WE ARE RECRUITING – WEB DEVELOPER NEEDED!

Posted December 21, 2009 by manorquarry
Categories: 5584

Tags: , , ,

WE ARE RECRUITING! Web Developer needed – Are you a natural born problem solver with a passion for technology?

We’re a fun-loving small company with big vision, in need of expanding our team to include another dedicated specialist in web technologies. Whilst technical skills & experience are important, we consider the raw materials of enthusiasm, troubleshooting aptitude, and innate propensity for well-architected code even more precious!

For the full details, further information and how to apply, please see our website and  the Web Developer job specification page.

Why use Social Media as a marketing tool?

Posted October 16, 2009 by manorquarry
Categories: Internet Marketing

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels – social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis etc (Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn and Facebook etc). It is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention, drive customer growth and increase web traffic all for a very low cost. The ultimate goal of social media marketing is to spread the word about your business, to put a marketable brand in front of the target audience and to increase sales.

Social media marketing fits into the category of ‘inbound marketing’, where companies focus on getting ‘found by customers’. Traditional marketing methods fall into the outbound marketing category. This is where companies focus on finding customers by ‘going after them’. Outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective, as the average human is inundated with over 2000 marketing interruptions in a typical day, and therefore working out more ways to block them.

About 83% of the entire online population between the ages of 13 and 54 now use social media. As this number proves, more and more people are using social media networks. Businesses must take advantage of this and develop a better understanding of this form of marketing, in order to succeed now and in the future.

Social media can take many different forms, including:

Communication:

Blogs (WordPress)

Microblogging (Twitter)

Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn)

Collaboration:

Wikis (Wikipedia)

Social bookmarking (Delicious)

Social news (Digg)

Multimedia:

Photo sharing (Flickr)

Video sharing (Youtube)

Audio and music sharing (Last.fm)

Why use social media marketing as a tool?

Create a ‘buzz’: An article, video, photo, or blog etc that attracts attention, will get passed on from one person to another, and increase brand awareness.

Customer engagement: A successful social media campaign will lead to more talk about your brand online. When your message engages with your uses, they will spread it more effectively than traditional methods.

Build customer relationships: Generate responses and comments from users who read your content/visit your page. By replying quickly and personally to their query/comment you will start to build a relationship.

Speed of feedback/results: Ranking highly or on the front page of a major social video, news or bookmarking site with quality content will dramatically increase your web traffic.

Content is limitless: there are not a set number of pages or hours, therefore allowing the audience to participate in social media by adding comments, instant messaging or even editing the stories themselves.

Brand building: By increasing the amount of people who are aware of your brand and what you do will ultimately lead to increased web traffic and leads.

Reach: Social media allows anyone to reach a large audience. Dependent on the quality of your content, you can start to build your online brand as mentioned above.

Low cost: Social media marketing can partially or fully replace traditional marketing methods by reaching a broader audience, for a fraction of the cost.

Search engines: Social media campaigns can bring you a large amount of back links that will enhance your ranking within the search engines.

Gain trust: Engaging with your audience will gain credibility from the crowd. Receiving recommendations and reviews of your products will increase trust and therefore sales.

Get noticed: As more people are ignoring traditional marketing methods, social media marketing has the potential to send visitors to your website.

How to get the best out of social media marketing?

When integrating social media into marketing plans, consider the following points:

Think carefully about the message that you will be displaying, the audience that will be receiving it, and the results that you expect.

Create a ‘buzz’ through a topical conversation about your brand. Respond to the feedback/comments, and learn from what they say – what are they interested in; why do they like certain products; and get to know your target market better.

Engage with your audience in an honest discussion, about how your brand can fulfil their needs. Embrace user generated content.

Provide up to date and real time information about your brand; how it is currently performing and give relevant case studies, with the option for your audience to comment and ask questions.

Become a fan of Manor Quarry on Facebook.

Follow Manor Quarry on Twitter.

Subscribe to Manor Quarry’s blog on WordPress.

View Manor Quarry’s profile on LinkedIn.

Bookmark Manor Quarry’s articles on Delicious.

