The following video should reassure you that Google fully endorses, and supports companies who are here to help customers with friendly, well-informed genuine advice, and who offer a fully “White hat” and “Google webmaster compliant” service. It’s known that a well planned online marketing campaign, can offer your business some of the highest potential long-term returns on investment, when compared to other marketing channels.

Source: Mashable

Mail merge enables you to dynamically create documents such as letters or labels, and populate parts of the newsletter or labels with data from a spreadsheet, which means you can use an existing spreadsheet of customer details and create many hundreds of customised versions in minutes.

• Some clients dont have access to Microsof Office software, so a great free alternative that is highly recommended is Open Office.

Here is a great video tutorial explaining the process of getting Open Office to create mail merged documents with ease.

If you need help creating your data spreadsheet, setting up your mailmerge, or creating great looking templates, to receive your customer data before printing, please get in touch for some friendly advice and recommendations.

Teambox helps us to avoid the masses of emails that build up over the duration of a project and makes communication much more efficient. Please have a watch of the videos below, for more about how the software works.

Overview

Instructions 1

Overview of functionality – recent activity feed

Instructions 2

Conversations – discussion a project and making decisions. Convert parts of a conversation into actionable tasks with 1 click.

Instructions 3

Tasks – creating tasks and managing deadlines also gant chart. Items in the activity stream can be converted into tasks.

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.

Freeagent: 10% discount

All invoices are created using their great pay monthly service – But you can use the following link whether you are a sole trader, LLP or Ltd company to get 10% off your subscription if you choose to continue using FreeAgent after their 30 day FREE trial.

• Use this link to find out more and get 10% OFF:
  http://www.freeagent.com/?referrer=41dezf70
• Or enter in this referral code when you signup for your 30 day FREE trial:
  41dezf70

An older video from Matt about Page rank sculpting by using nofollow tags on internal links. He also explains the other form of page rank sculpting by simply linking to internal pages from the home page (which usually has the most page rank of all pages on the website)

Question: I use the Google Toolbar to monitor PageRank. I read on the Internet that it gives old and quite unreliable data. Can I have reliable realtime PageRank information about the sites I administer? And how can I identify causes of a PageRank drop? silviot, Torino, Italy

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.

What are content farms?

Back in the early days of the web,  Google began counting links between websites as votes of confidence from one author to another and soon they became a very strong influencing factor on search results. In the scramble to climb the rankings, many companies bought hundreds or thousands of links from companies acting as “link brokers”. Due to the abuse that has followed, links of any value have gradually been getting more difficult to acquire. Several years ago Google announced that buying links to manipulate rankings would incur penalties, ruling out conventional link-farms and creating a demand for a new form of link building mechanism.

Content farms revolve around algorithmic robots that crawl the web “scraping” or collecting information from other websites. Due to the scale of the process and amount of search engine friendly information these farms could collect, they began to take over search results pages and some would argue that they still have an advantage in many niches. Content Farms create revenue from two main areas:

1. Pay per click adverts/affiliate links within the content
2. The “link authority” that is passed on to those companies who pay for links to their website to appear within content generated by the content farms.

The JCPennalty

The quality of Googles search results has featured heavily in the media of the past months, with American store JC Penney geting into trouble by “acquiring” thousands of links from unrelated websites, with near-exact match anchor text. Prior to the algorithmic change, JCpenney were ranking at number 1 for hundreds of valuable 1 keywords. Google announced the initial correction of results as a manual correction, however soon after, the algorithmic equivalent was released, now officially known as the Panda update (named after one of the creators of algorithmic improvement). One major feature of the update is that the value of links from spammy websites has been further devlued, whilst the definition of “spam” is in constant change as technology advances.

The panda / farmer update

Whilst some businesses actively buying and depending on risky link acquisition strategies have seen a major drop in Google rankings, as a result of  the update other comapanies have just been affected by the algorithmic reduction in value of (natural/unbought)links from low authority or spammy domains.

Another major aspect of the update, seems to be the importance of a website’s Link profile. In particular- high volumes of links with exact or near match anchor text. Websites who bought or acquired links and didn’t monitor where the links originated in terms of authority and relevance, have been indirectly affected by the depreciation in value of these links.

As the value of links are further scrutinized, it’s more important than ever to start publishing great content, useful resources and articles related to your industry. Over time and with a little promotion at the time of release, these articles will attract links naturally and improve the performance of your website in the mid to long term.

Summary of new ranking importance

Google is looking further affield for signals of authority, relevance and value to determine search engine rankings.

