Mass Media Design Blog

Lisa Barone writes a piece here about SEOs actually doing SEO rather than just reading about it.

It’s interesting because by searching the internet, you can find a lot of SEO tips that you can apply to your website.  Unfortunately, there is also a lot of poor information out there, which is why it is often more cost effective (and safer) to pay for an SEO company to do the work for you!

Lisa’s point about stopping reading SEO blogs is fine to a point, but you also need to keep abreast of developments in the SEO world.

At MMD, we read SEO blogs, develop our own techniques and also learn from watching our own SEO experiments.  By combining all of those elements, you get a great SEO service!

Those of you who regularly visit our home page at Mass Media Design will have noticed that we have a new website design.

It was time for a change - we wanted a fresher design but we also wanted to increase our conversions as well so we’ve implemented a few little features that we’re expecting to work for us.

Now that we have a design on our home page that we’re happy with (although there will be some small ch

anges of the coming weeks) we’re going to apply them to this blog so that we have a nice harmonious brand between the two sites (and maybe even our website marketing blog too).

I’d love to hear your comments on the new design - do you like it or do you hate it?  What would you change?  What do you like about it?  

I’m a strong believer in getting feedback and not being too precious about what feedback you get.  You’ll never please everyone but if you please no one then you’re in trouble!

So please leave your comments on the new site design and let us know what you think!

This is a supporting article for our sister website - Small Business Website Marketing.

N.B: These steps are for Microsoft Outlook 2007.  For other versions - try this article: http://www.lockergnome.com/windows/2006/06/13/add-a-signature-to-your-messages-outlook-20022003/

Creating a signature

Click on the Tools menu item and go to Options -> Mail Format -> Signatures

Click on New

Give your new signature an identifying name and click on OK.

Design your signature in the bottom of the page.

For example:

Gregor Spowart

Mass Media Design

http://www.massmediadesign.co.uk - Generate new leads and enquiries from your website

Creating a link

To turn the website address into a link, highlight the address and click the button that looks like a chain link.  

Type the website address that you would like them to go to when they click the link and click OK.

Once you’re happy with the signature click the OK button and then click OK on the Options window.

Inserting a signature

When you have finished writing your email, place the cursor where you wan tthe signature to go and click the signature button.  Select the signature that you want to insert.

Every good SEO knows that to be a good SEO, they need great SEO tools.  At MMD we’re always writing scripts and other tools to help us get great results for our SEO clients. Sometimes we make them available for everyone (such as with our Yahoo Site Explorer parser).

We’re currently working on a tool which is giving us an incredible insight into the competitive landscape for out target keywords, and it’s giving us a whole bunch of avenues to explore for our clients.  I don’t want to give too much away at the moment but here’s a screenshot to give you an idea of what to expect.

If you’re interested in being a beta tester then please email me at gregor.spowart@massmediadesign.co.uk or leave a comment on this post to register your interest.  If you have any testing experience then that’d be great but what I’m really looking for are SEOs with experience of using tools to help their clients.

Today we re-launched our Mass Media Design blog with a new design and a whole bunch of changes under the covers.

As you’ll see below, the move from the old blogging platform to the new hasn’t been without its problems and in the process we haven’t been able to move the comments to the new blog.  So please comment on any articles in the blog that you have an opinion on and lets get the comments ball rolling again!

You can start by letting us know what you think of the new design!  I like it - it’s simple, and doesn’t have anything to do with our brand but it’s sleek and makes the text nice and easy to read.

Apart from the design changes, the other huge difference is that we’ve finally moved away from the Subtext plaform and moved to Wordpress.org.  This isn’t generally an issue for you, the reader, but for me it means less hours are spent scratching my head and I can have a much lower heart rate.

Subtext is a very clever piece of software and has been highly engineered to the nth degree.  This is great in some ways, but in terms of trying to customise it for your own use, it’s a total pain.  This is bad enough for me, a Microsoft Certfied Software Developer, but for a non-techie user it’s nigh-on impossible.  It was also starting to be a little flaky so it was time to move.