Vote for Manor Quarry’s articles on Digg.

8. General Site Analysis

Posted August 13, 2009 by manorquarry
Categories: Web Site Optimisation

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

General Site Analysis

As well as looking at, and optimising the search on your site, and making your site as user friendly as possible, there are a few other aspects to look at when ensuring your web site meets all your customers’ needs, and is as effective as possible.

When analysing your own web site, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What else is there that you feel needs to change or be improved to help them have a better, and hassle-free time on your site, and so ultimately, for you, make more sales. Here are a few more suggestions to look at when optimising your site:

1. Page loading time

Try and ensure this is as quick as possible. Internet shoppers are impatient. If they cannot easily find what they are looking for, or are left waiting for a page to load, they will move elsewhere. Remember, having Flash objects on a page dramatically slows down the page load time.

2. Page content

As mentioned in the previous post (Friendly User Experience), make content relevant to the specific section of the web site you are in. Include links within the text to similar related material that you believe the visitor will find useful.

3. Product information

If you have an ecommerce site with lists of products, try and make the pages as interesting as possible. Include images of the product, a small description with a more info or more detail link to a specific page for that product. Make the image, heading (which should include keywords for the product so customers’ can identify with them even if they do not understand the product name) and other prominent parts of the product listing a link to the product page. Include a ‘buy now’ or ‘add to basket’ button, to make life for the customer as easy as possible, should they wish to purchase it without going into more detail. Most importantly, include the price because when a customer is scanning down a results page this and the product title are generally take into account first. The specific product page should include everything the customer would need to know about the item: more images, more detailed description, product info/spec/technical info, customer reviews, customers who bought this also bought.

4. Bestsellers

Promote specific products at certain times of the year. For example, at Christmas have some seasonal offers for Christmas presents. Make these prominent on your homepage, to encourage customers to click, and then buy. If you have old stock that you want to clear, do likewise. Have a ‘clearance’ or ‘special offers’ section to help sell the rest of the stock. Having a promotional banner linking to a space or area on your site can help get specific products into the customers’ eye level that they may not necessarily have seen.

5. Checkout process

How easy is it to actually purchase a product, and move through the checkout process? If there are a too many steps, too many forms to submit or is too complicated, the customer may get bored or confused and leave your site, abandoning their basket. Do everything you can to avoid this by making the process as simply and pain-free as possible, which should lead to increased sales.

6. Abandoned baskets

A customer has found something they want, they have added it to their basket, but don’t purchase it. Why is this? Using tracking functionality, monitor how many abandoned baskets you are getting and observe which products were in the baskets when they were abandoned. Then work backwards to try and find out why this is so. It could be down to the above point of having an overly complicated checkout process. It could be because of a slow load time for a certain page. Track down the issue and make the relevant changes/alterations to reduce the number of abandoned baskets, and therefore increase sales.

7. Friendly User Experience

Posted August 6, 2009 by manorquarry
Categories: Web Site Optimisation

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Friendly User Experience

So, you have made your web site, got it up and running and hopefully getting visitors onto it, but then what? You need to make sales, convert perspective buyers to actually make a purchase. There are a number of ways to boost your chances of making sales, most noticeably, by giving the visitors to your web site the best experience and service possible. If it is hard, for instance, to navigate around the site, and find what is being looked for, shoppers will not hesitate in leaving and more than likely spend their money on your competitors’ sites. The majority of internet shoppers are inpatient, if something is not there in front of them immediately or obviously, they will search somewhere else, and more than likely not return in the future. Is this what you want?

Make sure you keep on top of your web site. Over time your site can become out of date and unmaintained and these can create usability issues for the users.

Follow the simple steps below to make your visitors’ stay on your site enjoyable and easy, and ensure they will come back and shop again.

1. Keep the navigation consistent

Ensure that the navigation elements on each page are the same. This consistency makes it easier for your visitors to navigate, and so don’t waste time trying to find their way around. Make it as easy as possible for them to get to and find what they want.

