Season of Goodwill

If you wish to practice blogging or social media skills and have any questions over the Christmas - New Year period and you want some help, please feel free to ask questions here (as comments) or via www.twitter.com/BPcUK and I'll attempt to assist.

Enjoy! See you next year.

Comments on Blogs for SEO

There are many different kinds of motivation for commenting on blogs. Even when the common motivation is SEO, there are two distinct types - specific or generic.

The BPc maintains blogs for a number of clients. Whether Blogger or WordPress, we set them up so that anyone is able to leave a comment but every comment has to be approved before publication. Yes, there are occasions when a plethora of spam comments have to be reviewed but, in general, the numbers of comments are easily managed.

Most commonly received comments are from link-building agencies and most, though not all, should be rejected. Often, if you paste this generic type of comment into Google, it may be found on several other blogs, which brings no value to your blog.

It's a rare pleasure to receive genuine comments. These are from people who have read the post and given related feedback, good or controversial. (Please, feel free to leave your comments on this blog!)

Sometimes, 'specific' comments may promote competitors. If your client base is Hertfordshire and there is a comment linking to a similar small business outside your area, it could be beneficial to you both. It's worth checking whether they have a blog for reciprocal comments.

But what if they are a direct competitor? If there is an opportunity for a reciprocal link, then it could be OK. Contact The BPc if there is a specific instance to be debated!

Benefits of Comments on Blogs for SEO:

• add to the content
• increase relevant keywords
• keep blog posts 'fresh' for search engines

Links from Images in Blogger

I've just read a blog where the blogger was frustrated because he wanted to link to another blog by clicking on an image rather than the display a larger image, the default setting in Google Blogger.

To do this isn't too painful. At the top of the post, there are two buttons: Compose & HTML. Normally, a blog is written using the Compose window. When you have finished, you will need to go to the HTML window to change the link from the image.

In the HTML code, if you have used an image url (i.e. from another internet location) you will see a paragraph something like this:

• <a href="http://www.site.co.uk/image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.site.co.uk/image.jpg" />

If you have uploaded an image from your computer, the code may look like this:

• <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v8N8w/UZ9tIg/AAABMY/zuZNk/s1600/blogpic.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v8N8w/UZ9tIg/AAABMY/zuZNk/s1600/blogpic.JPG" /></a>

src= lets Blogger know where to find the image that should appear in the post and a href= is the default link to display the original size image.

Simplified, you must leave the src= (image source) intact but the link contained in "quotes" next to a href= can be replaced with the destination url/page of your choice. Sometimes you may just want to remove the /image.jpg part of the link, or you may want to replace the whole link.

Examples:

<a href="http://www.site.co.uk" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.site.co.uk/image.jpg" /> will link to the site where the original image is sourced.

<a href="http://www.anotherblog.blogspot.com" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.site.co.uk/image.jpg" /> will link to a different location, such as a blog, another website, social media account, etc.

Note that these paragraphs must remain between the < and > signs.

And finally... an example of an image that should open another blog in a new tab or window:

Google AdWords Tips for beginners

If you are new to managing a Google Adwords campaign, here are 3 tips you may find useful.

Mobile Devices
First of all, are you aware how many of your website visitors are using mobile 'phones? You can find out with Google Analytics. From the statistics used in the example below, almost a quarter of all views are from a mobile device with Apple iPhone the most popular.

You can check that your ads are already showing on mobile devices by logging into your Adwords Campaigns page, selecting the Settings tab and checking Devices. If not All, you may want to edit.

Geographic Target
If you have a limited geographical delivery or service capacity, such as a 30 mile radius from your base of operations, have you set or adjusted the regional target of your Adwords campaign? Do this by selecting the Settings tab for the Campaign and clicking the Edit option for Locations. To change the targeted location in the small pop-up box, click on it and, in the larger pop-up box, click on Radius Targeting. You will then be able to insert a core geographical target and a number of miles, shown visually, for you to adjust and save (or cancel if you change your mind). There are other options, too.