Wordpress is fantastic.  Simple to use, with masses of support and thousands of clever plug-ins and skins.  If you want to start blogging for your business (and you definitely should be considering it!) then Wordpress is 100% the way to go - I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Anyway, we’re here now.  Please add your comments to our blog and if you have any feedback at all, both good or bad, then please send it to us!

The title bar is the most important element of your website with regard to on-site SEO.  What follows is a very simple guide on how to change it for SEO purposes.  This was originally written to accompany the Website Marketing Newsletter.  Visit us here to sign up for your own copy.

If you want to make the changes yourself then you will need access to the web server that your website is hosted on and the HTML code.  If this doesn’t make any sense then you’d be better going to your website design company.  However, if you have access to both of these, then read on.

Open up your HTML file for the page that you want to change.  If you don’t know any HTML then it’ll look like a load of strange characters and words.

Thankfully, you don’t have to delve too far into this mess to make the changes you want.  Somewhere near the top, you should see this word: <TITLE> with some words after it and then another word </TITLE>.  These are called ‘tags’.

This tells Internet Explorer to display all of the words between <TITLE> and </TITLE> in the title bar.

All you have to do is change the words between those tags to the keywords that you want to display.

For example, change

<TITLE>Joe’s Accountants</TITLE>

to

<TITLE>Accounting Company in Reading.  Tax Accountants</TITLE>

Once you have made the change then save the file and upload it to the correct location on your web server - you should see the changes immediately so if they don’t appear then you’ve uploaded to the wrong location or your browser is caching the web page. Try clearing your cache in your browser.

I’ve finally lost patience with Subtext so have taken the opportunity to move to WordPress.

Subtext is good, but it’s huge, a nightmare to skin or make any configuration changes too and it’s started to be a bit flaky lately.  Plus I wanted to have a completely separate blog so have take the opportunity to install WordPress.org onto a nice new web host.

You can get to our new Website Marketing Blog here

I’ll still be proving great website marketing tips so please add the RSS feed from http://www.websitemarketing.co.uk to your favourite readers.

For more information on how to move from SubText to WordPress, visit this link.

This blog will stay here for the time being and I’ll probably post Mass Media Design specific entries here.  And I’ll keep providing special high value SEO tips in our MMD newsletter.  Click the link below to subscribe to that and get the inside knowledge on how to get your website sailing to the top of the search results!

How to makes sales through your website

Nearly every company has a website, but only a very small number of companies are generating regular leads, enquiries and sales through their websites.

In this article, I’m going to show you how you can make your company website work for your business and start earning you lots of cash through enquries and sales.

What is the goal?
Firstly, you have to start with the end in mind. What do you want your visitors to do? Do you want them to buy something? Then the end goal is them clicking on the ‘purchase’ or ‘checkout’ button. Do you want them to call you to discuss your services? Then the end goal is them clicking on an ‘email us’ button or a ‘contact us’ page.

Can they find the goal easily?
Once you have a goal then you have to make it as easy as possible for them to reach it. If you want a phone call then put your telephone number in a prominent location on EVERY page. If they have to click to find your number then it’s extra effort for your visitors - some people won’t do it and you’ll have lost them forever!

If you sell lots of products then have a sensible navigation system so that they can choose (for example) Tools -> Drill Accessories -> Masonry Drill Bits. Or, even better, give them a search function where they can just type in ‘drill bits’ and then choose from a list of products with a short line or two about each product.

In the results, make sure that the killer sales pitch for each product is in the results. Does this drill bit last twice as long as the competiton? Then make sure that you tell them in the search results. You want to make sure that people can find what they want with the least amount of clicks and hassle. It’s up to you to encourage them to stick with their journey through your site otherwise they’ll give up.

