Why Blog?

Why blog for your business?

Blogs have been around for quite a long time, in fact, they have been around since Justin Hall created Links.net, widely accepted as the first blog, in 1994.

Today there are well over 2m blog posts created every day! (http://www.worldometers.info/blogs/)

So, why blog for your business? There are many reasons, each will be considered in turn:

Visitors and visitor conversion

By having a blog, it shows your visitors that your website isn’t dead. It shows them that you value your website and your business. It also shows them you know what you are talking about when it comes to your products or services. By building a level of trust, visitors to your website are more inclined to buy your products or services. This leads to a good visitor conversion rate from your website.

Establish authority and your brand

By writing good content that people really want to read, you are setting yourself and your business as authorities in your field. Let’s face it, you got into the business because you passionate about your products or services. It is this passion that you need to show in your blogs. If you have a great product or service, tell people why they are great.

As you publish more and more blogs, your visitors will come back, to see the next post in the series, or to see what new content you have. This all helps you to establish your authority in your market and promote your brand.

As your visitors communicate with your through comments and receive good quality answers, you will be building a good relationship with those customers. They will see you as someone who cares enough about your products or services and customers to take the time to discuss them. Good customer relationships build good customers for your business.

A good way to release news

Have a piece of news you want to share or launching a new product? Your blog is the perfect way to reach your potential customers. It is far better than your local newspaper for the simple reason that the internet reaches far more people than any traditional newspaper could ever dream of. That is why most newspapers these days have a very active website.

You can build anticipation for your new product by releasing teasers in the days before. This will encourage visitors to keep checking back to see what the product is. This is done very successfully by big companies such as Samsung and others. In conjunction with other advertising, your blog is the perfect place to launch new products or share news about your company.

Help keep your content fresh

You will have visited a website that had old out of date information. In some cases of really old websites, they will even have the ‘last updated’ message showing, often this is years previous.

This is actually the mistake of many many business owners. Pay a lot of money to have a website developed and then leave it sitting there hoping it will bring you money. It won’t!

Like everything in business, the success of a website is determined by the effort you put in. Nobody pays you to do nothing. It is the same with an old website. You will, as many others before you have seen how old the website is, or that the content hasn’t been updated since the year dot. Like those previous visitors, you will just leave without interacting with the business. Not even sure if your email has been sent from the website. This type of website can be compared to the shop that has been closed for weeks. Eventually, people will stop checking if it is open.

People like new things. It is the same with content. If your visitors see that you change and/or update your content regularly, they are more inclined to return to see what is new. This is the exact opposite of what was happening above, where visitors http://imagineear.com/pharmacy/ just weren’t returning.

Google also likes to see new content. Google crawls (its program indexing a website) a website that is kept fresh regularly, even daily. Web sites it determines aren’t updated often may only be crawled 6 monthly or even annually. There is a distinct correlation between how often your site is crawled and the importance Google places on it. The more important websites are moved higher in the Google rankings.

It is vital to keep your content fresh. Both for your visitors and to help improve your Google rankings (other search engines are available). A blog is a perfect way to keep your content fresh. By regularly writing a blog you are ensuring the new content on your website.

How often you blog is up to you. There have been various studies to show that the more you blog, the higher you will be in the Google rankings. But nobody wants to be a slave to their blog! Niel Patel has a blog post to help you decide how often to write a new blog post. Visit the article here: 5 simple steps that’ll help you determine how often you need to blog.

What to include in your blog

As well as your content it is always advisable to include some extras with your blog to make it easier for your visitors to read and to help Google index your blog.

Social media

Links to social media at the bottom (or top) of each post, allows your visitors to share your content if they find it useful. You should always include social media links for Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn, together with an option to send the post as an email or to print it.

High-resolution graphics

The old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words is true. You should include graphics that help get your point across. In today’s HD and Ultra HD world, they should be high-resolution graphics or they will look very nasty on some of the larger screens.

Keywords

Simple subject keywords will help you rank higher. But a big note of caution, Google has some very strong metrics to work out if you are just trying to spam those keywords in your blog. So keep it realistic, for a 300-word blog, you should use your keyword 4-6 times at the most. Instead, the keywords should be used naturally in your blog.

Call to action

Every single thing you do in advertising and marketing should have a call to action. A call to action asks your visitors to do something at after they have read your post. Such as, enquire about your product/services, ask for more information, make a purchase and so on.

It is the call to action that turns visitors into customers.

Final thoughts

A blog can actually be a fun way for you to engage with your customers. As you become more confident with writing a blog, you will find it much easier. It may even be the case that you want to write it more than you had originally intended.

Your blog can help your website stay current with regularly updated content, it is a great way to release news about your business and establish your brand. By including a blog with your website, you will establish yourself as an authority on the subject matter of your business. It will also bring you new visitors to your website that will become regular customers.

