More Link Building
Today I spent the day looking at ways to carry out even more effective link building. I started by making a list in Excel of all the forums, blogs, sites, directories and local sites I could contact who would put a link to the Manchester based web page design company Made With. This is a company who specialises in web development, search engine marketing, online PR, content management, usability, online advertising and email marketing. Furthermore, they have produced successful digital communications for B2B and B2C clients and organisations such as Simply Gok Wan, Wolseley and St. Peters Partnerships. It's a very time consuming task but worth it in the long rund and hopefully I will get a lot of positive response and get Made With to rank high up in search engines!
Twitter me now!
I have finally done it; I have joined the world of twitter. I feel that it’s something which to be honest was long over due. Since signing up to it I have been reading other peoples tweets rather than write my own but watch this space…I’m sure I’ll start to love it soon!
EzineArticles- getting my writing out there!
This week I’ve spent time typing up content to put onto the website ‘EzineArticles’. This is a website where authors publish their writing and share information and various texts with each other and people on the web. This is an excellent way to get information read which is relevant to the websites which you are trying to promote and also a good way of link building. This particular website which I was promoting was the ‘Fused Networks’ group who have a business branch called ‘Fused-Webcalls’. ‘Fused-Webcalls’ promote ‘VoIP’ (Voice over Internet Protocol) and I have written the following article based around this.
The benefits of using VoIP from a personal perspective
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol ) is a new intelligent and a great money saving way of making phone calls; these can be within your business or even in your own time at home. The most valuable aspect of this product is that you can use it whenever and wherever you like via a laptop or mobile phone.
It is always interesting to hear about new products from someone’s personal point of view. From personal experience I can say that I have found this product is an excellent substitute in situations when standard international landline telephone calls are way too expensive, for example while living abroad for a certain period of time. It is essential that you keep in contact with friends and family when living or working in another country and I found this is the cheapest and most effective way. VoIP is perfect in these situations. As long as the person who you are contacting has the facilities and devices to incorporate VoIP- a laptop or mobile phone and internet access- setting up is quick, cheap and very easy.
For many business people international travel has become an everyday activity and standard telephone calls a thing of the past. Any business or individual wanting to save costs should invest in VoIP as it is reliable and the most modern way of carrying out international telephones calls. The signal, the quality of the phone calls and the speed of connection is the same as with a landline therefore it makes scenes for any business to introduce this system of communication.
Since starting to use VoIP when living abroad, I have not stopped using it. I’ve found that even when living in the same country communicating with friends and family via VoIP rather than a standard telephone or mobile phone network has still proven to be cheaper and just as efficient.
The benefits of using VoIP from a personal perspective
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol ) is a new intelligent and a great money saving way of making phone calls; these can be within your business or even in your own time at home. The most valuable aspect of this product is that you can use it whenever and wherever you like via a laptop or mobile phone.
It is always interesting to hear about new products from someone’s personal point of view. From personal experience I can say that I have found this product is an excellent substitute in situations when standard international landline telephone calls are way too expensive, for example while living abroad for a certain period of time. It is essential that you keep in contact with friends and family when living or working in another country and I found this is the cheapest and most effective way. VoIP is perfect in these situations. As long as the person who you are contacting has the facilities and devices to incorporate VoIP- a laptop or mobile phone and internet access- setting up is quick, cheap and very easy.
For many business people international travel has become an everyday activity and standard telephone calls a thing of the past. Any business or individual wanting to save costs should invest in VoIP as it is reliable and the most modern way of carrying out international telephones calls. The signal, the quality of the phone calls and the speed of connection is the same as with a landline therefore it makes scenes for any business to introduce this system of communication.
Since starting to use VoIP when living abroad, I have not stopped using it. I’ve found that even when living in the same country communicating with friends and family via VoIP rather than a standard telephone or mobile phone network has still proven to be cheaper and just as efficient.
Link Building
Link building is a very important aspect of driving relevant traffic within the web industry. If link building is done well then it is an extremely powerful way to improve your SEO. It is important to remember that people will only want to link to your website if it is of a high standard, so make sure you have a professional website with good usability and accessibility.
Link building is an activity which is rather time consuming but one which will pay off in the long run when the link usage increases visits to you web page.
Make sure you are building genuine links and request links from high quality websites. Some websites will bring you more traffic than others so take this into consideration when you’re requesting links. For example, links which are related to your website will carry more weight than links from web pages that are completely unrelated.
