Posted by admin in blog, Social Media on December 6th, 2012
Now that you’ve got your Facebook page established with a great cover and a few fans, what is next? Social media requires interaction with members. The trick is how to kick-start that interaction.
If you want Facebook Fans to visit regularly and participate in its activities, you must give them a reason to visit and react. The best way to do this is with content. The content can be graphics, photos, videos and good old text based content.
Think about what your company has in common with the Fan base. Perhaps employees are gearing up for the holidays or have returned from a Christmas trip. Encourage employees to post pictures and videos. Or as the owner, go ahead and post your own memories.
Sharing is one of the ways to maintain exclusivity and retain group members. Another way is to create videos and post this content on Facebook. If you are an artist and your paintings have won awards, post the news first on Facebook before posting it elsewhere. Of course, include photos of the artwork too. This is a great way to keep your group engaged.
Have you been holding back on getting engaged with your client using Facebook? We can help you get started. Just contact us at Sydney 0433 399 294 or Brisbane 0401 453 525.
One of the biggest mistakes new business owners make is to overlook the power of branding. Branding is the one marketing strategy proven to help set your company’s offers above the competition. Use branding as a way to frame the way consumers perceive your company.
A great example is the brand Fisher Price, a US-based toy company. Parents who chose Fisher Price toys over the competition associate the brand ‘Fisher Price’ to terms such as ‘quality’, ‘safety’, and ‘durable’. Tennis players relate to the Nike brand as one of ‘uncompromised excellence,’ ‘performance,’ and ‘Just Do It!’
If you haven’t thought how you wanted your brand to be perceived, do so before you become active on social media. You’ll want to weave company brand messages into Facebook, Twitter and especially into website content. Additionally, you’ll want the artwork on you Facebook, Twitter and similar social media business pages to mesh with your brand colours and logos.
Professionals Versus Company Brands
This is the era of professional branding. Whether your expertise is in accounting, skateboarding or yachting, you’ll want to take time to establish a professional personal brand. Perhaps you are a realtor. You might want your brand to be associated with trustworthiness or multi-level marketing programs designed to sell homes quickly. An orthodontist may want to have her brand associated with a bright and sunny smile. Her logo would present that in a graphical manner while the company tagline would make the connection with words. However, do not try to copy logos from other organizations since they are copyright protected. Doing so will land you in lot of legal fees and headaches.
A brand design can include logos, colours, catch phrases, and even the company name. It’s really difficult to “unbrand” your company so be comfortable with direction you set. It will be reflected in artwork for websites, logos, brochures, and even is represented in your products or services. McDonald’s logo is a classic example of a simple logo that conveys a strong corporate image. It is very effective at evoking a perception about their food services in the minds of customers.
Total Web Design has marketing professionals who help companies define their brand, establish branding guidelines, and then implement it throughout their marketing material. Contact them today for a graphic or free consultation.
Competition is fierce online, and the top places on the search result pages are the most hunted for; therefore, any website owner who wants to capture traffic from the Web needs to use a whole strategy to attract the best visitors and the highest traffic. The working principle for the blog optimization for search engines is the keyword.
When you start the race for SEO (search engine optimization), you already have an advantage: blogs are usually the ones to capture traffic more than static sites due to their highly informational content. By keywords we mean those phrases that a user types in the search box of an engine.
Blogs mainly rely on articles that are regularly updated and re-freshened, so that they have something new to offer all the time. New content with new keywords and informational articles captures new traffic.
Preparing for a Blog
Before you write the blog content, your SEO analyst will make a list with keywords related to your domain and which are most likely to be typed in the search box by Internet users. A brain-storming session is ideal to find the best structures you need to include in the pages and articles. There isn’t a single recipe to capture traffic and requires tweaking the recipe over and over.
Keep in mind that there are some rules you may have to follow here as well. For instance, choosing some very general keywords is not the best way to promote a business via a blog given the fact that though you may receive a high traffic, the profit could remain modest. Too broad terms attract all sorts of users, even those that are not interested in purchasing something. SEO experts use all sorts of parameters to check the profitability of a blog, and one of them deals with the number of relevant visitors a web page attracts.
The status of pages and keyword searches may change from one day to the other, given the intense competition that characterizes the Internet in general. Also, search engine companies change around their programs in an attempt to deliver better results to people searching for information. Consequently, the more frequently you update your web blog with new content, the better chances you have of benefiting from changes in search algorithms.
