, however, what we need to be honest about is why most people do not buy. This discussion has highlighted some areas we need to focus on. These areas have little to do with the online world or the efforts of my team, they are offline considerations that on a daily basis either make or break businesses”.

“We need to look at the range of products we cover. If we are spending money on visitors from PPC we need to ensure we have what they are looking for. When we can honestly say we have everything a customer wants (or at the very least what they could find on any competitor site) we need to look at what we are charging for it. Why are we more expensive? Why are we charging nearly twice as much for delivery? Why aren’t we offering free products and discounts on certain items? Let’s be honest as a team and work through all of these points. If we can’t compete on certain items that is fine, but let’s admit that we aren’t and then reset our expectations in terms of what online marketing can deliver. Let’s also be careful that when we are comparing stats of any type we are comparing them with a site that offers the same to a consumer.”

The boss is on his feet, applause shakes the walls, people are cheering out in the street. Your boss begs you to let him carry you out of the room on his shoulders. You allow him to. Moron sits with his head in his hands, your boss kicks him on the way out. Victory is yours. Working with computers is cool.

However, one name that is missing from most conversations on the ecommerce subject is Actinic. I personally find this very strange. It rarely even comes up in the pages of Net mag despite Actinic’s Ben Dyer making regular contributions. So, why this article? Well, as I sit here on a sunny Sunday morning waiting for a new ecommerce site to publish I feel relaxed and content knowing that what we have just finished building is built on a pretty solid platform.

So, why doesn’t Actinic crop up at the same rate as Magento et al? I honestly think it is a fluffy brand thing. Actinic is a software based solution featuring numerous tabs of grey input screens. The company’s website (only recently – and nicely I might add – redesigned) was for a long time a rather bland affair. The Actinic brand (as a combined package of the look of the software interface and the company’s general appearance) is not as sexy as Magento or any of the other big hitters. The big boys are ten kinds of sexy and this rubs off on the perception of the solution they provide. Is this right? Well, we fall for it all the time as consumers but sometimes we need to take a closer look at the less attractive things in life.

I think it’s a real shame for Actinic that the outer package looks a bit dull, a little bit Gordon Brown, yet on the inside you get something much better, you get a bit of Ronaldo. For the record I state these two individuals for a reason. We are in political fever at the moment so Brown springs to mind. He is bland, boring, and dull. But at the same time he has a certain intelligence. Now Ronaldo. He has some quality skills, he can pull things out of the bag that you weren’t expecting and if you put him up against the worlds top five players he will run circles around most of them. What does this have to do with ecommerce please? Well, if Gordon Brown was the world’s best footballer and Ronaldo was okay who would you rather sleep with? Ronaldo because he looks better? I don’t know. Neither. What’s my point? I honestly don’t know, perhaps packaging? Anywaaaay…

Put Actinic side by side with other vendors and they don’t look as appealing. But, get under the skin and you will see Actinic has a few Ronaldo-esque tricks up its sleeve.

I think that’s the point I was trying to make.

Firstly, let’s start at the cold harsh reality affecting every client to a varying degree… cost. Actinic is cheap as chips compared to some of the other solutions. It comes as a licensed piece of software in a few forms and you can take it home via download for less than a week in Benidorm. In fact this probably doesn’t help the image thing either does it?

The software is based around an internal database with every page being generated in a static manner when you hit the publish button at which point thousands of HTML files fly towards your web server. You can have multiple users with the right license and through the use of a ‘snapshot’ you can package up your site and pass it on to someone else to work on. So you need a pretty careful implementation of version control but it makes it great for web designers to create a site and hand it over or pick up a site from a client and tweak it.

When you first boot the software you are presented with a test site complete with products and categories. This helps to get your head around the software and its workings. Quite simply Actinic is based around a content tree. You add products manually or via an Excel spreadsheet and they appear in the root of the tree. From this point you can create new categories and subcategories (to an infinite depth) and drag and drop your products into whichever you wish. Want the product to sit in multiple categories? No problem, just copy, paste, drag and drop. From this point the solution is looking very strong indeed.

From an SEO perspective we particularly like the fact that you have free reign to add META information and Page Titles to each category independently. General SEO practise of targeting each page individually to a search term can easily be done within Actinic because of the simple approach to categories and products. From SEO to design there is good logic in the system too. You create your categories and then assign the category a template. However, templates are another reason that Actinic looks a bit shabby.

Out of the box, Actinic comes with hundreds of templates… all of them terrible. I’m sorry it needs to be said. Whilst it will suit many non-technical users who want to get going and will never really understand the importance of good design in ecommerce the standard templates are awful. What’s worse is that the majority of Actinic sites you come across use these standard templates. Makes sense, it’s a low cost solution aimed at the small business, non-technical user, they won’t be going to a web design agency with a project, they’ll use a stock template. The issue for Actinic is that these sites are an advertisement for the software… it doesn’t make them look like Ronaldo. We’ll design you some new templates if you want?

But, that aside, here at Webfaced Towers we love it. We love Actinic because you can create your own flat HTML and CSS layouts and bring them into Actinic. You can use Dreamweaver (if that’s your bag) as Actinic integrates seamlessly with it. And when we say you can bring in your own code, we don’t mean you can import it and then watch as your perfect mark-up is bastardised by some software that thinks it knows better. Your code is rendered exactly as you wrote it. Nice.

Once you have your layout within Actinc you can then start slotting in your Actinic generated content. By this we mean the navigation, the shopping cart, the search functionality etc. Every technical element that is handled by Actinic can be entered into the correct part of the page according to your design in a modular fashion. So Actinic behind the scenes is forming a list of all products in a given category and when this is displayed it is done so within your own HTML and CSS layout. So, we design an Actinic site like any other site. We consider our audience, we generate some designs and we code them in our usual way. Actinic is then just the frame work for handling the product catalogue and the payment process. Simples.

But, it doesn’t stop here. At this point Actinic does what any of the others do, although in a slightly easier (although blander looking) format.

