Whatsonpoker.co.uk

James Tomlin, one of the founders, says “Ever wanted to find out where to go and play live poker tournaments in your region or throughout the UK? Or find out when all UK Poker tours, Festivals and events are being held throughout the year? Well, WhatsOnPoker aims to resolve your poker problems by providing all this information in one easy to use Website. WhatsOnPoker will show you ‘what’s on’ in the poker world near you. Search by region, tour, casino, buyin or date to find a tourney to suit your needs.”

This website is going to be a huge success with a great team behind it, we wish them every success with the new venture.

Belinda King’s attention to detail really shows in their new website, with every photo and word chosen specifically to put emphasis on the professionalism and high standards achieve by their team.

It is without a doubt a flagship design effort by all involved and we wish them the upmost success with the new website.

Jane, the founder of Body Quest says “We are a ladies only retreat offering you immediate and long lasting weight loss. We are not a military Boot Camp in fact we base our program on having fun and achieving life changing results in lovely surroundings.”

We would like to wish all the team at Body Quest every success in their new website launch and look forward to supporting them every step of the way.

We wish all the team at caperol.com the greatest success.

For energy saving ideas and products visit www.caperol.com - spread the word!

Competitor research

Looking at your competitor’s gives you a great insight into what has been successful and what has failed in the past, although this is certainly not a blue print for a well designed website, you can gain some foundation knowledge on how the industry currently operates on the web and how you can take it in a new direction by building a well designed website.

Key things to take away from your competitors

• How do they convert visitors to buyers?
• Do they have a simple goal funnel (customer journey) process?
• What call to actions are they using?
• How do you navigate through the site? Is there a search system?
• Promotions, offers, discounts, pricing – are you competitive on a basic business level?

Armed with this information you can start thinking about how a visitor might act when they come to the website and how you are going to convert them into buying customers.

Consumer research

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer, what is the driving force behind a purchase decision for your product or service?

• Is it price based, if so you have an easy job on your hand, get the lowest price products and set up a simple ecommerce store and you should start seeing a market share take over.
• Feature & added value decision: If your product is in competition with similar priced products and you have added value, features or improved design for example, then your website needs to make this loud and clear, you might want to think about comparison tables, or bold feature graphics to highlight the benefits of your product, or if you can make a video and show why your product is a must have.
• First to market: If your product is brand new and makes it own market then you need to establish your own market place by solving a problem for the customer, and explain this on your website is a easy to grasp way that’s is super clear and delivered within the top fold of your homepage.

There are so many more purchase decision factors, which is outside the realm of this post, but do some research on “consumer buyer behaviour” and you will come up with ideas of you own.

User interface design

Now you know what your competitors are doing and how customers make a purchasing decision you can start planning how the website should be designed, from a graphical, user interface and goal funnel point of view. Start by wire framing out the website and drawing the elements that will make up your website on paper, thinking about how your customers will browse the website, where they will look for important information about your products and how they are going to move through your website to achieve the goal. Lets take the example of an ecommerce store…

1. Customer wants a electric golf trolley, but is unsure what makes a great electric golf trolley, they visit your website (via Google rankings, advertising, email campaign, etc)
2. On the homepage you need to instantly attract the visitor to the fact you sell golf trolleys by a strong call to action graphic, this qualifies you in the first problem of “I want to buy a golf trolley”. Call to action clicks through a product information and purchase page.
3. Here you have information about the golf trolley, how many holes you can play, how easy it is to store and fit into your car, along with pricing information and a small feature comparison table of major competitors. This fulfils the customer requirements and turns them on into buying the product.
4. The customer can easily add this product to the shopping cart and at this point you have a captive audience and you can try to upsell related products. The customer then checks out with an easy to follow, and secure payment system.
5. The payment system needs to show loud and proud that it’s secure, it has an SSL certificate and makes the customer feel happy that their credit card information will be secure to finalise the transaction.

The user interface design in this case is all firstly capturing the attention of your visitor through strong call to action graphics, then displaying the relevant information in a easy to ready manner and finally allow them to checkout in as fewer clicks as possible, the customer journey is complete and you have a delighted customer!

1. Correct heading tags

Create a structured, sensible approach to using heading tags, be descriptive and ensure they contextualise what your writing about, and please don’t use them for styling, that’s why we have CSS!

2. Remove duplicate content

Duplicate content plays havoc with your search engine rankings, giving it less meaning and authority, your want your unique content to be treated uniquely! Remove duplicate content by defining a canonical url (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html).