Marketing online isn’t akin to hitting an “easy button
Posted by admin in blog, Web Development on July 26th, 2012
An eCommerce website developer wears a number of hats including content planning, product description development, client liaison, web server, client and server side scripting, and last but not least, network security configuration. Depending on the product line, there may be just a few pages or hundreds of thousands of pages involved in the website solution. Visitors must be able to easily locate and navigate to any one of these product offerings. Of course, the final test is that the shopper can buy a product without pulling out hairs.
In a large ecommerce or marketing company, ecommerce website development often involves several people or groups at different layers of the orgainsation. In the world of freelance ecommerce, there usually are fewer people in the design and delivery channel which translates into less of a coordination challenge. A freelance eCommerce website developer may handle the entire project outsourcing smaller portions such as graphics and logo work.
Web development is a fast growing industry the reason for which are due to the demands of a highly mobile digital society. If you aren’t online, you aren’t in business. In fact, there is a significant move towards developing online exchange interfaces which make it easier for mobile devices to have simpler ecommerce transactions. The hidden message here is if you don’t have a website, then look for an eCommerce website developer who can make searching and shopping for your products an enjoyable experience for the mobile visitor and a profitable one for the business.
To find out more about mobile website design, contact us today. Quotes are free!
Call 0433 399 294 to learn if an eCommerce website developer is the right solution for your project.
Posted by admin in blog, Graphic Design on May 7th, 2012
The priciest real estate at the grocery store is directly in front of the checkout. The magazine industry figured this one out long ago. What else are you going to do while waiting to get groceries tallied up? Now, small refrigerators offer supercharged drinks to get you fired up after pushing that grocery cart around.
Store managers find that when they take items off the shelf and put them in an attractive point of sale display in a prominent location in a high-traffic area of the store, the items sell several times more often than when left for the shopper to find in the normal shelf location. You know you didn’t plan on buying those corn chips, but that new display of with corn chips paired with jars of nacho cheese was just too much to resist. Point of sale design spells “impulse sales.”
The most common types of POS design products are:
Free Standing Displays – You can place these anywhere they fit, but most frequently are seen in aisles and window displays.
Counter Top Displays – Just as the name conveys, these point of sale displays are used on top of counters.
Wobblers – The are used to cross-sell products, for example, a wobbler sitting in front of a packet of school notebooks and spirals is used to display pencils or pens to remind customers to not forget these writing utensils.
Studies have proven out the effectiveness of using POS displays to increase conversions. The goal is to get your customer to pick up an item that is presented in some type of point of sale display. Studies show that 75% of shoppers will purchase an item that they pick up to review!
Let’s get a great POS design in your retail shop. It’s easy to get started with a quick quote or just give us a call at 0433 399 294.
Posted by admin in blog, Graphic Design on May 3rd, 2012
If you are a new business owner, now is the time to think about your professional image. Maybe your business has been around for years, but you have a new product or brand. We can help you create a brilliant brand identity for your new product or for a new business. Brand identity ties into all your offline and online marketing. Our graphic designer team creates artwork to stamp your business identity across the continent and globally if you wish.
Online marketing campaigns need graphic designs services for web backgrounds, banners, Facebook and Pay-per-click advertising, presentations, ebook and information reports, infographics and logos, to name a few.
The Web is fast becoming the replacement for the “yellow pages.
If you look at many companies in the marketplace pick a couple that stand out in your mind. Apple or Nike are two companies that come to mind. These companies have a strong brand identity. This identity consists of their logo, image, tagline, font type, color scheme, or all of these. Whatever it is that you communicate to consumers will revolve around your brand identity. A brand identity helps build a compelling, professional image that awakens consumer interest and helps you stand out from the crowd. It shares that unique something special y ou have to offer beyond what other companies provide.
Providing a Consistent Image
When it comes to building a brand identity, every part of your image must be consistent. Inconsistency can mislead your audience and detract from your business. So, your logo, print materials, advertising campaign, direct mail, tagline, slogan, and even your website, must all be consistent in look and delivery. If you do it right, you will have no trouble attracting buying traffic to your door.
Think about it. How do you think a company like Amazon.com, IBM, Apple, Nike, Cola-Cola, Google, and so many others have been able build a loyal customer following. The reason is their branding. They worked hard to create the branding necessary so that consumers will recognize them and work toward getting to their doors. Some of these companies started off in a basement or garage, selling some items at garage sells. Once they realized what consumers wanted, they began to work on their brand identity. After so many months and years of trial and error, these companies were able to succeed in getting the brand created and exposed to the world.