One big piece of advice is to avoid ‘Link Farms’! These are web pages which consist for one reason and one reason only- to host as many links as possible. They will be detected by search engines and will get you banned. Also be professional when you are requesting a link, there is no point requesting links for the sake of it because the probability is: you will be rejected. Further more, to get other people to link to your page from theirs you should make it an easy and non time consuming activity. The easiest way to do this is to give them the HTML coding you want them to link to; this will also insure that the link is relevant. Finally, you might come across some websites which expect you to pay a fee or carry out a favour for them e.g. host some advertising on your page. This is well worth it if the traffic that is directed to you will benefit your website.
It might be a time consuming process but it will be well worth it in the long run. If you own a website you need people to visit it and to get people to visit it you need to rank well within search engines therefore you need to be link building regularly.
For a more detailed guide have a look at this website about Link Building, I found it very interesting.
Link building is an activity which is rather time consuming but one which will pay off in the long run when the link usage increases visits to you web page.
Make sure you are building genuine links and request links from high quality websites. Some websites will bring you more traffic than others so take this into consideration when you’re requesting links. For example, links which are related to your website will carry more weight than links from web pages that are completely unrelated.
One big piece of advice is to avoid ‘Link Farms’! These are web pages which consist for one reason and one reason only- to host as many links as possible. They will be detected by search engines and will get you banned. Also be professional when you are requesting a link, there is no point requesting links for the sake of it because the probability is: you will be rejected. Further more, to get other people to link to your page from theirs you should make it an easy and non time consuming activity. The easiest way to do this is to give them the HTML coding you want them to link to; this will also insure that the link is relevant. Finally, you might come across some websites which expect you to pay a fee or carry out a favour for them e.g. host some advertising on your page. This is well worth it if the traffic that is directed to you will benefit your website.
It might be a time consuming process but it will be well worth it in the long run. If you own a website you need people to visit it and to get people to visit it you need to rank well within search engines therefore you need to be link building regularly.
For a more detailed guide have a look at this website about Link Building, I found it very interesting.
Buzz Monitoring
Have you ever thought that some one seems to know an awful lot about your company? Wondered why some are following your footsteps? And wondered how you could get back that competitive edge?
‘Buzz Monitoring’ could be the answer. It is a fairly new development but at the moment it is highly topical prospect. It basically consists of companies who make it their aim to find out everything within a certain sector, be it retail, financial, media or telecommunications.
These companies look at customer’s attitude towards your product, delve into what your competitors are doing and analyse your websites presence on the internet. As well as this it can tell you how much a certain search term has been used over the past days, weeks, months and years- which is useful if this search term is the name of your company. They analyse what’s been said throughout the internet by looking at social networks, videos, online communities, micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, ordinary blogs and discussion boards. What’s more, it goes beyond written information; ‘Buzz Monitoring’ can also monitor logos and images.
Further more, it can be used to seek out fraudsters, people who use the internet for criminal activities such as counter fitting and piracy. With highly technical knowledge ‘Buzz Monitoring’ can help find out what people are searching for in a lot more depth than search engines can. They can monitor what people are actually doing and not what they say they are doing.
It goes to show how powerful the internet really is- if you try hard enough and look close enough you can find out a lot more than you initially might have thought.
‘Buzz Monitoring’ could be the answer. It is a fairly new development but at the moment it is highly topical prospect. It basically consists of companies who make it their aim to find out everything within a certain sector, be it retail, financial, media or telecommunications.
These companies look at customer’s attitude towards your product, delve into what your competitors are doing and analyse your websites presence on the internet. As well as this it can tell you how much a certain search term has been used over the past days, weeks, months and years- which is useful if this search term is the name of your company. They analyse what’s been said throughout the internet by looking at social networks, videos, online communities, micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, ordinary blogs and discussion boards. What’s more, it goes beyond written information; ‘Buzz Monitoring’ can also monitor logos and images.
Further more, it can be used to seek out fraudsters, people who use the internet for criminal activities such as counter fitting and piracy. With highly technical knowledge ‘Buzz Monitoring’ can help find out what people are searching for in a lot more depth than search engines can. They can monitor what people are actually doing and not what they say they are doing.
It goes to show how powerful the internet really is- if you try hard enough and look close enough you can find out a lot more than you initially might have thought.
Keeping up with website analysis!
This week I started off by completing another website analysis which PushON complete for free and which educated users about flaws, misleading information or inaccuracies within contracts. I found the website very interesting and although it was a fairly good website there were some key areas which needed improving to make it perform better. Giving advice on what to improve and which areas to develop will hopefully improve the websites overall performance.
