SEO Europe, SEO Canada, SEO Ireland, SEO Australia

None of us are eCommerce Consultants because we love articles, or back links or shuffling through a mountain of data from some random analytics software, we’re here for the results. The work we do, over time, can make a real difference to your business. It can open up whole new markets that you’d never been able to reach before, or locations that you had never approached.

Now I constantly go on about how SEO takes time, it cannot and does not happen overnight. That we cannot guarantee you front page of google results, no-one can; and if they claim they can then you should run a mile. However, despite this wave of realism we still somehow manage to win new business and attract new clients, maybe the truthful approach works after all? Our clients range from large multinationals to a bloke in a van who goes out to fix roofs. Just for a change, and because we’ve just done his yearly analysis, I want to speak about one of our smaller clients, whose name I’m unfortunately not going to be able to reveal for fear of random companies bothering him.

Anyway, a year ago this aforementioned roofing company pops into our office for a chat. They have no website, all their business is coming from paid traditional advertising and recommendations. They’d happily followed this path to relative fortune for the past twenty years, however over recent times they’s noticed rival companies had started display web addresses, and that new companies who primarily advertised online had started to spring up. Spurred into action they met us and asked us to build them a site, design them a brand and then promote it. We were happy to do this and gave them a rough estimate of the prices involved, which to be fair to them was not an unsubstantial amount of money; though less than half what they were spending with Yellow Pages on an annual basis. They had a lot of questions, a lot of doubts, were worried that this money would be flushed away, never to be seen again. However, they decided to plough ahead and in January 2010 we set out to build them a brand, a website and a new client basis from scratch.

They loved the branding, loved the logo, loved the site and for the first couple of months were happy to sit back waiting for the enquiries to start flooding in. Six months passed and the level of business wasn’t what they had hoped for, they were edgey, when will they see some action, if they carried on with their SEO campaign were they simply throwing good money after bad? We got them into the office, sat them down and showed them the figures. The number of people visiting their site, how many pages they looked at, where abouts they came from. They were appeased and said they’d give it another three months. Nine months in and they were a little more relaxed, they’d started to turn those few enquiries into orders, they were now starting to make money from the web.

As we do with all our clients we get them into our office, or visit them, every three months or so for a formal update. They all have account managers who they’ll speak to regularly, but it’s sometimes good for us all to get a different perspective on things. We’d seen their results and the stats look good, their account manager had reported back that orders were building so we thought everything should be positive. Anyway, meeting starts and we ask them how their business is. We love making a difference to peoples lives so were thrilled with  their response. The website, which at the time was eleven months old had already paid for itself. In fact, they had a 160% return on their investment within a year and they were asking us what else they could do to get even better results next year. We spoke about the six month meeting and I told them that a huge percentage of customers go through exactly what they had. However, they came out the other side and were happy that the few months of relative pain and nervousness had all been worth it.

The message of this blog is that you’re never to small to benefit from a website, you’re never in the wrong industry. Once your website is built then that’s it, no nasty surprises, no new bills, you own it, it’s yours. Sales on the internet are growing at 21% a year, in four years time the level of online business will have doubled from today. Directories are getting thinner and thinner, newspaper readership is plummeting.

We’ve seen the future and it’s web shaped.

Onsite Optimisation, Meta Tags, Alt Tags, Content

Building a good business, be that online or bricks and mortar, is all about getting the foundations right. Building slowly and making sure you have covered the basics before trying to dominate the known universe may be boring, but it’ll save you a heap of time and money in the long run. When building a website people  often overlook the basics, namely the design and structure of your website, followed by onsite SEO.

Onsite SEO can be broken down into roughly four areas, all of which I’ve described below. Get these four stages right and give it some work and a little time and you’ll see some great results for your website.

1. Meta Tags

Meta tags are small snippets of code in your site’s HTML file. Although your visitors don’t get to see your meta tags, they are important to the search engine spiders because they contain important information about your site. The meta tags you should pay attention to are the meta title, meta description, and meta keywords.

The title tag lets the search engines know what your page is about, and it should contain the primary keywords of your site. This will also be what is typically displayed as the anchor text in the search engine returns.

When you perform a search, you might notice that each search result will contain a 2 or 3 line blurb about the website. Most of the major search engines pull this information from your meta description tag.

The meta keywords tag is a place for you to insert all the major keywords of your site. This meta element isn’t as important as it once was, and Google has announced that they don’t take it into account whatsoever.

However, Yahoo and other smaller search engines may still take it into account.

2. Onsite Content

Perhaps nothing is more important than your onsite content. This is the heart of your webpage, and it is extremely important to all the search engines. One thing to pay particularly close attention to here is your “keyword density”. This is how often you use your keyword throughout the body of your content.

If you ask a wide variety of SEO experts what the optimal keyword density is, you’ll get a wide range of answers – anywhere from 1% – 5%. It is generally accepted that if you use more than 5% your site will be considered spammy.

3. Alt Tags

This is another invisible page element that can help the search engines. When you include photos on your site, make sure to make use of the Alt tags. This can allow you to show up in Google Image search.

4. Site Structure

You should make your site easy for the search engine spiders to crawl. Google has indicated that it won’t crawl all your links if you have more than 100 on a page. You should arrange your site in a hierarchical structure that appeals both to your users and to the spiders.

Onsite optimization isn’t that difficult, but it can make all the difference. A few of these tips only take a few minutes to implement. If you change them today, you will probably soon see a dramatic improvement in your search rankings.

So. It’s a decade into the new century. How has SEO/SEM changed in the past ten years?

Quite a bit, actually. Ten years ago Yahoo was a major player. There was no Bing. Twitter and Facebook weren’t even gleams in the eyes of their respective creators yet.

Now, social media is the name of the game. Advertising dollars that were leaching out of big business budgets are being funneled into SEM to boost brand visibility and increase ROI.

According to SEMPO’s sixth annual State of Search Engine Marketing Report, the North American search engine marketing industry will grow 14% this year from $14.6 billion in 2009 to $16.6 billion by the end of 2010. That’s a staggering increase, especially when  you realize that a bare ten years earlier, terms like SEO and SEM were just starting to be used regularly.

SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing

Growth has been remarkably steady since 2004, and companies are positioned to kick into high gear in 2010, according to Search Engine Land:

… budgets are expanding to match the interest in social media. 59% said budgets for social media marketing will increase this year, with 37% saying budgets for social media marketing will be the same. Just 4% said they will reduce their social media spend in 2010.

Despite the apparent lack of spending on social media, three quarters of companies said they are using Facebook (74%) and Twitter (73%) to promote their brands or companies.

Interestingly, agencies are significantly more likely to say that the rise of social media has had a major impact on their search engine marketing (74%) compared with just half of company respondents (52%).

Many larger companies are also building in house teams, trying to get ahead of the game and cut costs associated with outsourcing SEO and SEM. Having an on staff SEM can increase ROI as valuable time doesn’t have to be spent becoming familiar with the company’s vision, goals and target audience.

For most small businesses, however, the need for a reputable SEO services still stands. Organic search is still the best kind of ‘free’ marketing, and SEO is the secret to the best links, traffic and conversions.

Facebook, Twitter and other social sites are gaining rapidly, and SEOs and SEMs alike have to adapt their marketing strategies to work within the new parameters.

Search Engine Optimization, dripfeedblasts, senuke, evo2

So here we are, day two, feeling ok so far. Right this years hot topic, software automation and SEO, does it work? Well, in terms of using software as a stand alone SEO strategy, then no not really and some works better than others. Senuke is probably the best known, and most well used, of these SEO software packages and it’s software we’ve used ourselves, with limited success.

I’ll get the boring part of this lecture out of the way at the beginning, so you have something to look forward to later. There is no software on this planet that can compensate for a poorly designed, badly planned and content bare website. Get your priorities right, get a great site with content rich pages, get your onsite SEO perfected before even thinking about blowing hundreds of $’s on software to promote your internet offering. The basics of business do not change just because you happen to be online. If you’re selling the wrong product at the wrong price then no amount of promotion will turn your venture into a successful business, do some research before aiming for world domination. Same goes for design, structure and navigation of your site. If it looks like your ecommerce platform has been cobbled together by a small child on an etcha sketch then people will not buy from you, sorry. There’s no getting away from the fact you’re going to have to spend some money at some point, hopefully that’ll be with us, but we’re not going to hold you to that. Seriously, I think about 80% of all our enquiries are from blokes, and it is always men, asking how much it will cost them to get their products selling. The first thing we ask for is a URL for there site, which always leads to an out of the box offering for a website selling either financial products, advertising or the latest remedy for penis enlargement. You tell them that there’s no point messing around with SEO until they get the basics right, they disagree and move onto the next SEO company, hoping for a better answer. You can tell from speaking to them they’ve already done the SEO software thing, it hasn’t worked and they’re trying to work out where to go next.

Anyway, lets assume your site is primed and ready for SEO, which SEO software is the best for you ? Well, as you can imagine I’m not a huge fan of this type of software, not because it hurts my business, because the truth is it doesn’t, in fact the reality is quite the opposite. What we see tending to happen at the moment is people ignoring our advice, going ahead and using the software and reporting back that it doesn’t work or worse still their site has been sandboxed by google. The most popular software out there at the moment is probably Senuke, who’ve been launching their new product Senuke X for over a year now. We’ve tried this and the software does have some nice features, the pinging tool is good so is the article submission, but nothing that’s going to change your life as is always claimed in their sales blurb. These are some of the questions we always people when they talk to us about software:

a) Is Google blind/stupid/incompetent? Do you not think Google know all about this software, after all they’re advertising it all over the place? If we assume Google are fully aware of the software, which goes totally against the spirit, ethos and purpose of Google Page ranking, do you not think they’re not going to combat the effects of this?

b) Who has the biggest research and development department?

c) How important is this business to you ? If you’re playing at it whilst working 9-5 then cool, carry on. If it’s something you can’t afford to fail then don’t take risks you can easily avoid.

d) If the software is as good as they claim it is why are they charging you $99 a month? Seriously, getting a site to the first page of Google can be worth millions in extra revenue, all this for $3 a day? You know what your Mom says, if it sounds too good to be true…..

So in short, do what you have to do to make your site work for you. Get a blog, invest in design and build, start a facebook page, get a great product at a killer price, make sure your site is promoted by experts. Then if all else fails buy some software, if you do drop me an email and let me know how it goes. One more thing, we’ve had these new magic beans come into stock, are you interested?

SEO Birmingham, SEO Leicester, SEO Coventry

Another year older, not much wiser and certainly nowhere near acheiving any of my increasingly elusive dreams of:

a) Retiring to a nude volleyball colony in Bermuda.

b) Being able to go to the pub for just a couple of pints.

c) Getting the time to write a blog everyday.

I know I know, I’m always banging on about how great blog’s are, how they help in increasing and diversifying the keywords associated with your account, increase traffic and how Google loves content etc. So why is my blog about as up to date as a Lithuanian pop video? Well of course there’s always the pressure of time, the endless rounds of meetings, conference calls, IM conversations with our Web Developers in India. But, like a fat bastard with a bag full of new sports gear and a new hole in their bank balance, I have a New Year’s resolution – I’m going to breathe new life into this blog and update it on a daily basis. Ours is an interesting office, we’re at the forefront of SEO strategy and web design so this shouldn’t be an issue, always tons of stuff to write about, right ? So, hopefully, this blog will be a fascinating mixture of SEO insight and the sex life of the web design geek. I think I’ll start off with software automation and SEO, ’cause its a bit of a hot topic at the moment.

Google rocks, I love Google. Now I’m not just saying this because they’re like the ultimate overlord when it comes SEO, it’s because they’re really pretty good at what they do. In the competitive world of SEO dominance there’s been a huge raft of SEO tools which hit the marketplace over the last year or so, the big question is do they work? Well, depends what you’re using and how you use it I suppose. Now, I’m not going to name them directly because if you’re in the industry it’ll be fairly easy to guess, if not you’ll only mess it up and get yourself sandboxed. Plus they’re not paying me.

Xrumer Blasts – You know the type, 2000 ‘links’ a day, always some random account on a  messageboard with a couple bits of anchor text and a URL So we’ve used these, still do in fact, however if you think you can pay some bloke $200 a month and you then get 60,000 backlinks for your site every month then you’re way wide of the mark. Firstly, Google are pretty smart, if all of a sudden you start hitting your 6 month old PR 0 site with 2000 ‘links’ a  day they smell a rat and sandbox you. That’s of course if Google find these ‘links’ in the first place, if they haven’t been deleted, if they worked at all. Now not all links are born equal, Google are aware of these blast services, and from our own internal testing have found that Google are giving less and less importance to these links, if any at all. They know what you’re up to and they’re sitting back and letting you go along thinking it’s making a difference. These blast services are ok for long tail keywords, but if you think you’re going to dominate the first page just using this then it’s simply not going to happen. Used in conjunction with manual link building, article submission and a whole raft of other SEO techniques then a blast is a pretty useful tool, though certainly not the game changer a lot of these companies would let you believe it to be.

As this blog has been dragging on for a bit now I’ll leave it there until tomorrow when I’ll cover some more of the SEO software out there, stuff like Senuke, EVO2 etc. If you’ve any thoughts on these or would like to get my opinion on any software you’re using then just drop me an email. And of course, if you’re a potential customer pop in, give us a call or release a small pigeon with a note attached to its leg.

seo tactics, seo specialist, seo services, seo service uk

Is nothing sacred, sniff? Can’t they just be left alone to get on with their lives? These are all phrases that were no doubt uttered by Daily Mail readers around the country as the news broke that some naughty SEO marketeers were caught highjacking the news of some blokes engagement to his long term girlfriend and linking these keywords back to their sites. It is very naughty, people should really stop and think what they do before causing such a nuisance, hanging is far too good for them. Seriously, these people are a pain in the backside for reputable companies such as ours. Always be very careful when clicking on any links, and never ever respond to Nigerians who’ve got cancer and need your help spending $21,500,000 that’s TWENTY ONE MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS.

Hackers have targeted Prince William and Kate Middleton’s engagement news online by poisoning search engine optimisation in news results related to the big story of the day.

It’s become a common trend for hackers to pick up on big news stories as a way of infecting unwitting internet users by concealing viruses in links connected to the subject that is being searched.

Since the news broke yesterday morning at 11am when Clarence House released a statement confirming the royal engagement and plans for a 2011 wedding, thousands of media reports from across the world have been published online.

Hackers are taking advantage of the surge in online searches for news reports on the royal engagement by infecting specific news results online using a technique known as SEO poisoning which leaks viruses into computers.

The scam works by alerting the user that their spyware needs updating or a new system installed once they click on the news link. If the user accepts the request to install a new fake spyware system, the hacker is able to corrupt the users’ computer with malware and scareware.

Other hot topics which have been used in the past by hackers to spread viruses include the news of Michael Jackson’s death last year, and also the Haiti earthquake disaster.

SEO New Zealand, seo marketing, seo packages, seo services uk

Lovingthe.net, the UK’s leading eCommerce experts have launch a dedicated team to deal with rising demand from our wonderful New Zealand customers. From Christchurch to Wellington, we now have delighted customers right across your fair land.

Our New Zealand team are, you’ll be pleased to know, dressed from head to toe in black and only ever stop working on your account to listen to their Crowded House albums or check up on the score in the Rugby. Seriously, their work schedule here in the UK is designed to fit around yours, we work when you work making sure where ever you are, we’re available. In recents months we’ve seen massive growth across New Zealaind, in part due to our growing reputation and exceptional results, but also down to the relative strength of the NZ $, coupled with the Uk £  swirling around the plughole. Your money now goes a lot further, from historical levels you’re making a massive saving of around 30% just on exchange rates.

Anyway, we’re here if you need us – give us a call on +44 800 689 9000 or drop us an email to consultation@lovingthe.net

A news article detailing just how important the internet is, and online sales, for you guys in New Zealand.

Spending on online advertising in New Zealand has continued to grow with a 17.6 per cent year-on-year increase in the amount devoted to internet channels.

Figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau of New Zealand for the September quarter show spending is up $4.83m on the previous quarter to $67.93m.

All three categories measured search and directory advertising, display advertising and classified advertising showed positive gains.

Search and directory was up 16.4 per cent over the second quarter but display advertising showed a 24 per cent increase over the same period in 2009.

IABNZ chairwoman Liz Fraser says online advertising spending is predicted to overtake radio and magazine advertising before long, but as spending recovers across the board she says “the race is on” to see which medium will finish the year ahead.

As of December 2009 the Advertising Standards Authority reported that spending on radio advertising slumped $32m to $236m while magazine advertising dropped $32m to $217m. In the same period interactive advertising grew $21m to $214m, and that growth is expected to have continued throughout 2010.

The biggest display advertisers were the categories of investment, finance and banking; government departments, services and communities, and travel and accommodation. They accounted for almost 40 per cent of total display dollars in the third quarter.

IABNZ vice-chairwoman Laura Maxwell-Hansen says display has taken the “lion’s share” of the uplift in ad spend from last year.

“It continues to be the go-to product for advertisers, with the largest range of products on offer and the ability to consistently deliver on advertising and business objectives of clients.

“No longer a dirty word, ‘banner ads’ have innovated and offer a far more sophisticated solution for advertisers. Results in rich-media, video and direct response campaigns are proving that audiences do respond to great creative and sound retail offers.”

PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Chris Peree, who helped author the report, put much of the online growth down to the release of the iPad and improved smartphone devices, as well as the growing viability of social networks as a connection for publishers and advertisers to their audiences.

SEO London, seo leeds, seo link building, seo manchester

So where the bloody hell did that year go to then ? It only seems like yesterday we telling our customers that they were only 9 months away from the start of the holiday season and that if they wanted to make some impact in the marketplace that they should get their SEO strategy in place now. As ever most people ignored us so they’ll not be able to benefit from the shopping frenzy that’ll engulf the western world for the next four weeks or so.

While most Americans are gearing up for a long Thanksgiving weekend, retailers are readying their deals for the so-called Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping bonanzas – and criminals are already trying to capitalize on the impending buying frenzy.

Late last week, attackers began using search engine optimization (SEO) “poisoning” techniques to make their malicious sites appear near the top of holiday shopping-related search terms, according to researchers at internet security solutions provider SonicWALL. Terms such as “Walmart Black Friday Sales 2010,” “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” are leading users to malicious search results.

“We have already seen an increase in malware activity,” Deepen Desai, senior researcher at SonicWALL, told SCMagazineUS.com in an email on Tuesday.

Based on research from previous years, malware activity is expected to double during this holiday season, Desai said. For enterprises, the largest concern is that employees who are shopping online from work computers may inadvertently introduce malware into the network.

“Cyber Monday,” the digital equivalent of the brick-and-mortar world’s “Black Friday,” marks the beginning of the online holiday shopping season and is one of the busiest online shopping days of the year. It falls on Monday, when most employees return to work for the first time since the Thanksgiving break.

This year, 4.5 percent of workers with access to the internet, or 70.1 million people, will shop for holiday gifts from the office, according to new statistics from the National Retail Federation, a trade group.

“In general, a lot of people are going to be coming in [to work] and going to a lot more sites than they normally do,” Todd Feinman, CEO of Identity Finder, an identity theft and data leakage prevention software provider, told SCMagazineUS.com on Tuesday.

To take advantage of the hoards of online shoppers, scammers will likely distribute malicious links on social media sites purporting to offer tempting deals, such as “coupon codes” for popular stores or products, Nicholas Percoco, senior vice president and head of Trustwave’s SpiderLabs, told SCMagazineUS.com on Tuesday. These links could actually lead users to phishing attacks or sites containing drive-by malware.

This type of scam can spread quickly on sites such as Facebook and Twitter by budget-conscious users who believe they are providing friends and followers with money-saving opportunities, Percoco said.

