Social media and SMEs

Posted: under News.

In yesterdays blog on how useful is Twitter as a business tool, we concluded that blogging is a more useful way of reaching our audience. An article in the Telegraph reports that 52 pc of respondents to a survey found that social media was useless for their business.

This comes as no great surprise as the whole social media thing can become the means itself rather than the means to the end, when most small business owners really want and need to concentrate on doing the stuff that results in an invoice.

It is a surprise, however, how many SMEs, don’t even have a website, preferring to use the more traditional methods of mail shots and face-to-face meetings and telephone calling. That is a pity, really as they are missing a trick here. The first thing that mots businesses do when they receive a mailshot, no matter how good it may be, is to check ou the business on the old world wide interweb and if there isn’t a website, or it is of an amatuerish nature, then the mailshot has effectively been wasted.

Keeping Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin up to date can be all consuming, it is true and whilst the company may feel that their time could be better spent elsewhere in the business, there is absolutley no excuse for not having even the simplest of websites.

A small html based brochure site can work wonders as a virtual shop window and need not be expensive. For most businesses, one extra order as a result of the website will prove a significant ROI.

We would advocate the addition of a blog to any website and use this to update the world on what is happening in the business. Of course, it needs to be updated regularly – minimum once a month – but it need not take too much time. Allocate an 1 hour on a Friday to add a few words to your site. It will reap enormous benefits.

Comments (0) Oct 19 2010


Bullying on Twitter

Posted: under News.

I recently wrote a piece on twitter as a business tool. Over this last weekend (16/17th Oct) one of the folks I was following was subject to an unacceptable campaign from a so called commentator. Although not targetted directly at the individual, allegations were made against a family member. Whilst it was supposed to be a “joke”, it was inappropriate and probably libellous.
There followed a protracted thread which also involved the instigator receiving abusive tweets in response. Whilst not condoning the actions of these misguided, if well meaning folks, the person who kicked the whole thing off really had no axe to grind. Really sowing what she reaped.

Whilst there may be some out there who promote the freedom of speech thing, and people in the public eye are fair game, I, for one, do not believe that this should under any circumstance extend to theri families.

Social media sites such as Twitter do not have the benefit of moderators – unlike forums which were their predecessors. Any inappropriate postings were deleted and the ultimate sanction was barring from the forum. Although it ispossible to be debarred from Twitter, it doesn’t really happen sufficiently often and as a consequence these Cyber bullies can and do thrive.

I suppose it is up to us to police our Tweets and to unfloow anyone who becomes abusive. Maybe then they will get the message.

Comments (0) Oct 18 2010


Twitter as a business tool?

Posted: under News.

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece on the merits of Facebook as an e-marketing tool and suggested that a well branded page on Twitter could help small business get their message across.

Having spent the last few months on Twitter, I am not so sure of its relevance for SMEs.

It is important, of course, to follow the right businesses and, more importantly, to have the right people follow you so that the viral marketing effect is maximised.

There is a tendency for some businesses to post large numbers of Tweets per day and whilst this undoubtedly increases their profiles, it may become self defeating as it is easy to overlook them.

One Tweeter – who shall remain nameless – posted 12 tweets in a 15 minute interval and it was clear that there was no monitoring of the information being posted as it was being repeated on a regular basis. I have stopped following as a result.

It is also a very time consuming pastime and even using Tweetdeck, it is easy to lose site of the fact that we are in business to do invoiceable stuff. Being a busy fool does not pay the bills.

So if you are a small business with limited time what do you do? Easy, Blog, blog, blog.

I am probably as guilty as anyone at not blogging more regularly. Duncan Bannatyne, who is an avid Tweeter also has his own blog. The first he uses as a general chat, views on the world and a bit of personal promotion and the blog is much more business oriented.

That for me, sums up Twitter. It is a great place to have some fun but business promotion is more effective through use of regular blogs.

For a while it was thought that Twitter, Facebook etc had made blogging redundant. Quite the contrary, blogging is an even more important marketing tool and even if only updated once a month can and will do wonders for your business.

Comments (0) Oct 18 2010


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


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