An intersting article on the rural versus city debate on use of the web…..
New Hitwise data indicates that people living in Britain’s rural areas tend to out-participate city folk when it comes to online shopping and social networking.
For four weeks, Hitwise UK Research Director, Robin Goad looked at how many Internet users in a given geographic area went to shopping sites and found that city types are the least likely to visit an online retailer, while rural residents in Wales and the South West were most active. “A similar picture also emerges when it comes to social networking.
Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings has written a useful article on what makes great web copy and how it differs from offline brochure material….
Pretend you don’t know anything about what your company offers and you stumbled onto it somehow. Can you tell immediately what it’s all about? Can the search engines? Do this exercise with each inner page of the site as well. Is what each page has to offer, truly crystal clear? Or does your website presume that people already know who you are and what you’re about. If it’s the latter, you may have an online brochure on your hands, which isn’t a good thing.
I came across this article this week by Christine Churchill …. and it provides a great insight into what makes men and women tick online. A useful reference to check your own site against if you have a particular target group in mind.
The secret’s out: men and women are different—in person and online. Gender differences matter in web design, content, and marketing. It takes more than a girlish color scheme and soft focus photos of smiling children to draw women to your site and earn their loyalty. Color and design matter, but so do content, safety, and service. And oh, by the way: men want compelling visuals and for you to just get to the point. Surprised? You shouldn’t be, as these research findings demonstrate.
A useful article by Carsten Cumbrowski on the fundamentals of search engine optimization.
Originally published in SiteProNews, January 08, 2008
People use search engines to find things. Although you should avoid making your business depending entirely on free traffic from search engines, so is it still important to consider search engines in your overall internet marketing strategy. Ignoring search means leaving a big chunk of business on the table, which will make it much harder to stay competitive depending on the industry you are in and what your competition is doing. SEO isn’t rocket science and to a certain degree technical. It has nothing to do with magic and fairy dust will do nothing to help you with it. It also requires a long term strategy and commitment in order to become and remain successful. There is no silver bullet and no shortcuts.
How to get the most out of searching using Google and other search engines. A short interview with Matt Cutts - Senior Engineer with Google - who explores some of the best methods for searching.
I will also bet you a £1 that there is at least one tip that you didn’t know you could do via Google!
Internet Marketing has grown phenomenally over the last few years but the shift has quite clearly moved to a market that is driven by the consumer and that is no longer dictated by journalists and corporates. Online consumers are responding more favourably to non-intrusive, relevant and socially attractive campaigns and have quite frankly had enough of intrusive, forced online advertising campaigns.
Headlines are the most crucial part of writing linkbait. More people read the headline than will read the body copy. If the headline fails everything else does. No one will read your brilliant copy if the headline fails to entice.
This morning I went to my local Tesco to pick up some much needed nappies and chocolate muffins (the muffins were for me and the nappies for my kid, just thought I’d clear that up). I checked out the magazine rack. I can never resist a peek at the magazine rack. I love magazines, if anything gives you great ideas it’s a rackful of contemporary mags.
A new survey reveals what the UK’s internet users have been searching for, by studying which sectors are receiving the most visitors from search engines, and which sectors receive the greatest proportion of traffic from search.
The Nielsen/NetRatings study found that web users in the UK clicked on more than 1.3bn search results in July this year, which equates to 29,000 per minute.
The travel sector received the most, with 41.6m clickthroughs from search engines, which accounted for 4.7% of all clicks. Next was the social networks sector, with 40.2m clicks, followed by research tools, such as Wikipedia, with 39.3m clickthroughs.
A great article on preparing copy and writing effectively for your website with search engines in mind - by Christopher Conlan
SEO Copywriting is a skill. For most people it’s really something you learn over time by doing it, paying close attention to what your competitors are doing and reading up on how to write copy for websites, blogs, press releases and articles.
There are some simple rules that will help the beginning SEO copywriter and keep the experienced “know-it-all” like myself grounded!
First let’s start by really defining SEO copywriting.
SEO copywriting is the art and science of combining three elements:
I came across this article by Erik Kangas, President, Lux Scientiae and thought it worthy of a post because it explains how Domain Name sand DNS works in pretty friendly way - all credit to Erik Kangas.
To understand what Domain Name Service (DNS) is and how it is used, it is best to start with an example: John Sample wishes to register and setup his web site and email. Here are the steps involved:
An intersting article on the rural versus city debate on use of the web…..