Another threat this year is the potential for rogue mobile applications purporting to direct users to the best deals of the season, said Identity Finder’s Feinman. There have already been a number of Black Friday and Cyber Monday applications released and there is a danger that cybercriminals will set up similar ones with embedded payloads that harvest users’ contact lists, passwords or other data.

Also, attackers will likely send spam hawking sales and free offers that actually lead users to malware and phishing attacks, experts said.

Users should be advised to be cautious of links provided in email, instant massages, social media and other online communications, Percoco said. To be safe, those looking for deals should always directly visit a retailer’s website.

In addition, security professionals should ensure that all computers on the network have the appropriate software updates installed, since many employees will be visiting sites they normally wouldn’t.

seo birmingham, seo experts, seo firm, seo forum uk

Sometimes, and I’ll hold my own hands up here, we think that SEO is all about google, and that the other search engines don’t really matter. Google is still the big daddy, but according to a recent report Bing and Yahoo still matter, they still bring in a significant amount of traffic if optimisted correctly.

SEO Ireland, seo consultants, seo consulting, seo england

Lovngthe.net, the UK’s leading eCommerce experts have launch a dedicated team to deal with rising demand from our wonderful Irish customers. From Dublin to Galway City, we now have delighted customers right across your fair land.

Our Irish team are, you’ll be pleased to know, dressed from head to toe in green and only ever stop working on your account to listen to their Pogue’s albums or check up on the score in the hurling. Seriously, their work schedule here in the UK is designed to fit around yours, we work when you work making sure where ever you are, we’re available. In recents months we’ve seen massive growth across Ireland, in part due to our growing reputation and exceptional results, but also down to the relative strength of the Euro, coupled with the Uk £  swirling around the plughole. Your money now goes a lot further, from historical levels you’re making a massive saving of around 30% just on exchange rates.

Anyway, we’re here if you need us – give us a call on +44 800 689 9000 or drop us an email to consultation@lovingthe.net

An article to remind us of simpler times taken from Silicon Republic.

According to the head of Facebook in Dublin, Ireland underestimates its impact on the online economy.

In their short history, social-networking sites have been maligned as a place only teenagers go to get into trouble. But there is nothing like a good recession to focus minds, and the importance of these networks as key marketplaces in a world focused on cost reduction is set to grow exponentially.

Social-networking sites have evolved beyond the teen scene. Some, such as LinkedIn, have futures as business communications channels to allow professionals to keep their contacts books fresh.

But one social-networking site is planning a future around mass-market advertising, and it has chosen Dublin to spearhead its global plans.

Set up in 2005 by Harvard roommates Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moscovitz and Chris Hughes to keep in touch with fellow students, Facebook now boasts over 175 million users worldwide, including 400,000 here in Ireland. The site has emerged as a focal point for students and professionals from 18–50 to keep in touch, and big brands ranging from Starbucks to Ben & Jerry’s see it as a key marketing channel for the future.

In October of last year, it emerged that Facebook was creating 70 jobs at its international headquarters in Dublin to drive its online sales business. In recent weeks, the company embarked on a campaign to recruit the first 40 workers for roles such as online operations, sales and online advertising campaign delivery.

Aside from job creation, the arrival of Facebook could also have ramifications for the local software industry in Ireland and, last week, some 150 local software developers attended a Facebook developers’ ‘garage’ aimed at finding ways of contributing software to the evolving marketplace.

At the helm of Facebook’s operations in Dublin is Colm Long, who took up the post in January. He was previously head of online sales at Google’s operation in Dublin.

Derry native Long believes that Facebook could emulate Google’s Dublin success. When Google arrived Dublin in 2002, it only planned to create up to 400 jobs. It has since grown to 1,500 and is still recruiting.

“The key lesson for me at Google was how strategic the company was about new products. At Google, I realised a hunger and motivation in building out and developing operations.”

According to Long, Facebook’s choice of Dublin as the centre for its European operations owes its origins to the success of Google’s European headquarters in the capital.

“The chief operations officer of Facebook is Sheryl Sandberg. Previously, while head of global operations at Google, she was instrumental in bringing the company to Ireland. As soon as she came to Facebook, there was no other place in the world she would set up.

“Sheryl already had a favourable impression of Ireland, having worked as chief of staff at the US Treasury under Bill Clinton, and IDA Ireland did a fantastic job creating the environment for Google to establish in Dublin.

“I lived through that experience with Google and saw the ease with which we grew swiftly. I see the same with Facebook,” Long explains.

Key to the success of online businesses such as eBay, Yahoo! and Microsoft (which is building a $500m data centre in Dublin) is the supply of people, and Long says Dublin’s ability to attract young, talented professionals to work and live here is vital.

While a doom and gloom atmosphere pervades Irish life at present, Long says the country is still consistently punching above its weight.

“The markets Ireland is competing with for foreign direct investment (FDI) are primarily European ex-communist countries with inherent bureaucratic infrastructures. Ireland doesn’t have that hurdle.

“The country has always managed to surprise and demonstrate resilience and entrepreneurship. We have almost no right to attract the level of FDI we have, but we do. When Intel came here, it was on a promise to just let us show you what we can do, and it’s still investing in Ireland.

“Another factor that is underplayed in Ireland is the sheer talent of the local software development community – I cannot underline how well- regarded it is internationally.”

The local Irish software development community, Long says, is renowned for being innovative and savvy, and could have a key role to play in Facebook’s strategy going forward.

“Developers have a huge part to play in the Facebook ecosystem. It is important for us that they are successful so we can be successful. If we all do our jobs well, Dublin could play an important role in Facebook’s global operations.”

In terms of Facebook’s internal operations, Long says the dynamic is different from Google in that the business is focused around branding and not straightforward advertising.

“The key is to help companies market in an unobtrusive way that enhances rather than denigrates the user’s experience. Brands look at Facebook as an engagement process with core audiences, and you have to be aware of striking the right balance.”

In terms of advertising, Long says that two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies are using Facebook as a marketing channel.

Long says that Facebook’s 25-year-old co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is hugely excited about the company’s Irish operations. “He is an amazing visionary who is open to sharing ideas. He tends to create forums of collaboration and consensus in the company, and has a strong vision for how he sees Facebook going forward.

“He gave the green light for the Irish operations, and has spoken specifically about the role it can play. Some 70pc of Facebook’s users live outside the US, and most of these are in Europe.

“The power of the internet is shifting in Ireland’s direction, and Dublin has a key role to play,” says Long.

SEO canada, seo company, seo company uk, seo consultancy, seo consultant

Here at Lovingthe.net we love to help small and growing businesses, it’s what we do best. SEO can be a minefield for companies new to this area of marketing, let us help you out. Give us a call on 0800 689 9000 or drop us a mail to consultation@lovingthe.net

Increasing numbers of business owners are getting involved in SEO and hoping it will produce Impressive Results. SEO is acknowledged as a useful process in online business when trying to gain exposure and drive traffic to your website and this message is gradually spreading throughout the online community.

A large number of businesses are now running an SEO campaign. They are either using SEO techniques themselves or have hired a professional SEO company to run their campaign for them. Either way, they will be hoping and expecting to see some positive results. However, just because you use SEO does not mean this will be possible.

If running an SEO campaign yourself, you are highly unlikely to be running your campaign effectively unless you have a large amount of previous experience in the SEO field. Search engine optimisation is a complicated subject and when using SEO you have to have a great deal of knowledge and the skill to be able to apply this knowledge effectively. If you do not have this knowledge and skill then it is extremely likely your SEO Campaign is not working as well as it could be and it could even be damaging your progress.

If you are in charge of your SEO campaign, you have to take responsibility for the monitoring of the SEO techniques you have chosen to use. You need to be aware of how well they are working for your business and if they are really suitable for your wants and needs. If the methods you have selected are not working efficiently as part of your SEO campaign, you need to adapt your SEO campaign to make it more productive.

If you have decided to work with professional SEO consultants

on your campaign, they should be providing you with regular updates about progress made. Any improvements or successes should be acknowledged and shared with you so you know what is working and in what ways your SEO campaign is helping your business. It can take a considerable amount of time for major accomplishments such as big improvements in rankings or the amount of traffic visiting your website to be seen but even smaller developments are worth noting.

An issue with white hat search engine optimisation is the amount of time it can take for results to be seen. If your SEO specialists tell you this it is true and they are not trying to advantage of your business. However, they should be letting you know what is being achieved and what direction your campaign is going in so you can remain fully informed of any progress made at all.

Running an SEO campaign is the first step in helping your business achieve new levels of success but only if your SEO campaign is appropriate in the first place. You need to know what is working and what is not so improvements can be made.

We at Lovingthe.net can identify weaknesses within your current SEO campaign and develop and run a highly efficient and effective campaign for your business.

SEO Australia, seo consultant jobs, seo consultant uk, seo consultant birmingham

Lovingthe.net, the UK’s leading eCommerce experts have launch a dedicated team to deal with rising demand from our wonderful Australian customers. From Darwin to Hobart, we now have delighted customers right across your fair land. G’day to you all!

Our Australian team are, you’ll be pleased to know, dressed from head to toe in shorts and and t-shirts (despite the cold) and only ever stop working on your account to listen to their men at work albums or check up on the score in the cricket. Seriously, their work schedule here in the UK is designed to fit around yours, we work when you work making sure where ever you are, we’re available. In recents months we’ve seen massive growth across Australia, in part due to our growing reputation and exceptional results, but also down to the relative strength of the Aussie $, coupled with the Uk £  swirling around the plughole. Your money now goes a lot further, from historical levels you’re making a massive saving of around 30% just on exchange rates.

Anyway, we’re here if you need us – give us a call on +44 800 689 9000 or drop us an email to consultation@lovingthe.net

Some news from our pals at IT news.

Australia’s first Information Commissioner, Professor John McMillan, has recommended Federal agencies consider the use of search engine optimisation (SEO) to ensure public data is more accessible to citizens.

This among a raft of recommendations launched yesterday in the form of 10 draft principles to guide Federal Government agencies in promoting public sector information.

The draft principles are set out in Chapter 8 of the Office of the Information Commissioner’s first issues paper: Towards and Australian Government Information Policy [PDF].

The principles are intended to complement changes that come into force with the amended Freedom of Information Act and the operation of the Australian Information Commissioner Act 2010 from November 1.

Highlights from the draft principles include #2 which propose agency “information champions” such as Government CIOs to be responsible for ensuring adherance to open access principles and the routine and proactive disclosure of information.

Of equal interest to IT is principle #4 on “findable information”. The Information Commissioner suggests potential users should be readily able to discover the information an agency has published, and identify assets the agency holds but has not published.

It recommends applying search engine optimisation strategies to ensure that all published information can be indexed by search engines. It also suggests the publishing of an agency’s information asset register, to enable both internal and external users of information to identify available data from a single source.

Principle #8 - “Appropriate charging for access” – discourages Government agencies from restricting access to information through implicit price gouging practices of the past. Agencies are asked not to charge more than the additional marginal cost of providing access to published information, and in particular dropping the cost associated with producing the information.

It urges using online channels to reduce the cost of providing access to the information.

The vexed issue of rights to re-publish Government information is highlighted rather than resolved in Principle #9, “Clear reuse rights.”

While it opts for so-called “open licensing terms”, it appears to qualify this when it adds ”The Statement of Intellectual Property Principles for Australian Government Agencies” requires government agencies subject to the Financial and Management Accountability Act 1997 only to “consider” licensing public sector information, upon release, under an open access licence.

In an extensive interview with iTnews, Information Commissioner John McMillan said that this uncertainty comes down to the OIC’s deference to the Attorney General’s office on such matters.

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Lovngthe.net, the UK’s leading eCommerce experts have launch a dedicated team to deal with rising demand from our wonderful Canadian customers. From Halifax in the east to Vancouver in the west, we now have delighted customers right across your fair land. Not bad, eh?

Our Canadian team are, you’ll be pleased to know, dressed from head to toe in Roots gear and only ever stop working on your account to play with their Blackberry’s, drink a coffee or discuss the latest hockey news. Seriously, their work schedule here in the UK is designed to fit around yours, we work when you work making sure where ever you are above the 49th parallel, we’re available. In recent months we’ve seen massive growth across Canada, in part due to our growing reputation and exceptional results, but also down to the relative strength of the Loonie coupled with the pound swirling around the plughole. Your money now goes a lot further, from a historic level of around $2.35 CAN to the £ you’re now paying $1.6 – a massive saving of around 30%.

We are international members of SEMPO (search engine marketing professionals). Who’ve just appointed a new Ontario chair.

SEMPO Canada, recognized as the authority in Search Marketing in Canada, announced today the appointment of Helen Faber, Owner of Canadian SEO agency WebFuel, as the first Provincial Chair for the organization. SEMPO Canada is one of the country groups under this organization the SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization). Focused on improving the visibility of ethical, professional and responsible Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing for the Canadian search industry, the appointment of Helen Faber in Canada sets the organization up to pursue the next phase of growth in Ontario and across other provinces.

SEMPO Canada was created by founding members and co-chairs Ken Jurina, President and CEO of Epiar Inc. and Alexandre Brabant, President of eMarketing 101, who are charged with the mission to educate and increase awareness of the benefits of ethical search. “We are very fortunate to have Helen on board,” said Jurina. “Her deep understanding of the industry combined with her experience in building relationships, both online and off, has made her the perfect choice for the role of Ontario Chair for SEMPO Canada.”

Helen Faber will be working closely with other leaders in the Canadian Search Engine Marketing industry to ensure SEMPO Canada’s mission is fulfilled. Not unlike other countries, the fields of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), are well established in Canada. “We have a strong network of Search Engine Marketers who are extremely dedicated to ethical search from across the country. By building on that network, I look forward to continued innovation in the field to ensure business organizations in Ontario and other provinces across Canada are well served,” said Faber.

Join SEMPO Canada on LinkedIn
SEMPO Canada is currently reaching out to other Canadian Search Marketing Agencies and in-house Internet marketers who are looking to align themselves with an organization poised to strengthen the Search Engine Marketing Industry. SEO, PPC and SEM practitioners, managers and/or educators are invited to join the SEMPO Canada LinkedIn Group, which officially launched earlier today. “We welcome all levels of expertise who are interested fostering growth, awareness and understanding of ethical search marketing in Canada”, adds Ken Jurina. The SEMPO Canada LinkedIn Group is open to Search Marketing agencies and in-house Internet Marketers from all provinces across Canada, and in both official languages, looking to share their knowledge. Join the SEMPO Canada LinkedIn Group today to engage in topical discussions on Search Marketing, SEO, PPC and other search-related topics.

About SEMPO Canada
Working on behalf of the country’s Search Engine Marketing and industry professionals, SEMPO Canada is non-profit professional search marketing association dedicated to increasing awareness and promoting the ethics and value of search engine marketing in Canada.

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search engine optimisation uk, search engine optimization, search engine ranking, search engine submission, search engine website

Search engine optimization is the basis for all marketing and promotion of any website, if you’re not doing be assured that your competitors are.

With the proliferation of search-oriented online content providers such as AOL, Yahoo!, Demand Media, and About.com, internet users are increasingly likely to find that most of the general searches they do return results from these SEO-oriented content creators. Whether this is a good or a bad thing from the user perspective remains to be seen—and opinions vary—but one thing is certain: Competing with these search-result-savvy content providers can present challenges for traditional publishing companies and enterprises that hope to increase their rank on search engines to attract visitors to their own sites.

Most general searches these days result in a high percentage of results that reflect domains such as About, eHow.com, Suite101.com, Examiner.com, etc.; all are examples of sites whose content is created by literally thousands of contributors hired to create content to appeal to the masses.

Why? It’s a combination of the sheer volume of information owned and controlled by these sites and the power of SEO (search engine optimization). The content game—once dominated by traditional publishers—is increasingly something organizations of all types are participating in. It is also something that traditional search companies such as Yahoo! and Google are moving into full force. Thus, search and content are becoming more and more intertwined

Satisfying Searchers
Information search results were once almost solely the purview of name brand content companies. Today, however, top results (which may in fact be quite useful results) often come from cryptic sources, and information sources are not always immediately apparent. Demand Media, for instance, purchased Cracked.com in 2006, and its writers regularly provide content for the “Top 10” lists that appear prominently on Cracked’s homepage, with no mention of Demand Media to be found. Other content providers such as Associated Content provide a myriad of sources with content that may or may not be exclusive, meaning that web searchers have the potential to find the same information, from all of these aggregators, in multiple places. That said, previously unknown brands are becoming increasingly well-known, for example, About and eHow.

Brand name or not, sourced or not, the value of the content is in the eye of the consumer.

Giovanni Calabro, VP of user experience at Siteworx, notes that casual internet searchers are happy if the content that comes back to them eventually leads to the information they’re looking for. He doesn’t believe that they pay much attention to the source of that content. “If I’m looking for Lindsey Lohan, for example, if whatever comes back leads me to content about her, I’m happy. I don’t know if they’re going to sense that content as being generic or not. They’re looking for something so general, it doesn’t matter where they’re receiving it from.”

The good news, at least for now, is that the rise of companies such as Demand Media and eHow only reinforces the fact that there’s plenty of content demand and room for many content sources on the web. The trick, of course, is that everyone wants to sit at the top of that ever-valuable results list.

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Lovingthe.net are Birmingham’s leading SEO company, true experts in eCommerce. Give us a call on 0800 689 9000 for more information, or drop us a mail to consultation@lovingthe.net.

Google has republished its SEO Starter Guide with additional content and examples.

The original version was published about two years ago and has since been translated into 40 different languages to help global users of SEO services on their way to making the most out of their search engine marketing efforts.

Included in the updated version are tips on how to optimise a website for mobile devices, a larger number of example images to make it simpler to understand the content and a glossary of definitions.

The new Starter Guide can be downloaded from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Earlier this month, Alden DeSoto, a member of the Google Analytics team, recommended that online business create mobile-friendly websites.

He said that use of the mobile internet has dramatically increased in recent years, with Googlestore.com seeing fewer than 300 visits from mobile devices in September 2008 but more than 13,000 hits in July this year.

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Another great blog post we’ve borrowed. This one was written by Bharati Ahuja.

Since the time Google became synonymous to search , the search marketing Industry and SEOs got its own identity and importance. Everyone who had a website whether static or dynamic wanted to be on page one position one of Google. In order to achieve that the companies diverted their budgets from banner Ads. to SEO, and if their SEOs could not give them Page one rankings they opted to the PPC option and ensured their search engine presence.

But in early 2000 the web was still striving to revive from the effects of the dot com bubble burst and the search engines which themselves had simpler algorithms was the only place netizens could find what they wanted and the website owners also comparatively got the rankings and presence easily if their websites followed the ethical norms of the search engines as the competitiveness was comparatively less then.

Google itself was the first search engine which gave so much of information about SEO on their official blogs. This made the SEO process open and as the saying goes ‘The early bird catches the worm’ people who were quick enough in gaining this knowledge and adapting it became the Lords of the SEO world. Now after a decade, when the whole web, search and the online social scene has advanced and matured with technological enhancements in the hardware, software and the internet connectivity fields along with the number of websites and blogs increasing at an exponential rate on an hourly basis, it is time that we changed our approach towards the way we would like to gain overall quality web presence.

Yes, I would like to emphasize on the term ‘Web Presence’ rather than the term “SEO”.Optimizing your site for search engines and getting a page one ranking is just one aspect of online presence. There is a plethora of options available for getting inbound traffic. The social media fever which is catching up like wild fire and is a great option of getting inbound traffic if managed in a systematic and a focused manner. Blogging (The most original form of social media) or for that matter guest blogging too is a qualitative way of reaching out and interacting with the people who are interested in your products, services, news, views and ideas. I think in fact this is a platform where the marketing and sales functions are getting converged.