Next on the list when you consider ecommerce products is how to handle orders once received. Actinic handles the front-end development of an online shop but also provides a full order processing back-end with invoicing, receipt and warehouse packing list management. You can also integrate fully with Sage for your accounting. Issues such as stock management are dealt with easily. Tell Actinic how many DVD players you have sat in the warehouse and as soon as it has sold them all it will remove the ‘buy’ button so you don’t oversell. Of course if you want to allow back-ordering you can… Actinic has some great logic but always with the option of changing it to fit your business.

All the time Actinic is sat taking orders for you it is also cleverly storing information for added little functionality treats. You have access to a full customer and order database allowing you to run template or custom reports on orders, customers and products to support your marketing strategy. At the same time Actinic is keeping a watchful eye on which products are selling the most meaning you can develop upsell or promotional areas of your site which are automatically populated with products that are selling.

So, why isn’t everyone talking about it? It has to be to do with branding. It isn’t that sexy, it is a bit clunky (or at least it feels it) and there are a few bits of functionality missing but you cannot beat it for the cost.

If you are a small business, non-technical user then you can get your shop online quickly, easily and cheaply. If you have a little more cash (and a little more sense) you should get a web design agency to design and build your site on Actinic. If you are a web design agency I would urge you to take a look at Actinic. It may well suit your smaller ecommerce clients far better than a larger scale, more involved and yet less flexible solution which is really going to stretch your client’s budget.

Actinic is a serious contender… it just needs a bit of a makeover or at least a sympathetic eye. Gok Wan perhaps.

To understand how to implement and manage a successful affiliate strategy you need to have a little understanding of the type of business an affiliate is. Affiliates by their very business choice are lazy people! Sorry affiliates but you are! You don’t want to create a brand or product yourself you just want to take a cut of someone else’s by helping them sell it. That said, affiliates work bloody hard at getting traffic to their site and passing it on to you because this is the key to their business. Selling the product is then up to you, the retailer.

So, with this in mind think about what you need to do to a) get chosen by an affiliate and b) make sure they focus their attention on promoting you. Firstly, take a look at your competitors if they are using affiliates. What commission are they offering? Are they offering a discount code as well which the affiliate can publish to the user and encourage them to click through? Some competitor analysis at this stage will allow you to come up with an offer that will be more appealing to a customer.

The next thing you need to look at are the materials you are providing to an affiliate to help with their promotion. By making things easy for an affiliate they are more likely to select you and promote your products or services and in turn generate sales for you. They will want some appealing creative for their site, a standard range of banners are used around the web and creative for affiliates should be put together in a variety of sizes to make it easy for an affiliate to promote your products in various areas of their own (or even other) site. To help with this we have added the standard banner shapes and sizes below.

So, you know that affiliates are attracted to merchants (that’s you by the way) that have strong products and brands, offer the highest commission rates and provide the creative needed for promotion. What about managing the programme once all of this is in place? The best thing you can do is to be in constant contact with affiliates, building and maintaining rapport with individuals who want nothing more than a good product and brand that would appeal to their traffic.

The following specific tasks are central to good affiliate management:

1. Campaign and promotion adjustment – Keep your promotions and campaigns fresh in order to maintain a strong ROI
2. Support affiliates – Helping an affiliate (providing creative banners and offers etc) means they are more likely to choose to sell your products rather than those of your competitors.
3. Promotions for individual affiliates – Incentivise affiliates that work well, give them extra commission if they hit higher targets
4. Management and testing – Test links, test commission tracking code, test hosted creative is working
5. Affiliate selection – Keep an eye on HOW affiliates are generating you traffic. If they are doing something wrong tell them or get rid of them. They work for you! Also keep an eye on fraudulent transactions to highlight anyone abusing the system

Approaching influential affiliates – Once you know what an affiliate is you can spot them a mile off. If on your journey through cyberspace you find a good one, ask them to join your program.

Whoever your chosen affiliate network is they will offer the reporting functionality that you need to firstly ensure that commission is paid correctly but also lots of tools to enable you to find your top affiliates. This is really important because affiliates that work well for you should be rewarded. The more they are rewarded the harder they will work and the bigger the return for you as a merchant.

One of the questions we get asked a lot is, “What is the best way of rewarding an affiliate?”. The question is impossible to answer because in terms of motivation everyone is different. Some will want more money and others will want a good time! So, if the former is the case (and you will know this because you should be speaking to them every couple of weeks! HINT HINT!) why not say, “Well the standard commission rate is 10%. We will give you 12% and if you increase revenue by a further £2k per month we will give you 15% commission on everything!”. For the financially incentivised this is great because they earn more from you and for you it works well because you are getting more out of the deal for the commission you are offering. Not all affiliates are incentivised in this way though. What good is all this money to an affiliate if they never get a chance to spend it?! We have incentivised in the past with experience days taking one affiliate on a Ferrari day. It was a great day out for the affiliate and was a great way for our client to schmooze at the same time.

This leads us onto promotion of your brand in affiliate circles. Just as the affiliate is playing a numbers game wanting to get the highest amount of traffic through your site so should you be. If you promote your tiered commission rates and run monthly competitions for the best performing affiliate word gets around. You can promote what you are doing through the affiliate forums and blogs and before long you will have every affiliate on the network signing up for your campaign. Looking at things in this way it becomes easy to see how brand awareness gets such a boost with affiliate marketing.

In summary then the best way to approach affiliate marketing is to get everything setup BEFORE you unleash it to the affiliate community. Go in strong with a suite of banners, an array of discounts and promotional messages, the highest commission rate you can and lashings of spiel to get them excited about you.

Then keep in contact with all of them every couple of weeks just to let them know that you are around if they need anything. Further to this, pick out the top performers and reward them for what they have achieved and then incentivise them to achieve even more. Once you have rewarded and incentivised tell all the other affiliates about it. Let them see that working hard for your brand pays off and pretty soon you will have every affiliate working for you.

So, affiliates are not evil and they don’t run your brand into the ground. Affiliates are not totally lazy either, they work bloody hard at getting you traffic but they will only work for you if you reward them well! Do it right and you could gather together a whole army of internet marketers who will send you traffic and make you money. Affiliate marketing pays for itself… and then some!

