“If search engines were never invented or they ceased to exist
tomorrow, how would you build traffic to your website in a searchless
world?”
asks Brian Provost in his article: How To Generate Targeted Site Traffic Without Search Engines
He does give sixteen ideas though and in an ever increasingly competitive arena such as search, which we can’t control (like most marketing), we need to keep our options open.
This amazing video finished off an article by Aaron Wall about how small players should be getting into video. If you want to briefly understand about content and interaction on the web, then this will be a good investment of 4 minutes of your life.
Great news if you use Sitemaps on Google - they’ve added backlink data.
If your website hasn’t been submitted to Google Sitemaps, you are missing a trick. It is a great way to really manage the way that your site is seen by the giant search engine, enabling you to make the changes that will optimise your site and increase it’s visibility for search.
If you want to know how to do it, you can watch a video of how to include a sitemap into Google here.
Sorry, news update a day late this week.
We were light on the ground this week as Craig and Rob were out in the Cyprus office in Pervolia. Sorry, but while you were apparently sinking in 7 inches of snow, we were working hard running around Cyprus for a project.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the website for St. Michael’s Hospice, in Basingstoke went live. We are working hard for this local charity during 2007 to create great awareness for them and increase their web presence. It’s a lovely looking site with a case study to follow…
I took part in this e-mail marketing report from E-Consultancy recently and am not surprised about the findings. The highlights of which are:
The thing is, in my little opinion, that people are still thinking quick and easy wins. They want to buy a database, send a loose generic e-shot that just ‘gets there’. They will no doubt have some results but imagine how successful your campaign could be.
We recently did an e-mail campaign (business to consumer), based on segmented data to a specific target base of 361 people that yielded:
Wow! we wish every one was like that. They’re not, I can admit to that but why was this one so successful?
Read (and digest) this book "Permission Marketing" first and then start using this product - Campaign Monitor).
If you don’t fancy doing it yourself, give us a shout if you are UK based.
The BBC reported this week the increase in user tagging.
The idea is that you can use tools like del.icio.us to bookmark pages that you like with words that mean something to you. I use it, mainly for increasing linkage and ‘findability’ but very rarely to refer to for my own use. In an increasingly mobile world though, having bookmarks on-line does make sense.
The problem with them, however, is that the very fact that they are user-generated. Although this could be seen as a good thing, you also need to compete with bad tagging, as pointed out by SEO Book.
Other large sites have started following this tag example, and allow users to use non-descriptive labels like 2000, hip, and cool to tag their content.
This obviously flies in the face of trying to get relevant traffic by relevant linking. By handing more and more power to the user, we may become governed by more and more general vague noise, which in turn, will make a user search deeper!
Moral: Get relevant content on your website and watch the words that people are using - competitors and users alike.
A recent AXA report suggests that retired people now prefer to spend their time surfing the web with 41% of participants in the survey saying they like using the internet over 39% gardening.
The most popular activities are using e-mail (85%) and searching for information (83%) during their average 6 hours per week using the internet.
Who says all ’surfers’ are young - the times they are a changin’. I guess a lot of this has to do with better web experiences and confidence in the general media that the web is growing up.
Ref. E-Consultancy
Lisa joined the Project Management Team this week, was put straight in at the deep-end and man aged to swim without armbands. I’m sure some of you will get to know Lisa as is client facing. She has won us all over though, especially with her offer of an afterwork pint tonight.
The Tech Event Website went live this week with changes being made on the fly afterwards - just the way we like it and we also delievered the new improved "The Knowledge" for Maverick.
On the pitch front, we are looking at going International as we tender for work for Wales-based Eastern Valley Housing - Bore da! This is good stuff as we spread our wings west. We like Wales - It has the most amazing countryside.
The creative and web teams also bashed heads yesterday morning as we work on a new Escape site… details over the next couple of months but the brainstorm was wicked.
They do for them:
Internet search engine Google said its ability to cash in on web advertising had helped its profits almost triple.
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