Do you want a blog on your website? We can help you. Get in touch now to discuss your blog and your website https://esthetig.com/contact/

Meta Tags

Meta Tags for Marketing

Meta tags have long been used, and misused, to help a website’s rankings. But what are they?

“Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. Meta tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest.”
(Google link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en)

In other words, meta tags are pointers to search engines to help them index and categorise your website.

Have a look at your website, whilst viewing the website right-click on some empty space and choose ‘view page source’ (using Google Chrome, ‘view source’ in internet explorer) you will see a lot of code, but toward the top, you will see something like this:

<title>Web Design North Wales and the UK WordPress Specialist Responsive web design eCommerce Digital Marketing</title><meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>

Content Type

This meta tag is very important to tell your browser the type of document and the charset to use.
The content type has the following attribute values:

Content-type

This is the standard form of this meta, it tells the browser that the document’s content is of a type, in this case, TEXT/HTML and the charset, here UTF-8 is defined, this is the standard western European character set, others include Latin A, Han for East and so on.

Default-style

This version allows you to specify your preferred stylesheet, it must match the link to the stylesheet exactly.

Refresh

It is important to use this version carefully. It will cause the page to fail W3C’s web content accessibility guidelines. This meta is used to refresh the page after a certain period of milliseconds. An example use would be to redirect the page to another.Here the browser will redirect the user to a different URL after 3 seconds.

Title

<title>keyword – secondary keyword – brand</title>

This gives your page its title, you can usually see the output of this on the tabs in your browser or on the top bar of the browser.
You should ensure your keyword or phrase for your page is the first part of the title followed by any secondary keyword or phrase and finish with the brand.
Don’t cram the title with repetition, remember that you are writing your website for real people, not bots and machines. Make it easy to read and keep the length between 50-60 characters.

Google uses your title and description tags to build its listing for your website. Because of this, it is important to make it readable by real people.

Description

The meta description tag provides a summary of what your web page, this should not be between 100-160 characters long. This ensures it is long enough to describe the page but doesn’t go beyond the 160-character limit.

In 2009 Google declared that it didn’t include the meta description as a factor in its ranking algorithm. So why is it important? Google don’t need the description to summarise the page for their bot, it garners that information from the entire page. The description is important to help humans, your customers, visitors, readers etc. So, again it is important to ensure the content is targeted at humans and not crammed with your keywords. You can/should include the keyword or phrase to help the visitors understand what your page is about.

With the title, the description meta make up your listing advert in Google search results (other search engines are available!). Write your title and description to be just that, an advert that provides a compelling copy for real people. It should encourage the viewer to visit your website, nothing more nothing less. Writing an attractive ad is your goal when writing your title and description.

Keywords Meta

These days the keyword meta isn’t really used for marketing purposes. In fact, Google makes it very clear it doesn’t use the keyword meta within its ranking algorithm. In fact, most major search engines don’t use them at all. Some directories may use them but it is hard to find any that do.

One very important word of advice, if you choose to use the keyword meta, do not repeat your keywords over and over. Google will take this as a flag that your website is a spam site and remove your listing.

Unimportant Meta Tags

There are lots of other meta tags you could use such as; keywords, author, geotags, open graph, Twitter data and so on. However, these don’t really have any bearing on your websites search engine optimisation. These tags, whilst helping the way your website or web page is shared aren’t included in the Google algorithm and are therefore unimportant.

Final Word

A lot of systems such as WordPress, Zen Cart, Magento etc. that add your meta tags automatically for you. Don’t rely on these, make sure you are in full control of your meta tags, that way you will know they are working to improve the overall visibility of the website. A good marketing campaign will start with the meta tags to ensure they are working for you and aren’t doing your website any harm. Some systems and, sadly, developers who ignore the meta tags altogether, this is a big mistake. In this case, Google will have a guess and take the title from the first heading and the description from your first paragraph, this can really harm the effectiveness of your website.

Not sure what meta tags you have on each page of your website? Check them now to make sure they are working for you. A good rule of thumb when it comes to marketing is one keyword for each page, there are exceptions to this, but this generally works well for most websites.

