The Jewellery Boutique is a fantastic new ecommerce website offering a great selection of handmade jewellery from some of Britain's finest designers. We've been working closely with them to ensure that the website reflects the quality of the products.

http://www.thejewelleryboutique.com 

www.kirstenhendrich.com

Kirsten creates handmade jewellery and wanted an ecommerce site where she could sell her work, but also wanted it to retain an artistic feel. Kirsten uses our content management system to update her products, track orders, post blogs and edit static pages.

www.honeycense.co.uk

Honeycense sell honey and incense from markets on the south coast. They wanted a simple but effective, one page website which they could use to keep regular customers up to date with which markets they will be selling from. They have plans to expand the site over time, so check back again soon!

1.    Why Don’t I Have More Traffic ?

Many clients simply don’t know what they can expect with regards to traffic numbers. This is no fault of their own, but sometimes they can be disappointed by the traffic they receive from seemingly good search engine positions. Traffic estimates should be based on search volume and it’s important to clearly explain the huge difference in click through rate between a number one position and a number four position.

2.    Why Don’t I Appear For This Keyword or That Keyword?

When clients first engage in SEO activities, it must be clearly explained that in order to even begin to rank well for certain keywords, each page must effectively target its own keyword. If you try to focus a page on too many different keywords, it will dilute the message and leave the search engines confused as to what the page in question is talking about. Therefore, unless you have a large website, there is a limit to how many keywords you can expect to rank well for.

3.    My Local Directory Listing Is Outranking Me, Why Is This?

This is a very common problem for small and new websites. Quite often when a search is carried out for a chosen keyword, not only will you see your website come up, you will also see your directory listings appear. Sometimes the directory listings will actually outrank you. This is down to the fact that the directory probably has a lot more authority than you, and work will have to be done to boost the importance of your website above that of your page on the said directory. You could also try changing your directory listing to reduce its competitiveness.

4.    How Long Do I Have To Wait?

Probably the biggest question of all, how long will it take and how long will I have to pay you for? This is really important to clear up right at the beginning of any work. You have to explain that it will take time for your work to bear results. Honesty really is the best policy here. I would recommend preparing a client for anywhere between at least six to twelve months with a thorough check of progress being carried out every three months.

5.    How Will Doing More Help

This is a big one, especially if you are not getting the results as quickly as you may have expected. You may be going back to client several months down the line and suggesting yet more site improvements or link building efforts. Marketing on the internet is an ongoing process and the best results always come from the long term approach. If results aren’t going so well it may mean you have to revisit some of the website structure and address any technical issues that may be causing issues. Explain the from the offset and you should avoid digging yourself into any unnecessary holes.

We've all been there - you build a great looking site which looks great in Firefox etc, only to check it in IE6 and it's all over the place! It can sometimes take hours to get it looking right.

Most of the problems are limited to the same things everytime, which with experience can be fixed relatively quickly once you know what's going on. However, recently a couple of these problems got me totally stuck for ages.

Finding a reliable transparent PNG fix, and the z-index bug (my drop down menu would keep going behind an image in the content area below it).

Whilst searching the net for solutions, I came accross this great article which lists over 25 of the common problems, and how to fix them!

So until IE6 is finally redundant and no-longer in use (can't wait!!), here's the best resource I could find for fixing those nasty bugs!

Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet: How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs

Traffic
Keeping an eye of traffic is perhaps the single most important aspect. After all, if someone is paying you to carry out an SEO campaign, then they are effectively paying you to help increase their traffic. Logging into Google Analytics on a daily basis is well worth the effort, even if it’s just for a quick glance over the figures. I would also recommend that you set at least a little bit of time aside to look into traffic patterns. Try and monitor how long people are spending on your website, how high or low is your bounce rate and what your most popular pages are. If you can get a handle on these figures you will start to get a good idea of how your visitors see and use your website, and changes can be made when necessary....without having to rely on guess work.