Growing Your Business
There is one constant that is reflected in everything successful businesses do. They develop their brand identity and put it in everything they do. They do everything possible to make sure their identity stays in the front of the eyes of consumers on a regular basis. Now, no matter how established the company may be, there may come a time to modify a company’s brand identity. This is based on changes in the market. Social trends change and images or taglines that were popular for decades become irrelevant. This is the time companies need to revisit their brand identity. By continuing to expand ones brand identity, this will help companies stay in the marketplace, and stay in the eyes of consumers.
Currently, there is a lot going on regarding Google and the way they index pages. Since there are a lot of changes going on, it is a good idea to review the Google SEO discussions to keep up on changes. By learning more about it and how you can use it, you can have confidence in planning out your website SEO strategies. That way you won’t see huge shifts in ranking when Google changes their algorithms. It is important to learn SEO and how it relates to search engines now. By the way, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This term means that all web pages have been designed and optimized so Google can index the pages faster and put the pages of the website further to the top of search results; based on certain keywords that appear on each page of the website.
SEO and Google Search Query
To better understand SEO, you need to learn how Google Search Query works. Since Google is the leader in search traffic, we’ll start here with a discussion on SEO. The first step in the process begins when someone types in a word or phrase in the search field in Google. The web server sends the query to the index servers. The content that is contained on the index servers is similar to a book index. Google parses through the index and lists website that rank highly for that keyword phrase.
Next, the query travels to the doc servers. This is when the actual web pages or documents are retrieved. Then the server creates snippets so as to provide a description for the results of the search. Once this step has been completed, the results that were retrieved are sent to your computer and displayed on your screen. All of this is done in a fraction of a second.
How to Use SEO
Now you understand SEO and how it relates to search engines. So how can you use SEO to get your page ranked to the top of search results? One tip to get you pages indexed faster is provide search engines with a sitemap. By providing them a sitemap, you are giving them a way to index your site faster as they will have a page with a bunch of links on it. Another SEO tip is to place your keyword or keyword phrase in the page title, and Meta tags. After this, make sure you have quality inbound links with anchor text using that same keyword for your web page.
Search Engine Optimization, sometime referred to as Search Engine Marketing, can seem overwhelming at first. There are new acronyms and terms to learn. You may be expert at your business or profession, but as an uninitiated player on the sidelines, it sounds like a lot of “computer voodoo.” However, once you understand the basic premise behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you catch on quickly to know what it’s all about.
The search engines, like Google, build an index of web pages for terms they believe are relevant to the content found on the page. When you perform a search using Google, you really are searching and index of all the web pages on the Internet. They do this because the better their results returned to the searcher, the more likely that person continues to use that search engine. Of course, there are other motivations like the paid advertisements that are found on a search results page. But that’s a topic for another day.
Each search engine results page (or SERP) includes about ten organic listings (i.e. those you don’t have to pay for) your goal is to have your page indexed on Page One for a set of terms you believe relevant to your content and business.
To do this, you simply give the search engines what they want.
So, what do search engines want?
Search engines want a number of things but here are some of the basic ingredients that are common to Google, Yahoo and Bing:
1. Quality web design and informative content.
The better your content is, the more likely the search engines are to help you promote your content through better search engine placement.
But how do the search engines determine the quality of your content? Since they do this through an automated process, they had to come up with metrics that allow programs to award points to each web page on your website. Some of these points are related to what is found in the HTML of your web pages. Other points are awarded for how long people linger on your website and if they visit other pages. The longer a visit lasts then the greater the likelihood that they find the content on your pages helpful.
In other words, they found what they searched for using the search engine tool. The visitor had a positive experience and your website is awarded more points than another where people only visit a single page or stay just a few seconds.
2. Ability to easily evaluate what the main keyword phrases are to place in the index for your web pages.
Similar to the index at the end of a book, you expect the search index to present results for you to review that actually are relevant to your query. As your pages will be found when someone conducts a Web search, the search engines need to index your pages for terms (called keyword phrases) that are most relevant to your on-page content.
You can help them by ensuring that each page of your site is optimized around keyword phrases. How many keywords you should optimize for is really not known, in fact, there may not be a set number of phrases. The key is to ensure that each keyword phrase is relevant to each other.