There are quite a few big affiliate networks in the UK, Affiliate Window and Webgains being the largest. These networks provide the platform for affiliate schemes and allow affiliates to gain access to your creative banners and product information in order to promote you.

The affiliate business is booming and chances are, if you shop online you have bought via an affiliate even if you haven’t been aware of it. Affiliate sites stretch broadly across those small niche sites that target a particular brand and then focus their efforts on SEO to climb the rankings (in direct competition with the brands they are generating sales for). Others target consumers often with discount sites or reward schemes (Quidco and Hot UK Deals are two examples of some of the largest affiliates out there).

So, why do you care? Well, lots of reasons. Firstly I mention the brand targeting type of affiliate. They focus on a hot brand (let’s take Fitflop sandals which are everywhere at the moment). Affiliate X understands that these retail at an average RRP of £50. If Affiliate X can refer a customer to a shop selling them he will pocket anywhere from 10%-20% of that… for doing nothing but passing on a customer. Affiliate X holds no stock, handles no transaction, probably works out of a tiny office or even a bedroom and does the same thing with a hundred other brands. His business is based around getting as much traffic to his site as possible and then encouraging them to click through to yours.

Affiliate X is actively targeting the very same customers as you are. He will be promoting himself in the natural search listings, maybe the paid ones too. He is bidding against you and forcing you further down the rankings, he is part of the reason you are not sat at position 1. Affiliate X is an expert when it comes to search because he has to be, this is where his traffic comes from. Next, he is using images of your brand but his site isn’t the prettiest on the web (certainly to our standards!), in fact your brand name is plastered all over his site, do your customers think that he IS you?! Also, he is tweeting about your brand every single hour of the day in a bid to poach your customers and then sell them back to you with his commission taken off.

NUKE THAT AFFILIATE PIMP…!

Yes, fair enough if you have worked for five years at establishing an exclusive and premium brand. For you your whole business is built around the product being available from one or two outlets (think Harvey Nichols type niche brands) and you have invested hugely in creating the right image for your brand. For you, affiliates dilute this image and make it appear cheap because they are opening it up to the whole world. Chances are that if this is the type of brand you have created then affiliate strategy is not for you anyway.

So what if you sell computer monitors which anyone can buy at any out-of-town electrical shop? Well, you are probably less protective about how your products or your own brand appear on third-party sites but what about the competition with search etc? We would argue that any negative impact affiliates will have is vastly outweighed by the fact that they have the potentially to bring in an additional 20% of your revenue.

The nature of affiliate promotion (the fact that the customer ends up on your site) means that marketing in this way is a proven method for delivering incremental traffic. Affiliate X is out there promoting your products leaving you with increased brand awareness and competitive placement alongside likeminded brands. Reports from established online retailers attribute 20% of sales to affiliate marketing with 10-20% of new buyer sales coming from affiliate sites. So affiliate marketing can bring in new customers who, so long as you incentivise them like you should any customer, will stay with you and buy direct next time.

If you set yourself up on an affiliate program you will give hundreds of third parties a reason to suddenly jump into your market and compete with you for your customers, however, they are giving you customers and revenue at the end of it. If you are precious about how your brand appears and want full ownership of creative which you can only do by promoting from your own site exclusively then maybe it isn’t for you. Affiliates that sign up to your program are bound by a contract that you put together. If you want to stop them bidding on your brand terms or using specific words in their PPC ads you can do that. Anyone that doesn’t comply you can kick-off the program.

The main objectives for affiliate marketing are:

1. Generate additional sales on your own website in exchange for a pre-agreed commission
2. Increase traffic to your site and exposure of your brand / products / services
3. Appear alongside your competitors in affiliate spaces to help increase market share

So, that gives you an overview of why affiliates on the face of it get a bit of a bad rep, however, it also shows what a massive impact they can have in making people aware of your business and generating you sales. Your stance can then be re-assessed every six months. Once you have grown to be number one in your market and have a huge market share you have the power to start trimming things back. Limit where people can buy your things and make more from what you sell. Once you hit this point then affiliate marketing may go against your wider strategy.

Next week (Friday 26^th March) we will do a follow-up post outlining the best ways to go about affiliate marketing. We will examine what makes a campaign successful, what an affiliate wants from you and some of the pitfalls to avoid. So, if this was of interest make sure you come back next week to find out how best to go about it! We will be tweeting next week to remind you so make sure you follow us if you aren’t already.

Anyway, as usual I have digressed! This post, fuelled by the comment above, is about whether you can afford to ignore Facebook in your marketing strategy or whether any time invested on the site (or similar social networks) is money down the drain.

As with any marketing initiative you need to start with some research into your market. Only you will know who your typical customer is and whether they will be using Facebook. If you sell stair-lifts, Werthers Originals and those decorative fine-bone china plates with pictures of tjhe Queen on then chances are your target market is not of the Facebook Generation. I will say at this point that I am not ageist and I know that citizens past the age of 70 can and do use Facebook (they even jump out of planes for fun), however, they are less likely to be partaking in poking and sky-diving than your average twenty-something. My point is that if your market is made up of 15-24 year olds they correlate with the largest age group in Facebook’s user stats. Whilst not restricted to just Facebook, 73% of young adults use a social networking site of the same ilk so, if your market does fall into this age bracket then you should at least have considered Facebook as a suitable environment for engagement.

Right, for the purpose of this post making any sense we are going to assume that you don’t sell fine-bone china plates but instead you sell skateboards… better still… longboards. One of our clients, Longboard:Source does just that so they make a good case on which to base this post (and provide them with a free plug at the same time!).

Firstly, the market for longboards is huge and pretty varied, however, there is a heavy weighting towards the younger audience. So, we already know that a good proportion of the Longboard:Source market is likely to be using Facebook. But, that doesn’t mean it is still worth spending time engaging with people in this environment. They also read magazines, watch TV, go outside, sit in cars and listen to the radio blah blah blah. Why Facebook?

