Thank you again for the fantastic morning workshop yesterday, it’s definitely been the best one I’ve attended so far!

Many thanks and kind regards, Angela Aunins

A great company who do an amazing range of moulded MDF skirting boards if you’re into DIY or are interested in distributing them.

Claire was kind enough to say this

“I really cannot think of any improvements I really enjoyed the session. The content was just as I asked for and was covered in enough detail to get me started with the project”

and rated us 5 out of 5 across the 6 areas of content.

If you’re looking for SEO training but are too afraid to ask, go on, see what we can do – it will help!

Be. Loved Bridal supplies high quality wedding accessories and Rebecca was looking to get more visibility for her website as well as tips and ideas to make her website more interactive.

She was kind enough to say this about the training we delivered.

“Andy gave me some important instant improvements to my website which will improve results. For my level of competency this course was pitched just right”

“Andy’s knowledge, delivery and willingness to help small businesses is refreshing.  I found the SEO work Need More Clicks performed both useful and most importantly I can see a return on investment.  Being able to trust someone with your livelihood and passion was my biggest consideration as there are many companies out there happy to take advantage of inexperience.  However I found Andy to have integrity and expertise, thanks for your help!”

Thanks Rebecca

Here’s the long awaited first part of our 12 part online marketing course delivered to you every Monday afternoon for the next 12 weeks.

We’ll be taking you through how to get more visibility online, how to understand what Google’s looking for and how to use the tools that are out there, the best bit is that most of them are free!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy Part 1 ( I slightly went over the 5 minutes I mentioned!)

Any comments or questions, please let me know!

Just recovering from a great 2 hour training session organised by Karen Edwards, Busness Buddy at Beta Technology.

Great people and businesses in the room and hopefully lots of good advice given out!

These are some of the comments we’ve had:

“All extremely useful!!”

“Non jargon delivery and no sales patter”

“EXCELLENT COURSE! The best I have attended”

“Superb course, need to go and spend time following the advice. Nice to listen to an expert with passion for the subject”

If you’d like to enquire about a course or organise a follow up just let me know!

After all, if you’re a new or small business then you’ve probably done your website yourself or been very heavily involved in it.

Therefore, the way it looks, what it says and your brand is probably very personal to you.

However, when you start to think about how your website performs online in the search engine results, what you tell Google about what you do is fundamental and a first step in getting more visibility online.

In this article, we’re not going to talk about conversion i.e. how to make someone do what you want them to do on your website; we’re going to talk about what Google looks at on your page to understand what it is you do and therefore what types of searches it can bring your website back for in its rankings.

Rather than just looking at the overall design of your site, look at it as if you were Google.

Have a look at the following things

Page Titles – You’ll find these in the blue line that runs across the top of your browser window or if you’re using Google Chrome put your mouse of the tab and you’ll see the same. If it’s your Home page, Make sure there is something meaningful that reflects what you want to be found for. If it just says “Home” or “Products” for your product page you’re not telling Google what you do – it knows it’s your Home Page!

Page Descriptions – When you find you listing in the Google search results what do the bottom 2 lines say? Are they nicely formed, using descriptive compelling language and some calls to action? If you haven’t bothered writing these you effectively letting Google put whatever it likes in here!

Page URL’s – This is the URL for the individual page, it should have descriptive keywords, not be filled with numbers and lots of strange symbols like $,& or id=

Headings – This is the main heading on each of your web pages. Ideally these should contain the key phrase you’re optimising each page for, if you don’t have any put some in and on your Home Page try not to have it just say “Welcome to our website”!

Content – It almost goes without saying that each of your pages should have interesting, compelling content that provides value and is different i.e. not cut and pasted from other sites on the web.  Make sure it’s not spammy and is something you would like to read.

ALT Tags for images – When you upload images to your website, you’ll be given the option to give them an ALT Tag. This is another level of description and enables your image to appear on a Google Image search. Just a word of warning, don’t be tempted to download a photo straight from your digital camera or smart phone to your PC and then upload it to your website. It will be way too big (makes your web page load slowly) and it will have a file name that means nothing such as IMG_2035

We’ll flesh this out over the coming months to make sure you leave Google in no doubt about what you want to be found for.