3. Unique page titles

To go hand in hand with your brilliantly written and unique content you should come up with some unique page titles that are not found elsewhere in your website, ensure your descript the pages content accurately.

4. Descriptive description tags

Search engines use your meta description tags to give a little extract of the page as a summary to their users, so make sure it attractive, informative and will make people want to click on to your website.

5. Image naming

If you want to be picked up in the likes of Google image search then you need to name your images correctly and store them in a hierarchical folder set up. You could go for a date based option or maybe by product or sector. Stay away from naming images “banner.gif”, opt for something like “golf-trolley.gif” instead.

6. Friendly URLs

Its just one of those things you need to do, ensure you don’t have horrible long URLs like www.example.com?id=3767464&data=huge-horrid-url, instead go for something like www.example.com/huge-horrid-url which is not so horrid

7. Feed the engines

If you have a very large site then you really should feed the search engines in the form of site maps, so they know exactly what pages to index and how often they are likely to change. You can do this via the webmaster tools:

Google: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Bing: www.bing.com/webmaster
Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

8. Creative writing

You need to create amazing content for your website visitor to read and indeed for search engine to pick up on. This all forms the basis that you are an authority on your subject matter, meaning higher rankings, so get scribbling!

9. Use robots.txt

Robots.txt really can help search engines be pointed in the correct direction and stop them indexing pages you don’t want to appear on search engines (such as your admin system). Visit www.robotstxt.rog for more information on how to create your robot.txt file.

10. Helpful 404 error pages

404 Error pages happen when a page can not be found on your website and are a means of still capturing website visitors instead of seeing just the standard 404 page. You can help users find alternative pages to the one they landed on, ensure they stay on your website. http://www.404errorpages.com/

In summary

Check over your website with these 10 points and you will be sure to add some SEO value to your campaign today!

Paid directories

There are a few paid directories that are worth being listed in. Below are a few examples of the directories I suggest being listed in, they hold a high PR and have been around for some time to gain authority.

* dir.yahoo.com – PR8
* www.business.com – PR7
* www.botw.org – PR6
* www.joeant.com – PR5
* www.ezilon.com – PR6
* www.incrawler.com – PR6
* www.kahuki.com – PR6
* www.stpt.com/directory – PR4
* www.mavicanet.com - PR4

For more paid inclusion directories I suggest you visit www.paiddirectorylist.com which hold up to date and current paid directory listings in order of Google PageRank.

Free directories with authority

Some free directories are well worth the time investment in submitting to. Ensure you do this by a manual process and don’t pay for 1000 directory submission in an hour! These should be human edited with good directory structure that your website fits into.

* www.dmoz.org
* www.zoominfo.com
* www.hitwebdirectory.com
* www.alexa.com

There are many other topical and niche directories that you can submit to for your business type. You should visit www.directorycritic.com where you will find quality listings of many popular free directories to submit to. This is a great resource and you can even search by directory type for your industry / content type.

Social book marking websites.

Try and make useful bookmarks to new content on each of our clients websites, if there is a new blog for example or something is updated then make sure and tell these sites about it. Don’t submit all at once though, make sure and do it over a 7 day period for example. Ensure to keep every account up to date and don’t just link to your website, link to things you find useful as well to give it a good mix and become a resource for other users.

Ask a few other people to DIGG items as well so it gets a few votes, this will give your link more authority and more people are likely to view it through DIGG. You might also like to show how many people have “dugg” your link by displaying the DIGG icon on your page.

* www.blogmarks.net
* bookmarks.linuxquestions.org/
* del.icio.us
* www.digg.com/
* www.fuzzfizz.com
* www.jumptags.com
* www.stumbleupon.com
* www.twitter.com
* www.linkroll.com
* myweb2.search.yahoo.com
* www.reddit.com
* www.blinklist.com
* www.web-feeds.com
* www.technorati.com/
* buzz.yahoo.com/
* www.kaboodle.com/
* www.mixx.com/
* www.propeller.com/
* www.fark.com/
* www.newsvine.com/
* www.slashdot.org/
* www.clipmarks.com/
* www.furl.net/
* www.faves.com/
* www.dzone.com/
* www.blinklist.com/
* www.ma.gnolia.com/
* www.simpy.com/

