Wednesday 27 January 2010

Powerful Keyword Research tool

Whilst you are optimising your website for searches, make sure you know what your customers are searching for by using this excellent tool from google:

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

It shows you how many searches a month are being performed, both in the UK (local) and worldwide.

Combine this information with the competitiveness of the keyword and you will be able to rank well for low competition searches and get new traffic to your website!

To see if a keyword is highly competitive search on google in "quotemarks" this will give you the number of pages with that exact phrase - anything around or under 10,000 should be simple to rank for.

Tuesday 26 January 2010

google adwords tips and tricks ...

I have a few tips I thought I would share that will help you get the most out of your adwords  campaigns.

  • Use relevant keywords in your title and advert text.
  • Make sure each adwords campaign has its own landing page on your website. By having a unique landing page for your advert you will be making sure your content is relevant content - this will give you a better score and it will also meanm that you are paying less per click for your adverts.
  • Target only a single keyword phrase per campaign and make it match the phrase exactly. This will help prevent your advert coming up in irrelevant searches.
  • Geographical targeting: Make sure you are targeting only the areas you want to - ie the UK, or the South West, this will mean people outside of the country or area that you operate in will not get your advert (saving you money!).
  • Turn off the content network - this will stop your advert appearing on other websites that google thinks is relevant to you.
Just by tuning your campaigns to run like this you will be saving a large amount of money, as you are going to be only delivering your advert to the right people.

Thursday 8 October 2009

An Introduction

Today is a crisp 2nd October 2009 in the 'buffice' which is what we call the ex-city bus that has been renovated into an office (sometimes also referred to as the “Global International Corporate Head Quarters”). I am going to take this time to start to explain about what clickcreations is 'under the bonnet' and who the family are behind this project.

Mrs. clickcreations (also known as Bertie) has been in Italy with her father for the last five days. This leaves me at home alone with our four children, two goats and mix of poultry. The glorious solitude of Monday has transformed into into what I call the “all alone void” of today's Friday. The “all alone void” is that strange demotivating blankness that you get when you are used to being surrounded by people and activity and suddenly it all stops which can only be combated with loud Hip Hop music. You'd think that someone who managed to live in a spot in England that is at least a mile in any direction to a neighbour would relish the loneliness, and do I sometimes, but humans are complex creatures of many contradictions.

To combat these all alone blues I am listening to Plan B, a hard London Hip Hop band, really quite very loud. The advantage of having neighbours too far away to complain is that you can listen to music really loudly. Sometimes I think it bugs the pheasant hunters that occasion into the woods around the house. Some Hip Hop mixed with Music Popular Brasil, country, folk, blues and jazz doesn't quite create the right ambience for that authentic British countryside shooting experience. If you want the real modern countryside experience it should probably be more techno than hip hop. But I hate techno, and the game keeper doesn't even bring me pheasants any more so tough for him.

I like Eminem and I like Plan B for the same reason that I reason that I like folk and some country and some jazz and some blues: it feels honest and from the heart. It is probably much the same reason why I hate techno: there is no soul in it, no heart. It is just beats per second. Techno is the love people feel on a holiday romance: a passing and artificially induced feeling as much to do with the environs as the person themselves. Good Hip Hop, good folk and old school Blues and Jazz are the passionate love that develops over time with a partner.

All art and all music is artificial, that is what it does: it reproduces something we think or feel or experience.. the real thing is, well, the real thing. Art, including music, is its expression. If Bob Dylan performed under his real name of Robert Zimmerman, that dusty highway feeling be lost, but what Bob Dylan does really well is transform himself from an urban Jew with Eastern European roots to an all-American cowboy with liberal leanings. And he does it well, he does it authentically, because even though Bob Dylan is the persona and not the person, the persona comes from the heart in a way that your average situation comedy character does not.

The type of authenticity that I've always looked for in my life is the authenticity of Bob Dylan, of Eminem, and of Plan B. It is also the core of what we are trying to do at clickcreations. There is a fine balance in creating authenticity in a product, the temptation is always there to regress to something happened a hundred years ago, as if something that happened a hundred years ago was somehow more authentic that something that happens now. Things haven't, and don't, chang that much, nor do we change that little. The beautiful contradiction of humanity is that we are constantly in flux, yet fundamentally rarely change individually or collectively. Victorian England was as unauthentic to the age before it as we now are to Victorian England.