Targeting Keywords
When you create a new text ad, are you aware of the {KeyWord: Used Cars} feature? Place your default Ad heading after Keyword: within parentheses and if someone searches within your keyword selection, the search term with replace the default keyword, e.g. Used Cars may be replaced by Used BMWs or Second-hand Cars, tailoring the result to the person searching for the product or service you are advertising.

Follow The BPc on Twitter.com/BPcUK

Twitter Top Ten Tips

Twitter is easy to use but with a little more effort, it can be more rewarding. For example, most people manage to follow a few people when they first set up their twitter account and then they tweet, sometimes sporadically, sometimes frequently. Here are some tips for optimising Twitter for your business.


1. Are you tweeting as a person or a company? The two are (or should be) quite different unless, of course, you are the company. A corporate account should not compromise the company with personal views or opinions. You can, of course, set up an account for each.

2. Review your Twitter profile. Is it still accurate and is it interesting? Personal accounts are best with a head-shot image or other icons that represent your personality but please don't leave the generic starter pic on your profile.

3. Occasional promotional tweets about your products or services (with relevant links) are fine but the majority of tweets should be informative or entertaining to engage followers, e.g. links to an interesting blog post.

4. Occasional re-tweets, #FFs, responses to @others show that you interact with the Twitter community.

5. Don't just tweet links to general news* because people have probably already seen it. And don't be tempted to tweet rubbish just because you can't think of anything else! Imagine being the recipient of boring twaddle - you would soon 'unfollow'.

6. *Instead, tweet items that you found to be interesting and add a comment to explain why.

7. Give value to your followers - tweet tips or links to tips within your area of expertise.

8. Respond to questions on twitter, especially within your area of expertise. You can ask questions, too.

9. Unless you regularly do so, make an effort, perhaps once a month, to review your followers and follow some back. In addition to finding people to follow within your industry, follow local businesses too.

10. Finally, please refrain from just setting up automated tweet facilities. It's OK to have your LinkedIn and FaceBook Page posts tweeted but if you don't read tweets, you can't interact with the Twitter community and you will lose much of the value it could bring.

Company Logo Design Guide

Recently, we were asked to create a logo for a new company and asked for some information to help us establish the concept. The client told us that he had a concept and just required us to do the artwork. We were very surprised to receive a varied selection of highly complex sketches.

Tip#1. Keep it simple because logo design is not as quick and easy as some people imagine.

Tip#2. A versatile and durable logo will work well in a single colour and in greyscale.

Tip#3. A logo should be scaleable and look good as an icon. Of course, there are some exceptions, for example, if the logo includes or is comprised of a name, such as Johnson, Jackson, Jones and Partners.

Brainstorming and designs by committee can be a great idea but unless you include your professional designer, the end result will probably not be the end result. When researching, look at your competitors' and suppliers' logos because you want to be different but in a good way.

Some designers like to go straight to the computer but most will doodle, quickly sketching out multiple concepts and variations first, generally 'playing' with shapes and colours.

Consider where the logo is likely to be used: on business cards, stationery, emails, website, maybe promotional gifts, T-shirts, company vans, perhaps advertising on the web, in magazines or newspapers, on posters or even massive billboards and building wraps.

Quite often, a strapline will be used with a logo therefore attention needs to be paid to typefaces or fonts. The logo should be tested alongside various fonts as might be used on a website or brochure. Also, the logo should work well wherever it is placed (left, right, centre, top bottom) as well as on its own.

Keep it Simple and keep control of the budget.

sending a strong message yet keeping it simple

Sadly, we were not commissioned to design the above logos - here are links to more inspirational logos and examples of our clients' logos.

Continuing SEO tips / Google Webmaster Guidelines

Continuing with Google's Webmaster Guidelines, the emphasis in this post is on quality content. As Internet use grew organically, there is a plethora of deadwood and duplication that Google has taken upon itself to tidy up using the 'land fill' method. Current and future websites should abide by Google's rules or they may never find themselves.

A very good tip is to create content for users, as if you were presenting to humans. That done, the code and meta data should reflect the content accurately. In other words, if it isn't good enough for humans to see, the search engines don't want to see it either.

This includes hidden text, such as using white text on a white background. Google will find it and you will be punished.