Well, the small number of 150 million active users (predicted to be 500 million by 2011) shows that not only are your friends on Facebook, so are your potential customers and brand advocates. These people likely do not know you and your brand exists, however, if they did and they liked you enough to call you a friend you have a very powerful army on your side. I guarantee if it had been around at the time, Sun Tzu would’ve written a quote about Facebook.

Facebook’s ‘social’ stance gives you the context to easily begin a dialog with these people and build relationships. By engaging in conversations with your market you can better target your marketing and products to meet their needs. You can bring your brand into the forefront by consistently showing your face, posting relevant information to your own profile and other peoples. In doing this you can sculpt an identity for your brand and not only increase visibility but gain credibility as the expert in your area.

The best brands use Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, not to sell products directly but to allow consumers to see and interact with their brands. Brands that have failed miserably in this space haven’t realised this, they have seen it as an opportunity to sell in a different environment and this does nothing for a consumer in a today’s web environment. Think of social network marketing like a traditional WOM or PR campaign only online. A recent study I read stated that consumers are actively seeking out companies and making direct contact with them to understand where their products originate from. When asked who they would like more interaction with, 14 percent of Facebook users said they would like more access to their favourite brands. If you provide your audience with access to your brand and allow them to buy into certain elements that they find fun or cool then even if they aren’t actively purchasing from you at that moment, when the need does arrive you stand a much greater chance of being selected over a faceless corporation they have seen elsewhere.

Think of how Apple have been using the same principle to great effect since introducing the Apple Store to the high street. You can walk into an Apple Store, park yourself next to an iMac and spend the next hour checking your emails or messing around on the web without being approached once by a salesman. Unlike a Carphone Warehouse store where the phones along the walls act as bait so that a salesman can pounce on you if you show an interest, the Apple Store is about inviting customers in, getting them to use Apple products and then allowing them to leave thinking how cool Apple is because they aren’t bothered about trying to sell stuff. Apple are cool. People that work in Apple Stores are cool dudes. Cool. And then what? Well, in two months time when the customer wants a new MP3 player or a mobile phone, what are the first thoughts that come to mind… iPod or iPhone? Apple would agree.

There is also the fact that we are working with what has recently been dubbed the ‘splinternet’, since rather than one big web we have created sub-environments, micro-worlds such as Facebook and Twitter. Google understands the splinternet and it has created a challenge for the search engine since so much information it wants to add into its index is hidden away in these smaller worlds. So, what have we seen over the last 12 months? YouTube video making a strong presence at the top of (SERPS) search engine results pages. Then more recently a stream of tweets related to a user’s search term, Facebook user information… the list will continue to grow.

So, ignoring Facebook could mean that you are ignoring another avenue to getting your brand into the higher rankings of Google’s searches. As mentioned in the Webfaced SEO guide, Google is taking an intelligent look at how important a site is. We know that Google counts links to a site and deems a link as a vote. It would make sense that if this is happening they also monitor twitter and facebook and many other splinters to understand just how much of a big deal a brand or site is. Is it feasible that Google monitors the number of times a week a brand name or website is mentioned in tweets and wall posts? I would put money on it!

And finally it would be silly to ignore the cost (or lack of it) in handling such an activity. As pointed out in previous blog posts on SEO, social networking takes time. You have to keep your pages updated, you have to communicate with people, you have to write content. It all takes time and time does cost money, however, the flipside is that advertising yourself in this environment carries no fees and no media cost. If you know that a good share of your target market uses social networking sites then why not give it a shot? At the end of the day so long as you reflect a positive and credible image in the same way you would when embarking on a TV campaign then you really cannot afford to ignore Facebook because quite simply, your customers are not either.

Let’s clear up what sort of business we are talking about here. Firstly, if you are an online retailer then yes, you need a site, its pretty straightforward. I will count into ‘having a site’ those who have developed an eBay store and the like since the fact remains that you have some dedicated page somewhere on the worldwide-interweb-net where you are promoting yourself. But, everyone else, small or large, new or old, does everyone need a site?

In order to understand whether you do, go back to basics and do a spot of research into your market. Let’s say you sell sweets, in fact let’s be specific and say retro sweets since this is what one of our clients does. The company is cornering the UK retro sweets market which they happen to know very well. Did they need a site? Well, the market is geographically far-reaching ruling out the ability to capture the market with a single high street presence. The market on the whole is also very broad with a heavy weighting towards the 25-40 age bracket who remember the sweets first time around. This means they are statistically very likely to be using the web. So, it would clearly be beneficial to promote your business within an environment shared by your market, however, it still isn’t a must.

But what about if you aren’t a retailer, what if you sell a service, a builder for example. Do you need to build a website? Well again I believe it comes back to some good ol’ market analysis. How do people appoint a builder? They usually shortlist and get quotes from 4 or 5 so how do you get on that list? Certainly one will come from a verbal recommendation, one will come from the sign outside the house down the street, the others may come from a localised Google search. So, do you need a site to show up in a Google search for “builders in bristol”. No. If you list your business in local directories (or something like Yell.com) you may well be matched with someone’s search. But, are people just Googling to find a phone number? As Google weaves itself deeper into our lives and becomes the centre of our purchase process why not take advantage of a prospect’s need for information.

With a website you could build a portfolio, you could display photos of finished building projects, you could house customer testimonials and provide an insight into what matters to you as a business. Suddenly applying the standard principles you might use to determine whether you should put an advert in the paper you have found that the same audience can be reached via the web. But, even an expensive full-page, full-colour advert in the paper cannot provide all of the information you can cram into a website. In fact, with a website you can plump for a smaller advert which just carries a logo, strap line and web address which is surely going to save advertising costs moving forwards.

Also, consider what the builder wants to get out of an advert… they want a business lead. But, if a newspaper ad or flyer carries a phone number it may not provide a suitable communication method for some people. Many would be put off by having to call someone they know nothing about. Most people would surely want to know more about the person or business before picking up the phone, that is how we have been conditioned by the likes of Google who have made information gathering so simple.

