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We are pleased to announce our new Postcode Directory, which we have just launched. It will be built on over the next few weeks, but for now it is a free and open directory.

bondi postcode

mackay postcode

dubbo postcode

When looking for a cot mattress be sure to measure the bed frame and carry the measurements with you when shopping.

When measuring Cot Mattress should not exceed 25 mm (1 inch) between the mattress and the bed and the end of the gap between the two sides more. Infant or child can easily get stuck, if the poor between the mattress and bed fitting a larger gap. This is especially dangerous if their face or neck, restricted anyway. Remove the plastic packaging of all mattresses and water mattresses to ensure strong protection for good.

All mattresses are basically the same. But if you buy a used, you should be careful. Your baby has a firm and comfortable place to sleep, but do not think that a mattress will be fooled. Elongated more than it damaged the mattress is not a bed sheet, it is a threat.

If you think you may have found the perfect bed, mattress, try to use it to "test bed." In a good strong bed mattresses, bed sheets should be close and show a very smooth surface may be wrinkled or two corner. If you have the middle of the sheets on the mattress, their wrinkles, or if the mattress sheets facilitate the application of bending, so use it. This is a weak internal structure, which may cause your baby to provide evidence of silence during sleep, hit their motor skills (because they do not have a strong surface approach), or suffocate crease.

Many cot mattress cores are small from the polyester foam and spring steel surrounded by filler. They are usually full of air and steam through the ventilation to keep your baby dry. They can be waterproof, to keep the protection of health and polyester mattress sewing or removal of covering this very easy to clean.

The size of the baby cot mattresses safety important. If the crib mattress is too small to have a baby's head getting trapped in imminent danger and the crib mattress and crib bumper on both sides, or if it has a smaller gap, then perhaps it is the hand or foot can be trapped.

If your cot mattresses is too large or not suitable, or you will not use the dropside (If you have a crib), you probably will not make an uncomfortable not be able to slide the two sides raised bed bedding pad.

British safety standards recommend no more than between the crib mattress should be the edge of the mattress and the crib beside the bed gap 4 cm more.

Cot Mattresses are very cheap new, and a variety of content to choose from. All mattresses must meet the standards, but not very worried, buy cheap purchase the equivalent of a dangerous. You can always upgrade later!

Soft cot mattresses, sudden infant death like a baby at increased risk of accidents, flip to the stomach. No soft bedding, including the sheep or lamb between the end of paper, because it makes the sleeping surface too soft. You should run a test to see if the mattress is firm enough to your hand under the mattress. If you remove your hand, you can manually print to see, the mattress is too soft. If you can not see your hand print speed often than the mattress is firm, strong and the baby's safety

How Google Places works – Improve your position

Google Places is the new primary goal for SEO experts. As your website can sit, in most cases, at the top of Google, with a map, it is the most likely place people will click on when searching for businesses in their area. Google relies on a large amount information from a few different places. However, they claim the information that you submit to Google is the information that they trust the most.

Anyone with a physical address can submit their business to Google Maps. However there are a few things they do to make sure the system is not being manipulated. To make sure the basic information you submit is accurate, Google will ask you to verify it first by entering a PIN that will be sent to either your business address or phone number.

There are a few things you do to your chances of getting listed high on the front or side to improve Google Maps. Before we get into the nitty gritty, here are three quick things to remember about Google Sites. It is a far higher value on information from authoritative listings such as Yellow Pages, White Pages and other directories down. The closer the information on Google Maps on your Yellow Pages listing, the better.It is based on your physical location. There is more focus on the city / suburb of the search as the keywords.The more you try old SEO tricks to manipulate the results, the poor are tuned to.Google Places relies on proximity to the center of the town to determine which results are displayed. If your business address is in a great city, and you are far away from the center, you'll fight to your offer further.

The Easy Stuff

A listing for each physical location. They also cover several cities, do not use two lists.Use instead to explain the description of your company or category, the various services your company offers. Company with special services such as law firms and doctors or health centers are not allowed to cause several offers to meet all of their specialties.Use information as it would appear in the real world. People are going for you with your business card, etc. You can also find your company by his real address in the professional directories, etc. You try to look for should be listed as official as possible.Do NOT attempt to "SEO" your company name and business listing. Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. Again, this comes back to Amazon and professional associations, (authoritative listing), listing of your company. Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the company.Do not create ads in places where the business does not exist physically. Mailboxes do not count as physical locations. The exact address for the company must be provided in place of the broad city name or cross streets.Enter a phone number that connects to your specific location as directly as possible.For example, you should place an individual phone number instead of a call center.Enter a URL that identifies the best to your individual site. redirect do not offer phone numbers or URLs "relate" to other users or landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.Use contain the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in the title of your company, address or category fields.