Another bright idea that isn't worth trying is creating a number of pages with generally similar content to use keywords that didn't make it onto other pages - for example, repeating a page of content that describes a product or service and just changing a few words, such as a colour or location. Google referred to their culling of Duplicate Content as their Panda sweep which aims to downgrade 'doorway' pages or affiliate websites that contain very little original content and are created purely as a search engine promotion tool.

Establishing links to your website is a tricky business. There are several companies that offer to provide 100 or 1000 links for a fee. If you can't verify the list, think carefully about its value - Google's Penguin update downgraded websites that it deemed to have participated in low level link schemes. Google is happy to see reciprocal links that have been carefully considered and loves links from related unique blog content.

It's a tough job but we love to do it. Contact us for Continuing SEO.

Optimisation according to Google, plus legal compliance

In addition to complying with laws, directives and official standards (Companies Act, Disability Discrimination / Equality Act, EU Cookie* and Marketing / Advertising Standards) website designers should give consideration to guidelines from the leading search engine, Google.

Ultimately, the responsibility is with website owners to ensure compliance with laws and understand the basics of SEO. Search Engine Optimisation is a wide-ranging term that is generally accepted to mean optimised code and content plus link-building to raise awareness and popularity of your website.

Google is not so much King as benevolent dictator. Like it or loathe it, complying with Google's Webmaster Guidelines is the best way for sustainable results in the longer term. Some explanations relating to the design, content and technical sections this link are below:

• 'sitemap' does not refer to a site map page within the website but a file 'sitemap.xml' that is created and stored on the server, with details of your website pages for search engines to follow; 
• in addition to a navigation menu, important pages should have a text link from within the content; 
• every image should have a descriptive 'alt' tag and <title> in the code - you can see these when you hover over images - which are useful for search engines and comply with the DDA/Equality Act; 
• 'dynamic' pages are often found on database-driven sites, such as shopping sites, or websites with presentation scripts. (Ironically, Google's Webmaster Guidelines page uses a url that it warns against!) 
• unless your website is abundant with features such as Flash animations and scripts, using a Lynx browser is not common practice. However, websites should be tested in all popular browsers: Internet Explorer (IE9 & IE8 but IE7 use is declining), Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari - gaining ground as iPad use increases. Testing websites for compatibility on iPhones and Android mobile browsers covers most of the cellphone users;  
• 'robots.txt' may not be necessary for all websites, especially if yours is a static html website with no surprises, but a search engine expects to see it so it can be included as a default; 
• content management systems (CMS) such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and countless proprietary offerings are designed to make it easier for non-technical users to update their own content. (This is a whole other topic!) - Make sure that your designer uses 'friendly urls'; 
• site performance speed improvement tips: resize/re-render/optimise images (in other words, make them smaller) and, if possible, load main content before animations and scripts. 

... to be continued.

*please visit ico.org.uk and search for latest info, as their page links keep changing - thanks to Anna Gryshko for pointing this out.

Meanwhile, if you'd like a well designed website or optimisation for your current website ...
(holding page for new website) Approved by Browsers

coding extras for IE7 is so taxing

Visitors to this blog - not surprisingly, considering its subject matter - are not using IE7, launched six years ago. In the past month, five per cent of visitors used IE8 and seven per cent used IE9. Internet Explorer 10 is scheduled for launch this autumn.

• Firefox: 43%
• Chrome: 36%
• IE: 12%
• Safari: 9%

Taking a cue from Google, web designers Approved By Browsers, Professional Solutions and The BPc dropped support from IE7 last year (unless specified by clients) and, interestingly, Australian on-line retailer Kogan has addressed the situation by introducing a "tax" on purchases made via the IE7 browser.

This may lose them some sales but the percentage is small compared with the costs of coding the extras required for the website to look the same in IE7. And, no doubt, the ensuing world-wide publicity isn't doing them any harm, either!

See whose website gets more visitors from search results - you or your competitors

Instant Online Comparison of Website Traffic.

We've added a new service to our blog so that you can compare website traffic, instantly, on-line and without registration, allowing you to analyse your future SEO/Internet Marketing requirements.