Marketing is all about bringing the people to the product. If you share your opinion and viewpoint and participate in discussions and thereby sharing knowledge , I am sure people would like to regularly visit your blog or read what you write about. Instead of speaking about only SEO and rankings let us discuss about the other aspects of the website as whole and try to ensure web presence for websites and on the flipside I am sure the rankings on the search engines will also improve for those sites. It is all so interconnected.

Quality Content: If your website is having great information and content about your company, products, services, industry and the future trends related to your industry then your website surely gains the potential for getting linked by various resources on the web and good quality inbound links surely have a direct push on your PageRank giving a boost to the rankings in the search engines.

Image Optimization: Images speak louder than words. Add value to the content of your website by adding relevant images helping the user to appreciate what is written and the Alt Text and titles of the images will act as great content for the bots to make the images rank in the image search and also help as an on page optimization factor boosting the SERPs in a way. Use Info graphics to display milestones or other such data.

Local Search And Maps: Add your address and contact details on the maps and local search options of search engines and portals.

Videos: Upload videos on your site or any third party site like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. People love to watch videos rather than read. But categorize the videos in the right category and right titles in order to be found by the user.

Blogs: Blogs are the most original form of social media and the best way to ensure fresh content regularly and repeat visits by visitors who find the content useful.

Social Media Presence: Listen to what the buzz is and let a voice to you company online and thereby assure that you are heard. This media gives you an added identity and help you to interact with your potential and existing customers in a very open way.

Optimize For Search Engines Not For Google Alone: When you talk about SEO it is Search Engine Optimization and not Google optimization. Try to have search engine presence on Bing, Yahoo ( Of course now If You are On Bing You are On Yahoo too) and Ask.com

Marketing Budgets: If the marketing budgets are high try to have a right allocation by focusing on the right marketing mix as regards email marketing, affiliate advertising, press releases, local and other reputed web directories etc.

All these above aspects are applicable to all search engines across and as search engines keep on upgrading and updating their technologies. We as SEOs and online marketers should try to keep the website owners and clients informed and educated for having a right approach to online presence and convince them of concentrating on their website , blog and social media interaction and I am sure the rankings will surely be taken care of.

Though for some websites the efforts needed might be more than others but then it is a matter of time and as per my experience if rankings are achieved thus over a period of time the tendency for the ranking to get retained for a long period on high SERPs is more. As more than getting the website ranked high soon it is more important to see that it is retained at a high position in the long run.

The internet is a network of networks. Try to have quality web presence on all the aspects of the web and soon your website or reference shall be found on various platforms of the web thereby generating targeted traffic to your site. Just turn the tables for a while, stop thinking about search engines while optimizing sites think about putting your best foot forward on the web ( As Matt Cutts mentions in one of his SEO videos) and let your site have a reference or presence wherever possible, soon it will be the search engines who will find your website and rank it high and the footprints created thus get etched on the web helping the website in future in various ways.

logo design, loving the net, online marketing, pay per click, ppc

A post regarding the future of online marketing. Some interesting points. let us know what you think.

Social Media Portal founder Tim Gibbon has claimed that social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have more potential for online marketing than straight advertising.

Mr Gibbon said that online marketing social media had the advantage of “seamless” integration and so was able to avoid the weakness of direct online advertising – the “unwanted” factor.

He said that since 2005 there has been a huge shift towards social networking, a shift that was finally being recognised by companies who are now focusing on Facebook and Twitter for their online marketing efforts.

A number of companies even print their Facebook and Twitter URLs on receipts to make customers aware of their social media presence, Mr Gibbon noted.

New research this week identified another important phenomenon in the UK online marketing sector, which will have quite an impact on the future – mobile devices and applications.

A study by the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) revealed that most publishers are looking to build online marketing campaigns on mobile devices such as the iPad and even more were planning to launch new apps in the 12 months, offering some of their content and services free of charge.

Researchers found that half of those surveyed were already delivering mobile content, and one in six already had iPad apps. Some 72 per cent had mobile websites up and running, while another 25 per cent were planning to launch them over the next year.

An overwhelming 91 per cent of respondents identified the mobile online sector as an opportunity or “major opportunity” for marketing in the next 12 months – 86 per cent saw the iPad and other tablets as a good place to concentrate, while 84 per cent picked the smartphone and apps 80 per cent would be focusing on apps.

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A fantastic article by Vic Smith on the importance of link building.

Before the major search engines like Google became so finicky, the primary SEO strategy was to “build more links”. At that time, you could build a variety of links that were backed by the original standard of thought – the more links the better.

Just a few years ago I was in such a rush to comment on blogs and forums, dozens of times per day that hundreds even thousands of links were built in a manner of months! During that period, backlinks were the deciding ranking factor, and their impact on search engines was overwhelming. Quantity!

In today’s link building, that train of thought is considered outdated. Google currently decreases the power that various links have on your ranking. Additionally, backlinks building is not anymore considered important, as most websites have lost their power, trust and authority through Search Engines’ manipulative tendencies of their webmasters.

Quality link building is still possible, but it is done through a new qualitative method, which happens to be the newest and most dominant trend, not quantity but quality.

Greater weight is being placed on authority, which is the confidence that others have in your website being high quality and offering no spam.

The trust issue may not be easily or exactly understood and is also quite subjective making impossible to measure the authority of a website at the time of link building – you can only see in time if a link is giving you in return PR juice, traffic or even both.

Today, Google’s algorithm is adjusted manually (this is what I believe, is just a personal opinion though) to place a vote of trust on websites and to utilize these sites as the standard, in order to locate useful pages instead of spam. With this said, in the SEO world today trust is much more paramount than page rank. If until today we were using as guides the PR, it seams that the Page Rank is not anymore something to trust but website authority. Sadly for SEOs, the authority, as we speak, is hard to determine when doing link building.

Although many links failed to maintain the value they once had, link building is still an important factor in deciding rank. Links will remain the foremost scalable SEO parameter aside from the website’s content. The popularity of a website, as well as the trust from a search engine, originates via links.

Links are a great way for search engines to simplify the status and relevance of a website. There are no current alternatives to links, even though some search engines are looking into possible future alternatives, such as user behavior and whatnot.

Website importance is parallel to having a natural, varied, and well-formed link profile. This profile will include pertinent links from academic sites, authority sites, forums, blogs, fan pages, discussion groups, consumer information, directories, and review sites, just to name a few. It will also include an assortment of links, such as “nofollow” and “do follow” links, to the same page, with different anchor texts. These include long tail keywords, deep links to existing pages that use longer tail anchor text, and genuine natural links.

The best piece of advice is to be sure that the link profile occurs at an even pace, or a natural pace, preferably without large spikes and long interruptions.

No Follow – Google changed the way in which the rel=”nofollow” attribute of links being used in 2009. Prior to this time, “nofollow” stopped page rank from following a link. “Nofollow” conserved the page ranking (PR) for the linking site known as PR-sculpting. Now, however, things have changed to where the “nofollow” will stop the page rank from following; but the amount of PR that would have followed is not thrown out.

In other words “nofollow” does not stop anymore search bots from following but in the same time, will block the PR delivery.

google adwords, google seo, internet advertising, internet marketing service, internet marketing uk

Another great online find. 21 super useful tips on how to us google adwords effectively. Drop us a mail at consultation@lovingthe.net for more details, or a free ecommerce audit.

1. Make your website as good as it can be.

Small changes can improve your conversion rate substantially, meaning, for the same AdWords spend you can make more sales or generate more leads. A good place to start is with the following document from Google:-

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/conversion/make_your_website_work.pdf

Another site worth checking out is http://www.marketingexperiments.com/

2. Use Conversion Tracking.

At the very least you need to track how much each lead or sale is costing you, and if you have an eCommerce site, make sure your shopping cart passes data to AdWords and Analytics. This way you will be able to see (almost) exactly what your return on investment is for individual AdWords adverts and keywords, and which traffic sources are worth most to you.

3. Use Google Analytics.

You’ll be able to tell how much each visitor from each source is worth to you (not just your AdWords traffic). You’ll also be able to see where people are coming from, and where they are leaving your site from. http://www.google.com/analytics

4. Make sure your landing page is right.

This is covered partly in the Google document in point one. Basically if your AdWords advert is for ‘Blue Widgets’, make sure that the destination URL for that advert is your ‘Blue Widgets’ page, NOT your home page!

5. Use Google Web Site Optimizer.

Rather than guess what works, test what works and find out for sure! http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

6. Use (or at least test) a call to action in your AdWords adverts. ‘Buy Now!’

‘Download A Free Trial Now!’ May look down market and tacky, but if it doubles your Click Through Rate, then you would be stupid not to include this type of call to action in your advert text.

7. Always have at least 2 different adverts in each ad group.

Click Through Rate is the single most import factor in determining how much you pay Google in the long term. If you can create 2 similar adverts, and one advert gets even a marginally better Click Through Rate than the other one, then you are ‘quids up’!

8. Use different keyword match types.

‘Broad’ match can be very, well, broad, so if you are in a competitive market, and don;t have a big budget, you may be best to start with just ‘phrase’ and ‘exact’ match types, or even just ‘exact’ on its own. If you are using different match types, then, generally you should bid most on ‘exact’, less on ‘phrase’ and less still on ‘broad’.

9. Use negative keywords.

If you are using any match types other than ‘exact’ then negative keywords are a great invention. e.g. if you sell all colors of widgets apart from red widgets, then a good negative keyword for you would be ‘red’.

10.Have separate ‘Search’ and ‘Content’ campaigns.

More often than not, you’ll find that the Content network does not convert as well as the Search network. It’s worth having separate campaigns with separate bids mainly for this reason.

11.Keep an eye on your returns for ‘Search Partners’.

If you find that Search Partners are not working as well as Google Search then you can turn Search Partners off.

12.Have tightly themed Ad Groups.

If you sell green widgets, and blue widgets, then make sure you have a separate Ad Group for each. Don’t have too many (loosely related) keywords in each Ad Group.

13.Do your keyword research.

Use the excellent, free keyword tools provided by Google.

• http://www.google.com/insights/search/ https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordT oolExternal
• https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

or if you have a big online competitor that already runs a Google AdWords campaign, check out:http://www.keywordspy.com/ to give you a good idea of the adverts and keyword that are already working well for them!

14.Use Google Conversion Optimizer (CPA bidding).

Once you have built up enough conversion history in an AdWords campaign you can enable ‘Conversion Optimizer’ or ‘CPA Bidding’. This is a great time saver, as you no longer have to keep a close eye on all your bids to ensure that you are always making a profit. You just tell Google ‘I am prepared to spend a maximum of £5 to sell a blue widget, now go off and get me as many sales as possible without going over budget.
http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer/

15.Use Geographic targeting (and make sure your ads are tailored to the target market).

If you ship physical products outside your own country, you’ll find that separate campaigns for separate countries can work better. e.g. if you are targeting the Republic of Ireland, you’ll probably find that ‘Free Ireland Shipping’ in your ad text works better than ‘Free Shipping’. You’ll probably also find that “Save €’s” works better than “Save £’s”.

16.Use Google Checkout.

If implemented properly, this allows you to have a ‘Google Checkout’ badge next to your AdWords adverts which can increase Click Through Rate by 10%! http://checkout.google.com/

17.Use Google Merchant Center.

If you sell physical products, this allows you to set up a feed to Google Shopping, and (if not right now then in the near future) allows you to display product images in your AdWords adverts. In the near future, it will also give you the option of setting a CPA on every single product in your inventory without having to set up an individual AdWords advert for every product, which will be a great time saver!

• http://www.google.com/merchants/

18.Use the ‘reports’ tab in Google AdWords.

There are a number of very useful reports in here. Take some time to mess around with them.

19.Use a free AdWords voucher.

There are lots of these floating around. If you get your campaign set up a an AdWords qualified expert or AdWords qualified company, then they will be able to give you a £75 voucher as part of the deal. If you are in the UK and you join the Federation of Small Business they will send you a voucher every single month (or at least they have with me!) You might even be able to find one cheap on eBay.

20.Use Adwords Editor

This program can be a huge time saver if you are working on medium to large sized accounts. Download it and learn how to use it! (unless you use Linux) -http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/

21.Consider importing your Google AdWords campaign into Yahoo and Bing.

They make it relatively easy these days, and Microsoft support in particular make Google support look embarrassingly bad. Also, Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing will merge soon (or maybe they already have, depending on when you are reading this), meaning you’ll only have one non-Google campaign to look after.

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A great article on open source merchants and mobile purchasing. Written by Kerry Watson.

‘Are you still thinking that nobody will ever shop your online store using their cell phones? You can put that old saw to rest: Amazon.com reported that over the last 12 months they sold over a billion dollars worth of goods via mobile commerce.

While mobile ecommerce is hitting the big retailers by storm, smaller online merchants are struggling to make sense of what is hype and what is real. Most Open Source eCommerce (OSC) merchants still have few options open to them.

Here’s a guide to help OSC merchants know what you need to do right now to prepare for mobile ecommerce, in rank order of importance:

1. If your target market is young, hip, and bleeding-edge tech-savvy, you are behind and should already be offering a mobile version of your online store. Or if you are a big retailer selling something for everyone. Just stop reading this article and do it.
2. Everyone else, check your current website in an iPhone and a Droid or other smart phone right now to see what your customers are seeing. Borrow a friend’s phone or get one for dedicated testing. Fix stuff that doesn’t work in the test phone. Now repeat this every time you make a change to your site. Navigate to a product and buy it. Is it easy? Good: your site is mobile-optimized.
3. If you use Flash in your existing website, have your programmers add a no-Flash alternative such as JavaScript. There’s nothing that cripples a mobile ecommerce transaction more than using Flash as your main form of navigation.
4. If you do offer a Mobile version of your website, let visitors choose whether to use it or not – don’t use a program that automatically redirects them to the mobile site. Some mobile versions are so drab and dry that users prefer to view the miniature version of your regular site. They don’t want to re-learn how your site works in your new text-laden Mobile version.
5. If you simply must offer an iPhone, iPad and Android version of your store today, if your OSC store is Magento there is a new white-label solution that allows you to quickly deploy a mobile site. Cost is around $800 setup and $700-825 per year. Some tech-savvy store owners have deployed a mobile version of their store in just a few days.
6. If your OSC store is not Magento, i.e. osCommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded or some other flavor and you are dying to be in with the in-crowd with your very own iPhone or Smartphone app, you will have to pay for custom development. This is not easy or cheap, and each platform is different. You may be better off waiting for more apps to come out soon. You know they will.’

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Ecommerce set for slowdown, says Lovingthe.net

Online retailers have “had it easy” over the last decade, but that’s all set to change as growth in ecommerce slows down in years to come, according to retail consultancy Lovingthe.net

In its 2010 report ‘eCommerce and the development of online retail’, Lovingthe.net predicts a ‘significant’ slowdown in the growth of online shopping thanks to the maturity of the market and increased competition.

Spending on the web will continue to increase by more than 56% to £35 billion over the next four years, it forecast, and it will also continue to outpace total retail. But the rate of that increase will slow considerably from an average of 35% a year over the last decade to 12% a year between 2009 and 2014. And though by 2014 there will be 32.5 million UK shoppers, that’s only four million more than at the moment, as the market reaches maturity.

Nathan Bird, senior retail analyst at Verdict, said: “With the number of people shopping online becoming highly saturated, retailers will have to change and evolve their online strategies. Driving loyalty and increasing spend per head across all age groups will become vital factors to ensure growth.”

The group says the highest-spending group of customers, those aged 34-44 and likely to have young families, are most likely to cut back in the face of forthcoming government cuts.
Instead, it sees more potential in the 15-24 and 55+ groups. To meet the demands of the younger age group, retailers must focus on use of pictures, video and mobile, while the older group wants a service-oriented customer experience linked to brands they already trust.
Multichannel retailers are at an advantage, since they operate 14 of the 20 most-used shopping sites.
Senior retail analyst Andy Maslin said: “The online shopper is extremely valuable. Retailers have had it relatively easy online over the past decade because of the channel’s rapid growth and lack of competition, but just as in overall retail, the next five years will be much more challenging.”
Speaking to Internet Retailing, George Simpkins, managing director of customer loyalty specialist Opus Intel, added: “With the outlook for a more measured rate of growth in eRetail, the ingenuity of UK retailers will clearly be tested over coming years.”

adwords, adwords campaign, best seo company, brand management, cheap seo uk

As ever, we’re first with the news here at Lovingthe.net. Keyword have launched a new keyword tool, check it out.

You know where we are if you need to get hold of us. You can give us a call on our free phone number 0800 689 9000 or drop us a mail to consultation@lovingthe.net

Google AdWords has fully launched its updated Keyword Tool after successful beta testing.

The new application is a combination of the old Tool and the search-based Tool, with the service including easier keyword refinement and more flexible search options, allowing users to make queries by any combination of website, category and keyword to receive a single set of results.

It is also possible to select negative keywords, which are search terms companies do not want their AdWords commercials to be associated with, while there are a range of advanced options, including the ability to view mobile search statistics.

Ian Bird, a member of the Lovingthe.net AdWords team, told SEO services: “We hope you like the new streamlined version of the tool and we look forward to bringing you more features soon.”

Last week, his AdWords colleague  Paul Moulden advised that the use of negative keywords can help keep costs down by ensuring commercials are not appearing when irrelevant searches are made.

Source: Updated Keyword Tool Rolled Out by Google AdWords

website design, website design company, website development, website marketing, website seo

A great article about how website design has evolved. Enjoy.

‘App and Add on Icons are astounding. They manage to include incredible detail, often at very low resolution and with content that clearly identifies the application or add on’s exact purpose. Looking at the web browser screen in IE 8, there is the tiny printer icon, an envelope that is complete with stamp, rss feed indicator, arrows for going back and forward, and logos for services, such as Yahoo and YouTube. All of these icons manage to cram an awful lot of information into a very tiny package.

With smart phones, the resolution, quality and design of the icons and buttons becomes even more critical. With hundreds of colours, 3D effects and enough information contained in the symbolism, the apps screen can contain a wall of tiny little squares that are filled with vibrant colours and images, each of which tells a person exactly what they are going to do or to get when they press an icon.

As a result, one trend is for apps and add on developers to purchase kits that have pre-developed icons and images or to work within a well coordinated colour, imagery and design scheme. These can then be modified and customized to create beautiful and relevant artwork that becomes the communication between app and user that says “This is me and this is what I do.”

Others have worked, using illustrator and photoshop programs, to develop their own icons and then go on to develop even more for sale.

The biggest trend today is dimensionality. Three dimensional icons are the rage, yet the Google Android icon is a simple, flat green fellow who looks as if he belongs on a restroom door to symbolize access for “androids only”.  Most icons are generally shaded and related to a background to stop them from looking as if they are just floating in space.

Use of colour is a growing trend. The cute little three dimensional robot of the Google Android is a specific colour of green that is incorporated into other android icons, such as marketplace. But in many cases, a good number of the 250 available colours are incorporated into tiny works of pure art.

Colour, however, can serve as the message and identity of the application. The distinctive bronzy-orange colour and crisp, curved white lines of the RSS icon can be applied to all kinds of shapes while still getting universal understanding of what it all means.

But there are trends toward too much originality in icon design that can have serious pitfalls, the biggest pitfall being that, even though the meaning was very clear to the designer, the user is baffled as to what the icon is for. This is why the use of icon packages helps to keep the customized designs closer to standardized and universal symbols for things.

Designing machine-like parts and icons that look as if they are from the future, from the game of MYST or from some alien space ship technology is big these days. In other designs, beautiful and classic imagery is the norm. One very hot trend for 2010 is to have crisp and accurate imagery that can make buttons look real or that integrate several functional working icons into one well designed package that looks like a smooth dashboard, an uncluttered office desktop or a tabbed screen.