The Harder Stuff

Choose your battles. If you have the chance to present your company in a small local list, do it. Do not try to up against larger competitors in larger areas.Try changing your address listed in as many places as possible. Add a physical location for each time list in a local directory.Local citations are king. You should try to get listed your company and your address in as many local addresses as possible.Good reviews by Google Places improve your position. You should encourage your customers, a review of you to write as much as possible.

PPC vs SEO

It seems to be the hip choice to spend money on SEO right now. The forums are full of people claiming; don’t spend money on Adwords, it is expensive and short sighted. In some instances, this is true, however it does not tell the full story.

Why does PPC advertising work?

The bottom line is Google Adwords works extremely well in some markets. First of all you have to realize that spending money on PPC advertising is a strategic choice. The strategy could be long or short term, however you do need to look at it in a targeted and outcome based way. You can’t spend money on PPC advertising in an aimless manner. Second of all Google Adwords has to be one of the most ubiquitous advertising method on the planet right now. More people interact with Google on a daily basis than watch the Super Bowl. You can reach any niche, any target in a cost effective way not imaginable 10 years ago.

What is the problem with Google Adwords?

However in recent years Google Adwords has become  too good for its own boots. We regularly document changes in the pricing of Google Adwords, and mostly they never go down. Over the last 6 months the cost of ALL adwords has increased, with some markets experiencing a 24% increase in the cost of advertising. Some keywords cost $50 plus per click, which is pretty much out of the reach of any small business marketing budget. This is compared to a far lower cost per click on something like Facebook. The other problem is that, because almost anyone can have a panel of Adwords  on their website, and because the best markets have become wary of advertising from Google, the quality of clicks from Adwords has also slowly decreased.

When does SEO work?

Building, and raising, an online profile takes time, effort and skill. SEO isn’t just about links, or just quality web content. It too can take time and money that might not see a return if done incorrectly. It is certainly more fickle than an Adwords campaign. However it is generally a far more profitable strategy for long term lead generation. In some markets, where there is little competition for certain keywords, one good link from an online directory can be enough to give a website a front page berth. In fact this would be the case with almost all local markets, and local keywords, where there are less than 10 competitors looking to make the front page.

In this scenario, the cost to the website owners might be a few hours in the beginning and then maybe one or two hours a month after that to maintain front page status. This is compared to $1 per click on Google adwords in a small market that, in a $150 campaign, will only generate a few leads for one month only, after which the owner has to start all over again. Even if you look at spending money on Facebook ppc advertising, you might get some response from 50c per click, but again it is short term and may generate some followers on your Facebook page, but that is about it.

When is a Google Adwords campaign a good idea?

Spending money on Adwords can be a very effecting marketing strategy in the following scenarios;

The strategic campaign

Got a short term offer, or event, that might last for one day or two weeks? Adwords is a great idea for this. If you are promoting an event, or something that is only going to exist for a short term, ppc in any form is one of the most cost effective online advertising methods. Adwords or even social media advertising allows you to target a diverse range of people, even in just one local area. SEO for this scenario would take a long time to build, for something that exists for only a short period of time.

Where SEO is expensive

Effective, long term SEO can be expensive in highly competitive global markets. International insurance companies are a good example. The leading Australian global insurance companies have exceptionally high PageRank and have tens of thousands of affiliates linking to them. If you were to launch a marketing campaign in this market, the $50 price tag per click would actually see cheap. If you found the right target, and could convert, almost any form of ppc would work better than attempting an SEO campaign

Where you are branching out into new markets

If you are an established player in one market, and you are looking to move into a new area, Adwords, or some other ppc campaign,  might be your best and only option for an online marketing campaign. When a website builds an online profile, the search engines will give the website a ranking for a particular keyword. Once that keyword profile has been established, it is very hard to shake. So if you have rated well for “Sydney Marketing” if you suddenly want to add “Brisbane Marketing” onto your keyword profile, you are not only looking at starting again, you are also looking at having to work against the “Sydney” keyword profile you have already got.