Compare the numbers of visitors who click through to your competitors' websites (example below):

First, enter your own domain name for a comparison with other websites using the same keywords, then enter your competitors domain names for more results, click: Compare Search Engine Traffic

If you would like The BPc to improve your results, let us know.

EU Cookie Law: website owners

The debate about how to comply will continue long after the effective date (26 May 2012) but current thinking is to follow the examples from the authorities concerned, albeit, this course of action requires us to frequently return to those sites to monitor any changes.

The EU seems to have taken a minimalist approach: www.europa.eu places a 'legal notice' link at the top of the page. At the foot of the disclaimer/copyright/privacy policy, there is a description of cookies and an off-site link to www.aboutcookies.org

Direct.gov.uk placed the word 'cookies' at the top of their home and newsroom pages, which links to a very comprehensive list of explanations with numerous lists to further information. Their preferred cookie information site is www.aboutcookies.org

HMRC has a 'Privacy Policy' link along the footer which then provides another link to a specific page about cookies which then has a further information link to Direct.gov.uk

TfL placed a 'cookie policy' link in the footer, which links to a comprehensive list of cookies, brief descriptions and off-site links for more information. TfL has chosen to link to www.allaboutcookies.org

The FSA has a number of links listed in the footer, including their Privacy Policy which covers cookies. The FSA also links to  www.allaboutcookies.org

But perhaps the most important is the Independent Commissioner's Office website - it is their responsibility to make this work. When you reach their website, you are presented with

You can't continue unless you tick the box.
However, you can browse the site but the message will continue to be presented on each page unless you accept cookies - because the cookies will remember that you've ticked the box. Clever, eh?

Google Police / Panda / Penguin

From Panda to Penguin. Google is attempting to bring quality to website searches. Google's basic policies remain the same but their concern is that some websites are using cunning plans rather than delivering a website with good content.

To address these concerns, Google's Panda sweep was introduced to down-grade websites that primarily consisted of duplicate content. In other words, if swathes of text had been found elsewhere on the internet, the content with the earliest associated upload date would be considered as original. If, however, the copy attributed the original, it was deemed to be acceptable (I think!).

Penguin is addressing the dubious practice of mass-links from 'low-value' sites, which have no original related content to the landing page of the linked-to website. Don't panic if you have a listing on sites such as FreeIndex, AboutUs or social media - these are fine. It's the ones where lists of website links have no associated useful information and, in particular, link sites that provide paid links (excluding bona fide advertising sites).

Clients of The BPc have no cause for concern. We just don't do this. We build quality links to our clients' websites, using acceptable methods, from blogs, social media, articles sites and, where possible, other websites with similar content. We offer a monthly fee programme to keep your website visible.

Testimonials and contact info: Internet Presence & Website Promotion.

Intro to domain.tel

It would be easy for people to contact you if all they had to type into a browser was yourname.tel, e.g. davidcameron.tel or primeminister.tel.

Domain names with the suffix .tel are a different type of domain. You can't upload your own website to it, you can only list your contact details, a brief description of your services and links to other sites, including your social media accounts, such as Twitter and Linked-In. It costs approximately £13 per year and includes a control panel from which you can add your details.

See www.telnic.org for full details You can buy a .tel domain at most hosting companies, e.g. heartinternet.co.uk and daily.co.uk.

There is a global directory at telpages.com or telpages.co.uk; to the right is a customised page found at: london-olympics.tel

Here are details of a local Herts-based company that we use:

Your Website, Google Analytics & the EU Cookie Law

If you are in business and you promote your goods or services on your company website, you may have Google Analytics tracking code on your website pages which will use "cookies" to gather information. A new EU law, introduced last year, states that henceforth, if use of your website is about to place cookies in a visitor's browser, permission must be obtained in advance.

Links to explanations: What are cookies? What are Google Analytics? What is a browser? 

So. Google Analytics will track visitor activity to your website by associating an identifying cookie to a visitor's browser. It's not a complete picture because all browsers offer a choice of allowing or disallowing cookies, usually found under browser settings.

