Instagram & Facebook – Why?


A few hours ago I read that Facebook had acquired Instagram for $1bn… aptly enough, this news came to me via my Facebook feed. There’s also an official release here from Mark Zuckerberg My first thought once I checked the legitimacy Read more

Return On Influence: The New ROI


There is not a single activity in business which is exempted from a query regarding return on investment.  Focused strategic planning and expenditure to optimise your e-commerce mix is known to be an investment worth making for product and Read more

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» SEO

10 Ways to Improve Your SEO Using Twitter

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Mike in Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media | Leave a comment

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: It has been widely accepted now that both Bing and Google have integrated with social media platforms to improve their own SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages.) One of the big two social media platforms –Twitter, Now provides you with huge potential and power towards improving your SEO results. For those not sure, Twitter is a huge network of micro bloggers which allows its users to communicate through 140 characters or less and has become a very effective marketing avenue. An effective Twitter account does not just help with your SEO, but it will help to build your online brand, and increase visibility of your company by building new connections. These ten points are designed to help you get the most out of the micro blogging network and help improve your results. 1.              Building your Presence Determine a purpose for your Twitter presence. As with most things it is important to have an end goal in place to help establish ROI and avoid confusion further down the line. Do you want to share product and service information, Do you want to focus on customer support or would you like to engage with people from your own industry? These types of questions help you determine and define the purpose of your twitter account and allow you to measure its results. 2.            Choosing the Right Username Your username should best reflect your brand and or services when possible, as every time you post a tweet or receive a RT (retweet) it will…


Have Google Missed Out on Superior Social Search?

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Fayaaz in Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: This week’s hottest topic has seen confirmation from Google that social signals from Twitter, Flickr and Quora will influence its search results in more detail than ever before. This news comes just several months after social media giant Facebook and Microsoft announced a partnership that brings “Like” data and profile search to Bing search results. Google have said recently that they want to bring elements of relationships and connections to its search results, providing more influence to the end users search journey. The most recent improvements to Google’s search enable you to gather even more information from your closest connections. Google’s Social Search Firstly Google has ensured social search results will be mixed throughout your natural results based on their relevance, you will have seen these previously, however located at the bottom of all results out of sight. What does this mean? You will begin seeing more related websites from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below any results they’ve shared or created in the past. The example Google use’s is if you’re thinking of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt (Cutts, in this case) has written a blog post about his own experience, then Google will improve that post’s ranking with a small picture and brief note. Secondly they have made Social Search more comprehensive by adding notes for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites. Previously Google have shown you results which have been created and linked through their Google profiles. Now, if someone you’re connected to has publicly shared a…


Protected: The 2011 Social and Search Summit

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Fayaaz in Events, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media | Enter your password to view comments.

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SEO for SharePoint

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Mike in Search Engine Optimisation, SharePoint | 2 Comments

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Excerpt: Firstly what exactly is SharePoint? Microsoft SharePoint enables people to work together and share information easier than before. SharePoint 2010 allows your staff to set up a web site to share information with others members of staff, manage documents from start to finish and publish reports online, helping you and your business to make better decisions. SEO for SharePoint When building any web facing site, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is crucial. Building a site without SEO in mind drastically effects how you rank within search engines; sites without SEO fail to attract natural traffic. Ideally SEO should always be factored in from day one of the project. There are many things to consider when planning a site, below is a guide to some of the basic SEO steps for SharePoint projects, this is by no means a checklist simply a set of facts which will help you and your SharePoint website attract visitors through natural search. Domain Name and Friendly URL’s In SharePoint 2010, you need to carefully plan your site infrastructure and page names so it can be more meaningful to the crawlers and the users. Search engines are more likely to crawl your site if the URL is friendly and does not contain deep domain folders i.e /blog/marketing/seo/sharepoint/article1. Page Titles that are Effective Give your page a meaningful title, if the subject of the page is “cloud computing” that is likely to be a keyword you wish to be found for and should form all of or part of your page title. Meta Elements This is one of my…


Case Study: Renault Parts Direct – Traffic Explosion

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Fayaaz in Customers, Search Engine Optimisation | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: At Generate UK we really take pleasure in seeing our clients enjoy the benefits of our work. An excellent example of this is when we worked with Renault Parts Direct on a search engine optimisation project that took them from 200 unique visitors per month to 7000 within 12 months (now regularly receiving over 12,000 unique visits per month). Renault Parts Direct is a specialist online supplier of Renault parts, accessories and merchandise for a variety of vehicle models. All parts are new and fully backed by the manufacturer’s warranty. When we first started working with them their main challenge was that people were not finding their website. With this in mind Generate UK embarked on an aggressive Search Engine Optimisation Strategy with the objectives of: •    Increasing traffic •    Improving search engine rankings •    Driving customers to the website This was a really exciting project as we were able to focus on a niche market, Renault parts, not just car parts. We set about developing a strategy that included targeting priority keywords both on-page and off-page which enabled the site to improve its search engine rankings. The approach was a complete success, as the analytics have proven. The number of visits per month has risen by a massive 3500% in the last 12 months. This is largely to do with the fact that Renault Parts Direct have moved up the search engine rankings and now appears within the top 3 search results for all of their priority keywords. Sara Collings, Group Marketing Manager at Fish Brothers (RPD’s…


Digital Marketing in 2011

Posted on December 24, 2010 by Mike in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing | 1 Comment

