The proposal was introduced to people working within the business at the MintTwist Annual General Meeting on 30th November 2011.

This article is written so that people working within the business and other interested parties may use this area to facilitate discussion, questions and comments on the proposal.

What do MintTwist want to do?

MintTwist aims to be the most successful supplier of Digital Agency company services for businesses in Europe by 2016.

How?

MintTwist is aiming to do this by developing and further growing its network of clients and by adding more value to their businesses by devloping and further growing its network of highly skilled people working across the organisation and together, with well defined process methodologies.

How will the growth be funded?

MintTwist have been seeking a sustainable growth model that accurately represents the key value drivers for the existing growth that MintTwist has experienced to date and one that will incubate, encourage and reward the key value drivers for future growth of the business.

MintTwist’s Proposed ‘Social Capital Model’ for facilitating sustainable growth of its business

MintTwist’s proposed solution is a key component for facilitating the continuation, development and expedience of its market/service diversification growth strategy … MintTwist have termed it ‘The Social Capital Model’.

social capital model

The social capital component represents a portion of the company that cannot be bought, sold or owned.

Access to the benefits of the social component is for people who are working within the business.

Key elements may include:

1. A share in governance with direct representation

2. A share in the profits

???

Weighted access may be representative of:

1. Length of service

2. Relative value of contributions

???

In essence should a dedicated mobile platform be created, or should businesses simply allow their mobile users to be served up their ‘normal’ website in whatever way the browser software on the given mobile platform chooses to do so?

It’s a tough question and one which the group mostly debated from an ROI perspective. Given that mobile usage rates in the UK are still fairly low (5% of a websites traffic may come from mobile users), one might be tempted to conclude that for typical small and medium sized b2b businesses the answer is no.

However, it is not that clear cut.

Firstly, there is the issue that mobile usage is growing incredibly quickly (see article : What will Smart Phones Do to our Websites? for more on this) and there may well be material benefits for ‘getting in quick’ (including SEO benefits).

Secondly there is ‘how mobile users are behaving issue’. The data is not entirely accurate at the moment – but early signs are clear: mobile users do not use the internet in the same way on their mobiles as they would do on their PC’s or laptops.  Usage is driven by factors such as location (users accessing their mobile devices to find information on ‘where they physically are at the moment’) and impulsivness (users accessing their mobile devices to find an answer to a fairly immediate question/problem).  Factors such as these all feed in to the ideal way in which the information should be presented to the mobile user, i.e. b2b businesses could have a ‘mobile optimised homepage’ that clearly presents a clickable telephone number link and clickable interactive google map so that visitors to the business can quickly get the information that they may be after if they are accessing the website from a mobile device.

A difficult topic for business oweners and marketing manager to grapple with; here are MintTwist’s high level thoughts on the subject …

• Mobile is an important consideration, however, it is not necessarily a vital immediate concern for ‘most’ small businesses (because well designed website designs will render correctly already).
• The trend towards increased mobile usage is growing.
• The differing user goals and usage habits of users on mobile platforms needs to be properly understood on a case by case basis for a useful and quality mobile solution to be delivered.
• The group felt that businesses that should be immediately addressing mobile users (because they could potentially see a real ROI) are:

1. Businesses with large visitor numbers
2. Media businesses
3. Some retail (e-commerce) businesses
4. Businesses running functional websites / website applications

• Other groups of businesses may want a mobile solution (even if it won’t provide them a clear ROI) for other reasons (e.g. to get ahead of the competition, brand identity etc).
• Two main categorisations of mobile website solution exist, these are outlined by the information chart below:

Thoughts and feedback on this post are very welcome

All the data coming out of the researchers suggests that the trend towards smart phone/tablet usage and away from desktop/laptops is taking hold.  E-Consultancy are reporting that 57% of US professionals say that they will use a smart phone or tablet device as their primary source of internet usage (vs a PC).  They are also predicting a rise in the proportion of online spend that is dedicated to Mobile, today in 2011 it is 15%, in 2015 it is predicted to be 64%.

What does this mean for our warm and snuggly websites?

Maybe not that much.  As is the way with things, they tend to evolve rather than spontaneously transform (albeit at a speedy pace in the digital world).  The same E-Consultancy data appears to show that the focus of mobile spend is around 3 areas – the mobile web, mobile search and social networking.

Some more examination of these phenomena reveals that they are all in fact evolutions and in some cases the same animals as those faithful ‘old’ websites that we know and love so well.

What does this mean for my business?

Mobile Search

Mobile Web

The vast majority of updated websites will be compatible with Smart Phones, HTML5 based websites are entirely supported.

Moving forward, it is worth considering creating a mobile version of the existing site, this means presenting the content in a way that is ‘mobile friendly’, i.e. short, concise with a focus on contact information.  This need not be an expensive addition to your brief – correctly put together it would be an extension of the existing website system.

Mobile Search

Again, if you are engaging an SEO or Web Marketing agency, Mobile search will be partially covered by the traditional SEO work that is taking place.

Moving forward, if the website system has been designed in a manner in which it supports both platforms as mentioned above, the job of specifically optimising for mobile platforms should be a natural extension to the SEO campaign work and mean only a minor increase in budget.

Social Networking

The Social Networks have been quick to capitalise on the Mobile Web and have extended their systems intelligently to support mobile platforms.  They have designed new front-ends, optimised for the mobile experience that leverage the same application and database systems that power their PC and laptop interfaces.

In order to be successful here, businesses need to engage in a progressive Social Network marketing campaign that is integrated with the SEO (the Social Networks will make the technology work).  By doing this, businesses will be able to leverage their website and SEO plays to improve the outputs of their social endeavours.  It’s all about good old-fashioned strategy and correctly done it results in more potential customers engaging the website via online channels – from the mobile, PC and the of course the real world also

With such opportunity and competition it is extremely important for new and existing companies to make effective use of modern marketing strategies.  Internet marketing is now a major multi-billion pound industry and a method suitable for the progressive nature of the UAE business community, particularly for the two major Emirates; Dubai and the capital Abu Dhabi.

Internet penetration in the UAE is on the rise as regular web usage has reached 67% of the population, with 55% of the population using it on a daily basis.  Currently, the web is used primarily for emails and searching for information, with a smaller percentage accessing the internet for business or for making online purchases.  The internet is inevitably changing the dynamics of how we structure our business, culture and society, with the UAE being no exception.  As internet penetration in the UAE grows, businesses must respond by developing high quality Arabic web design.

A modern well-presented website is now expected for most businesses and organisations.  With good quality website design, Dubai and Abu-Dhabi based companies can benefit from improved information distribution and an expansion of reachable markets.  It is an effective way of winning new business and retaining existing customers, while responding quickly to new competitors.

With competition becoming more demanding and search engines more concerned with the user experience, the web business owner should consider the importance of web development.  A UAE company immediately commands respect from web visitors with a professional Arabic web design.  In order to compete amongst the ever-increasing market in the UAE, it is wise to invest in a well-constructed website with a strong logo, a harmonious colour scheme, simple and professional looking graphics, and effective navigation options.  UAE consumers have high expectations from companies, expecting high levels of service from them.

As internet use in the Arabic world has grown faster than anywhere else since 2000 and access costs have shrunk, businesses should now increase investment in web content in order to gain a place in the highly competitive world market.

When they followed you back you were a rush with emotion. Digital acceptance into their inner circle meant you were connected, accepted and had one very cool ‘follower’, earning your digital self that bit more kudos.

But over the months and years things change. Your digital avatar has grown up, moved on from an adolescent obsession with popularism and found it’s place in the digital world – with like minded individuals from whom they can garnish and share genuinely relevant information.

Get divorced on Twitter

That popular connection of yours is still uber cool and successful but somehow their musings just don’t do it for you anymore.

Eventually you decide that clogging up your timeline with randomised, automated ‘quotes of philosophers’, ‘links of the hour’, ‘daily funnies’ and the occasional interaction from a low paid intern feigning coolness is just not worth the kudos…. So you resolve yourself to unfollow your childhood sweetheart!

But how do you do it, how do you get divorced on Twitter!?!?  How will they feel, what will they do and most importantly will their auto-unfollow script kick in, meaning one less follower for you and one very cool one too!?!?

I was faced with exactly this dilemma recently.  Having followed the eminent Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki) since the very early days (he was a tweeting pioneer) I had felt a special bond of kinship… I was sure he held me in high regard amongst his 360,000 loyal followers.  I used to wait, tweet-deck at the ready on his every word – but after the years and much to my dismay his tweeting just doesn’t do it for me anymore

And so I give you; ‘How to get divorced on Twitter’ …

elliott_king Elliott King

Sorry @GuyKawasaki - I have to let you go … it was great while it lasted, I just think we’re in a different space right now.

9 Jun

And that was it – it was done!  No tears, no drawn out discussions, he accepted it, duly un-followed me ( ) a few hours later and we’ve both gone our separate ways … with no hard feelings … none at all … I’m in a good place right now …

In certain countries such as the United States, the UK much of Europe and Japan almost everyone between the age of 15 and 29 has a Facebook account. However in these countries the internet has existed for a several years and young people are now growing up with the technology.

But this does not show the full Facebook picture. There are lots of countries where the internet is a much more recent phenomenon and it is changing the way young people in particular interact and share information.

For example the UAE perhaps does not have the world’s fastest most reliable internet service but the Facebook penetration is very high. It could be argued that because the population is much smaller in comparison to the US and the UK it is not a fair statistic.

On the other hand, it could be argued that the high Facebook penetration shows just how much of an influence the social networking site has. If people have access to the internet, depending on their age and other demographics, they will almost certainly have a Facebook account.

The UAE has become an important region of financial investment and infrastructure growth. It is now home to the world’s tallest building the Burj Khalifa. Dubai is a city which has emerged from the desert as a leading centre for a wide variety of businesses and industries.

In Europe and America nearly all businesses now have websites and the standard is always climbing. Businesses are now putting a lot of effort and money into web marketing and SEO because they understand that in such competitive markets and advantage or opportunities must be exploited to the fullest.

The car manufacturing giant, Ford revolutionised personal travel by implementing mass manufacturing to produce the Model T which really opened up the car market to a much wider group of people.

In 2010 Ford again revolutionised the industry by launching its new Explorer model only on Facebook. More and more businesses are looking to social media for marketing opportunities as it offers businesses the chance to interact with customers and to gain valuable insight into products and services.

Of that total a whopping 64 million of them are in the Middle East, accounting for a staggering growth rate of 1825% over the past decade.  Amazingly this growth rate is 15x that of what was seen in North America over the same period.

As more and more people are gaining access to the Internet, it is the perfect opportunity for companies to move their business to the Web.

At the start of the Internet age Europeans and North Americans were by far the largest users. However, this is gradually changing as other continents embrace the World Wide Web. In recent years there has been a big increase in Internet users in regions such as Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Since 2000, the number of users in Africa and the Middle East has increased by around 1,800%. Meanwhile, Asia has gathered 704 million users – over 300 million more than any other region, encompassing about 42% of worldwide users. This can be attributed to large population in Asia; a staggering 3.8 billion of the 6.7 billion people on earth (that is 56%) live in Asia.

Another change is that Europe has overtaken North America as the second biggest user of the Internet. In terms of percentage of their population Asia is still quite far behind, with North America having the highest figure. Only 18.5% of Asians use the Internet, while half of Europeans do and three quarters of North Americans do. In the Middle East, 30% of people use the Internet today, however, this reach is rapidly increasing and as it does the importance of businesses being well presented online becomes ever more apparent.

Computers and the Internet are modern inventions which therefore effortlessly fit into modern life of Europeans and North Americans. Many Africans and Middle Easterners have very different lifestyles and this is reflected in the figures. Asia is a mixture of old and new, but modernising all the time, thus the increase in Internet users. As developing nations like Asia, Africa, and the Middle become more technologically advanced this trend is likely to continue.

Businesses and organizations in the Middle East that want to capitalize on everything the Internet has to offer should look no further than the web design and development firm, Mint Twist. Originally based out of London, Mint Twist has successfully created websites and marketing strategies for a wide variety of companies over the past eleven years. They are now entering into the foreign marketplace with the opening of Mint Twist Dubai. The growth of business and Internet seen within Dubai and the Middle East could not be better supported and facilitated than by the experts at Mint Twist.

If you were old enough, you may have seen the teaser trailer when it first came out. The trailer makes the film out to be quite dark with omnious music and threatening voice over. According the to the trailer it is “The story of a boy, a girl and a universe” and “A big spralling space saga of rebellion and romance”. It is also “Ahead of it’s time” (cue cut to C3P0).

One notable omission from the trailer is John Williams’ score. Presumably it had not been recorded at the time.

At MintTwist it is almost mandatory to be a Star Wars fan, and memorabilia encouraged at all desks:

Chewy and Boba play nicely

Some MintTwist team members bear more than a passing resemblence to characters in the series:

Silvio and Luke

Silvio Rainoldi – php developer or saviour of the universe?

Gedi and Hans

Gediminas (Gedi) Burinskis – php developer or space cowboy?

Alexis and Chewbacca

Alexis Pratsides – Director or Wookiee?

1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
   The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution – one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases,WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that’s easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.
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2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
   Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are – Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or WordPress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page – this is the best solution).
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3. Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
   First and foremost, you’re writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target “searched for” terms.
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4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
   Whatever industry or niche you’re in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that’s already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority).Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com’s blog search in particular is of very good quality).
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5. Tag Your Content
   Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you’re targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a “bump” towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it’s worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
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6. Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
   There’s something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there’s an easy solution – don’t offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you’re upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.
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7. Don’t Jump on the Bandwagon
   Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren’t. Just because there’s huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends – this is because they’re already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you’re launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable – not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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8. Link Intelligently
   When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there’s a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It’s almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you’re linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
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9. Invite Guest Bloggers
   Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowledging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that’s as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you’re already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers – make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it’s posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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10. Eschew Advertising (Until You’re Popular)
    I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That’s not to say that contextual advertising can’t work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don’t get me wrong – it’s unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you’ll have the same impression – low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don’t. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they’re sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link – you definitely don’t want that limitation while you’re still trying to get established.
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11. Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
    Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occasional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you’re having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bullet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestible block of content.
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12. Cover Topics that Need Attention
    In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it’s particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle – give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you’re virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
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13. Pay Attention to Your Analytics
    Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don’t get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I’m a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the “register” link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
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14. Use a Human Voice
    Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it’s most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you’ll be in a good position to succeed. It’s also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We’ve certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans – be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly – if there’s a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there’s no going back.
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15. Archive Effectively
    The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving – pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a “noindex” in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong – in the well-organized archive system.
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16. Implement Smart URLs
    The best URL structure for blogs is, in my opinion, as short as possible while still containing enough information to make an educated guess about the content you’ll find on the page. I don’t like the 10 hyphen, lengthy blog titles that are the byproduct of many CMS plugins, but they are certainly better than any dynamic parameters in the URL. Yes – I know I’m not walking the talk here, and hopefully it’s something we can fix in the near future. To those who say that one dynamic parameter in the URL doesn’t hurt, I’d take issue – just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we’ve worked with.
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17. Reveal as Much as Possible
    The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that’s usually private – trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occasional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what’s off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
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18. Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
    Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error – build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you’ll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
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19. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days
    If you do have linkbait, whether by design or by accident, make sure to capitalize. When you hit the front page of Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, or, on a smaller scale, attract a couple hundred visitors from a bigger blog or site in your space, you need to put your best foot forward. Make sure to follow up on a high traffic time period with 2-3 high quality posts that show off your skills as a writer, your depth of understanding and let visitors know that this is content they should be sticking around to see more of. Nothing kills the potential linkbait “bump” faster than a blog whose content doesn’t update for 48 hours after they’ve received a huge influx of visitors.
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20. Create Expectations and Fulfill Them
    When you’re writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who’ve come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don’t ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue – deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency – if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That’s not to say you can’t take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It’s not fair, but it’s the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note – guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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21. Build a Brand
    Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occasional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be off putting for new readers, but they’re solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand – once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it’s very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you’re building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.

Best of luck to all you bloggers out there. It’s an increasingly crowded field to play in, but these strategies should help to give you an edge over the competition. As always, if you’ve got additions or disagreements, I’d love to hear them.

p.s. Note to self – starting long blog entries at 11:30pm is not conducive to a good night’s sleep. At least Angela got kicked off Project Runway tonight.

1. What do you want your Website to say?

Normally, you will want your business website to clearly spell out the main benefits of your products and/or services. Ideally this will be done in a language and style that will engage the types of customer groups that your business serves.

2. Who do you want your Website to say it to?

The marketing website is for your customers. What types of people are they? Can your customer base be categorised into distinct groups? Are your customer groups buying the same or different prducts and services? Do they buy for the same or different reasons?

Identify target customer groups and associated products and services

What do we do next?

Well, there is still more planning work to do. Beyond these two questions there are further steps in a website planning process (see the article ‘Planning the Perfect Website‘, by MintTwist, for further detail on this subject), however the process becomes far easier and the end result will be far more effective with clarity on what we want to say and who we want to say it to.

How does planning help design?

A website homepage will push the core messages in a design that will enage our core customer groups. However it’s most important function is to quickly and clearly direct the website visitor (potential customer) to the product or service page that is most relevant for them.