Other link finding ideas

1. Ask all suppliers to your business for a link back from their website to yours. Try to vary the keyword anchor text used if possible.
2. Get a link from local business directories, chamber of commerce and those well enjoyed business network meeting websites!
3. Try out www.craigslist.org and add a classified – it’s free!
4. Create a Google group and post some good content to it. Once you have built some worth while content specific to the group you might like to include a couple of links back to sections of your website.
5. Create a www.squidoo.com/ page for each keyword theme of the website, remember to write unquie content for squidoo that’s is not duplicated anywhere else within your off page efforts. You might like to also include some quality images, links to your favourite blogs (they could even be yours!) and some amazon books – remember to link back to your website within the editorial section as well as these links will hold topical weight as well.
6. Post questions in relevant forums with backlinks in the footer section of your post. Try to be helpful and regularly visit the forums to help others out, that way you get recommended and people visit your profile which can contain a back link to your website.
7. Hand in hand with forums goes blogs. You can post comments on other peoples blogs and include a link back to your own website, however be careful not to just spam other people blogs with your links as they will just get deleted. You should write a great comment which is topical and worthwhile to read. After a few comments on the same blog you can then look to add a couple of links where appropriate!

Online articles releases

1. Send an article to the www.isnare.com/ article distribution service. Ensure the article is written for the internet with good SEO copy and keyword distribution. You should include 2 backlinks within the text to your website or include a couple of links within the footer using keyword rich anchor text.
2. Create a list of authority editors in the industry and mail them the press release, do each one personally and tailor it to them and their particular publication. Try to include a topical image that you have captured (jpg format).

Building links back to your website

In order to ask for links from other websites which are one way, or indeed to get them without asking, you need to provide content which is unique, helpful, informative and topical! With these pages you can ask for links back to say a “Buy to let mortgage calculator”, “Investment profit analysis tool” or simply a “top 10 sites for bookmarking” article. These types of pages are much easier to build links for and you will see your link acceptance rate increase dramatically.

Example content you could build

1. Build a 101 list relevant to the industry
2. Build 10 x “10 easy tips to help you…” type articles
3. Create a top 10 myths article
4. Create a topical directory, tightly themed to that of the website, ensure the websites listed are well ranked and have authority – and don’t forget to ask for a link back from the sites that you list!

The back link code on your website

Make sure people can link to the website easily, include a how to link guide and easy copy / paste of the link code. Give a couple of linking options with keyword anchor text variation, you might like to include some banners to give a balanced portfolio of backlinks.

Conclusion

There are so many ways to build links to your website that if you had a team of 20 people working continuously on it you still wouldn’t maximise the potential! The key is to build interesting content and start putting the word out, once others see how great it is they will talk about it online and link back to your website without you even asking! I would suggest to build some links yourself to, keeping an eye on the anchor text you use so that you can target specific keywords that are performing well.

Happy linking

We have been shortlisted in two categories; New Business of the year and Best Marketing Campaign.

We are delighted with what we have achieved this year for our customers and very pleased by the recognition of being shortlisted.

We will find out at the evening awards function on the 26th November whether or not we have been placed.  Either way we are looking forward to a good evening and delighted to be involved.

We worked closely with the school to develop a site that complemented the previous non content managed site while offering an easy to use and maintain content management solution.

An extremely useful guide and to be honest something we use ourselves just to check!

Have a think about the points below to see if your website is up to scratch.

Try marking your website out of 10 for the following:

The checlist

Does the homepage sum up what you do instantly?

Are your contact details clearly visible and easy to read?

Are your contact details clearly visible and easy to read?

Is the first page of your website quick to download?

Text on your website should be clear and easy to read using a standard font unless in graphics.

Can users easily navigate to the other pages of your website without having to figure out complex menu systems and dropdowns?

Have you got a site map detailing all relevant pages within your website?

Is the content important to the customer? Ensure your talking to them, not about you!

Try not to repeat content throughout your pages, ensure each page is useful and gives only the information that pages needs to.

Do you use examples of your products? Why describe a product if you could use a photo.

Try to stay away from using “click here”, it’s not that useful and you could use more descriptive text about where the link is going to take you.

Do you use strong “call to actions”? Ensure the user has something to do as soon as they come onto your homepage – making it easy for them to stay on your website.

Try to make any registration process on your website only 1 or 2 stages long, if not the user may get frustrated and leave the website.

Check through your website for broken links, spelling – ensuring all the graphics work correctly, videos loads up and all processes do not cause errors.

Title each individual page with reference to its content. This will help with search engines and also give the user a clear definition of that each particular page is about.