2. Use clear language in the menus

Don’t make visitors guess what certain menu/navigation items mean. Use clear, concise language for them to understand, and that tells them what is behind the link.

3. Different ways to navigate

Increase the amount of ways visitors can move from page to page, by including links in the text, links in images, breadcrumb trails (hierarchal link system where the viewer can see where they have been, and a useful way of going back to pages previously visited) and extra menus where you see fit.

4. Add new content

Try and regularly add new content to your site, to give visitors a reason to come back time and again. Content that becomes stagnant and old can be a turn off to a visitor who has read it before. Also make sure wording is grammatically correct and spelling is error free, and as concise as possible.

5. User tailored content

Add content specific to the region/geography that are reading it, to make it relevant and appealing to them.

6. Product ratings

Try and include, where possible, ratings of products that you are selling. This will give the visitor an idea on the quality of the product, and what others have thought of it. This rating could be generated from product feedback forms that previous buyers can fill in, or by you if it is a third party item.

7. People who bought this also bought

This is a very useful indicator for perspective buyers, so they can see what other people interested in the same product also bought. It allows greater exposure of your products also, getting them in the public eye, and therefore greater sales.

8. Use Contextual Links

Include links in the actual text on the page to help your visitors find contextually relevant, detailed information.

9. Check to make sure the links work

Making sure both internal and external links still work is extremely important. Broken links are really frustrating, and can soon ruin a visitors’ experience on your site. Ensure links reach contextually relevant pages.

10. Check for broken images

Run a check on every page to ensure that all images load correctly and are in the correct place. Out of place images will have a knock-on effect on the layout of the rest of the page, and can ruin a nicely designed page.

11. Check your contact form works

Make sure it is useable, includes the relevant fields, and works! Link to it from every page, ensuring visitors know how to get in touch should they wish.

12. Links to the home page

It is common practice to use your company logo in the header of the page as a link home. Try and have multiple visible links back home, to prevent visitors wasting time searching for them.

13. Include a site map

Map your web site out in the form of a site map. This will give an overview of every page on your site, allowing a clear and simple navigation to any page should a user wish to use it.

14. Try your site in different browsers

Believe it or not, different browsers read your site differently. It might look great in one, but the formatting may not work as wished in another. Prevent visitors having a bad experience in certain browsers by making sure the site works universally, including in the varying versions.

15. Check your site search history

As the previous post explained, check to see which keywords are being searched for, and make sure you cater for these words. By learning from previous searches, eradicate ‘no results found’ results pages. Also if something is being searched for and you want it more visible, take the relevant steps to make it more in the users’ eye line.

6. Internal Site Search

Posted July 2, 2009 by manorquarry
Categories: Web Site Optimisation

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Internal Site Search

After optimising your site for the search engines, and increasing its rankings, there should be an increase in traffic to your site. The next stage to look at is how to keep visitors on your site for longer, and how to optimise it internally.

The aim of internal site optimisation is to make your web site as friendly a place as possible, from easy and clear navigation, to ensuring customers find the products they are searching for. By improving the visitors’ experience on your site, you will have more chance of keeping them browsing longer and therefore making a purchase.

Think of it logically. When someone visits your site they are a perspective buyer. If it is hard to navigate around your site and find what they are looking for, or the search produces limited results, then this customer will not hesitate in leaving your site and head to a competitors to try and find what they are after. You have missed an opportunity. Do not let this happen by correctly optimising your site internally by providing the customer with what they want.

Understanding your customers is an important part of internet trading. Analyse the searches people are doing on your web site. This allows you to track what visitors are looking for but more importantly shows you if your website is delivering.

This information is invaluable for marketers when making decisions about keyword changes, creating promotions and amending the inventory that will ultimately help improve the customer’s shopping experience.

Analysis of sales statistics show that more sales are generated from customers who use the site search facility than those who don’t. Therefore, a critical element of a site’s success is how the search process is managed.

See how your visitors search your site, what they look for, and where they end up. Track top search terms used and top search terms yielding no results.

