Internet Marketing Nottingham

What is SEO? A handy guide

2011-09-19T03:26:00.000-07:00

Confused by SEO? Find it all a bit confusing and over-complicated? Check out this handy little video from Search Engine Land

External linking strategies

2011-07-21T07:13:00.000-07:00

Came across this video this morning and it offers up some interesting points in the external linking debate that is often discussed when planning a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.

I think the 2 approaches discussed here demonstrate how the internet and subsequently, online marketing has changed over the past few years. Perceived wisdom was to keep all your ‘link juice’ for yourself and your partners and build a fairly defined yet disconnected mini-network, exchanging links but excluding anyone who could be a competitor on the SERPs. This has changed somewhat as the web has become more ‘social’.

With the advent and growth of sites such as Twitter and Facebook, linking to interesting and engaging content has become as much of an aspiration as writing original content on your own site. The works favourably in a number of ways:

it can help position you as an expert with their ‘finger on the pulse’
subsequently people may follow you for more insider knowledge
linking to larger sites or more popular accounts can sometimes result in a link back
in turn, this can put you on their radar and may develop into more interaction
clever use of anchor text and web copywriting can actually make another’s content into a positive contribution to your own site

Personally, I’m all for sharing information, links, infographics, videos and anything else that inspires. Obviously you need to be careful about the anchor text that’s used and how prominent someone else’s content is on your own site but done correctly, it can be massively important and helpful for your own web presence.

What do you think? How do you handle external linking?

The vendor/client relationship

2010-10-21T02:42:00.000-07:00

A great video that resounds very loudly with me! It's amazing how many people actually do business like this and expect you to just play along...

Matt Cutts talks .coms in UK search results

2010-06-01T01:22:00.000-07:00

A nice little video from Matt here talking about why you see .com websites appear in search results from the UK. It seems that some people think that you should only see .uk domains appearing, or at least, priority being given to them.

Personally, it makes absolute sense that if a .com is UK focussed and the most relevant/quality result then absolutely it should appear. I personally have a mixture of .com and .co.uk websites (sport massage Nottingham for example), focussed entirely at the UK. Of course, I'm careful that each site is clearly UK focussed in its content and has been identified in Google Webmaster Tools as being a UK site so should see no reason why they shouldn't rank well for people searching in the UK.

Monster Screen Prints

2010-04-29T03:47:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd write a quick post about a company run by a friend of mine who are the leading t shirt printers in Nottingham, Monster Screen Prints.

They have a huge amount of experience of screen printing and t shirt printing, especially for bands. Some of their clients have included Pitchshifter Lawnmower Deth, Tigertailz, Sabbat and many more. You can view the whole gallery here.

I've known the owner Steve for many years and he's printed all kinds of stuff for me in the past, so if you have any t shirts that you need printing or anything else that you would like screen printed, they really are the top guys to go to.

Google Facts and Figures

2010-04-26T05:45:00.000-07:00

Just found this really cool infographic on the Pingdom site - enjoy.
(The original can be found at http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/24/google-facts-and-figures-massive-infographic/)

Graze.com - my new favourite website!

2010-04-19T04:40:00.001-07:00

The internet is full of great ideas, often fairly simple concepts with make your life that little bit easier whilst bringing something extra to your daily life. One such site is www.graze.com.

The concept is very simple but the execution is truly excellent.

I'm terrible for snacking throughout the day and despite my best intentions, often end up eating less than ideal foods at my desk. Graze helps to improve your snacking habits by delivering to your door a box of nuts, seeds, dried or fresh fruit based on your personal preferences. You can choose to have one a day, one or more a week or just one every now and again. It's entirely flexible.

Beyond the basic concept though, is the excellent execution of the website, branding and food box that arrives in the post. From start to finish it really is slick, professional and above all great value for money.

I've set mine up to deliver a fresh box every Monday morning - what a great start to the week.

Give Graze a go for free by using discount code 171DBLP. you'll get your first box free (worth £2.99) and then your second box at half price. Bargain.

