blogs as SEO tool?

Posted: under News.

When did you last make an entry on your blog?

Blogs have been around for some time and those of us involved in web marketing have been encouraging our clients to add blogs to their websites as a means of getting their message to a wider audience. Indeed there is much copy in the social media about the value of blogging for SEO purposes. We at IYES e-Solution disagree with that approach. Our reasoning in this is because blogging is not an SEO tool but about marketing. This may sound pedantic but it goes to the heart of the matter about SEO firms’ understanding of the difference between SEO and web-marketing.

Blogging is a marketing tool and the beauty of having a blog is that the website owner can update it without recourse to the SEO company. It is all about getting your message across – whatever that may be.

How often should you blog?

That is a question we are often asked. There is really no definitive answer here, once a day, once a week, once a month. It really depends on your market, your news and being able to set aside a few minutes to add something newsworthy to your site.

Content should always be relevant to your market place and potential customers and peers – a new contract, a new product, service, client. See DB Studio An event that you have attended with some feedback. Our client nest has been very successful with this approach.

Be controversial and ask questions that will make people want to read your blog and more importantly – return for more. Of course, the ultimate objective is for potential customers to buy your products or services so if you haven’t updated your blog recently go do so now.

If you need help with setting up a blog please contact us now.

Comments (0) Aug 31 2010


What makes good SEO?

Posted: under News.

What makes good SEO? That is a question I am asked most every day. It is almost easier to answer what makes bad SEO?
The problem with much of search engine optimisation work and many companies that offer SEO services – usually as part of the build and development offering – is a fundamantal misunderstanding of the what search engine optimisation is all about. At IYES e-Solutions we receive many enquiries from companies with websites that have been “optimised” only to find that some key words have been added to the meta headers or that each page is identically set up. This is not search engine optimisation and at best does nothing at all, or at worst is detrimental to the site’s ranking on search engines.

Other companies may just register your site with search engines in the mistaken belief that is all that is required. We have had clients whose sites have still not been indexed by Google six weeks after being “registered”. In a recent campaign with a new site and a new domain, we had our client’s site not only indexed on Google within four days, but page 1 for one of their key search terms. Admittedly this is is unusual, but we expect our client sites to be indexed or re-indexed after the first pass by the search engine, which in Google’s case is normally with 14 days.

So What Makes Good SEO? Firstly, search engine optimisation, like any marketing campaign, is about understanding the client’s business, products/services and market place. Without that there is little chance of having much success. Each business is different and so the strategy for each SEO campaign needs to reflect each business’s objectives. At IYES e-Solutions we take time to understand each client’s business and to assist them in establishing what they want from their website.

An e-commerce site has very different objectives to a straightforward brochure site.

By understanding our clients’ markets we can assess the competition and then suggest a strategy for that business.

We then implement that strategy page by page, optimising each page individually. This, of course, involves more than just adding a few keywords in the meta headers and the whole page needs to be optimised including removal of redundant or extraeneous code, images, and wherever practical moving scripts to offpage includes for speed of loading and search engine spidering. Clearly this last element requires the SEO firm to have a strong understanding of web development – although not necessarily design.

And finally, good SEO is never cheap but bad SEO is always expensive. Not matter the fee to the SEO firm, if the SEO is done badly the opportunity lost to the client’s business can be much more than the initial outlay. Good SEO always pays for itself.

Comments (0) Aug 30 2010


Is facebook right for your business?

Posted: under News.

With over 500 million punters now registered on Facebook there are many companies large and small who believe that this is an untapped market for their wares. Really? Given the slightly anarchic and sometimes anti-establishment culture of FB, it may be counter productive to advertise certain services within the FB arena. Unless, that is you can take a slightly off-beat slant to your marketing that can build a cult following.

Steve Richardson has recently posted an interesting article on social media strategy which make interesting reading.

Like having a website, you cannot leave it to work on its own.