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Excerpt: What a year 2010 has been, Advances in many areas of digital marketing has seen continued growth within social media, increased PPC budgets as well as more in depth SEO techniques utilised. Just last week Mark Zuckerberg was announced as Time Magazines Person of the Year, I honestly believe this is just the beginning for social media as part of a digital marketing mix. Below I have broken down some key areas to be considered in 2011 when putting together a Digital Marketing Strategy including SEO, Video Marketing and of course Social Media. Social Media as a Marketing Source 2010 has without any doubt seen an advance in social networking for businesses; a trend that is most likely to continue to increase during 2011. Research by EpiServer has shown that nearly half of executives questioned said that websites and email would remain their focus of attention next year, Indicates that many businesses appreciate the potential that social media marketing could bring them but do not know how to harness its power and drive traffic and increase business on-line. The likes of Facebook and Tweets of Twitter can be used to produce quality SEO results which will obviously benefit any website in terms of increased visitors. During 2011 search will become more social focused, last week executives from both Bing and Google confirmed that social media already plays a part in producing SREP’s (Search Engine Result Pages), highlighting that social services such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will become even more heavily integrated into organic search results…


Website Speed can affect your SEO rankings.

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Ian Fergusson in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | 2 Comments

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Excerpt: How long are you prepared to wait for a website to load until you get impatient and click away? One second? Two? Google recently carried out an experiment where they intentionally decreased the speed of their own website from 100 milliseconds to 400 milliseconds. The results showed decreases in the average number of Google searches from 0.2% to 0.6%.  Users were turning their backs on Google as the time taken for search results to appear was too long. Even after Google returned their site to the original speed they found that searches continued to decline for the next five weeks! It is because of this dramatic affect that speed has on user’s experience of a website, that Google has announced faster websites will be ranked higher. This is the first time that Google has officially announced that Speed does have a direct effect on Rankings. SEO guru’s have suspected this for a while and a fast website is always desired for usability reasons, but Google’s announcement has put any debate over this issue to rest. Google uses its Googlebots to test how long a page takes to respond as well as Google toolbar to test page load times. Generate UK have invested a lot of time and money into our server capabilities. This means that the sites that we host on our server have quick and smooth load times. As demonstrated by the Google experiment speed not only judges your Google ranking but that the amount of users actually decreases with a…


SEO – Learn from your mistakes!

Posted on May 28, 2010 by Ian Fergusson in Search Engine Optimisation | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: 5 SEO Fails! SEO is vitally important to help your website gain valuable traffic for desired keywords. There are two types of SEO, on page and off page. On page includes meta titles, keywords and quality content. . . all the things you would find on a web page while off page includes back links and all the things relating to your web page that aren’t on your page, simple. Many Search engine optimisation companies or SEO ‘Gurus’ will make huge promises to you offering you top spots on Google by optimising your site or buying links for you. However you do need to be slightly cautious of such people. In this blog I have compiled I list of things NOT to do in SEO, which I have appropriately titled SEO Fails! They say people learn from their mistakes, well here are a lot of other people’s mistakes for you to learn from! 1) Make sure all your URL’s are friendly. The tagline of this site is ‘Internet made easy’ ironically their URL is not easy to read. Google hates URL’s like this, it is long, complicated and says nothing about what content is on this page. Make sure none of your pages look like this or have any % or ~ in them, keep it nice and easy for example www.generateuk.co.uk/seo.htm. The two other problems I have highlighted on this page is the navigation keywords are in white, therefore not readable as well as the content not actually being found! You…


Why Search Engine Optimisation is so important?

Posted on December 10, 2009 by Mike in Search Engine Optimisation | 1 Comment

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Excerpt: When-ever you venture into Internet marketing or think about putting up your business on the web, it is not worth if your WebPages are not ranked within the first three or four of the first page of Google or any other search engine search results. When I started with my website, I had to know about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and just knowing did not help. To get my site exposed to that level of being noticed, I had to learn the SEO techniques and as I gathered the experience from the results I achieved, I found my website having an excellent ranking by Google. The Internet marketers use all kinds of marketing techniques to get a formidable ranking which gives them the advantage of having created for themselves a leading edge over other similar Internet marketers. There are various marketing techniques used. However, the most important is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which forms the basic foundation in driving more and more traffic to your website. You need to have your business known to people, and SEO, if done correctly, provides you the automated way in getting traffic to your website. The important thing about doing SEO correctly is to research for correct keywords that you need to use. This needs your effort in spending time to find the keyword phrases and use them with the other known marketing techniques. You need to learn SEO techniques only once, and as you gather the experience and get to understand the technique better, you…


Generate UK’s Festive Online Marketing Workshop

Posted on November 17, 2009 by Mike in Business Development, Events | 1 Comment

festive-workshop

WELCOME to Generate UK’s Festive Online Marketing Workshop. Date: 9th December 2009 Time: 9am-12.30pm Venue: Donnington Grove Country Club – click here for directions A workshop designed to help participants understand and embrace a number of key online marketing activities. The workshop will be dynamic and focused on sharing experiences with clients, partners and each other providing the dos and don’ts when it come to implementing a proactive marketing strategy! The workshop will discuss:

  • The principles of SEO – what are they?
  • Business Blogging – to blog or not to blog?
  • An effective website – do you have one?
  • Email marketing –does it work?

The workshop aims to be delivered in an informative yet relaxed atmosphere helping Marketers and business owners become more knowledgeable when looking to contribute to their online marketing strategy for 2010. On top of this you’ll have a chance to network with industry professionals through an hour of speed networking! Plus you’ll be entered into a special draw to win a round of golf or dinner for two! The workshop is limited in numbers so please register here to avoid disappointment or call 01635 550431 to book your space. www.generateuk.co.uk


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