Scene Photgraphy Time Lapse Video

2010-03-29T02:44:00.000-07:00

Here at Michon, we use Scene Photography for a lot of our studio and location photography work. The results are consistently excellent as their recent award win for Best Creative Nottingham Company 2009 recently recognised. Check out their blog for examples of their work including this captivating time lapse video:

Scene Time Lapse from Scene Photography on Vimeo.

A new chapter begins

2010-03-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

So after 3 years working in the Lace Market Nottingham, I've started a new chapter by joining Michon in Radcliffe-On-Trent as Head of Digital. I'll be calling on all my years of experience in the fields of web design and online marketing to help Michon grow our digital offering for existing clients and promote ourselves to new potential clients.

Michon are one of Nottingham's largest design agencies with a very impressive client list including E.ON, Ronseal, BT, De Montford University and many more. We're based in absolutely fabulous offices in leafy Radcliffe-On-Trent, a mere ten minutes from the city centre.

Find out more about Michon by visiting our website: www.michoncreative.co.uk.

I'm anticipating making more use of this blog in my new role, so keep checking back with me to see how things are going.

Cheers

Long time, no blog!

2009-11-05T02:57:00.000-08:00

Well, for the first time in a long time, I've found myself with enough time to actually write a blog post!

It's a bit ironic how poorly maintained this blog is, seeing as I'm such an advocate of our clients using blogs regularly for their promotion. I can thoroughly appreciate it when they come back to me saying that they don't have enough time to write original articles on a regular basis! Bearing that in mind, I've come up with some suggestions for how to keep your blog fresh, with minimal effort, using examples from some of our clients:

1. Comment on news or media

A great example of this was our client Sorcit who are product design consultants based in Nottingham. To keep their blog up to date we suggested commenting on Dragon's Den and Starck's Design For Life, the day after they aired on BBC. This proved extremely easy for them and very interesting for those of us with an interest/background in design.

2. Keep it short
Don't worry about writing a 500 word completely original piece about your industry or area of interest, often shorter, more focussed blog posts are more effective. They're also easier to read and digest for busy people on the move. Check out Globus's Learn Russian blog for short sharp, easily written posts

3. Busy doing nothing

If Twitter has done nothing else, it has suggested that there is beauty in mundanity! If you've got nothing exciting to say, just comment on what you're currently up to - you'd be surprised how often this can turn into something interesting.

4. Serialise
If it suits you better, write a longer article but rather than post it as a single article, break it down into smaller chunks and then post these once a week or every few days. You can create interest if you present these as a series and promote each one through your Twitter etc account as you post the latest part. Newson Gale's static electricity blog demonstrates this.

5. Retweet

If you've got nothing new to say but have read something interesting on Twitter or another blog, just share this link with your readers with a bit of an introduction. It's good to share! See our accommodation blog which rounds up news across our leisure sector clients.

So I hope that there is something there that might help you to keep your blogs fresh and up to date without compromising your day-to-day business or adding more pressure to your life!

If you've got any more suggestions of how to make blogging quick and efficient, please let me know.

Rich

Page Rank Sculpting - To sculpt or not to sculpt?

2009-06-18T07:41:00.000-07:00

Page Rank Sculpting is something that I've not actively practised but have heard many other professional SEO practitioners swear by, so I was very interested when I came across this article by the inimitable Matt Cutts.

Page Rank Sculpting is the practice of manipulating links within your website to try to ensure that important pages have a higher Page Rank than less important pages. Matt uses this diagram to demonstrate the perceived wisdom of how Page Rank cascades down through a website:

This can be controlled by using the "nofollow" tag to exclude less important pages from this PR distribution, therefore distributing that precious PR to the key pages only. In theory this sounds great and although Matt makes it clear that it's not quite as simple as that, should we not all be doing this? Here's his advice - should you Page Rank Sculpt?:

I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

This really reinforces my own personal approach to SEO. There are lots of little tips and techniques out there to help improve a site's ranking but at the end of the day it comes down to the fact that the most important things are building the site in the most logical, search engine-friendly way possible and writing original, high quality content that people will want to read and link to.

Damn, that's not very catchy is it? Perhaps I need a quirky 2 word phrase to describe it... any ideas?