Having knowledge of search volumes will give you a sense of what is being searched for and what keywords you may want to focus on. Once knowing which words and terms are most searched, use this to your advantage. This is what people are on your site for, so in the cases where these keywords don’t match any products, either start selling the product or add these additional keywords to current product descriptions to include them in search results going forward, therefore eliminating “No Search Results Found” on the results page, making product searches more effective and helping customers to find what they want.

By analysing and comparing which products are more popular or prominent on your site also helps in the search process. Order results by popularity to show customers what is being purchased more often as this will give them confidence in the product. Also look at the slower selling products and try and work out why they are not so successful. It could be down to a number of factors including: wrong keywords being tagged to the product; poor product description; lack of images; or placed in the wrong category. If a product is struggling, try promoting it to get it in the eye line of perspective buyers.

Once you know what people are searching for, what they are finding and what they can’t find, you should be able to act accordingly and make any necessary changes.

5. Pay Per Click (PPC)

Posted June 18, 2009 by manorquarry
Categories: Web Site Optimisation

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Pay per Click (PPC)

Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is simply where you pay the host of the site you are advertising on (normally search engines) a fee each time your advert is clicked, and traffic is directed to your site.

In a similar way to getting your site high in the organic search results, you select keywords relevant to your product/service, and your advert is shown when these words are searched.

The fee you pay is dependant on the keyword/s that you are targeting, and how popular they are with other advertisers, and the target market. It is a dynamic marketplace – the higher you bid, the higher your advert will be displayed.

PPC allows you to get maximum exposure, for whatever budget you choose. You can specify a set amount to spend per day or per month, and when enough clicks have gone through to your site that you reach your budget, your advert is simply removed until the next day/month where it starts again, meaning you don’t spend more money than you want to. People ask how much they should spend on PPC. However there is no straight forward answer other than spend what you can afford, based on your value per lead.

Google Adwords

One of the most common and popular places to advertise via PPC is in the Google search results. Found on the right hand side and sometimes the top of the page, the most relevant adverts to the search term are shown.

The advert itself is broken down into 5 parts.

Headline: Max 25 characters

Description line 1: Max 35 characters

Description line 2: Max 35 characters

Display URL: Max 35 characters

Destination URL: Max 1024 characters

The aim of a PPC click is the same as your site being shown in the organic results: you want the viewer to click it and go to your site. To do this, you need to entice people to click.

Points to consider include:

  • Test different words/phrases and see which are more successful, then alter accordingly.
  • Explain your product/service in a way that it entices the viewer to click.
  • Use your keywords, preferably in prominent places, such as the heading.
  • Test certain words like ‘free’ and ‘download’ as these invite people to click.
  • Look at your competitors’ adverts and see how they word and structure them.
  • Test. Refine. Repeat.

After completing your advert, the next stage to consider is where it leads if someone clicks it. This is called the landing page. Someone has clicked your advert because they like what you are promoting or saying, so this next page must be relevant and specific to the advert. Similar wording and phrases should be used to tie them together.

Other points to consider:

  • Keep it short and simple.
  • Try and limit navigation away from the page, as other messages or pages may distract the reader and take them away from the page.
  • Have prominent calls to action: contact us now / get started / forms etc.
  • Align it with your keywords.

PPC is a good way of getting fast feedback on what you are doing and how you are marketing yourself. It is useful to promote short term events and a good way of testing new products and markets, as it is easy to track the amount of times your advert has been viewed, and the amount of times it has been clicked, and from that, you can monitor how successful it is. However, to make the most of SEO, you should not rely solely on PPC. If not used correctly it can be an expensive way to promote your site, so is best used in conjunction with other marketing techniques such as implementing keywords in your site for search engines to index you organically and linking to your site from elsewhere.

4. Keyword implementation (2)

Posted June 11, 2009 by manorquarry
Categories: Web Site Optimisation

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Page Content

Search engines also take into account the content of your pages that viewable to your visitors. To make the most of your content, you need to adhere to three factors:

1. Organise your page content so that the most important aspects (keywords, information etc) is near the top, ideally in the first 500 words, as search engines look more closely at the first 500 words on a page.