By breaking down the products and services by customer group and at the same time having a good understanding of the benefits that are most relevant to each group we will be able to design product and service pages that will enable us to focus our communication towards the needs of our potential customer, increase engagement and ultimately increase sales leads and revenue.

This article is based on the “MintTwist Method” for Website planning. MintTwist is an International Web Agency with offices in London, Dubai, Switzerland, Italy and Portugal.

According to Software Magazine’s Software 500 Survey, the revenues of the top 500 software companies total $394 billion, a growth of 3.5% from the previous year. Today’s biggest contenders include IBM, Microsoft, HP, Oracle, SAP and Apple.

The convergence of multiple point technologies wireless, pervasive broadband, and online collaboration generates a whole new level of interactive applications. The heralded Web 2.0 revolution with its innovation in content (e.g., blogs, wikis, user editing and tagging), tools like search, and services like content hosting brings about a much larger opportunity to transfer the new developments in the consumer side to the corporate environment.

According to McKinsey & Company / Sand Hill Group, two major business models
are competing for a growing share of software spend: Software as a Service and Open Source.

Software as a Service has become increasingly relevant to both large corporations and SMEs and is likely to impact the entire IT landscape. Software as a Service has already gained momentum in number of application areas including payroll, human capital management, CRM, conferencing, procurement, logistics, information services, and e-commerce) and is expected make gains across a much wider cross-section of applications over the next 3 years.

On the other hand, Open Source continues to upset packaged software business models. Major open source projects have expanded across nearly all layers of the stack, including web browsers (Mozilla Firefox), application servers (JBoss, JOnAS, Geronimo), web servers (Apache, Tomcat), mail servers (Sendmail, QMail), databases (MySQL, MaxDB), operating systems (Linux, BSD, RTOS), and programming languages (Perl, PHP, Smalltalk, Java).

translation services

As the competition in this sector heats up, businesses are realising that the need for language translation services for associated marketing material as well as the website localisation services is becoming paramount. “By their nature, web services are international, and firms who intelligently employ translation services to open up their offering will be sure to profit.”, stated McKinsey.

A recent McKinsey survey of CIOs shows that experimentation with open source software is now relatively mainstream, with 43 per cent mentioning the use of open source applications of some sort and 41 per cent the adoption of an open source infrastructure like Linux.

MintTwist’s redesign of Serious Stuff and the implementation of an online shop was complex but we think the website and shop look great and works even better!

Visit www.serious-stuff.com.

MintTwist is keen to lend our support to this worthy cause. Air amblances really can make the differrence between life and death. There is no doubt that countless lives have been saved by their incredible skill and dedication.

In aid of the Herts Air Ambulance – ‘Petrol Heads and Pampering’ will be held at Porsche Centre Hatfield on Thursday 14th April between 7pm and 10pm. Ex-Top Gear Presenter and Sunday Times Columnist, Jason Dawe, will host the evening; with new and classic Porsches to admire and a rare opportunity to have a guided tour of the Porsche Workshop by highly trained technicians.

Michelle de la Bertauche, Fundraising Manager for the Herts Air Ambulance, said: “This will be a fantastic event with so much going on – we’ve already had lots of interest. We will be raising vital funding for the Herts Air Ambulance, which costs £130,000 every month to enable it to continue to fly its life-saving missions. We can’t thank The Porsche Centre enough for giving us the exclusive use of their showroom for this event, it is such an exciting opportunity.  We’ve also had huge support from other local businesses, it looks set to be a great evening we are all really looking forward to it.”

MintTwist were tasked with redesigning the website and bringing a fresh feel to the website. It is now also integrated with a CMS to make it easy to edit for the client. MintTwist are also excited to work with SmoothRed on a web marketing campaign to promote them through SEO and online marketing.

Visit www.smoothred.co.uk.

In the beginning there was Netscape Navigator. However by 2002 the browser had all but disappeared. This was primarily down to the growth in Internet Explorer, and the dwindling development efforts by the Netscape Corporation.

Internet explorer is a bit like Ghenkis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Perhaps not the most obvious comparison, but give me a chance. So, Internet Explorer was launched in 1995 and by 2003 had a market share of close to 95%. Between the year 1206 and 1280 the Mongol Empire grew to stretch from Korea to Moscow.

The rapid expansion of the Mongol Empire is much like Internet Explorers rapid growth in popularity. The development of Internet Explorer was also fairly rapid and progressive. The Mongols were also progressive and introduced new technology and new thinking into a medieval Eurasia.

However like all Empires, over time cracks begin to appear. For the Mongols, their days of power were numbered and to make matters worse the epic trade routes that were built up now helped spread the Black Death which decimated both Mongol and other populations.

In 2010 Internet Explorer had a market share of 60% which is a long way of its 2003 peak of 95%. This begs the question, what happened? The answer is quite straightforward. Mozilla happened.

Mozilla created the web browser Firefox and it really came into its own with its 3.5 and 3.6 versions and now their latest version, Firefox 4 is available to download. The browser is currently competing with Internet Explorer for top spot, but right now it has a market share of about 30%.

Internet explorer was never going to maintain a market share of 95%. Competition from Mozilla, Google’s Chrome and Safari ensured this. In my own experience having started with Internet Explorer, then on to Google Chrome, I am now using Firefox 4 and have found it to be an excellent web browser.

In my field of SEO and web marketing I believe Firefox offers me the best web browsing experience. It is well designed, easy to use and highly customable. The amount and variety Firefox Add-ons available is exceptional and definitely provides me with very important data and information.

Greg Jacobs

Content Manager
www.minttwist.com

The MasterCard study showed that the most influential group are those between the age of 25 and 44 and within that group, those between 35 and 44 will use online shopping more frequently. There are a number of explanations for this but perhaps the most obvious and logical is that those aged 35 and above will have more disposable income.

Furthermore, the study also showed that online shopping is becoming increasingly popular for women in Dubai and the wider UAE. The data suggests that 7 per cent more women are using the internet for shopping compared to last year.

The market research carried out by MasterCard involved 8,500 consumers in the region. This has provided rich data which has generated some useful information. For example it showed that the leading categories in the UAE in 2010 included airline tickets, hotel bookings, home appliances and electronic products, clothing, restaurants and home food delivery.

As the online market continues to flourish in the UAE, the key to maximising its effectiveness is to ensure that there is strong internet penetration. After a slightly slow start the UAE now has approximately 75% of its population online which is a very healthy figure.

So what does this mean for web design in Dubai and other parts of the UAE? It suggests that as the internet becomes even more popular in the region the more demand there will be for web design, web marketing and SEO from business community.

As a relatively young online market, the UAE provides excellent opportunities for businesses as the level of competition is still quite young and relatively small. If for example you want to dominate a keyword in Google.ae it is important to invest in SEO and web marketing now rather than wait a couple of years only to find that a competitor has pulled out a massive lead.

Sadly though this does not mean that Dubai is free from global economic forces and so in 2009 the GDP contracted by 2.4 per cent. This was due to a plunge in the property and construction market which was, and still is, crucial to this Arab emirate.

However property and construction is not all that Dubai has to offer. International trade and tourism play a big part in Dubai’s economy. It is thanks to this that the Dubai Statistics Centre can state that they expect GDP for the whole year to increase by about 2.2 per cent, having increased by 2.4 per cent so far.

The other key economic sector for Dubai is tourism. In fact with limited oil reserves it could be argued that tourism is the future for the country and therefore the priority. Judging by some of the construction projects you would assume that Dubai’s leadership is acutely aware of this.

What does this mean for web design in Dubai? Well, web design Dubai is in fact a young part of the economy but as the number of businesses and organisations increase so will the demand for top quality and professional web design. Be it internet projects or intranet projects, big business or small business, all will require web solutions.

The infrastructure in the UAE region has improved significantly and will continue to improve. Projects such as the Dubai Metro have had an excellent response from commuters. Other digital projects such as Dubai’s e-government site are an example of the kind of integration between government, businesses, public services and people which will all contribute to the continued success of Dubai.

Fast forward to 2011 and the internet, some might argue, has become the eighth wonder of the world. The difference between the internet in 1996 and 2011 is integration. Today the internet forms an integral part of our lives and even forms part of our identity.

For half a billion people at least, there is a site which allows you to share with the world your life and everything about it. Yes the Facebook generation is here, they are here to stay and content is king. The Facebook generation has grown up with the modern glossy internet which has evolved to become incredibly technical and capable with lots of potential.

However, content is not universal. Different people in different countries will interpret content differently. Different languages are spoken in different countries and the way people will read will be vary across regions and countries. Therefore the design of a website and the content within are the two most important factors for success.

Showcasing digital content gives web designers and developers from around the world the opportunity to raise their profile. Events such as the World Summit Awards allow web design Dubai to compete and showcase its work amongst the best.

The WSA competition sets out to determine the world’s best and most innovative e-content and ICT technology. Winning this competition gives tremendous international recognition which is why web designers and developers from around the world are so keen to win this prestigious prize.

Web design UAE is pushing hard to meet the deadline of March 17^th. After last year’s competition there was a lot of interest following the success of the ‘Hesabi –My Math’ project. It was judged to be a great product for children because it makes learning more enjoyable and more like a game which maintains children’s attention levels.

Innovations and success such as this has paved the way for technology in the region. The web design and development market along with web marketing and SEO is progressing at a rapid pace in the UAE as is the demand for such services.

Why is this happening?

Over the last three years, the ASA has received over 4,500 complaints about non-paid for advertising. They were unable to act in these cases. A government review last year on the sexualisation of young people highlighted how more and more messages to this group are communicated online but the existing Code could not protect them. The ASA have said that it has the “protection of children and consumers at [its] heart”.

What do the extended regulations now cover?

Any non-paid for marketing communications where a product or service is being promoted, such as the company’s site, are now included. Crucially the marketing messages you send through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are part of these regulations.

Are any websites exempt?

This applies to all UK websites, even if the domain is not .co.uk.

What should I do?

You may want to review your company’s website and non-paid for advertising. The CAP code has been developed “to ensure marketing communications remain legal, decent, honest and truthful.” Ifyour marketing communications reflect this (online and offline) then you have nothing to worry about.

What happens if someone blogs or Twitters about my company and what they say violates the regulations?
The CAP Code calls this “user generated content”. The ASA cannot regulate what people say about your product or service. However, it would be subject to the regulations if you were to use what they have said in your marketing communications.

What will the ASA do if it finds a company in breach of the code?

The ASA will do one or more of the following:
• “Name and shame” the company on the ASA website
• With the co-operation of search engines, remove paid-for advertising links to the page that has the offending marketing message
• Place ads online that brings attention to the company’s non-compliance

Where can I find out more?

Check out the ASA’s Digital remit advice. They are also running seminars and offer a website audit service.

The future…

It will be interesting to see in the coming months how the ASA discovers non-compliant sites and messages, and how realistically it can deal with marketing messages going out via social media. Given the thousands of websites in the country and marketing messages thrown at us every day, it is impossible for them to police each one. They will need to rely heavily on the public to complain about adverts and messages they think are misleading.

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This post was written by Victoria (Operations Manager at MintTwist). MintTwist are a leading web design London agency offering a full web service that also includes web marketing and SEO London.

The genius of Tommy Flowers was obvious from a young age and he eventually earned a degree in electrical engineering from the University of London. The very concept of electrical engineering was relatively novel in the 1920’s but Tommy Flowers knew it was the future.

Tommy later gained experience working on telephone exchanges and by 1939 became convinced that a completely electronic system was possible. At the very same time, Europe was descending into the chaos of war which would soon drag the rest of the world and Tommy Flowers into it.

Alan Turing, another technological hero, was working for the British government breaking German codes. He developed the world’s first algorithms and was literally years ahead of the competition. Eventually Turing heard about Tommy Flowers and asked him for help.

The reason he asked him for help was because the latest code breaking methods being used at the time required large amounts of data input which by hand would be completely impractical. However if an electronic machine could be made which could break codes by inputting large quantities of data then any German code could be broken.

The key for Flowers was valves, lots of them. To put things into context, at the time the most complicated electronic device used about 150 valves. Flowers proposed that his machine which he names ‘Colossus’ would use 1800 valves. Sadly the British government and the Ministry of Defence were yet to be convinced and rather than offering their help told him to make do on his own.

Undeterred Tommy poured every ounce of energy, every second of concentration and every penny he had into his ‘Colossus’.  After eleven months, Flowers and his devoted team built ‘Colossus’. The world’s first computer was born and immediately set about breaking German codes. Later the ‘Colossus Mark 2’ was built which used 2400 valves.

German intelligence became British intelligence immediately. The Allies now had a massive advantage over the Germans and with their new intelligence were able to dominate the war at sea, the war at air and the war on ground. The D-day landings, which marked the beginning of the end for Hitler, used vital information gathered by ‘Colossus’.

The Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, Dwight D Eisenhower went for a meeting at Bletchley Park, the home of ‘Colossus’ and the code breakers, on the 1st of June 1944. There he was handed a decryption made by ‘Colossus’ which showed that Hitler did not want additional troops to be sent to Normandy. Eisenhower turned to his staff and said “We go tomorrow.”

Without the work carried out by Tommy Smith and the code breakers at Bletchley Park it is quite possible that the outcome of World War 2 would have been different. Tommy Flowers is my technological hero because he built the first computer which broke the German codes which won us the war and brought freedom to Europe and the world.

When Google first launched, there were a number of competitors vying for the lion’s share of online search – Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Ask, Alta Vista, Lycos and many more.  Google seemed to arrive and blow everyone else out of the water and show no signs of slowing.  It’s now almost impossible to imagine using the Internet without Google – it ranks as the number one website for many countries according to Alexa.  Its market share of search is as much as 85% globally and it continues to provide new services such as Maps, Places, Gmail and Docs.  Google has now even become immortalised in the English language with the verb ‘to google’.

What happened to the other search engines then?  Yahoo continues to be a key player in the US especially.  However, its usage seems to be slowly losing ground to competitors.  Microsoft’s newly re-launched search service, Bing, is expected to leapfrog Yahoo in the next 12 months to be the second largest search engine.  Check below to see a table showing the top search engines in the US for December 2010 (according to comScore):

As you can see, Google totally dominates the US search market. But what about globally? Based on Net Market Share data for 2010, we can see that Google performs even better worldwide than in the US:

Google has an unprecedented market share – no other search engine even comes close! Interestingly, you can see that Chinese search engine Baidu ranks at number three. This is an amazing achievement considering the narrow demographic it caters to (bearing in mind Baidu is largely only used in China whilst Google is global).

What next for the online search industry? Well, it is hard to imagine any other search engine being able to dislodge Google’s strong hold but let’s look at some hypothetical contenders:

1. Bing

Yes, Bing! Although probably not going to beat Google, many people forecast it to become the second most used search engine soon. Coupled with the merger with Yahoo and it is easy to see how Bing will become more of a competitor for Google.

2. Baidu

Baidu is arguably the most significant contender to Google. Whilst it may only reign supreme in China, China’s population is expected to grow and its economy recently dislodged Japan as the world’s second largest – arguably whoever can crack the Chinese Internet market is in for a good future. What will be key though is if Baidu can branch out to other geographies. Interestingly, its ranking in other neighbouring areas is less significant. According to Alexa it is the 7th most popular in Hong Kong whilst only being 9th in South Korea and 15th in Taiwan. Baidu’s growth overseas will be the most important factor in determining whether it will be a genuine competitor to Google or not.

3. YouTube

Yes, I know it is not technically a search engine but you do search on it! Interestingly, YouTube recently become the second largest search engine in terms of monthly searches performed. This represents a huge shift in the way people are searching for information. As broadband becomes the norm and advertisers continue to embrace online media, media-rich content is becoming standard. YouTube (which Google owns) highlights two things about the Internet. Firstly, Internet users enjoy communicating and secondly, text is no longer enough. Neither is animated gifs. For SEOs, web marketers and anyone associated with the web world – ignoring the power of YouTube and multi-media search may prove to be a mistake.

4. Facebook

Last but not least, a small website you might not have heard of yet. Facebook’s growth has been unparalleled – adding hundreds of thousands of users daily. At the moment, Facebook is still very much centred around users and people. You can’t search for information in the same way but more and more information is getting uploaded to Facebook pages for people to ‘like’. Additionally, Facebook gives companies and individuals the ability to speak directly to visitors in a way that is not often afforded to them on websites and traditional media.

So there we have it! Google is probably going to continue to be the undisputed search behemoth but there are numerous contenders vying for second place. What will be most interesting is to see how traditional search engine alternatives develop. As Facebook gears up to launch its new communication platform (including emails), does this signify Facebook’s intent to become the new Google? We will have to wait and see! What are your predictions for the online search industry?

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MintTwist are a leading agency for web design in London. We are also a leading company for SEO and web marketing in London. Colin is part of the web marketing team and you can contact him here: colin@minttwist.com.

Useful links:

• Web design London
• SEO London

Watching a revolution unfold on television is a fascinating experience. What’s even more fascinating is that the internet and social media in particular were key components of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. An army of bloggers and tweeters in Egypt and Egyptians around the world were at the heart of the uprisings.

