It's official, I have the will power of a twig!

So I invented a sentence, and everyone thinks it's a well know saying! 

"I have the will power of a twig"

I'm not sure why this came about as I was highly intoxicated, but it did stick.

Now there are many people who use this saying, and don't now where it came from.

Now you do. 

Twitters DM gamble.

Twitter users can now send direct messages (DM) of up to 10,000 characters. 

Is this good or bad? 

#twitter #socialmedia #digitalmedia #socialmarketing 

What We Do And Why Everyone Wants In!

What We Do And Why Everyone Wants In!

Over the years we have been leading the way in SEO and other digital media processes whilst developing a system to help small businesses as a secondary project.

It started in 2008 with a system we created, which was an affordable way for businesses to get high rankings by working together on content sharing, networking and link swapping and loads more.

It was received very well and went toe to toe with the leading search directory for a while (it was actually much better and cheaper)

But unfortunately this system relied on the members being proactive and helping each other to help themselves.

THEY WERE JUST TO BUSY!!!!!!

After battling with my lack off faith in local business people “the ones I set out to help” I was approached by the chamber who was interested in the system for their members.

I worked closely with them and many businesses to discover just what businesses need, how much time they could commit, and developed a new strategy.

So after two years of study the main factor we decided was the issue was

THEY WERE JUST TO BUSY!!!!!

When this information clicked with a real big light bulb moment!

Why don't we re-develop the system and add a package where we combine our Seo and Social media skills with this system and do all the work needed on our clients behalf!

Obvious or Genius, you decide! lol

What We Do........

Im not going to sell that to you now, im just going to tell you what we do and how you can do it yourself.

So, In my opinion after lessons learned over the past 12 years, you need a four pronged approach, Start with optimising your website, make sure it has the right message to convert into sales, in the past, techniques to get high rankings failed to do this and had a negative effect on visitors, creating a false economy, being number 1 on the search but with not conversions or sales.

Set up a social media campaign, following your brands guidelines (if you don't have any BRAND GUIDE LINES create some) using call to action banners and buttons.

Target local first, don't sell at them, engage with them, join local groups and networks. Social Media is the buzz word at the moment but dont rush in, Twitter and Facebook are the most popular but not always the most effective. Have a look at Linked in , this is a business "Facebook" and can be very good for B2B sales.

Look outside the box, If your retailing you can use Pinterest or Instagram to promote images of products. there are social media platforms out there that are industry pacific, have a look for these also.

You need to get creative! Write about your product or services, the more the merrier, content is king.

Make it interesting and informative, and on put it on your website! this content is the starting point for your SEO campaign.

By this point you should have a few connections locally from your social media campaign, get them to promote your content in return, you do the same. This is Search engine optimisation and this will create links to your website which is still a very big factor in ranking on Google.

Internet marketing is were people who think they know my businesses and have no clue look at me funny!

This is often miss represented as SEO, Internet marketing is Visual online marketing, let me give you an example, Group-On, they use Internet Marketing, you will probably have been on a weekend break with Group-On but you will not find them at the top of Google, or even in the top 10 for the term Weekend Break. the promotion of banner ads, emails, apps are key to and are the finishing touch to a good campaign.

My latest catch phrase has been

DIGITAL media courses cost £1400 plus

if You can learn a new trade in a day, this is for you!

Or if you are a realist and JUST don't have time?

Let our qualified professionals do for only £150 per month!

Ok I may have slipped a sales pitch in there after all!

But.........

There is no secret formula, short cuts or good quality offshore cheaper options!

Just as in your business and what you do, its Just good old fashioned hard work.

Anthony Johnson

Seo is more than just link building and well written content.

Seo is more than just link building and well written content.

Having a professional Seo company look at the structure of your website is a must if you really want to make sure that search engines rank your website at the highest level. If your website's pages contain certain errors, search engines (mainly Google) will pick up on the errors and flag them.

See if your website has any critical issues

Critical errors will have an immediate effect on the rankings of your website on Search engines, Broken links are the main cause.

Most website have broken links. If you update your web pages frequently, you may find broken links that need addressing.

Hosting errors are another issue, the cheapest servers are not always the best. Use UK hosting from a reputable company, preferably with a instant support facility via chat or local rate phone number, last resort a fast response ticketing system.

Server errors can cause major problems with search engines. Slow loading pages can be overlooked by the search engines and some not even indexed.

This also delivers a bad customer journey.

Your website pages have to communicate with the search engine and your visitor, not having titles on your pages or duplicate titles can cause the most important of your pages not to show in search also.

There are tools out there to check this for free, but they will not fix the issue.

So your website has no critical issues, but still not ranking?

There are many influencing factors to ranking on search, you really need to go to town on your pages content and the message you want to deliver.