Viral marketing through the right social media is a very powerful tool – the Jay-Z spoof on Youtube is a prime example, with hundreds of thousands of hits in a very short time.

Top brands like Cadbury have previewed some of their more creative adverts on Youtube. Who could forget the Gorilla drummer or the Eyebrows.

For businesses that are do not have the huge budgets of the big brand companies, it is still possible to get the message across with a well positioned video on Youtube which has carefully crafted meta descriptions. This can give a company an enormous lift in what may be a highly competitive sector in Google.

Branding your pages in Twitter and Youtube makes a big impact and, of course linking WordPress blogs to Twitter gives you double the coverage.
We do not have a Facebook page for the business as we do not believe that is the best place to focus our marketing efforts.

Really when push comes to shove, online marketing is no different from any other. You need to identify your market place and devise a strategy to target your audience. That will determine where best to place your social media efforts.

There is an old adage that half of all advertising fails – problem is identifying whihc half. Social media is no different.

Comments (0) Aug 11 2010


wordpress permissions

Posted: under News.

Having worked with WordPress for some years now, I have found the installation pretty fool proof and set up straight forward.
That is until we installed two new blogs on Titan servers. WP could not set the permission for uploaded images.
This was due the way their Apache server was set up. When the month changed, WP could only set the images’ permissions as 640 rather than the 644 that is the norm. The only way we could ensure that we had trouble free uploads was to disable the change of month facility. Hardly ideal, but it means that the sites work as they should.

The problem, however, has totally foxed the technical people at Titan and, of course, they put the blame on WordPress. Interestingly every other WP blog we have installed on various servers have worked out of the box.

Moral in the story? If you are experiecing problems with your WordPress install – it may not be you, it may just be how your server is configured.

Comments (0) Aug 10 2010


Import WordPress? Not so straight forward.

Posted: under News.

In a recent piece of work we imported a client’s blog from WordPress.com. This is usually a fairly straight forward action whicha llows you to be up and running in no time at all.
In this instance, although the posts themselves were all imported ok, the image paths related to the old site.
In the original, the link to the images related to the post but on importing this command was lost and all links were to the old site. On changing the options and the html coding the site workded properly but only after some serious head scratching.

Comments (0) Jul 26 2010


Link Building. Is it worth it?

Posted: under News.

The number of inbound links that any site has has lng been touted as a highly important metric in promoting any website’s page rankings. As a consequence SEO firms (and we have been no different) have been diligently finding directories to which to add our clients’ sites in the quest for the Holy Grail of page 1 Google. This is an extremely time consuming activity and when all is said an done, does this manual addition to relevant directories actually make any difference?

The perceived wisdom is that 100 inbound links are the minimum required to have any beneficial effect. Our experience is that it takes an hour to submit to around a dozen directories – so do the math – a day and a half to submit to the minimum 100! Even with the most relevant of directories it could take 6 months for it to appear in the directory.

Now, of course, there are those directories which will give you immediate posting for a fee. At around $5 a throw, that becomes prohibitively expensive and there is absolutely no evidence that paying for the link is more effective than those which do not charge.

Let’s be controversial here. Does every site with great P/R in Google actully appear in Google Page 1? Well, no. And the converse is also true. Websites with great on page optimisation which can be found on Page 1, Google, don’t all have brilliant P/R either.

Smaller, niche sites may well be found reasonably easily on the search engines after some judicious searc engine optimisation but won’t necessarily have great P/R. In the end it is being found by prospective customers that is important, or is it?

This might seem obvious, but our experience is that very few websites are built with any marketing objective in mind. Even e-commerce sites where the ultimate objective is to sell goods online rarely have any marketing objectives. As for brochure websites which are the main stay of the web – how many are ever considered as part of the overall marketing mix or promote the company’s branding. All too few. Our first question to prospective clients is always – “what do you want the website to achieve?”. Invariably the answer is “more sales”. Fair enough answer, but as we probe further it is clear that few people treat their websites like their printed equivalent.