Website Translation

2009-06-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

Metafocus has spent the past year or so developing it's offering into international markets focussing on multilingual SEO, internal internet marketing and now into website translation.

As our portfolio increases with every Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian website that we've built and optimised, we've realised more and more that having accurate translation by native speakers of each language really is key. Subsequently, we're now offering ourselves as a website translation agency specialising in translating and interpreting text from both a marketing and search engine optimisation perspective using native speakers.

This service comes into play when performing keyword research too as it's vital that the right words are chosen. For example Metal Improvement Company offer a service called "shot peening" which is a specific term in english but has 6 or 7 interpretations in Chinese! By working with our native translators and the client's Chinese distributor we were able to choose the right word and optimise the site accordingly.

If you're looking for quality website translation from native speakers, give us a call on 0115 9470011 or visit the Metafocus Gloabl Website.

How long does it take to rank in Google?

2009-05-14T01:55:00.000-07:00

Ah, the million dollar question!

Many people aren't aware that a new website is unlikely to appear in Google's results pages straight away on launch. There is no official quarantine period from Google and no official word why websites aren't publiched immediately but the common consensus is that they wait for a site to somehow prove itself by receiving links from other established websites over a period of time before appearing in the listings.

But how long does this take?

Typically we say that it takes between 3 and 6 months before a site becomes listed, based on our experience which appears to be backed up by a recent survey described here: http://www.creativemindsearchmarketing.com/rank-well-on-google.

oF over 200 respondants, 35% agreed with the 3-6 month timescale whilst 19% experience a 6-9 month delay before a new site appears. Over at Metafocus we'd be very disappointed if a site took over 6 months to rank for any of it's keywords. Obviously this would be dependant on the competitiveness of tHe keywords and the content on the site itself but the 3-6 month bracket seems much more realistic.

If you're interested in learning more about search engine optimisation visit the Metafocus SEO Nottingham website.

And for the next challenge!

2009-04-13T13:24:00.001-07:00

One of the things that I like about my job is the fact that it is different day-to-day, week-to-week working on our range of clients. As I look back on the Bank Holiday and having a short break, what have I got coming up this week?

1. Get a site ranked in Google UK
So why is this speeding offence website for a local motoring solicitor not being seen by Google as a UK site?

2. Rebuild a Chinese Website
After some, ahem, problems with our client I've got to rebuild this chemical suppliers' site... again!

3. International Link Building
An exceptional opportunity to quote for some truly international work, but how do you accurately quote for multilingual link building? By link? By time? Hmmm...

And on top of that we've got a new team member joining, senior staff away and umpteen projects to finish off... It's gonna be a busy week!!

Why I hate the new Nottingham City Council Website

2009-03-04T09:12:00.001-08:00

Nottingham City Council recently relaunched its website after much local advertising and promotion - but is it any good? Here are my thoughts:

1. Web 2.0 = Wow!
I can imagine the brief now: "Everyone likes MySpace and Facebook, let's make a website like that! In fact just copy the BBC website, that'll do!"
It really smacks of a generic "Web 2.0" template where the content takes a back seat to widgets letting you link to your Facebook or Gmail. People visit a Council website to get local information not to be a portal for their email etc - know your place NCC!

2. Supporting Local Business
So what was the reasoning for using a company in Plymouth to build this? There are many, many established and successful web companies in Nottingham that could've built this travesty - whatever happened to using local businesses eh? Not really "On our side" are you?

3. Adsense!!??
"I know, let's make some money out of this website - these Google ads look great!".
No, no, no, no....

4. Lack of Direction
The site seems to have lost track of what information that people want to see. Don't worry about making a cool Web 2.0 site, get the information in an accessible format that people can quickly find. Too many different navigation items and distractions, not to mention the Google Ads - keep it simple please.

But, it is a LOT better than the previous site which was truly terrible! And fairplay to NCC for trying but I think it's missed the target somewhat.

What do you think?

Metal Improvement Company

2009-03-04T02:16:00.000-08:00

We started working with Metal Improvement Company back in December 2008 and designed and built them a suite of new websites for the UK and Chinese markets to sit alongside the established .com website.