• How will the new law affect website visitors? 
  There are a number of different ways in which website owners/designers will address the issue. Visitors may be confronted with pop-up messages that require a yes/no tick before they can proceed further. Details should be given under a privacy policy or site T&C.
• What should website owners do about this new law? 
  If your website generates cookies, including Google Analytics, you should advise visitors by means of a prominent notice as soon as they land on the website, and offer them an opt-in or opt-out choice. Your website designer should be able to do this for you. Alternatively, you may decide to remove Google Analytics and any other cookie-generating code.
• What use is Google Analytics to a website owner? 
  Most successful websites have been 'optimised' to present information to search engines (primarily Google) in a search-engine-friendly format but it's really the content that is important. Google Analytics stores information that can be used to improve how your website performs in searches, such as:
• a history of popular search terms used by visitors to find your website;
• which searches resulted in visitors taking a good look around the website and which searches resulting in visitors leaving the website immediately;
• how visitors reached the site (via search engine, referral from another site, social media, etc.);
• visitor trends, daily to annually ... and so much more!

Google Analytics does not track or store any personal information from any visitor. It's similar to visiting the high street and a researcher noting that on day-1, X visited three stores, spent 20 minutes in each one and made a single purchase, Y visited a single store for 5 minutes and made a purchase, Z walked straight through the high street without stopping; on day-2, Y revisited the same store and a number of new visitors were similarly tracked.

Website Owners.
You will need to contact your website developer or Internet professional for advice regarding compliance with the new law. There are several information sources, such as Information Commissioner's Office and cookielaw.org,

If you already have Google Analytics, it is worth continuing if you want to improve your website's search engine performance. You can try it yourself: SEO info / Social Media info
or contact a specialist, such as The BPc, about SEO and Internet marketing.

BranchOut with FaceBook

Most of us in the UK will not yet have discovered the BranchOut app for FaceBook. Launched in the USA in 2010, it was developed as a 'career network application' for FaceBook users.

At The BPc, we need to have experience of social media applications so that we can advise clients which applications are best suited to their needs; we have spent a few days deciding whether to sign up for this app or not and our current decision is ... not just yet. BranchOut's origins are primarily aimed at blue-collar workers looking for new jobs and this is not the market we and our clients currently address. That might change and we shall return to the BranchOut situation periodically, maybe sooner than envisaged.

There are so many social media applications available that we focus on a core few and the recommended mix will depend on each client's specific needs. Usually, we recommend Twitter and often we recommend LinkedIn, FaceBook, YouTube and Pinterest. Sometimes, Tumblr, Digg, etc.

Related blog posts:

• Social Media in Business
• Twitter Strategy

QR codes for smartphone users

We've had a bit of fun with this. If you are reading this blog on your smartphone and you have an appropriate app installed (from iTunes or Google Play) you will be able to link to our twitter account or email us with the following images. If you're on the PC, try scanning them with your smartphone!!

twitter.com/BPcUK

email The BPc

(QR = Quick Response)

Social Media in Business. Using Facebook pages, Twitter and Pinterest

Everyone has heard of Facebook. Many people know that Facebook has been coerced, over recent years, to facilitate business usage - which they have - via Facebook pages. A dilemma for many companies, however, is whether to jump on the bandwagon even if it isn't considered to be a useful medium for their business. Here's the optimum answer for those who are undecided: it costs nothing and can take up very little of your time so, why not?

Twitter is a more cosmopolitan mix of business and social interaction. Business people often tweet their own opinions interspersed with corporate data, connecting with a wider audience by adding personality to a faceless company. Love it or hate it, Twitter can be a very useful business tool, akin to the ticker-tape statements that run along the bottom of the screen on Sky Sports. Be there - or miss out on multiple opportunities of promoting your website, products, services, news, etc.

The new kid on the block is Pinterest, barely a couple of years old but already massive across the USA and growing fast. Whereas Twitter is a reading list of 'sound-bytes', Pinterest draws interest visually by letting its users pin pictures to their pin boards - either as an upload or from the internet with a link back to the website where the image is from! Not all companies will find it easy to promote themselves with images but if you have some on your website or blog, these can be pinned. Of course, those alone would be a duplication of your website content and not at all in the spirit of Pinterest (you may be punished) so you need to interact more with potential followers and re-pinners by being generous with your pins and re-pins.

