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July2015

Why bother with social media?

Most businesses know that they need a social media strategy, but they are not always sure about what value social media brings to a company. Here are five ways in which social media benefits your business:

Increased brand awareness

A business is a brand and the more people recognise your brand the better chance you have of converting them to customers.
Often people first hear about your company on a social media site, rather than your main web site, so a better impression via social media will likely lead to more people visiting your profile being converted into customers and clients.

Improved loyalty

Your Twitter followers and your Facebook friends are a community. Providing quality information will increase their loyalty to your brand.

More conversions

The goal of marketing is to convert interested people to customers. On social media you are building a relationship with your followers. They may not convert to customers straight away, but the more interaction they have with you, the more likely they are to purchase your product or service.
Each social media activity is a chance for people to react and this increases the chances of conversion.

Increased website traffic

Visitors to your web site are usually people already familiar with your company or perhaps they have found you through the search engines. All social media content that contains a link to your site is an opportunity to attract visitors to your web site.

An added benefit is that these inbound links will help your website rankings.

Improve perceptions of customer service

Social media sites are communication channels, where people can comment on your business. They are also the means by which you can promptly address issues or concerns. This will demonstrate your commitment to quality customer service.

These are just a few of the many reasons how social media can benefit your business.



Three Google SEO myths

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the art of optimising your web site to rank high in the search engines. There are a number of SEO myths that are (more…)



The power of video

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How the use of language can help your website

The language you use on your website can significantly affect the rate at which visitors are converted to customers.

Here is a brief guide to (more…)



See your social media followers as a community

Businesses often refer to people who buy their products and services as customers or clients. When it comes to (more…)



Eye tracking shows how people read web pages

Quality web content is a key element for a business web site. Another essential aspect is the page layout and design. It is important to know how visitors look at web pages. The best method to discover this is eye tracking, a process involving sensors attached to the top of the computer monitor that detects where people are looking at.

Images

When a new web page loads, the first thing that many people notice are the images. There are two general types of images, pure decorative ones, and ones that are judged by the viewer to contain important content. Eye tracking research reveals that often people just glance at decorative images, but spend more time scrutinising content images.

On an e-commerce site the important content images are photos of products. On business websites people take notice of pictures of the company executives as they mean that the company is not a faceless organisation, but run by real human beings.

How people read web pages

Eye tracking research has shown that a web page is read word for word by only around sixteen per percent of the readers. What the rest do is quickly scan a page to find what interests them.

The implication of this is that your web content needs to direct readers to important sections. This is done in several ways including, headings, highlighted words and bullet lists.

Headings and sub-headings should be meaningful so that the reader quickly knows what text below the heading is about.

Bullet lists draw attention to the key points of an article.

Highlighted keywords in different colours or containing visual links are also effective in capturing reader’s attention.

When creating a web site, it is important to have an insight into how people read web pages.



Why social media is important

In the digital age, businesses need a social media campaign in order to (more…)



What is high quality content?

Search engines focus on helping people find quality content. Google and other search engines do not disclose exactly how they judge the quality of website content in order to rank websites in their search results. Google does however have guidelines which, if followed correctly, will help your site have a high ranking.

Here is a summary of Google’s main recommendations:

Trusted experts

Google is looking for information that can be trusted and this means it should be written by an expert or trustworthy enthusiast on the topic.

A high ranking web site needs to be regarded as a reliable source of information with original unique content not found elsewhere.

Give both sides

If a subject is controversial then acknowledge that there can be two sides to a story, and give both views to enable readers to reach their own conclusions about the topic.

Relevant

All content should be relevant to the subject matter of the site. Off topic articles and articles that are too similar should not be included on the site.

Websites should be aware of the interests of their readers and this will inform relevant content.

Grammar and spelling

As well as articles being free of factual errors, there needs to be no spelling, grammar and stylistic errors.

Too many ads

Whilst advertisement can be a good revenue stream for a web site, too many advertisements surrounding an article distract readers and will be penalized.

Not too short

Articles should not be too short, unsubstantial or lacking specifics.

Remove low quality content

One page of low quality content can negatively affect the ranking of the whole site, so it is worth while removing this content.



Three SEO mistakes

All businesses want their websites to rank high in the search engines. They use search engine optimisation (SEO) to help achieve this. However, not all SEO strategies are beneficial. Here are three SEO tactics to avoid:

Keyword stuffing

If your site is about red widgets, for example, then you want your site to feature at the top of the search engine listings when someone searches for the keywords “red widget”. You may be tempted to use these keywords as many times as possible on your website home page. This is known as keyword stuffing.

Above all, using this tactic will result in your web page content not reading well. Google is interested in quality content and will penalise you for text spoilt by keyword stuffing. Four to eight occurrences of a keyword on a page are sufficient.

Cloaking

One way people try to get around bad content due to keyword stuffing, is to hide keyword text so that it is not seen. The easiest way to achieve this is to use white text on a white background to make it invisible, this is called cloaking. Search engines recognise this technique and will punish you for cloaking by ranking your site lower.

Bad links

There was a time when you could list your website on directory sites whose only purpose was to provide links to other web sites. These became known as link farms. When ranking your site, Google does take into account links to your site, but it only ranks you on quality links from sites relevant to your subject area and, much like with cloaking, will penalise you for using link farms.

The art of SEO is about knowing what to avoid as well as the best SEO tactics to employ. For expert advice on ethical and effective SEO, contact us at the Pressroom.



Optimising your social media content

It’s an issue many of us have, making sure that the content on our social media accounts stays up-to-date and relevant while retaining its impact.

Naturally, it’s understandable to take the logic that your posts must be optimised. However, the issue is, with so many different social media sites, how  (more…)