Beginning with a completely fresh visual design that takes the brand in a new direction to its previous online presence, we've designed everything with SEO and online marketing in mind. For this particular company, it was felt that their visitors would find and browse the site through two main routes:

- by market sector e.g. aerospace, automotive, medical etc
- by service e.g. shot peening, laser peening, engineered coatings

This is reflected by the template layout which has clear navigation by market sector on the left of the screen beside a flash movie illustrating some key areas of their work. Beneath this is a list of the main services offered along with a brief description of each.

We've also created a Wordpress blog to act as news module. This feeds content on the UK site and the two Chinese websites (Chinese and English language), using categories to filter news to each site.

We've been working on the SEO for a couple of months now and the site is beginning to rank for some of it's chosen keywords which, considering it's a brand new domain, is very pleasing. I fully expect there to be a big jump in rankings very soon as teh site becomes indexed to a greater degree.

Get a tan at work = awesome!

2009-02-13T01:36:00.001-08:00

Wrong, just wrong!

2009-02-10T07:42:00.000-08:00

And I though owning a 'Blogger' T-shirt was a step too far...

http://mashable.com/2009/02/10/wordpress-tattoo/

Potassium Permanganate Revisited

2008-11-24T06:18:00.000-08:00

I posted sometime ago about a new client of ours, Chongqing Jialing Chemical Products Ltd who are chemical suppliers of potassium permanganate and other chemicals. This is a Chinese client looking to develop their overseas client base particularly in the UK.

As is often the case with new SEO work, particularly for sites inherited from other web designers, in this case a Chinese agency, we avoid making structural changes to webpage names and navigation wherever possible so as not to confuse the search engines who are newly indexing the pages. In this instance we have decided to duplicate the product pages to make the URLs more search engine friendly as the keywords are particularly competitive.

For example, the potassium permanganate page has been renamed http://www.jialingchemical.com/products/detail/potassium-permanganate-KMnO4.html to make sure that the search engines associate the right keywords with the right pages. We've done the same for the potassium hydroxide and chloroacetic acid pages too.

The site is already being indexed far better now than it was before and we're hopeful that we can get it ranking high up in the Uk search engines.

Metafocus featured in the Nottingham Evening Post

2008-11-14T06:42:00.001-08:00

We've been working on Chinese websites for some time now as part of our expansion into international internet marketing and have been getting some good PR as a direct result.

The latest of this is a half-page article in today's Nottingham Evening Post focussing on our China connections: http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/news/City-s-China-link-starting-pay/article-472766-detail/article.html

"Lace Market-based global online marketing company Metafocus was one of 16 businesses from the East Midlands to visit Shanghai and Ningbo – the location of the University of Nottingham's new campus in China – to promote the best of Nottingham to Chinese businesses.

They represented the city's strongest sectors and some of its best hopes for building wealth and jobs in Nottingham, according to the city council."

Check out one of our latest clients, Jialing Chemical Company potassium permanganate chemical suppliers from Chongqing, China.

Internet Marketing and SEO in a recession

2008-10-20T03:07:00.000-07:00

The news of the past few months has been dominated by one thing only - the global economic slowdown and recession. More and more, we are seeing evidence that business is slowing down, companies are spending less and money is generally becoming tighter. Just this morning, The Ernst and Young Item Club, economic forecasters, are quoted as suggesting the UK economy will shrink by 1% in 2009 before recovering in 2010 to begin growing again.

How does the recession effect internet marketing and search engine optimisation?

We have a real range of clients here at Metafocus, from the small independant trader relying on ecommerce conversions to larger companies looking to raise profile and online enquiries alongside other advertising media, but, in all instances we are seeing particular trends as they become more focussed on expenditure and activities:

1. SEO Expenditure Goes Up!
This sounds a little unusual but we've actually seen a change in spend for some of our clients with a shift towards online marketing as opposed to more traditional media such as magazine advertising. One of our clients, a well known local hotel group commented that 3 months of SEO was the same price as one magazine ad!

SEO and online marketing is very cheap and above all, monitorable. We often recommend PPC to our customers as this is completely trackable and scalable and really does let you know what is working and what is not.