It works both ways. A website will fulfil the human need for information and reassurance. A website can show off your work, reflect your company’s standards and display customer testimonials. All of this will help to sell you and your services to the customer before you even speak to them. At the same time though your qualifying of leads, quote writing and delivering of sales pitches takes time and time costs money. A website can give you a head start by ruling out those leads that if generated via a newspaper ad may have completely misunderstood what you offer. It can also provide you with information on available budget and specific requirements to enable you to tweak your pitch when you contact the prospect.

You can get by without a website because not even the biggest computer geek spends 24/7 online or does everything in binary code. You can advertise offline if you want and it will work. The web is not a replacement media, it is an additional one. Therefore having a website should be a new string to your bow… not necessarily the only one. You don’t need a website but as every month passes and more people are born into the Google generation you are likely to be at a serious disadvantage without one.

What I want to focus on this time around is a simple checklist of considerations for PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. These are the paid ads that appear at the top and the right of a search results page. These ads, unlike their natural listings to the left are the result of a paid campaign whereby the advertiser pays a certain amount for every click the ad receives. PPC provides a highly measurable marketing medium. To know the value of a click, you need to decide what the goal of your advertising is. If you are just branding, then you should expect to lose money to gain mindshare. If you are using pay-per-click to generate direct product sales you need to know how much each click is worth. Most clicks end up being failures so even if you have a 30% conversion rate, 7 out of 10 clicks did nothing for you (and they cost you money). When you begin PPC advertising you stand a good chance of losing money before you start making it.

Well that sounds really positive, thanks, sign me up.

Keep reading! PPC is a highly measurable way of reaching your market and whilst it can be run at any point to boost traffic, where Webfaced almost always recommends a paid search strategy to clients is when their sites have just launched.

The logic behind this is that PPC will start bringing traffic to their products or services before their site has even been indexed by Google (let alone ranking for their target search phrases).

It can be very daunting starting out with paid search since every click is going to cost money. However, the process can be broken down into some key considerations that remain relevant whether you are just starting out or whether you are a weathered sea-dog on the voyage of paid search success. You shouldn’t embark on a paid search campaign without considering the following five steps.

Step 1 — Select & Refine your Keywords

Whatever market you are in and whatever type of product or service you sell, someone will be searching for it using a search engine and they will apply some form of logic to the search term they enter. By using keyword tools you can find the likely phrases being used and then understand the volume of searches matching those phrases. This will enable you to find the phrases which are used most often or indeed, those which have less competition. WordTracker and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool are great places to start. Once you have selected your keywords, run some searches using them and find out who is bidding and what they are saying in their ads. Getting a feel for this will help you in the next step.

Step 2 — Write & Review your Ad Copy

Your ad needs to work like a magazine cover. It needs to be bold, sensational and attract attention, but you also want to make sure that anything you claim on the cover can be found inside. Many search engines highlight the words in ads that match the users search phrase. Placing the most likely search phrases in the ad will help your ad stand out more and improve your click through rate.

Ad copywriting is a careful balancing act and one that will require some careful ROI measurement over time. On the one hand you want to make your ad copy as appealing as possible to improve your click through rate and ultimately get the maximum number of visitors to your site. However, you also want to limit the amount of clicks which are less likely to convert. For instance, if you are an online retailer and you advertise the fact that you have free postage you will encourage a greater number of clicks, however, if users land on your site and find that they have to spend £50 to get it, you will vastly reduce the number you convert. Don’t forget that you have paid for every single user who comes via PPC; over promising could be an expensive mistake!

Step 4 — Build Landing Pages

One of the key indicators of quality in the calculation of Google’s Quality Score is the relevance of the keyword to your ad and the location you take a user to after they have clicked it. For this reason your homepage, whilst being the front door to your site, will likely not be the best target page for a PPC visitor. In fact you will usually find greater success taking them far deeper into the site where they are immediately presented with content that closely matches their search phrase. The benefit of getting this right extends well beyond obtaining a good Quality Score, it will leave you better placed to convert a visitor. Think of it this way, you will always critique your site and make changes to ensure that a user can find what they want quickly and easily and to secure a sale. You will be doing the same thing with PPC although rather than just trying to secure revenue from a sale you are also trying not to lose money because every visit has cost you something.

You need to test your landing pages continuously if you want to make the most of your paid search marketing efforts. Tools like Google Analytics can be vital in this area.

Step 5 — Be Brave!

When you first launch your campaigns you will find that your CPC (Cost per Click) is higher than you might expect. This will slowly come down if the earlier steps have been successful. As your ad copy is refined to become more relevant to your keywords and your click through rates increase then Google will give you a higher Quality Score. The higher you can get this quality score the lower your cost per clicks should become or the higher you will climb for your bid. Also, by measuring what works from an ad copy perspective and monitoring individual keyword performance you will learn a lot over time.

What is great about PPC is that you have full measurability, you can amend your site to convert the highest possible percentage of visitors and then when everything is working well you can ‘open the tap’ by allocating more budget to your campaigns rather than capping your daily spend. Once you have run your new campaigns for a few weeks, take some time to reflect on how they can be improved. There is a lot more to learn than is described above but this should give you a good start.

The key once you have considered these tips is to continually test, measure and refine, then we can help you look at Geographic Targeting, Dynamic Keyword Insertion and Content Network Placement!

Anyone following the Webfaced tweets this week will know that the TFM&A exhibition (Technology for Marketing & Advertising) was in town. However, it was not during a seminar at Earls Court that I heard such sense being talked. Actually, all TFM&A did was to demonstrate why few people will earn the right to be called a social media expert (even if they declare themselves to be one). This post is dedicated to someone who was NOT at TFM&A, Chris Buckley, who heads-up social media consulting for the social PR agency, Headstream.

I can’t get through a day without hearing the constant sound of tweeting and trying to get through an evening without being poked to death by a friend is impossible. So why do I say that there is no such thing as social media? Well, because I wanted to make a sensationalist statement to inspire you to read this post. There is such a thing of course, however, “social media” is a term I loathe because it leads people to place too much emphasis on the ‘media’ part and not enough on what is ‘social’ about it.