We will go into the major Adwords markets later this year, but for now, you can see, Adwords are great in the right place.

2011 SEO Trends

Here are the top SEO trends affecting business right now, and into 2011.

1. Increased Focus on Local Search (Google Places)

Google has already shown its intention to increase the importance of local search. Some keywords have already started showing a combined local and normal search, as you can see in the image here.

It seems that businesses will be hampered in optimising for a location, when you don’t have a Google Places listing in that area. This means good things for local businesses that have a reputation, and bad things for international businesses that don’t have local HQ. It also places a greater emphasis on local reviews, as they are now listed alongside your normal web listing.

What can businesses do? Well for starters every business should claim their Google Places listing. Next you should try to get listed in every local web directory you possibly can. For more information you can read our post on Google places.

So what could Google do next? Google has removed the use of external reviews from their local search but in the next year businesses will be able to have their own testimonials from their website appear on their Google places listing. This indicates that Google intends to make Google Places to keystone of their move forwards for search.

2. Different optimisation for mobile search

Right now if you do a search on a mobile device, unless you specify otherwise, you will get the same results as a normal browser search. There is already some changes to the way search is presented, but not really enough to notice a difference. This has to change to increase the focus on websites that are correctly optimised for mobile browsing.

Mobile browsing currently makes up around 5% of all web browsing, however we already know that those browsers are tech-savvy, heavily connected, early adopters. This means that by the end of next year, we expect, mobile browsing will make up as much as 15% of all web browsing.

As mobile browsers have different requirements (screen size, media use etc) to desktop browsers, there will have to be a change in the way Google evaluates websites to give properly mobile optimised websites preference over those that are not. In the same way that Google is increasing the value of fast websites, so too will they increase the value to websites that are optimised for mobile browsing.

3. Increase in link value for “in context”

At the moment, most web masters know that links that are out of context (ie links that have nothing to do with the page content) get less value than those that are in context. What we expect to see over the next year is an increase in the value of in context links. We are not going to speculate on the current value of things like blog comments and forum posts, but we expect these to reduce in value over the coming months. Why? Well it is a small chink in the search algorithm that spammers go for. At the moment an SEO spammer can forum post, blog spam, mass three way link exchange, and even though there is diminishing returns, these links still count, and against pages that are old but have no links, they do quite well.

Overall what we expect to see in the next few Google updates is a reduction in value for links from spam havens like Digital Point forums, and an increase in the value of links from quality pages/posts, EVEN if they are rel=”nofollow”. There may even be a balance between high and low quality links, with a penalty for a high number of low context/quality links.

This expectation is reinforced by the face that EVERYONE is saying the only way to build links is with websites that are in the same field as you.

4. Rise of Yahoo/Bing

This is highly speculative given Google’s long term dominance, and that in 10 years of web growth both Microsoft and Yahoo have done nothing to crack the market. However it would take a further massive failure on the part of Microsoft for them to no steal at least some of the search traffic from Google. Right now they make up about 5% of the traffic to this website, but they make up about 10% of the total web search traffic. We think this has every chance of rising to 20% by the end of 2011.

Ever since Bing started to provide the search results for Yahoo (effectively turning Yahoo away from being a search provider and into a content provider), they pretty much became the only other English language search contender to Google.

A lot of web users have forgotten about other search engines, which means they only need to become reacquainted to start using another search engine. There are a lot of instances where Google’s first page results have become filled with content that is not relevant or is getting a little spammy. It will only take a few of those for a user to start looking for something else.

Yahoo/Bing will need to work on some partnerships with browsers and content providers to become a serious alternative however, but they have all the potential to grab more of the search market.

5. Social Media Integration

In the same way that Google has integrated customer ratings and local places into search, we expect that Google will combine information from popular social networks link Facebook into the normal search results. At the moment you can see results from Twitter, but there is little to no connection between the social result and the normal search result.

As media like Twitter becomes more popular, we expect to see Google integrate feeds from social websites into their normal search. We don’t think it will affect the results in any way, ie you wont be able to spam Twitter to improve your normal search place. However we do think there will be some reference to social media activity within your listing. You Facebook/Twitter page may well become like your physical address in Google Places, who knows.