One major issue for people is page content and the pages themselves being duplicated or even being very similar to each other, there is no penalty for duplicate content, but one page will usually be chosen to be displayed to the visitors search and the other give no or very little rank.

Web pages with no content or little text content won't get high rankings, also very importantly check the spelling.

If your web pages are linked with and without www, and with both http and https, there can be canonical URL problems. Ask your server provider to make the changes, they are usually happy to do so or get a pro to add a canonical attribute .

Some website designers accidentally block search engine robots. If a web page blocks search engine robots, it cannot get high rankings.

A very high click depth can be an indicator that people cannot find a page easily. Web pages that aren't easy to find should not contain important content.


Temporary redirects are very common, these can cause problems as do pages with to many out bound links.

There has be a lot said about the websites meta description and if it influences rankings, but this is still very important, this is the wording that shows in the search bellow your title, your visitors will use this as a quick reference as to weather your site is the one they need. Also a duplicate meta tag will flag the page as poor quality.

Websites can always be improved!

The information above will help you on your way to having a high ranking website, there are many more factors that you can find on my other posts.

Here is a list of other issues to look out for.

Redirect same URL
Upper case URLs
Rel. link to domain
Canonical URL used
Meta Robots None
Meta NoFollow
Meta NoIndex
Meta NoSnippet
Anchor text wasted
H1 tag keyword
H1 tag empty
H1 tag missing
H1 tag wasted
Image problems
Perm. redirect (301)
Other redirect (303)
Temp. redirect (307)
Forbidden (403)

Checking these things will make sure that your web pages is optimised.

You can contact us to do the audit and repairs for you anytime.

A Web Design company in Coventry

 

Meet the First Image family…

 

and give your customers offers they can’t refuse!

Ok so we may not be as good as the real mafia at sending out ‘messages’, but we think we’re the best when it comes to delivering marketing ideas for your business that’ll make your clients sit up and take notice of your brand, products or services.
And whilst we draw the line at horses heads, we’ve lots of other attention grabbing branded products and direct mail ideas that’ll get your brand front and centre of your prospective customers.
F First Image is a professional Website design & marketing studio in Coventry. Whether you’re a new business eager to get started, or an established business looking to update your brand image, First Image can help you with modern design and branding, that will give your potential and existing customers the best impression of who you are, and what you do. We work very closely with preferred industry print partners and can advise you on the best marketing materials your business will need to reach its target audience, this can be anything from a simple business card through to product catalogues and annual reports.
We work with many businesses, schools and charities of differing sizes, but one thing all our clients have in common is a desire to look great on all their communications materials.

The mobilegeddon aftermath, was it as bad as expected?

The mobilegeddon aftermath

Since Google announced the new mobile ranking algorithm, the media have been predicting the end of high rankings for non-mobile friendly websites calling 'mobilegeddon' on mass too all.
Google have released the new algorithm now. so is it as bad as expected?
Do you still have to convert your web pages?
What exactly is Google's new algorithm?
On 21 April, Google released a ranking algorithm that changes the way web pages are ranked in Google's mobile results. According to Google, web pages that do not display correctly on mobile phones, will get lower rankings than before:
According to Google, there's less that 5% more mobile-friendly websites from two months ago, when Google announced the new algorithm. The update doesn’t apply to all devices or results though:

• it affects only mobile device search rankings
• it applies to individual pages of a site, not all of the website
• it is a global algorithm update that affects search results in all languages

Many webmasters changed their websites - was it worth it?

Well we predicted this change would and was happening before Christmas, we noticed back then that changes were happening to mobile search and we advised all our clients to "get mobile friendly"  in December.

The mobile results haven't changed dramatically for many websites, the effect seems to be small. Some websites saw dropped rankings for some of their main keywords but not for all.

Google did say that secure websites would get an advantage, a lot of webmasters added SSL certificates in a rush and encountered many problems that were hard to fix (broken security certificates, broken plugins, less relevant AdSense ads, etc.). So far, HTTPS sites do not seem to rank better but we will be keeping an eye on things and information will be posted we found.
The new mobile algorithm could be similar. A new mobile website can also cause problems:

• for many websites, mobile traffic is worth less than desktop traffic
• if you change an effective web page with high conversions and replace it with an untested mobile design, conversions might drop
• Contact a reputable company that are specialists in mobile websites.

Anthony Johnson
@anthonyjohns0n

www.digital4trade.co.uk

charity Boxing UWCB a massive success

It's the first time I have been to boxing match let alone in Coventry.

We decided to go to support a friend raise money for this charity event and was plesently surprised on the quality of the set up, but it is the Ricoh arena after all so It should be expected.

As a Digital Marketer, I would usually stick to watching it on sky but I'm glad we went.

Our guy win his bout and somehow we where given free beer so it turned out a great night for all.

It's good for the City having events like this and hope we have many more.