It used to be that a marketing stunt or a street marketing event had to be picked up by the media to have any real success other than advertising to a few passers-by. These days however, getting picked up by the media is an added bonus, the real value comes in spreading your reach on social media. The best part? It’s free and you can do it yourself!

We really enjoyed ‘The Indestructible Billboard’ by EVOC; a great marketing event idea but the best part is the way that they linked it up to Facebook. They achieved an increase in fan activity of 220%, not to mention that it was picked up by several magazines. Check it out:

Social networking sites may be great for showing off new baby pictures, snooping around your friends photos or telling your friends where you are; but they are useful for much more than this.

Social networking sites provide endless opportunities to target specific groups of the market and to provide a space for user generated content to culminate. Every user that interacts with your brand on a social networking site instantly becomes a brand advocate as their activity is posted to their network. Not only do social networking sites provide good market building and brand awareness, they are great for improving brand image.

Let’s say you’ve just moved house and you’re searching for a new local takeaway pizza place. You hit Google and make your search. There’s a site on the first page that seems to match your requirements, it’s nearby, it’s cheap, it’s website is up to scratch and it has online ordering. From the site’s point of view they’ve done everything right so far, they’ve obviously invested in SEO activities to be ranking on the first page and their site provides the functionality required by it’s customers. You see a Facebook button on their page so you decide to check out their latest activity, who knows, maybe they have a special going? When you go through to Facebook there are two likes, one of them is from the old page of the pizza place and there is one post – “testing.” Instantly your perception of the brand plummets, the store has to work hard from now to keep your interest, they better be good looking pizzas. It’s very possible you will click back, back and choose the next site from your search.

So being active on social networks is not just a great way to increase brand awareness, it’s also very important to be active on social networks in order to boost your brand image by showing that your brand is active on multiple levels on multiple platforms.

The Conflict

They’re both very important but sometimes they can conflict. SEO trends are pointing towards more and more content and web design is pointing towards minimalism. It’s hard to have a nice looking site full of images that is also optimised for SEO purposes… or is it?

A good web designer will know a few tricks here and there and any serious SEO specialist will know every trick in the book.

The Design Side

From a design point of view, a good looking website will be structured to perfection to be pleasing to the eye as it guides the user to calls to action and entry points into the site. This often involves displaying less content and having crisp images.

The SEO Side

From an SEO point of view, good design is by no means detrimental, although search engine robots don’t feel pleasure by looking at a site. These robots like relevant and high quality content.

The Balance

The balance between web design and SEO comes through working together to incorporate SEO into design using specific SEO techniques. The web designer plays a major role in maintaining the high quality appearance of the site whilst adding more content. This can be achieved through skillful use of segmentation of text, breaking up the page using graphic tools and images and having multiple entry points for other pages to further break up the page.

Make sure that you don’t design a site with no SEO consideration or optimise a site without design consideration. These two processes must work hand in hand to ensure that the most effective and high quality site is produced at the end of the day.

Browsing around Facebook pages, you’ll notice that there are some pretty pixelated timeline cover images at the moment. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the good news is they can be completely avoided by following a couple of simple steps.

Facebook cover dimensions

The actual size of a Facebook timeline cover image is 851 x 315 pixels. The minimum size Facebook allows is 399 pixels in width. Any images with dimensions outside of the actual size will cause Facebook to resample the image to make it large enough to fit the image container. Of course doubling a low resolution image will cause it to look terrible.  If you create your cover image to the specific dimensions, you’ll avoid having your image resized by Facebook.

Facebook cover image file size

The other factor that comes in to play to maintain a sharp Facebook cover image is the file size of the image that you’re uploading. If you upload a file larger than 50kb, again, Facebook will take over and re-compress it for you. It’s much better to compress the image down to 50kb yourself using Photoshop. Use the ‘export for web and devices’ (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+S) to get it down to just under 50kb without much noticeable quality loss.

If you follow these steps, you should end up with a sharp cover image for your new Facebook timeline.

A new year always means new design trends come on board, and also means it’s time to say goodbye to some older trends. With smartphones and tablets becoming the most used devices for browsing the internet, considerations which didn’t previously exist are now making their way into web design.

