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SEO – If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix it!

December 26th, 2009 · SEO

Let me paint a picture.  Your web site is running at 30 visits a month and you need to raise your profile online.  You hire someone to do so and in a matter of many months they raise your monthly visitor count to 3000+ unique visitors and all for relevant search phrases of 2-3 words each, and a low-low bounce rate.  What do you do next?

One thing I can tell you for sure is to not redo the work already accomplished and which has led to positive results, because the level of monthly visits is only going to head south.  Experience tells me this when you see the so-called ‘benefits’ of others taking over your own work.

As a client, unless you are constantly monitoring the performance of your site and you know how well it is doing, it is easy to fall prey to so-called SEO gurus who tell you they can further improve your performance, or greatly enhance it.  Who would say no to such claims?  And until you really put those claims to the test you can’t be sure.

The reality is that SEO is just one part of a larger marketing picture, and once you have had benefit of that initial hit, you should start thinking beyond that equation and see about how you can draw potential customers in by creating useful content specific to your range of keywords.

It’s always easier to pay someone to improve the relevance of your site to search but it takes real effort to actually add content to your site that will widen the net and drive potential traffic.  The cost of setting up a blog, or social media profile from which you can blog, micro-blog, or post relevant items, is NIL, and the advantage of doing so huge, but being convinced of actually making the effort is another story.

I suppose what I am trying to say, more succinctly, is that wholesale change will have a potentially negative impact on your traffic, after an initial hit and improvement of SEO, and that you need to think above and beyond the component of SEO as part of your online marketing strategy before you seriously start thinking about monkeying around with your site and its relevance as has been set and achieved already.

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Gwilym’s Disloyalty Card – Consumerist Counter-Culture

December 17th, 2009 · Opinion, SEO

The Dis-Loyalty CardNot to paint a bad picture, I actually love the idea of Gwilym Davies’ (current World Barista Champion) dis-loyalty card, but for everything I love about it, I also find it, for all its harmless fun, kinda missing the point.  What point is that?  You might ask.

Maybe there is no point to it and it is just for fun, but it’s an interesting commentary and view on the whole notion of loyalty and loyalty cards in particular.  For everything one can hate about loyalty cards, they are not the only part of building loyalty with customers, but they form an easy part of thanking those customers who do grace your business with the pleasure of their repeat business.

I wrote, not so long ago, a piece about customer loyalty and how to generate it, and though this is a fun idea and might drive traffic initially, I don’t think it is a great way to enhance long term visitor numbers through the door of specific businesses, and surely at the point where it sits on all the counters of the grouped coffee shops it just becomes another loyalty card.  Perhaps the disloyalty card is just like one of those wicked design ideas that look awesome but when it comes to their real world application rather fall flat.

On the flip side though, I like the idea of diversity, especially when it means highlighting quality, and diversity, rather than being spotlighted in a 60′s counter-culturist fashion should be celebrated and that, by ganging together in a ‘coffee panthers’ kind of way, the caffeine percolating one-stop-shops could offer something more solid and cool to their new and existing customers.

In reality though, I am likely over-analyzing the entire shebang and of course the notion of this collective dis-loyalty will spark the public imagine and be a run away success.  We all know how subversive and zany those Shoreditch, Dalston and East End types love to be!

So really.  Who does have the best coffee house in the ‘hood? Replies below …

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FWA: Site of the Day – the15reasons.com

December 9th, 2009 · Work

Congrats to my fellow stinkers!  The 15 Reasons, built with Hyper & Naked for Sony PS3 in the Nordic marketplace has scooped the much vaunted FWA Site of the Day award for 9th December ’09.

The site built in flash, with an HTML alternate site with base information about the PS3, comprises of 15 videos and interactive games, along with filler video, demonstrating to viewers why the Playstation 3 is such a great product to buy.

The award for the15reasons.com sees us at Stink Digital notch up our second FWA this year and seems as if we are off to a great start.  I wonder what is in store for 2010.

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Proof-Reading Your Posts – Easier Said Than Done

December 9th, 2009 · SEO

It’s always shocking when you write a blog entry, publish it, and then come back hours later to re-read it and find it is littered with misspellings and grammatical errors.  Even more so when you know it has already been read by multiple blog visitors.  So what’s the Vincent top 10 formula for ensuring sure you don’t make yourself look like a 7 year-old non-genius?

  1. Don’t read, just glance.
    When you write and read repeatedly your mind becomes numb to the actual words and although casting your eye over the words as you read, your brain is really just reciting what it remembers and you will easily miss typos.  Trick #1 therefore is to look for the RED underscores in your text editor.  This at least catches the most obvious howlers.
  2. Check for conformity.
    Read through the titles etc and make sure they are all styled the same.  Are they all initial caps? Do they all end with a full-stop?  Make the styling for our various markers along the way consistent.  If nothing else it makes the overall blog posting look a whole lot better.
  3. Wait …
    They say patience is a virtue right? True enough, but when you have just polished off a 1500-word posting, and you want to get it published ASAP, waiting is the last thing you want to do.  Even if you hold of 5-10 minutes before doing a final read through, those 10 minutes would be well served in the grand scheme of things.
  4. Keep re-reading.
    Even after you have published the post, keep reading it over and over, in your head and out loud to catch anything.  The more times you read the post the greater the chance of catching things.  People won’t necessarily tell you later when things are wrong, and going through older posts proofing them is a real pain.
  5. Preview it in situ.
    Use the lowly ‘Preview’ button and review the text & graphics you have just added for your post in the overall design of your blog.  This fresh setting might just allow you to catch things that you wouldn’t quite have noticed before.  The difference in the two stylings between the edited and live/preview versions on-site can make all the difference.
  6. Enlist help.
    Get some friends or colleagues to proof for you, WordPress even has ‘Editor’ roles and ‘Pending Review’ status.  Everyone loves to have a sneak peak and to provide opinion, so why not harness that power in the form of ‘free’ proofers.  Who knows they might even tell you where to cut back on your verbose descriptions!

So there you have it, 6 golden rules for making sure your blog posts sparkle and you don’t ever look like an illiterate junkie again!

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Rather Pointless Auto-DM Conversation on Twitter

December 8th, 2009 · SEO

Here is an example of why auto-DMs are mindless, rude, and the quickest way to get you unfollowed, blocked and reported for spam.

Pointless Auto Direct Messages on Twitter

Why bother using crappy auto direct message tools on Twitter when they are only going to make you come across like a complete idiot.  Surely the whole point to the social web is that you are sociable and that you engage with your audience and actually have real life conversations!

This dude might be a graphics zen master but his skills in other areas are definitely lacking.  I suppose it is no wonder his Twitter username is @rudezen.

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