We then discuss their markets, their business strategy and then how to convert that into a web marketing strategy which will start to make their website more appealing to prospective customers and consequently attract more traffic, which we will hope to convert to enquiries and so on.

This cannot be done in a couple of days of keyword bashing and needs to be developed over weeks and months. It is, however, a whole lot better use of time than submitting to directories which may or may not ever display the site.

Think on!

Comments (0) Oct 12 2009


SEO and W3 Compliance

Posted: under News.

There has been much debate over the years about how much influence that having a site validate to w3 standards has on Google page rankings. Matt Cutts has come out and states that it has absolutley no effect at all on P/R. Does that mean the end to all the hard work? I don’t think so.
The main reason that folks want sites to validate is that it makes it easier for sites to be cross browser compatible, which regardless of what the philistines say, is actually quite important. However, I no longer subscribe to the “must validate” at all costs philosophy. Not all validation errors are fatal to browser rendering. Take the use of the ampersand in coding. If not written as “&” then it will cause a W3 validation error. Now although this would clearly be better from a coding point of view,if not then it is no big deal.

It is true, though, that some errors will stop the bots spidering past the error even if it doesn’t prevent the site rendering and if the following piece happens to contain the all important key phrase or phhrases, then page ranking is bound to suffer as a consequence.

There are some who argue about the need for compliance to the above standards, but surely if the web is to develop then we should be ensure that there are standards that browser developers can work to and make life easier all round.

Ever ask the question, if Microsoft had not released IE6 (and IE7 for that matter) and IE8 had been closer down the line, then FireFox would not now be the second larget browser in town?

Comments (0) Sep 23 2009


Slow Broadband Speeds

Posted: under News.

So you think that you have slow Broadband speeds? A South African Company was so frustrated that the challenged their telcom that a carrier pigeon could do better. The pigeon took just over an hour to reach its destination and some 40 mins or so to upload the data from the USB it was carrying. In the same time only 4% of the data had been uploaded by the telcom company. Don’t know about you but the prospect of our information winging towards us by pigeon has a certain symmetry about it in these days of everyone wanting us to hgo back in time to save energy.
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8248056.stm for full article.

Comments (0) Sep 11 2009


Web Template Launch

Posted: under News.

In recognion of the need for small businesses to have a simple, cost effective internet presence, we have developed a range of web templates. The entry point is a brochure type template. All the client needs to do is supply the logo and content and the web site can be online the same day.
For more advanced users who wish to display their products or general photographs we offer a portfolio template. We will upload the photographs, logo and content and have you up and running the same day.
At the top end of the range is our premium template. This has a strong content management system which allows users to manage their content whether it be purely content or photo rich.
All templates are fully customisable to the client’s requirements in layout and colour, are cross browser compatible and comply with latest W3 protocols on valid html/xhtml.

Included in the price is one year’s hosting and if required a .co.uk domain.

So if you are a small business owner, sole trader or club web development officer, these templates are developed with you in mind.

Contact us now for more information.

Comments (0) Jun 30 2009


FCKeditor Compatibility with Safari

Posted: under News.

For the many folks out there in design land who use Safari, they may be unaware that their content management system (CMS) may not be working as intended. You will know this if the text boxes in the CMS show html code instead of a WYSIWYG format.

This is now a simple affair to correct.
Prior to version 1.3, Safari lacked the ability to interface with FCKeditor. With newer versions this is now possible. With FCKeditor 2.5, the two are now compatible. Just go to FCKeditor for the lastest version, unpack it and upload to your server.

You will, of course need to ensure that the fckeditor.cfg file matches your CMS’s setup and that the folder name matches that in your site – otherwise it won’t be recognised by the code on each page.

I have to say that I don’t find the documention in FCKeditor very helpful and the samples even less so, which is why I have used Tinymce, a Javascript based editor for most other CMS applications that I have built. So saying, FCKeditor is easier to use where there is a need to have more than one text box on the page with different height, width combinations.

Comments (0) May 15 2009


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