Ask people to vote for you!

Edge of the Web is

Vote for us!

 proud to have been nominated for an award as the Best Business Provider 2010, by The Best Of Warwick.

However, that pride will turn to embarrassment and self loathing if we don’t actually win the thing.

So we’d like to shamelessly solicit your vote.

Obviously we can’t provide you with any sort of incentive (Hannah has already eaten all our muffins), but if you’ve dealt with Edge of the Web and been pleased with our designs, our prices, our service, our blog or even our tea-making skills, then please head on over to http://www.thebestof.co.uk/local/warwick/awards  and vote for us.

We’d really appreciate it.

And maybe in return, we could provide you with a free cuppa if you stop by the office (providing that Tom has finally done the washing up).

So, you’ve just spent your hard earned on a (hopefully) shiny new website, and it’s time for the search engines to start sending visitors through to your website, right?

“I’ll just navigate to my favourite search engine, tap in a term that is related to my company and shazam! ”

Nothing.

And worst of all? It’s a list of less good competitors with rubbish websites and a bunch of unrelated services.

Time to put your expectation management hat on, and here’s why.

Search Engines (i.e. Google) are not the internet. They are websites.

Google (and Yahoo, Bing etc) have done a smashing job of becoming a first stop online for almost everyone, but fundamentally a search engine is a commercial online service that make money by helping people find their way around the internet (through selling advertising). Whilst their agendas are fiercely commercial they are still reasonably complimentary to the needs of owners of good quality websites.

The agendas of search engines are heavily influenced by spammers.

In life and business, lots of money is made by understanding  rules and exploiting loopholes (see any lawyer, tax accountant or benefit cheat for more info). The world of search engines are no different. They were created using rules intended to support the successful exposure of good quality information, and inevitably these rules were flaunted and abused by people who wanted to make money with rubbish websites. This abuse happened to such an extent that search engines now find it hard to trust what new websites have written on them. One way of overcoming this barrier is by having trusted and established websites link to your website. This is like a vote of credbility. The more votes of credibility you receive, the more confident a search engine will be to trust your content and suggest your website to it’s visitors.

(please note: any good idea you may have to get links artificially has already been thought of by spammers and search engines alike…don’t bother unless you really know this industry)

So to get to the point…when is your website going to show up in Google?

Well, if you just use the “site submit” services that the search engines offer, it can take many weeks to get your site reviewed (crawled) and, even when it has been reviewed, there is no guarantee that your site will be in the top 100 results for any given search term.

If you can get some links from established websites, you can get reviewed in just days (or sooner), and you are much more likely to appear more highly in the results.

But it’s very hard to get links from popular and established websites (which is kind of the point). So you can make a choice:

1) Sit and wait for your website to be found

or

2) Get out there and start building links to your website.

• Mention your website in discussion groups (don’t spam them!)
• Ask related websites to give you a link (don’t spam them!)
• Call in favours from old companies and contacts who have websites (spam away!)
• List your website on web directories
• You can provide articles to related websites
• You can do something newsworthy which will get your website mentioned around the net
• You can start a blog and compliment or insult some of your industry peers

There are lots of ways to get links back to your website. As a rule, the ones that are provided by third parties for just a few (hundred) pounds with almost no effort on your part are a total waste of time, however good the rhetoric.

Today is forecast to be the busiest online shopping day of the year. Some call it “Mega Monday” others “Cyber Monday”…I’d call it an opportunity for all online retailers that use pay per click marketing.

If you are advertising on search engines using PPC marketing, it might just be worth upping your bids. The value you extract from PPC marketing is a result of the number of clicks multiplied by the rate at which those clickers actually buy something minus the cost of acquiring those clicks. I anticipate both the number of clicks and rate of purchase to be noticeably higher today, therefore you can probably increase the cost of acquiring clicks and still make a great return, with the added bonus of increased sales volume.

Happy hunting!

There are a million good reasons why a contact us page is a must for every website. Here are 6 of them

a contact form provides versatility

1. 24/7 availability!
   You want your customers to be able to get in touch with you when it suits them. A telephone number is of course a “must”, but is by no means an alternative to a contact form. If you are prepared to answer the telephone at 4am then all power to you…if you are not, then a contact us form captures vital information from willing enquirers for you to follow up at a suitable time. Your website can literally be working for you whilst you are sleeping.
2. Protecting your email privacy!
   Search engines scour the internet for new websites and information….so do spammers! A contact form will protect your email address from unwanted attention, whilst retaining your availability to customers.
3. Intelligent routing!
   Do you have different departments or availabilities in your company? Your contact form can route enquiries through to the relevant people without making your customers think too hard!
4. Essential information!
   A contact form lets you structure the information that your customers provide. Do you need to know an organisations size or an enquirers location before you call them back? You can ask (or insist) people give you this information with a contact form.
5. Intuition!
   People expect to find a contact form on a website. Having one is part of a larger ethic towards keeping your websites simple and intuitive.
6. Customer discretion!
   Lots of people surf the internet when they should be working. Those same people may like to make subtle enquiries about a service or product, but are not at liberty to pick up the phone (the less cynical side of me says perhaps they are in a library). A contact form gives these people the option to request a call back or more information at a time or in a manor that suits them.

Photos courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons license from users eyesogreen

Landing pages are a way to instantly connect with visitors to your website, significantly increasing the likely-hood they will end up purchasing from you (or do whatever your websites intended goal is).

In certain forms of online marketing, such as pay per click or buying adverts on other sites, you can control the pages on your site to which your visitors are first taken. Quite simply, the more relevant your page, the more likely you are to retain your visitors attention.

They say (whoever “they” are) that you have around 3 seconds to convince a visitor your site is worthy of attention before that visitor hits the dreaded “back” button. Don’t make people work hard to give you their custom! Take them to a relevant page at your first opportunity.

All too often I click on an advert (in Google for instance) after a key-phrase search and arrive at a seemingly unrelated page. It’s possible the site I arrive at will provide the product/service I am after, but it’s more probable that I’ll just exit the site at this point.

If a visitor has already told you what they are looking for, by way of a key-phrase search in Google, or a specific offer on an advert, and you still send them to a less relevant page on your website then quite frankly you are being lazy and deserve probably deserved a bounce (a bounce is when somebody finds your website but then exits before viewing another page).

So a landing page is a page on your website specifically designed to capture the attention of your visitor and guide them through to the product or service they want to buy.

When you create a landing page for key-phrase based advertising…put the key-phrase in at the top of the page as a headline (this tells people they are in the right place instantly). Then below this headline put all the products or services you provide that relate to this key-phrase.

The same goes for an online advert. If you are advertising a particular product or price point…link through to a page on your site that concentrates almost entirely on this offer. Make the offer the headline on the page.

I can recall innumerate instances where landing pages have increased the performance of my online advertising by over 300%. If you are spending £100, £1,000 or £10,000 on your marketing, that’s a hell of an improvement.

This is such an easy tactic, it’s relevant for your customers, it’s profitable for you and it’s likely to be incredibly cheap to implement. So why doesn’t everyone do it? Probably because they haven’t thought of it…but now you have, so no excuses!