We can accommodate this by using responsive layout, by changing the design elements depending on which device is being used. However, we’re starting to see desktop websites also being designed with ‘touch based’ interfaces in mind.

You may have noticed Google doing some redesigns of their products over the last 6 months. Although it’s not immediately clear, their buttons have all become larger and look more like proper buttons. For example the Gmail desktop interface is definitely more geared towards larger touch-focused button elements.

I think 2012 is the right time to stop being hesitant about utilizing the power off CSS3 in our everyday websites. With the user base for older IE versions decreasing, and more people using CSS3 compatible browsers, there are endless possibilities for using style sheets. Drop shadows, gradients, text shadows and rounded corners. Where previously we would have to go into Photoshop and create complicated images, wrapping div containers and background images to achieve these effects, using CSS3 lets us do these effortlessly with a single line of text.

Dynamic fonts are another area where we can start breaking some boundaries. With Google’s web fonts, there are now hundreds of different font options which previously didn’t exist. This means less compromise when it comes to designing a website, and not having to stick with ‘web-safe’ fonts if something else would suit better.

For me at least, the initial glossiness of ‘Web 2.0’ design is past its prime. The days where every menu bar, every button and image would be coated in gloss no longer seems as cool as it previously did. Although Apple continues to exemplify this design trend in their OS, I think Google is on the right track moving forward with their softer (glossless) gradients.

And finally, I think we can safely lay to rest the idea that having a person walk onto your screen and start talking to you is a good thing. Of course, there are hundreds more design concepts which were never good, but continue to be used, but in the spirit of moving forward in 2012, I think it’s better to forget those entirely.

Often people are blind to the opportunities that lay dormant with long tail keywords. Instead they focus on the golden keyword that has 100 a day in traffic. Before I explain more on this topic let me quickly explain what they both mean.

A long tail keyword is a keyword that has very little traffic but very low competition. Often ranking for these keywords only requires an article written on the topic and keyword optimisation.

A golden keyword or a high traffic keyword often has a number of competitors that are competing for that keyword. Often it can take months if not longer to rank for such a keyword. It also requires months of back linking as well as a number of SEO tricks, even still it might be a challenge to get on the top page depending on how much competition there is.

These days Google loves authority sites that reach a range of small long tail topics. Often a website that has 50 articles around the subject tennis, will often out rank a website with a fewer pages and a lot of link building for a more competitive keyword of “tennis” by itself. Google wants websites that give value ranking at the top, the company prides itself on giving the most usable searches and it is this reason why the company is so successful.

So your website is looking a bit old, it doesn’t really do much. Yeah, there’s some good info on there but people don’t seem to be converting.  Sound familiar? It’s clearly time to put some money down and do something about it.

The next problem is how much money do you have to put down and where should it be spent?  Your site might just need a face lift to make it look more up to date.  The reason you might do this is the same as the reason you would paint or decorate any bricks and mortar business.  This is a representation of your business online, and it should be treated the same as your business in reality.

A good way to find out where your business is falling short online is to use the website yourself.  Check out what other successful sites in your market are doing too. This will show you how customers are going to perceive your business in comparison.  Be careful when you do this, because there are a lot of sites out there with plenty of bells and whistles that might look exciting and ‘fancy’ when in fact these additional features are detrimental to the overall usability of the website.

More features do not always make a good site. Sometimes limiting the features can create a better, more simplified user experience.  Just think of Apple.
Is your call to action visible enough? Does it look inviting? You would not have a retail shop and make it difficult to get to the counter to make a purchase. You would make it tidy and it would be clear where the counter is.  Don’t try and trick people by hiding your checkout, your pricing information, or your general call to action.  They will only get frustrated and leave. Be confident in your product.  Be proud of your service.  And make it clear to people what your site does, and how they can enquire about or buy your product/service.

As we come to the end of February, and our theme of ‘loving your site’, I think it’s time to take a look at social media.  While your website is a huge part of your online presence, it is very rarely successful in isolation.  There are many components involved in creating a successful online presence (many of which have already been discussed in this blog), and one of these components is of course social media.