These fundamentally mean the same thing, getting more people to your website by getting higher rankings in the Search Engines. The higher your website ranks, the more clicks you receive and the more enquiries and ultimately business you’ll get.

When we talk about Search Engines, in the UK we’re talking about Google which has 85% of the search market.

Most people regard getting on page one as their goal and this is indeed what we should all be aiming for as a minimum. However, as the graph below shows, getting on the bottom of page 1 still doesn’t guarantee a lot of traffic. Your website needs to be on page 1 but as high up page one as possible, as marketers would say “above the fold”, this means what people see on their screen before they have to scroll down.

Look at the graph below and you’ll see how the percentage of clicks drops away the further down the page you appear. SERPs stands for Search Engine Results Page and the positions here are from 1 to 10.

The majority of the clicks are for the positions 1 through to 5.

This is why every website needs SEO, without it you’re not telling Google what you do and that means that Google can’t bring you back in its search results for the sort of queries that you want to be found for. When we run SEO Courses, one of the things we hear all the time is that business owners face a barrage of calls from SEO companies, very often from call centres berating them over SEO and telling them “they need to be number 1 on Google”.

The graph above is the reason why. However, this is why you need SEO, there are lots of different ways to implement it which we’ll talk about over the coming months.

For more information talk to us.

These are my seminar notes from this morning’s session at the Business Network North meeting held at Forest Pines.

If you click on the presentation you will get the option to download.

If you have any queries please drop me a line.

The foundation of all marketing, know what you sell, know where your crowd is and go and get them!

Our friend Google is exactly the same.

Earlier this year, Google’s head of search, Amit Singhal talked though how search works and how Google is always trying to keep upto date and any of you that have been on one of our SEO Courses will know – relevancy is king.

In short, what value does your website deliver.

As summed up in the article below…

What is the additional value the visitor gets from that site beyond just a skeleton answer? Ultimately, it’s those sites that provide that something extra that Google wants to showcase on the first page of search results.

http://searchengineland.com/peeking-into-the-world-of-googles-algorithm-changes-with-google-search-quality-head-amit-singhal-121528

Birthday? No

Anniversary? No

Summer officially starts? No

For those of you running websites you’d be forgiven for not thinking that this date was anything special but you’d be wrong.

The 25^th sees the official date by when website owners in the UK should comply with the EU Cookie Directive aimed at making site owners be upfront with website visitors about what Cookies are, what they do and which Cookies are running on their website.

A Cookie is a small piece of software that gathers information and is designed to make your web browsing easier and more of a pleasure. For example, you’ll have noticed that when you go back to an online store you’ll notice more often than not that the site knows an awful lot about you.

Most websites use some form of analytics software such as Google Analytics which in theory could be made redundant by this directive.

Most Cookies are harmless, but the chances are that unscrupulous website owners could be using more powerful Cookies to gather lots of information that they could use for sinister means.

With this in mind, the EU directive is designed to let the website visitor know what Cookie a site’s using and for what.

However, if anyone has seen the directive, you’ll see it’s not totally clear what they want and what ‘compliance’ means.

Econsultancy provide an excellent guide that you can read here.

Generally speaking, there seems to be 3 levels of compliance.

Level 1 A prominent link to a Privacy Policy which talks about the website’s use of Cookies (as used by John Lewis)

Level 2 An option out option (as used by BT)

Level 3 An opt in option (as used by the ICO)

Given that even the Government has admitted it won’t be ready in time, what should the humble website owner do?

In some ways it’s very frustrating because not all countries have agreed to be compliant, in fact in addition to the UK only Denmark and Estonia have provided compliance dates.

I think the essence of the directive is that it protects privacy and the least you need to do demonstrate some compliance is to have a prominent Privacy Policy that talks about Cookies and what you use on your website.

If you’re in any doubt, consult your lawyer!