Traffic Sources and Links
Undoubtedly, in some shape or form you will be trying to increase the number of links pointing to your website, and get more people talking about your business or online project. Checking the traffic sources will help identify which links are providing the most value and give you a good marker with which to measure your success. Checking the number of inbound links is also a good way of keeping tabs on your campaign. Services such as Yahoo’s site explorer will indentify any inbound links you have coming in. The numbers published are not 100% accurate and you will find they vary somewhat, however it’s still worth checking to see how well your content is spreading. Not everyone will let you know if your content or story has been published, so this is also a very good method of seeing who has published any content or news stories you may be distributing.

Ranks
The number one goal of any SEO campaign is to increase your ranks on the search engines. Results should be checked regularly and it’s recommended to use a spreadsheet with month by month results. You will find that some keywords jump around a little, this is perfectly normal and is nothing to be worried about. Google personalise search results which does make tracking your ranks harder, but if you take the long term approach and compare results over three month periods you will get a good idea of what’s going on. Just don’t fall into the trap of checking daily and getting worried when certain results slip or even disappear...it happens!

The Dashboard

This is the first page that you will see when you enter the report. It is there to give you an overview on what is going on, and typically includes; Visitor Numbers, Site Usage Data, Unique Visitor Numbers, Map Overlay and Page View details. Any of these modules can be removed and if you’d prefer to include something else in the dashboard e.g Keyword data then you can. To add another module to the dashboard, simply view the report in question and click ‘add to dashboard’.

Visitors Vs Unique Visitors

At the top of the dashboard you should see a large line graph spanning the page. This graph shows you the amount of visitors or ‘hits’ your website has received. The standard display shows data from the previous month, with points for each day. This can be changed to weekly or whatever you’d prefer to see. You can also go back in time to compare results against another period. This data shows the total number of visits and will include yours. The real number you should be interested in is the ‘Unique Visitors’. To get a more accurate view, you can block certain IP addresses from the report.

Traffic Sources

For anyone involved in SEO this is the really interesting bit. It is crucial for any online marketing that you can keep an eye on where the traffic is coming from, and also see what keywords are sending traffic from the search engines. If you are fortunate to spot a dramatic spike in traffic numbers this report will identify where they have come from. With regards to keywords, you can go into quite a lot of detail and find out not only which phrases send you the most traffic, but which ones are actually converting into customers. This is vital if you are engaging in pay per click advertising when each click is costing you money.

Site Usage

This is the bit that confuses most people. Once you understand what’s being reported you will find this information extremely useful as it lays out a very detailed report on what people are looking at, and for how long. The three most important things you should be checking are; Bounce Rate, Average Page Views and Average Time On Site. If your site is doing well, you should expect to see a low bounce rate, a relatively high average page view and again a relatively high average time on site (over 2-3 mins is good!). For poor performing websites the bounce rate is often very high, i.e people are clicking on the website and ‘bouncing’ straight off.

Getting good results in the search engines can be tricky business. However, many people make common mistakes that hinder an otherwise good campaign. By sticking to and following some basic principals, you should be able to see your rankings improve. There is obviously a lot more to it than this, but below we have laid out three common mistakes that people make, and with each one comes an explanation of how to try and fix the errors.

For the purpose of this article, we are using a fictional website called dogwalking.com, trying to target the pages for keywords such as ‘dog walkers’ etc.

Bad Meta Data

Getting the meta data right is one of the first things you should focus on when optimising a website. The titles, descriptions, and tags should all be clear and concise and inclusive of you main keywords. Many new webmaster simply aren’t aware of this, and the most common mistake is to just use the website title, or page title with no thought to what keywords should be used.

The picture above shows the common mistake of simply repeating the website title as a meta title. This adds no focus to each page and leaves the search engines confused as to what the page is talking about. Duplicate titles are also bad for the very same reason. This can easily be resolved by using keywords within the titles, and making sure nothing is repeated. See the picture below for a good example:

Broken Links

Links throughout the site act as the passageway in which the search engine’s spiders crawl your website. Therefore it is crucial that there are no broken links that could negatively affect this process. Having broken links will basically mean that the spiders hit ‘dead ends’, and if this happens too often then they just won’t be able to get to the information you need them to.

