What happened to 2008

Eh? I have been fairly busy in all of 2008 and the start of the year but back to now with the great news that we have a great new Ecommerce Web Design & Digital Agency called Channel 6 Multimedia www.ch-6.co.uk.

Some of our designs this year are great and will be added to the new Channel 6 website which will be launching very soon!

Channel 6 will be a one stop shop for Web design and Internet Marketing with Com.Motion eventually becoming part of Channel 6.

More posts to follow.

Ten Secrets for Pay Per Click Success

Have you been frustrated by the performance of your pay per click campaigns? Here are ten tips to consider to get real results – cutting down unnecessary costs and still reaching your target audience.

1. Consider ALL popular search engines. Yes, Google is by far the most popular in the UK but because of this it is the most competitive. Yahoo and MSN still have their share of UK internet users and are less competitive. Give these a try too.
2. Consider regional advertising rather than national for Google. If you have a product that will appeal to specific regions of the country or if you have a very limited budget then select only one town or county. Your cost per click will be much lower.
3. Include the relevant keywords in your ads. Make sure your ads closely match what the searcher is looking for by creating targeted ad groups. Yes, Google looks at the amount you are willing to pay for top placement, but it also looks at quality. An advertiser can pay less and still get to the top position just because their ad more closely matches what the searcher is looking for.
4. Analyse. Analyse. Closely monitor pay per click campaigns using the free reporting tools available within Google Adsense, MSN, and Yahoo. Also consider an analytics package such as Google Analytics so that you can track which campaigns are generating sales.
5. Choose keywords carefully. Consider choosing the less competitive keyword phrases that really describe your product. There are plenty of free keyword tools out there so take advantage of them.
6. Use appropriate landing pages, rather than the home page. You want to give the potential customer the product or service they want immediately, rather than make them search around your website.
7. Use the advanced tools provided by Google including phrase match, exact match, and negative keywords to eliminate unnecessary clicks. There are excellent online tutorials available if you are unfamiliar with these tools.
8. Have a unique selling point? Display it in your listing to ensure that you stand out over your competitors. Give your customers a reason to click on your ad instead of the others. However, be careful about lying or making grandiose statements, as customers won’t buy if you make promises you can’t keep.
9. Tweak. Tweak. Tweak. Analyse your reports and try some the following:
   1. change the ads that aren’t performing
   2. Remove keywords that are generating traffic, but not sales.
   3. Try a few new keywords.
   4. Ensure that you keep a record of any changes and their impact
10. Focus your campaign. If you have hundreds of products concentrate your pay per click marketing on just a few products rather than adopting a blanket approach. A small campaign is much easier to manage at the start.

Increase Sales Through MySpace?

Want to tap into the myspace community and create your own company page? This social marketing site should certainly be considered as part of the Internet Marketing mix for companies wishing to build relationships with young consumers. However, winning friends in this community can be difficult especially for traditional companies that may be thought of as “uncool” by the young myspace crowd.

Musicians, artists, and celebrities all gather huge numbers of friends on myspace, as their talents can easily be showcased using the website, but how does a more traditional, less sexy company get in on the action?

There are certain types of companies that seem to be a more natural fit in the myspace community. Trendy brands like Redbull, or Mini appeal to the young myspace community and are likely to win friends. Popular nightclubs, shops, and restaurants would all easily have success. Charities have lots of young supporters who will be happy to provide their backing through myspace.

The key to success on myspace is to write good content. This content should be creative, unusual – off the wall – anything to get people talking about your company.

This content should provide either (a) some information that the myspace community would find useful or (b) just simply entertain them by providing unusual videos or animated games for example. Offering friends on myspace some sort of discount or promotion is another way of getting noticed.

Companies that currently use informative and entertaining content to win friends on myspace include:

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Apple – the company created 3 separate Myspace pages to market the IPOD Nano range – green, blue, and pink. Apple has been using social networking effectively to market itself on other sites, including Facebook, where the company offered 10 million free itunes samplers to friends on the site.
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Wendy’s – the American fast food chain created a character called “Smart” for the Myspace community. Smart is a 28 year old male from New York who is “square”. He likes all things square and “has no hair”. Smart has 67055 friends on Myspace. Check out http://www.myspace.com/wendysquare
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Proctor and Gamble – the company tries to be more subtle about promoting their “Secret Body Spray” by focusing their myspace page on pop star, Rihanna and peppering the text with references to the “Secret Body Spray” tour. Rihanna mentions her favourite scent of body spray – Vanilla and also promotes their full range of scents from Peach Shimmer to Tropical Radiance. Secret body spray has over 31,000 friends in the Myspace community.

Objections have been voiced by consumer groups because it is difficult to tell the difference between a genuine member and a marketer. Fooling potential customers may win you friends in the short term, but consumers value honesty and it is best for companies to come clean about who they are and what they are promoting.

Creating a simple ugly page with basic company information on myspace won’t do your company any favours. If you are willing to put in some time and effort however myspace offers a tremendous marketing opportunity that your company can’t ignore.

Myspace is not right for everyone – especially businesses that sell to the B2B market. For the business to business market you may want to consider other social marketing sites where the focus is more on business relationships. For example www.linkedin.com is a popular medium for business networks amongst others.

Discover Your Google Links

Google has recently updated Google webmasters central with an excellent tool that allows you to discover who is linking to you. You can now use web master tools to view a greater selection of links to you web pages.

The information provided is more detailed and it can be downloaded to a spreadsheet to allow you to analyse accordingly. The Google webmaster team have split the links into 2 categories to make it easier for you; these are - external and internal. The official Google Blog has clear descriptions to what this means and can be found at this location - Google Blog.