2. Targets Become More Focussed.
For many people, SEO is still seen as a "dark art" with the exact techniques and approaches hidden from view. Although we're much more open than that, many of our clients are happy to step back and let us do our thing with little or no interference. However, as belts get tightened we're noticing that the demands placed on us are becoming more focussed and need to be measured more accurately. And to be honest, this works for us too!

Knowing exactly how many orders we need to get through the door, which products or services to target and which target markets are the most profitable can only make our job easier. Which leads onto..

3. Conversion is a 2-Way Street.
As much as some of our clients take a back seat when it comes to internet marketing activity, often we are out of the loop when it comes to how much business is actually being done. Ecommerce is easy to measure, after all, it's all about how many sales you make and how much money you bring in but what about a B2B company who measures success by the number of enquiries they have coming in - how is this measured?

We've seen a few examples now of clients building internal systems to measure enquiry sources and which of these convert into customers, to help them work out what is working and what is not. Are they getting enquires through web searches or PPC or referrals? Is this the right sort of business for them? Again, all this helps to inform what we do and make our job more focussed and effective.

4. Expenditure in Some Sectors Increases.
Despite the doom and gloom surrounding the housing and holiday markets predominantly, we've noticed that people are actually spending more on smaller luxury items such as clothes, jewellery or even, ringtones as a treat in lieu of a holiday, new car etc. This is actually good news for some of our ecommerce customers who are seeing an increase in business for smaller, more luxury items. Harnessing this through increased PPC is actually a good idea for some people right now, despite the news of a downturn.

So, internet marketing is thriving then?

Although the slow down in business is obvious to see, we're actually seen an increase in some of our online marketing business with customers working that bit harder to make their businesses grow online. Internet marketing and SEO is cost effective, quick to react and above all else very trackable.

At times like these, dropping advertising and promotion is not an option but changing focus to becoming more targetted and focussed has got to be the number one priority... and internet marketing and SEO is perfect for this.

The impact of YouTube

2008-10-13T02:40:00.000-07:00

A colleague of mine, Ed Lewis has been experimenting with YouTube as a way of getting very quick #1 rankings for specific product terms. Search for "Kenwood Energysense JK450" in Google and you'll see the video right at the very top with a blog link a few places further down.

This could be a very useful tool for us here at Metafocus as we have video cameras and an edit suite which we've been using for a long time for a number of our clients. This could be really useful for eCommerce Websites where there may be a handful of products which are the most popular or competitive, which we could target with short, focussed video.

In the meantime, here's a video of some techno kittens!

Metafocus goes social!

2008-09-18T06:58:00.000-07:00

We've decided to try to beat Facebook at its own game and setup our own social network: http://metafocus.ning.com/

I came across Ning some time ago courtesy of Sacral Musings, a network for student and qualified osteopaths which really impressed me with its functionality and useabiliy. It's a really nice, hosted solution that takes all the best features of Facebook including photo and video uploads, chatroom and forums and lets you focus around a particular subject.

Having set this up, I'm really keen to get it working for us as both an internal communication tool, company extranet and way of getting to know some of our clients better. It's going to be very much about Metafocus and who we are, so it has a lot of potential as a marketing tool too.

Plus, all links aren't 'nofollow' so we can abuse that too :)

UK Search Engine Usage Statistics 2008

2008-08-28T09:42:00.000-07:00

We always optimise sites across all the major search engines and measure success in Google, MSN and Yahoo but are these realistically the right ones to look at? What about Ask?

So, I did a bit of poking around and managed to find some data courtesy of Hitwise:

% of UK Searches - June 2008
======================
Google = 87.34%
Yahoo = 4.00%
MSN/Live = 3.72%
Ask = 3.14%

So Google are still the dominating search engine with the other 3 very far behind. So the question is should we bother with these 3 other search engines at all? Or should we look at all 4 and ensure an even visibility?

Matt Cutts (Google) talks about basic SEO

2008-08-19T01:10:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across this video on www.potpiegirl.com whilst seacrhing for some Squidoo tips and it's actually a very nice introduction into what basic SEO means and how to get your site found by Google. Now there's nothing new in here, it just reiterates the points that you need to consider the keywords, put them on your site, build links and ultimately write original, interesting content.