 
Always ensure that your website is tidy, and that your sitemaps are up to date. If content is changed or replaced, or new pages added, make sure these are linked to correctly and that there are no dead links pointing at the old content.

Wrong Anchor Text

Anchor text is extremely important in telling the search engines how much authority your website has and in what area this should be counted for. The text that displays a link will give reference to what the linked to website is about. If the link is coming from an authoritative website, then it’s crucial that the search engines are instructed clearly via the use of anchor text. This can have a really strong effect on rankings, and below are two examples to illustrate the point:

Bad anchor text example

Good anchor text example

<div class="thumbnails">
	<img src="image1_thumb.jpg" alt="" class="image-1" />

	<img src="image2_thumb.jpg" alt="" class="image-2" />

	<img src="image3_thumb.jpg" alt="" class="image-3" />

	<img src="image4_thumb.jpg" alt="" class="image-4" />

	<img src="image5_thumb.jpg" alt="" class="image-5" />
</div>

<div class="gallery">
	<img src="image1" alt="" class="image-1" />

	<img src="image2" alt="" class="image-2" />

	<img src="image3" alt="" class="image-3" />

	<img src="image4" alt="" class="image-4" />

	<img src="image5" alt="" class="image-5" />
</div>

So, as you can see above - we have a block of thumbnails and a block of large images. Now here's the jquery - I've put comments in so you can see what's going on. You'll notice that the syntax for the selector is very similar to a css selector...

$(document).ready(function(){

	//First, we want to hide all the big images but fade in the first one when the page loads.
	$('.gallery img').css('display', 'none');
	$('.gallery img:first').fadeIn();

	//Ok, here's the selector and the click event
	$('.thumbnails img').click(function(){

		//First thing to do on the click is fade out the current image (we will 
		//actually fade out all of the big images here to make things a bit easier)
		$('.gallery img').fadeOut();

		//Get the class of the thumbnail that's just been clicked on.
		var Class = $(this).attr('class');
		
		//Fade in the large image with the matching class
		$('.gallery img.'+Class).fadeIn();

	});

});

And there we have it, a very simple jquery gallery. Next time we'll do a bit more to jazz it up! One thing that's worth remembering is to set the css overflow property to 'hidden', and set a specific height and width on the gallery container - that way, if someone looks at it without javascript (or it fails) - it will only show the first image. But more about that next time!

Tune in for all our news, updates and tips!

The Wise Team

Content
Creating useful and interesting content is where everyone should start. By coming up with some areas on your website that your visitors will find useful, you should be creating things that people will talk about. ‘Spreading the word’ on the internet usually translates into links, so the more interesting and useful content you can come up with...the more links you should earn. Ideas could include fact sheets, FAQ’s, video tutorials; or anything that will aid your users purpose.

Affiliate Schemes
Affiliate schemes are fantastic as they offer one way links, and also an opportunity for both parties to make money. If you run an online store the idea is simple; if someone places a link on their website back to yours, and in turn a ‘click’ converts to a sale, the website publisher who placed the link will earn a percentage of the sale. Obviously, there is a bit of setting up to do to make sure the ‘clicks’ can be tracked, but once set up it’s win win for both parties. The online shop boosts it’s sales with more advertising, and the website publisher can now earn money from their website.

Social Media
Getting your website traffic involved with you social media sites can be a great way of encouraging return business, and also attracting new traffic. Social media sites such as twitter and facebook can allow you to keep in touch on a regular basis with your customer base, in a non invasive and interesting way. The world of social media is one where things can spread quickly, and if you can build up a vibrant ‘community’ you are sure to attract more business and more links at the same time.

Blogs
Having a regularly updated and interesting blog can be another great way of attracting both return visits and new traffic. The aim is to provide useful bits of information that your users will find interesting. Once you have built up an audience, RSS feeds and other such tools can keep them updated and word should start to spread...and in turn the links should build up. Remember though, make sure it’s interesting and aimed at what your users want!