Let’s define social media. Literally it is media that encourages people to interact socially. It is this media that enables people to develop groups and form communities. Social media brings people together and in the commercial world it allows people to interact and live more closely with brands and products.

In reality though it isn’t the media that brings people together at all it is the content that is shared across it. If we all woke up tomorrow to find no tweets, an empty Facebook wall and no contacts in Linkedin (a sort of online 28 Days Later type affair) what would happen? Well the (social) media is there so we are all still connected and part of this online society aren’t we? What do you mean there is no content? What about the media? Don’t forget the media, someone please think of the media!

So, people tend to get hung up on the media (I think you get my point!) and as they scramble to get on the twitter train they forget what they are on it for. They either don’t engage with anyone for months or at the other extreme they tweet a million “special offers” and deeplinks to products nobody even wants. The ‘media’ part is misleading people into thinking that whatever they broadcast on these platforms is going to be lapped up by the entire world because just by being published on twitter it is worth reading.

This is as naive as saying, “We can make a TV programme about whatever we want. It doesn’t even need to make sense. In fact, let’s not really give it any thought and just get it done. People love watching TV, I read it in Marketing Week, so if we put it on TV they will watch it. And love it. And love us. And buy our stuff”. Brilliant. I hate you. You should retire.

Content is king, we’ve been screaming it at clients for years to help change their pre-conceptions of SEO and yet somehow people using social media still don’t get it. What good is it broadcasting across every media in the entire world (both online and offline) if what you are broadcasting is utter rubbish? There is no point, in fact, it will make people hate you, or think you are weird. And I’ll hate you, but I hate most people.

Looking around even this small office I can see Tweetdeck open on the machine next to me and on my own I have multiple Chrome tabs open with WordPress, LinkedIn and YouTube open. Oh, and I’ve got the Facebook app open on my iPhone for good measure. But, I am using these media platforms for a different reason than the person sat next to me. The content we eat up via this media varies dramatically. Even grouping social media together can cause issues since I use different ‘social media’ sites for very different purposes. I do not look to form business relationships via content on YouTube, likewise, I do not turn to LinkedIn during my coffee break to entertain myself. I use social media in many different ways yet at the centre of all of this is the content.

You want to make a name for yourself? You want to establish your brand? You want to sell products? Fine, but I’m not going to follow your tweets just because you are on Twitter, I want you to entertain me God damn it! You have to work for my friendship, say something interesting and I promise not to de-friend you. Bore me to death and talk crap all day and I will do exactly what I would do if you were my friend in real life, I’ll never call you.

So, it’s back to basics. Just like any traditional advertising strategy you need to do your homework. Evaluate your market, learn what they do in their spare time, learn where they hang-out online, understand what they like to consume when they are there. Once you know all this you know what content to broadcast to them.

There is such a thing as social media, its bloody straight forward and you can start using it today. Its free, it takes a few hours and hey presto, you are suddenly one of the cool kids. But if this is where you think your project ends there really is no point setting it up in the first place. You need to concern yourself with something far more important than social media, you need to be thinking about ‘Social Content’.

A simple analogy normally gets entered at this stage so we will of course oblige! If you decided to open a shop on your local high street the grand opening would be a momentous occasion. You might have banners and balloons, music playing and maybe even enlist the help of last year’s Big Brother runner-up to hand out flyers. Some will be enticed into the shop by the banner on the door, some by the products they can see in the window and some just to witness last year’s Big Brother runner-up’s rapid fall from celebrity!

At the end of your first day you might have sold a few items and certainly some people will have gone home and talked about your new shop and what you sell; good times.

The truth is that whilst opening a shop on the web might be cheaper than on the high street, it is the lack of a physical presence on a high street that means that the launch of your site can never be the end of the project. You could open a shop on any high street in the world and people will see you. They will walk past your door on the way to another shop, they will peer into your windows and make a mental note to return if they need something in the future. For the sake of argument, on the web there is no window or high street; once you launch your site it is going to take a miracle for anyone to stumble across it. You need to tell people about your site, point them in the right direction and then push them through the front door.

There are many ways of advertising your business online and many great books that talk you through the processes, however, this post is to inspire you to start looking at Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and gives you some ideas for improving your presence on the web.

Webfaced provides SEO & PPC services. If you are new to search marketing and read through this post and require assistance, please contact the Webfaced team.

The search results you can see at the very top and to the right of the Google results screen are Pay Per Click listings and are ranked according to how much the advertiser is willing to pay for each click. PPC is a very useful strategy (particularly early on) and can provide a business with fantastic results.

Webfaced offers a PPC management service, however, this post focuses on organic results. Web pages ranking in the organic search results receive the majority of user’s attention (both visually and via clicks); between 60-70% depending on the prominence of ads and the relevance of secondary content. It is this majority of attention coupled with the fact that visits via these links are, unlike sponsored listings, completely free, that makes domination within the natural listings so important. A search engine wants to be sure that the site it recommends to a user is going to be of interest therefore it compiles a mountain of information about the sites it finds on its travels through the web to make a more informed decision when a user asks it a question. It is providing search engines with this information, both directly and indirectly, that will push your site to the top of the pile.

SEO is a well-known subject where ten years ago it was still a bit of a dark art. Asking most people what factors matter in SEO they would inevitably say, “Keywords on your site”. This is certainly the approach that many companies still hold onto. Google have shaken things up with changes to their search algorithms and this document is designed to describe a few important aspects of SEO but NOT everything! If you want to use this document as a starting point for your own work then fantastic, if it inspires you to contact us to discuss a project where we take care of this and much more for you then that’s even better!