Users are creating demand for replacing Smartphone icons with icons that work or look better for them. The Android marketplace has an app icon packages, one of which is called “ADW Launcher”. Once this is loaded, there are other packages that can be obtained in a growing field of icons that allow for replacing such items as the market icon, with better looking images.

Oddly, when a person surveyed the 25 most common colours in the iPhone apps catalogue, the results were very muted and subtle. The apps developers have many exquisite choices for integrating the icons in their apps in ways that show detail, allow navigation and show great creativity.

A look at the icons section of the Android Developers system netted a view of some interesting trends in pre made icons for apps developers that can range from dingbat fonts to tiny sticker styled items with incredible detail, dimensionality, message a colour. There are collections of standard icons, such as for Facebook, RSS and so on. Then there are artistic liberties that are taken to turn the RSS icon into a light bulb or a shaded spherical object.’

web developer, web development, web ecommerce, web marketing, web promotion uk

Todays post ties in nicely with the blog from two days ago ( I think) where we talked about Quality SEO and articles, not quantity. This was written by our good friend Peggy Tee.

Online writers are a dime a dozen, and writing services have proliferated on the internet. With such a glut of supply, webmasters should be rejoicing, but the truth of the matter is that good quality, SEO (Search Engine Optimized) content is difficult to find. There are disadvantages to entrusting your SEO articles to a writing service, the main issue being poor quality work.

Low prices, low quality

Writing services rely on high volume and fast turnarounds. If you choose to buy SEO articles from a writing service, chances are your work will be rushed through. Even worse, some writing services outsource to writers in countries where English is not the first language. The result is articles with unclear sentences, awkward phrasing, mangled grammar, and confusing idioms.

General articles

Some writing services have templates they use, such as a stock standard article for websites looking for a landing page for product selling. They simply tweak the specific information, such as type of product, region of distribution, contact details and name of business, and palm these copies off as original, unique content.

Tone of voice

When it comes to branding, it is best to keep it consistent. Unless you find a writer whose voice matches perfectly with your business’s brand, it can be difficult to match what you are seeking with what writing services can offer you. Writing services do not offer personalised service and often ignore customer’s requirements for tone. For example, light, serious, casual, or persuasive – these considerations are ignored by most writing services, who seek only to churn out as many articles in as little time as possible.

Working terms

Writing services often do not give you an overview of the work offered, or a sample of what you are buying before you pay. It can be costly in time and money to purchase from a writing service if you have to rework shoddy or poor quality articles. Rewrites are often not included in the fees charged by writing services. Be sure to specify that the articles you are purchasing are in fact, original work. Duplicate articles are ineffective from an SEO standpoint and search engines may penalize your site for posting non-unique articles.

Although buying SEO articles from a writing service may seem like a quick fix solution to your web content woes, a better course of action may be to hire a freelance writer to work with you. This way you have more control over the quality, tone of voice and terms of the articles written.

web design, web design cost, web design prices, web design uk, web designer

You have to learn to love twitter, it’s here to stay, a great way of communicating with your customers plus Google loves it !

Twitter is a useful tool in brand development and is now used within the search engine optimisation campaigns of many businesses. To use Twitter effectively, you have to regularly create appropriate tweets so others within the Twitter Community begin to notice you and understand what your business is about. When writing these tweets, there are some important things to remember which will help ensure your tweets work effectively for the development of your company.

When tweeting, you must remain focused on what you want to say. You are only able to create tweets using a small number of characters and this means you must express your messages clearly if others are going to find them useful and understand them. It may sound obvious but keeping the aim of your tweet and the information you want it to include in the forefront of your mind will help you to communicate your information clearly. It is easy to go off track when using Twitter and you need to remain focused.

It is of great importance when using Twitter to remember your audience. When running a Search Engine Optimisation Campaign you have to keep in your mind who it is you are trying to target and communicate with. A wide and varied audience use Twitter and you have to know who within this large group you wish to get noticed by and then work out how to do this effectively. The audience you are trying to attract affects the topics you write about and the language used within your tweets too. You have to make sure the tweets you create are suitable for this audience in every way. This means they will be suitable for their wants and needs, will be of interest to them and will use language they can understand easily.

When using Twitter as part of a search engine optimisation, you are doing so to help get your business noticed, trusted and respected. Therefore, it is important when creating tweets on behalf of your business to think about how your business will be perceived from the content you write. When you have written a tweet, consider it again. Is it helpful? Is it professional? Will it be of interest to others? You need to make sure your tweets are appropriate for your business at all times otherwise this could damage your development within the Twitter community. Tweets need to be high quality and suitable.

Twitter can be an exceptionally useful tool in a search engine optimisation campaign but for this to be the case, must be used appropriately. There are a lot of things to consider, research and monitor when using Twitter in this way but if you can do this successfully, impressive results will be achieved.

If you are struggling to understand how Twitter can help your business and don’t know how to use it appropriately for the benefit of your company, we at Lovingthe.net can help. We understand the importance of social networking sites in SEO today and help our clients to use them successfully.

seo usa, social marketing, uk seo, uk seo agency, uk seo company

A fantastic post from Stephen Chapman over at SEO Whistleblower. I’d love to say that most SEO Companies don’t think like this, I’d like to, but being honest I can’t. It annoys the hell out of most of us, but we try to keep on fighting the good fight.

If you’re looking for a way to get rich quick, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is absolutely the way to go. It’s so incredibly EASY to make bucket-loads of cold, hard cash with SEO! All you have to do is follow the checklist below, then sit back and marvel at yourself as you amass riches beyond your WILDEST DREAMS!

1 - No matter what, you absolutely CANNOT care about others; just yourself! You must pretend to care about others, but you must refrain from actually caring about them.

2 - You can ONLY care about money. And yourself. You can only care about money and yourself… but mainly money.

3 - Barely learn the basics of SEO, then start referring to yourself as an “SEO guru.” The people will follow.

4 - Create a Web site, post a bunch of “I rule at SEO” awards and badges that do not link to anything, then get your site ranking for long tail keyword terms like “SEO guru is cooler than a pack of Camels and you will be too” and “SEO guru is really Luke Skywalker’s father because Google says so.” It won’t take you any time at all to rank for them and you can use them to show prospective clients that you can take them to the top of Google because you rank first in Google for not just ONE, but TWO awesome keyword terms! Plus, your one term says you will make them cooler than a pack of Camels. Who could resist throwing money at you to make THAT happen!?

5 - Put into practice ONLY the things that are supposedly outdated and call it a new method: OES (Optimized Engine Stuffs). For instance; tell clients that PageRank is all that matters and that if they see green in that bar, then they’re golden! If they don’t see a green bar, then tell them it’s because they don’t have enough keywords stuffed in their meta tag. This will make you sound all smart and “SEO-y” ‘n stuff. Translation: CHA-CHING!

6 - Convince everyone to ignore folks like Rand Fishkin, Wil Reynolds,Matt Cutts, et al because what the heck do THOSE guys know, anyway!? Psh. Nothing, that’s what! You, on the other hand… you’re going to make BANK!

7 - Create a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) that’s comprised solely of rehashed content from Google’s SEO Starter Guide and sell it to unsuspecting victims (refer to point 1 above). Your status as an “SEO guru” automatically gets a +1 for this.

8 - When you build links, just use the following list of excellent link-building comments. Rinse and repeat between that list of 20 and that’s all the work you’ll ever have to really put in.

9 - Last but not least, make sure your clients know that there is no way to track the work you’ve done for them. Tell them that SEO is magic and you’re like David Copperfield… only without your own TV specials, because SEO is just, “way too amazingly-amazing to be seen.” Tell your client that Google called you and told you said client is now officially, “cooler than a pack of Camels.”

BONUS: If all else fails, you have a mega trump card at your disposal. Just tell your clients that for one large fee (something like $2.2 million*should suffice but make sure they know this is an investment into their future!), you will call Google up personally and tell them to make sure your client’s site is indexed in Google and will be ranked first for every term they want to rank for. Clients fall for it every time. Done and done!

Start opening that Swiss bank account, because you’re done! That’s it! If you want to be one of the select few who can say you became a bajillionaire because of SEO, just follow the steps outlined above and you’ll be good to go! You can safely contribute to everything that’s wrong and misunderstood about SEO while reaping the rewards. What could be better!?

Please tune in next time where I show you how to make a KILLING with affiliate marketing! You’ll have great fun and earn GINORMOUS cash by taking advantage of people’s insecurities and using fake bank account screen shots. Acai berry, MOVE OVER! The REAL cure to cancer is the tears of little children! Oops… I’m giving away my HIGHLY lucrative secrets way too soon. *wink, wink*

*If the client can only afford $30 instead of $2.2 million, just go ahead and accept that. This will all play into the illusion that you actually care about them.

(Sadly, this sarcastic post isn’t too terribly far off from a methodology many “SEOs” have used to earn a full-time living in this industry. Should you ever be approached by anyone offering the “services” you see on the list above, run for your life. That is all.)

seo specialist, seo tactics, seo specialist, seo tips, seo uk

Hate to say we told you so, well we don’t so here we go. Told you so. Will you listen to us now? Doubt it, but at least we have this blog to back up the fact that at least we know we we’re right all along.

Driving traffic to a site through search engine results is just one aspect that needs to be considered by SEO services, an expert has suggested.

Writing for the Search Engine Journal, Bharati Ahuja explained that ensuring the content published is of a high quality can be just as important.

Attracting visitors to a site can be achieved through having good content which not only relates to the firm itself, but also future trends the industry as a whole and, explained Ms Ahuja.

Producing such output will likely see it receive links from other sites, which will help web users to find the content.

Placing appropriate images on a piece with an image tag that can be picked up by the search engines is another way of getting traffic without relying solely on text.

“The social media fever which is catching up like wild fire and is a great option of getting inbound traffic if managed in a systematic and a focused manner,” the writer added as another potential method of pushing up hits.

So stop just throwing any old crap at it, yes you might get a bit more link juice for a couple of your keywords, but don’t forget the internet is all about image. Do you really want your business to be associated with an article or press release that sounds like its been written by a dyslexic on day release ?

Write less, put more time into it and build up a following. It’s a longer term strategy, but hey, you can stick it out right ?

Give us a call on 0800 689 9000 or pop in for a chat at our new Birmingham head quarters, we’d love to hear from you, even if it’s just so we can say ‘told you so’.

SEO New Zealand, SEO packages, SEO services, seo services uk, seo specialist

Heard it all before, sick of all the broken promises? Well, all we can is we’re sorry, but we are different. Talks cheap right, from us or anyone else. So we’ve decided to put our money where our mouth is, we want to show you exactly how different we are. We want to be a partner in your online business, we want to share the risk; we’ll let you keep the reward.

1. Right, you don’t know us and we don’t know you. So it’s a risk for us all, to make your life slightly easier ask us about our credit accounts, and the ability to pay us in arrears.

2. So some smart guy has quoted you £7500 for a new website, you love the site but it’s a hell of a gamble to shell out all that money. Talk to us, we’ll design you a fantastic new website, make it totally search engine friendly and build you an unbeatable SEO package, all for one price. Now here comes the best bit, you can pay us over 12 months. That’s right, no need to fork out all your money straight away, cash is king, keep it in your bank. Also, we realise that we need to make your site work, if we don’t then the chance of us making any profit from you is next to zero. We’ll hold your hand fully for 12 months, as desperate for your site to work as you are.

Can we say fairer than that? Nope, didn’t think so. Compare this with what our competitors are offering, they’re just happy to take your money and run. We are ecommerce experts, we wouldn’t offer the pay monthly option if we weren’t confident we could make your site work for you, after all we need to make some money to pay for coffee and bourbon creams.

Give us a call on 0800 689 9000 or drop us an email to consultation@lovingthe.net for further details, and maybe a bourbon cream or two.

seo leeds, seo link building, seo london, seo manchester, seo marketing

Hoorah, another satisfied customer! After a few months of hard work, and a few hours of tears, we’ve finally finished the new website for the Godiva Group, visit them now at www.godivagroup.co.uk.

A great company to work with, this is a little bit about them.

Based in Central England, the Godiva Group offers the highest standards and commitment to excellence for all of our clients across the UK. Our vast portfolio of customers range from small to large and cover a huge array of industries and business, who all agree that our level of complete service is truly of value.

Offering construction project management and a high level of consultancy the Godiva Group is continuing to grow in its reputation for highly conforming to Industry Standards and offering our clients the best solutions each sector has to offer.

We’re just about to start on a huge SEO campaign for the Godiva Group as well, watch here for updates.

If you’d like for us to take a look at your site, or if you have a great idea for a new business then give us a call on 0800 689 9000, or drop us an email on consultation@lovingthe.net.

seo england, seo experts, seo firm, seo forum uk, seo ireland

There’s a lot of daft people out there, but occasionally we come across an expert who really explains a subject really well. We’ve listed one below.

Since Google began rolling out Google Instant a week ago, the web has been dancing with all sorts of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) personalities coming out of the woodwork to claim everything from “the death of SEO” to “no impact on SEO whatsoever.” The truth is more on the side of the latter, but we’ll delve into that in a minute.

If you’re unfamiliar with Google Instant; in a nutshell, Google attempts to guess what you’re searching for as you type your query into the search box. The result is a near-real-time return of search results while you’re typing. Additionally, it provides a few suggestions in a drop-down box when you pause/stop typing (almost like Google Suggest did, but with far fewer suggestions now). So, just what does Google Instant mean for you, anyway?

What Google Instant means for you as…

…a searcher:

The primary consideration for Google Instant, searchers are now empowered to find what they want to find faster than they would have found it before Google Instant (by 2-5 seconds, according to the Google-created graph below). The idea is to allow you to leverage search in a much more productive way. For those of you who do intense research and make use of advanced Google queries, Google Instant may very well feel like more of a headache than making headway. Luckily, you can disable Google Instant either in your preferences or via a trigger just to the right of the search box.

…an SEO consultant/agency:

Put simply, Google Instant will not affect your rankings. Traffic, yes. Rankings, no. Google addresses this specifically in a Q & A section on theGoogle Instant home page (disregard the question’s typo currently residing on the page):

Monitoring your traffic should be your priority for a while and making adjustments to your keyword priorities as necessary. Usually, updates that Google implements are transparent to your clients, but if you see a significant drop in traffic for your monthly report and you accurately narrow it down to Google Instant, don’t scare your clients, but level with them. This is exactly the reason why your SEO work should *always* be done with the caveat that nothing is guaranteed — or guaranteed to last, at least! I know clients don’t want to hear that and to win business, you have to walk a fine line between making promises and being realistic, but I imagine some of you out there have churning stomachs because of what you’re going to have to report for September’s numbers. =)

…a client implementing SEO:

If you’re paying someone to implement SEO for you and you’re in the habit of receiving monthly traffic/ranking reports, expect to see a dip in traffic and maybe even a wild fluctuation in relation to longtail keyword traffic. As I noted above, keyword rankings themselves aren’t affected by this, but the likelihood that someone will find you based on a longtail keyword search has most likely been decreased. Ask for an explanation, but don’t prod too much or immediately lose faith in your campaign goals or SEO if the explanation is something to the effect of, “this is because of something Google did.” As I noted earlier, it is for reasons like this that absolutely *NO* SEO can guarantee sustainable results. With that said, great SEO agencies/consultants will analyze, adapt, implement, overcome and contribute just like they always have.

Since my aim for this blog is to stay as SEO-centric as possible, I’m not going to delve into the SEM (Search Engine Marketing)/PPC (Pay Per Click) ramifications of Google Instant here. Chances are, if you’re reading this and wondering why I didn’t cover those bases, then you’re already up to par about as much as I am with the industry-wide discussion on those topics.

In conclusion, I’d like to say that although the exact ramifications of Google Instant are yet to be fully analyzed and documented, Google Instant absolutely is not the death of SEO. Nor was the “Mayday update.” Nor was the update before it or the update before it and so on and so forth. For every random opinion touting the death of SEO, there’s an SEO who analyzes, adapts, implements, overcomes and contributes. SEO just becomes more of a specialty due to requiring more focus and hard work to do it right… at least on the research and analysis end of things, that is.

What do you think? How has Google Instant impacted you as a searcher? How about as a Web master, client, or agency? I would love to read your thoughts!

seo consultant jobs, seo consultant uk, seo consultant birmingham, seo consultants, seo consulting

A year ago SEO consultants were all worrying about some new Google algorythms, don’t worry we’ll be worrying about something else next week.

‘Google’s introduction of Caffeine—a new project—might change the algorithms of the world’s most famous search engine.

Web developers were asked to test the new infrastructure by software engineer Sitaram Iyer and principal engineer Matt Cutts.

The company says that there are no changes regarding the queries, although Vanessa Fox says that the search results could change if Caffeine is put in the mix. This would side track the search engine optimization (SEO) strategies of several companies, which have worked hard to top the rankings with the original Google algorithm. Fox says that Caffeine will put more emphasis on universal search.

However, the impact of Caffeine is still unclear. Until it goes live, there are no sure conclusions.

The press questioned if the motivation behind the unveiling of Caffeine is Microsoft’s introduction of Bing. Cutts quickly pointed out that this was not true.

“I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months,” said Cutts. “I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward.”’

SEO Canada, seo company, seo company uk, seo consultancy, seo consultant

A bit like the Pope, Loving the net is now in Birmingham! We’re loving it so far, and very glad to be here in fact I’m a born and bred brummie so I’m a bit biased. We understand the need of businesses all over the UK for top end SEO services and cutting edge web design, so we’re branching out. Instead of having to travel down to our London offices you’ll now be able to pop in and see us in Brindley Place, which is nice.

Anyway, it’s just over a year since Bing and Yahoo announced their merger. This is how we reported it way back on 24th September 2009.

‘The announcement in recent months that Yahoo will be merging with Microsoft’s newly launched Bing search engine is big news in the SEO world as it throws up a lot of questions about the market share of search engines. Google’s huge market share means that any real competition against Google will be looked upon as a good idea, but for SEO companies it may bring some other bigger opportunities for their clients. Until the long awaited merger has fully been implemented then it is mainly speculation at the moment but one thing is for sure that SEO companies will have to think more about the new Bing search engine. The full implementation of this new Bing search engine is predicted to take Yahoo up to 24 months behind the regulatory approval, which itself could take months, so there is a long time to find out how it will work out.

Bing currently has a 15% market share of the search engine market, which means that it is well worth optimising for. Since the recent launch of the Bing search engine from the original Microsoft MSN, there has been some noticeable preferences, such as concentration on keyword use in subdomains and root domain names. From the point of view of Google they love exact keyword matches, but Bing prefers keyword placement in the sub or root. These Bing algorithms are sure to change once the search engine has been implemented in a few years time, but for now this can act as a basic guide between Google and their new rivals.

Bing Will Get Lots more Data

The estimated increase in the amount search traffic on the website and the merger of Yahoo and the large amount of information they have built up means that Bing will have much more data. They probably won’t have as much as Google but Yahoo’s database of profiles, their own research and behavioural targeting means that they will have much more information to play with. This should help improve the search engine and may pave the way for greater advances on the personalization front.

Bing’s Webmaster Tools

Signing up to Bing’s Webmaster Tools may be a good idea as it may uncover a few aspects of your website that could be improved through a number of SEO techniques. Bing’s Webmaster Tools will be important for conducting better organic SEO campaigns on the Bing search engine and seeing how Google & Bing may rank your website differently. Bing’s Webmaster Tools is currently quite as robust as Google’s but they are working hard to catch up and hopefully go on to surpass their rivals and will prove valuable for webmasters on all platforms.

Lovingthe.net are constantly improving search engine results for both Google and Bing but they are also constantly monitoring the Bing/Yahoo merger to see how our clients can benefit in terms of SEO. For more information about our internet marketing services, along with our other SEO services, please contact our SEO specialists.’

search marketing, seo, seo agency, seo Australia, seo Birmingham

Erm, hello. Can you hear me? Would it help you understand if I stood about 4 inches from your face whilst screaming each sentence slowly?

