The Robin Hoods of marketing have just ridden into town!

posted by John in June 17th, 2008 
in Recommendation, Seminars   Tags: ,

For the first time ever…the secrets, thinking models, and people that world class brands use to make their businesses’ boom are now available to small and medium sized businesses.

Step Change Communications seminars are taking bookings in Sydney for their first seminar, “Positioning for Success”.

It’s a one day seminar where business owners and marketing people will complete a plan (live in the room) that will take their business to the next level.

Numbers are limited to 20 people to ensure time for one-2-one coaching with the presenters.

Full information is available at:www.StepChangeCommunications.com 

ABOUT STEP CHANGE COMMUNICATIIONS: Step Change Communications is a collective of marketing and communications specialists who are determined to level the communications playing-field. 

Our aim is to equip small to medium sized businesses with the quality of thinking, tools and processes that were formally reserved for big business. In the age of the customer as king, businesses that are not aware of the changing tide of consumer behaviour, competitive environments or emergent technologies do so at their own peril.

 Step Change Communications seminars are constructed with specific outputs in mind to leave attendees empowered to take on the marketing challenges that will cause a step change in business growth. 

For Further Information Contact :

Step Change Communications

www.StepChangeCommunications.com42/156 Chalmers Street, Surry Hills, Sydney, NSWTel: +61 (0)416 454 370

Contact Ashton Bishop

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Peter Dowse launches new website SEOhub

posted by John in June 16th, 2008 
in SEO, SEO Beginners Lessons   Tags: ,

Peter Dowse has always been regarded by me as a guru on Search Engine Optimisation. In particular understanding how the web processes work together as a whole, which I have found out to be the “key” to maximising your search engine optimisation.

What I mean is that SEO is more than just the right key words and meta tags. Peter taught me that it starts by understanding your audience, how they search, what terms they may use in a search engine, why they are using these terms, what they are looking for and making sure that they find that answer on your landing page - not three clicks later. And this was just the start.

The good news is that Peter & Michelle Dowse have just launched SEOhub.com.au which will go into all these topics in detail -  plus some. I highly recommend that you register for their newsletter, and give the site a regular visit to catch up on a few things that you didn’t know. Don’t forget that most SEO techniques can be done by yourself for free. It’s just understanding what needs to be done and how to do it.

So if you would like to learn SEO, visit the SEOhub website.

I will also keep you posted on any great SEOhub releases!

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Site-maps for Blogs

posted by John in April 4th, 2008 
in Online, SEO Beginners Lessons   Tags: , ,

Further to my post on site-maps, I was asked the question about producing a site-map for a blog.

A blog is slightly different from a static website and it does get a little more complicated in regards to site-maps. A blog is a dynamically produced website which is updated through a blog engine which presides online (either on your own host site or on a community site like blogger.com). A blog can be updated through any web browser and therefore is a convenient way for businesses to update products and publish press releases.

Blogger Blogs

Most of the community blog site have an SEO feature inbuilt.  In addition, you can still submit your RSS feed (which is an xml file) to the Google webmaster site. You will still need to verify your site to open a webmaster account. You can do this in blogger by getting a meta tag from Google and editing your blogger template by going to your dashboard, selecting template and Edit HTML. Add the meta tag just after the <head> tag. Once you have verified your account, you add your rss feed as your site-map.

Word-press

Word-press is my choice of stand-alone blogs, for once it is setup it is a breeze to use. Arne Brachhold has produced a plug-in which takes all the site-map hard work out of your hand and automatically updates your site-map each time you submit a post.  Arne’s plug-in and setup information can be found here http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/. Works a treat.

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Marketing without Metrics

posted by Peter in April 4th, 2008 
in Free, SEO   Tags: , , , ,

I heard a great saying the other day… “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. This is true in all aspects of business. When it comes to marketing, the golden rule is accountability. Knowing how much money you need to put in to get X return, and is this return worth it?

The beauty of online marketing is that everything is trackable, therefore accountable. Each click, search engine referral, download or visitor can be logged, tracked, analysed and improved upon. If you don’t have tools in place to manage and analyse your website, you’re doing yourself and your business a disservice.

Followed are some great free tools that will get you on your way to managing your website effectively.

Statistics
It should be a sin to not have stats on your website. Statistics are the road map to your website; they tell you how you can improve your site, get better conversion rates or more search engine traffic. The best free statistics package available on the net today (in my opinion at least) is Google Analytics, and it’s free!
www.google.com/analytics/indexu.html

Heat mapping
Heat mapping is a great way to find out where is the most valuable real estate on your website. If you’re not familiar with heat mapping, it’s a visual representation of where people are clicking on your website. It’s great to determine where you should put advertising, sponsored links or important information.

Crazy Egg has a free version of their heat mapping service. Check it out at www.crazyegg.com

Long tail search terms
If you’re chasing the long tail for your search terms and have a website that has over 100 pages on it, you will want to take a look at www.hittail.com

SEO information
If you want to get easy SEO info about a website quickly and painlessly, then I would recommend checking out the RankQuest toolbar for Firefox. It’s simple to install and makes looking at important SEO elements a breeze. Check it out at www.rankquest.com/download-toolbar.html.

Free photos
There are loads of free photo websites out there but one that I have found to be of excellent quality is www.sxc.hu. Another useful site is www.morguefile.com/

I know this isn’t really metrics but hey, who doesn’t love free stuff, right?

So here are a few free things you can use to improve your website. Enjoy!

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SEO for beginners - Lesson 2 - Creating a sitemap

posted by John in April 3rd, 2008 
in Free, General, Recommendation, SEO, SEO Beginners Lessons   Tags:

Creating a sitemap for Google & YahooThe first question is why do I need a sitemap?

The answer is that you don’t… unless you want to be crawled by Google & Yahoo in a more efficient way and in a more timely matter. A sitemap contains information about your entire website and instead of just telling Google & Yahoo that you have a homepage, you can make sure that every page in your website is submitted in a way that forces Google & Yahoo to crawl them all. Submitting a sitemap to Google also seems to decrease the time it takes for Google to initially come and crawl your site. I once read that you should try to imagine that the Google Bot (the thing that crawls and indexes your web) as a train and the sitemap as the train tracks.

What is a sitemap?

Simply speaking a sitemap is an xml file that contains information on all your web pages and links. The beauty about sitemaps is that they also supply Google and Yahoo on information such as change frequency, priority, date created and more. It also helps the search engines understand the structure of your website and how it is used.

How do I create a sitemap?

Thankfully there are plenty of tools to help you generate sitemaps. My favourite is a free service offered by auditmypc.com. Another benefit of using programmes like this to create sitemaps is that they will pick up any bad links that you have on any of your pages, which you can then go back and fix. Auditmypc.com also has a great video tutorial to guide you through the setup process. Once created, all you have to do is copy the xml file to your website’s root directory and submit the URL address (see below).

Create a sitemap.xml file for your website using auditmypc free sitemap generator and place this file in your rootdirectory (e.g. www.mywebsite.com.au/sitemap.xml):

www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

Submit your sitemap.xml file location to Yahoo & Google (e.g. http://www.mywebsite.com.au/sitemap.xml):
explorer.search.yahoo.com/submit/
www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

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