1. Social factors are increasingly important – We all knew social factors would grow in importance for both traffic creation and brand management. New data from SEO moz Munich suggests that shares, likes, retweets and links from authority sites such as twitter and facebook actually have an ever-increasing value to SEO.
2. Link sentiment – Search engine algorithms analyse the semantic context of the domain and page that makes the link. The linked-to page is then analysed for relevance to the the linking site. This feature has been around for a while now, but it’s thought the algorithm is more aggressivley focussing on relevance, domain authority and the context of the link.
3. Anchor text Link profile  - Google is looking for a “natural” inbound link profile. A website with 95% of inbound links with perfect match  anchor text, would look very suspicious and likely have the value of those links suppressed by the algorithm

See below, a great set of slides on Search ranking factors from Rand Fishkin’s presentation at SMX Munich.

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.

Although a website homepage is an important entry point, popular news articles, pages or resources should be optimised to encourage visitors to stay by identifying issues and improving aspects such as usability, options, links and calls to action.

Calculated from the data gathered on your website by tracking software such as Google analytics, bounce rates are a strong indicator of the first impressions of a website. ‘Bounces’ are website visitors from an external source such as search, social media, pay per click advertising, email campaigns, that land on a page of your website, then leave by one of the following means:

• Pressing the browser ‘back’ button
  Visitors arriving from search engines often make a quick scan of the website to evaluate the relevance, before clicking the back button to return to their search. Did your title tag and meta:description information explain the page correctly? Do you need to add more information or options above the fold (the screen height visible without scrolling), or even adding a ‘call to action’ to urge the visitor to interact with your website.
• Clicking a link on your page that leads to an external website
  It’s great to include links to useful and relevant external web-pages, your visitors will appreciate the convenience and if they help your visitor during their ‘research stage’ they will be more likely to return when they are ready to buy. Many search engine optimisers also vouch that relevant and useful outbound links to authority websites will boost search engine performance.
• Closing the browser window
  Most social media networking website launch links to external website in a new window; which when closed – without interacting with the page, registers as a bounce.
• Typing a new address in the browser

Definition of bounce rate

Bounce rates are usually measured in 2 ways

• The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.
• The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).

Bounce rate = Visits that left after 1 page or a short time  / Total number of visits

Bounces from different ‘sources’

Bounce rates from different traffic sources can indicate issues with various aspects of your website and/or the targetting of your traffic generation efforts. When viewing your analytics dashboard, by default bounce rates are the average rates for all visitors.

It is possible to drill down to view the bounce rates and information for certain ‘segments’ of your data, by  selecting ‘advanced segments’ as highlighted in blue on the photo at the top of this article. This will filter out all the data from excluded segments, and provide an overview of that specific aspect of your data. Useful segments to filter include:

• Traffic source – direct / external / search / social media
• Geography / language
• Browser / operating system

5 tips to improve website bounce rates

1. Utilise tracking data to make decisions
Although direct feedback from users is very useful it can be very difficult to collect and interpret into actionable changes. In general, improvements should be based on user tracking data and the ongoing analysis of changes and improvements.

When tracking the success of marketing efforts elsewhere on the internet, it is  important attach tracking tags to external marketing campaign links with a campaign url tracker such as the tool provided to work with Google analytics, so that the data is correctly attributed when collected by analytics.

Links that are too long can be shortened using a service such as bit.ly to retain the tracking tag in the link. Of course many social networks and popular websites won’t allow the tracking tag or remove it when creating the link.

2. Prioritise the improvements

Most small businesses lack the funds to perform a complete overhall, but instead should focus on those particular pages with the highest amount of traffic and high bounce rates. Avinash Kaushik from the Google analytics team, suggest that most websites fluctuate between 40%-60%. Pages with bounce rates significantly higher than 60% should addressed, whilst the most popular entry pages should be prioritised for improvements first.

3. Filter down to identify specific issues

Using analytics, click the visitors tab to focus in on the data relating to your visitors. Next find broadband access speeds to see if low speed connections show a high bounce which would suggest your website loading times need to be improved as customers may be bouncing due to the slow load  of their landing page.

Alternatively, focus on the browser type segment to identify if certain browser types have high bounce rates, which may indicate browser compatibility errors that are impairing the user’s experience.

