Entries Tagged 'Work Related' ↓

I’m now into my second year at Distinctive Chesterfields/Click 4 Beds and I’ve just realised that I’m now chasing my own performance from last year… in effect I have a ghost car to race against just like in a game where last years performances are now being used as a benchmark for this year…

Love it!

Well it’s officially the start of 2010 and despite not being able to work in the office due to frozen pipes I’m working from my home office and loving the snow (but not this aweful flu I contracted over the new year). So what better time to do some general housekeeping for your websites to make sure theyre on top of the game for 2010!

Heres just a few of the things I intent to do over the next few weeks to get things back on track.

Blogs

As our blogs are managed by the team, theres the opportunity for them to go off the rails, so I intend to revisit the last years posts (January 2009 was the last time I did this) and correct any typos, make sure the links are anchor rich, add images where appropriate and swap out any dead links. This will make the blogs perform a little better and I will be able to draw up some further guidelines for the bloggers to ignore lol (not really guys you’re doing a great job). A top tip is to remember that citation (mentioning your brand) in posts on 3rd party websites is going to be big in 2010 so get a few of those in there.

Copyright

I will quickly revisit the footer files of each site and make sure that the copyright statement is up to date.

Past Comments

I will use Yahoo Site Explorer to look back through any 3rd party blog entries that mentyion the brand and if I commented with a link, ask the owners to remove my nofollowed comment link, leaving the in-content do follow link to do the job it was originally supposed to do without my sabbotaging myself. This is based on new info published late 2009.

Image Search

I will use Google Images to look for people using our phopography without permission and ask them to drop in a link as thanks.

Check IBL’s for 404

Using Google Webmaster Tools I will look through our back link profile and check that all inbound links resolve to a target page and contact the owners of linking sites where the link is now off target.

Distinctive Chesterfields (where I work) is having a massive sofa sale, offering 10% off any of our high quality leather chesterfield sofas, club chairs and wing chairs.

Marketing mumbo jumbo follows…

Distinctive Chesterfields hand made high quality, traditional English Chesterfield sofas for sale around the world. As a manufacturer of the original Chesterfield, our sale sofas represent great value for money. Created in our UK based workshops by our skilled team of frame makers, upholsterers and leather worksers, your chesterfield sofa is hand made to order and dispatched by our global courier service.

In our sofa sale you can get 10% off any sofa or chair including the popular queen anne chair, derby sofa and range of chaise longue. Simply find the item you want from our online catalogue www.distinctivechesterfields.co.uk, pick the colour and style of leather required and call us on +44(0)1484 663294 to place your order.

We’re having to let go of some people which is not plesent as theyre good people the banks are just arseholes! One of which is Adam Williams, a really great PHP developer so if you’re in or around Leeds and need a new PHP guy for long-term or short term projects then give him a call 07595120137 or visit his website http://www.awdigital.com/

Adam is a great php developer, really up for a challenge and all round nice guy.

So once again, just for Google – Freelance PHP developer Leeds

At Click 4 Beds and Distinctive Chesterfields we’re rapidly approching the cut off time for deliveries to arrive in time for Christmas its time to think about the next big sales period, the January Sales. Even though most retailers have pre-christmas sales, January’s offerings are still a big draw for many customers seeking to fill the post Christmas void with some bargains… And we all want a healthy slice of that Pie.

So, how can this be achieved? Well, some quick tinkering with your sites title tags and a few well placed blog posts are a good place to start and if you act now you should be indexed in time for the Janrary sale season. Heres a few tips to optimise your site for this season:

• Add in motivators such as the terms ‘January sale’ and ‘January sales’ into your title tag
• Change your Meta Description to reference January
• Get new voucher codes distributed to your coupon network
• Create a nice splash banner highlighting some of your more prominent deals
• Blog post about key deals
• Send out PR highlighting key deals
• Update your prices
• Contact your affiliates and provide new banners and other materials

All in all this should help you optimise your potential (if you can do such a thing) and get the most out of january sale sales.

I’m proud to announce the re-design of the Distinctive Chesterfields website as performed by both Adam (php genius) and myself.

View the Distinctive Chesterfields website.

It was a great challenge as we had to keep all of the content and site structure the same and had to work around a rather archaic CMS produced by the previous creator.