Why does my website need SEO?
As mentioned above, the majority of web traffic is driven by search engines. If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content is unsuitable you miss out on being listed by the search engines and promoted to millions of users each day. Whether your site provides content, services, products or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all web users. Search queries (the words that a user types into the search box which contain terms and phrases best suited to your site) carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make (or break) an organisation’s success. Targeted visitors to a website can generate awareness and revenue at a fantastic ROI. Search engines are continuously improving their technology and returning increasingly relevant results to users. However, there will be elements of a site that they can’t understand or that they interpret incorrectly that good SEO could assist with pro-actively. In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO can also help boost rankings taking you higher up the list where searchers will be more likely to see it. In weighing up whether you should invest in SEO there is a very simple question to ask yourself, “Would you rather pick where you appear in the list of Google results or have someone else decide where your site should appear?”. The online environment is becoming increasingly competitive and those companies who perform SEO will have a decided advantage in attracting visitors and customers.

How does a Search Engines Work?
1. Crawling the Web Search engines run automated programs, called ‘Bots’ or ‘Spiders’ that use the linked structure of the World Wide Web to ‘Crawl’ the pages and documents that make up the web.

2. Indexing Documents Once a page has been crawled, its contents can be ‘Indexed’. This is when the pages that are found are filed in a giant library that the search engine then uses to match someone’s search query with a web page. This index needs to be well managed by the search engine so that requests for billions of documents can be completed in a fraction of a second.

3. Matching Queries When a request for information is given to a search engine by a user (hundreds of millions each day), the engine retrieves from its index all the documents it has found whilst crawling that match the query. A match is determined by the terms or phrase the user is searching for existing in the webpage.

4. Ranking Results Once the search engine has determined which results are a match for the query, the engine’s algorithm (a mathematical equation commonly used for sorting) runs calculations on each of the results to determine which is most relevant to the given query and sorts the pages accordingly. The results are then ordered from most relevant to least so that users can make a choice about which to select.

What Problems do Search Engines Experience?
As mentioned in the section above, a search engine crawls the web by following links on pages. This takes a spider on a journey throughout a site and then (if the site has outbound links) onto the next one. If you imagine a thread existing between every link on every site you begin to see how the ‘web’ got its name. There are certain things to look out for that may make it difficult (or impossible) for a spider to follow a thread through your site:

1. Complex URLs with many dynamic parameters eg. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&ID=4&User=%Dom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl URLs like this because they often result in errors and broken links)

2. Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)

3. Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)

4. Pages that are split into “frames” can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

5. Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button

6. Pages requiring a javascript navigation to access them

7. Pages accessible only via a search box

8. Pages blocked purposefully from search engines eg. via a robots META tag or robots.txt file

9. Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)

Relevance and Popularity
If you do a Google search for “Web Design Webfaced” you will see 9700 possible results. However, Google needs to rank these so that the most relevant and useful result appears at the top. This aids Google’s users and makes them return to the search engine which creates a loyal user base and secures valuable advertising revenue for the search engine. The two keys to how the results are ranked are ‘Relevance’ and ‘Popularity’.

Relevance – The degree to which the content of the documents returned in a search matched the user’s query intention and terms. The relevance of a document increases if the terms or phrase queried by the user occurs multiple times and shows up in the title of the work or in important headlines or subheaders.

Popularity – The relative importance, measured via links (the act of one work referencing another, as often occurs in academic and business documents) of a given document that matches the user’s query. The popularity of a given document increases with every other website that links to it.

Each web page holds some standard information which in the past were the only indicators used to determine relevance. The Page Title, META data, URL and source code within the page are all important elements that you need to ensure remain relevant to the target phrase for the page. META tags have changed over the years, the META keywords tag for example is widely regarded to no longer be used in the analysis of pages. However, the META description tag is still of some importance, particularly as several search engines use this tag to display the snippet of text below the clickable title link in the results pages, likewise the Page Title also appears here. Because of the secrecy surrounding search engine algorithm, nobody knows for sure how much of an impact elements like this have on ranking. However, as described earlier, covering all bases offers the best chance of success with search, particularly as Google has been known to switch their algorithmic logic leaving companies with a narrow SEO strategy to fall down or even completely out of the Google index. A Google SERP shows the use of the META description (black text) and title tags (blue text). It is on this page that searchers generally make their decision as to which result to click, and thus, while the META description tag may have little impact on where a page ranks, it can significantly impact the number of visitors the page receives from human traffic. This is another focus for you as part of SEO Management, it’s not just about appearing at the top of the list, it is very much about ensuring that the most amount of people click through to the site. As these adverts do not cost per click then to attract the most amount of attention the consumer should be encouraged to click it by offering promotion and sales related information in it. This does require specific focus since a high click through rate is a positive thing for SEO. Most of the search engines will use a page’s title tag as the blue link text and headline for a result, and thus it is important to make them informative and compelling. The best title tags will make the targeted keywords prominent, help brand the site, and be as clear and concise as possible.

Search engines are used to dealing with manipulation of the META data for commercial benefit. For this reason they do not place their full attention on source code and META information because this could be misleading and very different from the content a human actually sees on the page. Targeting the visible text on a page to a search term is very important and is another key focus for SEO Management. It’s important to remember that search engines measure the terms and phrases in a document to extract a great deal of information about the page. Writing well for search engines is not easy, however, more and more, writing for humans is going to benefit your site the most. Genuine natural and fresh content for your target audience which is rich in keywords, informative and engaging will rank well.

1. Ensure that the primary search phrase for the page is prominent in the copy

2. Ensure that copy is on-topic – Search engines use sophisticated lexical analysis to help match related keywords to primary keywords to ensure that the article really is about what it appears to be. Google for example will scan a site which it believes to be focused on ‘web design’ and look for words it understands are related (website, design, SEO etc). This is a massive step away from being fooled by ‘keyword stuffing’, an old black hat technique for cheating the system and is a step towards only showing true human focused content in results.

3. Ensure that copy is of high quality – Search engines use the findings of researchers to identify common elements in high quality writing. Thus, great writing can provide benefits to rankings, as well as visitors. Grammatical errors make a webpage hard to read for a user and show a lack of care so it is not surprising that a search engine will not want to recommend it to its user.

4. Ensure that the page follows an optimized document structure – The best practice is generally to follow a journalistic format wherein the document starts with a description of the content, then flows from broad discussion of the subject to narrow.