It's all stuff that we know and use here but Matt puts it across in a very eloquent way and makes it clear that there are no mysteries or tricks to it, it's all common sense really.

Long time no blog!

2008-08-15T03:20:00.000-07:00

It's been crazy busy here over the past couple of weeks managing both our existing workload and adding a whole new group of websites to our ever-growing portfolio. We've got some very exciting new prospects which we hope will be going live soon, alongside some substantial consultancy work for some big names...

But the thing that's taken up a fair bit of our time recently has been the redesign of our UK website with a brand new look and feel, aligned with our Global Online Marketing website launched a few weeks back. If anything I prefer this one as we've had the chance to shoot some photography for the pages and spend a little bit more time on the content itself.

As a business, Metafocus has changed it's emphasis slightly so that rather than being all things to all men, we're focussing on a core set of skills:

internet marketing
search engine optimisation
ecommerce websites
international websites

With this approach we feel that we can be more effective and focussed as a business but also expand our skill set to embrace techniques such as banner advertising, email marketing and much more. Exciting times ahead for Metafocus!

10% off at Aspetto!

2008-08-05T02:21:00.001-07:00

Aspetto Male Grooming is one of our flagship ecommerce sites, which has been running for about 6 months now. The business is very seasonal with special offers around the major occassions such as Father's day, Christmas etc but also at different times of the year. This summer we have encouraged them to create a discount code that we can promote on their behalf

So for 10% off anything at www.Aspetto.co.uk just enter this at checkout:

Summer2008

It'll be interesting to see how much more business this attracts for them...

It's here: www.soles4u.com!

2008-07-23T02:40:00.000-07:00

It's all a bit hectic here at the moment with sites going live left , right and centre! A site that has been in development for a while but has now finally gone live is Soles4U, an ecommerce store specialising in large size womens shoes and wide fitting ladies shoes.

We've built the site entirely using OsCommerce as a basis but have done a lot of customisation as we've gone along. I've highlighted a few of the features in the graphic on the left here which is a screengrab of the "Pink Princess Kitten Heels" page:

- Newsletter signup has been integrated into the template and the look and feel of the page. This data is captured in the back end and can then be exported via CSV into any email program

- Multiple images can be uploaded for each product to show different views or detail shots. Images are dynamically resized for convinience

- Taking a steer from an established competitor's site, we've added Product Care information to each page which can be tailored to each product

- We've also dropped in a dynamic 'Customers who bought this product also bought' as this is a great way of sharing links throughout the site and cross-selling products

- And finally, we've setup Paypal as the payment provider

We're really proud of this one and it sits perfectly with our other ecommerce clients like Mobility Buddy (disabled scooters) and Aspetto (Mens Skin Care). If you know anyone looking for ladies wide fitting shoes who might be interested in Soles4U, please have a look and let me know what you think.

Metafocus Goes Global

2008-07-22T03:52:00.000-07:00

We've been developing our International Internet Marketing portfolio for some time now and deceided that it was time to split our website in two. (See here for some of our reasoning: "To split or not to split, that is the question"). So, we now have a brand new website focussed entirely on Global Online Marketing: http://www.metafocusglobal.com/

We're really proud of this site here and personally I think it is one of the best sites that we have ever done from a design and web build point of view but also from a strategic and planning perspective too. We've been very focussed in what the site is all about, focussing on 4 key areas:

- international internet marketing
- multilingual seo
- chinese websites
- european websites

The whole site is built around these 4 areas with everything from the menu text to the URLs to the meta tags to the content on these pages being targetted on these keywords and a series of supplemental long tail keywords. We're going to go into full-on promotional mode over the next few weeks, building links in, promoting the site through blogs and forums and generally getting the domain name out there! I'm confident that once it is picked up by the search engines it will start to rank well as the content and site build is spot on.

So, go have a look and if you're looking for global online marketing or what to know about International Pay Per Click, give us a call!

Ouch! rebrands as Recover!