Save time and money with a website marketing campaign from Esthetig

Your website should bring you a return on investment

More Info

Internet Facts

that may surprise you

January 2019

World Population: 7.69 billion

Internet users: 4.34 billion or 56% of the world’s population

Mobile users: 63.4% of the world’s population

Social media users: 2.77 billion or 36% of the world’s population

UK eCommerce

18% of all purchases in the UK will be online

The average customer spends a total of £1,600 online

67% of all customers check the returns policy before they buy

Mobiles

53% of all emails are opened on a mobile

70% of mobile users hate mobile ads

80% of internet users have a mobile

$2.73 trillion is expected to be spent online in 2019

Sources: world population: worldometers.info, internet users: internetworldstats.com, mobile users: statista.com, social media users: statista.com, UK e-commerce: pure360.com, mobiles: websitehostingrating.com

Web design basics

Web Design Basics

In the past, I have looked at marketing your website, a very basic HTML course, choosing images and fonts for your website. Web Design Basics is going to guide you through the whole process of designing a website. First things first, let’s get the planning started.

Before you Begin

When looking at web design basics we need to start right at the beginning and ensure we plan correctly and have everything in place.

Strategy > Plan > build > Promote

Strategy

Get your keywords in place (Google has a great tool to help with this here).
What must brand rules must the website adhere to?
Who will be your users?
What is your marketing strategy?

Plan

What information does the site need to give? Here you need to look at databases; what information/data does your website need to gather and where will it be stored.
Create a sitemap for the website – this will help you determine the navigation structure
Put a drawing together of how the overall website will look and any sub-page special features (be consistent though, don’t want your visitors thinking they are on a different website).
What calls to action will your website include? Good marketing practice dictates every page that sells something (a service or a product) must have a call to action – don’t forget even pages such as your contact page may need a call to action, especially if you are hoping to encourage people to sign up to a newsletter.
What is the brand identity for the website? This should match your company in the real world.
Are there any special requirements for the code language? (Will your site be HTML, PHP, ASP etc)
If you are using content-management or e-commerce systems do you require a bespoke system or are you happy to use a robust “off-the-shelf” system such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Zen Cart and so on.

Build

Valid code is vital – make sure that your developer adheres to standards established by the W3 Consortium.
Content Management System needs to be put into place
E-Commerce platform needs to be built
Elements such as movies, buttons, banners etc need to be built a this stage
The database/source needs to be built
Test and implement the site.

Promote

Search Engine Indexing – add your website to the major Search Engines (but don’t forget the smaller niche ones too!).
Search Engine Optimisation – On page optimisation should have been completed in the build stage; but further enhancement of your site needs to be carried out here.
Email and Mailshots are great tools to get the message about your new website across quickly – getting to the top of a search engine for your chosen keyword/phrase will be much more successful if your campaign includes real-world advertising thrown into the mix.
Keyword research – recheck at this point to ensure your keywords/phrase are the most effective.
Social marketing – will you use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc? You should use a selection of these in every campaign for your website – which you will choose may be down to personal preference. But also, consider which your target market is using – if the demographic group you are targeting tend to favour a particular platform you MUST also use that platform.

Marketing Mistakes

Want to avoid the most common website marketing mistakes? Then read on.

When you first have a new website it is easy to fall into common website marketing mistakes. We all know the situation, you buy a new toy for a child at Christmas, by the afternoon they are playing with the box, by Boxing Day it is forgotten and they have moved on.

All too often, we fall into the playing with the box trap. We pay for a new shiny website and invest in some search engine marketing. We sit and wait for all the big business to roll in. By the end of the second day you start to think that there is a mistake, the developer/website marketing specialist didn’t put your website on Google. Your search for your website and your worst fears are proven, your developer and or marketing specialist didn’t publicise your website as it isn’t in the top 10. This is the typical process for a new website owner and one of the common website marketing mistakes.

OK, you may think it is easy for me to defend your developer as I am one. But, unless you paid for advertising space on Google or you are only searching for your company name, you won’t find your new website in the top ten. Just a small aside here. I am always coming across people who have paid to have some marketing carried out on their website where the marketing company informs them the campaign has been successful as they are number one in the Google listings. Indeed they are, for their company name – as I have said countless times on this site, you should be number one on any search engine for the name of your company. Let’s face it your company name and location are unique, as such, it should be number one within any search based on the company name and location – or your business isn’t listed.

Website Marketing Mistakes

I guess the previous paragraph really constitutes as one of the common website marketing mistakes. All too often people are satisfied with top spot in Google or other search engines for their company name and location. However, most people don’t search for your company by name – they search by a keyword or phrase that they think will be successful in returning the product or service they want. However, let’s consider some other common mistakes, as that one is too easy.

Duplicate Content

Calling it copying sounds a little harsh but that is exactly what it is. Don’t fall into the trap of looking at what your competitors have to say, especially those at the top of the search listings. It is tempting to duplicate what they say. After all, it got them to the top right? However, most modern search engines detect duplicated content and penalise your site for copying – based on which one was first. Also, the owner of the site you copied would be within their rights to take you to court!

Things can be a little more subtle, it is one of the more common website marketing mistakes to copy your own content across several pages. It does speed things up if your title and description are the same across all of your pages. However, the search engines will pick this up and rate your site lower as the title and descriptions will have nothing to do with the content of the pages you copied it too.

