The website which supports the Business Family’s events programme, and gives Tameside businesses an opportunity to promote themselves by submitting blog posts or creating an entry in the comprehensive directory on the site, was designed & built through a coloration between BSA Marketing (Who implemented the site) and Asone Design ( Who delivered the design elements of the project).

You can take a look at the new site via this link www.tamesidebusinessfamily.com

MAS North West are offering grants of up to 50% for manufacturers located in the region who are looking to develop their presence on the web and make more use of the fantastic marketing and business development opportunities.

BSA Marketing is a fully accredited associate of MAS North West. If you are a manufacturer in the North West of England, and are interested in enhancing you web presence, get in touch.

Through MAS North West, BSA can also offer, at no cost^* to you, a full review of your current web marketing.

For more information, visit our grant information page

It now seems to be official that Google are considering adding website speed to their ranking algorithms. This means that they may now use the speed your pages load as one of the factors in determining your page ranking in their index.

You can hear it from the horse’s mouth in this interview with Matt Cutts of Google (The discussion on site speed is about 2:40m into the video).

Before we all start panicking and loosing sleep over this one, we need to consider a few things:

1. You should already be concerned about the speed of your site! – Speed is a significant factor in making your site appealing to visitors. If each page takes 30 seconds to load, visitors will not stay long, and you have a problem irrespective of whether Google list your site.

2. Given point 1 above, Google are not going to put a site with less relevant content that loads in 1 second ahead of a site with great content that loads in 3 seconds. Their mission is to deliver the content people are searching for, so the best way of ensuring a good ranking is still going to be having a site with great content that gives searchers what they are looking for.

3. Google have been using speed as a factor in their adwords quality score for a while now, and I have seen very people commenting that they are being penalised for the speed of their site in this area, so it would seem not to be a key factor. Google use over 200 ranking factors is indexing sites, each with different weightings. I do not believe that speed will be a heavily weighted factor.

Assuming that you do not see the speed of your site as an issue for a visitor experience point of view, I would suggest that you would be better spending resources on improving, enhancing your site content and ensuring it clearly communicates your message in an interesting & informative way, and on building good quality back links to your site. Once this job is done, then by all means spend time “minifying your javascript” to speed up your site.

In other words speed of your site should always be a consideration, but it should not become more important just because it has been added to Google’s agenda!!

Although we do include social networking (Including Twitter) in the marketing mix for some clients, I have always had the nagging voice in my head saying “is this really worth it?”.

Being honest, although I believe the answer is probably “in some cases yes” I don’t really have an answer as yet.

I have however found an interesting thread on the UK Business forum, which I believe makes some useful comment on the subject, so I thought I would share it:

Twitter, Whats the point – From the UK Business forum

Its that the of year again where we will be spending a couple of weeks chilling out & recharging so that we can be fired up to meet your internet marketing needs in 2010.

To this end, our offices will be closed from lunchtime on 18th December, re-opening on 4th January. Well refreshed & ready to help you make the most of the web in 2010 and beyond.

We will be monitoring our emails over the holidays, so if you have anything that can’t wait until the 4th Jan, feel free to drop us an email.

For a while now, we have been saying that when measuring online success you should focus on metrics that offer real value like site visitors and conversions rates. Rather than the usual ones touted by SEO companies (Google page rank, number of page 1 listings etc). With this in mind, it is good to know that the mighty brains at Google agree! As illustrated by this recent post on Webmaster central:

“Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.” – Susan Moskwa (Google Employee)

FYI, here’s the post

If you want some help adding Google analytics to your site, we are happy to do it for free – Click here for details

As a marketer, I am a great fan of e-commerce for smaller retail businesses as it is a great way to get close to your customers & service a wide marketplace without spiraling overheads.

However, when making the decision to set up an ecommerce site, one key question is which shopping cart system to go for. There are many on the market, but which is the right one?

I recently found a useful summary of the main carts on the market which highlights their advantages & disadvantages so I thought I would share it:

www.itwebexperts.com/oscommerce_zencart_xcart_comparison.php

We develop our sites in CRE loaded, and the key reason for this is its flexibility. I am a marketer and as such believe that e-commerce is a marketing and not an IT issue. I am also firm believer that your business should drive the e-commerce system, and not the other way round.

CRE loaded is relatively easy to customise, so when a customer comes to me and says “Can I ……. with the online shop?” The answer is invariably “Yes” and the solution will not normally be expensive to implement.

So if you are considering taking the plunge into e-commerce, I recommend reading the above review, and feel free to contact us, as we are always happy to discuss the options.

Traditionally redirecting a standard HTML page on a Windows server has been tricky especially if you don’t have access to the server config.

This may now have changed. I was watching an interview with one of the Google “Geeks”, and he was explaining that Search engines have agreed a new standard for redirects. (In addition to 301 which is still perfectly legitimate):

Here is a link to the interview if you are interested

The method is simple & involves adding a tag to the top of the page

link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/example.php”

where href = points to the page you want the search engine to index.

(note: This needs to be put in the normal opening & closing tags <......./> in the header of the document)

A couple of incidents recently have caused me to ask this question, and it’s is one you should be asking too. In many cases you may find that it is not be as secure as it needs to be.

In simple terms your on-line brand consists of 2 elements:

1. Your domain name
2. Your website

There are a few things you need to check with both of these elements:

Your Domain Name

This is arguably the most important factor as this IS your on-line brand. It is therefore essential that it is secure. To confirm that it is, you need to check that the domain registered to you. If it is not, get it changed NOW.

You can check this by doing a Whois lookup (here is a link to the one we use – www.dnsstuff.com) and check the Registrant Details. This should be your company. If it isn’t you need to get on to your domain supplier & ask them to change it.

Your Website

The big question here is “Are your website and any associated databases backed up regularly”.

Ask yourself the question:

“If I woke one morning to find my website was gone, or worse still had been hacked & replaced with someone else’s content, what would I do?”

If you have a back up the answer is simple – restore the back up and you are sorted. If its not, then the result could be an expensive rebuild from scratch!

You should check with your web provider that your site is backed up regularly and what they would do in the case of a “disaster”.

If you have any concerns that your web presence is not secure, feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to give you our input.

At BSA Marketing – We are always advocating the use of Web marketing, but I recently came across a real world example where a company’s approach to marketing on the web directly influenced their business.

Picture the scene:

It 7pm on a Friday night, and you decide to go out for a meal. You know where you want to go, but want to book a table & don’t know the phone number:

Enter Google maps – do a search. Nothing…

Try Google search…

…….It comes up with a number but its an old one, so no joy there either.

At this point you change tack & think “OK, I don’t want to risk it, so where else can I go”;

Back to Google maps, you do a search for Restaurants, and up comes an Italian that you know is pretty good. Two more clicks & you are talking to them & the table is booked.

That restaurant who had got their web marketing right got my business that night!! (and it was a very good meal).

The Italian restaurant was Va Bene in Glossop, Derbyshire if you are interested.