‘Have you ever stopped to consider how many people are saying“hello” to each other today, and in how many different languages? If you want to say “hello” to everyone on the planet, you would have to learn at least 2,796 languages and greet at least 6,500,000,000 people. Here are some of the ways of saying “hello” around the world. Hola in Spanish,Ciao in Italian or bonjour/salut among peers in French!:)’

That all seems like a lot of hard work, it really does. So hello will have to do, we might move onto hola by 2014, but we have no firm plans or commitments in place to do this.

Now, what’s our reason for coming over all continental I hear you cry? Well I have to write something down otherwise what will I do with all that leisure time? Well, being serious for a second, the UK is the world hub for SEO, eCommerce and general flogging stuff on the net. This is because the UK contains the highest proportion of geeks in the western world, plus we have long and historic links with India where a lot of the manual SEO work is done.

Now, there used to be a time where we were an expensive luxury, not any more. Thanks to our banking system and their advance ‘pulse check’ for mortgage approvals our currency has dropped faster than a college students bikini top on spring break. You can now either pays us in the good old British Pound, or magic beans, depending on the prevailing exchange rate. Stirling has dropped by over 40% against a whole basket of currencies over the last three years making our services not only industry leading but amazingly well priced to boot.

Overseas business now accounts for 50% of all new orders. So don’t be shy give us a call, we can have a nice cup of tea and some sandwiches.

search engine optimisation UK, search engine optimization, search engine ranking, search engine submission, search engine website

We have a great choice of lessons today. The first is called ‘Tell me Something I don’t Know’, or alternatively you can take ‘Well, Duh’. Once you’ve completed these two preliminary courses you can then move onto the much tougher ‘Have you tried turning it off and on again ?’

We’re heading straight for the basics today, promoted by my discovery of the following release by the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses.

According to figures from the Forum of Private Business (FPB), more than one in five small companies in the UK do not even have their own website.

Phil McCabe, a spokesman for the FSB, said even those that do are often not making the most of their online presence.

“Many small firms do have a website but may not see much benefit from it because they haven’t invested in the right SEO services,” he stated.

Mr McCabe pointed out that about 80 per cent of people now go to the internet first when they look for a product or service they are interested in purchasing, making e-commerce a very important tool for small businesses.

Source: SEO Investments ‘Required by Many Small Businesses’

The stand out figure for me was that 80% of all people look online before making a purchasing decision, seems crazily high but the guy was wearing a suit and had glasses on so he must be right; right ?

So four out of five people will tap into google before buying a car, a new roof or even before getting their bikini line done. So come on people, what the bloody hell are you waiting for ?

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The launch of Google Instant does not sound the death knell for the optimisation of online content, according to one industry observer.

Jake Hird, a senior research analyst at Econsultancy, said the predictive, real-time results offered by the new feature may have changed the user experience and results pages, but the underlying algorithms remain the same.

Furthermore, Google is still displaying pages based on a user’s choice of keywords.

As a result, brands will still need to harness the power of search engine optimisation (SEO) to ensure their content is reaching their target audience.

“Instant may make this process more complex to understand and execute, but probably won’t destroy SEO as we know it,” he added.

According to Google, its new “search-before-you-type” approach will predict the most likely queries and stream results in real-time.

The company’s vice-president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said this should shave between two and five seconds off each individual search.

News brought to you by Lovingthe.net – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.

ppc birmingham, ppc england, ppc uk, professional seo services, search engine friendly

A very interesting piece of news has broken recently, underlining our thoughts here in the office. We have said for a while people are asking less and less about PPC, Google Adwords etc. Maybe it’s the recession, maybe it’s the fact that people are waking up to the reality that PPC, if not treated with extreme care, is a sinkhole for all your money. Often with little or no return.

Anyway, details of the report are listed below. Let us know your thoughts.

A new report has revealed that Britons prefer natural search results to paid-for ads – potentially outlining why more and more firms are engaging in search engine optimisation.

The Search Attitudes survey conducted by YouGov for Tamar found that most consumers see organic listings as more trustworthy when researching products and brands than pay-per-click ads, with older web users the most likely to hold this belief.

It also indicated that almost half of 18 to 24-year-olds make use of real-time search results from social networks like Twitter, while mobile search is also on the rise.

When it comes to making purchases, reviews and images are becoming increasingly popular among consumers requiring more information about products and retailers.

“Consumers have matured in the past four years in their relationship with search and the one constant progression that the Search Attitudes Report series clearly identifies is the growth in awareness of the differences between natural and paid search,” said Tamar search director Neil Jackson.

Google is the most popular search engine in the UK, with the site accounting for about 91 per cent of the market through both google.co.uk and google.com, according to Experian Hitwise.

Bing is second with 3.25 per cent of searches, followed by Yahoo! on 2.83 per cent.

The last set of figures are stunning aren’t they? Google accounts for 91 percent of all searches in the UK, their next closest competitor is Bing with 3.25 percent. I’m not aware of any major market in the world that has such a complete domination of any sector as Google has in search, no wonder they can afford to pay their workers to play ping pong before they pop out for an Indian head massage.

No don’t get me wrong, PPC should be part of your online marketing mix. But it should be the safety net that brings in consistent traffic and sales, not a one pill miracle cure for all that ails you.

logo design, loving the net, online marketing, pay per click, ppc

The primary reason that you have a website in the first place is to get people to visit. This fact is true whether you are providing information or selling something. One measure of success of a website is the number of visitors it gets, and one way to increase the traffic to your site is to use pay per click advertising. When used effectively, pay per click (PPC) advertising will help you reach your target audience and get them to your website. And when you get right down to dollars and cents, the real measure of the success of a website is the number of paying customers who visit your site.

If you handle your pay per click campaign in the right way, you will get immediate traffic, and your web visitors will tend to be your target audience. PPC is handled in a very unique manner in which you are usually only are charged when your ads are clicked. In order to make sure that your ads are running, you will bid on keyword phrases. The three largest operators of PPC are Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing. All three of these companies allow you to bid on your keywords.

As with any advertising campaign, it is important that you understand your target audience in order to use PPC effectively. If you know what types of keywords your target user is likely to be searching, and you select the keywords that are most relevant to your website content, you will be able to effectively place your pay per click ads to greatest advantage.

You can achieve value from your PPC advertising even if you don’t get immediate clicks. Your target user may see your ad, without clicking on your link at that particular time. This does not mean that your advertising has not had an impact. Your brand will be remembered, and the next time your target user is looking for your product or service they will remember having seen your ad on a previous session and will search out your site.

Besides placing your pay per click ads on a variety of websites where people search and spend time, one strategy that can be effective is to place your ads so that they appear on websites that have content similar to yours. A user at that site is likely part of your target audience, and by advertising there it can draw the user to your site instead.

link building uk, link building london, link building, link building campaign, link building strategies

It’s nice to be nice, right ? Who here doesn’t want to be liked, doesn’t enjoy the warm feeling of being popular? As a three hundred pound schizophrenic with athletes foot and abandonment issues I struggle to be loved, but hey such are the cards we are all dealt. Now sometimes SEO is a bit scary and confusing, to be honest everyone of us are baffled by an SEO concept at some point and manfully bluff our way through until we can google it. So I’m going to simplify Link Building as much as I can, hopefully you’ll try and understand what I’m going on about. Please let me know if you have any questions as there will be a test at the end of this blog.

Link building can be split into two sections, firstly you have to imagine that your website is a person. The more funny, attractive, friendly you are the more the more attention you’ll get and it should follow that’ll you also be pretty popular. Secondly, links are friends, the more friends you have the more the most popular kid in school (google) will like you. So are you all following the analogy so far? Good, I knew I only had the smartest of readers, apart from you, you know who you are. Idiot.

So website = a person. Links = friends and most popular kid in school = google. Right, good. So the aim for any website is to be as attractive to other sites, and google, as possible. It can do this by being well built, well designed, have great content etc. This is at least half the battle, getting a great site is getting the basics right, without this you’re going to struggle. So now, you have this new fantastic site, all shiny are bright, desperate for some recognition and friends. You’ll be offered lots and lots of ways to make new friends by hundreds of different companies, all of them promising the earth but in truth delivering at best a short term solution to a long term business strategy. You remember back in school right, a kid had a huge back of sweets or a new toy and he went from being the class outcast who smelt like french cheese and always wore wellington boots, even in July, to being this popular person. This only lasts as long as the toy is new and the bag is full, after this it goes back to being all alone and crying into his lunch box. Same with Link Building, yeah you can pay lots of money and buy friends but google always finds out in the end, it’s about as smart as any company out there, you don’t get to be the largest company in the world by being out-thought by a bloke in his spare bedroom in New Delhi. So don’t buy friends, you’ll only end up all alone and desperate. Influence friends, promote yourself to friends but always know the boundaries.

So you’ve started making friends, and this is now where it gets even more complicated. So we’re back in school, which I can tell you is a tough tough place for anyone to survive in. You soon realise that having friends is great, but some friends are valued higher than others. The painful truth is that if you want to be popular as possible you’re not going to get there by hanging out with the chess club. so you have to make powerful and influencial friends, or as google would have t those with a high PR. Now PR goes from 0 to 10, a link from a website that is PR 10 is worth infinitely more than a PR 0 site. So again, it’s ok to have some geeky friends but it’s the more powerful and popular ones which will make all the difference to your campaign for world domination.

So there it is, hopefully I’ve explained what a link is, tomorrow I’ll go more into how to get links.

google adwords, google seo, internet advertising, internet marketing service, internet marketing uk

There are some days that writing this blog is hard going, there are times when I’ve got a mental block or run out of anything interesting to say, not that you’ve noticed, right ? Well today, dear reader. isn’t one of those days. Just like any normal business we keep an eye on our competition, see what they’re doing, what new ideas they have and how much they’re charging. Some of the time we think that’s a good idea, and improve on it, most of the time we hold our head in our hands unable to believe some of the promises made about SEO and Google Adwords.

Right, here are some of the promises made by our competitors, we wont give them the links by mentioning them directly but most should be obvious.

1. *****n provide guaranteed SEO services that are both cost effective and measurable

There is absolutely no such thing as a ‘guaranteed’ SEO service. It’s impossible, there are too many different factors that will affect your sites performance, many of which we cannot control. With www.lovingthe.net we guarantee we’ll do everything in our power to get you great results, and a return on your investment.

2. Our SEO techniques are most cost effective, customized to meet your individual need and offer you instant result.

What? Instant Result? Hang on, that is impossible. So you’re telling me we agree to an SEO project and instantly we are on the front page of google? Talk is cheap, right ? Make sure you deal with a UK based SEO company that has a proven track record of success, not just fancy promises and little substance.

3. Note, we offer a full, 100% money back guarantee if we don’t get you to the first page of google.

Read the small print. This will usually mean that if your keyword appears on the first page of google even for 5 seconds at 3am then their work is done. It is pretty simple to get you to the first page quickly using black hat techniques, keeping you there for any length of time is more of an issue. Using a company like this leaves your website wide open for blacklisting by google, I can assure you that they wont be using these techniques on their own site.

4. $399 annual – Guaranteed fast listing on DMOZ, Netscape, Google, MSN, AltaVista, LYCOS, FAST, ASK/Temoa and 100+ other engines and portals! Trace your traffic and guarantee a higher position!

Right, where to start with this one? Firstly, how can they guarantee submission to a search engine? Do they own the search engine? Are they in charge of approving listings? The answer is fairly obvious, they’re talking rubbish. They are making guarantee’s about a service they have absolutely no control over. If you guys fall for this then I have some magic beans you might be interested in; *guaranteed more magic than normal beans or your money back. Past bean performance is not a guarantee of future performance. Not to be used if you suffer from back pain or if you have pale skin and freckels.

We guarantee hard work, commitment, cutting edge promotional techniques but we can’t guarantee results. Who can?

Stay safe out their readers, you know how we worry.

ecommerce site, ecommerce uk, ecommerce web design, ecommerce website, email marketing

Right, I’ve got some bad news for all of you; it’s not looking pretty out there. Three months ago I thought we were through the worst of it, the recession I mean, we could see some steadyish growth, the vital signs of the economy seemed ok, unemployment had stopped rising and had even fallen slightly. Well, I think what we experienced was a bit of high wind that preceded the hurricane. I can see nothing on the horizon but black clouds and huge great drops of rain. Here in the UK we’ve suffered pretty badly so far, we had a huge banking sector, which failed in a quite amazing way. We had huge personal debt combined with a massive public sector deficit, meaning that for the 5 years we’re all going to have to survive on dried noodles and tins of beans. I read a report this morning which said that here in Birmingham we might have to get rid of up to 25,000 council employees. These are huge numbers and potentially devastating for local families and local industry.

So today, 1st September 2010, we have decided here at lovingthe.net towers to build a huge great moat and collect as much bottled water and toilet paper as possible. What has this looming depression got to do with SEO in the UK I hear you cry/plead/beg? Well it’s an opportunity, we are going to experience 5 hard years of belt tightening, business failures and low spending consumers. The days of even medium sized companies having monthly budgets of £100,000 for online advertising are gone. People have got to relearn the value of money; turnover is vanity profit is sanity. All business is not worth winning, you have to make a profit. Not just a gross profit, but you have to factor in every single cost you can. So you’re making 8% gross on your sales from the internet, well done. So how much are you spending on warehousing, staff, depreciation of stock, dead stock, customer services etc? And the list goes on and on.  A good rule of thumb is that all small to medium sized businesses should be making at least 15-20% gross profit on each item they sell. Any profit made should straight away be invested into the structure of your online business, making sure as much of the work is automated as possible.

So we’re screwed, right? Well yes and no is the answer. A lot of large, cost heavy, businesses are screwed. My prediction is that we’ll see plenty of consolidation within our industry; companies that have a high street presence and use their website as a vain bolt on will reassess their approach. Very very few of the high street retailers, especially the supermarkets, are making profits online. Virtually all are subsidised by their regular stores, their profits used to subsidise loss making online operations. I’ve already covered Ocada in a previous blog, but they are a business that I don’t think will be around in two years time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if companies such as Asda and Sainsbury’s abandoned their online stores altogether.

So that’s the bad news, what else is there? Well, to be honest we’re quietly excited about the next few years, it will give massive opportunity to smaller companies who can move faster and bring innovative products and services to the marketplace. The huge advertising budgets will shrink leaving a much more level playing field for the rest of us. Here at www.lovingthe.net we specialise in small and medium companies, not just happily designing them a website and waving them off but ecommerce as a whole. We know the pitfalls because we’ve fallen into them ourselves; we know what works and what doesn’t.

The next five years will see a total change in our society. It will be a time of austerity, a time of reassessing what really matters. We’ll all work out that we don’t need a 50″ LCD TV; the 42″ will be fine for now. That credit and borrowing is bad and saving is good. I’m looking forward to the shift; I’m looking forward to the challenges that lie ahead. The next five years will see the internet and ecommerce grow at about 20% a year, whilst the high street contracts by 5%. New players will emerge and old established brands will withdraw. This is a time of great opportunity; don’t let it pass you by.

company logo, e-commerce, ecommerce, ecommerce consultant, ecommerce design

You looking at me? Are you looking at me? Are you, are you? You’d better not be looking at me ’cause I tell you, if you are you are in serious trouble. And I don’t mean trouble like sit on the naughty step or there’s no way you’re going to stay up late to watch Match of the Day. Trouble with a capital T. Good, we’re both on the same page now, both know where we stand. Ok, lets move on. Slowly with our hands down by our sides.

On the internet everyone’s out to get you. Google isn’t fair, your web designer is playing you for a fool, your SEO isn’t working and all that the SEO company is doing is playing farmville all day. You can’t be sure of any of this but you ‘know’, call it gut feeling, whatever you just know.

The problem with the internet is that the front is transparent and easy to follow, heck you use a web browser 100 times a day. You know the internet just enough to be opinionated about it, you use it so you must know how it works’ right ? I bet you’re the same guy who always comments on the plane landing, usually along the lines of ‘bloody hell we’re coming in fast’ or ‘that was a bumpy landing, I think there were cross winds’. The truth is just because you fly to Benidorm twice a year to really get away from it whilst eating your full English breakfast it doesn’t naturally follow that you know what you’re talking about. Please, lets all take a moment, lets regain our composure and talk about this like rational grown up men (we can pretend). There are good SEO companies and bad SEO companies out there, just like any other industry. Heck, I’ll admit it, there are more in ours than the average. The reason for this is you can’t see what we do, we don’t produce anything apart from a rather confusing set of figures once a month, apart from that there’s absolutely no way of proving we’re actually doing anything other than booking holidays and registering yet another account at virign wines to take advantage yet again of one of the three million £20 off vouchers they’ve circulated throughout the internet.

So how can you tell if they’re doing what they’re supposed to be?

1. Reputation – If they have one they’ll not want to lose it so if they come recommended and have been around for a while then you should be ok.

2. Location – Right, how do we put this? You know when you call up your bank and try and set up a direct debit or fix a problem and you’re put through to ‘John’, well you know how difficult and frustrating that can be, now try that with an indepth and complex SEO campaign. Now, we are not saying for a second that all none UK SEO companies are bad, we just believe a higher percentage of ones based outside of our fair shores do not always deliver on their promises, and if they don’t what then ?

3. You get what you pay for – We’ve covered this already but hey you need to be reminded. Writing this blog and submitting it to all the differnet search engines probably takes me an hour a day. Times that by 20 and you’ll have my blog work for the month. Now blog’s are great, but they’re less than 10% of the time neeeded if you want a fully fledged SEO campaign. Lets be generous and say total hours worked are about 160-170 a month, which is a typical working month for most people. Now what’s the minimum wage again ? Yes you can, and we do, get some of our more basic work done in places where they’ll work for less, but not all of it. If you have a budget of £200 for SEO then you’ll get what you pay for, which with the best will in the world isn’t going to get you a seat on Dragon’s Den anytime soon.

We are great ecommerce consultants who consistently get results for companies on micro budgets, give us a call on 0800 689 9000 for some free advice, or visit us at www.lovingthe.net

adwords, adwords campaign, best seo company, brand management, cheap seo company

Right, I’m back from my week long holiday at the rather glamorous Scunthorpe Hilton, which had simply magnificent views stretching right across the Lincolnshire countryside. I rested well and come back to you relax and re-energised for the challenges that no doubt lie ahead, how long this new found optimism will last I’m not entirely sure, not long I suspect.

Adwords and Cheap SEO are unlikely bed fellows. When anyone asks me what the difference for a business is and what their budgets should be I give the same rational all the time, Adwords is like buying a fish, SEO is the fishing rod. We can all nip down to Waitrose (I’m posh me) and get some Dover Sole, I can you can and your competitors can. It’s the easy option, it’s the unthinking way to get fish, expensive and immediate. Where as buying a fishing rod takes time, you need to get the right equipment, find the right lake, get the right bate then start to discover what works and what doesn’t. Then when you’ve done most of the hard work and you think you’re there it all changes again. Some fish bite at certain times of the day and only during certain weather conditions, there are parts of the lake that are better than others for certain fish; I’m no fisherman, as you can no doubt tell, but it seems like a hard task. Then, when finally you have worked out all the different variables some bugger pollutes the stream feeding the lake and all the fish die and are restocked with something totally different.

When I started out on the above analogy I didn’t hold out much hope for it, however as I progressed the parallels grew clearer and more obvious. The answer I give to customers who ask is at first you have to buy a bit of fish so you don’t starve, as your skills and knowledge develops then you can buy less and less fish until finally you are landing all you fish for free allowing you to buy a huge deep sea trawler.

So competition, there is two ways of beating them and getting some business than them.