At The BPc, we don't have a lot of interesting products to add to Pinterest as we mainly specialise in SEO, website design and a few graphic design projects. We use Pinterest to help our clients by pinning their interesting images from their websites, blogs or other social media. We add in some complimentary images that we like, too (but not from our clients' major competitors!)

If you feel that promoting your company via social media is a drain on your time or resources, The BPc will undertake to do it for you for a controllable monthly fee. EMAIL
(Linked-In has been ignored in this post because it doesn't address the same general audience. More about that another time.)

How Twitter Can Benefit Your Business

Twitter can be used to target potential clients but the success rate of a direct approach via this medium is very VERY low. Better to use Twitter to build a reputation, either within your local business community or your industry. Doing this properly will help you spread the word about your work.

Promote your products or services by the simple strategy of connecting with your existing and potential clients. If you tweet well, you could be promoting your products or services to the whole world every time you tweet.

• follow people in the same industry or geographic location to get relevant info or inspiration ... and reciprocal followers
• use relevant keywords in your tweets to attract followers
• provide your followers with links to your blog or website

Twitter can get your blog or website promoted exponentially!

Often, those you follow will reciprocate so keep them interested with a selection of quality tweets. Comment on your industry or locality, refer followers to interesting news or blogs (your own or others) using concise descriptions, recommend good services or products, let followers know of upcoming events of interest and inform them first when you offer a new service or product discounts or announce a competition.

Using the tweets you follow as a guide:

• decide your minimum and maximum frequency of tweets
• allow no more than one sales tweet for every informative tweet
• don't forget to link to relevant pages of your website or blog
• limit the number of @user conversations as these exclude your other followers
• don't retweet more often than you tweet

If you are posting tweets as yourself, you can be less formal and have opinions that, as a company, you may not want to air. For example, Joe Bloggs may support England against Scotland but his company would not wish to alienate any prospective Scottish clients. In this case, you may need to consider managing two Twitter accounts (that may, occasionally, retweet each other).

Finally, if you are too busy to blog or don't have the time or inclination to manage your online marketing well ... that's the time to contact The BPc! (SEO & website design also a speciality.)

Website Revamp? Questions to ask your Website Designer

When revamping an existing website, ensure that links in to your website pages from other websites and search engines are retained.

Websites need updating every now and then - ideally, no longer than three or four years. Even if your products or services haven't changed, everything else has: search engines, browsers, your competitors, etc.

Now that you have decided to revamp your website and approved the new design, there are some other things that you need to consider so that you don't lose whatever ranking you have.

Here are a couple of important points to discuss with your website designer:

• There will be links to pages within your website, not just your home page. If the page name or the path changes when the new website replaces the old one, you will lose traffic. Ask your website designer to include a '301 permanent redirect' or similar for each of the removed URLs.
• If you have taken the opportunity to rewrite some of the content, ensure that the effectiveness of keywords is not diluted. Whether or not the visible content changes, there are code changes (both HTML and CSS) that need to be checked, especially: title tags, meta-descriptions, header tags and anchor text.

More information about optimising websites & legal considerations for website design.

Search Engine Optimisation: What, Why, When, How, Who, Where and Which?

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation

What does it mean?
Optimising the way your website is seen by search engines means to present comprehensive data in a certain way - just like you would present business prospects with a document, using headings, sub-headings, summary, details and links to make it easy to follow.

Why optimise?
Websites that have been optimised to present the content in a way that Search Engines can easily index with relevant words are likely to show results more quickly that those that have not. This is not all that has to be done; search engine algorithms also include a number of other factors, such as volume and quality of links into your website, popularity (i.e. number of visitors, length of time spent browsing, etc.) and other activity. With millions of websites competing for attention, it is essential to optimise your website for search engines, most particularly for Google, with its near-monopoly.

When to optimise?
Optimise as soon as possible and regularly, at least every three months, for continuing good results or your competitors may put in greater efforts and leap above you. Also, search-terms evolve over time so you need to ensure that your content keeps pace.