6. Website Speed

I wasn’t going to include website speed as a trend, because it is sort of already happening, but I have decided to throw this in here at the last minute. Google has already shown that it is taking the speed of a website into consideration as a ranking factor, but also stated that a slim percentage of website will be affected. It is fairly easy to see that Google will continue to make website speed an increasingly important  factor in assessing the quality of the user experience.

Do you have any coming trends for 2011?

The best home improvement squidoo lenses

Squidoo seems to have missed the mark when it comes to offering an information community. A quick look at the top Squidoo lenses reveals that most of the information on the site is either for SEO purposes or money making purposes. This may well be the intention of the website, to create a way for people to build their own profiles without breaking SEO rules. However it seems it is falling shorter than something like Hub Pages as a corner of information for the web.

Squidoo is a website that allows anyone to publish and create a community. The pages people create are called “lenses”. Lenses are pages that gather everything someone knows about one topic.  It’s a simple, fun and interesting way to develop a community online that does not revolve around Facebook. Apart from the fact that Squidoo is currently filled with spam, it is a neat idea.

Home improvement is a growing niche online, so we thought we would highlight what we thought were the best home improvement lenses, and why.
Vegetable Garden Layout
There is so much detail, and so many pictures, going through all the possible connetations of a vegetable garden, it is mind boggling.
Gothic Style Bedrooms
With Twighlight being such a massive hit, we can only assume that people are hell-bent on making their bedroom look like something out of a Brams Stoker novel. It seems that this lense caters for those people that love the nightlife, but don’t know how to boogy.
Romantic Outdoor Lighting
With Valentines day a painful day away, this had to be slipped in there. If you are willing to spend money on Amazon then this lense is the one for you.
Insulation
The best insulation available in Australia is discussed in this lense.

SEO Sydney

Increase web conversions

Increase web conversions

Sales training Sydney

Sales training Sydney

The lookie loos

The lookie loos

Sydney SEO

Sydney SEO

How to install insulation

How to install insulation

increase wordpress speed

how to increase wordpress speed

cheap car insurance quote

cheap car insurance quotes

The benefits of using facebook at work

the benefits of using facebook at work

Who is Eduardo Saverin?

Eduardo Saverin (born March 20, 1982) is one of the co-founders of Facebook, along with Mark Zuckerberg. He owns a 5% share of Facebook, worth $1.3 billion. In The Social Network, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin gets screwed. But Saverin writes, "The true takeaway for me was that entrepreneurship and creativity... are perhaps the most important drivers of business today." His $1.1 billion stake in Facebook probably helps.

Recently has been hiding out in Singapore for the better part of the last year-and-a-half. We have heard told he lives in the penthouse of the tallest building of the city, and is a regular at Singapore’s club hot spots, especially a place called The Butter Factory. Rolling with the city’s socialites aside, locals say that Saverin is pretty low-key. No one who has spoken with had ever heard him refer to himself as the “co-founder” of Facebook. It either goes unsaid or, on one occasion, he told someone who’d never heard of him he was merely a “programmer of Facebook games.”

Saverin is also an occasional guest blogger on CNBC.com. Last Friday he wrote that what he found most compelling about the film was “who said what to whom and why.” He wrote, “I have wondered how Hollywood would depict [Facebook's] creation and development on the big screen,” noting that “the movie was clearly intended to be entertainment and not a fact-based documentary.

Mobile Marketing

• Bank of America has more than 930,000 customers for its mobile banking services and is one of leaders in the space.
• Mobile click-through rates average 8.9% up to 49%
• Android has doubled market penetration and overtaken iPhone in the last 8 months.

There are basically three leading, different and incompatible operating systems on modern mobile smart phones. First there was the Blackberry, which handles email and business applications very well, and over a secure connection. Next there was the iPhone, which is Apple’s offering. The iPhone broke the mould with its applications market and has lead the industry for the last few years with slick design and flexibility. However, in the last few months, Google’s Android has come on the scene with its own applications market, and is now leading the pack.

So what does this mean for marketers?

Although mobile browsers only make up around 1% of total web traffic, you have to look at the demographics of mobile web browsers. For one they are almost certainly educated, tech savvy and with disposable income. Secondly, the lions share of web browsing happens during the commute. Basically you know you are talking to the early adopters when you are marketing online. Also, this segment is probably the fastest growing market segment at the moment, with mobile browser usage doubling every few months.

Who is doing it and what is working?