Popularity
As mentioned earlier, the key to good SEO comes down to not only relevance but popularity. Every link to a site is seen as a vote. If your site has a high number of votes from trusted sources, this confidence will flow into your site and you will stand a better chance of being ranked well. The emphasis needs to be on the quantity of quality links as five hundred links from good quality sources is worth more than five thousand links from poor sources. The most well-known system for ranking sites based on link data is the formula developed by Google’s founders. PageRank, which relies on log-based calculations, is described by Google in their technology section:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

A good way to generate links to your website is to influence mainstream or niche press outlets to cover either your brand or the products you sell. This is a highly effective way to drive attention to the site but takes a considerable amount of time to look after. Press release sites are good starting places for driving traffic and links and as these tend to feed the major online news search engines (Yahoo! & Google News), they can provide high visibility as well. Through the publishing of content to these networks and then republishing or ‘spinning’ the articles across other platforms a snowball effect of content and links can be generated.

Many hundreds of thousands of news and offer sites are not pieced together by humans but rather compiled automatically by a program that surfs the web and ‘Scrapes’ content from sites it finds. This means that over the course of a few months you may find content from your site directly copied onto other sites. This is often seen as a negative point from a brand protection and copyright perspective, however, from an SEO angle it can be very beneficial. If you were to write an article or press release including links to your website and publish it somewhere it is highly likely that after a month that same article (and links) will have been copied and published onto several other sites. So, from the publishing of one article you could generate many links from other sites without having to lift a finger.

Another fairly labour intensive task is the tracking of links obtained by your competitors to find an edge in what is effectively a link building race. Competitor analysis needs to fit into your link building strategy along with proper management of the following:

1. Anchor Text – describes the visible characters and words that hyperlink to another document or location on the web. You need to ensure that anchor text features relevant keywords which will signal that ‘Site X’ believes your site is relevant to the words expressed in the link.

2. Global / Local Popularity – of a site in its geographical market is very important. Where some SEO firms have gone wrong is in building a huge number of links from link farms and directories in a geographic location away from the company’s target territory (usually Eastern Europe). Even if all of these links were trusted (which they rarely are) all this does is signal to a search engine that the site being linked to is of most relevance to users in Eastern Europe which can have a detrimental effect to ranking in the home country. If you hear “Thousands of links in 24hrs” comments from an SEO firm chances are you should take your business elsewhere.

3. Relevant Placement – comes from the search engine’s ability to understand a link to your site within the context of the page the link sits on. Search engines have been noted to weight the text directly surrounding a link with greater importance than the other text on the page. Thus, a link from inside an on-topic paragraph may carry greater weight than a link in the sidebar or footer. Part of your SEO work needs to focus on ensuring that links are built in ‘on-topic’ pages rather than randomly, another failing of many SEO agencies that seek quantity and sacrifice on quality.

A Dozen Top Tips
1. DO – Research the best keywords to target
2. DO – Monitor what your competitors are doing
3. DO – Optimize your title and META tags
4. DO – Ensure you use H1, H2 and H3 headings in your page copy
5. DO – Ensure your content has Title and ALT attributes
6. DO – Ensure your image names reflect your target keywords
7. DO – Create an HTML sitemap page
8. DO – Generate and upload an XML sitemap for Google
9. DON’T – Spam your pages with keywords
10. DON’T – Neglect your website, keep it fresh and exciting
11. DON’T – Forget to focus EVERY page at a keyword or words
12. DON’T – Buy or exchange poor quality links

So that should give you an overview of some of the things you should be looking at from an SEO perspective, the next question is, are you going to do it yourself or enlist the help of an agency like Webfaced?

In-House or Outsourced? As in many other areas of web development, a long-standing argument exists between those who feel that learning and practicing SEO should be done in-house, versus those who feel it is best left to the professionals. There are advantages to either side, and it’s best to weigh these against each other when making a final decision:

Advantages of working with an SEO specialist
1. Diverse Experience – Professionals with several years of SEO experience under their belts can tell you what to expect from the search engines as you conduct the optimisation process. They can also interpret and understand ranking data that may indicate certain trends or strategies that should be implemented or avoided.

2. Pre-Existing Relationships – Many SEOs have contacts inside the SEO industry to people with experience in certain fields and expertise in unique areas that can have a great impact on the success of your efforts. If your chosen SEO agency also designed and built your site they will understand you and your market better and this could represent cost savings over time.

3. Link Building Knowledge – Professionals will have the ability to quickly identify topical communities and the most popular and relevant sites in them, saving time when link building. SEOs also have considerable experience with link acquisition, and will recognize the requirements of certain sites for paid links.

4. Identifying Linkable Content – SEOs are often masters of crafting and launching content. Not only can they identify the content most likely to get links from the specific web community, they’re also experienced in how to package and promote it.

5. Fixing Possible Problems – Professionals are competent at identifying and managing issues that can cause a lack of indexing, low rankings or penalties from the search engines. This is a skill that can be very hard to develop without years of practice and experience. If you have a ranking issue, an SEO agency can be of great value.

6. Time Savings – SEO can be an exceptionally time-consuming task. An experienced SEO has the processes and systems of optimisation down to a science and can use that efficiency to provide better service in less time.

Advantages of DIY-SEO
1. Complete Control – With personal responsibility comes complete control for each element of your site’s progress. There can be no question as to who or what created a link or modified a document.

2. Learn from Your Actions – The ebb and flow of the SERPs will quickly teach an amateur what works and what doesn’t. Certain links, timing and on-page changes will be fully visible and recordable, making it a learning process.

3. Personal Responsibility – Your success or failure will depend entirely on your own efforts, narrowing responsibility and preventing overlaps in work or issues of blame.

4. Cost Savings – Doing SEO yourself means you don’t have to pay someone else. If you find that your time is less expensive than outsourcing the discipline DIY can be a great way to save money.

So… we have put together a FREE SEO guide to set you on the right track in terms of understanding the task ahead.

FREE Webfaced SEO Guide

If you want to discuss any of it with us just drop us a line. Feel free to share the document and tweet it if you find it helpful.