After several months testdriving some of the best online accounting and invoicing software solutions available to small businesses, here are some of the best options

Spanning several months of testing and including solutions from Kashflow, Xero, Clearbook, Freshbooks, Siwapp and Invoice bubble. The final conclusion for the Small business (1-10 employees) was:

• Recommended online invoicing and accounting software: Freeagent made by Edinburgh-based developers.
• Along with invoices and estimates, FreeAgent can handle timesheets, expenses and if you choose to import and annotate bank statements you can complete your HRMC TAX return and submit it online.

Read more →

Learn more about Google’s latest changes, including a left-hand panel with powerful tools that will make it easier to find what you are looking for.

A video from Matt Cutts at Google’s search quality team. He explains how frequently page rank updates occur and how often you will see updated values in the pagerank toolbar.
Read more →

The Farmer/Panda update is arguably the largest algorithmic change Google have implemented in the last 10 years and is reported to have affected the rankings of over 16% of websites on the internet. In many cases this has seen smaller, higher quality sites rise in the rankings whilst websites with thin or scraped content have lost ground in many areas.

Some are saying this  is a great win for smaller businesses struggling to compete in search, others are more cautious and suggest it was an excellent PR move after the recent poor publicity around Google search quality and their slow loss of US market share to the Bing / Yahoo Search network.

Read more →

Bounce rates are one of the most useful metrics when monitoring both your website usability / conversion-rate performance, as well as evaluating the success of other internet marketing investments.

Partially attributed to the increasing mobile accessibility of search, social networking sharing and link shortening services; growing numbers of website visitors are clicking links that bypass home pages and lead directly to product or service pages, blog posts and news articles.

Read more →

Internet marketing has been shown to offer small and medium scale businesses the highest returns on investment when compared to television, radio, events, sponsorship and direct mail marketing methods.

Read more →