A. Spend more money than them. If there’s any of you out there who want to outspend your rivals please let me know. I’ll get the special headed paper ready and maybe even call you instead of the other way round. If you can let me know exactly how many thousands of pounds you intend to spend every month I’d really appreciate it, the Scunthorpe Hilton is very popular and I’d like to book for next year.

B. Be smarter than they are. That’s where we come in. We’re pretty smart, nah forget that we’re really reall ysmart. In fact we’re so smart we sometimes even surprise and amaze ourselves. Now, we’re not the largest SEO company out there, and we certainly have no budget to promote ourselves in relation to a lot of our competition. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to go to google and tap in the following keywords. Ecommerce UK, Ecommerce Consultants, Ecommerce Consultant. Stunning results eh? The top search phrases in the UK for Ecommerce and we’re all over the first page. Whenever you choose and SEO expert always say to them, in the style of Jerry Maguire. ‘Show me the Rankings’, lets face it if they’re rubbish at promoting their own business how are they going to be with yours?

As ever we’re here to help. Give us a call on 0800 689 9000 or visit us at www.lovingthe.net. Let us show you there is another way, a way that doesn’t involve you selling your house.

seo, seo company, seo consultant, seo marketing, seo services

As Jimmy Saville might have said circa 1979, we’ve had a bulging mail sack this week. And we have. Lots of good questions, lots of bad ones and a tonne of confusion. To save time, and to act as a handy Q and A I’ve listed some below with our answers. This is handy for us as we’re really bored of constantly answering the same question, we’ll just direct you here instead in the future. Not really, but you might stumble across here, you never know.

Q What do you mean you guarantee to get us on the first page of google ?

We will get your keyword onto the first page of google within a set time period, usually ranging from 3-6 months. This is on the understanding of course that you carry on paying us, do not get your site banned by google and have no other huge Titanic style issues. Now this keyword might stay on the first page for 6 months or six minutes, cannot guarantee either.

Q What happens after you get me to the first page?

Two things usually, firstly you’ll get loads more traffic and think you’re going to be king of the internet world. Secondly you’ll think all the hard work is done and you’ll bugger off, at which point your rankings will drop faster than a students knickers during freshers week. You’ll then come back, usually after a couple of months, and ask us to start again. There are a few of you who listen and we keep your words where they should be and add some more, you know who you are, you get a gold star.

Q How long will it take ?

Erm, don’t know. Depends on numerous different influencing factors. Firstly, the bigger your SEO budget the more time and resources we can throw at your project and the quicker you’ll rise. Also depends on your site, its content, the onsite SEO, the age of your site and the competition. We will get you there, just relax, it’ll all be worth it in the end.

Q How much will it cost?

How much have you got ? We will work out a project for you, the best possible, and then how fast it is implemented depends on your budget. This is the most frustrating part of our jobs, seriously, we’re not trying to tarmac your drive or sell you a TV, in both these cases the costs are fixed. You know how much the tarmac costs, know how long it’ll take and the bloke at Curry’s knows the cost price of his TV. We don’t, we have no clue how quickly or aggressively you want these keywords promoted. Our costs are 95% labour, therefore our prices are pretty elastic.

Please, please, please if we ask what your budget for this project is don’t say you haven’t got one. Firstly that’s a lie secondly it makes it impossible to work out a plan for you. We have customers spending £200 a month with us, others spending over £10,000, all for basically the same product the difference being the amount of time and people associated with your project.

We always try and work out a price that works for all of us. We don’t work for free, and neither do you, we try and work out a price that benefits us all. You have to make money from this SEO, we never ever forget this.

Q Can your powder remove stubborn stains even at 40 degrees?

Idiot.

Q I am sick of all the broken promises, are you different?

Yup, absolutely. Our industry is full of companies promising you world domination within six weeks all for £199. Seriously, if you’re dumb enough to believe that’s really true then I have some magic beans for you. If it was that easy everyone would do it, it’s not SEO is a long hard slog. The internet and ecommerce is huge, and growing at about 20% a year. Just think how huge the internet is now, how large a part it plays in our everyday life, our decision making? In 4 years and 9 months the amount of money spent online each year will have doubled from today, in 7 years it will be treble the size it is now.

We will never over promise, but we’ll also be brutally honest with you. If your website is rubbish we’ll tell you, if your product or service is uncompetitive we’ll let you know. You wont listen but we’ll tell you anyway.

We are different, give us a call on 0800 689 9000 to find out just how different we are.

search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, search engine ranking, search engine submission, search marketing

Well it’s not really is it? Bit of a daft headline, just had Swiss Tony going round in my head. Wasn’t the fast show great, eh ? Sorry, I digress, for a change.

Search engine optimisation needs to be taken slowly, first off discover Google’s likes and dislikes, be gentle, sensitive to the needs of both your client and Google themselves. Don’t go at it like a bull in a china shop other wise you’ll peak too soon and it’ll all be over before you’ve really begun, you’ll be consigned to the sandbox to practise your technique all alone.

Right, enough… Starting to worry myself now, bloody voices in my head.

As you all know search engine optimisation is the process of targeting keywords or phrases from your website that could generate substantial traffic, you then using various strategies to make your site is as appealing as possible to both google and other websites. The more popular your site the higher Google will place your keywords on their SERP’s (search engine ranking page). So maybe, on reflection, search engine optimisation is not too different to the dating game t. The man who gets the girl is always the cool one, not too much Brut, not too many buttons of his shirt undone, understated and confident. Just like your website and search engine optimisation needs to be. Keywords are like women, the more beautiful the harder they are to get. So maybe ‘SEO  UK’ would be Cheryl Cole whilst ‘Llama training school Redditch’ would be more your Heather from Eastenders type, easier to get a result with but not one to boast to your mates about.

If your site’s an ugly duckling it doesn’t really matter how cool you are or how nice you smell it’ll always hold you back, search engine optimisation will help and your results will still be good, though not as much as if you’d had a serious makeover. The same as if your site is getting on a bit and dresses like Bruce Forsyth, it’s not going to attract teenage girls, you might not want it to. It might do amazingly well in its own age group and you may have specifically dyed your hair grey and bought 3 cardigans for £20 from Marks and Spencers just to get your look right.

So dear reader to summarise, if I can from the garbled mess you have read previously, make sure your website is self aware, make sure it knows whether it’s trying to pull Carol Vorderman or Hannah Montana. Once you know the age you’re after then the technique is pretty much the same. Make sure you’re wearing a nicely ironed shirt and that you have a clean hanky then be cool, get a strategy together and most importantly give it time. We can’t all end up with the most beautiful girl in the club, but the good news is she always brings a few less good looking and slightly more desperate friends with her. Hey, it could be worse, at least you’re not going home alone on the night bus with only a luke warm kebab and a can of lilt for company.

online marketing, pay per click, ppc, ppc uk, search engine marketing

August is traditionally a quiet month in a lot of different industries, from office supplies to construction it’s all slowed down as people unwind a little and take a well earned vacation. Not so here at www.lovingthe.net, our eCommerce Consultants have never been busier, long may it continue. We’ve been helping businesses all over the UK with their SEO and Web Design needs, and also a couple of new customers from Canada and Australia as well.

So why the crossroads then I hear you ask, bit dramatic but you know what I mean. Well the question gripping us here in the office is do we carry on doing what we’ve been doing? Should we carry on servicing smaller customers with tiny budgets or should we now concentrate on corporate clients only? We love our smaller customers, but the ugly truth is that we lose money on every single one of them. You see, we can’t say no. We know that some people are relying on us for the growth of there business, there is no plan B, there are no fall back funds for an email marketing campaign. So, in the end we are as committed to the project as the business owner is. That’s great, but we have to make money to survive, hence the crossroads. We started out with the idea that if we treated our smaller customers well in the beginning then they’d be loyal, as their online business grew they’d use more and mroe of our services and what initially was a loss leader could end up being a nice little account for us. However, that doesn’t always happen, people get their site up and running and doing some business and they think they’ve made it. They stop the SEO and decide that they know everything now and don’t need us anymore. The unfortunate truth is they’re often back within three months, tail between their legs and we have to start right from the beginning again.

We know as eCommerce Consultants that the only way we’re going to retain a customer over the long term is if our Web Design UK and SEO UK services are second to none. The meeting is this afternoon, my gut feeling is to carry on what we’ve been doing, carry on delivering great results to smaller companies, yes it’s not great for our bottom line but out of little acorns do huge great oak trees grow, or at least we hope they do. Small businesses are the backbone of the UK economy, we are a nation of entrepreneurs and shop keepers. So if you’re out there with a fledgling business and a miniscule budget, don’t worry we can help you, just give us a call on 0800 689 9000, even that’s free!

google adwords, google seo, internet advertising, link building, logo design

Go on ask, I know what you’re thinking. ‘So Ian, what is your big hang up with fat people, almost every picture on your blog contains some fat bloke and a skinny girl, is there something you’d like to tell us?’. Ok, you’ve got me, hands up I’ll admit it. I’ve put on a few pounds recently, for a few pounds read almost doubled my body mass. It’s a sedatory life sitting behind a desk all day, dealing with customers, designing SEO strategies. Lot of stress as well, all in all a bad combination, especially with London 2012 looming large and me unable to put my socks on without taking a puff on my inhaler.

So what to do? I have no will power, I can’t do this on my own so I decided to find someone else to get fit with, a bit of extra motivation if you will. So I put an advert on gumtree and sat back and awaited my results. Now being an SEO consultant I knew how important it was to make my advert relevant, clearly written and appealing to my target market. So that’s what I did, and guess what, me and two new buddies are off out jogging on Wednesday.

Now I understand sometimes my blogs have a very tenuous link to the title, or to the subject I’m trying to talk about, however I’ll try and clear that mystery up right away. Websites are like me, the lonely fat bloke who no-one wants to talk to, lacks motivation or guidance. Now, I could be an insanely gorgeous thin bloke, but the results are the same I’d still be lonely unless I advertised myself and developed links with other people. See what I did there ? Google assumes all our websites are terrible and deeply unpopular, like the fat bloke, as such it ranks us lowly and does not allow our message to even approach a place where people might see it. So we have to reach out, talk to other people, start conversations, release articles, build back links.

Back links are basically friends, the more friends you have the higher placed your keywords are. Now, google isn’t stupid. It knows that just like in the real world that if you have a lot of money you can get friends quickly, now these aren’t real friends, just people who love you for your money. Google only wants to see real friends so if it sees you buying them they’ll stop inviting you to the parties and social gatherings, they’ll send you to Coventry. So, it’s a thin line we walk, we all want friends but not too many and not too quickly. Google is very clever and just like us when we look at the picture above alarm bells start ringing; the same happens at Google, it smells a rat, it knows the difference between real and fake, knows the difference between real and paid for friends.

So if you are like the fat bloke reach out, lose some weight and make a few friends. Do not be tempted by miracle diets or fat melting pills, it’s a long tough road you’re on and when you cheat you’re only ever really cheating yourself. Don’t pay for friends, they’ll only disappear when the money runs out.

For weight loss tips or link building advice you know where we are. Now drop and give me 20 fat boy.

SEO New Zealand, SEO Australia, SEO Canada, SEO USA, SEO Ireland, SEO Europe

Hello chums, welcome to England. Today the weather will be mainly dull, grey (certainly not gray) and overcast. I have had a lovely cup of tea already and am very much looking forward to a pint of weak warm beer later. Whilst we might be a UK based company, and have the bad teeth to prove it, we deal with customers from all round the English speaking world, and the Welsh.

Whilst you might think it’s best to use a local SEO company, we’d disagree. Firstly, price is really really important to everyone, especially in such a cost concious market as online sales. Fortunately for all you foreign types the once mighty British £ is now worth next to nothing, seriously if things get any worse here we might have to go back to bartering. The good news for you guys is that our prices are now really cheap. For example, if you’re based in the frozen north of Canada, sitting on all that oil and wood then you’re saving about 50% due to the strength of your currency. So not only are you getting an unbelievable service from some of the UK’s leading eCommerce Consultants but you’re getting our unbeatable services at prices you couldn’t hope to get from Mike in Canmore.

So we’re cheaper, right, we’ve covered that. But more importantly are we any good, will your results suffer due to us not being based within spitting distance of you? The answer is no, quite emphatically, we can still do all the same analysis and research that we do for our UK customers, we just change the location. If there’s a huge time difference between foggy old London town, and where you’re based we’ll still make sure you can speak to us when you want to. Our eCommerce Consultants work from 8am until 8pm, UK time, ensuring that even if you’re based in Wellington there’ll still be some part of both your working days when you can speak live to each other.

We’d love to show you some of the truly amazing results we’ve achieved all over the world. From new websites in Wexford to fantastic SEO results in Sydney. Take advantage of the huge discounts on offer, we’ll also lock in your price at today’s exchange rates, meaning if the British £ ever does rise from the grave then you’ll never pay anymore than you do now. So for all your needs be that SEO Australia, SEO New Zealand, SEO Ireland, SEO Canada, SEO USA or even SEO Europe give us a call for a chat about how we can save you some serious money and also get you some amazing results.

International SEO

ecommerce design, ecommerce site, ecommerce web design, ecommerce website, email marketing

You’ve heard it all before, right ? We’re different, we’re better blah blah blah. Here at lovingthe.net towers we realise there’s a load of eCommerce Consultants out there, or at least people who claim to be eCommerce Consultants, so why choose us? Well, firstly, we are truly eCommerce Consultants, we haven’t just given ourselves this title or got a piece of paper from an online university based in Guam, we’re the real deal.

We come from a background of owning and managing ecommerce platforms, and we still do. We have walked the walk, we have turned websites from a good idea into multi million dollar ventures. Not porn sites or gambling sites, real proper ecommerce platforms selling normal everday consumer goods. Go on, ask your next eCommerce Consultant this question the next time you speak to them, ‘So Hank, you know you’re so good at SEO, can you show me a retail platform you own?’. At this point they’ll shift nervously in their seat and make up some excuse like, we’re too busy running this company etc, we could if we wanted to, and so on.

Well the truth is my friend, hey after all this time I think I can call you that, is they have never ever gotten their hands dirty in the real world, they don’t understand the pressures you are under, they have no clue about just how hard it is to make a profit online. Don’t forget, we’re selling a service, which is 3000 times easier than selling a TV set.  We can’t just get your site looking great, we wont just make sure it ranks well we also will help you with every single aspect of your ecommerce site. We will help you avoid all the costly pitfalls that we made, we will guide you through the legal maze and hold your hand until you reach the other side. Listen, lets be honest with you here, we’re here for the long term. Your current SEO company could not give a damn about how well you’re doing as long as you’re paying them on time, they don’t know and don’t care if your product is incorrectly marketed or priced. They have no clue about your industry sector or competitors. We do, and this is going to sound corny, we care. We see this journey as a partnership, we want to share in your success and be part of your solution.

Listen, if you know it all already we’re not the guys for you. If you want to get rich within six months with a budget of $400 then sorry, we really can’t help. However, if you’re serious about ecommerce, and have a long term vision then give us a call. Don’t worry if you think you’re too small or that your budget isn’t going to cover, that’s fine we’ll work something out.

That’s what makes us different, like the fat bloke at the top. We might not look great, but we always get results.

Customers come and customers go, an unfortunate truth in any business, and no different in ours. Sizzle sells, so when after three months of SEO your website isn’t quite ready for world domination some people panic, they start trawling the internet to find some bigger promises, to try and work out what’s going wrong. You tell them, nothing’s wrong, it’s just the way it is. SEO takes time, but it’s worth it, we see this stage all the time. Companies have seen the initial good work of their keywords rising from nowhere to page five of google, they then expect to see an huge strides being achieved on an almost daily basis. You tell them, the pages you’ve overtaken were not promoted, not worked on and had risen without any assistance, the hard work is now just starting. You now have to beat companies who are competing for space, paying for work to be done to promote their site and keywords, just like you are.

They hear the words, understand the concept but are desperate for results now. 85% of all internet traffic to new websites does not come from Google Adwords are other forms of Pay Per Click (PPC), it comes from natural or organic search results. So yes, paid for advertising is good and will get you some results straight away, but it isn’t the answer, just part of it. So back to the question, google adwords or natural search, which should you be concentrate on first ? Well, the answer really depends on you, your expectations and you business. If you’re a small company that needs immediate results we say go for PPC from day one, with SEO taking something of a back seat until you can really afford to invest in long term results. People always get confused with this, but just to confirm, google adwords does not effect your natural search results. Spending a ton of money with google will not make them look at you more kindly and grant you special dispensation to get to the first page of natural search, you’ll be back in the pack with everyone else.

We always tell our customers before we start our SEO campaign to know that they’ll get to three months and be wondering whether it’s all worth it, never the less we always get the same fraught phone calls from customers, who quite rightly want to know if they’re doing the right thing. We give them examples of sites we’ve worked on over a longer period just using SEO and show them the fantastic results they’ve achieved, however in most cases we get the same response back, we’d like to take some of our budget away from SEO and use it for Google Adwords instead. This is an ecommerce consultants worst nightmare, but after all it’s the customers money and they should do whatever they feel is best. So we do it, our customer gets an initial flurry of new orders then that dies down a little, after nine months they come back and say we’re really disappointed with our SEO results can we move all the money into adwords, again we protest but go along with it. After twelve months our customers orders are still falling and they’re now losing money on adwords, they come back and say it’s you not us we’ve wasted all this money on advertising, we’re off to find a better SEO company, and the cycle starts all over again. However, the company that stuck to its guns, which held fast and got over the three month hill is now reaping the rewards. It’s well established on the first page of Google and its business is growing slowly but surely.

So for us SEO wins everytime, PPC and Google Adwords are really great tools as long as you do not use then at the expense of long term SEO. Paying for advertising is a bit like paying for fresh fish, SEO is buying the fishing rod.

adwords, brand management, company logo, e commerce, ecommerce

Sorry, I haven’t been around for awhile, I’ve been trying to calm down and gather my thoughts. You know it’s me right? It’s not you I just say those things because I’m mad, angry at myself for all the stupid mistakes I’ve made. Listen, I wish I could change but I can’t, this is me the good and the bad all rolled up into one overly complex ball of love and rage. You know I didn’t mean those things I said about your Mother, she’s great really, her cooking isn’t that bad and I know that deep down she means well. It’s just, does she really have to live with us ? I mean, she’s a really healthy 97 year old, and that one good leg of hers really allows her to get out and about.

Listen we need to work on our relationship, I know I’m not the easiest person to get along with but I’m trying to change. I’ve given up drinking, and I haven’t slept with your sister in days now. I know there’s no money this month for the rent but those magic beans seemed like such a good deal at the time. But your mother, seriously, she had two bowls of cornflakes yesterday morning, was ther any need for that? I know she has lent us all that money, but even so, two baths a month, really?

And back in the room…. Oops, sorry about that, got a bit carried away there for a moment. So what’s your point I hear you collectively crying, wait, I’ll find one. Here it is. Stop blaming Google for everything whilst overlooking your own glaring shortcomings. Google are not the big bad wolf, if your site has been banned it’s your fault. Google owe you nothing, stop trying to fiddle the system and compete like everyone else on a level playing field.

Ok, Google penalty’s. Roughly once a week we get a panic ridden phone call from the sales manager at some random company. He can’t understand it, there he was chugging along nicely, his site sitting pretty at the top of google rankings and then the next day it had sunk lower than Ann Widdecome’s chest when the elastic snapped. He admitted his rise had been somewhat meteoric, after all his site was only six months old and despite all advice to contrary here he was ahead of all his rivals who’d been plugging away at this SEO game for years now. When starting out Jeff, lets call him Jeff, had gotten a few quotes from well established SEO companies that he’d found online. Not satisfied with the prices quoted or the timescale alluded to he had decided that ‘Link Farms are us’, a New Delhi based company, were the men for the job. The prices quoted were pretty competitive, but more importantly they guaranteed some amazing results. Taken aback Jeff asked them what their secret was, at which point they laughed in the style of a black and white horror movie and tapped the side of their collective noses.