2. Focus on a few keywords that are most relevant to that page. Select between 3 and 5 keywords per page and insert these strategically in the text, as this will keep the content focused and search engine friendly.

3. Refresh page content regularly is important as search engines reward you for this. Update content on a weekly basis to avoid content becoming old and stagnant. A simple way to update content is to write a new blog post, or a new article.

Within the content it is also important to consider using heading tags (‘h’ tags’). These range from ‘h1’ (being the largest) to ‘h6’ (being the smallest), and as the name suggests, used for headings.

Inserting keywords and relevant information into these is very beneficial as these appear more prominent than normal ‘body’ text to search engines, and therefore increase your rank.

The heading tags take the following form:

<h1>Main heading including relevant keywords</ h1>

For paragraphs further down the page use ‘h2’ tags.

When writing content, also remember the following points:

  • The first time you use a search term in each paragraph, highlight it in bold.
  • If you use a search term within the body of the text that relates to another page, link it to that other page. Look for opportunities to link to other pages, or even to other websites. Just having the link there at all increases the prominence of that term on that page.
  • Give each link in your navigation a title tag or an id tag to identify it. Use your search term relating to that link in the tag.

ALT and TITLE Tags on Images

To further enhance the visibility of your site to search engines and to improve the user experience, you need to get the most out of every page element, and ALT and TITLE tags are no exception. They increase your site’s usability level and promotion possibilities if you clearly understand where to put them and when to use them.

The ALT attribute is designed to be an alternative text description for images. ALT text displays before the image is loaded and instead of the image in text-based browsers. ALT is a required element for images and says what the image is.

You can use the TITLE attribute for just about any page element, but it isn’t required. Use it to describe links and images. They’re more versatile than the ALT attribute and many search engines read the text in TITLE attributes as regular page content. The TITLE tag can be seen when you hover your mouse over an image or link and a description flashes up on the screen.

Using keywords in ALT and TITLE tags is beneficial to increasing your search engine ranking. Use the tags to provide more information about the element, and as search engines love keywords, this is a prime area to use targeted keywords, and another excuse to get your keywords into your web pages.

Utilising the appropriate and relevant keywords is important for any web site if you want it to rank highly in the search engines. Using keywords like mentioned above is only one of the aspects of helping to optimise your web site. Next, we will be looking at making the most of keywords in Pay Per Click (PPC).

3. Keyword implementation (1)

Posted June 11, 2009 by manorquarry
Categories: Web Site Optimisation

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Keyword Implementation

Now that you have chosen your keywords, it is time to put them into action in and around your site.

Let’s start with your domain. You want to buy a domain name that is both local to your targeted nation (if you are targeting multiple countries, consider multiple locally-hosted sites) and one that contains your relevant keywords, as URL’s rank high in search engines when they match the searched terms.

The key to optimising your pages is to get your keywords into the right places, where the search engines will give you most credit and therefore rank you higher.

Page Title

With SEO, page titles are very important, as search engines value the words in your title very highly. Page titles are used in the ranking process, and it is also what is physically shown in the results, so it is vital to catch the searchers eye and get them to click onto your site. Some people even consider it to be the most important element to consider on your page.

The page title takes the following form:

<title>Company name and two search terms describing the page</title>

Points to consider when constructing your page title:

  • Keep it to about 10 words or less, or within 75 characters.
  • Include the company name and the two best search terms for the page, as a page title can be customisable for every page, this will make it easier for search engines to differentiate between pages.
  • Start with a capital letter but do not use all upper case.
  • Do not use a period or full stop at the end.
  • Make it comprehensible: this is the line that must entice users to click your search result, so simply having a list of keywords for your title is unlikely to help.

Meta Description Tags

The meta description tag influences the likelihood that a person will actually click on the link to your site in the search engine results page. It is not visible when on a site, but it is the description that appears on the search engine results beneath the page title. It is supposed to be a brief and concise summary of a page’s content.

