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.

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.

Some weeks ago we at IYES e-Solutions were delighted to be asked to assist with the search engine optimisation of Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity’s new website BCH.org.uk. The website, built by Webstrong is a beuatifully constructed site which highlights the main fund raising acttivities of the Charity and how everyone can become involved.

Our intial efforts have been centred on the top line pages and defining keywords that will attract a broader audience interested in fundraising in the greater Birmingham area, achieving no2 on Google for “fundraising Birmgham” after the first pass by Google and n0 5 for “Charities Birmingham“.

A good start. The team at BCH Charities are tireless in theri efforts and they have a Facebook page and are on Twitter.

Of course, whilst we are doing all we can to promote the site, in the end the objective is to raise cash for BCH and the Children’s Heart Appeal.

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.

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.

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.

The folks at nest wanted their blog transferred from the WordPress.com server.
On the face of it a fairly straightforward procedure. Install latest WordPress to new server and import all the files from the old one.

There were a few issues with the transfer with importing not as foolproof as Wrodpress would have you believe.

Nevertheless the template – based on the very basic default – has been tweaked and the blog is up adn running with slickr-flickr, twitter and subscirbie widgets added. nest blog.

We have just completed the addition of a WordPress blog to DB Studio’s website.
Although an add on via the usual sub-domain, the client was keen to have the look and feel of main site’s home page similar to the blog.
We added functionality so that there was a WordPress type sidebar on the home page.
The blog has dynamic connections to the main social media websites of Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook.
See now at db-studio.co.uk

Having just finished buidling new site for client in home refurbishment and home maintenance sector. The site has several features involving jQuery including accordion and image fading – and both in some pages. Our design partners came up with a stunning layout and we optimised the site for speed as well as started the process of homing on major key phrases.

The site ws uploaded late Thursday evening – April 28th and was no 6 in Google by Monday 23:30 for key phrase “home refurbishment Glasgow”. Needless to say very happy client.

BookSource.net is a book distribution company based in Scotland but with a worldwide market. We are currently undertaking a web marketing exercise.

A month after undertaking a comprehensive on page optimisation and search engine optimisation exercise, the website is at the top of the searceh engine rankings.

At time of writing it is no 1 on Yahoo (out of 62 million results) and no 4 on Bing. So far top of page 2 in Google and rising (watch this page for updates).

This is a surprisingly competitive sector and long tailed phrases are the key to success.

The sit has taken longer to index in Google than is normal and we are monitoring closely to gauge the pattern.