Ask no questions tell no lies thought Jeff, couldn’t care less as long as the orders flooded in and the  MD said what a special soldier he was.

Then comes the same sentence we always hear. ‘ Bloody Google, they’re a nightmare. It’s all so unfair. ‘

As the bloke in the t-shirt at the top says. Don’t f**k Google otherwise you’ll end up losing your life for 18 years coupled with a  huge rise in your living costs. Ok, maybe not that exactly but you know what I mean. If you need to sow your wild oats always use protection. As my Dad has said on maybe 4000 separate occasions, ‘Son, I always practised safe sex. I never gave her me real name or address.’  Hmmm, nice.

search engne optimisation, seo, ecommerce, web design

You’re selling a fast moving consumer product, say for example it’s a mobile phone. It’s really just like all the other mobile phones out there, same design, same spec, same manufacturer. Price might vary a little but heck, not enough these days to spend the savings on anything more than a half of lemonade and a bag of crisps. So here you are, no-one has ever heard of you until they land on your £200 website, and you can’t understand why people aren’t buying. Seriously people, get real. You can’t even pay on your site using a credit card without going through some laborious and seriously unprofessional check out made in your garden shed and backed by the might of paypal. Do you know what, I reckon you’d think twice before placing an order, and you own the bloody website.

So you can’t work out what’s going on, why aren’t people buying from your website, which to the casual observe looks about as professional and legitimate as a Republican presidential vote in Florida. Well let me be straight with you, I can’t really be with you on the phone it’s not polite, the reason you are getting less orders than a Jewish pork scratchings salesman is that everything about your outfit shreaks cheap and nasty. Why would anyone with even a half functioning brain buy from you? Even if you were almost giving your product away I’d look elsewhere. Now there’s nothing wrong with having a limited budget but huge dreams, but why can you not see the limitations of your business plan? Do you seriously think armed with a£100 budget and a website from the back of cereal packet you’ll be troubling anyone? Your not even doing anything unique, all you are doing is selling someone else’s products, badly.

So here we go, the call has been and gone, you have all the relevant details. You know the products, the site and the competition. You like the bloke you’ve just been nattering away with, you want to give him a break. You know a new site is an absolute neccesity but understand fully that they simply can’t afford it. Being the benevolent type of person that you are you give them a huge break, this is it you say it’s July and I’d really like to be keeping the geeks busy so we’ll make them an offer they cannot refuse. You let them have it, tell them where we all stand, tell them you cannot polish a turd and there will be no point directing any further traffic to their site which looks like its been designed by a four year old using an etcha sketch. £500 a month you tell them, twelve month contract. That’s for a brand new logo, brand, website, ecommerce plaform, onsite SEO and a full SEO package for a year, all beautiful and hand made. So the full cost of launching a brand new business is £6000, spread out into twelve bitesized pieces.

All I could hear was the sound of someone fainting and hitting the floor hard. In the backgrund you can hear people busying themselves fetching wet towels and mars bars. A couple of minutes later they regain composure and splutter down the phone. f.ff.fff…five hundred pounds? Is that per month or in total; they manage to gasp out? Erm a month you reply, seriously, I’m offering you a stunning new business for £500 a month. The money you make in a year will more than cover what you’ve spent, then you will still have this site, in essence I’m giving you a free website. You’d have thought I’d just tried to sell them a turd sandwich and called it nutella.

Now remember, I’m no snake oil salesman, I haven’t cold called anyone. These people already have a website, they already know they need help promoting it that’s why they called me. I presume they are aware of the work involved in SEO and web design, presume they know their market place and competitors. Even after all these years it never ceases to amaze me that some people feel they have a God given right to compete with the carphone warehouse and their £6 million annual website budget despite having all the finance backing of a lemonade stand.

So my message is get real. We offer amazing deals at lovingthe.net, for goodness sake if you have a budget of £100 a month buy loads of scratch cards instead of competing with a multi national, you’ve a better chance of getting some of your money back.

SEO, UK SEO, ecommerce, SEO Consultant

Being an SEO consultant is tough. Listen, we know it’s not in the same league as being a coal miner or a personal care assistant in an obesity clinic but it’s a really competitive environment, plus the hours aren’t always the best. We have to get these amazingly tough keywords onto the front page of google, we have to do it like yesterday whilst still finding time for our playboy lifestyles.

We like what we do though, it’s about as close to team sports as us geeks get, without the high fives and sweat of course. Being honest here for a second the other thing that makes our job that little bit harder is you guys, there we’ve said it. Now,  I’ll clarify that a little, and it’s not all of you, just a pretty vocal minority. For some reason when it comes to SEO, ecommerce and web design everyone’s an expert. Knowledge is great, it empowers us all and sets us free; but I don’t know more than the doctor who’s treating me for a rather severe case of SEO consultants elbow. I don’t know as much about God as the Archbishop of Canterbury and I certainly don’t know as much about drinking as a Glaswegian. Right, what I’m trying to say here is you don’t know as much about search engine optimisation as I do. Your input is great, really useful but please, let us make the choices. After 3 months if you can’t see the results then you were right all along, that hasn’t happened yet though.

Where you can help is by updating your blog on a regular basis. Guess what? I don’t know much about draft excluders or guttering therefore this work has to fall onto your shoulders, sorry. Send us loads of pictures you’ve taken of your work, any news of satisfied customers or anything else that is even slightly nes worthy is of use to us. Any positive message or story reinforces your brand and identity, which takes time to build but in the end is more than worth it.

So, be kind to your geek, understand the stresses and pressures that he (and it usually a he) is under. Help him out by updating your blog and sending over cool stuff, know that we’re working hard to get you the results you want however we aren’t Google, we can’t tell them what to do. Keywords take time to get to the front page, we told you this from the outset, all we ask is that you trust in us and wait for the results. Is that really asking too much ?

So let us move forward together, as it says in the great book ‘and the Geek shall inherit the earth’. So be nice to your geek, treat him well and he’ll get you some amazing SEO results.

UK SEO, eCommerce UK, Ocado, Search Engine Optimisation

Making a profit online is really tough, competition is immense and costs are high. The figures are pretty scary, it’s something like 97% of all websites do not make a profit. Granted most sites aren’t designed to make money, however lots are and most don’t. In fact the worst offenders are websites that are part of large high street chains, these tend to lose more money than a Michael Barrymore resale property.

I’ve been in this industry for about 12 years now, all of my working life. I’ve seen the .com bubble of 2000 come and go, was a little wet behind the ears then so really didn’t take it all in. Can still remember all those faceless websites that had never made a penny profit being listed and making their owners huge amounts before going ‘pop’ a few months later. I thought that time of stupidity had been and gone and that investors now realised that whatever type of business you buy into you understand that it should have strong underlying fundamentals, a great business plan and a dynamic board of directors. Yet here we are some ten years after the tech bubble with the craziest investment opportunity since the McCann’s launched their own range of child minding services.

Ocado are an online grocer. They don’t sell their own products mind, that would be far too simple. They have an agreement with Waitrose to sell their products online, presumably buying large enough quantities to get some pretty good discounts before passing these goods onto us at about the same prices that they sell for in the shops. First thing to notice about Ocado is that it has never made a profit, yup, not a bean. In fact HSBC are estimating that by 2014 Ocado might make a profit of £25 million, wow. So how much are the directors of this business valuing it at then, go on guess. Yup, that’s right, about £1.37 billion pounds. To clarify, Ocado does not sell its own products but those of another company under license. That other company just happens to have its own online business, waitrose direct, that sells exactly the same products as Ocado. Up until now under the terms of this agreement Waitrose weren’t allowed to sell online within the M25, something that will change from January 2011 onwards. Coupled with the news that Marks and Spencers and even Amazon are looking to enter the online food shopping arena then I’m struggling to work out how Ocado are ever going to make money if they’re not now.

Ocado have had a pretty fractious relationship with Waitrose,  though they did recently sign a ten year agreement to carry on selling their goods. If, for whatever reason, Waitrose do not renew this agreement then Ocado are stuffed. Now this isn’t a new start up business, its been going for eight years. And to be fair to them they’ve been the absolute model of consistency, they’ve not once made a profit, which is pretty good going. And get this, the prospectus says the company “does not anticipate declaring or paying a dividend in the foreseeable future”. So, like the SS fat guy, you’d be a bit daft to get on board, you just know this isn’t going to end well.

So there you go, the world has gone crazy again. If Ocado’s loss making online business is worth £1.37 billion then what is ours worth? Go on, I’ll start the bidding at £1.4 billion, any takers?  No? Ok, how about £4.50 and that recently purchase copy of ‘Nuts’ ?

SEO UK, Ecommerce uk, seo choices

I love our customers, it’s what keeps this job interesting. Lets be honest here, SEO can be a bit of a dry and dull subject. Seriously, can you imagine how boring it is sitting there at 9am with a full days worth of article submissions in front of you? I’m lucky, and also a little bit long in the tooth, these days I don’t really get my hands dirty. Fortunately we have a veritable army of eager beavers in our technical HQ in Pakistan, these guys have some crazy work ethic. They’d turn up for work everyday of the week if we let them, and paid them of course. Most of my time now is spent dealing with prospective customers and taking care of existing ones. Throw in a bit of SEO strategy and planning and hey ho it’s almost home time, or more commonly pub time followed closely by wandering round waitrose with a bewildered look on my face trying to work out if I’m in a cooking or reheating mood. It’s more often than not the later that wins the day, curse my hours of day dreaming at the back of the home economics classroom.

So on my way home I must pass about 8 pubs and 6 supermarkets, but I always use the same ones. Maybe I’m a creature of habit, maybe I’ve found what I like or maybe I have one hell of a rewards card. Whichever one it is there’s no doubting it I’m a loyal customer, I return time and again, no need for special offers or dancing girls (though that would be nice). So in the virtual world of e-commerce how do we new find customers, and more importantly how do we create loyalty and get them coming back time and time again?

Firstly customer loyalty differs massively depending upon the industry you’re in.  So you’re selling a 8gb USB memory stick, how do you make people buy from you not the bloke next door? Well the first battle is to be noticed, to be found. That’s the hardest part, then all you need to do is be the cheapest and most efficient and the £0.34 of gross profit is all yours. The first thing you have to understand if you’re reselling computer/IT/electronic items in the UK is that customer loyalty is very hard won. This is good to know, it means that you have to get your customers through the door as cheaply as possible. There are so many companies out there paying £4 in advertising to win a new customer and then only making £1 in profit from the order, problem being is that as there is virtually no customer loyalty you’ll have to pay another £4 the next time as well. It’s no surprise that the really big internet success stories are those that sell advertising, not those who sell MP3 players. Go figure.

Even though ours is a virtual world good sound business fundamentals still apply. If you offer good service and deliver on your promises people will come back to you time and time again. If your storefront looks interesting and well designed then people will step into your shop. If your products are reasonably priced and freely available then people will buy from you. There are so many business’s online who put loads of thoughts into their website, their promotion their price but who totally forget to get a warehouse manager or a customer services team. So do the basics right, have a long term strategy and be patient. Growth must be reasonably paced, and you must have a scalable business that can grow with the increased demand without your service ever slipping. If you build a website out of straw then it might look fantastic but it’ll last about as long as Wayne Rooney’s diet as he passes a Gregg’s.

Standing out from the crowd is tough, only the strongest few will reach the top and even fewer will stay around long enough to be able to plant the flag.

SEO UK, UK SEO, SEO Strategy, SEO Choices, eCommerce UK

Below is a made up example of a very very typical conversation we have here at lovingthe.net. Whilst not wanting to put people off SEO, please do a little research before buying a site. One of the problems we have is getting people to realise just how much manual labour goes into promoting a site, and just how highly skilled that labour is. Seriously there are companies out there with hundreds of people working full time promoting their sites, with the greatest respect how can you expect to compete with major international companies when they’re spending more on paperclips than you’re spending on SEO. Sorry for the rant, we love you all really it’s just we think you need to know.

Hello you’re through to lovingthe.net, how can I help?

Yes, wonder if you can? I just want a quick price on SEO for my website, so how much ?

Well sir, that’s a pretty hard queston to answer, do you have a budget in mind at all, after all we have customers paying from £250 a month up to five figure sums for our large corporate customers, and everything in between.

Well, I don’t really want to give you a figure, can’t you just tell me how much it will cost?

So how many keywords are you looking at getting promoted? How many articles, press releases, submissions, backlinks are you wanting a month? We’ll also need your company URL so that we can analyse what you have at present. The price you pay will also depend on the age of your website and the industry you’re working in. Not forgetting how aggresively you want us to promote you.

I have no clue what any of those are, I just want a price for SEO.

But Sir,what you’re asking of me is impossible. It’s like saying you want to buy a house but refusing to talk about the style of the property, number of bedrooms you want or the location.

Listen, stop getting smart with me all I want is a price from you, it says on your website SEO from £49 a month.

Fine Sir, sorry, I was trying to get some more information from you so that I could give you a full quotation.

So what will I get for £49?

For £49 you will get one word promoted on your website. We guarantee that one word will appear on the first page of google.

Is that it? I thought I would get my whole site SEO’d for £49.

Sir, SEO is a massively complex and time consuming undertaking. All our work is done manually, and for a small website with little competition you will need to spend at least ten hours a week working on a site to see any kind of results. For anything else you will need considerably more effort.

Right then, what would I get for £200 a month?

To be honest Sir, not much. You’d still see results but it would be for a very limited number of keywords and it would take time.

Really, I thought SEO was cheaper than that. I’m sure other companies are cheaper than you.

No, SEO is a big undertaking. Just think for a second if you’re looking at 40-50 hours work a month how much would you expect to pay? I have  a cleaner who charges £8 an hour. And with all due respect to her SEO is a highly skilled and competitive field, it’s not picking up socks and vacuuming.

Ah well, maybe SEO is not for me then. Just out of interest, I work in financial services, how much are the big boys spending on SEO a month to get on the first page?

Well I’d imagine the really big players are spending over £100,000 a month on SEO. We know of contracts in home insurance that are far larger even than that. So you can see that spending £200 a month really isn’t going to make much of a dent. This isn’t to say we can’t or wont help you, we just need to get everything into some perspective. We’re the best at what we do, and if you’re spending £200 with us you’ll get much more than you would with some other companies spending £1000, but we’re not miracle workers.

Really, well I’m staggered. Thanks for your time.

No worries Sir, let me know if I can be of any further assistance.

SEO UK, SEO Strategy, eCommerce UK, SEO Blog, Search Engine Optimisation

Right, first off I’m really disappointed with you for asking me that question. You’re here aren’t you? And getting you here, how much did that cost me, that’s right nothing. So you’re here, reading my stuff, adding to my visitors total, giving me other good stats like page count and time on site etc. This should lead to a decent google page rank, and also a rise in SERP’s. Heck you might even buy from me, or recommend me to someone who will. So all in all, apart from me having to sit here everyday talking about myself and my work it’s a free ride.

But apart from all the rankings stuff and word of mouth, does this random collection of ravings ever trouble google? Random, Random? Do you know I sometimes spend minutes writing this stuff, though at times there is some method to my madness. I like to choose themes and keywords, just out of interest really at first, that was until my first blog made me sit up and take notice. The blog was entitled SEO in the UK. Choices. Choices! Choices? I was new, fresh, wanted to make a good impression so I spent some time on it, tried to make it readable, funny. Not sure if it worked, however I ask you to go to google and tap in SEO Choices. Go on, it’s safe for work, I promise.

SEO Choices – Google

When you do you’ll see me on top of page 1, good eh? So how many wins are we up to now, by my count 4, though I’m guessing. Blogging is great, it really is. It allows you to interact with people, starts discussions and also gives you some really good ideas about whole areas you may have overlooked previously. The trick with a blog is consistency, you can’t just do it when you feel like it, can’t just update it once every 14 years and hope that your loyal band of followers are still hanging on your every word. You can also link your blog into your twitter feed and facebook page, again keeping those pages fresh and giving you more exposure. So there we have it, blogging is good for just about every site out there. Even if you sell roofing services a blog can help. More importantly it’s free, you don’t have to pay an SEO Consultant to do it. Granted you might run out of things to say after a couple of weeks, if you do just bluff your way through 500 words and click publish. Not that I ever do that you understand.

Social Marketing is the dogs danglies, it turns your site from a flat and boring advert into a live interactive sales tool. Google love it and will reward you accordingly. So make the effort, think of something to say and then sit back and enjoy the benefits. Alternatively we can do it for you, go on, you’re allowed to be a little lazy occasionaly, you’re special

SEO Consultant, SEO UK, Ecommerce UK, UK SEO, Search Engine Optimisation

Go on, guess what our answer is ? I know what you’re thinking, we’re going to say yes of course you do, sign here, initial here and here. That promoting your website is an amazingly difficult and complex task that only we can do. Well, the majority of people who contact us do not need the help of full time SEO Consultants, they might need a little bit of advice to start off with but after that they’re good to go. Website promotion takes time, effort and dedication on the part of the website owner. Meaning that 98% of people who start off down the road of self promotion never make the end, actually I think I’m being pretty generous when I say that only 98% fail, it’s probably much higher than that.

If you’re selling a service understand that the website is an extension of your self, an extension of your personality. Therefore you need to sell your self. The website must reek of you, your life, your passions and your experience. Never forget, in the service sector when you are selling intangable goods the people are buying you. So personalise your site, get people interested and interacting with you, give them a reason to like you and to come back for more.

We gets lots of emails asking about our free consultation service, asking if we can take a look at their site and let them know where they’re going wrong. The vast majority of these enquiries does not end up with new business for lovingthe.net, however we figure that if we help people out along the way that in the fullness of time we’ll get some recommendations, or if the advice we gave was good and helps the website prosper then maybe they’ll remember our good turn and come back to us next time they need their site upgrading or if they want some promotional work done. Most of the sites we see are beyond help, the owners have mocked up a DIY site using some out of the box software then can’t understand why people aren’t buying from them. Would you go into a poorly lit, badly designed supermarket and buy groceries? Of course you wouldn’t, your website is your real estate. The least you can do is clean the floors and stick a hanging basket outside the front. The internet is not a quick fix, it will not make you a millionaire overnight. If it did then we’d all have given up work years ago. It’s also going to cost you some money to get it right, a cheap site is like a cheap suit, it may be all you can afford but it still looks bad. Save up and launch when you’re ready, when you’re able to give your idea a proper chance to succeed.

Give of yourself, understand what makes you different, what makes you attractive to other people. Employ an SEO Consultant to get you heading in the right direction then start writing. Content is king, get a blog, get a facebook account, use twitter. Paying for advertising should always be a last resort or a useful tool in a much wider marketing plan. Get some advise, speak to an SEO Consultant, get a recommendation and then use us, we’re really good.

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Have you noticed how at the moment everyone is full of questions? Bit annoying really, especially if you’re like me and a bit knowledge freak; it really frustrates me when I can’t answer people either fully or even at all, especially as an SEO Consultant I should really have an answer for everything.

The question I’m getting most at the moment is about google page rank, does it really matter, does it effect SERP’s, when is it being updated? The answer to the first part of the question is we’ve been told for a while now that google page rank does not effect how your keywords rank, and in any case there are two google page ranks, one which we see and the official one which we don’t. Confusing stuff eh? So the google page rank we see, what’s the point of it? Well, as SEO consultants we like to see our sites rank as highly as possible, it’s good to see that we understand the rules and google and other people are liking our site. We tend to believe Google when they say that PR doesn’t effect ranking stats, after all we have new sites with a PR of zero on the first page for some pretty competitive keywords. There are loads of examples of huge sites with rubbish PR, Alexa.com for example has PR 1 despite it being one of the most widely used tools in the world. The daddy of them all BBC.com has PR9, which they probably deserve, it really is one of the best websites in the world, scratch that it’s the best. So, Google PR is a useful tool, but not one we should get overly hung up on. I think that Google will do some tweeking on their PR algorthymns in the next year or so, doesn’t seem quite right that there’s a quality guide for sites which doesn’t effect ratings. If Google came out and said the better the PR the better the rankings then that would get a lot of sites of their backsides and start improving their design and structure. Which would not only benefit SEO consultants but the web as a whole.