For example, a website about arthritis in dog shouldn’t have pages and keywords devoted to how to raise your puppy. Instead, chose keyword phrases like arthritis in dogs, natural treatments for arthritis in dogs, and so on.
After choosing which keyword phrases to target, make sure to add them to your “meta page title” and “meta page description” at minimum. These are HTML components of your web page.
Also, it’s important that these keyword phrases appear somewhere on your actual page… the content that can be read by your human visitors. This helps the search engines to index your pages more easily and you will be rewarded for your work.
3. Getting as many links as possible for each page of your site.
In Internet terms, each link pointing to your site is seen as a “vote” that your page is relevant to the piece of text that is linked.
So, if you want a particular page of your site found for the keyword phrase, best Sydney plumber, you’d be wise to get as many websites as possible to link to your page using this phrase in their “anchor text.”
Anchor text is merely the words that create the clickable link. If the phrase, “best Sydney plumber,” is linked to your web page, you just earned a “vote” for that page.
The more links you can get with that term, the more likely your page will be to rank well for it.
There are numerous methods to improve the SEO of your website. The principles discussed above create the foundation for each page of your website. If your pages contain great content and the website is sound, pages are optimized for a relevant keyword phrases and are linked to from other websites, you’re on your way to improved search engine placement.
One of the first things we do when we bring on a new client is to analyze what their competition is doing as far as search engine optimization, or SEO. Competitor analysis is a huge part of SEO. If you want to be the number one listing for a keyword phrase, you have to be able to bump the current listing off that ranking.
We research the resulting web pages that show up in search results for keyword phrases that are relevant for the client’s niche. If our client owns a bar in Sydney, then we’ll go to Google and type in Sydney bar to see who pops-up on the organic listings. The organic listings are those down the middle of the page, not on the right side or very top of the results page. Then we’ll note some important facts about the top 5 listings. Here are things that are worth noting:
Domain Name
Is the page listed the top-level domain name or is it an inner page. If you look at the term Sydney bar and you find that the first listing is for www.sydneycafes.com.au/bars.html, then you know that one of this website’s internal pages is ranking as # 1. If the page listed is the very top level domain, i.e., www.sydneycafes.com.au, then the top level of the domain is ranking for #1.
It’s important to know that for a few reasons. It’s quicker to basically jump other listings and get page one results if you can grab the keyword specific domain. So if you’re looking for ranking on Sydney bar and if SydneyBar.com or .org or .net is available, you may get to the top of the search results simply by buying that domain and putting up well crafted web pages optimized for the search engines. This gives you a very strong likelihood of ranking for that term very quickly.
This is often one of the hardest things for a business owner to accept. They’d much rather have the domain named for the bar. Of course, that is often the path we have to accept. We won’t argue with a strong brand name. If they already own RockpoolBar.com with strong brand recognition, then we’ll just improve on the current website while maintaining the domain name. [However, we might must go ahead and purchase Sydneybar dot com if it is available. That is premium Web real estate.]
Domain Age
More mature websites are harder to compete with than websites that are new or under a year old. The concept here is that an established website is one that is more likely to be around in the future. If you are buying a domain, you may want to pay extra for an aged domain. The price can go up astronomically with age, so do some serious thought as to the value of that domain to your brand image or web strategies. New domains can still compete for top ranking when the website design is sound and content writer uses smart SEO strategies. If you are registering a new domain, consider spending the extra $10 to register it for 2 years instead of for one.
Google Page Rank
One other thing to take note of when you’re doing competitor analysis is the Google Page Rank. Page Rank is a calculation, based on incoming links, of Google’s estimation of the importance of a page. It is expressed on a scale of 0-10 in the toolbar, with ten being more important.
On Page SEO
Take a look at your competitor’s on page SEO. On page SEO includes things like meta tags, url relationship to keywords, header tags (H1, H2, H3…) and the keyword density. Take note of their weaknesses and make them your strengths.
Evaluate In-bound Links
You can use the Yahoo Site Explorer to see what links are pointing to the competitor’s high ranking page. Avoid attracting links from unrelated websites, or worse, links from adult-type websites (unless, you have an adult-type website.)
The best way to get quality in-bound links is not to pay for links. The best way is to create unique, compelling content that attracts links. This is a win/win because not only will great content attract links pointing to your website, but also visitors.
You can offer articles to website owners. Contact the owner and ask if they would be open to posting a unique article that includes a link back to your top-level domain or internal page. Usually, a website owner is open to posting quality, unique material. All you need to do is make it available to them.
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