Tahrir Square was the epicentre of the revolution and once the protesters took control of the square and organised it, at the very centre were the bloggers. The job of blogging was made much harder as Egypt’s internet service providers were forced to shut down in an attempt to make it harder for demonstrators to get organised and limit the flow of information to the international community.

By the time Egypt’s internet was largely shut down the news of the demonstrations had already gone around the world and back again. The speed of information thanks to the internet and social media is what ensured the news of the protests went global in minutes.

Sadly, as is the case with most revolutions, it cost lives. It is estimated that at least 300 people died and hundreds more were badly injured in the Egyptian revolution. If free and fair elections can be held in Egypt within six months, as the military which now controls the country has promised, those who died will not have done so in vain.

One individual really caught my attention during the Egyptian revolution. Wael Ghonim is Google’s head of marketing for the Middle East and Africa. Such is his influence that he was arrested on 25^th of January and not released for twelve days.  Upon his release and following an emotional interview on television thousands of supporters joined a Facebook page in his honour which states “We authorise Wael Ghonim to speak on behalf of the Egyptian revolution.”

Wael Ghonim is not a politician. He is not a man who seeks power or accepts that he at all special. However, because of his position in Google he was seen as a major threat to the ousted president Mubarak which resulted in his arrest and it could be argued this made him a political prisoner.

For the revolutionist, the demonstrator and the protestor, Facebook, Twitter and blogs are their voice to the outside world. To a dictatorial regime Facebook, Twitter and blogs are powerful weapons that must be contained. The only problem is that the internet and social media has taken root and digging it up is impossible.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol is essentially the dialogue that allows distribution and collaboration to take place across the Web. While its technological creation can be considered a modern venture, there were several precursors to the concept, which arguably has its roots in ancient times.

The desire to categorise and organise information is almost second nature, and has existed for centuries. Reference works such as dictionaries and encyclopaedias, index annotations such as the Dewey Decimal Classification, and even pre-printing press texts such as the Talamud were accompanied by annotations and symbols that would guide the reader/follower/surfer around the text. These systems were separate to the process of documentation – they were concerned with the connections between texts, and the ease of information retrieval.

The springboard for the etymology and electronisation behind HTTP came in the 1940s, when Vannevar Bush – an engineer associated with the analogue computer and atomic bomb – created the term Memex, based on the words “memory” and “index”. Memex was proposed as a compressed store of documents that could be indexed numerically, with the aim of making it a more efficient mechanical Rolodex. It was described as “an enlarged intimate supplement to one’s memory” (Lev Manovich, New Media Reader).

The Birth of the Internet: Vannevar Bush

In 1963, Ted Nelson – an American philisopher and technology pioneer – coined the phrases hypertext and hypermedia, which imply an overcoming of the constraints of written or tangible media. The terms refer to things displayed on an electronic device with references (hyperlinks) that lead to other text/media that are instantly accessible. Nelson’s IBM-funded research project at the time was the Hypertext Editing System (HES), which sought to organise data into two categories: links and branching text that could easily be pinpointed and recalled using labels.

The flexibility, immediacy, and collaborative nature of these ideas made them an ideal basis for creating the World Wide Web. It was Douglas Engelbart, while working on a rival to the HES, who became the first person to publicly present what is now known as “The Mother of All Demos” in 1968. This showcased the computer mouse, video conferencing, email, hypertext, word processing, and real-time editing – things many of us consider to be ultramodern.

Doug Engelbart 1968 Demonstration from Nathan Garrett on Vimeo.

The Mother of All Demos

Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) carried out a breakthrough in hypertext development when he integrated it with the Internet. He created ENQUIRE, a hypertext-style database of unique identifiers (what we now refer to as Uniform Resource Locators – or URLs) in a customised language that would become the basic building blocks for links and branching text (Hypertext Markup Language – or HTML), which could then be transferred between servers and computers through “conversation”. This was the first example of what we now refer to as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.

The World’s First Web Server – Tim Berners-Lee’s workstation.

This epic article was guest written for MintTwist by Shreena from Anastrophe and Cheese. Check out her Twitter here: http://twitter.com/shreenas. Thanks very much Shreena! This article is awesome.

For more information on web design in London please visit the MintTwist website!

MintTwist have continued to work with Gold Matrix on their web marketing campaign, optimising the site for SEO, as well as managing its social media activities.

Visit www.gold-matrix.com

With this in mind, writing copy for your site can seem terrifying.  How do make sure visitors find what they want?  How can you engage them more?  Writing good content is not impossible but it does take practice.  Here are our top ten tips to get you started:

1.     Headlines should tell users what the page is about.  Being too clever can backfire.

2.     Make the first sentence after the heading count.

3.     Use 50% less copy than you would for printed material. If you have more to say, move it to secondary pages or make it available to download as pdf.

4.     Put keywords, statements and important information in bold.  This helps users pick out what is important to them quickly.

5.     Break copy up.  Use bullet points and sub-headings to make copy more scannable and easy to read.

6.     Structure copy using the inverted pyramid style so users get the most important information first before drilling down to detail.

7.     Avoid marketing language.  This bogs users down with unnecessary words to process.  They need to get information quickly.  It can also turn them off.

8.     You don’t have to be polite.  This delays users so “welcome”, “please” and “thank you” can be dropped without being rude.

9.     Avoid using “Click here”.  As well as being lazy, it is a no-no for disability standards.  Replace it with an action and tell you reader what will happen, e.g. Visit the MintTwist blog for awesome posts.

10.  FAQ and Help pages should get to the point.  Don’t be afraid to say yes or no – it’s the answer people are looking for.  Say it, then explain.

Writing great copy is important for web design London and SEO London campaigns.

For this example let’s consider the title “Web design London“

Let’s say that MintTwist have a website with a content management system and let’s consider the average CMS.

Most CMS will automatically generate an SEO friendly URL from the title of the page, as mentioned in this case, “Web design London“. This means that our SEO friendly URL will be web-design-London. But what if we don’t want that as the URL?

What we could do is have a field that allows us to enter the  URL we want. Makes sense right? So we can add that, but isn’t it a bit of a bother remembering that you have to format it for a URL? Well if you use our little function below it will sanitise your input string without it having to be done on the back-end.

$.fn.slug = function()
{

return this.val().replace(/[^a-zA-Z 0-9-]+/g,”).toLowerCase().replace(/\s/g,’-')

};

This simple function will make sure that there are only alphanumeric characters and hyphens in your string so you can write your page URL without having to do it all in lower case and remembering to add a hyphen instead of a space.

You can use this function very easily; consider the example below:

$(‘#pageName’).val();

var pageSlug = $(‘#pageName’).val();

To use this function on the page slug variable you would simply append the jQuery function we have created.

var pageSlug = $(‘#pageName’).val().slug();

Easy, no?

Content is often the last thought but it should be one of your first. Writing what goes into your website at the beginning:

• Helps you focus on the structure and aims of the site.   By thinking through what will go on the site, you are more likely to drop redundant sections and develop better ones.
• Assists web designers in producing better more accurate designs.   What you have written informs and inspires them about your company.
• Minimises development time – you will receive a test site that is 95% complete, leaving you free to concentrate on fixing bugs and making final tweaks, rather than feeling the pressure to produce hundreds of words.
• Gives you a head start with SEO.   With your content written, you can start planning your SEO strategy and give your site the best possible launch.

Creating content can quickly become an elephant – weeks away from launch it is a small speck in the distance. Suddenly it’s large and looming. One of the biggest reasons people put it off is that they are unsure how to write engaging copy, and copy that will work for SEO. Good copy can reap big returns so it is worth taking the time to research how to do it properly. Check out our Top Ten Tips for Web Copy and the Short Guide to SEO from MintTwist and kick start your content today.

Search engine traffic should be the number one driver of traffic to your website.  The percentage of new visits from search engine traffic is higher than direct traffic and should be considered more valuable – new visits mean potential new customers!  Being found in search engines isn’t the be all and end all though – being number 1 in search results should be your main goal.  Being number one means you will get the lion’s share of search engine traffic for that search.

The first thing you need to do is identify the keywords you want to rank well for, the level of traffic for those keywords and how hard it will be to rank well for that keyword.  These two factors shouldn’t be ignored.  It’s all well and good trying to rank for ‘cars’ but the likelihood off your website ranking first is nigh on impossible.  Instead, focus on the long tail – keywords which are more defined.  They’ll be less relative traffic but you’ll have a better chance of ranking for them.  Potential keywords should be analysed for both search volumes and opportunity.

Once you have identified the best keywords to target (and this can be a large piece of work), the next step is to do some on page SEO.  Optimising your website and web pages will greatly benefit your SEO campaign.  On page SEO has many different elements.  The most important are:

1. Content

Having good, keyword relevant content on your web pages will greatly help them to get indexed by search engines for keywords.  Broadly speaking, you should aim for at least 300 words of content.  Not only is content beneficial for user experience but it is by far the most natural way of increasing your visitor numbers.  However it is possibly also the element which takes the longest time to see results.  It is important to make sure your content is keyword rich but not keyword saturated.  Search engines use highly intelligent mathematical equations and algorithms to determine what your page is about, how good it is and what search terms it should rank it for.  But, they are only algorithms – they are not human monitored.  You need to help the search engines understand what your page is about.  Writing about cupcakes, televisions and the United Kingdom will only confuse the search engine.  They like to pigeonhole pages and sites into neat little categories.  Make sure you can do that with your pages.

2. Meta data

The role of Meta data has become controversial in the world of SEO but it is still important.  Meta data is behind the scenes information that search engines and other websites use to gather information about your site.  The two most important Meta data elements for SEO are keywords and the description.

The description, as you can imagine, is a description of your site.  This is the paragraph that gets shown under your website title in search results.  It is important to note that Google doesn’t use these to judge the quality or relevancy of your website.  Instead you should utilise these as prime advertising spots.  Sell your company or business here!

Here are examples of bad and good Meta descriptions:

Bad Meta Description:

Good Meta Description:

It’s also important to note that you only have 150 characters to write your Meta description.  If you write too many then they won’t get shown.  Make sure you utilise this search engine real estate well.

Additionally you have the meta tag for keywords.  Here you should add your selected keywords for your web pages.  However, it’s also important that each page has a unique set of keywords for their meta tag to get the most benefit from them.

3. Title

The title of your pages is something that search engines take into consideration.  Having a keyword driven title will definitely help your SEO efforts.  The most important thing to consider is search engines rate the relevancy of your title and links based on their syntax – going left to right.  That is to say, keywords in your title found at the beginning (to the left) will be given more weight than those at the end (towards the end).

Using MintTwist as an example, here are two titles:

- ‘MintTwist – Web Design London’

- ‘Web Design London – MintTwist’

In the first title, ‘MintTwist’ will be the most important keyword, whereas in the second title ‘Web Design London’ will be more important.  It is up to you whether you want to put more focus on your brand name or your services although from a search traffic perspective, targeting services and associated keywords will be more beneficial.

4. URLs

Lastly, something that is very important to consider is URLs and URL structure.  All URLs need to be friendly – that is to say, reflective of the content.  Having a URL like http://www.minttwist.com/web-design-london is much better than http://www.minttwist.com/services/web/service-area:12a/service-type:1.  Search engines will markdown the second URL but like the first URL – hopefully for obvious reasons!

One important thing to stress is that everything should be relevant and related.  For any individual page, URLs, titles, headers, on page content and keywords all need to be the same.  Having a URL that ends in ‘web-design-london’ but keywords that are about ‘web marketing in Spain’ will get you marked down for irrelevancy in search engine algorithms.  More specifically, they won’t understand what your page is about and are more likely to not rank it for anything.

Once your website has been fully optimised, the next step is to build links.  You can do this in numerous ways and it will hopefully happen naturally over time as people link to your website for X number of reasons.  However you can also build links manually.  Ways to do this include article writing, guest blogging and social media networking.  However, this takes up the most amount of time and you may want to outsource it to a web marketing agency.

MintTwist is one of London’s leading web design and web marketing agencies.  Please contact us if you would like a quote on any SEO campaigns and we would be happy to answer any questions.

Other links:

• SEO North London
• SEO South London
• SEO East London
• SEO West London

Web design is quite a fast moving industry. Web design companies are constantly striving to improve their abilities and their knowledge in an effort to get ahead of the competition. This requires a web design company to pay close attention to what the likes of Google are doing.

The pace of life today is incredible. Google has obviously picked up on this because loading speed is now part of the Google algorithm. Some websites contain huge amounts of data and others not very much, and both present challenges. For new websites your web design company should be aware of the latest Google algorithm and ensure the site is developed with it in mind.

Images are everywhere on websites and they are prime example of loading items which could hamper your site. It is imperative that the image file size is kept to a minimum and that they are ideally formatted in JPEG and GIF.

Another challenge for web designers and developers is to make sure the site being built is suitable for the various screen resolutions available today. The can range from 640 x 480 to 1024 x 768 and as technology improves resolutions are only going to get bigger and better.

There is also growing demand for websites to work with mobile devices such as the Apple iPad or Samsung’s Galaxy Tablet. Web designers are quite used to having to perform cross browser testing. Cross platform testing is certainly a growing aspect of web design and represents significant opportunities for various businesses.

The style of websites has changed so much in recent years. At first the web was all about bright flashy bold colours and fonts to grab the eye. Now, the best sites are those which use neutral colours and fonts which are easy on the eye and easy to use. Take Google, the world’s most successful site, notice anything?

Visit www.voyanacruise.com

The first thing you can do is cut down the number of firms to choose from. If you were to include every single web design company it would take a very long time. Companies with experience, a solid track record and a good portfolio should be top of the list. It is also good to try and work with a web design company that has done work for other businesses in your business sector because the designers and developers will have an even better understanding.

The portfolio of a web design company is their signature. It is a demonstration of what the company is capable of and also gives you the opportunity to contact them and find out what their opinion of the web design company is. Ideally a web design company will have page for testimonials with glowing references, but this is not always the case.

It is also important to have an understanding of the technology. Building websites is a technical operation which requires the work of highly skilled individuals. The portfolio of the web design company will give an indication of how advanced they are. If the web designer’s website looks like it was built in 1995 it is probably best to avoid them.

Budget is always a concern for businesses. Keeping within budget is absolutely critical to businesses, particularly new ones. If you feel you are being well and truly overcharged, meet with a competitor and see if they prices changes. Don’t be afraid to negotiate because often web design companies will be somewhat flexible.

Finally, if you want to have a website which continues to exist and function for several years, it is important to stick with the same web design firm as the company who builds your site will have the best knowledge of your business and over time their knowledge of your business and how you work will improve allowing them to provide a better service into the future.

Writing quality content is arguably the best thing you can do for your search engine optimisation goals.  You can not underestimate the importance of having great, useful content to offer.  The Internet is all about information and resources.  Aside from the social and entertainments aspects, the Internet is mostly used as a news and information source.  Thus, the majority of searches on search engines are normally for answers or finding out about a specific thing.  If you can offer genuine, helpful and useful content then visitor numbers will increase naturally.

This is also true of guess blogging.  Blogs are personal things – a direct point of communication between the writer and the reader.  Therefore, most bloggers care personally about their blogs.  They pride themselves on their content and spend a lot of time writing it as well.  You should make the same amount of effort, if not, when writing a guest blog.  They’re a great way to reach potential new readers/visitors and you wouldn’t want their first impression of you to be a negative one.

In the next part of this article series we will look about how to get a guest blog post published.

1. Plan Ahead

Planning is key for all decisions but you need to determine your goals for your social media campaign.  Ask yourself why you should become involved with social media?  Is it to build brand awareness?  Open up customer relationships?  Or are you trying to promote a new service or a special offer?  Knowing the answers to these questions will mean you can better focus your efforts meaning you get maximum efficiency.

2. What Resources Do You Have?

Social media is an umbrella term for a lot of different activities which require a lot of different skill sets.  Who is going to maintain the conversations that arise from your social media efforts?  Will it be you or someone else?  Can anyone in the team afford to devote the time to sustaining a social media campaign?  One of the most important aspects of social media is communication.  Setting up a great campaign and then keeping up with the conversation from it will mean that it’ll inevitably fail.

3. Who Are You Talking To?

The Internet is a huge place and there are online communities for everything.  Furthermore, these communities all act in different ways and spend their time doing different things.  Knowing who your target audience is, what they enjoy doing online and genuinely being able to engage with them will make all the difference.

4. Create Epic Content

This is definitely the most important aspect of all social media interaction.  Offering your customers and potential customers something interesting, engaging and worth sharing will mean they keep coming back for more and also send your content on to their friends.

5. Integrate Resources

Good social media marketing campaigns utilize lots of resources.  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and so much more.  Using them to cross-promote your campaign will mean greater traction and more interaction.

6. Schedule Social Media

As mentioned earlier, the nature social media requires you to continually interact with other people in order to get the most of your campaign.  This can be hard to sustain if you have a million other things to do.  Create a schedule of when to check Twitter or when to post Facebook updates.  Set aside 5 minutes in the morning, at lunch and before you leave to monitor your campaign and sustain the conversation.  You’ll gradually get into the habit and it’ll become second nature like checking your emails.

7. Devote Your Time Properly

So much about social media is being a genuine contributor – endless self-promotional will get you nowhere fast.  Devote approximately 80% of your time to communicating without self-promotional and then the rest of the time feel free to plug yourself.