It seems that all the cool kids are doing it. Samuel L Jackson has his own app. Most of the big companies have started some kind of mobile marketing program, because Mobile Marketing can provide marketers with theholy trinity of

marketing, timely, personalised, actionable marketing messages. There are dozens of great mobile marketing case studies to look at that show how easy it is to get a response out of targets. The methodologies vary too, with some mobile marketing groups using SMS, and others using applications.

SMS marketing?

An example is this case study; McDonald’s says, send a SMS to Santa & get your gift within seconds. Promoted using unique codes on cups for consumers to send in with 1 text message – right in the restaurant. Every code wins – for the first time even physical prizes. It resulted in a stunning 25% response rate – with more than 1.5 million participations in five weeks.

Mobile App marketing?

This is where the cutting edge cool is at. Almost all smart phones now use GPS  to give users their current location. Now marketing professionals are tapping into this, providing targets with information about their brand. Reebok released a free app that allowed users to customise their trainers. This creates engagement and interaction directly with the brand. Time Out offer an app, like many other media groups, that taps into their information system and provides users with what is going on, events, gigs around them right at that moment.

So what does this mean for marketing professionals?

In almost any industry, you must be looking at mobile marketing as part of your mix. There are thousands of ways you can provide information to your customers through mobile marketing platforms.

Magento Designs

As Magento has started to emerge as a great tool for businesses who wants to sell online. With its full offering of options and features, Magento is hard to go past when it comes to an eCommerce platform.

Since we our first post on the best wordpress themes for business, and since we offer Magento as part of our own eCommerce Design program, we decided we could do a similar post on themes for Magento. Based on what we already know works for business, we thought we would find Magento themes that have the following criteria;

1. Menu bar across the top.
2. Two Column Layout
3. Space for your logo in the top left hand corner.
4. Background colour of the body is white.
5. Stretchable side areas (outside of the body)
6. CSS menu (not images)

When you are looking for a Magento template, there are some key things you should look out for;

Decide what your brand is; choose a flexible template

Have a look around at the competition, what they website looks like and how they are producing their website. Find a template that looks flexible and can adapt to your brand. If the buttons are blue and white, but your branding is all red, then maybe you should look elsewhere.

Breathing space

Your ecommerce website should breath. Too much clutter and you will confuse your buyers. Every element in your wordpress website should be given breathing space. It should also mean that when you add a widget to the sidebar, whether it is an image or text, it should not destroy the flow of the template.

Based on these recomendations, these are the latest best Magento themes. If you want to purchase any of these themes, all you have to do is click on the images.

This cohesive theme includes design for everything you need to launch your online store:

• Homepage (Image gallery is included for free)
• Category Landing Page / Product Listing Page
• Product Page with free Lightbox gallery integration included
• Register / Sign In Page
• My Account Pages
• Shopping Cart Page
• Checkout Page
• Content Page template
• Email Header

Tribeca is a clean, magazine style Magento theme. It has penty of room around the elements, plenty of breathing space and the main text is balck on white, which make it easy to read.

Crisp and Clean includes all the pages you need to set up your online store. The main thing we love is that, again, the elements have plenty of space to breath.

• Ultra crisp, clean and clear http://960.gs/ layout.
• Plenty of white space for high legibility and easy reading.
• Unique custom gallery on homepage
• Detects iPad visitors and serves up an iPad-friendly version of the site
• Custom lower galleries with reversing arrows
• Lightbox gallery on product pages for displaying jumbo product images
• Custom cart preview modal window
• Amazon style (but better looking!) huge multi-column subnavigation

This furniture store theme is lush looking, and inviting!

• Modern, luxurious, professional, clean & elegent design.
• Unique slideshow is designed for showing off Furniture.
• All blocks are customized.
• All cart & checkout progress pages are customized.
• All product catalog pages are customzed.
• All customer pages are customized.
• Banners for Furniture products & the targeted business included.

GENERAL FEATURES

• Div/Tabless HTML mark-up.
• XHTML 1 .0 Strict valid.
• CSS 2 .0 and CSS 3 .0 valid.
• Cross-browser support. Compatible with all major browsers such as IE7 +, Firefox 3, Safari 5, Chrome 5, Opera 10.
• Prototype-based Javascript (avoid javascript confliction).
• Support Magento CE version 1.4.0 and higher.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)-orient in design and development, fast loading.
• Full PSD files supplied, easy to edit.
• Well-structured and commented HTML & CSS for easy customization.
• Full user guide documentation to help you installing and utilizing the theme.