Some of the features of the new Distinctive Chesterfields website include:

• Improved product information pages
• Removal of some sales workflow barriers
• Combined brochure and swatch request pages
• Refocused international page contents

The new Distinctive Chesterfields site has been online for a few weeks now during soft launch and with only a few minor niggles, I’m glad to say the company has had its best month of sales to date, a fact that I’d like to attribute partially to the new design.

I received a call from a lovely lady today who tried unsuccessfully to sell me a yell.com listing for one of the e-businesses I work on. She failed because Yell.com fails to realise that many businesses don’;t operate a bricks and mortar business, instead relying heavily on Google listings and Adwords for their custom -; a function that Yell.com’s regional directory based structure completely misses.

After a brief conversation where I vetted the ‘Google Friendly’; links that are nofollowed (yeah Google friendly… riiiight) I was passed onto a guy who wanted to sell me the Yell.com Adwords advertising service.

Here’s a quick lowdown on this service:

• You get to bid on a term in your area i.e. "beds in Honley"
• You get to specify your daily budget (wow really)
• You get a ‘landing page’ created as the target for your Adwords advert that can contain up to a massive seven bullet points, one of which can be your website address (no link) and telephone number

Anyone spot the numerous fatal flaws in this ill conceived service?

• The hits would be infinitesimally small
• No direct link to the relevant product page
• No tie with an ecommerce function
• The landing page would be completely unbranded or based on Yell’s previous efforts, completely amateurish

My advice is stay clear of this service and spend some money on a good Adwords training book or hire a team to do your PPC for you.

At least you’ll know you’re getting a better service than Yell.com

So What Should Yell.com Do?

Heres a couple of my quick thoughts to help kick start this ageing service:

• Firstly, remove the no follow from external links on their site
• Secondly re-work the site structure to make it more spider friendly
• Thirdly, recognise that lots of businesses dont have a showroom and re-work the logic of the site to operate around business type and not location
• Sack all of their customer web design team and invest in some up to date templates that can be easily themed (or just use wordpressmu)
• Completely re-think their Adwords offering and maybe tie it to some kelkoo.com style product portal so at least customers can sell items via their services (potential additional revenue stream too!)

It’s taken lots of research however if you’re keen to see more than 1000 backlinks in Yahoo Site Explorer then I may have a solution for you. Granted, it doesn’t show you all of the links but it does give you more than the stated 1000 links and can return some surprisingly useful information to aid in your link building activities.

The trick is this…

In yahoo.com (not siteexplorer) enter the following:

linkdomain:www.click4beds.co.uk site:.co.uk

example

This will now give you access to all of the backlinks to the main domain that have a .co.uk extension. Even more useful is when you use other suffixes i.e. .com, .gov and .edu etc, all of which help you mine links in these niches.

Its set to the default 10 items per page but this can easily be modified using the Advanced Search option at the top to show 100 results per page. Just remember to check that the full search with linkdomain and site are repeated in the advanced search menu.

Happy link building.

To help bolster the rankings of Click 4 Beds and to provide a nice little resource for our customers I’ve decided to put together Bed Instructions, a free online resource where people can find the construction instructions that often go missing from deliveries. So far I’ve managed to get the bed instructions for the entire Hyder range and I know that Ikea Fans have a library of Ikea bed instructions that I could pilfer/link to

The sites only got a few bed instructions published onto it so far, yet I am already getting requests for different makes and models from the general public which only goes to highlight just how useful this site will become.

The idea is that this site becomes a resource that other bed sites link to as a source of information which should help bolster the sites SERPS. In addition the product name, size and brand nature of the listings should help the pages rank for long tail terms which will be converted to sales via a sponsored store(s) links which will of course start with Click 4 Beds and should progress across affiliate campaigns for much of the competition.

A position has opened at Click 4 Beds for a Junior SEO. As you will be trained in the basics of SEO and key principles, little knowledge or understanding is required however the applicant should have enthusiasm for the role and have a basic understanding of HTML and how websites are put together.

The role will include:

• SEO Copy Editing
• Page Optimisation
• Link Qualification and Development
• Social Media
• Analysis

If this sounds interesting and you’re looking to take your first steps in this growing field of expertise and want to learn from someone whos had 10+ years experience in SEO and Internet marketing then apply here or spread the word!