Is your website Optimised or are you just being Optimistic?

For many businesses the focus when starting out on their Internet campaign is the design of a great looking website, a website that not only looks good but also reflects the right image for the business. However, it is also very important that the company website lists well in the major search engines and many businesses quickly move to measuring the value of their website in terms of the number of visitors to the website. Why, because what is the point of having a great looking website if no one can find it and it attracts only minimal traffic. Businesses quickly become aware that increased levels of traffic can potentially lead to potential for increased sales and market profile.

One thing to consider is that over 80% of all Internet traffic comes from the major search engines with Google, Yahoo and MSN currently responsible for the vast majority of all Internet traffic. With such an overwhelming amount of traffic coming from the search engines, it makes sense to put a lot of effort getting your website noticed.

Regardless of how you measure the success of your website, the bottom line is that to succeed on the Internet you are going to have to bring more visitors that are looking for the information, content and/or products that you are providing.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

Bill Limits EU Data Roaming Charges
Greater protection to prevent mobile phone and computer users from running up large data bills when overseas has come into force across the EU.

New rules mean that users will be automatically cut off when their monthly bill for using the internet abroad reaches 50 euros (£41), excluding VAT. Customers will receive a warning when they have used 80% of this limit. They can set their own monthly cut-off point by contacting their provider.

Accessing the internet via your mobile phone while abroad is called “data roaming”.

The move follows cases where people built up massive bills by watching videos or downloading music while abroad. “There will be no more bill shocks for tourists or business travellers surfing the internet with smart phones or laptops while in another EU country,” said the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes.

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Government to Axe ‘Unnecessary’ Websites
The government is to conduct a review of all 820 of its websites, Cabinet Minister Francis Maude has announced.

A report by the Central Office of Information has revealed that the government spent £94m on website development and running costs and £32m on web staff in 2009 – 2010.

The UK Trade and Investment website averaged 28,000 users per month but cost over £4m to build said the COI.

Each site visitor cost the government £11.78 according to the figures.

Around 16% of government departments did not know how their own websites were being used by tax payers, and almost a quarter were not aware of the running costs, according to the COI report.

In 2007 the BBC reported that the government was to axe 551 websites, protecting 26 from closure.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

China to Get its Own domains
Chinese people should soon find it easier to browse the web as domain names written in Chinese win approval.

Net address overseer Icann has approved the creation of domains that use only Chinese characters.

The decision builds on earlier work to create internationalised domain names (IDNs) using with non-Latin characters.

The first IDNs were for Arabic scripts and Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the first to register domains using them.

Icann said firms in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan would soon be issuing domains for people and organisations within their countries that are written with all Chinese scripts.

“One fifth of the world speaks Chinese and that means we just increased the potential online accessibility for roughly a billion people,” said Icann head Rod Beckstrom in a statement.

He said the decision goes some way towards addressing the contradiction that 60% of the net’s users are non-native English speakers yet the dominant language online is English.

This is because when the domain name system was set up addresses, such as the familiar .com and .uk, were written only with Latin characters.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

French find E-Mail Passwords in Google Street View Data
Google scooped up sensitive data such as passwords when putting together its Street View service, suggests an early look at the information.

The examination was carried out by French data protection agency CNIL as it decides whether to prosecute the search firm for gathering the data. The data was gathered as Google logged wi-fi hotspots to help it develop location-based services.

Previously, Google said there was “no harm, no foul” in collecting the data.

CNIL, like many other data protection agencies worldwide, asked Google to hand over copies of the data it gathered to find out if privacy laws had been breached. CNIL chairman Alex Turk said Google handed the data to the agency on 4 June following an official request and it was now in the process of combing through the reams of information.

Google said it was working with the French authorities and many others and would delete the information it had gathered if asked. “We have reached out to the data protection authorities in the relevant countries, and are working with them to answer any questions they have,” a Google spokesperson said. “Our ultimate objective is to delete the data consistent with our legal obligations and in consultation with the appropriate authorities,” added the spokesperson.

Google has defended its collection of the data saying it was done “accidentally”. Google boss Eric Schmidt said there was “no harm, no foul” in collecting the snippets of information. “Who was harmed? Name the person,” Mr Schmidt said at during an interview at the company’s annual Zeitgeist conference held in Watford in mid-May.

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Follow the Code to Stay Safe Online
The internet opens up a wonderful world of entertainment, opportunity and knowledge. To help your children to enjoy it all safely, the UK Council for Child Internet Safety has developed the Click Clever, Click Safe code.

The code has three simple actions: `Zip it, lock it, Flag it’.

It’s easy to remember when talking to children about online safety and it’s designed to help keep them safe on the internet.

ZIP IT    
Keep your personal stuff private and think about what you say and do online.

BLOCK IT
Block people who send you nasty messages and don’t open unknown links and attachments.

FLAG IT
Flag up with someone you trust if anything upsets you or if someone asks to meet you offline\

TaLk to your kids about the Click Clever, Click Safe code — to help them to enjoy the internet safely.

