16th May

By Alice Neeson

First steps to making your website more search-engine friendly

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is an internet marketing strategy that involves improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website via search engines. In general, the more frequently and the higher up a webpage appears in search engine results, the more visitors that page will receive. Optimising a website for SEO has two main considerations: what users search for and what search engines reward. Why is SEO important? A website without visitors is like a shop without customers. And because most websites generate the majority of their traffic through organic search queries, it makes sense to focus on improving your rankings...

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8th May

By Alice Neeson

Best practices for writing online press releases

A press release can be an effective tool for generating publicity about a product, service or event. Journalists are more likely to use a press release if it is written in a particular manner. When writing online press releases, keep in mind the following points… Who, what, when, where, why Your press release should be written like a news story. Include the basic five Ws of standard journalism. This will help to catch both journalists’ and readers’ attention. Write in an “inverted pyramid” structure, keeping the most important and interesting information at the beginning of the press release. Have real news Is the information...

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25th Apr

By Alice Neeson

15 SEO quick-wins

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is, arguably, more difficult than ever. Over the last couple of years, Google, Bing and other major search engines have left website owners with few ways to reach healthy search positions other than to produce high-quality, valuable content. Producing such content takes time, effort and money. However, there are a few quick ways to help you boost your rankings. Run a survey in your industry to collect data, which can be used for content production. This can be a great way to gain quality links and build your reputation. Set up...

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17th Apr

By Alice Neeson

How to get attention online

These days, customers have less and less attention to give. This is especially true online, where people are busy doing other things and don’t like to be disrupted. The old models of marketing and advertising are facing huge challenges, as customers increasingly view them as intrusive and annoying. A solution for some advertisers has been to produce outlandish content in the hope that it goes viral. For example, last year a teaser for Volkswagen featured a pack of dogs barking the Star Wars theme. It garnered 14 million views in two weeks, but didn’t feature any product. Although crazy videos may...

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10th Apr

By Alice Neeson

How to find free images for your blog

More and more businesses are becoming aware of the advantages offered by a regularly updated blog. And one of the simplest ways to make your blog more appealing is to add an image to a post. However simply selecting a photo from Google Images will very likely violate someone’s copyright. Understanding the rights surrounding an image will help keep you safe from legal difficulties. Fortunately there are lots of images that are freely available to use. Flickr.com allows users to share, store and search through millions of photos. However do bear in mind that not all of these are freely available to...

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