How to optimise - the basics:

• List the keywords that your potential customers are likely to use to search for the products or services that you supply
• Allocate each keyword to a page or pages of your website that have most relevant content
• Prioritise the keywords - because the most important need to be (a) near the top of the content (b) repeated for emphasis
• Write or re-write the page content for human consumption, making sure that you include the keywords listed above.

Behind the content, the source code also plays a vital role; you may need technical assistance with the following:

• "Friendly url" should be meaningful and contain a major keyword, i.e. www.mywebsite.com/flyingwidget rather than /product1
• The page 'Title' should be unique for each page and include the most important keywords in a short sentence or two (maximum 70 characters).
• Meta Tags (Description and Keywords) should be included on each page. Description is the more important and is a longer version (about 160 characters) of your page title; Keywords is a list of the top 10 or so keywords that are contained within the page content and not an opportunity to supplement the content (refer the lists you made for each page at the beginning of this exercise), e.g. flying widget,flying gadget,air propelled widget, etc.
• Header Tags are used by search engines to identify and prioritise key components within the text of each page. H1 will be used for the most important heading or identifier. H2 & H3 tags can be used for various sub-headings.
• Image Attributes (Alt and Title) add descriptions to images. Not only do these attributes enable a search engine to associate keywords to an image but they are useful information when images are not displayed. Alt is used by text-to-speech software to describe images to visually impaired users.

A Sitemap file can be uploaded with your website to assist search engines flow through the website pages, making it easier to index all the pages listed in the sitemap. There are free tools available to generate a sitemap file for you, e.g. www.xml-sitemaps.com.

Who can perform the code optimisation?
Depending on how your website has been written and on what platform, you may be able to do it yourself, you may be able to shop around for a service supplier you feel comfortable working with or you may be locked in to your website designer/supplier.

If you don't have the technical ability or accessibility to update your website, there will be a cost involved but you can minimise this by preparing the content yourself and, in many cases, viewing the HTML source code to review the elements for optimization.

Where do we go from here?
Anchor Text (the words that are clicked on to link elsewhere) and Links - both internally and externally - can increase the importance of the landing pages. For example, using the term 'flying widget price' on the home page as the anchor-text link to the product page www.mywebsite.com/flyingwidgetprice, that also contains an H1 of flying widget price, is an indication that this key phrase is critical to the website page.

The same applies to external links. One of the best ways to improve your website's search engine position is to have other websites linking to yours - and not just the home page. Sometimes, you will have no control over this but if you are using social media or writing a blog, you do and, instead of using 'click here' as the anchor text, you can choose a relevant phrase.

The more quality links you have, the better your ranking on Google. A quality link is from a website with a high page rank and content that is relevant to the content of the linked landing page. It is the regular building of external links that can be time consuming and, although some can be managed in-house, it's often easier and more cost-effective to contract an external team member for a few hours a month while you concentrate on your core business.

Which tasks are best managed in-house and which services should be outsourced?
Obviously, this varies between organisations and the personnel available but, in general, building followers on Linked-In is personal; Facebook and Twitter can benefit from posts with personality and could be co-managed.

Newsletters, a weekly blog post, press releases and articles should be written or edited and posted by the Internet Marketing specialist but will need periodic input. Other opportunities may include reciprocal links, comments on similar posts and forums.

This is our core business. The BPc will guide you through optimisation or manage your optimisation and linking projects for a monthly fee or an hourly rate. We are also able to create websites for a range of budgets, either in standard code or open-source CMS using Wordpress. We always aim to give best advice.

View our Client Portfolio Blog.
For internet presence and website performance, small to medium businesses, please email The BPc in the first instance:





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Logo and Business cards designed/printed at reasonable prices

If you are in a business start-up, re-launch or re-branding situation, you may require a logo design for your business cards and stationery. Here is a small selection of client logos that we have created:

Logo design is from £75+vat and can include a pdf proof and word template for your headed stationery.

Business card design and print
250 business cards £55+vat (subsequent names at £40+vat)
500 business cards £65+vat (subsequent names at £50+vat)

(prices correct at 31st December 2011)