The authenticity that I am striving for is summed nicely in the phrase “down to earth”, because that is what we as family (clickcreations is a family run business) try to do, quite literally. Our “down to earthness” included a lot of earth. Most of the year its just mud. We keep chickens and ducks for both eggs and meat. We have a couple of goats. We try to garden, although I'd be lying if I said we ever had much success. We are not 'self-sufficient', nor do we want to be. We are curious: what is milk like when you squeeze it yourself? If we raised chicken for meat, can we bring ourselves to dispatch them? Is free range chicken really tastier than caged? How do you dress (pluck and gut) a chicken? How do you make cheese?

But the curiosity goes further than that, not only do we want to know how to raise our own foods, even we are also just as happy to head out to the local cafe for a fry-up, we also wanted to get the bottom of this whole “business” thing. With the typically “leap before you look” blindness that me and Mrs. clickcreations often use to start an adventure, we started hatching our `escape into reality` strategy when P was born and Mrs. clickcreations was forced to give up her design job with a fancy London agency. Mrs. clickcreations started with some freelancing, doing jobs here and there while I continued to work as a programmer, manager and all around technical guy for ITV then the BBC. Mrs. clickcreations' freelancing soon reached critical mass, and once we had enough money to live, albeit very cheaply, in France for a year I quit my job and off we went with three kids and a bus (not the buffice, this was a different one) to the foothills of the Pyrenees to see if we wanted to make a permanent life there. After a year there the older children where hating France, the taxes where high, and Mrs. clickcreations was preggers so we returned to the UK, put our London house up for sale and, after spending half a year and living and working on yet another bus (not the buffice, nor the bus we took the France!) we found the place we are in now, situated nicely in the woods, not far from Great Torrington in North Devon.

For most of this time both of us worked as a team of freelancers, with Mrs. clickcreations doing design and Mr clickcreations (that's me!) doing the technical side of things. Freeclancing has its advantages, but it has its disadvantages as well. Often the Freelancer simply ends up an underpaid employee with no job security, having to work to someone elses schedule. It also means that a lot of time has to spend pitching, proposing, and costing things up, then sometimes an equal amount of time chasing up payment. One doesn't have to be in business long to realise two things:
1.There are a lot of sharks out there, people who will waste your time, take your money, and don't deal in good faith.
2.Integrity is paramount to doing business. Despite the all sharks out there, if you don't deal with people fairly and justly you end up screwing yourself in the end.

I can thank my parents for starting the important lessons about integrity early in my life, because it took a number of bad incidents (sometimes involving the police!) as a teenager before the penny finally dropped, thanks to their way of using equal measures of guilt, punishment and reward to keep me on the straight and narrow. I can also thank my first real boss, Norm Henderson, who not only gave me my first chance when I was a newly qualified IT guy but also taught me that not only can you can run a business and have integrity, you cannot successfully run one without it. Bob Dylan has a line “to live outside the law you must be honest”; that line applies very well to business. When you run a business you never live outside the law, but you do sometimes have to tip toe right up to the edge of that cliff and walk along there for a while in order to make it work, but as soon as you “go down the path of dark side, forever it will dominate your destiny” (as Yoda said to Luke in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back).

As I look at the rather healthy amount of money owing, and the rather shabby amount actually in the bank account, I am reminded that 'security' and running a business doesn't always go together. And this leads me nicely back to Freelancing. Freelancing is a yo-yo of boon and bust, lovely in its own right, but we decided that it was time to do something beyond simply customizing websites for £1000 to £5000 a go. We also thought back to the people who have approached us over the three or four years we freelanced, who desperately wanted a website by simply didn't have £1000+ to pay for it. Some of these people tried making their own website through the various “create yerself a website” tools that out there. Some did really well, but most others didn't and ended up spending a lot of time, effort and sometimes even money for very little result. The key, our business coach Chris Kaday (http://www.chriskaday.co.uk/) keeps telling us is to make the most amount of money with the least amount of effort and that is what our clickcreations packages are aimed at: both for us, but also for our clients.