4. Keep an eye on the bounce rates of specific keywords

Identify the keywords by drilling down in the ‘traffic sources’ tab to see which keyword / landing page combinations are not performing. If you are investing in SEO and/or Adword campaigns that focus on specific keywords, find out if the keywords have high bounce rates, and improve the landing pages for those keywords. Also consider keyword visits from search, you may need to improve the page title and description that appears in search results.

5. Watch out for external links

Especially on popular pages that bring lots of traffic to your site, high bounce rates could indicate that visitors are clicking an external link to leave. Although external links for customers can be useful for them and may offer SEO benefits for relevancy, avoid using them on your most popular landing pages if the bounce rate is high (although that page may be getting some traffic as a result of the SEO value of the link)

Exceptions to consider

Certain business types, markets and websites have exceptions that should be kept in mind when assessing bounce rate performance.

Low traffic rates

With low levels of traffic, analytics data can be sporradic which results in less accurate calculations. It’s best aiming to increase traffic volumes whilst monitoring emerging trends within the data.

Higher traffic volumes also create the opportunity to take advantage of A/B split testing (and with larger volumes - multivariate testing), tracking changes and further improving conversion rates by using analytics to serve variations of each page to different users.

Blogs and news articles

Blogs and news articles as part of a content publishing strategy, have been proven to offer significant benefits to SEO and traffic generation, but often have high bounce rates.

The specific and topical content of these pages is often a great source for search engine visitors who arrive, read the article then leave. Such visits will register as bounces even though they stayed to read the content, they did not interract with the website. Encourage them to stay by providing links to recent articles, service pages and calls to action, ideally – above the fold.

Business sector and type

Certain keywords may have higher bounce rates due to more complex factors, before implementing changes to attempt to improve content, assess the value and relevance of the keyword / source.

• Imagine a business is called Acme widgets, and sells products through their website
• The products available are every size and shape of Green widget
• The website will have an address like www.acmewidgets.com
• And have lots of content referring to all things widget related
• After some effort, the search engines may serve Acme’s website pages in results for searches such as:
• “Widgets”, “cheap widgets”, “portable widgets”
• But when the visitor who was searching for the above arrives
• They bounce – because they were intending/ should have searched for
• “blue widgets”, “cheap green widgets” or “portable red widgets”

Acme has 3 options, they should consider re-naming to Acme Green Widgets,  start selling other colours of widgets or not be so concerned by higher bounce rates from search for keywords such as “widgets”, “cheap widgets”, “portable widgets”.

Advice from Google

If you could only choose one metric to look at, Bounce Rate might be your best choice. Learn why in this entertaining and informative segment from Avinash Kaushik.

Internet marketing strategies involve many different techniques which revolve around your website – which acts as the foundation of your on-line presence. An effective website design will set you apart from your competition and improve the conversion rate of customers that you get to your site, but the next step is to start attracting more visitors – as efficiently as possible.

How to promote your new website after launch

Some people who are new to internet marketing, think that after launch a website will behave like a print magazine advert - assuming it will be visible  to and viewed by the whole web.

It would be better to think of your new website as the ultimate interactive catalogue of of your business and services – a highly customisable, interactive tool used to attract and convert potential customers into sales.

Much like a printed catalogue – a website should represent the business professionally and then be distributed to as many people as possible – with targeted distribution, offering higher returns on investment.

One of the greatest advantages of the internet lies in the cost-efficiency of distribution and the ability to promote globally at a fraction of the cost of conventional marketing mediums. The other great aspect is the ability to track almost every customer interaction and click across the web and back to your site, through to an enquiry or sale.

Tracking and analysis

The analysis of tracking data can reveal the performance of your website, click-adverts, email campaigns and social media activity, enabling us to determine what works, what doesn’t and where key opportunities lie.

All websites from Alloy come with Google Analytics tracking installed so you can access the data and have a look yourself. But chances are you will need professional support to get the most out of this data. Ongoing analysis and recommendations are provided free to customers who receive monthly marketing support. Read more on the Google Analytics analysis service.

What are the best tactics to promote your website?

With so many options available and with some offering better value to certain types/scales of organisation,  smaller businesses can benefit from professional assistance in developing a cost-effective marketing strategy. The general areas that should be covered can  seen below roughly in order of cost-efficiency.

1. Word of mouth / networking
   Tell friends, family, colleagues past customers and more about your website
2. Search engine optimisation
   Climb higher in the search results to increase visitors
3. Social Media Marketing
   Interact with customers to increase awareness and interest
4. Pay per click advertising
   Display ads across the web & only pay for clicks to your site
5. Email marketing
   Collect email addresses from customers and website subscriptions then send them targeted messages