This cohesive theme includes design for everything you need to launch your online store:

• Homepage (Image gallery is included for free)
• Category Landing Page / Product Listing Page
• Product Page with free Lightbox gallery integration included
• Register / Sign In Page
• My Account Pages
• Shopping Cart Page
• Checkout Page
• Content Page template
• Email Header

Time to first byte (TTFB) is the time it takes for a browser to start receiving information after it has start to make the request to the server. In some situations, as much as 75% of the time spent loading a page can be taken up by waiting for the first byte of data to arrive. You can test your time to first byte by using something like Byte Check or Load Impact

There are a few factors that come into play with TTFB, such as the network you are on and the server that your website is hosted on. The only thing that is controllable is the server you are on.

Optimise Your Database

This is both in a database size sense, and using the “optimise tables” sense. If you are using WordPress you can use one of the database optimising plug ins to remove your old posts. If you have a mySQL database that is over 10MB, then your server is going to spend a few milliseconds crawling through the tables to find the right data. The smaller you can make it the better.

Once you have reduced the overall size of your database, you can then optimise the tables, which will reduce any overhead you might have.

Take note of the host you are with

Even if you are using a CDN, your host will have an impact on your time to first byte. We ran a test on 4 identical websites using 4 different web hosts based here in Australia, and we found there was about a 20% difference in time to first byte depending on the server you are on. Sometimes it is both impractical and too costly to move to a new hosting provider, however it is something you need to look at next time you are in the market for a host.

Use Amazon Cloud Space

Using a Content Delivery Network is worth your while because not only can it reduce the bandwidth burden on your current host, but it can improve the speed of your website by a huge amount. You can self host as a CDN, but it won’t reduce your burden, it won’t change the TTFB, and it might only reduce your overall website speed by 10%.

We started out using the normal Amazon S3, but we actually found it to have a slower load time than our own server. However when we switched to Amazon Cloud Space, we went from an overall  TTFB of 4 seconds to 1 second. That is a 75% reduction in load time just by using the Cloud Space.

Links

Link Market - Free Link Exchange, Link Building and Link Trade Directory
Have you ever tried to exchange links, link building, or trade links? Was it hard? Use link market instead; - it is easy to use, free and very smart. It will save you hours of work.

Classifieds, Uk Classifieds, Used Cars, Jobs, Pet, Hotels, Camper
Free uk classified adverts, giving you the best deals on buying and selling, cars, real estate, properties, sport goods, charity, sell and buy used cars, property, tourism, rent a property, online dating, vehicles, computers, electronics, games, pet!

Top 11 SEO tip for web design agencies

Over the last two weeks we have had dozens of Web Design Agencies ask us for SEO advice on growing their business through their website. Web Designers is a highly competitive business, particularly online. The top Web Designers business, for the search “Sydney Web Design Agencies”, on Google has a PR of 6, over 4500 indexed links, and has a domain authority of 63.

What SEO methods do Web Design Agencies use increase their traffic and increase their sales leads? It is the same as any other highly competitive industry.First you need to know you should be focussing on quality traffic. That means you are looking to attract visitors that are looking to hire you right now.

SEO is about getting people to spend money with you, NOT your competitors. To that end, chasing after people looking for “Sydney Web Design Agencies” may not be the best way to go. Your primary goal should be to drive people to search for you, find you and then spend money with you.

You need to know your tools. We use the following;

Google Keyword Tool – You will use this to find low-competition/high traffic keywords.

OpenSite Explorer – You will use this to find the highest ranked AND most relevany pages linking to your competitors

Directory Critic -This is where you will find the most relevant quality directories for articles and links.

Yahoo – This is a much better search engine for finding links, who is linking to you and your competitors. Google Webmaster tools are ok, but for some reason they don’t list all of the links.