Before, members of the public would have to wait for TV/Newspaper interview's to keep tab's on the latest happenings - now there's a constant stream of news, direct from the horses mouth and at the same time offering instant feed back!

10 Downing Tweets summarises all the latest news, twitter polls etc all on one site - it's easily our favorite site of the campaign!

www.10downingtweets.co.uk

About Kirsten Hendrich Jewellery:

“I design and make contemporary silver and resin jewellery. I aim for my pieces to become sentimental to the wearer and a wearable art form in themselves. I hand craft silver rings, pendants, necklaces, chains, brooches, studs and earrings. As a result, all the work I sell is 100% unique.”

http://www.kirstenhendrichshop.co.uk

In the meantime, have a good look round and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or feedback!

I'm going to write a few tutorials so that anyone interested can give it a try!

I'm going to start by talking about 'selectors'. This is a way of selecting html elements without needing to write anything in your html code and is similar to the traditional javascript method of 'getElementByID'.

So, step one is to go and download the latest version of Jquery here.

Now include it as you would a normal javascript file in the head section of your page and then just below this you should setup your block of javascript code within script tags - $(document).ready has the same effect as using onLoad="".

$(document).ready(function(){

    //code will go here

});

What we're going to do now is write a couple of lines of code that will create an alert pop-up everytime a link is clicked on. Pretty annoying and pretty useless, however it is a good and fairly basic example of how Jquery works - later on I'll show you how to do something a bit more practicle! For now though, insert this code into the block that you've just created and see what happens!

$("a").click(function(){
     alert('Hello!');
     return false;
});

1.    Creating Interesting Content
Creating great content is the best way to gain natural links back to your site.  The aim is to publish content that your website users will want to link to. The search engines love these links as they produce a really natural link profile. Your new content could be anything from videos, to articles.

2.    Giving Away Free Tools
Web users love free tools. If you can create tools that can really help people go about their work, you are guaranteed links. The idea is that whenever a tool is given away, it comes complete with a link to your website.  Tools could include maps, analytical software, widgets and more.

3.    Free Directory Submissions
There are thousands of directories on the internet offering publishers the chance to list their websites into relevant categories. This can be an effective method of building a large amount of links, especially for new websites. However, care must be taken to ensure that the directories actually pass value with their links.

4.    Paid Directory Submissions
This is a very similar tactic to the one above, however in this instance you opt to pay for links in premium positions within the directory in choice. This can be a great way of gaining traffic, and most directories will give you multiple links if you pay for premium submissions. However, it is still vital that you make sure the directory has value.

5.    Social Media
Having busy and active social media profiles will give you a great outlet for promoting your website and the content within it. With social media, the aim is to create an exciting online community that will generate interest back to your website. The more interesting content you post, the more interest you get, and the more links you should achieve. This also a very good way of increasing your traffic.

6.    Blogging
Setting up a blog and keeping it updated can be hard work, but eventually you should end up with a base of regular readers. If you can create an interesting blog for your industry, this should help establish you within your field and generate interest and links back to your website.

7.    Blog Comments
Finding relevant blogs and commenting on them not only gives you an opportunity to leave a link, it should also get you seen within the online community. Being seen as an active member of the online community in your field should make promoting your content easier.

8.    Article Writing
Writing interesting and useful articles that are relevant to your industry is an effective way to keep pushing out new content. Leaving links within the article body should mean that when someone reposts your article, they in turn give you a link. There are many websites that allow you to post your articles, all of varying quality.

9.    Press Releases
If you’ve got great content, shout about it! Taking care to write a carefully constructed press release should entice journalists and bloggers to write about your website (with a link of course). Try to target journalists and bloggers who write about your industry, and also make use of news wires that can distribute your press release to thousands of writers.

10.    Forum Posts
Most forums allow their users to leave a link within their signature. Try to find relevant forums within your field and get stuck in. Don’t be spammy, just try to be useful and interactive. This should also lead to gaining some traffic.