2008-07-18T08:21:00.001-07:00

We build a website last year branded as Ouch! for a local group of personal injury claim / no win no fee solicitors which unfortunately had to be taken down due to a copyright clash with another website. We rebranded the site, rebuilt it and now it's live!!

Recover Compensation has gone live with Google Adwords in tow, focusing on their main areas of business:

Car accident compensation & road accident claim
Back injury compensation & whiplash settlement
Work injury compensation & fall accidents

The difficulty that we are going to face now is the fact that we have a brand new domain and will literally need to start again with promoting the site and building links etc. Luckily we have a template to work to as we were beginning to get good results for the old Ouch site, even achieving top tens for "whiplash settlement" and "compensation lawyer" amongst other.

We like a challenge here at Metafocus, so expect to hear back with some success stories!!

Metafocus Global UKTI Video

2008-07-18T03:25:00.001-07:00

Metafocus Global UKTI Video
Originally uploaded by metafocus

As part of our new website (coming soon...) we've linked up with both our You Tube account and our Flickr group. Flickr lets you share photos and images directly with Blogger so I thought now would be a good time to share the UKTI video filmed in our Lace Market premises a few weeks ago talking about our International Internet Marketing expertise. Enjoy!

Potassium Permanganate!!

2008-07-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I really like about my job is the variety of clients that our team has to work with for every male grooming products website, which I can directly relate to, there is a client coming from a market that I literally know nothing about... welcome Chongqing Jialing Chemicals Company!!

Metafocus has been working a lot recently on Chinese Websites, promoting both Western companies to China and Chinese companies to the West, this site falls into the latter category.

Chongqing Jialing Chemicals Company are the world's largest potassium permanganate producers but that's not all that they do. They also manufacture KMn04, Chloroacetic Acid and Potassium Hydroxide. The difficulty when working on the promotion of a site like this is understanding what these products are for and subsequently where to promote them. Wikipedia is an obvious option but without looking a bit deeper, it's difficult to create a list of potential link resources.

That's where the interest comes in though - did you know that potassium permanganate can be used for such diverse uses as to induce abortions, act as an antidote to poison or even as rocket fuel!! Blimey, that IS diverse!

Promoting Your Sweet Shop

2008-07-09T02:26:00.000-07:00

Your Sweet Shop is a client that we've had for some time now and one that we've had some good success with so far, but being a team of perfectionists(!), there's always more that we can do. My task this week is to try and improve how well they rank for their range of sugarfree sweets and diabetic chocolate.

As the site has been around for a while and we've done as much as we can on the pages itself, it's now a case of building links in from relevant sites and creating some kind of a buzz about these words. We've already created a Facebook page which we keep up to date with new content and products as they come in and linked to this from various sweet appreciation groups and diabetic support groups to build a few links and create some interest.

We've also created a Squidoo lens all about the website. This is a great source of quality links and something that we can easily grow and develop as part of the Squidoo network.

Today, I'm going to use one of my other blogs Nottingham Massage Advice to write a post about diabetes, diet and sugarfree foods. This should give me plenty of opportunities to create links targetted to their products with relevant text surrounding the nitty gritty. Linking between these blogs and the blogs of my colleagues should help to get these articles listed with the search engines and by definition, lift up Your Sweet Shop as a result.

Twitter... why, exactly?

2008-07-03T08:47:00.000-07:00

I'd resisted Twitter for quite some time despite hearing it mentioned in a lot of online and offline media as the 'future of the internet' or some such overblown claim. Finally this week whilst looking at ways to improve my blogs' saturation on the net I thought, why not give it a go...

You'll notice on the top right of this page a little box saying my current status as entered on Twitter. Clicking on this will then take you through to my Twitter profile where you can, erm, see my current status.

I think I must be missing something here - This is no more exciting than updating your Facebook Profile Status! But hey, somehow Twitter has worked up to a Pagerank of 8 so it must mean something.

OK, if you have lots of friends on there and opening Facebook is just too much effort, go to Twitter but otherwise, I just don't think i get it... but hey if you want to follow me, lookup "stinkyrich"

Mobility Buddy - 3 months on...

2008-06-20T09:41:00.001-07:00

We've been working with Mobility Buddy for coming up to 3 months now, looking after both their Pay Per Click Advertising and ongoing Online Marketing including search engine optimisation.

