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An analysis for The Times over a 3 month period in 2007 saw Google exceeding ITV1 by ?10m in advertising revenue, representing a UK annual growth for Google of approximately 43.5 per cent.Bournemouth headquartered Digital Marketing experts, Refreshed Media (http://www.refreshedmedia.com), who specialise in online marketing, warn that without expert advice and guidance, businesses could lose thousands in their efforts to utilise this medium.

Sarah Baker, Sales and Marketing Director of Refreshed Media said, “As a digital marketing agency we are delighted the web is coming into its own and being used as the effective marketing tool it is. However, as a specialist agency we would urge people to seek advice before parting with their cash. We are passionate about online marketing, and as a full service agency, we can help any business make the most of this powerful tool. If you don’t know your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) from your PPC (Pay Per Click), then talk to someone who speaks your language and that of the digital world to get the best from your marketing budget.”

Top tips from the experts at Refreshed (http://www.refreshedmedia.com) to help maximise this medium include:

- Make sure your website can be used

Design your site with the end user in mind. What is obvious to you may not be obvious to someone visiting your site for the first time. Simplicity is the key to usability.

- Use your website as a business tool

Your website is not there to just look pretty. It must achieve a discernable business objective. ‘Call to actions’ on every page is the key to this.

- Track what people are doing and improve your site.

The magic of marketing on the internet is that you can track everything your visitors do. By using your tracking statistics you can ensure your website stays relevant, is easy for customers to use and achieves your business objectives.

- Make sure people can find you

If there is one thing you must never forget, then that is to ensure that your site can be easily found in the leading search engines. Although SEO isn’t an exact science there are some basic tips; Make sure your content is relevant, of high quality and frequently updated; Make sure people are talking about your website; Make sure your site is coded to a high standard; And if you still find your site struggling, talk to some experts for advice!

- Use a variety of marketing tools

With the wide range of media available now, audiences are increasingly fragmented. To ensure you reach your target audience it is vital that your marketing campaign uses a variety of media and concepts. By integrating your campaign across a wide variety of media your message has a greater chance of reaching your target audience.

Working for national clients such as Boots, McCarthy and Stone, Gleeson Homes and Redrow Homes Bournemouth based Refreshed Media also has offices in Reigate, Manchester and Edinburgh, Refreshed can be contacted on 01202 414101. Alternatively visit www.refreshedmedia.com.

There are surely hundreds of different ways that people can mess up their sites. Based on our experience from working with scores of clients, here are the 9 most common problems that we find:

1. Broken information architecture - These are sites that fail to map the nature of the information they are providing into an understandable hierarchy. Bad for users and search engines.
2. Poor site usability - Results in poor conversion rates, poor lifetime value per visitor, and a less attraactive site for linking to.
3. Mismanaged internal link juice - Some sites allocate their link juice poorly, resulting in not enough of it going to their most important pages.
4. Content getting buried over time - A surprising number of sites that create huge amounts of content use publishing systems that buries stuff over time. Such a lost opportunity. People and crawlers are looking for this stuff, don’t hide it!
5. Bad redirects - Why is is that every engineer who does not have a background in SEO defaults to using a 302 redirect? OK, that’s probably unfair (you might even say ignorant), but it sure seems that way at times.
6. Poor titles and headers - Keyword tools are wonderful weapons. These are valuable for far more than SEO. Keyword tools tell you what language people use when referring to your products and services. Even in a world without web sites, this is something you would want to know. Then you need to make sure you have pages and content that addresses the major topic areas that relate to your business.
7. Insufficient content - No content (or tools) means no links means no traffic. It’s that simple. What unique value are you offering a visitor to your web site? Why would someone link to your site?
8. Duplicate content - It’s unbelievable how much duplicate content that some sites create. It’s a common killer, and it’s a very big factor in poor page rank management.
9. All flash site - Very, very pretty, but not a great experience for a crawler. This does not mean you can’t have an (almost) all Flash site. Just make sure you offer text link navigation options and use a technique like Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) to tell the crawler what is in the movie.
10. Same meta description (and keywords) on every page - These elements are included in duplicate content filter checks by the search engines. And, of course, the meta description is important because it often gets used as the description that the search engine uses for your web page, so make sure it describes the unique info to be found on that page.

Rand at SEOmoz published some great information based on questions he asked Matt Cutts. There were several interesting questions answered, but I think the biggest nugget was the suggestion that you can freely use NoFollow within your own site to control PageRank flow, including on your own internal links, without fear of it being seen as a poor quality signal by Google. The quote from Matt was as follows:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

This opens up some really interesting advanced SEO techniques. For example, do you really want to have PageRank flowing to that “Contact Us” page? Or that “About Us” page? Or a page that simply lists your clients? Now you can keep the page there for users, but tell Google that you don’t want to spend any PageRank on them.

For that matter, you can do some research on your site using web analytics, and find out what pages are not providing any traffic any way, or which pages are not providing any conversions. Then you can take these pages and cut back on the PageRank flow to them, and increase the PageRank flow to the pages that matter the most.

If you have a large and complex site, this opens up some great dynamics. I suspect that this statement by Matt launched a few thousand experiments in understanding how to leverage this aspect of NoFollow.

From the obvious to the “Hey-I-never-thought-of-that-great-idea-before”, here are 10 of the top 52 tips on how to optimize your website for its turbo-charge rocket ride up the search engine rankings.

Be bold. Use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. (more…)

Blogs are the current rage, and many webmasters have blogs but fail to use their blog to it’s full potential. Blogs provide a steady stream of fresh content, and if this content is written and managed properly, blogs have the ability to increase a website’s ranking in the search engines.

1. Host Your Own Blog

In order to prosper from a blog, be sure to host it on your own domain. Hosting the blog on your own server will maximize the links to your website. (more…)