The meta description takes the following form:

<meta content=”Brief description of the contents of your page.”>

  • Limit the description to 170 characters or 200 characters at most.
  • Try and keep it to one sentence.
  • Pick a style and be consistent throughout your whole site.
  • Expand on the page title, adding more keywords that have been identified and extracted from the body of the page, and make it a unique description for each page.

2. Keywords

Posted June 11, 2009 by manorquarry
Categories: Web Site Optimisation

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Keywords

To continue the series on web site optimisation, and in particular SEO, we are going to look into the importance of keywords within your web site.

Keywords are vital to the success of SEO. Selecting keywords though is not simply a matter of picking some words and hoping for the best. You need to know your target audience and the best way to reach them. Your SEO campaign must use the correct keywords for your product/service. Use the wrong ones and you could have great search engine rankings, but with no one searching your keywords.

Keyword Selection

The best way to start the process of selecting your keywords is by having a brainstorming session, to determine which words/phrases are most relevant to you and which words/phrases are most likely to be searched by your target market when looking for your product. You want to compile a list of between 5 and 10 words which you believe would find your site when typed into a search engine. It may also be beneficial to search your competitor’s sites to see which keywords they are using.

A very useful tool to see which words are actually being typed into Google is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). This enables you to see if the keywords that you may select are being searched enough times for them to be successful to you. For example, you don’t want to pick a phrase that is only searched on average 5 times per month. However, you also have to think realistically, if your keyword is being searched hundreds of thousands of times a month, the chances of you getting a high enough ranking are slim as such high volume keywords are saturated by competitors.

The tool also allows you to see synonyms of your keyword that you may not have thought of, and other popular phrases that are searched. You may not want to stop at 5-10 keywords, so you could add some of these synonyms to your list.

When choosing your final keywords/phrases, there are a few points to consider.

  • Are the keywords relevant to your product/service?
  • Can you use these keywords to target specific pages?
  • How many of your competitors are using the same keywords?

1. What is SEO?

Posted June 4, 2009 by manorquarry
Categories: Web Site Optimisation

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Getting Visitors onto Your Site

What is SEO?

How do you get your web site noticed? How are visitors supposed to know that your web site even exists?

The answer is through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

To begin this series on Web Site Optimisation, we are going to have a look at SEO, what it is, what it does and the best ways to implement it yourself.

The Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) definition of Search Engine Optimisation is as follows:

“Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimising a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.”

The majority of traffic on the web is driven by search engines (Google 37.3%, Yahoo 29.7%, MSN 15.8%, AOL 9.6%, Ask Jeeves 6.0%,Other 1.6% (Source: ComScore Media Metrix)), rather than someone typing your URL directly into the browser, or through links on other web sites. Whether your site provides content, services, products, or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users.

Google and other search engines are specifically set up to deliver relevant results and direct the user to the most appropriate pages according to the searched term. Your aim is to increase your site’s visibility and make it search engine friendly to improve traffic to your site, therefore receiving more business for your company.

Optimising your site and getting high up in the search results requires you to work hard on the content of your site. Unfortunately there are no shortcuts to take. Results will not be seen overnight, it takes time, and this is something to be aware of so do not to get disheartened or give up after one week.

The founding principal of optimising web pages for search engines hinges on the search terms, otherwise known as keywords. These are the words which you want search engines to associate with your pages, so that when someone searches using them, your page is one of the top results. It is important to understand and use keywords in your page title, meta descriptions, image alt and title tags, and the content on your site. We will discuss keywords in more detail in the next post.

When getting started, an important factor to consider is physical location. Search engines are increasingly attentive to the location where the content is hosted, so to give yourself as much chance as possible of appearing high in the results, host your web site in the nation that you are targeting.

You need to make your web site stand out from your competitors. You want to have good content that is updated regularly, unique and specific to your product/service and that will appeal to visitors. If you succeed in this, you will get return visitors, who may even link to your site, which is invaluable when it comes to higher ranking on search engines.

It is not necessarily about the amount of links you receive to your site however, it is the quality of links you receive. You will get more credit getting links from getting links from more respectable web sites such as CNN or BBC. Linking is possibly the hardest part of SEO to implement, as it is ultimately out of your control.