Over the last few weeks or so we have been running some interviews for an undergraduate placement opportunity here at Freezone.

While I don’t subscribe to the suggestion that our education system has been dumbed down, there does seem to be a lack of concentration on digital marketing.

Even amongst those reading more commercial subjects with a focus on business or marketing, students seem very unfamiliar with basic terms such as domain name, web hosting and search engine marketing. (Familiarity with social media tends to be self driven rather than being ‘taught’ as part of a course.)

Given that practically most companies now have a website and use some sort of digital marketing and also given that channels such as direct mail are in decline, we need to ensure that our graduates are equipped with the right kind of knowledge and skills to succeed in a digital economy.

If there are any academic establishments looking to develop a practical curriculum for all things ‘web’, we would be happy to help.

domain name · Search engine optimisation · Social Media · Web Hosting

A few days ago I was at a conference on how small businesses can exploit search engine optimisation more effectively to achieve better ranking and therefore attract more customers.

The audience was a mixture of marketing people / owner-managers with fairly limited understanding of SEO. To gauge her audience’s understanding of search engines, the speaker asked them how they thought that Google searched for and presented them with search results to a query.

There was a significant minority that thought that Google takes a query, scours the web and presents back the results based on some sort of ranking rules.

Well, not quite. In fact, Google (like other search engines such as Bing, Ask and Yahoo) takes your query and simply searches its own database that has been built by indexing millions of websites across the web. Effectively, search engines create a snapshot of the nature of websites they visit and then continually update it.

Now this is obvious to those of us who are familiar with SEO and it immediately becomes obvious to anyone who thinks about it.

Therefore, just because you have a website does not automatically mean that you will be found on search engines through standard search queries – not near the top results pages in any case.

So, as a website owner, your job is to ensure that your website is correctly indexed by search engines. This is done by making sure that the coding of and the content on your website (on-page / on-site optimisation) clearly defines your business so that search engines can index your website based on the kind of business you are. And more fresh content you add to your website, more chance of search engines visiting your website more frequently to keep a more up-to-date ‘profile’ of your website on their databases.

The other half of the SEO picture is to build relevant links (off-page / off-site optimisation) to your website from other well ranking websites.

While we have discussed SEO elsewhere in this blog, the key thing to remind yourself is that search engines look through their own databases to provide results to queries. The more you can do to help create a better ‘profile’ on their databases, the better the chances of seeing your website when people are looking for the type of product / service that you provide.

While SEO maybe a job for experts, there is plenty that you can do to get the ball rolling. In fact, the UK web hosting industry offers plenty of free advice to small businesses looking to optimise their websites. Contact your web hosting company and see if they can give you some tips and point you in the direction of a suitable SEO professional.

Search engine optimisation · UK web hosting

Having endured one of the worst recessions of recent times, the UK economy sprouted some green shoots of recovery with the last two consecutive quarters registering positive growth, albeit only just at 0.4% and 0.2% respectively.

And now that we are starting to put the election behind us, what is the mood amongst the small business community about UK’s immediate economic prospects.

Well, not very good – it looks like that the small business community is suffering from post election blues.

According to a recent survey of its members by the Federation of Small Businesses, 54% of firms will not move forward with plans to expand. (In fact, 49% want another election in six months.)

It is expected then that marketing budgets will continue to be under considerable strain. As a web hosting company, we have seen more and more small businesses investing time and switching resource into the digital activities including new websites, email marketing and social media.

Most of these cost very little (apart from your time) and can produce disproportionately greater return on investment.

So, now is the time to get your online strategy right – re-vitalise your website, get your web hosting company to explain how you might build your email database and exploit email marketing and how you might go about improving your presence on search engines.

It’s clear that with our fiscal deficit there are going to be challenging times ahead. Your online presence could play a vital part in how your business performs over the next 12-18 months.

Email Marketing · Search engine optimisation · Social Media · Web Hosting

We hear a lot of people asking this question. After all, they say, they have paid good money for web hosting and yet when they search for keywords related to their business, their website is not to be found anywhere on search engines.

In fact, there are still plenty of businesses that assume that all they need to do is register a domain name, buy some web hosting and their website will miraculously appear on top of Google. Sadly, the reality is somewhat different.

Unless businesses take search engine optimisation (SEO) seriously, they are unlikely to realise the potential of their website.

Now, I don’t propose to write a best practice manual here, but let me distil a few key components.

First, what exactly is SEO?

In plain English, it’s the process whereby you undertake some tasks that will help your website to appear on search engines (towards the top few pages) when your potential customers type in keywords associated with your business.

There are two broad areas you need to think about – on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation.

Now, search engines aren’t as clever as you might imagine – they can’t recognise what a website is about simply by looking at it as we humans can do in an instant. So, you have to tell them by using special notations. You have to ensure there is sufficient amount of relevant content on your website. There is more, but fundamentally, this on-page optimisation allows search engines to index your website based on the nature of your business.

The second stage, and some regard this as much more critical, is building links (effectively votes) from other websites to your website. This is off-page optimisation. More popular and relevant a website is to your business, more weight search engines will allocate to a link from it to you. The more relevant links you have to your website, the better the positioning on search engine results.

And here is the key bit of advice – think about SEO at the same time you secure a domain name, web hosting and start creating your website. Don’t leave it as the last thing on your list.

Let me leave you with a final thought…not optimising your website is a bit like opening a business, but not telling anyone about it. No business would do that. Or would they?!

domain name · Hosting · Search engine optimisation · Web Hosting