With the Pope even coming online with a campaign to popularise Lent via Twitter, it’s easy to see the importance of a smart social strategy to raise brand awareness and increase targeted traffic to your website.  But with so many social options, it can be hard to know what to use and how to use it.  With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram, Google+ and so on, the choices really are endless.  This doesn’t mean that you need to waste hours being on every single social media platform that emerges – for those with limited resources, it can be better to choose a couple of popular options and make sure they are done well.

When looking to choose which social media platforms are best to use, you need to know what your business objectives are and what you want to communicate, and gain, by having a social media presence.  But this blog isn’t about helping you choose the right social media platform. There has been plenty written about this already and the majority of businesses would do well by having a presence in 2 or 3 of the major social players – Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But just to help you out, here is a great picture that breaks down some of the options.

This blog is about giving your social presence the love and attention it deserves.  Too many businesses jump on the social bandwagon, set up their profiles and then promptly abandon them.  This may be due to a number of reasons – they didn’t get the results they were hoping for, they didn’t know what to do or they just didn’t find the time.  You may see your social profiles as a ‘nice to have’ as opposed to a business necessity, but in reality that can offer an excellent opportunity to connect with your customers on a more personal level and drive traffic to your website.  It can also be damaging to your brand to have your website linking to abandoned social pages.  It’s very hard to get a positive impression of a company when you are taken to their Facebook page which has 5 ‘likes’ and the last post was 6 months ago.

So if you have been letting your business’ social presence slip, here are a few tips to help you out:

1. Create a strategy – what are you trying to achieve with social media and your online presence overall.  When you know this, it will be easy to know what to communicate and how.
2. Allocate resources – there doesn’t have to just be one person in charge of social.  If you have good communication guidelines, it is possible to share the load to ensure it gets done.
3. Just do it – many businesses don’t know what to post on the social profiles, so they post nothing at all.  But with practice, knowing what to post becomes easier.
4. Mix it up – You don’t always need to post about promotions, new products and so on.  People are on these sites to be social, so make it personal sometimes.  If you’re going away on holiday, or having a team celebration, use that for content.  It will help people connect. Try and have a good balance between business / sales messages and more personal type ones that can be interesting.  One of our clients have done very well on twitter by sharing bits of fun trivia – they get a number of retweets each time and have seen a great increase in traffic coming to their site from twitter.

So hopefully this helps encourage a few businesses to stop neglecting their social media profiles and jump in there.  Obviously you don’t want to make any big social gaffes (hello Qantas, Bonds, McDonalds etc) but as long you’re smart, something is generally better than nothing when it comes to updating your social presence.

Like anything in business, a website requires attention, maintenance and care; otherwise it will start looking dated and possibly make your business look dead.  This might be the opposite of how your business actually is. With existing clients and customers returning constantly, your business might be doing well.  But how well is it performing in an online environment?

I’m sure I am not the only one who has come across a website that looks like it has not been loved by its owner. That looks like nothing has changed, developed, or progressed in the company since 2005. The websites forum has tumbleweeds in it and the last post was 3 years ago in a thread called “Hey everyone, we now have a forum!”.  This raises loads of issues and I hope to cover at least a couple of them with this article.

Websites have a life cycle that business owners need to be aware of to make sure their business is well represented online.  Too many businesses leave it too long to move to the next step because they do not see the value in it or they feel like they have just finished the site and do not want to work to maintain or improve on it.

To keep a website fresh and improve on the customer/user experience, websites should have a 6 month cycle (or even 3 month for web/online services) that allows for improvements of any size or scope to be completed.  Here are some examples of areas that can be reviewed:

Menu and content structure

Is it easy to use?  Are people finding what they need?

Checkout facilities

Are people not completing their purchase? Where are they dropping off?

Advertising placement

Are you making money from website advertising? Try placing ads in different areas of the site and monitor their performance.

Forum

Does the site have a forum? Is it dead? Get rid of it. A lot of sites have a forum because they can, not because they need one. Users often do not participate, even if your site has a decent amount of traffic.

Aesthetic Design

When was the last time your websites aesthetic design was reviewed? Does it look like it has come straight out of the 90’s? (animated gifs and fluoro text on black backgrounds are a dead give-away – LOL).

Hopefully your website is not looking too old and dead, but don’t forget the importance of maintaining a regular review cycle to keep it alive and looking well.