We inherited the site which is often quite problematic but in this instance hasn't held us back significantly. An OsCommerce site with customised elements, it's fairly well setup to allow us to get in and amend everything that we've needed to so far.

Coming from a point of ranking virtually nowhere for any of their keywords, we've started getting some very good results for them, particularly when it comes to brand names such as Shoprider or Pride Scooters. A slightly tougher nut to crack are the more general keywords such as disabled scooters but we're progress here to. We may need to make some more fundamental changes to the wording on the site to achieve success here.

The Living Aids section is one that I'm particularly interested in as after graduation back in 1997, I was very keen on moving into the design of living aids for the elderly and disabled. Unfortunately that didn't really happen but I'm always keeping an eye out for what is out there. Mobility Buddy has a great range of commodes and other more direct improvements to day-to-day living such as kitchen equipment like Easyturn Tap Turners which may look rather mundane but will make a huge difference to some who has lost use of their fingers from arthritis or an accident.

Moving forward, we're very optimistic about what we can do for Mobility Buddy, so keep a lookout for their site as we're hoping for it to become the #1 place for disabled scooters and living aids in the UK.

Using Picasa as a link building tool

2008-06-13T05:52:00.000-07:00

As anyone who works in the Online Marketing industry will testify, building effective links into a website is one of the most important parts of the job... and also one of the hardest.

We use a lot of blogs and forums but have recently been experimenting with photo sharing sites such as Google's own, Picasa.

Today, I've created a Photo Album for the Derbyshire Garden website. It can be viewed here: http://picasaweb.google.com/rich.moore.stinky/CascadesGardensDerbyshire

Picasa is extremely easy to use and lets you upload photos literally in seconds. You can also add captions including links for every image. Perfect, right? Well not quite. The dreaded 'nofollow' tag is applied to all these links so does that mean that it's a waste of time? Perhaps in terms of building links for search engines but I would argue that there is merit in having images listed on popular public gallery sites such as this as a means of getting your business, product or service in front of people. As with blogs though, it does mean that the quality of the imagery needs to be high enough to be engaging - Just having a presence isn't enough.

So I think we will continue to use Picasa for some of our key clients but perhaps it may not be as useful as a good old fashioned, keyword-rich link... like this one for hellebores!

Cascades Gardens featured on BBC One

2008-06-13T05:02:00.001-07:00

Fox's Biscuits Advert: Funny Panda

2008-06-02T05:06:00.001-07:00

Michon the move - video

2008-06-01T10:59:00.001-07:00

We've recently been working with Michon, a design agency who have just moved to Radcliffe On Trent. We're helping to fulfil their web and online marketing requirements, part of which was building their new website. Here's the video which graces their new homepage.

Aspetto - Male Grooming Products

2008-05-29T02:35:00.000-07:00

The Aspetto site has been live for a few months now and is just starting to pick up momentum. We've been working very hard to get the site ranked with the engines and to avoid languishing in the Google Sandbox for any great length of time.

Our strategy with SEO is three-fold: firstly, we've optimised the site for keyphrases such as "male grooming products" and "male grooming uk", then targetted the gift market with keyphrases like "gifts for husband" and "gift for boyfriend" and finally aimed at the brand names themselves using the standard format "buy clarins UK online" and "buy clinique for men uk online".

Aspetto is targetting both the straight and gay markets so we've been very careful to keep the keywords gender-non-specific so that it is relevant for all parties. With the recent increase in civil weddings, using the phrase 'husband' is now as suitable as boyfriend for both groups.

On a personal note, I'm a big fan of Clarins products and heartily recommend the Active Men Face Scrub and Mositurise Gel!!

Welcome to my new blog!

2008-05-29T02:23:00.001-07:00

We're very keen on blogs here at Metafocus, so myself and my colleagues in the Online Marketing Department will be generating blogs about our internet marketing business and how we are working with our clients.

We have an official Internet Marketing Nottingham Blog which we will continue to use, so our personal blogs will offer a more personal insight into what we are doing.

Keep checking back to see how we are working for our clients.