All you have to do is verify ownership of your Google web master account to access this information. Click on this link - Com.Motion's Links page to see a snapshot of our links on Google webmasters central.

Search Engine Optimisation Part1

Does the text on your homepage start with “welcome to my website”? This article will explain how text like this can negatively impact upon your search engine rankings, leaving customers with no hope of finding your products or services on the web.

Over the next few newsletters, we will discuss search engine optimisation and the different areas businesses should consider in their online marketing activities.

This month we will discuss one main area of search engine optimisation - web page optimisation. Com.Motion will demonstrate how to optimise individual Web pages on your website so that your products and services are found by potential customers. Com.Motion will use an existing client and one of their products as part of this example:

The Business – The Funky Group
Website Address – www.thefunkygroup.co.uk
Product – Pink GHD Straighteners – found on http://www.thefunkygroup.co.uk/cat-3-subcat-9-product-481

Focusing on one product I can identify the areas that make up the product’s page and highlight how search engines, such as Google, spider or index it.

Web Page Optimisation
Each Web page contains a number of areas that can be managed to help increase online visibility for search engines. These include:

1. Title Tags
2. Description Tags
3. Webpage Body Content
4. H1 Tags
5. Alternative Text Tags

Title Tags
The title tag should be about 60 character long including commas, spaces and full stops and is the most important of all tags for search engines. The title tag can be seen at the top of the screen depending on which web browser you are using. All websites should have unique title tags for each individual Web page, as this is a fantastic opportunity to market your business brand and the specific product or service your company is offering. Therefore, title tags should include your brand, product or service and key search terms and should highlight the page you are trying to promote. For example the Funky Group has labelled their GHD Pink Straighteners page as follows:

If you search using the following terms, you will find this product ‘GHD Pink Straightener’ on page 1 of Google for the business The Funky Group.

• GHD Mk4
• New MK4 Styler
• GHD New Mk4 Pink
• GHD Mk4 Pink
• Pink Mk4 Styler
• Pink Mk4 Straightener

It is imperative to use your chosen keywords near the start of the title tag i.e. GHD Mk4 Pink. There are many other searches that a customer could use to find hair straighteners and these other terms could be incorporated into the title tag and webpage. However, based on research, these terms were considered the appropriate keywords and phrases to use at the time of this product launch in October 2006.

If you have a website that incorporates many Web pages, consider the following for your title tags.

1. Create a unique title tag specific to every single page of your site
2. Use the most important keywords early in the tag – GHD Mk4
3. Use your company name in every tag - towards the end for branding
4. Think about key search terms or phrases (what are people going to search for)
5. Avoid sales pitches and slogans

Description Tag
The description tag is not displayed anywhere on the web page itself and is hidden in the website code; however some search engines index it. A description should be around 150 characters long and should be a simple sentence that includes the specific keywords of the product or service that you are discussing on the specific page. The description tag for the GHD Pink Straighteners is below:

META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Buy GHD New Mk4 Pink Professional Ceramic Hair Styler & Straightener from The Funky Group online shop"

Webpage Body Content
Body content is the actual written content on the web page itself. The Web page body content should discuss the product or service that you are trying to promote within the first two or three sentences. Below are the first three sentences from the GHD Pink Straighteners Web page body content:

“GHD Mk4 Pink Professional Ceramic Hair Styler & Straightener - the Holy Grail of Hair Styling Tools. These are the brand new MK4 GHD Pink Professional Ceramic Hair Styler's, what are you waiting for!

Be the first to own GHD's new MK4 Pink Professional Ceramic Hair Styler in sizzling new hot-pink. The 2006 GHD pink styler comes in an exclusively designed roll-mat with all new packaging. With a funky new sleek design, rounded barrel for improved curling and styling, auto adjust for international voltages, stronger cable and a new sleep mode which turns itself off after 30 minutes!”

Highlighted in bold are the product and search terms that potential purchasers of this product might use in their search on Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Additionally, this page discusses and promotes only one specific product which is key for promotional activity.

Header Tags
Header tags are another important area to include keywords in. Header tags are normally displayed on a web page as a section heading. For the Funky Group, you will find that a header tag reads as the following:

H1GHD New Mk4 Pink Professional Ceramic Hair Styler & Straightener/H1

Alternative Text Tags
When browsing a website, search engine spiders cannot read image files unless they have an alternative text tag - “Alt Tag”

The use of an ALT tag provides a text description for images on a page. This feature works when:

• The mouse hovers over the image
• The visual images don’t download
• A screen reader is used

The Alt tag of the image on the GHD Pink Straighteners webpage is the following, keywords in bold.

ALT="New Mk4 Pink Professional Ceramic Hair Styler & Straightener"NAME="ProductImage"

Alt tags are important for two reasons:

1. Search Engine Optimisation
When “crawling through” a website, search engine spiders only understand what an image is displaying if it has alternative text associated with it. Businesses have the opportunity to include key words in their alternative text descriptions, increasing the chances of their website getting found when a customer types in those keywords into a search engine. To achieve the best results on search engines, alt tags should contain of maximum of 70 – 80 characters.

2. Website Accessibility
Under the Disability Discrimination Act, businesses have a legal responsibility to make their product or services accessible to everyone. This includes any products and services promoted online. Failure to do so is potentially discrimination under the Act.

Search engine optimisation is a huge area and this article demonstrates only one aspect of this wide ranging topic - web page optimisation. However, the next article will dicuss other areas of search engine optimisation and why they are equally important to your online strategy.

To discuss other aspects of web page optimisation, please feel free to contact us.