Wrong Title

This is one of the most common website marketing mistakes people make, they rush to get their site out there without any thought to the title of the page and sub-pages on the site.

The title should be a descriptive short sentence to summarise what the page is about (it must include the keyword or key-phrase for that page).

Field of Dreams

Just like the child in our opening discussion who received a toy and eventually gave up on it. All too often I come across people who have built a great looking website and given up on it too soon.

This is probably the single biggest of all the website marketing mistakes people make. The old adage “build it and they will come” doesn’t really happen in the real world.

Running a website takes work and lots of time and patience. The reason that web marketing specialists charge so much is that there is a lot of man-hours involved in getting a website to the top of the search engine listings.

Website marketing mistakes happen all the time, but this one can be avoided and must be. When you purchase or build a website, you must realise that you need to commit time to promoting the site to get it higher in the search engine listings. It is a long process, a week of work can result in little or no sign that your website is moving up the listings. Then one day, when you least expect it, your site will jump up those listings. But only if you work at it.

Assuming Google is the only one

It is one of the most common website marketing mistakes to believe Google is the only search engine. However, they are the most commonly used:

Google does have a massive share of the market – some 82%, but there are other search engines – Bing, Yahoo to name but a few. Now before you purists start calling foul, I know Yahoo isn’t a search engine, but a directory!

A more important issue to note here than just assuming that Google is the only search engine, is that you must never write your website for the search engines. This is one of the typical website marketing mistakes people new to the industry make. Websites should always be written with your customers in mind, i.e. real people, NOT search engines.

Lack of Keywords

You have come up with a great website and want to get it seen. You have decided that you will advertise your site based on this keyword or that key-phrase. It is one of the easiest website marketing mistakes to make to not include your keyword or key-phrase enough times on the page.

Sadly I cannot give you the exact number of times your keyword or key-phrase should appear in your copy, as this varies from search engine to search engine. However, it should be in the range of 3-7% of the text. Don’t forget to include your keyword/key-phrase in the headings and ALT text of images. Just a small note about ALT texts. They are intended to be a description of the image to ensure that people who don’t display images (such as people with poor eyesight who use a screen reader) can understand what the image is. Please don’t be tempted to stuff ALT tags with keywords – mention them once.

The reverse is also one of the worst website marketing mistakes – don’t stuff your page with your keywords. Please make your website easy to read, it is too tempting to keep finding clever ways to add the keyword or key-phrase to the text. Please make it part of the paragraph, but remember to use standard English rules when writing. Don’t repeat the same word more than once in a paragraph!

One of the best ways of ensuring your website reads correctly is to test it against the Flesch Reading Ease Readability Formula. It sounds, and is, complicated. Fortunately, you can click here to test your text against the formula and read what exactly the Flesch Reading Ease Readability Formula is.

Link Spam

Google ranks your website based on how popular it is in searches. If your site is referred to on a website considered to be an industry specialist, you will receive kudos with the search engines. Building good quality links to your website is a great way to improve your search engine ranking. However, Google and all other search engines will give your sites severe penalties if you have lots of links that are poor quality, this is one of the worst website marketing mistakes. Don’t ever be tempted to accept links from websites that have nothing to do with your industry. Worse still are the links from so-called link farms. These sites are blacklisted by the search engines, because of this your website will also be blacklisted if it appears on those link farms or you have a link to them.

Building good quality links takes time. A simple way to start getting quality backlinks (links from other websites) is to use a blog on your site or use Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. I know you don’t like using these sites, after all, who wants to hear what you had for breakfast! They are, however, a great tool to get your business seen, consider using them. Another way is to look at your competitor’s websites that are in the top ten listings, who links to them? If you can discover who is linking to them, why not ask those companies to link to you also? The worst that can happen is that they say no.

Flash Websites

My final look at website marketing mistakes is to consider Flash websites. Not the ones that just simply look great, but the ones built using Adobe Flash. Essentially a website built using Flash is just an image, a graphic. Search engines cannot see the text contained in images (I know there have been some moves towards search engines being able to detect the text, but generally, they still have great difficulty. Anything that is a block in the path to search engine nirvana is something that will cause a search engine to stumble and not pick up your site.

If you want a website built using Adobe Flash, you should have an HTML version available too.

I hope that this discussion to common website marketing mistakes has been useful. Anything that is considered risky, sailing close to the wind, black-hat, should be avoided, eventually Google and the other search engines will get wise and prevent those methods and websites employing those techniques will also be prevented from achieving their original position. Read what the search engine recommends, that has to be the best start to your ultimate goal and help you to avoid website marketing mistakes.

Marketing