The clickcreations as a product was born: our idea is to combine the need people have for an expert who understands the complexity of search engine optimisation (being found on google), hosting, domain registration, design, and layout with the affordable “create yourself a website” options that already exist. clickcreations is exactly that: we create a website for the customer, and (if they want) put the initial content in, they then have access to this website and can change the content with clickcreations' content management system without worrying about effecting the over-all look and feel of the website. All our websites and the domains are hosted on our own servers.

Our approach to selling clickcreations is the same as our approach to life: down to earth. We don't pretend we are a huge corporation, but we act like the best: we are professional, efficient, and deliver on time. We act with integrity. If a customer isn't happy, we try to fix it, and if we can't fix it, we'll usually offer a refund Our servers are all housed in a professional data centres, we have people on back-up so if we can't do something someone always can. And it is for this reason that I am starting this blog, so we can honestly and forthrightly let those who want to know where we are as a business and what we are doing.

At the moment, our product has running for just over a year since it was 'soft launched', and now we are working with Chris Kaday (our business coach) to hard launch clickcreations and bring it to a larger audience. Over the coming months we are going to launch into new territory for us: how to market clickcreations to a mass audience. We know we've got the right product, and the right price. The question now is how to tell the rest of the world what we have!

Stay tuned!

Saturday 27 June 2009

Devon Web Design Company

Clickcreations web design, a devon web design agency, where finalists this year for the FSB Awards for Devon' Best E-Business.

We are pleased as punch, the awards dinner and ceremony was amazing and it was great to see the other brilliant companies in Devon who were also in the running for this award.

Achieving finalist status for us was fantastic result as there where more entries than ever before this year.

The crowning winners in our where a language company in Exeter called sure languages.

Excellent SEO Course

I just spent the last two days learning even more about SEO at an absolutely fantastic SEO course in Bristol run by Search Classroom.

Anyone thinking of doing and SEO course: I thoroughly reccomend www.searchclassroom.co.uk

nty8dxsir6

Tuesday 16 December 2008

SEO - what? how? where?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, it is the art of getting your website to be understood and rated better by search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

If your website has good SEO then your search engine ratings will improve, this will help visitors and potential customers find you, so it is a very cost effective marketing tool.

There are other ways to get your site a good listing on search engines, but you have to pay for the privilege, this is called pay per click advertising. When you do a search on google it’s the adverts that usually appear on the right hand side of the page. Every time someone clicks on your advert you pay an agreed price. It can become an expensive way of advertising your website because the competition is huge. Last time we checked out how much it would cost to get an advert displayed when the phrase web design was searched for it cost in excess of £6 per click!

If you get you SEO right you shouldn’t have to worry about pay per click advertising because customers will be finding you through search engine listings.

Make SEO an important factor in your marketing strategy, your customers are using search engines all the time to find products and services, make sure you are doing all you can to help people find you!

I am going to give you a very simple explanation of how a search engine works to help you understand how a search engine thinks! Sorry if it gets a bit technical!

A search is performed – this gets sent over to a massive bank of computers called index servers. Index servers are where search engines keep all the information they gather on the internet, this means they don’t actually go and look at each and every live website, they have versions of every website out there saved on their own bank of computers – this means they can do searches in millionths of a second. Once the query has been sent to the index servers it gets passed through the doc servers, which send back the results to the user in a meaningful way, rating them in order of importance. It is all designed to work as fast as possible, and to return you meaningful and useful results for your searches. That, in a nutshell, is how a search engine works!

I want to tell you a little bit about spiders! Not the creepy crawlies but the little programs search engines use to populate the index servers. A spider will visit your website roughly once a month, although if you have a website that has content updated daily, like a newspaper, spiders could visit two or three times a day or more! When the spider visits your site it will strip out all the frills and go straight for the heart of the code, it is really important to build a website so that it can be easily read by spiders.

