Welcome to the Escape Blog

If you create HTML e-mails, you may be interested in this easy to understand chart displaying various e-mail clients and the CSS they support.

Courtesy of our favourite e-mail software company - Campaign Monitor

It’s not often I get home, see the junk mail sitting on the mat, and smile.

I did yesterday though with this personalised campaign for the Daily Telegraph.

Combining creative thinking with technology, such as variable data printing, direct mail can still stand out.

That said, I didn’t take them up on their offer…

Steve Jobs yesterday unveiled the world’s thinnest laptop computer at the Macworld Expo. The Macbook Air is aimed at the wireless generation, foregoing a DVD or CD drive, hence the thin-ness.

I doubt I will ever own one, as much as an Apple fan I am. I struggle not to break my MacBook Pro’s (I’m on my third).

What amazes me about Apple though, in terms of marketing, is the amount of hype they can generate, which is no mean feat. A week after the world’s largest tech show, CES, Apple seem to be dominating the Blogs and the mainstream news channels (Terry Wogan even mentioned the Macbook Air on Radio 2 this morning).

When you can get people talking about your stuff, anticipating the next era of products you are bringing out, and your name becomes synonymous with ‘cool’ electronics, you know that your marketing and advertising is going to be that much easier.

And, it’s not born from the marketing in the first place, it’s born from great products. Your product (or service) can be your best marketing tool.

Many companies introduce a spanking new website as part of the evolution of their business or brand: A new design, a new structure and new pages. But, are you carrying over the old authority you have gained or are you throwing it all away?

Why you need to create redirect pages

This was new to me until a couple of years ago and the only reason I am mentioning it now is because we have just done this with our website, with great success less than a month later.

The idea is that when you create a new website, the chances are you are moving some of the pages. It is important, both for SEO and for user experience that you re-direct any old pages that may well be on your new website, but in a different place.

Case Study

The page in question for me was a white paper about improving your web presence. This page, up until about 20 December, used to be here (www.the-escape.co.uk/onlinmarketing/reference/successfulwebpresence/).

Anyway, here we are less than a month later and my page has a Page Rank of 5, for what it’s worth.

Creating 301 Redirects

I won’t reinvent the wheel, this is how you create the 301 redirects (or this is how your webmaster does it).

The video idea was inspired by Doug at Velocity Partner - Thanks Doug.

I have worked on a couple of web projects recently that have highlighted the need for web hosting to be configured correctly to maximise search engine optimization. So, I thought I would highlight some common issues that I have come across.

Geography

First and foremost, I would always suggest that your website is physically hosted in the country you are serving. The domain suffix (.com, .co.uk, etc.) is obviously relevant but the IP address of where your site emanates from (the physical web server) can also affect your position in the country related SERPs (search engine ranking pages).

I say this because search engines have more than one server. The sets of results someone gets will differ depending on the server they have ‘latched on to’ when they connect to the search engine address and this usually is based, in part, on where they are located.

With (especially) Google trying to increase it’s level of relevant (and local) search, it would make sense that they deliver geographically relevant results that can be derived by the closest physical websites. This is obviously not the major factor of search results, but we are looking to maximise opportunity here, and it can make a difference, especially across country borders.

Domain Settings

Another issue that has cropped up is one of top level domain addressing. Some hosting is default set to use the www. protocol (eg. www.the-escape.co.uk), whereas some hosting is preset (I have found this more with US based hosting) to the straight http:// default (eg. http://the-escape.co.uk).

Every web page on your web site is it’s own entity, so if you are linking, or have any external links, to a www. page on your website, but it is defaulting to an http:// page, there may be confusion, especially if you start to use sub domains as well. Conformity is key.

On the websites we create, we use Global Reference files and Parent Paths. This allows for flexibility when creating and/or moving web pages. This has thrown up issues in terms of these domain settings and also the growing authority of a web page.

If you imagine you have a link going to http://www.the-escape.co.uk, this could be seen as a different page to http://the-escape.co.uk. This can potentially spread any ‘link love’ or page rank you have across two seemingly different pages, even though they are the same page.

This also comes into play with how you link to your internal web pages. If you have links in your navigation, or anchor text, that go to actual web page files, ie. http://www.the-escape.co.uk.index.html this could be seen as different from http://www.the-escape.co.uk, again, diluting the link juice.

Error Pages

Another area that gets highlighted in Webmaster tools, an also hinders usability of your website, is a lack of error pages. These are set at the hosting level, although you also obviously need the physical web page in place.

The key one (an error 404 page) is the page that your visitor ends up at if a page they have typed in does not exist on your website. It’s like a back up page, the sign on your door that says you are closed, but also shows your opening hours, so to speak.

So, if you went to www.the-escape.co.uk/sjhdgasjhgd you would end up at www.the-escape.co.uk/_404.asp, our error page, which has an apology and a site map.

Hosting is a pain, but oh so important

Hosting is an integral part of your web presence and can damage your search engine profile if set incorrectly. I came across a website yesterday that although on a .co.uk domain, kept referring to the parent site at .com, which may be good for the .com site, but certainly not for the .co.uk, which is the one they wanted to push.