When is it being update then? Well, Google usually update page rankings every three months, the last time being April ’10. So, anytime soon, probably, is our best answer. As an SEO consultant it’s be nice to have definite dates for reviews, after all it’s a part of what we do. Customers demand high PR sites, even though we don’t think that at present it directly improves SERP’s. What it does do though is make your site more attractive to others, much easier then to get involved in a bit of link exchanging, which most certainly does help.

Now, if our customers ever ask us about dmoz.org and when there site will be added we just stare back at them blankly. SEO consultants we might be, psychic we’re not. Not yet anyway.

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Right, how do we put this ? Ok, there’s no really nice of saying this but I’ll try. The beautiful SEO company lied to you, it doesn’t really think your product is marvelous, it doesn’t truly believe your service offering is unique, they’re just sweet talking you for your money. In reality your site, your products and your services are about as appealing to the general public as John Goodman’s jock strap after a sponsored walk, in July, whilst wearing a wet suit.

How could they be so cruel I hear you cry, well here’s the rub. They just want your money, they know you’re selling a dud but they don’t really care. All they’re thinking is if this guy is dumb enough to think this product will work then we can probably get a good twelve months of overpriced work out of him before he realises he’s being tucked up.

Listen, every business needs money to survive, grow and even is some cases prosper. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with making money, it’s what makes the world turn, it pays the bills. However, we like to think we always make more money for our customers than we make from them, a win win situation if you like. And yes, we do get ugly sites and ugly products through the door on an almosr daily basis. When we do we try and sit them down and tell them the facts, as gently as possible. Now, and you might already know this, most people don’t take advise very well, they always think they know best and they wouldn’t know good taste or a sound SEO strategy if it bit them on their backsides, however we do our best. You see, our reputation is everything to us, we get most of our business from recommendations, as such a spectacular failure can harm our business almost as much as website selling England merchandise which open up the day after the Germany game.

So for an honest appraisal of where you’re at right now give us a call on 0800 689 9000, or drop us an email to consultation@lovingthe.net. Ugly people can apply, just be ready to be greated by our own version of Gok Wan. And as he might say, if he worked for a UK SEO company ‘ It’s all about the confidence (plus your SEO strategy)’. Not that I watch any of his programmes of course, I’m far too busy reading about the latest google update, honest.

Great SEO, Top SEO, SEO UK, UK SEO, Ecommerce UK

You know how it is. Somedays are just great, the plans and ideas you’ve worked on for so long are starting to come to fruition. You’re starting to see results, your Alexa rankings are rising, pageviews are better, people are staying on your site for longer, heck the phone’s even started to ring. So that’s it then, all you have to do now is site back and enjoy counting the money, the good times are here. Well, I’ve got some good news for you, you’ve probably cleared the first massive hurdle. Everyone who has set out with an SEO strategy gets to the stage where they’re questioning whether all of this worth it, whether they’ll ever see the results of their hard work and investment. I always tell people and companies who are new to SEO UK that they will go through this period, it sometimes lasts for one week, it can go on for three months. However, as long as your SEO strategy is sound you will eventually see the light at the end of the tunnel, if it was easy everyone would do it, right ?

So, you’ve cleared the first hurdle, your SEO is now starting to pay for itself. The results aren’t spectacular yet, but you’re past the stage of questioning your SEO strategy, you’re happy that SEO is no longer a financial issue and the results are there for all to see. Excellent, take thirty minutes and enjoy it, bask in the warm feeling that you’re through the SEO graveyard. Right that’s it, thirty minutes are up, the hard work starts again. You’re not happy with mediocre are you? You do realise that these results that you’ve worked so hard for can drop and disappear without trace if you sit on your backside for too long?

Right, phase two. How do you get your results from pretty good to life changing. Well, the answer is pretty boring I’m afraid. It’s more of the same, if you’re selling online make sure your customers are delighted with your service. Make sure they come back and buy more from you, make sure they tell their friends and give you positive feedback on review sites.  If you’re promoting your brand or service then capture some emails, start talking to your customer base, keep them engaged and informed.

UK SEO is abit like a diet, the number of people who give up on SEO because they don’t think it’s working or get some success then get bored is frightening. SEO UK takes a long long time, it really is survival of the fittest.

Now dust of your trainers and get out there, don’t care if it’s raining, no excuses. Do you hear me?

SEO UK, UK SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design UK, eCommerce UK

Can your UK SEO package ever be too big ? Do you ever reach the point where all those thousands of links and hundreds of man hours are wasted? If you work in our industry, search engine optimisation, brand management and web design then the answer for us is unfortunately no, you can never do too much SEO UK. Ours is about as competitive an industry as it’s possible to get, apart from porn and car insurance of course. So, to get good google rankings and be anywhere near the first page you need to be adding content to your site, adding back links and promoting your brand almost constantly. There are companies in our  industry with over a million backlinks, that’s right over one million, that takes years of work. However I realise ours is a particularly tough industry and fortunately for most our customers  such extreme, and expensive, measures are not needed. An effective SEO strategy is vital and should be the first thing you do before any marketing campaign, agree goals, fees and workloads from the outset.

Carrying on from a rant in a previous blog, this is why it’s impossible for a one size fits all SEO UK package, it just doesn’t work that way, it’s never that simple. Before you even look at off site SEO you need to make sure you’ve got your site nailed down, onsite SEO is vital to the success of any site. It’s always worrying for me to see the huge number of companies out there ploughing thousands of dollars a month into off site optimisation whilst their website itself is badly design, poorly structured and not properly optimised. Get the basics right before you start worrying about link wheels or press releases, a few meta tags can make the world of difference.

In short, the best SEO strategy is the one that brings you the most results for the cheapest possible outlay, that is the tricky bit and it takes time and a lot of effort to work out what your optimum level of SEO UK is. Only spend as much as you can afford, word of mouth and a good contact list is every bit as effective as a great SEO Strategy and a well run PPC campaign. In most cases a website should an extension of an already successful business, you certainly shouldn’t rely on it to make you bundles of money during the first year, the chances are that it wont.

Another great SEO strategy is to keep down costs by doing a lot of the work yourself. A blog can be a really useful tool, as can effective social marketing. However you go about it set realistic goals and don’t put all your eggs in one basket (and don’t use too many cliches). Have a full, well rounded, SEO strategy and then stick with it.

UK SEO, SEO in the UK, eCommerce UK, Web Design UK

Your SEO project has been running for three months now, you’ve noticed yourself thinking about it more and more recently. You’ve spent all this money, but the phone isn’t ringing, the orders are flooding in as you expected, as you were kind of promised by the SEO UK company you hired to do the work. By kind of promised I mean almost promised, hinted at , referred to. Never on paper of course, or in an email, however they certainly were good at selling you the dream. You feel a little dirty, cheated almost, all you want is to see something for all this money you’ve laid out in good faith. So why isn’t it working out for you? The most common reasons are listed below, feel free to add your own.

1) Erm, how do we put this nicely? We can’t, so sit down. Your product or service is rubbish, seriously who’d want a lime green dog basket ? This is personally my biggest moral dilemma as an SEO consultant, many times I’ve come across people, new businesses or one man bands with what they feel is the newest, latest and greatest idea of all time, and it really isn’t. How do I tell them they’ll fail and lose a shed load of money, is it even my place to have this discussion with them, would they even listen?

2) How much ? The internet is a cruel mistress, it does not encourage loyalty or long term relationships. People will check on average 7 sites before they make a purchase for a specific product. If you’re selling a blue ray player for £189 and Dixon’s is selling it for £149 then you’re stuffed, doesn’t matter how good your website is or how effective the SEO you wont sell.

3) Patience Luke. You have to give SEO UK time. It does not happen overnight, it takes months and months of hard work. There are very few companies that go from selling £100 a day online to £100,000, and those that do find their systems cannot cope and 99 time out of 100 they go bust.

4) Your SEO is rubbish. It happens, they’ve over promised and under delivered. It happens in all businesses, all round the world, and you’re just another in the long line of disappointed people who thought that they’d be .com millionaires as a result of your SEO UK project. There will be no legal redress, the contract you signed without really looking at 6 months ago is more watertight than a pair of speedo’s on a fat bloke.

I don’t want to use this blog as some kind of neo Stalinist propaganda tool. However, it really annoys me that so many companies in my industry treat their customers as semi disposable objects. Have them for six months before moving onto the next one.   We’re different here at Lovingthe.net. We have nothing to hide, SEO is not KFC, there are no secret herbs and spices. The SEO UK tools are out there for everyone, it’s how we use them that sets us apart. Give us a call on 0800 689 9000 or email us at consultation@lovingthe.net and find out the finger licking difference for yourselves.

seo uk, search engine optimisation, UK seo, lovingthe.net

SEO UK, SEO, UK SEO, ecommerce UK

There’s an ugly truth out there, a fact that most UK SEO companies don’t really want to talk about, especially those who claim they can offer fantastic results in a short space of time. SEO companies in the UK are a bit like the Tour de France teams, lots of the people are getting fantastic results due to the use of performance enhancing drugs. Like the tour some teams and riders get away with it for a while, some even get away with if for a few years. However, in the end they all get caught, and if you own the website you’ll have to carry the can, not the SEO UK companies who are never stupid enough to use the same tactics on their own site they use on yours.

At lovingthe.net we build for the long term, we don’t pump your sites full of google steroids, the work we do now will still be giving you a return on your investment in three years time. There are other companies out there, who will remain nameless, you can usually tell them by their outlandish claims and lack of substance who do not think quite so long term as we do. They will take your site, add a dash of black hat link farming, insert hundreds of keywords randomly thoughout your site, maybe even a whole page of keywords stuffed and hidden somewhere out of public view.  You, the unsuspecting website owner will sit back in wonder and amazement as your most competitive keyword suddenly rockets from 118 in the google listing to 4. This company is marvellous you’ll say, and happily recommend them to all your friends and business associates, happy to share your unbelievable find with them. After basking in your good fortune or a few weeks you’ll wake up one morning, browse through google and find that you’re no longer on the first page, in fact you can’t any of your keywords anywhere. You’ve been sandboxed.

Once you enter the hell that is the google sandbox you could be stuck there for a few weeks, more like a good few months and you might never leave. The UK SEO company you used to help promote your site will shake their heads, mumble something about ‘bloody google’, they will deny they did anything wrong and then very nicely offer to help you get out and listed again, for a price of course.

The plain truth is Google are pretty good, all they want is those sites with the best content, the most users, the most links to be rated as highly as possible and to rank accordingly. They understand the game, heck they created the rules, they know when websites are trying to cheat the system and they will come down heavily on them.

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Promises, promises, promises. Flashy headine, grab peoples attention, sizzle sells. However, sometimes the promise may not be all you thought it was. Go to most SEO sites and you’ll find a top 10 guarantee, or a first page of google promise. You know the drill, pay us a load of money and we will get your keyword to the first page of google, sounds great, right ?

Google is a cruel mistress, very much like the black widow spider, she has no problem spitting out dead carcasses after she has used and abused you(spent all your PPC money),  never to be seen again. So this first page promise, what does it mean in reality, is it the game changer you thought it really was ? If you look at the terms and conditions of your agreement  it will state that as long as at any point within a six month time frame your keyword enters the front page of google, even for a minute that’s it, job done. The reality of the situation is that unless it’s a ridiculously hard word or phrase it’s pretty easy to get you on first page, the real trick is staying there. It’s also more important to make sure you have a broad range of effective keywords than concentrate all your efforts on one shooting star. Of course, first page of google is important, however always read the small print.

The moral of this story is pretty straight forward. Don’t get taken in by the headlines, understand that SEO in the UK is not a sprint, heck it’s  not even a marathon, it’s one of those crazy endurance events that you see on Japanese TV where the poor contestants are flogged and ritually humiliated,. In UK SEO the riches and rewards goes to those people who hang in there the longest, to those who can get over the hump of the first 3-6 months where you can’t see any results and feel like it’ll never happen. Stick in there kid, remember if it was easy everyone would do it, and we don’t want that do we?

Promises are great, just make sure you look at the whole picture. Choose a search engine optimisation company that goes beyond the headlines, that has a proper long term vision for you business. Give us a try, we specialise in long term. We’ll give you a first page guarantee if you want one, just understand the game.

Now how does that song go again? Oh yeah, Near far, where ever you are….

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A man stood up from his bolted down plastic chair and nervously glanced round the room, he could feel the beads of ice cold sweat running down his back. ‘Hello’, he said, his voice breaking with emotion. ‘My name is Dave and I’m addicted to pay per click’. The room broke into knowing smiles, a few shakes of the head and a general feeling of we’ve walked in your shoes as the crowd chorused back, ‘hello Dave’. After a painful 8 months of serious addiction Dave had finally taken the plunge, here he was taking his first baby steps to financial freedom.

A bit more confident now Dave began to tell his story. ‘When I first did PPC it seemed ok, I thought I was different, stronger. The killer is my first fix was free, the nice people at google sent me a $50 voucher to just give adwords a try. At first I just dabbled, I was a recreational user, a couple of hits on a Friday afternoon then before I knew it I was on constantly, 24/7. I couldn’t get off it, couldn’t survive without it, it had taken me over completely and without it I was unable to function, trapped and immobile’. The room again nodded in agreement, they’d all been there. Joanne, who sold bespoke hand crafted furniture in Worcester was a bad case, like Dave she had just dabbled at first but in the end she was spending hundreds a day on her habit, so bad had it become that for every £100 of gross profit she made she was spending £130 on her fix.

These poor people are just the tip of the iceburg, the few desperate or strong enough to seek out help. There are many others who simply ignored their addiction, denied it, found crazy ways to justify it. I’ll give up soon, I control it it doesn’t control me, I do it because it helps me relax – we’ve all heard them before. Now don’t get me wrong, in moderation and never ever more than a few units a week PPC is fine, in fact a bit like red wine it can actually be good for you. However it should only ever be used as part of a varied diet, and as you get older you should use it less and less.

We’re here to help. If you find yourself craving traffic from Bogota or Belfast at 3am on a Tuesday give our support staff a call on 0800 689 9000. We can help you with your cold turkey, we can show you a better way.

SEO UK, UK SEO, ecommerce uk, search engine opimisation

Speaking with customers on a daily basis we’re asked lots of different things, as you might imagine. The one question we’re asked more than any other is how much? This is closely followed by when will I see results?

Two great, and important, questions. The first one is pretty easy, we take a look at the customers site, their competitors and then offer them an affordable solution. Some of our competitors have a menu of services and prices, never understood that. You can’t neatly package companies like that, everyone is different and a unique set of ideas and solutions need to be implemented to make the website is promoted as efficiently and effectively as possible. Does a person selling hairdressing supplies from a small warehouse in Oxford really have the same needs as a multinational pet food conglomerate, is it ever really that simple, how can one solution be effective for both?  Whether a customer of ours  spends £250 a month with us or £4000 they all get a personal tailored solution, as opposed to being bracketed into a pre-designed solution which will only ever benefit the ecommerce consultant.

The reason a lot of SEO companies use this one size fits all solution is that it means they can then just send a standardised bunch of information through to their workers in India who can then use this to work on your site in a predetermined and timetabled fashion. We like to think we’re different, we take a personal interest in you, your business and we will work tirelessly to make sure your website reaches its full potential. In a world where no two companies are ever the same, where every market sector is different and google change the rules 6 times a year it is impossible to have a standardised solution that can work for everyone. Works pretty well for the SEO’s company profits though.

When will I see a return? The honest answer to this is I don’t know, cannot predict this at all. Can guess and say that you might see the start of some results after maybe 4 weeks, but on average you do not really feel the benefits until after 3-4 months. In SEO so many things are outside of our control. For example during the last year we have found that Google are taking longer and longer to give a site a page ranking. It used to be that every 3 months they’d update a site. Now it’s all a bit more random. We believe the next google PR update will be at the end of this month sometime, we’ll see. However, Google are like Usain Bolt compared to Dmoz; don’t even get me started on that one.

Just because you pay more doesn’t guarantee faster results. In fact the reason you’re probably paying more is that you’re in a crazily competitive industry sector, which will naturally take a bit longer. However long it takes we’ll be with you every step of the way.

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Who said too many choices can be as bad as no choice at all? Actually, I’m not sure anyone did, it might have been me. These profound statements usually hit me at about 11pm on a Saturday night, just after kicking out time, co-incidence I hear you cry, maybe so. So who to use, what do I need, how much should it cost?

The SEO market in the UK has grown exponentially over the last 3-4 years, what was once an aside to the perceived real work of paid advertising has now become mainstream, and lots of ‘new’ SEO companies have sprung up to cater for this demand.

So, you own a small plumbing business in Barnsley, you mainly deal with residential customers but also fix a couple of school toilets every now and then. You think you’ve got a great line in plumbing gear (this is where my absolute lack of plumbing knowledge might just let me down), you’ve started importing all these parts for toilets and shower heads from China, and want to start selling them online. So, how do you do it without spending more on advertising than you make in profit? You’ve heard of SEO, social marketing and all the jargon that goes along with it and frankly you’re confused. How much, by whom, for how long and most importantly will it work? You’ve got a lovely website that was designed by John who was recommended by business link, but he said he doesn’t really do SEO and that you should take a look online. So you power up the broadband, get to Google, you nervously tap in SEO and wait for the results. In the space of 0.13 seconds you are assaulted with 300,000 companies from all over the world promising you the front page on Google, so who should you go with?

Our Top Ten Tips for Choosing an SEO Company.

1. Make sure they are a proper company, not some spotty student doing a bit of SEO part time from his bedroom to pay for pot noodles and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin albums.
2. Results, Results, Results. As Jerry Maguire would have said if he left the glamorous world of representing multimillion dollar sports stars and had moved to Barnsley to sell U bend pipes. Show me the Rankings. Make sure the SEO company know what they’re doing, get them to show you proof they can deliver.
3. If it sounds too good. SEO takes lots of time, plenty of investment and some hard work. If you are promised a top spot on Google within 4 weeks run, run fast and do not look back. The truth is no-one can guarantee anyone results, Google own the ball and they can decide to change the rules or go home for their tea whenever they want to.
4. Speak to a real person. Make sure you can contact your SEO expert, by phone, during regular office hours.
5. Never spend too much. If your aim is to sell toilet seats within Yorkshire you will not need 8000 back links or a twitter page with 2500 followers.
6. Set goals. Try this, say ‘ok I’ll give you £500 now, get me to the first page of Google and I’ll pay you another £500. Watch 98.7% of all SEO companies disappear without a trace.
7. Use ecommerce consultants, like us. I know, I know, but there haven’t been any other blatant plugs apart from this one has there? Why use a web designer that can’t do SEO. Why get SEO from a company who have never actually traded online? Seriously, if they are that good at online marketing why aren’t they selling widgets themselves?
8. Get a tailored solution. One size does not fit all; even condom manufacturers know that. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6161691.stm Get a solution that works for you.
9. Get recommendations. Speak to people, ask around. Make sure they mention Lovingthe.net.
10. Be realistic. Rome, or Barnsley, was not built in a day. Understand the huge amounts of time and effort that goes into promoting a website. If someone offers to do SEO on your site for £50 a month understand that you get what you pay for.

For More information on SEO UK, or a free consultation you can always get hold of us in all the usual ways. Either via email at consultation@lovingthe.net or give us a call on 0800 689 9000.