8. Quality Over Quantity

It can be tempted to judge the success of a social media campaign purely on the numbers.  However, quality is more important than social media.  Having an engaged audience of 1,000 people is better than 5,000 people who do not engage with you at all.

9. Allow Your Audience To Lead The Communication

It can be tempting to want micromanage your social media campaign, unfortunately this is practically impossible and is also not something to be encouraged.  The nature of the Internet means that it’s difficult to control what people will say about you.  The advent of blogs and micro-blogging means it’s now easier than ever for people to say what is on their mind.  Many companies will want to limit any negative conversations about their brand which is understandable.  However, instead of trying to silence them – engage with them to learn from any criticism.  This will is great for public relations.  As the old saying goes, the only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity.

10. Learn and Refine

As with everything, you can always learn more.  Continually devote time to learning new tactics and ways to engage with people.  You can then go back and refine your campaign strategies and continually grow.

Social media shouldn’t be something to fear.  Learning to interact with online communities can appear daunting but it is something that will ultimately improve customer relations, boost brand exposure and can be enjoying to do.  What is becoming clear is that companies need to embrace the online social phenomenon and those that fight it are quickly getting left behind and have to play catch up.

The region has seen huge investment over the last two decades and created an oasis in the desert. Cities such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi have emerged and are now key drivers for the region. The region is home to the offices of numerous multinational companies and corporations. In addition to this there is very healthy growth of small to medium sized business.

In today’s business world there is no doubting the importance of a web presence and the UAE is no exception. The problem is that the vast majority of web development firms in the UAE do not have the same level of knowledge or experience as professionals in the West.

Internet usage is growing at a rapid rate in the UAE amongst the 4 million or so people that live there. Companies are investing millions of dollars in the region and the internet is a vital communications tool which is only growing in use and importance. Choosing the right web design company to work with can be difficult but below are some useful hints to help with that difficult decision.

Check the Portfolio – For web design companies having a portfolio is a simple must have. It gives a web design company the chance to show off their work and you can quickly gauge what kinds of styles are possible. However, be warned because seeing them in a gallery is not enough. It is vital that the functionality of these is thoroughly checked.

Talk to the owner of the business – Before any deal is made it is essential that you meet with the director of the web design company. This gives you an opportunity to test their knowledge and gives you an opportunity to talk about their previous and future projects and get contact details for referrals.

The kitchen sink – The very best web design companies will do more than just develop a website. The best firms will begin with a free consultation which will be based on a very high level view of your business and who it is targeting or which markets are most relevant. It is also common to discuss the design and development process used by the web design company because this will help in organising time scales.

Following on from this the Dubai web design company should be able to demonstrate their skill in keyword research, content management, digital graphic design, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and web marketing. If your web design company can fulfil all of this then you are speaking to the right people.

The people – Knowing that there is a team of dedicated professionals with specialist skills, working on your behalf is hugely important and can give you a lot of confidence in the web design company you are working with.

The vibe – Finally, the design company you choose to work with has to feel right. The communication needs to be friendly but professional and constructive. In other words you must be able to question the design company and you should expect good answers in return. Companies who don’t listen to their clients inevitably let them down so if you are ignored head somewhere else.

2)      Ensure its well linked up

3)      Less is more

4)      300 words bare minimum

5)      Make the headline snappy

6)      Be passionate

7)      Fine tuning

8)      Keep it easy on the eye

9)      Be consistent with your style

10)   Get those keywords in

1) Form an opinion

Blogs are enjoyed by so many because people enjoy reading about others opinions. A blog is written by an individual to share their thoughts on a matter and form and opinion. People like opinion because we all form our own opinion on matters and enjoy comparing it to others.

2) Ensure its well linked up

A blog post should not be one link after the other. Overloading it with links is off-putting so choose appropriate words at appropriate intervals. If you want a link to your services or products page make sure the word which will link to that page is related.

3) Less is more

Do not get sidetracked. It is easy to start typing away and forget what the core point of the blog is.

4) 3 minutes

The longer the post the more the reader has opportunity to lose interest.

5) Make the headline snappy

Often the hardest part of a blog, try to condense your argument into a few words. The tabloids have mastered the art.

6) Passion

People like passion and it is easy to pick up on. The most successful bloggers are incredibly passionate about what they write about. Controlled passion is the key.

7) Fine tuning

When you have written your blog read it again, and then again. Try to find any mistakes and ways to improve the structure, the words and the tone. The first draft is never perfect.

Easy on the eye

Ensure that the blog does not contain huge paragraphs and endless sentences. The font needs to be easy to read, so not too small or too big.

9) Be consistent

Readers enjoy consistency because people like to know what to expect. That’s why so many people have favourite writers. If you read a book and enjoy it is quite usual to buy another book theirs.

10) Get those keywords in

Try to put yourself in the reader’s shoes. What keywords would people use to search for your blog post? Include as many of them in the body as possible and try to keep them as natural as possible.

Cloud computing refers to anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet and encompasses any subscription-based or pay-by-use service that, in real time, extends IT’s existing capabilities.

A clear benefit of this provision is the inevitable reduced cost incurred by any organisation.  The provision is not owned, with any resources being consumed as a service.  The company only pays for what is used as a utility, therefore avoiding capital expenditure.  According to New York City’s Mayor, “Through our partnership with Microsoft, we’ve found ways to offer our employees Microsoft’s newest computing tools while reducing costs to taxpayers.

By capitalizing on the city’s buying power, consolidating dozens of separate city agency license agreements into a single one, and paying for software based on use, we’ll save $50 million over the next five years.”

Until now, New York City’s agencies each purchased software individually, comprising more than 40 separate license agreements and even more maintenance and support contracts. With the new cloud agreement, all of the city’s software and services will be under one unified agreement, saving money and eliminating confusion.

Organisations also benefit from increased storage capacity as compared with that available on private computer systems.  With a phenomenal growth in data quantities, companies are under pressure to store and protect not only new data, but older existing data that is kept ‘just-in-case’ to protect against any future difficulties.  With this storage requirement comes additional costs associated with the greater need to manage and protect the data.  Cloud computing provides a cost-effective solution for this ongoing problem.

With the continued advances in technology and ever changing needs of organisations, cloud services ensure that the most up-to-date software is available to companies.  Similarly, the evolving nature of such provision ensures that companies are offered greater flexibility in how they access services and the many different combinations of services that may be required.

Possibly the most significant benefit arising from this shift in technology is the ability to access information from anywhere, resulting in greater mobility for employees.  In the case of New York particularly, this benefit is exemplified by the fact that many of the city’s workers are not office-based and so will have improved access to services with resulting improvements in communication between agencies.

Despite the significant benefits associated with the cloud computing revolution, there is also concern surrounding cloud computing and its attendant security risks.  The main concerns about cloud computing are security and privacy as data inside the ‘cloud’ is outside a company’s firewall and that brings with it an intrinsic threat of risk.  With an increase in hacking attempts, companies need to implement stringent security measures such as proven cryptographic methods to authenticate users.

This security risk extends beyond data storage to web development.  It is evident that an unsecure server is bad for search engine optimisation and for a company’s website.  As identified by an SEO London company, a lack of security in the cloud can result in the loss of search engine rankings.

As part of the ever growing and evolving IT industry, we must be open to advances in technology even if we maintain some reservations about potential security issues or associated concerns.  A spokesperson from a London web design company recognises the potential for cloud computing and the advances in technology in our every day lives.  “As web designers we frequently find ourselves caught up in the everyday workings of the internet”.  Cloud computing may very well be the new technology to drastically change the web design market but ultimately only time will tell.

It is wise for all companies to recognise the benefits of outsourcing for the continued progress of their business.  For the web design company, self-contained projects are easy to outsource and reap numerous benefits.  This type of organisation can help managers to set priorities more clearly and focus on core projects, which thus improves productivity.

Outsourcing converts fixed costs into variable costs and therefore releases capital for investment elsewhere in the business.  In this way it is possible to avoid large expenditures.  Inevitably, labour costs are reduced.  Hiring and training staff for short-term projects can be expensive while using temporary workers is often ineffective.  Therefore, with specific projects outsourced, human resources can be focused where most needed within the business.

The use of outsourced agencies enables new projects to begin quickly, without the need to commit weeks or even months for preparation and setting up.  Companies see an increase in productivity and gain access to a broad range of services which place businesses on a level playing field with other, possibly larger, companies.

Conversely, there are costs associated with outsourcing project work that impact on more than just financial growth.  The greater number of outsourced projects, the more potential for communication difficulties between the outsource provider, the company and the client.  More specifically, the field of website design necessitates ongoing dialogue with the client in order to meet expectations whilst achieving maximum results.  It is far easier to manage the client relationship and achieve consistent service levels without the introduction of a third party.

It is always prudent to keep in mind that, while functions can be outsourced with each project, accountability cannot.  Web design companies, such as MintTwist, deal with sensitive data for each client that must be managed carefully.  While it is possible to identify and outsource provider’s portfolio of work, it is more difficult to assess its ethical conduct and personnel practices.  Such issues can be easily managed internally within the ethos of the organisation and under direct managerial control.

With a long-term perspective it can be an excellent decision to invest in training for staff in order to achieve a consistency in output for the company.  Whether it be skills related to website design, sales, marketing or SEO, London web design companies require employees to have the current knowledge base and associated skill set to contend with the competitive market.  The ongoing use of outsourcing does not allow for the development of high level functioning internally.  With competitively high service levels and excellent client relationships, MintTwist determines that the costs of outsourcing project work outweigh the benefits for the company.  Outsourcing introduces an unknown quantity for the web design company, where projects are in fact better managed in-house.

Yes it’s true! MintTwist is offering the finest Champagne (FREE) for each and every successful referral you provide.

How to get my FREE Champagne?

It couldn’t be more simple.  Send us a quick email with the details of the business you are referring, including the contact you would like us to approach, and we will do the rest.  Our experienced sales team will get in touch with the business, and if they decide to use one of our Web Design, Web Marketing or SEO services we will ship your your FREE Champagne.  Nothing to it!

How do I start?

Simply send us an email to info@minttwist.com with the contact details of your referral and let our sales team do the rest!

The product has been well received with registered users proving to be fans and advocates of the technology.

myhomepage - personal password management and bookmarking

The problem

However, the team now know that they are now entering what is potentially the hardest part of their start-up journey. Much of the seed investment has gone on developing the product. The team now have to focus their attention towards marketing the product, but with little budget remaining it needs to be a boot-strapped exercise.

Potential investors have set the ‘active user’ target at 50,000 before they will release the second round of investment capital that is so badly needed to move the business on to the next level.

The current number of active users is 5000 and with minimal marketing impact thus far, new user registrations are running at just 15 a-day which is 5% of the average number of new and unique visitors that arrive at the site each day, but the 300 new and unique visitors that arrive at the site each day has been static since inception.

To make matters even more challenging the business has been set the challenge of achieving 50,000 myhomepage users within just 6-months.

At the current conversion rate the site will only achieve another 2700 registered users – leaving the business to fall far short of the target that is so badly needed for further investment.

myhomepage – the second coming

The team have resolved to fight-back against their predicament.

Over the last few weeks the founders have re-focussed the direction of the business towards marketing the existing benefits of the product whilst making stinging cut-backs on overheads and product development.

Money has now been re-focussed on an all out attempt to raise the profile of the business, drive up the number of website visitors and haul-in the thousands of new registered users that will see the business win the investment that they need to survive.

myhomepage need YOU

In 6-months myhomepage must get 50,000 registered users. At current conversion rates this means getting one million new and unique visitors to the website over the next 180-days, this means an average of 5,500 users per day versus a current average of just 300.

There are two members of staff, one trained in SEO and the other is a content writer. There is no money for ad-words or any other form of paid for advertising.

There is scope for organic SEO, viral marketing, blog marketing, social network marketing and guerrilla marketing.

Which of these avenues should myhomepage pursue? What should the angle be? Are there any other avenues that myhomepage should follow?

Read more on the team of friends behind myhomepage.

For further information on myhomepage please contact Max Aengevelt (m.aengevelt@mhplive.com) or Massimo Agostinelli (m.agos@mhplive.com).

Massimo Agostinelli and Max Aengevelt, founders of myhomepage

Quite a feat when you see how far their business has come in such a short space of time.

In just one year myhomepage have a highly developed password management system that has a applied for patent and online bookmarking system that is up and running on the internet.

myhomepage are operating in an emerging and intriguing space and the business is already a leading player in a sector in which heavy weights such as Google and Microsoft have already expressed an interest.

Massimo and Max have been close friends since meeting at Hurtwood House boarding school in Surrey England and the friends both have business in their blood.  Both are heirs to well established and highly successful family businesses that make high value equity investments all over the world.

But family connections will not provide a free ride, the family businesses have provided the seed investment, but the founders are well aware that they are required to ensure the business is able to stand on its own two feet by winning further investment from external sources.

Massimo and Max set about achieving their vision for myhompage in early 2009 by assembling a team of exceptional technical experts, marketing guru’s and seasoned start-up executives. myhomepage aims to become a leading start page that allows user to save, manage and automatically log into their favourite bookmarks.

Key to the success so far has been the fact that the founders have extended the hand of friendship as well as camaraderie to all the members of their team.

The latest to join the team is the web agency MintTwist.

MintTwist were involved early on in the myhomepage story, having been contracted to improve the website design, look-and-feel and usability.

Having seen the tremendous value that exists within the business, MintTwist were delighted to agree on even closer ties, by becoming equity partners in the myhomepage business.

Massimo, Max, MintTwist and the rest of the fledgling team still have a long way to go. And they are under no illusions about the difficulties that lie ahead; first they must prove that there is traction in the product by significantly raising the number of active users that have taken up the myhomepage system.

In a latest twist to their story, the team have now been set the challenging goal of achieving 50,000 new users within just 6-months.  Read more on the myhomepage marketing challenge.

But as ever the two enigmatic founders are un-phased – “We will do it”, they say.

For further information on myhomepage please contact Max Aengevelt (m.aengevelt@mphlive.com) or Massimo Agostinelli (m.agos@mphlive.com)

The KPMG Retail Think Tank’s latest paper discusses web marketing techniques and concluded they form an integral part of UK retailing.

There are 10 million (and rising) Twitter users. China’s social network explosion is led by teen-targeted website QZone which has over 200 million registered users. The power of social networking starts to become clearer.

Social Network Marketing

Beyond being a channel for transactions, the internet has created a powerful marketing tool and a huge “shop window” for products, provides valuable brand-building opportunities, increased profile through third party tie-ups and most importantly a new, constantly evolving and different communication mechanism.

As the power of social networking and online communities’ increases, consumers are sharing thoughts and ideas, particularly within fast moving sectors such as fashion, meaning that we are seeing a fundamental shift in the way people shop and the consumer being increasingly complex for retailers to understand.

From the forward thinking retailer’s perspective, this environment presents a number of challenges. However, it is clear that if they are to stay ahead of the game they need to invest now, before the rest of the retailing world catches on. It’s a bit like the days of the Wild West – we are experiencing a massive grab for real estate – on the web. Those business that get their organic search engine optimisation (SEO) in sync with their blog and social network marketing will ensure that their websites are at the top of the search engines for the longer-term. There are short-term wins to be had, however, the real rewards will be reaped once generation Y start to get their wallets out.

At the moment it is forward thinking SME’s are leading the way. Make International sell bespoke Pottery Mugs and have used Social Media to enhance the power of their organic search engine optimisation work. Amazingly this work has pushed them onto to page 1 of Google for the keyword “pottery” in the whole world!

Plan-it Interiors, an Office Furniture supplier use Instant Messaging technology embedded on their website to provide live, real-time support to their customers.

Blindsinabox, a Dragons Den winning company backed by James Caan and Duncan Bannatyne make use of a YouTube channel to showcase their range of cheap blinds and blackout blinds as well as to provide useful instruction video’s for would-be consumers.

As well as these types of benefits, the strongest retailers will spot the less obvious opportunities to develop their offer through the customer insight the new data brings. A report by the Chief Marketing Officer Council found that of 500 senior marketeers surveyed, only 16 percent review online sources for comments, complaints and suggestions, despite almost 58 percent agreeing that online media – such as blogs, Twitter and other social networking outlets – have a major influence on customer expectations and buying attitudes.

So yes, the platforms might be changing but the fundamentals of retail remain unchanged – understanding the consumer and giving them what they want will always be the winning strategy.

Helen Dickinson is Head of Retail at KPMG

Green-Field is an elegant two column fluid-width WordPress theme. The header image has grass and what looks like some flowers all in shades of green. The left sidebar is shaded in two different types of grey color.

Download

Identity

Identity is a modern, 3-column, Widget ready, fully validated theme with black & white colors. I am sure this theme will suit most of the modern age bloggers. It is a fixed-width theme having good amount of space for blogging.

Download

Motion

Dark and colorful theme with sweet transparency characteristics. Drop-down categories menu, 2-column layout and widget-ready footer and sidebar.

Download

Skittlish is a fun, candy colored theme with seven color options. In addition, it has options for fluid or fixed widths. It is hatom supported and I put in some styling for an OpenID login form. It also supports the following plugins (included in the download). Make sure to check for the latest updates for these plugins.

• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• Similar Posts
• Live Comment Preview
• Gravatars
• Get Recent Comments
• OpenID plugin (included for the fun of it)

The above plugins do not have to be installed but their functions are supported.

Download

Stunning Press

Stunning Press is a free WordPress theme with options page and supports the post thumbnails. Suitable for any niche.

Features:

• Options Page
• Post Thumbnails
• Featured Video
• Featured Content
• 125×125 banners ready (easy editable from admin options)
• 468×60 Header Banner ready (easy editable from admin options)
• Two columns
• Gravatar on Comments
• Compatible with latest WordPress versions
• Widgets Ready
• SEO Optimized
• Fixed width
• Logo .PSD file and font files are included in theme folder.
• Tested and compatible with all major browsers: IE, FF, Safari

Admin Options Features:

• Featured Video
• Featured Content
• Logo image
• Twitter
• Header 468×60 pixels banner code
• 125×125 pixels banners
• Sidebar Ads/Banners
• Header and Footer script codes

Download

zBench

Simply, little images, designed and created by zwwooooo. It is a simply WordPress theme without any plugins needed (support plugin WP-PageNavi, WP Page Numbers, WP-PostViews, wp-utf8-excerpt, Related Posts of Simple Tags, WP-RecentComments), widgets, threaded-comments, Valid CSS3 & HTML.

Download

See below for our first release of free downloadable wordpress themes that can be installed in minutes.

Chocotheme 0.10

Simply, little images, designed and created by zwwooooo. It is a simply WordPress theme without any plugins needed (support plugin WP-PageNavi, WP Page Numbers, WP-PostViews, wp-utf8-excerpt, Related Posts of Simple Tags, WP-RecentComments), widgets, threaded-comments, Valid CSS3 & HTML

Download

DF Theme

A cool WordPress theme which is dependent on several plugins to work properly. The plugins are included with the download package. Make sure to follow the step by step installation instructions from the author’s website.

Features

• Compact WordPress theme.
• WordPress 2.3 Compatible
• Included Flickr and Gravatar Plugins

Installation Notes

• Unzip and replace wp-content in your WordPress installation directory.
• Activate the plugis in the wp-admin.
• Enter your flickr ID in the flickr plugin options to get it work.
• Choose the blank Gravatar – blank_gravatar.png - (wp-content\gravatars) in the gravatar settings.

Others

• Change the sidebar welcome note in sidebar.php
• Change df_logo.gif (theme URL / images) for custom logo
• Note: This theme is not widget ready

Download

Duneez

Features:

• Magazine Style
• Ajax/Widgets
• Content Slider

Download

There are people whose career is now dependant of Facebook. There is an ongoing battle between  independent application developers and development companies such as Zynga, around the world including web design London.

Zynga is a fantastic example of success with Facebook. After being in business for nearly three years the company has an annual revenue of over $100 million dollars and are responsible for some of the most popular applications on Facebook, specifically Farmville and Mafia Wars.

However, in the interest of fairness and objectivity, one could argue that Facebook is a bit like Marmite. You either love it or hate it. My fourteen year old niece for example will happily spend hour after hour on Facebook, whereas I will spend maybe five to ten minutes on it every day or two.

How many times have you been out with friends, maybe you had a few dozen too many drinks and made a complete fool of yourself, which would have been fine pre 2004 because even if your friends did have cameras and took pictures there was no website which could embarrass you in the same way Facebook can.

The influence of Facebook has also spread to businesses and careers. It is widely reported that employers will try and find your profile on Facebook, just to see if there is anything you perhaps forgot to mention. You have the ability share with the world absolutely everything that you like and dislike, your favourite music, food, movies and your political and religious affiliations.

For some the amount of information has gone too far. It is frequently said that knowledge is power, and if that is the case Facebook is all powerful because they have knowledge of over half a billion user. Some might ask what possible harm could come from all this knowledge?

Well a lot really. To begin with, companies will go to extreme lengths to gather data on customers and Facebook is a giant and rich database of customers. Since 2004 advertising has become increasingly significant for the company because it brings in revenue. With Facebook companies can set up highly targeted adverts, so one could argue that ad least users aren’t bombarded with random advertising. By localizing the site Facebook is sending out a strong message of willingness to improve their service which is encouraging.

There is also a much darker site to data which was demonstrated during World War 2. In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, as the Nazis grip spread to Poland, France, Holland and Belgium the census’ of the countries were used to hunt down Jews and other political enemies. Indeed this is a somewhat extreme example of the dark side of data but it did happen and does show how information can be used in the worst possible way.

String delimiting

This is a very cool technique that you can use for a wide variety of things, the one we will be talking about is how to use it for displaying different features for a product on an e-commerce website.

Let’s say you have a nice simple e-commerce website, you Login, you go to add a product, let’s say the fields are:

Title/Description/Features and Price

On your website you want all your features to display as a list, yet you don’t want to have to code it up and set a limit to how many features you can have, so what can you do?

Break up your string! When adding features separate them using some character that is likely never to be used in describing your feature… i.e (; (a semicolon)).

So the content in your features textarea will look like this:

cool; shiny; well worth the cash; attracts the ladies;

How do we get this to display as a list item on our product detail page? easy follow the steps below.

1- Set up a new string variable to store the features – On your code that displays the product features you will have to do the following; In this example we will assume this is coming out of a database.

$your_string = $row['your_product_features_field'];

2- Use the explode function – this function breaks your string up and inserts each value as a value in an array.

$your_string_array = explode(';', $your_string);

3- Create a loop – Loop through your array and put each value of the array into li’s

foreach($your_string_array as $product_feature){

$feature_list .= "<li>".$product_feature."</li>";

}

4- use your new feature list variable.

That was easy wasn’t it?

This is the full snippet of the code:

$your_string = $row['your_product_features_field'];

$your_string_array = explode(';', $your_string);

foreach($your_string_array as $product_feature){

$feature_list .= "<li>".$product_feature."</li>";

}

If you have any questions just ask and i will be happy to help. Long live web design london!

Living in London you really do get a sense of this shrinking planet we share. Having been born and raised in this remarkable city I consider it a genuine privilege. The city has so much history, energy, culture, style and beauty it is impossible not to fall in love with it.

There have been many famous quotes about London but one has always stood out for me. The English poet Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) once said “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Putting to one side my bias and instead thinking more impartially, for me to say that London is perfect would be a lie. There is no such thing as perfection. However the same can be said about all major cities, they all have their problems.

What I find most amazing about London is the richness of culture and the variety of nationalities, which you don’t have to go far to see examples of. The workforce at MintTwist itself is evidence of a small world and multi-culturist society.

• Eric our SEO guru has Kenyan parents and moved to the UK at a young age.
• Gabriel, who works on web marketing, is from Argentina.
• One of our developers, Julien is half French, half English.
• Andre our senior developer is half Portuguese and half Angolan.
• Mustafa, our project manager is Turkish Cypriot.
• Lee our head designer is a quarter Italian, three quarters English.
• Alexis, one of MintTwist’s directors is half Greek Cypriot and half English.
• Our other director, Elliott, and without doubt the most interesting blend of nationalities, is one quarter Spanish, one quarter Jamaican and half English.

As for myself, I have a Croatian mother and my father’s family immigrated to the UK from Poland over a hundred years ago.

More than anything, what this demonstrates is that the movement of people is a fundamental part of the development of mankind. Ever since humans evolved into bipedal creatures it has been in our genes to explore and relocate to better places. Without it Columbus wouldn’t have discovered America, the Vikings wouldn’t have come to Britain and the British would be much worse off and a more crowded place because we wouldn’t have Australia to send criminals to.

Only joking!

Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses to contain no Latin characters, which their president (Rod Beckstrom) has described as “historic”.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called “country codes” written in Arabic scripts.

This move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Thai, Tamil, and Chinese.

More than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

Icann has said that the new domains are available for use now but did admit that there is still some work to do before it is perfected and correctly working for everyone. They may be formalities but hopefully there will be so major delay or setback.

Teething

The introduction of the first web names using so-called country code top level domains (CCTLDs) is the culmination of several years of work by the organisation.

Whereas before websites could use some non-Latin letters, the country codes as .cn for China had to be written in Latin script. The historic change means that web addresses can be completely written in native characters.

Before you get too excited, Icann has warned that the internationalised domain names (IDNs) will not work on all PC’s immediately. Why exactly is unclear but most likely is that the service will be phased in gradually. By doing so the process is u much easier task to manage.

According to Icaan, “You may see a mangled string of letters and numbers, and perhaps some percent signs or a couple of “xn--”s mixed into the address bar,” said Mr Davies. “Or it may not work at all.”

Previously, Icann has said that people would have to update the software on their computers to view the domains.

“Computers never come with the complete set of fonts that will allow it to show every possible IDN in the world. Often this is fixed by downloading additional language packs for the missing languages, or specifically finding and installing fonts that support the wanted languages.”

Global Access

When Icann first announced its plans for non-Latin web names it said it was the “biggest change” to the net “since it was invented 40 years ago”.

Perhaps this should have been rephrased as “arguably the biggest change”, especially when you consider that it is yet to be perfected. Over time, this will no doubt grow and become a massive part of the internet but it has a way to go yet.

Mr Beckstrom has quite rightly said that “Over half the internet users around the world don’t use a Latin-based script as their native language, “IDNs are about making the internet more global and accessible for everyone.”

Ask a life-long Brooklynite if he has an accent and you’re likely to get this rapid-fire response: fuhgeddaboudit! Ask a typical European what that means, and you’re likely to get a befuddled look and silence.

That’s why a London-based translation agency is looking for people to help translate Brooklynese.

Today Translations has posted an ad on craigslist seeking speakers of “‘Brooklyn English,’ with good knowledge of accent, slang, nuances” to help foreigners who “find it an unexpected challenge.”

The freelance gig pays up to $210 a day. It’s open to anyone who can decipher such Brooklynisms as “not for nothin,’” “cawfee” and “whatayagonna do?”

“We’re looking for someone who loves the dialect and is able to understand someone who has the heaviest Brooklyn accent,” said Mick Thorburn, spokesman for Today Translations.

Along a stretch of Carroll Gardens dotted with Italian businesses, the job offer drew a smorgasbord of reactions.

Vinny Mastellone, owner of Mastellone’s Italian Market on Court St., said he never has a problem tawkin’ to the tourists who stream into his shop.

“I have fun with them,” Mastellone, 49, said.

The job posting drew laughter from Joanny D’Amico, who runs D’Amico’s coffee shop near Degraw St. She admitted that the dialect spoken in the neighborhood can sound like a foreign language to outsiders.

“We don’t speak in full sentences,” D’Amico said. “We kind of mush it all together.”

Danny Calcaterra, a retired longshoreman from Bay Ridge, said the problem cuts both ways.

“I have a tenant from England and I can’t understand a f—–g word he says,” Calcaterra said, noting that whenever he leaves Brooklyn, nobody seems to understand him.

“I was in Britain, I had trouble. I was in St. Martin, I had trouble. Same thing in Vegas,” added Calcaterra. “I almost got locked up in Canada. You say one thing. They don’t understand you. They lock you up.”

Brooklynese is not entirely unique, experts say.

The tendency among Brooklyn stalwarts to drop an “r” at the end of a word as in “deah,” for instance, is shared by the British.

“There’s no linguistic reason why a New York City accent should be more difficult to understand for a person overseas,” said Kara Becker, a doctoral candidate at New York University who has studied city accents.

Augie Giglio, a retired electrician who moved to Brooklyn from Italy when he was a kid, said he could relate to foreigners who need help with the accent.

“Sometimes, you get high-class Italians, their dialect is so far beyond me,” Giglio, 60, said, pausing. “Fuhgeddaboudit!”

On 21^st April, HSBC Middle East bank sent a promotional email to 400 ‘Premier’ customers (whose qualification criterion is to maintain at least $95,000 in their accounts). Unfortunately, HSBC revealed all these customers’ names and email addresses to their peers by accidentally using the generic “To” function for this communication, rather than a personalised and confidential addressing technique. Understandably, a number of HSBC customers have publicly expressed their outrage and some have claimed that hackers have subsequently tried to access their email accounts.

This story is spreading fast across the local media and HSBC are clearly embarrassed and very much on the back foot. Whilst they have swiftly and profusely apologised, also emphasising that no customers’ bank account security has been compromised, it is too late to prevent any resulting damage to the bank’s reputation regarding standards of care and confidentiality.

Tim Mace of Tenzing a href=”http://www.tenzingmiddleeast.com/index.html”>Marketing Consultancy believes that every brand – not only banks – needs to earn and maintain a brand image focused on trust to retain existing customers and to attract new ones. Trust is justifiably the most sought-after emotional attribute and there is no short-cut to gaining customer confidence.

Reputation-dependent companies like HSBC constantly measure a range of customer perception factors, which do not generally fluctuate much in the short-term, and HSBC will be hoping not to see a negative movement in their UAE stats for April or May and that this incident is swiftly forgotten by any of their customers and prospects who read this story or heard it from a friend.

However, disgruntled customers have long memories and Tenzing wonders what HSBC would (hypothetically) be prepared to pay to turn back the clock to the moment just before that fateful email was sent to 400 of its top customers!

Tenzing Marketing Consultancy – based in Dubai – is helping brands to reach new heights.

Now, the hot issue for local commentators is whether these visitors represent genuine consumer demand or whether they are mostly sightseers and that Mirdif City Centre will become a deserted shell during the summer months.

It is rumoured that Emaar’s massive Dubai Mall has struggled to establish a solid purchasing footfall during its first year and that its amazing aquarium has actually been the big attraction, so is there room for yet another mega-mall in Dubai?

Tim Mace of Tenzing Marketing Consultancy thinks MAF has got it right.

“Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable for a 400+ outlet super-mall to be located in the Mirdif wilderness. However, this locality has mushroomed in population and infrastructure and the Emirates Highway has rendered Mirdif City Centre easily accessible to a catchment stretching from Sharjah to the Green Community at Jebel Ali.

Mirdif City Centre offers a sky-diving attraction which, on the face of it, is less of a pull than exotic reef-life or indeed Mall of the Emirates’ spectacular indoor ski slope, so gimmicks will probably not be enough to win the hearts and minds of the fickle Dubai public.”

However, MAF has a history of planning and executing major mall developments at the right time and in the right locations and has clearly taken these factors into consideration. Their track record in Dubai is difficult to fault; Deira City Centre, now 15 years old, is still fully tenanted and gridlocked with customers at most times of every day and night, whilst Mall of the Emirates is firmly established as the must-shop venue for residents within a 10-15km radius – not to mention tourists and visitors from Abu Dhabi.

Alongside the obligatory Carrefour store, the retail mix of Mirdif City Centre comprises many new brands to the Gulf, which will probably either make or break its longer-term mass appeal. Brand Management of the Mirdif City Centre itself will also be important. Importantly though, the selection of retail brands and food outlets seems to be strong and with this comes the promise of more leading international brands following suit. Last but not least, the mall car park connects seamlessly with the surrounding road system.

We at Tenzing are confident that the future is bright for Mirdif City Centre.

Tenzing Marketing Consultancy – based in Dubai – is helping brands to reach new heights.

Writing articles for your blog might feel like a big task when you first start your blog.

You want them to be perfect and to convey exactly what your reader is looking for. Well first off let me tell you that there is no perfect. I know you want to get it right, to be professional and to gain the admiration of your followers but it’s so more important in blogging to be REAL than to be PERFECT.

Now that we have that out of the way I do have ten tips for you on how to write great articles for your blog.

Here they are and in no particular order:

10. Give Value – It’s important to remember that most people who read articles are looking for information. Make sure you give value first, provide information and then lead them towards the next step (a sale, signup, etc).

9. Give Action Oriented Information – Again, people are looking for information and action steps they can take to reach their goal.

8. Touch on Hot Topics – If there are hot topics in your niche make sure you touch on them and address them. Weighing in with your opinion will give you more personality and will attract people to you. Even people who disagree will still respect your opinions.

7. Use Bullet Points or Lists – Don’t write big clumps of text that are hard to read. Even if people are really interested in your topic if the post is hard to read they’ll go somewhere else to find the information.

6. Use Keywords – Do your research! Find out what people in your target market are looking for and provide it to them through your article.

5. Use sub-headings – Using sub-headings throughout your article will break up the text and make it easy to read. Read-ability is extremely important on the internet while you may online have someone’s attention for seconds. It’s your job to keep that attention with great sub-headlines that pull them through your article.

4. Know Yourself – When you write from your own perspective people can relate. Don’t try to project something that’s not you because it will only always appear fake.

3. Know Your Market – The better you know your market the better you can write to them. Get to know the details of your market. Are they male or female? What age are they? Where do they work? What do they do for fun? The more you know, the better you write and relate.

2. Know Your Point – Have a point in every article and keep on point. If you find yourself breaking off into another topic stop and save that for another article.

1. Know Your Purpose – Every article should have a purpose on your blog. Is it to build readership, to get them to sign up to your newsletter or to sell something? Know your purpose and keep on point.

There you have the top ten basic tips for writing an *almost* perfect article. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Just start writing and you’ll get better every single time you put your fingers on that keyboard!