For advice on internet safety go to www.direct.gov.uk/clickcleverclicksafe

Apple & the IPhone 4 Launch
Apple tried to put the genie back in the bottle at its sold-out Worldwide Developer Conference, WWDC, when it launched the latest version of its iPhone , the iPhone 4.

The problem for the company was that the technology blog Gizmodo had stolen a lot of Apple’s thunder weeks ago when it released a flurry of photos and videos of a prototype of the phone which was left in a bar.

Even though Steve Jobs acknowledged the event indirectly, he refused to utter Gizmodo’s name and tried to imply he wasn’t bothered by the whole affair by joking with the audience “Stop me if you’ve seen this before”. In a bid to raise expectations above those set by the blog, he quipped “Believe me, you ain’t seen this.”

Next Generation Internet Explorer offers Faster Browsing
The next version of the Internet Explorer browser will offer much smoother graphics than its predecessor, Microsoft has said. IE9 will offer faster JavaScript performance and support for the HTML5 standard, meaning that it won’t be limited by the capabilities of plug-ins such as Adobe’s Flash.

IE9 will be able to work a computer’s graphics processor to its limits, offering much faster and smoother visuals, the company said, after it released a second developer preview of the browser.

“The IE9 Platform Preview shows the significant performance gains that web pages enjoy when a browser takes full advantage of the PC’s hardware capabilities,” said Dean Hachamovitch of Microsoft. However, the company has previously stated that IE9 will not be compatible with Windows XP and will only run on the Windows Vista and Windows 7 platforms.

Meanwhile, a report from web-monitoring firm Net Applications showed that Microsoft is losing ground in the browser market to Google. IE’s share has slipped to under 60 per cent while Chrome’s share grew from 6.1 per cent to 6.7 per cent in April.

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Importance of Pay per Click Landing Pages
Setting up a Pay per Click campaign, such as Google Adwords and attracting visitors to your website will not necessarily create sales for your particular product or service. Having a poor quality landing pages could mean click thru’s – and therefore your money, are wasted by the client being taken to a page that does not provide the specific information the visitor is looking for.

Your landing pages should be a direct reflection of the copy used in your Pay per Click advert. Picking one generic page of your website to send every visitor to is not the right approach and, as I’ve already said, it’s likely that, with this approach, youl could well be losing potential sales and money with this approach.

Having your visitors land on the home page of your site is not the most effective strategy for any Pay per Click campaign. Look to have a targeted landing page to send your PPC clicks thru’s. Not only do you want the page to reflect the details from your Pay per Click advert but it is very important to have some sort of call to action items on your landing page.

 If you want the visitor to call you don’t assume that they will know to do this. Make the contact telephone number and other contact details stand out as much as possible in multiple areas of the landing page.

Put yourself in the shoes of the person clicking your ad and anticipate where you would like to land. What would you think of the landing page? Would it induce you to part with you hard earned money?  Does the landing page offer the product advertised in the Pay per Click advert, is the page attractive and is there a call to action which is both simple and tested. Make sure it works!

Finally, check to make sure link is not broken on your advert. You would be amazed at how often this happens and it is a sure fire way to put a potential visitor off from visiting your website as well wasting your PPC campaign budget.

In short, if you want to make the most of your Pay per Click campaign, make sure you have good quality, advert specific landing pages set up.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

Making a Website Work for Your Business
In a perfect world, SEO would be developed while a website is still in infancy. While this ideal situation rarely occurs, the following steps summarise the process as it should occur every time.

Key Phrase Strategy and Website Development
Before building your website, you must have a keyword strategy. Select key phrases that are relevant to your business and receive an acceptable level of traffic. It is often appropriate, particularly for smaller / new businesses, to avoid the most competitive phrases where the level of competition you would be up against would be significant. You can always develop to these phrases as your business grows.

Once you have selected your keywords you can begin to develop the website using basic SEO site structure principles. These include the Meta titles, Meta descriptions, linking strategy, clear site navigation, optimised coding and great content.

Web Analytics
Try to include some web analytics platform that will allow you to monitor users are coming from and what search terms they are using. One free example is Google Analytics which provides a reasonable level of feedback on the traffic levels and sources to your website. This information will enable you to monitor and update your website to try and achieve the best results possible within your market sector.

Driving Traffic to the Website
Obvious really, but look to get your web pages listed in the main search engines as quickly as you can.  You can submit the website, but also look to get your URL linked to from websites already in the search engines. Subscribe to directories and develop a strategy for effective link building. Remember, with links, it’s about quality, not quantity; a handful of links on top-notch sites is worth hundreds of links on irrelevant, insignificant sites.

Incorporate off site and traditional marketing methods. For example, include your web address on your stationary and have it displayed on the side of company vehicles.

Consider employing the services of an Internet Marketing specialist to help with the Search Engine process. At Direct Submit we regularly see clients who have spent thousands on a website wrongly assuming, the traffic will just come, only to find their lovely looking website is not SEO friendly and they have no identifiable SEO strategy in place.

Monitor, Evaluate & Refine
After you campaign has run for a time, review and look to assess how the project has been working. Are your keywords receiving the most traffic and bringing in the best ROI, is your website listed in the major search engines and do you need to update /refine the website content.