Then I moved onto finding out about the new craze 'Buzz Monitoring'....
Then I moved onto finding out about the new craze 'Buzz Monitoring'....
"The Factory Episode 1 Who Needs An ERP System Anyway?"
First of all I feel I need to share some important information with you…this video "The Factory Episode 1 Who Needs An ERP System Anyway?" which has been produced by PushON for K3 is brilliant, take a look! It’s very funny especially if you’re a fan of The Office and Ricky Gervais like me.
Exploring Firefox's Add-ons
This week I worked with Katrina PushON’s online marketing manager who introduced me to Firefox’s Add-ons. Once you have signed up to Firefox you can have access to all the different widgets they have to offer- there are hundreds! Some of the ones I learnt to use this week were the ‘British English Dictionary’ which is quite self explanatory, ‘SenSEO’ which helps you check pages for search engine optimisation features such as Meta data, page titles and page content and last but not least I also installed the ‘Total Validator’ widget which validates external, internal or local web pages. Once these were installed onto the computer I got cracking with another web page analysis this time it was a web page which focused on selling cooking products and offering recipes to adults and children.
I found that Firefox's Add-ons are a really useful feature and I’d recommend anyone to sign up and start using them!
I found that Firefox's Add-ons are a really useful feature and I’d recommend anyone to sign up and start using them!
Website analysis
This week at PushON the team had the brilliant idea for me to start recording what work I’ve completed so far. I started by signing onto here and exploring all the different layouts and designs it has to offer. After choosing one that I liked the look of I got cracking and started jotting down all of the things I’ve been up to so far. So from now on my blogs will be up to date and I will be sure to record my progress after each week. There will also be some informative bits of writing about any new ‘crazes’ that are knocking about the info comms community. Hopefully I’ll be educating myself and you guys at the same time!
This week I was also introduced to a very valuable feature which PushON offers (free of charge) to any company who owns a website. The Website Analysis, also know as a website M.O.T., is a tool which looks at a websites features and individual elements throughout the site to see what needs to be done to optimise the website performance. Improving various aspects of a website can improve its ranking within search engines. This is important, if a search engine can’t find you because of the way your sight is designed, people probably cant either thus resulting in your company losing potential customers.
This whole feature was new to me, so with the help of Mark Mayne (another one of PushON’s hard workers) I started analysing my first website.
Here are some examples:
This week I was also introduced to a very valuable feature which PushON offers (free of charge) to any company who owns a website. The Website Analysis, also know as a website M.O.T., is a tool which looks at a websites features and individual elements throughout the site to see what needs to be done to optimise the website performance. Improving various aspects of a website can improve its ranking within search engines. This is important, if a search engine can’t find you because of the way your sight is designed, people probably cant either thus resulting in your company losing potential customers.
This whole feature was new to me, so with the help of Mark Mayne (another one of PushON’s hard workers) I started analysing my first website.
Here are some examples:
- As well as CSS, JavaScript needs to be kept in an external folder as well.
- You shouldn't use images as links because Google can’t read these.
- Your sitemap should be a XML sitemap as this shows search engines that links are present. This is useful because ideally you want all your links to be indexed.
- It’s important to always have a personalised ‘custom 404 page’. If you don’t and a user enters incorrect characters when using your web page they will be taken to a standard 404 page, instead of a page explaining what's gone wrong. This could cause confusion/annoyance and the user might leave your site.
- You should avoid using frames. They’re an old fashioned way of designing web pages but also because not everyone’s software can read frames so some people could have problems navigating around your site- use CSS instead.
- Make sure your URL doesn't contain numbers- use keywords. Ensure your page title is under 60 characters. PushON have an excellent tool which can check this for you. Amongst other nifty tools they also offer a String Length Tool which shows the length of your meta tags as you type them and a Header Checker which makes sure your pages are being redirected easily.
I left feeling like I'd learnt a huge amount and was really looking forward to the coming weeks.
Week One
The first time I met Simon Wharton, the managing director of PushON , was when he came to my lecture at MMU as a guest lecturer to talk about good web page design. He discussed how to develop search engine rankings, covered topics such as high accessibility in search engine optimisation and talked about improving usability.
Following this presentation I was intrigued and organised an interview to hopefully gain some work experience.
After our initial chat and a discussion about what I wanted to get out of the work experience and what I could do to help PushON as a business, we decided on a start date.
Following this presentation I was intrigued and organised an interview to hopefully gain some work experience.
After our initial chat and a discussion about what I wanted to get out of the work experience and what I could do to help PushON as a business, we decided on a start date.
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