Today the internet is a somewhat different story. Compare the internet now to ten years ago. The first thing that might come to mind is having to dial up using your 56k modem and wait an eternity for any kind of progress. Nowadays you are either jumping on a wireless network or perhaps in an office they may be using Ethernet connections. With both, getting online takes a second.

However this is not what the internet is about. The connections speeds were inevitably going to improve, and will continue to do so. Now internet providers in the UK are offering fibre optic internet connection which will give users lightning fast speeds. In addition to this more people are using the internet as their primary medium for entertainment and broadcasters are making more content available online, such as the BBC’s iPlayer or 4OD.

Since the bubble burst a lot has been learnt. The capability and dynamism of websites has improved dramatically and has lead to certain websites becoming synonymous with the generation of today. Sites like FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, to name a few, are more than websites now, they are part of many people’s lives, daily routine, and consciousness which has altered the way we interact with each other.

To imply this is how everyone feels about FaceBook wouldn’t be accurate but ‘generation Z’ is growing up with the internet and their experience and expectations are very different to those of a decade ago. Kids and teenagers around the world are accessing the web and sites like FaceBook are in high demand from people around the world which includes many languages.

It was just over a year ago that FaceBook started localizing itself for the world. The company utilized outsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though volunteers aren’t the only people translating content, a year later, FaceBook has done an impressive job of going global.

Some recently reported key stats from FaceBook’s global expansion efforts include:

• 40 percent of FaceBook users are not using English.
• More than 70 percent of FaceBook users are outside the United States.
• It reaches more than 10 percent of the total national population in 26 countries.
• FaceBook is available in 43 languages and is in the process of being translated into another 60 languages.
• 25,000 volunteers helped translate FaceBook into Turkish last year, and there are now 9 million Turkish-language users signed up for FaceBook.

In conclusion, we have seen FaceBook recently overtake Google in the USA as the most popular website. Does this mean sites in other countries will be knocked of the pedestal? At this stage it is hard to say. In the UK the most popular website is Google, but not too far behind is FaceBook, which will continue to grow and chase. But this is not the optimum acid test for FaceBook; instead it will be to see how successful FaceBook are in non-English speaking countries by the year 2012.

At Today Translations, the licensed tranlsation agency, our linguists know there’s more to professional translation services than mere words. We are a specialist translation company, capable of providing anything from English to Arabic translation, to Russian to English, to French, to any language translation you could want – and much more!

The BBC is a publicly owned organisation, which means that the BBC website belongs to the people. As a result there is tremendous affinity and popularity for the site.

Although if you were to look at the site in 1997 you might be a little disappointed as you can see below.

BBC homepage 1997

This was a basic offering with two sections to the site. Over time it has grown to encompass a great deal more. However due to the organic way in which the website evolved and the old structure of the business, with dozens of small design teams working independently of each other, the site had a fairly schizophrenic nature once you delved into its depths.

About 2 years ago, after printing out the site onto what has now become jokingly known as the ‘Wall of Shame’ the BBC decided to embark on an ambitious project, called Global Visual Language 2.0, with the aim of unifying the visual and interaction design of bbc.co.uk and the mobile website.

The BBC created a new wider, centred page template to take advantage of wider screen resolutions and for the first time created an underlying grid. They rationalised the hundreds of different banner styles into a new global and local branding and navigation system.

The scores of different audio and video players were discontinued and they created a universal embedded media player. They also redesigned the homepage creating a visual style that began to ripple through the site and onto the mobile platform.

The BBC showed excellent mastery of ‘web 2.0’ which is an approach that has been adopted by many other businesses and organisations. However the BBC now believes it has served its purpose and it is time to move on.

They have set out to broaden their ambitions to create a design philosophy and world-class design standards that all designers across the business could adhere to. They want something distinctive and recognisable and they knew whatever was created needed to be truly cross-platform and that with simplified user journeys.

The BBC didn’t do it on all by themselves. Together with representatives from across the business, led by the project’s Creative Director, Ben Gammon, they formed a Global Design Working Group, and created a GVL Steering Group to help manage and direct the course of the project. The BBC also approached the industry to find a partner to co-create the styleguide: Neville Brody and his agency, Research Studios.

Over the last four months, they have spent countless hours and created countless iteration designs, components, mastheads, footers, polar maps, word documents, pdfs and grids… and this is all still a work in progress.

They are creating a design philosophy, or a set of values, to unite the user experience practitioners across the business and have settled on nine keywords which sum up what they’re about and what they’re trying to achieve:

Modern British
The BBC want to create a modern British design aesthetic, something vibrant and quirky that translates outside our national boundaries.

Current
It needs to feel current and reflect what’s happening in the UK right now, in real-time with links to the past – to a rich archive.

Authentic
Need to sound authentic and relevant, warm and human.

Compelling
The BBC engages the audiences with compelling storytelling with voice ranges from serious and authoritative through to witty and entertaining.

Distinctive
Standing out from the crowd, the BBC is bold and dramatic.

Pioneering
They pioneer design innovations that surprise and delight.

Joined-up
All services and platforms as one connected but deliver experiences that are sensitive to their context of use.

Universal
The services are open and accessible with simple, useful and intuitive interfaces.

Best
The BBC’s ambition is to be the best digital media brand in the world.

In doing this work they have begun to distil the essence of a new visual style. Taking inspiration from many sources to try and achieve “an underlying grid system that was flexible enough to enable many unique design variations whilst still feeling coherent and considered.”

The new grid is based on 31 sixteen pixel columns with two left hand columns that can be split into four, and one wider right hand column.

A key feature of the new GVL is a much more dramatic use of typography. As well as Gill Sans they have introduced big bold type in Helvetica or Arial and restricted variations in size so that we have much greater consistency across the site.

Below and on the left is an example of it all pulled together on a new story page, and examples of typography styling in promo drawers. It is focused on signposting and articulation; you can see the time stamping treatment and signposting for live content.

The BBC wanted to create something that is flexible enough to allow all the brands their full expression whilst uniting them into a coherent user experience.They also wanted to strip out any superfluous decoration and allow the content and imagery to shine through which we find exciting and refreshing

The final push is to finalise the masthead and footer. They are also looking at mobile, IPTV and social elements on the page (social bookmarking, share functionality, comments, ratings, reviews etc).

As to when exactly this will go live, it is hard to say. There will need to be a significant test phase because maintaining their status as a very reliable site is very important. But considering they are in the latter stages of the build it could be as soon as this summer, but we may have to wait until the winter. Whatever the case maybe we are looking forward to its arrival.

MintTwist – Web Design London – refreshing the web

The haze and aroma of fireworks has now subsided following the grand launch of the amazing 800 metre tall Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai.

The world’s tallest building is settling nicely into its new name after being known as Burj Dubai during more than five years in construction.

But is it a good idea for a brand to change its name at the moment of launch?

Dubai marketing consultancy Tenzing would say this is normally not a wise move. However, in this case (whatever the underlying reason) we feel that the long-term benefit of renaming the tower after the President of the collective nation will outweigh the short-term discontinuity in message – as well as the cost of replacing all the signage…

Dubai’s achievements and extrovert personality have long overshadowed the identities of its neighbouring nations and fellow Emirates, most notably Abu Dhabi – its senior sibling and the federal capital of the UAE – to the net detriment of clearly communicating their shared values and identity.

Abu Dhabi has taken more of the international limelight in recent times, with happenings like the acquisition of Manchester City and its new Formula One circuit, but an independently more boisterous Abu Dhabi brand will not help to resolve the jigsaw puzzle of competing Gulf identities for most foreigners.

The time has surely now arrived for the UAE to market itself as a coherent and highly functional entity, with the scale and diversity of economic activity to take a step closer to achieving genuine global respect.

The naming of the iconic Burj Khalifa building represents a significant (and tall) step in the right direction.

Tenzing Marketing Consultancy – based in Dubai – is helping brands to reach new heights.

Google and Microsoft are arguably two of the biggest companies in the world and they make money with our time and clicking mice. The price we as users pay is to have to put up with a few adverts on your screen, which is a small inconvenience for the vast majority of people, who are for the most part quite apathetic. The most important thing users want is a good service and for it to be free.

Have you ever considered the difficulty language can play in the world of business and politics? Consider the United Nations for a moment and the cost of translators and interpreters. If the United Nations wants to send all 196 of its members a memo it would take an age to do it each countries native language. As a result the six official languages of the United Nations, used in intergovernmental meetings and documents, are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. The United Nations Editorial Manual states that the standard for English language documents is British usage and Oxford spelling, the Chinese writing standard is Simplified Chinese.

These six different languages will make the organisation of the UN hard enough, but there are still so many languages out there. Perhaps it would be best if there was a machine on the internet that could translate any document from one language to another, which brings us back to the raging virtual battlefield. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all competing for that coveted title, best online translation machine.

There are however a couple of factors which will prevent anyone ever achieving the perfect online translation machine. The first and most important point which will remain part of language forever and what makes it so special is that it is constantly changing and evolving, as is the way we use language. Another key factor is that the smallest mistake can make the biggest difference. Grammar is the organisation of words and if the grammar is wrong the words don’t make sense.

To get a better understanding of the different translations machines research was carried out on Bing Translator, Google Translate and Yahoo’s Babel Fish. The same phrase was typed into each machine and the results were analysed for accuracy.

In conclusion the different translation engines had different results to one another and none were completely accurate. Each translation has its peculiarities, certainly, and this comparison isn’t intended to show that one machine translation service is better. What this demonstrates is that if you need something translated and you want it to be accurate and professional, you would be much wiser using a specialist translation agency.

At Today Translations, our linguists know there’s more to professional translation services than mere words. We are a specialist translation company, capable of providing anything from English to Arabic translation, to Russian to English, to French, to any language translation you could want – and much more!

You are probably thinking, hey i work in an office how does an office damage the environment? Well think about your office, break it down.

What does an office need?

1- Electricity
2- Paper

What byproducts does an office produce?

1- Paper waste
2- Other waste i.e. Food waste, plastic…

Starting to get the big picture?

So i am sure many of you are able to put two and two together, but for those of you who get a five out of that calculation let me break it down for you…

What can you do to be more eco friendly…

1- Turn off your computers at night.

What are they on for? Do they get any work done when you are not at the help?

2- Use environmentally friendly computers.

Less electricity used means that if we all do the same the consumer demand goes down meaning they don’t have to make as much electricity meaning less damage to the environment.

3- Turn off lights that are not in use.

I have worked in a few offices and a lot of the time there are lights on that no one is using, so this one is a no brainer.

4- Use less paper.

Have a memo to send out, use outlook, have your to-dos written out, use word or notepad or even better use BaseCamp to keep track of your tasks!

5- Take in your own food or get food wrapped in recycled materials

When you take in your own food you probably will be taking in your leftovers meaning less food waste at home as well, if you don’t really fancy leftovers you could always just buy food that comes wrapped in recycled materials.

6- Recycle, recycle, recycle

If you don’t have one set a recycle target and try and recycle as much as you can at your office!

Whether we believe it or not, We make a huge impact on our environment in nearly every sector, and we need to all look into whatever sector we are and try to do our best to make a positive impact rather than a negative one.

So start caring today!

“During my time on the Private Security Board, I became aware that approximately 50 percent of all private detective companies fail in their first year of business. These failures occur primarily because the new licensees have no idea what is required to succeed,” said John Chism, chairman of the state Private Security Board. “Programs like UNT’s will provide a sound footing for a new licensed private investigator to succeed and better serve the citizens of the state of Texas.”

UNT’s program will not only train participants in the theory and practice of private investigations, but will also cover the business side. Upon completion of the program, students will be able to launch their own private investigations businesses or work in a variety of fields such as insurance, law and business.

The program will be administrated by the Professional Development Institute at UNT, and will be offered in Dallas and in Houston. Dr. Scott Belshaw, UNT professor and former owner of a Houston-based private investigation firm, and Karen Hewitt, UNT alumna and co-founder of Hewitt & Cowden Investigations in Dallas, developed the program’s curriculum. They were committed to developing a program that was comparable to a four-year degree. Participants will be required to complete 12 courses, for a total of 220 hours of instruction. Upon completion, students will earn a certificate in professional private investigations.

“These students will have every advantage as they work toward becoming quality private investigators,” said Belshaw. “Our instructors will include professors, private investigators from the community and even former FBI agents.”

The Dallas program will begin on March 19 at the University of Dallas, and the Houston program will begin on March 26 at the University of St. Thomas. The program will be taught in an executive style with classes on Friday evenings and all day on Saturdays. The program lasts for approximately four and half months.

Conflict International provides professional private detectives in London and around the UK.

The evidence is being sought by celebrity publicist Max Clifford, who has started legal action seeking to prove that News of the World investigators unlawfully intercepted messages left on his mobile phone.

Jeremy Reed, Clifford’s barrister, told Mr Justice Norris in the high court that, according to a witness statement from an information commissioner investigator, unlawful requests from newspaper reporters to obtain information about “high-profile” individuals and their associates was “endemic”.

The case follows the Guardian’s revelation that Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire secretly paid £1m in damages to Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, and two other figures from the PFA to settle legal actions that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using a private detective to illegally hack into their mobile phone records.

Clifford, like Taylor, was one of five individuals named in the charges against Glenn Mulcaire, a private detective in London used by the tabloid who was jailed with the paper’s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, in 2007.

Clifford has made an application to see documents concerning News of the World reporters from the information commissioner, the watchdog responsible for protecting the public’s privacy.

The commissoner seized paperwork from Steve Whittamore, a private investigator who has been convicted of illegally accessing official and commercial databases. Whittamore had cultivated sources who extracted information from police computers, British Telecom, the DVLA, the Inland Revenue and others.

The paperwork shows that there were a total of 13,343 requests from 305 journalists including 27 journalists from the News of the World who paid Whittamore to obtain personal data. One NoW reporter made 130 requests, and another 118.

The information commissioner is prepared to release this paperwork to Clifford as he believes that the employment of illegal methods by the News of the World and other newspapers was widespread.

Today, the News of the World said: “This legal issue is coming up for hearing shortly. We are therefore unwilling to comment in any detail, other than to say that the relevant report from the information commissioner was published in 2006 and it referred to matters arising in 2002–2003.”

“For the record, the information commissioner’s report has nothing to do with voicemail accessing.”
It is understood that the News of the World will argue that the records obtained by the information commissioner are irrelevant and therefore should be kept under wraps.

A court ordered the release of documents from the information commissioner when Taylor sued. The Murdoch papers later paid him £700,000 in a confidential out-of-court settlement.

Last year, Clifford said he had been told by the police more than two years ago that his phone had been hacked. He told the Guardian: “I believed that this was a one-off, just two lads overstepping the mark. I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Now it is increasingly worrying that there could be an awful lot more.

Conflict International provides professional private detectives in London and around the UK.

Nadiya contracted a Dubai based marketing consultancy to develop a premium branding system and help take Nadiya into the FMCG retail sector.

They developed a brand story for their brand launch.  The Nadiya brand celebrates traditional Arabian culture and hospitality, with a contemporary twist.

Then they defined their brand experience for their brand launch – Nadiya hospitality is always the talk of the town.

Marketing Consultancy

Tenzing Marketing Consultancy then worked with them on Pack Design. The Nadiya logo conveys a stylish and relaxed mood and their elegantly designed packs promise tasty treats within.

Finally Tenzing worked with Nadiya to design and deploy a sustainable and cost effective adverstising campaign that still provides a strong return on investment. Nadiya advertising has always communicated the brand heritage and exclusivity.

Six years later, Nadiya is the leading retail brand in the Middle East, continues to thrive in servicing the Gulf’s five star hotels and corporate gifting sectors.

Tenzing Marketing Consultancy based in Dubai that work with small and medium sized companies to help their brands perform better.

I have outlined the most important ones to me for my processes, This list is not ordered by importance and by all means if you think i have missed out something you think is important give us a shout! Links to the software mentioned below…

1. Firebug

This little Firefox Addon has helped me in many ways, when you are trying to figure out why some div does something wrong or whatever, this helps you quickly locate your problem without having to press CTRL + U and search through your source code.

2. Eclipse PDT

This piece of open source software is the one and only piece of software PHP developers should use, this provides a full debugging system for PHP and a nice clean environment to code in that includes code colouring to seperate your classes from your functions so on and so forth, if you develop PHP and you have not heard of this or used it, go and get it now!!!!

3. Sequel Pro (MAC)

Sequel Pro is an excellent software package for managing MYSQL databases, it works extremely well and has a very atractive UI which is always a plus as this helps you work faster as you don’t need to scour the screen looking for that whatever your looking for.

4. Photoshop CS4

Whatever you need to do whether it is to create a graphic or a complete website visual, the power of Photoshop never ceases to amaze me, it’s versatility is what makes it one of the most widely used graphics editors amongst web designers today even ahead of fireworks which is specifically for web designers.

5. Filezilla

Simply the best FTP client out there, i am not even going to bother writing a description of why just get it and use it!!!

Firebug Firefox Addon
Eclipse PDT
Sequel Pro
Photoshop CS4
Filezilla

Middleport Pottery Factory

A charity led by the Prince of Wales has stepped in to try and save the UK’s last working Victorian pottery from closure.

For more than 100 years artisans have been turning out sought-after Burleigh porcelain pottery from the kilns of Middleport. But like other potteries in North Staffordshire, which was once the centre of the world’s ceramic industry, it has been hit by the economic downturn and competition from overseas.