1. Use Google Analytics. If you outsource your SEO functions, make sure they give you a full detailed report, or at least access to your analytics data. This will allow you to see where you are getting the most traffic from, what is working for you, and what keywords most people are using. If anything it will open your eyes to the volume of traffic that can come from the most random places.
2. Spread your keywords/look for the long tail. Everyone is competing for “sydney Web Design Agencies”. I am not saying abandon this completely, but start thinking outside the box. There are more people searching locally for “Hot Water Service” (12000+) than for “Sydney Web Design Agencies” (~9000). Also there will be people who are more likely to buy when they are searching for “Emergency Hot Water Plumber”. Also would you rather do business with people looking for a “Cheap Plumber” or “luxury home plumber” or “best quality plumber sydney“?
3. Build Content. This means you have to look at building up your quality content around lots of related keywords. I would suggest building a blog. You could write a few “how to” articles. Once you have written them, wait 2 weeks, and then submit them to the article directories listed in Directory Critic.
4. Follow these rules; Use unique interesting title tags for each page. Do the same for the meta description.
5. Use Video. Firstly, few Web Designers businesses do use video, so you will stand out. Secondly, it is a great way to bridge the gap between those that do and don’t trust your business.
6. Don’t look for high PR links only – Use the Open Site Explorer and Yahoo to find out where the most authoritative links are coming into your competitors. Try to get links in relevant directories. You don’t have to chase the top PR websites on the web, because not only is that unrealistic, but you will probably miss out on a lot of other places that could give you quality traffic.
7. Strive for publicity. Sponsor a local soccer team, donate to the local hospital, hold a “How to change your water heater” event for old people. Write information that can be used by the press and local media. The bottom line is, by doing all of this a) you will get a lot of people linking to your website and b) it will raise your profile in the local area.
8. Get links in sparingly. Only initiate link exchanges and directory submissions from website that are highly relevant and have been indexed for a long time. If you do use a reciprocal link exchange read this first. Avoid buying or selling links. Pretty much the only place you should buy a link from is the Yahoo directory. After that you might want to get a premium placement in a Web Designers directory online. Everything else is a waste, until you know where your traffic is coming from.
9. Control the number of outbound links on your pages and on pages where you place your links, avoid link-farms, links to gambling, pills, etc. If you want a rule, never link to other Web Design Agencies in your country, only overseas. Only link to websites related to home improvement or Web Designers. Only link to websites that are ranked on the firsst 3 pages of the search engines.
   
10. Spend money on other things, like Facebook/Twitter, before Yellow Pages. The yellow pages rarely rank top for any of the keywords you would want. Few people actually read the books any more, and there are better ways to spend your money. If you want a cheap alternative to PPC, look at social media, or having a Facebook page, and spending some money on PPC. Also think about using Twitter actively to find clients.
    
    
11. Get a Google Places listing, and focus on improving that. Firstly your location matters in Google places, and that can’t be faked. Secondly it relies on a lot of data sources to see where your address is, so every time you place a link back to your website, make sure you put your telephone number and physical address down.

Want some more great reading about SEO for Web Design Agencies? Here is some great information about the SEO Success pyramid, which has a great, in depth, breakdown of the things you should be looking for.

Creative Brand Evangelists

Brand Evangelists are your key to outstanding of Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing. These are the people that will go forth and spread your marketing message. They are your early adopters and the last customers standing behind your business. They have the following characteristics;

1. They are vocal, they spread the word – they are usually the most active people in forums and online. They will be the first to claim a great victory and the first to be crying over a great loss. They are the first to pass along information and help make it become a viral sensation. Evaneglists will be the first to call foul also, and their cries should not be dismissed.
2. They are loyal – Betamax became Betacam because the product was high quality and the following was strong. Apple fans purchase products that are higher priced, and often with fewer features for the sames reasons.
3. They are the first to try your latest products. They are early adopters.

If you can capture this key, valuable, segment of your market, they will spread the word for you, and act as an unofficial marketing force. Here are the steps you should take to engage this part of the market.
Create for one segment of the market. Target your largest, or most valuable, portion of the market and create a product specifically for them. There is nothing that dooms a product or service more to failure than something that tries to be everything to everyone. Find out how, where, when and why they use your current products. Use this as a model for your next product. Get your key segment to test the product and get a first look at it. Allow them to try it out for free.
Create a Culture. A culture is made up of traditions, heroes, shared experience, symbols and rituals. Think of all the Rocky Horror fans or the dead headers. Artists are great at this because they always project something that their fans can grab on to. Companies can create a culture by giving customers more than just a service. Customers will become proud followers of a company that shares experiences. If you are selling a product, who uses that product in a unique way? Which of your customers deserves to be recognised?
Empower your customers to spread the word. Social networking has helped companies to spread the word to their immiediate followers. Allowing them to spread the word is the next step. This goes beyond t-shirts and free golfing umbrellas. This means inviting them to exclusive events, so they can tell all their friends.
Create something unique. It does not have to be the best, or the brightest. It can be the most functional, the most interesting, or even something in a different colour. People want to buy the hole, not the drill bit. However people will fall in love with a drill bit that never breaks, or that glows in the dark so you don’t lose it.