When you build a website SEO should not be built in as an afterthought – it’s a crucial part of getting your website out there and encouraging more visitors to your site so it should be the first thing to think about when you build your website, so many times I have people approaching me asking me to do SEO on their websites, and after the site has been built it is often a much bigger job than if it had been built into the site in the first place.

Research words that are associated with your business, research things people would type into a search engine to find your business or service, these are vitally important to use throughout your site to help validate your site to those pesky spiders!

Inside the code of every page there should be some invisible code called meta tags and descriptions, each page of your website should contain no more than 12 unique keywords relevant to that particular page and one meta description consisting of a descriptive sentence about that page containing no more than 24 words. Again this is good spider food! Its also really important to have good and descriptive page titles, this is the phrase that appears along the top bar of your browser, most times you won’t even notice its there but spiders love these too! If you get all of these elements right you will be giving the spiders a good feast!

Populate your web site with rich and meaningful content. Search engines work with something called a word cloud. They take the content of your website and list each word inside it in order of importance, the more instances there are of a word, the more importance the search engine will give it. However you have to be careful because you can’t simply cut and paste the word over and over again, the spiders will think you are taking the piss and spamming them! And your visitors will not stay long either, as it doesn’t make for great reading! If you populate your site with rich and meaningful content you should naturally be using your keywords in a healthy manner! I have noticed that web sites with excellent ratings seem to use their most popular keywords about 4% within the text of their page.

Add useful content and articles to your website and make sure you add content to your site regularly to keep the spiders interested! Useful content can include articles which will be of interest to your visitors, for example an accountants website would have articles on tax tips, articles on business tips, articles on business funding etc things that would not only help your search engine validation but your customers too!

Links going to your website from other websites are really valuable, the more external links you can get to your website the better, the better quality the website is that is linking to you the better as well, it is proof to the search engines that you have a web site that is worth linking to! Links going from your website to other websites are not so important unless you are using them as reciprocal links, ie I’ll link to you if you link to me! Be careful though not to link to websites that have a blacklisting on Google such as scam sites or poorly rated sites.

One way of getting links back to your website is to use social networking sites like facebook, stumbleupon, linkedin or ecademy, these websites allow you to have a profile page that you can put information about yourself or your company on and you can put a link to your website from there too, there are many, many social networking sites out there to use. Another thing to do is open yourself a free blogging account on one of the popular blog sites, and blog! Link back to your website in the signature of your blog, use the articles you’ve written for your web site as blogs, get creative!

Be proactive get your site indexed on google and yahoo by submitting it to them if its not already on there, its easy to do you just visit the search engine and follow the instructions, don’t sit around hoping the spiders will find you one day! Go spider hunting! List your business on google maps and yahoo local, this is an extremely powerful thing to do as not a lot of people know about this yet so it gives you instant search engine success for local searches. Its simple to do and free, so you may as well go for it.

There is a special search engine called dmoz which is built by people not spiders, it’s a very valuable inbound link to have so it is worth visiting and following the instructions to get your website listed on there. Again not many people know the importance of dmoz so it is well worth doing it to give your self the edge. www.dmoz.org

Hopefully this has been a useful introduction to the vast world of SEO, you have to look at it as a bit of a hobby, it requires patience and planning. Have fun and experiment with it, one day if you keep at it you will realise you’ve risen to the top of the pile!

Monday 27 October 2008

The Perfect PR

I've been mulling over this and doing some research, the fact is that if you write good press releases and get them published often, it is free advertising ... the problem is you can't waffle on about your services or company when you write them.

The perfect PR consists of the following:
  1. news that others will find useful or amusing
  2. a human angle
  3. enough information to allow potential customers find out more about you or your services
  4. brief and to the point - papers will edit down long stories
The best way to get your PR noticed by a paper is to fax it to them, emails tend to get overlooked, and post is easily binned - faxing puts the news item directly in their hands and they are more likely to read it than bin it straight away.

Finally - write something that is worth reading, is your company doing something for charity, or sponsoring someone, offering something that goes above and beyond the norm? is something quirky or unusual happening that would make a good story? be creative and get your company name out there!

Thanks for reading!