Web hosting requires specialist IT skills and there is the important cross-over into getting it right for SEO, a point which can sometimes not get enough priority placed upon it by your regular IT people (IMO).

Finding a hosting partner that can deliver the expertise is not easy - trying to get the personal touch. In my experience, many hosting companies profess to have all the knowledge, but I have never come across one that understands the SEO aspect of getting it right.

That said, there are people (and companies) out there that do… and if you are looking to be found through search, a well constructed hosting set-up could be a very important foundation block in achieving it.

Two bits of fun in one day… Advertising Goodness with some arty use of desktop space:

Following Fridays investigation into an Adwords Campaign for a friend, I got to discussing link quality this morning with Jacqui, talking about (a) how some links aren’t really links, and (b) how some bought links, simply aren’t worth buying.

We started by talking about Yellow pages and how the online search (Yell) is really quite useful. (BTW, neither of us liked the hard copy book and promptly throw it in the bin when it arrives through our doors.)

Localised online advertising

For a small local business, serving a local customer base, I think adding yourself to the Yell directory could be worthwhile, depending obviously on the cost, which I don’t know.

With Yell, the value could come (approx. £360 per year) from a paid advert with a link back to your website. Yell do use “nofollow” attributes on their links, but I still think it is worth it as it is still a direct link. More importantly, you are more likely to get enquiries from the link.

NB. I did just do a search for Graphic Design Companies in Basingstoke and the first listing was a for a company in Reading… Cross-selling across regions defeats the objective does it not?

Other paid directories

In comparison, we started talking about other directories, some paid, some free, where you can submit your website. These webmasters have got savvy selling the value of an incoming link to the advertisers website, and sell that as a bonus. The problem is, many of these directories don’t actually offer you any value of an incoming link, and here is why:

Firstly, a good incoming link needs to come from a good quality web page (or website) with good anchor text. Translated, this means:

Does the directory you have the link from have any ’status’ on the web? Google Page Rank is a very quick way of checking this, ie. Does the page your link comes from, or the website itself have a good page rank? The higher the better.

What is the anchor text used? IE. If the directory defaults with “visit the website” then this is not good. In the case of a plumber, if you had the link text as “plumber in Basingstoke”, this has more value. Even your domain name is good for the link in this instance.

Direct linking is something a lot of these directories do not do. EG. I just did a search for Basingstoke Business Directory and came up with Matren. If you look at the advert that comes up, you will see the link goes to a redirect page. This means you have NO link value from this site.

Conclusion

Many companies are trying to associate the offline way of traditional advertising online. Unfortunately, for that way of thinking, there is very little comparison.

I for one would think long and hard about any online advertising I did, and would do some research on their web directory before accepting any ‘promises’.

For further reading:

• Are Web Directories still relevant to SEO?

Via Noisy Decent Graphics, the Church Sign Generator… minutes of fun to be had.

I will be looking for bolts of lightening all day now.

My friend has a small local business. A few years ago, we did him a website as a favour. It’s a bit dated but it gave him a presence. Obviously times have changed so please go easy on us…

Anyway, a company approached him on the phone a few months ago and he signed up for their offering and then he came to me like an excited puppy to tell me (he knows I’m a geek):

“Craig, craig, I’ve started using this company that can get me onto Google for £100 per month for up to 10 keywords. Look, if you type in “obscure term” I am there look, see, right at the top”.

I started to explain how pay-per-click works and I couldn’t understand what he had actually bought from them. But he has persevered with them.

He called this morning explaining how many visitors his website has had from the adverts, based on figures the company gave him over the phone.

The thing is, when I set up his website, I also put some stats running on it so we could see what it was doing and the numbers don’t seem to correlate. Hmmm.

Setting up pay per click campaigns takes more than £100 a month (which includes the advert spend).

For instance, I would usually spend at least four hours researching and setting up a campaign for small website, with constant monitoring for a couple of months, and that’s not including the spend. I’ve had some very good results with pay per click doing it this way.

But, it’s getting harder and I still insist it only pays for itself on business to consumer commodities, ie. e-commerce sites.

I also think there are a lot of people looking to sell pay per click on an ad-hoc basis to people like my friend, who, to be honest, doesn’t understand (a) how it works, and (b) how to maximise efficiency and reduce cost per acquisition.

I did ask one pertinent question though that really got him thinking… how many enquiries have you had?

Update…

I got an e-mail forwarded to me for the keywords that he has been selected for… All [exact] and all very specific, with, in my opinion, very little search traffic going to be generated. This keeps the advertisers costs right down, maximising his profit.

What’s more, one of them has a blatant typo!

I was reading today about how the DMA have teamed up with Royal Mail, TPS, ISBA and Acxiom to create a standard for environmental performance in direct marketing. The standard will be facilitated by the BSI and is expected to take up to 12 months in development. All areas of direct marketing will be covered from email to direct mail and field marketing.

Robert Keitch, Director of Media Channel Development for the DMA stated…

For the first time, businesses will be able to collectively demonstrate their environmental credentials and cut through the “greenwash” We believe that a standard will be a credible means of differentiation in a competitive marketplace.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops over the next year and whether the potential cost of credentials will be affordable to the small business market in general.