Convince them that they have to buy this product or service
It’s all very channeling them towards a goal but they’re going to have to want your product or at least have an interest in your service. When someone comes to your website, you literally only have 2 or 3 seconds to catch their attention before they go elsewhere. So whatever the killer aspect of your service or product is, it has to be right their in front of their eyes. It has to be the first thing they see.

Will your product make them loads of money? Will your service save them time? Will your product make them more happy? TELL THEM!!! If they think that they need or can’t live without your product or service then you’ve won them! But they won’t think that if you bore them to death with technical details or irrelevant details.

This fantastic article from one of Europe’s top marketing experts tells you how you can sell your products or services. Read it and try to apply it tells you to the text on your website. “How to sell anything”

An example

It might be helpful to compare this example to your own website. Does your website grab your attention and direct you towards a goal like the following text does? If it doesn’t, then you need to fix it!

Get their attention: The first thing they see - “Our product saves our clients at least £3000 EVERY YEAR”.
Build on their curiosity: “We all have to spend time doing X, but our product means that you can do it in half of the time.”
Make it desirable: “For a limited time, we are offering this product for a special reduced cost of £xxxx to our website visitors”.
Make them carry out an action: “Call us now on 0123 123123 to find out how much money we can save your business!”

Simple - and all in 4 lines! Now go to your website and see if your website has the same impact. If it doesn’t then think about how you can fix it. Most importantly - make sure that you actually DO something to fix it. If you don’t, then it’ll NEVER work for you!

I’ve been using Google Chrome now for a few days and I really like it.

I’m a bit behind the times with posting a review but I wanted to take a few days to get used to it and see how I found it. So this is more of a considered review rather than first impressions.

Having said that, I think that for me, the first impressions still stand.  It’s fast, nice to use and seems to be stable -  I haven’t had any crashed yet.  Interestingly I was ready to blame it for my computer crashing repeatedly after I’d installed it but that turned out to be Outlook having some issues of its own - thankfully now fixed.

One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned in the reviews is what it feels like to use. It’s nice. Going from Chrome to IE shows just how clunky IE is!  Chrome is smooth, sleek and works like you’d want it to work - minimal buttons, minimal clicks, minimal fuss.

I haven’t yet used it for any development purposes but the thing that I really like is the ‘Inspect Element’ function.  A quick click and you can see the HTML and the styles applied to a certain element.  That’s very handy!

I also like the fact that they’ve maximised the screen size available to the web page.  I didn’t realise how much of my screen was taken up by various toolbars (Stumble, Delicious, Google) in FireFox but there we go. 

The only thing stopping me move from Firefox completely is the lack (or non-existence) of plug ins for Chrome.

Google is obviously hoping to grow this area and it looks like they’ll be using this site to do it http://www.chromeplugins.org/.  I just hope they somehow manage to keep the stability and maximum screen availability.  3rd party plugins can easily affect the speed and stability of the browser and it’d be too easy to install a few toolbars that then take up a large area of the screen.

It’s still early but hopefully the plugins can gracefully integrate with the browser.

For what it’s worth, I’d like the Delicious, StumbleUpon and SEOQuake plugins please!

As you probably know (in fact, it’s almost impossible to avoid it) - Google launched a new web browser on September 2nd called Google Chrome.

The implications for Firefox are pretty immense since the early techie adopters form the main user base for Firefox.  These same people are the people most likely to move to Chrome, at least in the short term. 

It’s early days, but judging from the website statistics that I gathered from my blog, Google has managed to get about a 6-7% market share at the expense of Internet Explorer (down 1%) and Firefox (down 5%). 

This clearly isn’t representative of the population, since the people that come to my blog are more likely to be of a techical nature and be early adopters. 

But a 7% share in early adopters of a beta product is a good start.  I personally use it for simple browsing but I still use Firefox because I use the plugins on a daily basis for my job. 

It’ll be interesting to see how things develop - the main challenge Google will have is to try and get those people away from Internet Explorer.  Marketing it as a simple, reliable and fast browser is a good start.

Update: Another source points to Chrome having a 1.12% market share, which is probably more accurate in the global sense.