Free Australian Directories

Looking to list your business for FREE somewhere? Why not try one of these places

http://www.localbusinessguide.com.au/

http://www.web-directory-australia.info/

http://www.kmdirectory.com.au/

http://www.aussielocal.com.au/

http://www.sitereview.com.au/

http://www.whoisthegreatest.com.au

Some great articles from around the web

As we recently wrote on our top blog posts, I thought I would find some of our favourite, but lesser known, posts about Marketing in Australia and post them here for you all to read. You can read about marketing all you like on websites like B&T, Marketing Mag and Mumbrella, but these blogs are the ones that offer unique and interesting insight outside of the mainstream.

10 ways plumbers can improve their direct mail flyers

This post was in response to a swathe of plumbers that started knocking on our door, not just to offer to unblock our drains, but because they are working in a competitive market, and they want to increase their market share. There are a lot of things people can do to increase the conversion rate of their marketing, not just the usual test, test, test. The main thing Plumbers need to do is try something different from their competitors. There are loads of plumbers out there trying to get their slice of the same pie. The best thing you can do is invent your own pie and fish in a different pond.

Why the media love the Sex Party

Written Bret Treasure over at Free Beer, this is a witty look at Australia’s favourite party. Talking about cynicism, idealism and boredom in the media, this post hits the nail on the head over the political process, in the media, in Australia, especially in the lead up to an election.

More Healthy advertising Needed for McDonalds?

An interesting look at the marketing of McDonalds. McDonald’s has recently taken up a lot of space at Customs House at Circular Quay in Sydney. The playground is part of the new McDonald’s campaign ‘inner child’. The Defectors Blog is a good one to browse when you are feeling low. With their aim to “REVOLUTIONISE MARKETING and change the way we interact with the new empowered and “connected consumer,”” how can you not want to read what they are thinking?

Foursquare in Sydney Australia

Some interesting test ran by Social Media News into the popularity of Foursquare amongst users in Sydney at several locations in Sydney. They found that whilst foursquare is still relatively absent from the majority of the population in Sydney, Its clear Foursquare is getting high usage from Media professionals and business workers.

Applying the Four P’s of Marketing to AdWords

A great post by Reload Media on why you should get back to basics with your adwords campaign. Using the example of an Acoustic Guitar sale, they show how you can cover the four P’s in Google Adwords. They claim that the trick with Search Marketing is to create ads that possess an even balance of creativity and detail about the advertised product/service.

Is it Direct Mail or Junk Mail? Analysis of an inner city mailbox

It seems Chris Maloney is a spirit brother of ours, because his views on Junk Mail could have come from this blog in itself. As we have posted before, what is the point of posting something that is just going to go bin-bound. Over a preiod of one month, Chris received 25% of it was addressed to people who no longer live here and 50% of the mail received was unaddressed. Teh most painful thing about this waste of money is that it takes only a few more minutes of thought and only a small percentage more in costs to make this marketing work! We are with you Chris!

Are Facebook Ads the most effective advertising there is?

Echoing one of our own posts on the use of social media in marketing, Charlie and Business2 looks at a case study of Facebook marketing and how it worked for him. Claiming that Facebook.com is already breaking even on this advertising stream, Charlie showed how Facebook marketing can be targetted and very cost effective. Another great tit bit is that Facebook is not just for kids, as there are more people using it over 40 than under 20.

Zooba – Making Sense out of Business – Edible Blooms

Founded by Kelly Baker, in 2005, Edible Blooms has become a leading online gift retailer through its range of “bouquets” of gourmet chocolates, home-baked cookies, fresh fruit and even “beer cakes” instead of traditional flowers.

SEO Sydney Blog – Client roles in SEO success

The success (or failure) of a SEO project is very often entirely attributed to the SEO consultant or agency, however the client itself has a critical role to play in the outcome of a SEO project.