This week creditors will consider an innovative rescue plan which it is hoped could safeguard the future of the works. The Prince’s Regeneration Trust, with the help of a substantial grant from English Heritage, has made an undisclosed offer to rescue the business and its Grade II-listed building.

Burleigh’s distinctive porcelain pottery blue cups and saucers are made in much the same way as they were when the works were built by its founders, William Leigh and Frederick Rathbone Burgess, on the banks of the Trent and Mersey Canal in 1889.

The trust, whose president is the Prince of Wales, made its bid last week to reassure the plant’s 40 workers in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, after fears were raised about its future.

Under the rescue plan the building will be restored and turned into a visitor attraction showcasing the region’s heritage, and the pottery will continue to operate as a business on the site. Creditors are due to meet on 22 February to discuss the offer.

She said the rescue plan would ensure that creditors got back 90 per cent of their money, as well as keeping vital craft skills alive and guaranteeing that 10,000 pottery moulds, some of which date back 150 years, remain in Britain rather than being sold off and shipped abroad. “We are absolutely delighted to have been able to put forward an offer which not only preserves this hugely significant building, but also the time-honoured techniques and crafts that have been used by generations of potters and might have been lost forever,” Ms Kerslake said.

Just as it was at the height of the British Empire, clay is still processed on the premises and pounded by the original steam-driven machinery, while much of the work is completed by hand.

At the height of its success in 1939, Burgess & Leigh, as it was then, employed 500 workers. The company had been a pioneer in improving the conditions of ceramic workers. It was one of the first potteries to install baths and basins for its employees, earning Middleport the title the “Model Pottery”.

MAKE International runs a successful internet store, specialising in designer porcelain pottery, china pottery and all sorts of other ceramics pottery.

The company will produce ranges of ceramic and crystal products, including a number of limited-edition Waterford, Wedgwood and Royal Doulton pieces.

A selection of the ceramics pottery will be produced in the UK, while selected Waterford Crystal items will be produced in the Republic of Ireland. The products will go on sale later this year.

Tenders for licensed merchandising opportunities, including ceramics and glassware, were held last year.

Charlie Wijeratna, London 2012 director of commercial negotiations, says, ‘It is fantastic to have WWRD involved. Its brands are iconic, incorporating the best of British and Irish design and tradition.’

MAKE International runs a successful internet store, specialising in designer porcelain pottery, china pottery and all sorts of other ceramics pottery.

If building a great blog was as simple as writing quality posts, we’d all be tied for number one on the Technorati Top 100 blog list. I’m not about to start my own ProBloggingRant.com web site, but I did want to start sharing tips that I’ve personally found valuable when building the traffic to the MintTwist Blog.

It’s possible that these tips have been shared before–perhaps they were lost among all of the “great content” on the web–but I’m pretty sure these will be fresh ideas. I initially thought I could fit half a dozen tips in a single blog post, but as I started writing, I realized that each tip easily fills a single post. So instead, I’ll start with Tip #1 and see what you think. Leave a comment if you’d like to see more tips in the future.

Tip 1: Your Blog Post Titles Have Two Audiences

You’ve no doubt read that you need to make your blog post titles “search engine friendly,” but doing so often kills the creativity and initial appeal of your writing. Instead of trying to appeal to your loyal readers and Google at the outset, approach the two difference audiences in separate stages.

Stage One – Your initial blog readers

Your initial audience is likely going to be those that have already subscribed to your blog’s RSS feed–or happen to check your blog every day. They want to be thrilled, excited, and given a reason to not only read your post, but also share and link to it.

When you first publish your blog post, follow this advice:

• Make your post title interesting – it could be that you ask a question, share a scoop, or offer a cryptic title that peeks your reader’s curiosity. I’ll often use a blog title that sounds like a scandal/scoop, but is really just a question. For example, “Microsoft Buying Yahoo?” I ran that headline last year–before Microsoft made its bid. It generated a lot of traffic then and even more so now.
• Keep it short and sweet – if you make your initial post title too long, you run the risk that you’ll either confuse a reader or give them so much information, tthere’s no need to read the post itself. Back to my example, “Microsoft Buying Yahoo?” leaves a lot of unanswered questions that just beg the reader to click through to view the entire post. If I had used “Rumors that Microsoft May Buy Yahoo, but No Confirmation Yet,” how many of you would have clicked through to read the entire post? Not many.
• Appeal to keyword scanners – When you read posts in your RSS reader, do you sometimes scan the titles looking for keywords that you know will interest you? Apple, Google, Wii, and Blue-Ray are all examples of keywords that might appeal to your specific audience. This is not the same as keywords for SEO–that comes later–at this stage, you’re simply looking to include words that will make your post stand out to your readers. Use popular keywords in your post titles and your post will have a greater chance of standing out among all of the other posts in your reader’s RSS aggregator.

In stage one, your goal is to appeal to the initial readers that will likely view the post on the day that you publish it. But what happens after your post is relegated to the archives? It’s unlikely someone will spend hours just wondering through your archived posts. Instead, they’ll likely discover your “great content” via one of the search engines. OK, only one search engine: Google.

With this in mind, you need to massage your post’s title so that it can go to work for you in Google’s search results.

Stage Two – Your Google readers

That cryptic, enticing post title you used to attract your initial readers isn’t going to cut-it when it comes to attracting Google search engine users. Sure, you want your post title to entice a click from the SERP (search engine results page) but if your post is sitting on page 10–and not page 1–it doesn’t matter how engaging your post title. In stage two, you need to give your post title the Google-juice it needs to make the first SERP.

• Add keywords to your title – you should have already included a relevant keyword that appeals to the human “keyword scanners.” Now that it’s Googleblot scanning your post title, it’s time to pump-up your keyword count. Now, don’t go overboard and add half a dozen keywords to your post titles–you want the title to remain targeted and enticing–but you should look for opportunities to include additional keywords. Compare this before, and after post title. Before: “Ten Ways to Avoid a Google Reputation Management Nightmare.” After: “Ten Ways to Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results.” Both are engaging, both convey the same meaning. Yet, the revised title removes keywords that are not likely to be Googled such as “avoid” and “nightmare,” while adding keywords that are searched often, such as “fix” and “remove negative results.”
• Change the word order – I always try to take into consideration my potential Google ranking, when writing my post titles. However, there are many times when I see my post sitting at #11 on Google, because the word order I used–while appealing to my initial audience–isn’t doing me any favors in the SERPs. So, like a good optimizer, I go back and change the word order so that the beneficial keywords are closer to the beginning of the title (which is where Google prefers to see them). Here’s a before: “26 Free Tools for Buzz Monitoring.” And after: “Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Buzz Tracking Tools.” (Notice I also added the keyword “buzz tracking” to the title).
• Optimize your TITLE – When you first publish your blog posts, you’ll likely want your TITLE (aka title tag) to match your actual post title. Once you start focusing on your Google audience, it might make sense to tweak your page TITLE so that it’s even more optimized than your post title (side note: most blog software will simply match your page TITLE to your post title). If you’re using WordPress, consider installing the SEO Title Tag plugin to do just that! I don’t use it on Marketing Pilgrim, but on other blogs, I’ve found it a great way to further optimize my TITLE–which is what is displayed in Google’s SERP.
• Don’t play with slugs – I’ll write more on the topic of page “slugs” (aka permalinks) but I’d be negligent if I didn’t warn here that, while you should change your post title, changing the actual page slug is to be avoided.

I hope you’ll find the above tactics to be fruitful in your quest to increase both initial, and Google-referred, visitors to your blog. I’ve got plenty more tips I can share, so let me know what you think and if you’d like to read more blog promotion tips.

Today Translations have taken a serious interest in the way language is used around the world and how it evolved to be so. When we recently learned that every 14 days a language dies we were shocked to say the least and even more devastated to hear that by 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth—many of them not yet recorded—may disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain.

By identifying language hotspots—the places on our planet with the most unique, poorly understood, or threatened indigenous languages—and documenting the languages and cultures within them we have a much better chance of saving this incredibly valuable knowledge.

Why Is It Important?

Language defines a culture, through the people who speak it and what it allows speakers to say. Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not translate precisely into another language. Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories, songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written forms. With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.

Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems—many still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts.

Studying various languages also increases our understanding of how humans communicate and store knowledge. Every time a language dies, we lose part of the picture of what our brains can do.

At Today Translations, our linguists know there’s more to professional translation services than mere words. We are a specialist translation company, capable of providing anything from English to Arabic translation, to Russian to English, to French, to any language translation you could want – and much more!

Web Design concepts for BEAD, a firm of architects in the UAE.  The Design Process being followed is based on the MintTwist Method.

1. Home Page

Home Page web design concept

2. Portfolio

Portfolio web design

3. Portfolio Drill Down

Portfolio Drill-down web design

4. Portfolio Drill Down (Open Image)

Portfolio Drill-down (Open image) web design

For comments, suggestions, questions or just to connect with the friendly web designer behind this work contact Lee Baillie.

Tags: web design london | marketing Dubai | brand consultancy Dubai

David Beckham can cross a football today just as well if not better then when he was at Manchester United. At United Beckham earned a fortune and become a legend winning just about every piece of silverware possible. He went to Spain enjoyed tremendous success under Fabio Capello at Real Madrid, and then went to America where it seems like things are going well for him. Apparently there was also some little tiff he had with Victoria about cheating on her which was quickly resolved and his public image has remained intact.

As for Ashley Cole he didn’t something most Londoners would advice against. He went from Arsenal to Chelsea, something that will never be forgiven by several thousands in the capital and many more around the world. That however wasn’t his biggest mistake. One night Ashley got drunk and cheated on his wife with a hairdresser. The reason this infuriated so many people is quite simple, he is married to quite possibly the prettiest thing that has ever or will ever come out of Newcastle. Quite frankly Ashley Cole is the luckiest man in the world and the only way the country will ever forgive him is if he set up the winning goal in the World Cup final.

Tiger took a slightly different route to David Beckham and Ashley Cole. He travelled around the world winning the biggest golf tournaments and in doing so becoming the first reported sportsman worth ‘$1 Billion’. He also got married to a beautiful blonde (Elin Nordegren) and had a few kids when he came home to visit. So whilst Tiger was gallivanting around the world enjoying his success he slept with……well who knows really? It could be argued that any female, with a heartbeat and a functional brain may well have been enticed, and to be honest, I don’t blame them. Tiger Woods is a good looking and athletic man who made golf what it is today, and in the process he made a fortune. He made so much money his wife, Elin Nordegren had to hire a private investigator just find out how much.

Finally it was John Terry’s turn. Captain of club and country, he is the role model for a whole generation of children who would sacrifice all their pocket to see him lift the World Cup in South Africa this summer. Exactly how long the affair was going on for we can’t be sure of but it seems Terry was doing everything right as a husband and father, he was even voted ‘Dad of the year’ in 2009. The woman he had the affair with, Vanessa Perroncel, judging from recent press, was a committed footballer’s girlfriend, so much so that she worked in a nightclub frequented by footballers and in between John Terry and Wayne Bridge managed to sleep with several other premier league players.

There is no question that John Terry should have known better, so should Tiger Woods, Ashley Cole and David Beckham because in today’s world if you are celebrity nothing will stay a secret for very long. With insatiable public demand for information, the power of the media and private detectives has demonstrated that no secret is safe.

Conflict International provides professional private detectives in London and around the UK.

Leading Web Marketing, Design and Development agency have an excellent opportunity for an experienced Senior Sales Manager with strong Web experience to join their London Head office.

In this role you will be responsible for the following:

- Follow up leads and win new business contracts on a monthly basis

- Develop and cultivate the continuous supply of sales leads, lead generation channels and business contacts

- Attend face to face meetings

- Manage relationship with new and current clients

- Attend relevant networking events and industry forums

- Develop sales strategy for the UK and Europe

- Develop accurate sales forecast with business Director

- Manage database of clients and contacts

- Work with salesforce on a daily basis

This is an exciting opportunity to join a market leading business in a very visible and important role to the business. In order to be considered for this role you MUST have experience in the following:

- Strong experience in High Level service sales

- Web background and strong knowledge of web marketing techniques

- Web sales experience

Please send a copy of your Resume through to elliott@minttwist.com

The English test forms part of a points-based system that will cut the number of immigrants entering Britain by about 20,000 a year. But ministers have decided to exempt performers at specific festivals, including Edinburgh, Glyndebourne, Glastonbury, Wimbledon and the London Marathon.

The new rules will apply to all skilled workers — including footballers and managers — from non-EU states. The Government planned originally to insist that they understood English up to GCSE level but this was changed amid fears that it would rule out too many players, such as Manchester United’s Ji-Sung Park, from South Korea, and Carlos Tévez, from Argentina, and Arsenal’s Denilson, from Brazil, who have struggled to master the language, and man will have no choice but to use language interpreters.

Favourite training ground expressions being taught includes ‘pick your man up!’, ‘don’t let him turn you!’, and ‘take him on, beat your man!’ Eleven hours is the average time it takes to educate them from zero English to being able to function on the field.

Instead of the usual textbook approach, however, one of the top teaching tools is the Subbuteo miniature soccer game. It is used to re-enact an actual game so the relevant phrases come to life making the language as pertinent as possible to what they’re going to be doing on the field.

‘There’s no point in teaching him to say ”my uncle’s pen is in your auntie’s bureau’, or how to buy a first class train ticket,’ said Dr Kettle-Williams.

‘We need it to be real, so he can function on the field. There’s no time there for hesitation, or stopping to think ”what do they mean?”

‘We teach them these phrases and then, in the next game, they are alert and switched on, understanding instructions from the sidelines and playing better.’

The Home Office document said that workers would need to demonstrate “an ability to understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases, to introduce themselves and others and ask and answer question about basic personal details”.

Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, said: “I am afraid they will have to speak English. We do not want people coming to work alone. We had originally suggested requiring everybody to have English to GCSE level, but a lot of people thought that was going over the top.”

At Today Translations, our linguists know there’s more to professional translation services than mere words. We are a specialist translation company, capable of providing anything from English to Arabic translation, to Russian to English, translation to English to French, and much much more.

Competition between various publishing houses was rife to obtain the language translation rights to publish the English to Arabic translation of Chirac’s memoirs. For Kalima to obtain the rights to publish this book in Arabic is yet another indication of the prestigious position which the project has managed to obtain in the publishing world.

The translation services of such an important book to be a contribution towards a better understanding between the Arab World and the West, and another bridge between the cultures. The book attracted worldwide attention. Serialized highlights of many of its chapters appeared on Le Parisian, Le Figaro, and the weekly Le Point.

Chirac’s memoirs come at the right time. His popularity in France is still high, even though it has been more than two years since he left the French Presidency. His memoirs have sold out with sales exceeding 200,000 copies.

The first volume of his memoirs covers the first sixty-three years of his life, from being born in 1932 up to the moment he became President in 1995. He scans over the important landmarks of his early political life, especially the time when he twice became the Prime Minister under Presidents Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand.

At Today Translations, our linguists know there’s more to professional translation services than mere words. We are a specialist translation company, capable of providing anything from English to Arabic translation, to Russian to English, translation to English to French, and much much more.

“All our homeware and tableware is made from top designers,” said Dominic Speelman, Director of MAKE International “Keith’s range of designer fabrics are really beautiful. Not only are they lovely to look at, but they are soft to the touch because they are made from such quality material.

We pride ourselves in making in designer porcelain homeware that will last, and Keith Brymer Jones’ range is no exception. Even after many washes Keith’s fabrics will look as good as the day you bought them.”

“The Keith Brymer Jones collection would be perfect for presents, or to add style to your kitchen, dining room, or bedroom! Clean lines and simple design makes a home look contemporary, yet welcoming. We want all of MAKE’s ranges to add that certain something special to your home and therefore ensure that all our items are of the highest quality.”

MAKE International runs a successful internet store, specialising in designer porcelain pottery, china pottery and all sorts of other ceramics pottery.

That doesn’t mean the party’s over for optimising your Twitter page though. Search engines do index Twitter tweets (through “statuses” – which look like this). So how can you help ratchet your tweets up into search engine results as well as increase your number of followers?

By including relevant keywords within your title on your status pages.

Twitter creates the title for your status pages by taking up a slew of characters for itself. You can’t change that part (such as Twitter/MintTwist) but you CAN change what comes after it. There are only about 27 characters available for you to use (and you thought fitting something into 140 was tough!), but every little bit counts.

In addition to showing up in search engines, when you include keywords in the titles of your status pages, you also become more visible through Twitter’s own search interface, as well as the many search sites out there that comb through Twitter posts and tweets for certain keywords – like this:

If I were looking for twitter tips, and these tweets came up in the results, would I want to follow these people to see what else they had to share? Absolutely!

And if you click on “View Tweet” for any of these results, you’ll be taken to – surprise!  The status page! Status pages are static – which means they will stay there forever unless you delete them or Twitter disappears from the face of the Earth (not likely!) – so use them to your marketing advantage and start including a few keywords in your titles and tweets.

Now that you know how to better leverage your titles and statuses, get to work and start optimising those pages with every link you post!

Web Design London by MintTwist // Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/minttwist

By determining the fraction of a type, or isotope, of carbon in bone fragments and charcoal, the specimens were found to be 17,500 to 18,300 years old.

The authors say that the ages are more precise than previous efforts because a series of more than 40 radiocarbon-dated samples support the estimate.

The Yuchanyan cave was the site where the oldest kernels of rice were found in 2005, and it is viewed as an important link between cave-dwelling hunter-gatherer peoples and the farmers that arose later in the basin of the nearby Yangtze River.

The previous oldest-known example of pottery was found in Japan, dated to an age between 16,000 and 17,000 years ago, but debate has raged in the archaeological community as to whether pottery was first made in China or Japan.

The most recent dig at Yuchanyan was in 2005 by a team led by Elisabetta Boaretto of the Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. They believe they have found a more precise way to read the history of human activity written in layers of sediment, or stratigraphy.

‘Layer cake’

“The way people move around and mess up caves is very difficult to see archaeologically,” David Cohen, an archaeologist at Boston University and a co-author on the research, told BBC News.

“Imagine you have a fire and then people come in again have another fire and another, so you have the ashes of all these fires building up but at the same time people are digging and clearing, pushing things to the side; this messes things up.

“If you have an open-air site, you sometimes get a very clean ‘layer cake’ stratigraphy. Archaeologists before haven’t looked at this closely enough to realise what’s going on in caves so they interpret this stratigraphy as a layer cake. But in actuality, it’s ‘lenses’ of stuff that’s been mixed up and moved around.”

It is comparatively easy to find evidence of human occupation in caves through the dating of charcoal from fires or bones from long-ago dinners, Dr Cohen said. However, because of the unclear layering of sediment it is not easy to correlate well-dated layers with the pottery that may be nearby.

The team worked in sub-divisions of just a quarter of a metre square, painstakingly collecting bone and charcoal fragments. The samples were then radiocarbon dated, revealing a clean distribution stretching between 14,000 and 21,000 years ago.

‘Fantastic cave’

One fragment of pottery was found in a layer between two radiocarbon-dated fragments that both measured about 18,000 years old, taking the record for oldest pottery.

“It’s a fantastic cave, and we hope that the way these excavations were done would set a precedent for how other caves will be looked at,” said Dr Cohen.

Dr Tracey Lu, from an anthropologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who was not an author on the latest study, noted that the dates reported in this paper were slightly older than dates on pottery found in Japan.

However, she said the accuracy of radiocarbon dates in the limestone area has been under debate for many years.

“I agree that pottery was made by foragers in South China,” she told the Associated Press news agency.

“But I also think pottery was produced more or less contemporaneously in several places in East Asia… from Russia, Japan to North and South China by foragers living in different environments.”

MAKE International is the worlds mail order supplier of pottery mugs, pottery cups and all sorts of other pottery gifts.

Being able to sell to a diverse customer base is one thing, but it’s just the first step in an ongoing process of fostering successful customer interactions if winning loyalty is your goal. It might be daunting to engage call center representatives with language translator skills, but many customers are thrilled to find support information in their native tongue online. Self-service is the ticket.

Consumers are gearing up to acquire more high-tech gadgets from big box stores and online retailers at highly competitive prices. This is a great time to consider how companies can ensure customers are satisfied and successful with their purchases and how they can plan ahead for 2010.

Picture this: Manuel waited in line for hours to get the best sales deals. He gave up dinner with his family and battled cold temperatures through the night so that he could be the first person in line at his local big box technology retailer when the doors opened at 5a.m. It was worth the long wait, because he walked out with a new 50-inch television at a rock bottom price — complete with features in Spanish, a requirement of his family and friends.

Now — the moment of truth. It is time to set up his prized possession — his reward for his long wait in line. Manuel carefully unpacks the TV and strategically places it in the family room of his house for all to enjoy. Now all he has to do is figure out the setup and programming.

However, Manuel makes a horrifying discovery: The programming menu is stuck on the English main menu screen and won’t advance to the next menu screen or switch over to Spanish. The manufacturer did provide the quick start guide in Spanish to help with the setup, but it offers no help in troubleshooting this error. The support manual is available as a PDF on the company’s Web site, because the company had the vision to be provide a translated version, created by a professuiional langauge translator, however – Manuel doesn’t know this …..

All of a sudden, the time spent in line, the cold weather, and the frustration of missing dinner come flooding back and are aimed squarely in one place: the manufacturer of the TV.

21st Century customer service will require comapnies to provide customers with the same depth and quality of information for self-service, regardless of the language they speak.

Providing a self-service option on your site is great, but if you are selling globally or to diverse groups in a particular region, remember that customers prefer to interact with companies in their native language. Manuel prefers Spanish and would have been thrilled to know there was a self-service option available to him in his native language.

Oftentimes, companies will translate product information required for prepurchase into many languages but stop short of professional language translation because of the cost. This sends a signal to customers that they are important enough to sell to but not important enough to support. Manuel was starting to wonder if the company’s Spanish-speaking customers were less valuable than its English-speaking customers.

Another way is to restore the the thumbnail view for the PSD files within explorer.

Here’s how to restore thumbnails for PSD in explorer

The psd thumbnail view is not included by design in the lastest version of photoshop. To restore this feature follow these steps:
1. Download psicon.dll
2. Place the DLL in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Shell\
3. Thumbnail previews of PSD files are now back

The psicon.dll can be downloaded from here.

While Facebook’s “viral channels” – the News Feed, invitations, and messages – play a central role in the spread of content through Facebook, employing important SEO tactics within your Facebook Page can help your Page reach more and more Facebook fans. While viral distribution can help you reach people your fans are directly connected to, search engine optimization exposes your Facebook Page to Facebook’s entire userbase. In fact, Facebook itself has taken major steps to improve its own SEO during recent weeks and months, creating opportunities for Page owners to benefit directly while creating value for Facebook at the same time.

So, without further ado, here are 10 SEO strategies and tactics every Facebook Page owner should know:

1. Choose the best name for your Facebook Page – and don’t change it

Choosing the right name for your Facebook Page is vital. Despite the temptation to stuff your Page title with high value generic keywords – like “Mike’s Travel Agency: Las Vegas, Hawaii, Cancun – Hotels, Flights, & More” – this approach will actually harm your Page’s viral growth rate inside Facebook more than it will help through better SEO. For example, if your page’s title appears too spammy, fans will be less likely to share it with their friends on their profile and more likely to hide your updates from their News Feed.

Second, don’t give into the temptation to choose a fully generic page name like “Travel” or “Hawaii.” Because Facebook’s intention for Pages is that they authentically represent businesses, brands, or celebrities, Facebook has recently been disabling updates for generically named Pages – effectively neutering their ability to reach their Facebook fans.

The bottom line: use your business’s real name as the name of your page. And once you pick your Page’s name, don’t change it. Facebook uses your Page name in the title of the Page, and since Google dings pages when their titles change, modifying your Facebook Page’s name will cost you SEO points.

2. Select the best URL (Facebook username) for your Facebook Page

Facebook recently launched the ability to choose a vanity URL (Facebook calls it a “username”) for your Facebook Page, one of the most important SEO opportunities on Facebook to date. When you choose a Facebook username for your Page, your Page’s URL becomes www.facebook.com/YourUsernameHere. Usernames can be selected at www.facebook.com/username.

Facebook usernames present a better opportunity for businesses to consider incorporating generic keywords for SEO purposes than the Page name itself. While Facebook has created a black list of generic usernames that Pages (and users) are prevented from registering, there are still opportunities for businesses to obtain relatively generic usernames, or usernames that combine their actual name with additional generic keywords.

However, we do offer a word of caution when incorporating generic keywords in your Facebook Page URL: Facebook intends for Pages to authentically represent the identities of businesses, and brands and has revoked privileges from Pages with generic titles in the past, so it’s not unfathomable that Facebook might somehow punish Pages with generic usernames by similarly revoking status publishing rights (or at least the username itself) at some point in the future.

The safest option – and wisest long term bet in our view – is to choose a username that authentically represents your business or brand. For example, we chose www.facebook.com/InsideFacebook. Once you pick a Facebook username/URL for your Page, it cannot be changed – ever. So pick a username you’re going to be comfortable with and confident in for the long term.

One important note: in order to mitigate Facebook username squatting, Facebook requires that your Page have at least 100 fans before it becomes eligible to select a username. If your Page has less than 100 fans, you’ll need to recruit more fans before being able to take advantage of this important SEO strategy.

3. Use the “About” text box to place keyword-dense prose near the top of your Page

One important SEO strategy that should be employed on your Facebook Page whenever feasible is placing keyword-dense prose as close to the top of the Page as possible. Because Facebook limits where Page owners can place large chunks of text on the default Wall tab of Facebook Pages, the “About” box actually represents the highest place in the CSS structure of the page to add custom text.

In order to add text to your Page’s “About” box, click the “Write something about [YourPage]” in the box underneath your Page’s profile picture. You’ll then be able to enter custom text in the input box – there is a 250 character limit, so choose your words wisely.

4. Use the “Info” tab to include more important keywords, text, and high priority links on your Page

Facebook creates an “Info” tab for every Facebook Page that has fields containing important descriptive metadata about the Page. It’s important to fill out these fields, because they provide the opportunity to include keywords, prose, and links that will increase the content score of your Facebook Page for many types of Google searches. For example:

• Address, City, State, and Zip code are important fields for local searches
• Company Overview, Mission, and Products are important fields for product searches
• Websites is a valuable opportunity to add direct links to your own websites or other relevant sites in your space

The specific fields present will vary according to the category you choose for your Page when you create it (business, brand, or public figure), so choose the category that best fits your needs.

5. Create “Static FBML” boxes and tabs to place lengthy content and more static links on your Page

While opportunities to place large blocks of static text on the default tab of your Facebook Page are quite limited (see the “About” box section above), Facebook allows Page owners to create additional boxes or tabs that can hold any kind of static content, including text, images, and links. Adding content boxes or tabs to your Page can be a great way to boost the content density score of your Page (note, however, that each tab lives at a separate URL in Google’s eyes).

In order to add a custom content box or tab to your Page, follow these steps:

1. Go to the “Static FBML” application on Facebook.
2. Click “Add to my Page” on the top left side, and choose the page you’d like to add a custom content box or tab to.
3. Once you’ve chosen one, close the dialog box, go to your Page, and click “Edit page” under your Page’s profile picture.
4. In the applications list on the resulting page, you should see an application called “FBML 1″. Click the pencil icon on the right, and choose “Edit.”
5. You’ll be taken to a page with 2 fields: “Box Title” and “FBML.” Enter the name you’d like to give the box or tab in the “Box Title” field. Enter the HTML you’d like to use in the “FBML” field (FBML stands for Facebook Markup Language, and is a subset of HTML.), and then click the Save Changes button.
6. Once changes are saved, click the “Edit” link at the top of your Page to return to your Page’s application settings page. Click the pencil icon next to the name of the FBML application you just created, and choose “Application Settings.”
7. If you want to add the FBML you just entered as a box, choose “Add” next to the Box option. The custom FBML box will by default appear on the Boxes tab, so if you want to move it to the left side of your Wall tab, you’ll need to then go to the Boxes tab, click the pencil icon on your FBML box, and choose “Move to Wall tab.”
8. Or, if you want to add the FBML you just entered as a tab, choose “Add” next to the Tab option. The custom content should then automatically appear on its own tab on your Page. Note, however, that Facebook truncates tab titles after 10 characters, so you’ll need to choose a short title.

And voila! After that somewhat arduous process, your custom content should appear. Be sure to write good copy

6. Post direct links to your website (or other relevant sites) in your Page’s stream

Status updates offer a powerful way to place direct links near the top of your Page’s CSS structure. Because Google boosts pages that link to relevant sites – and dings pages that link to unrelated sites or add too many links too suddenly – posting links in status updates can be a powerful and authentic way to boost your Facebook Page’s link score.

There are two ways to post links into your Page’s stream:

1. Including the raw URL in the text of the status update itself
2. Using the “attach link” feature in the Facebook publisher

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each approach from an SEO perspective:

1. Raw URL

When you include the raw URL in the text of the status update itself, Facebook auto-links the text directly to the URL. While you can’t control the anchor text of the link (it is always just the URL itself), the link does go directly to the destination page – and not through a Facebook.com URL that adds the Facebook menu bar at the top when you click through to the destination page.

2. Attach Link

When you use the “attach link” feature of the Facebook publisher, Facebook pulls in the title, body, and images from your Page, and suggests a thumbnail image and text snippet which it places adjacent to your Page’s link. The automatic inclusion of this text further boosts the keyword density of the CSS region near the link, and the thumbnail also links to the destination URL – both nice perks of using the “attach link” feature.

Power tip: You can also change the anchor text while clicking the page’s title before clicking “Share” in the Facebook publisher.

However, importantly, the link itself does not go directly to the destination URL – rather, it goes through a Facebook.com share URL that includes the destination URL as an iframe on the resulting page, with the Facebook menu bar at the top which includes commenting and sharing features. While there is still some debate in the SEO community as to the impact of the specific implementation details of such toolbars, the lack of a direct link when using Facebook’s “attach link” feature does partially mitigate the SEO benefits of posting links on Facebook Pages.

7. Add photos with captions, events with descriptions, and a discussion forum

It almost goes without saying, but it’s important to always be sharing interesting content on your Facebook Page, and always using all available descriptive fields on each type of content shared. When posting photos, use verbose and keyword-dense descriptions. When posting events, take the extra minute to include text and keywords in the event description field that you want to rank for. Add a discussion forum to your Page.

Facebook makes all of the content shared on Facebook Pages indexable by search engines, so use the tools Facebook provides to your full advantage.

8. Get more inbound links to your Facebook Page from the web by posting links to your Page on all your websites

Just as a variety of inbound links from authoritative websites help boost PageRank for traditional websites, getting more inbound links to your Facebook Page will boost its PageRank as well. You can do this with text links, but Facebook has also created a “Find Us On Facebook” badge which it encourages Page owners to use. The new Fan Box widget for Facebook Pages also includes links back to your Facebook Page.

Facebook has created promotional guidelines for promoting your Facebook Page that are worth a read. Basically, Facebook doesn’t want Page owners to claim you have officially partnered with Facebook by virtue of having a Facebook Page. However, Facebook does want as many links as possible pointing to Facebook.com

9. Get more intra-Facebook inbound links by getting more Facebook fans

Because Facebook places links to Facebook Pages on the default version of Facebook users’ profile pages which are visible to search engines, the more fans you get, the more links you’ll have to your Page within Facebook. For Pages with thousands (or even millions) of fans, the number of links can really add up.

10. Strengthen intra-Facebook reciprocal linking by getting fans to comment and like content in your stream

When fans comment or like content in your Facebook Page’s stream, Facebook links their name back to their Facebook profile page. As a result, when the profile stubs of those fans who have posted comments and likes on your Page are indexed, Google will see more reciprocal links between your Page and your Page’s fans (in a way that grows organically over time), which it will see as a stronger bond. This creates a virtuous cycle of improved link weight from the indexed profile page stubs to your Page, and vice versa.

Conclusion & Next Steps

While building and expanding your Facebook Page presence requires creative planning and consistent execution, SEO can play a vital role in boosting your Page’s growth rate. While viral distribution limits you to the people your fans are connected to, search engine optimization exposes your Facebook Page to Facebook’s entire userbase – and as we’ve discussed above, there’s a lot that Page owners can do to maximize their exposure through Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and other popular search engines.

How to turn on and use Remote Desktop in Windows 7?

This is how you turn on remote desktop in Windows 7:

Click the Start button, right click on Computer and choose ‘Properties’. You can, alternatively, press the Win+PauseBreak keys together.

Click on Remote Settings in the left panel of the Control Panel Window that pops up.

In the new window that appears, make sure that ‘Allow Remote Assistance to this Computer’ option is checked. Also, turn on any one of the options mentioned as per your preference : either allow connections from your network, or any machine.

Click Apply, OK. You’re done. You have now turned on the remote desktop tool that allows any machine to access your Windows 7 computer.

Thanks to Today Translations the professional Translations Services agency in London for their assistance with translating.

1. The DVD you are using is corrupt.  If you are burning the ISO image to a DVD, you need to choose the lowest speed and be sure to verify it after burn (I used 4x)

2. Your memory may be playing up.  Run a memory test using the free tool from http://www.memtest.org.  Any errors reported need to be ironed out.  I simply took out 2gb of the 4gb my system had installed and this cleared the error.  I then re-inserted the memory when Windows 7 had installed.

3. Reset your BIOS settings to default and make sure you are not aggressively over clocking your system.

Good luck!

Google made the very brief announcement in their official blog about the Twitter Deal as part of their goal to “create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world.” While it will be interesting to see what they do with Twitter tweets, I seriously doubt if this will bring them closer to reaching their goal.

For those not familiar with Twitter, it is a micro-blogging site that might be better described as a micro-messaging site. It is based on a cell phone text messaging model and limits the length of a message to 140 characters. Messages are called “tweets.” Links can be included to tweets, but the length of the URL is part of the 140 character limit. Online URL shortening tools are commonly used to add very brief URLs that are then redirected to the final destination page. In order to receive someone’s tweets, the user must sign up for a Twitter account and then voluntarily sign up to “follow” another Twitter user’s tweets.

Twitter can be effectively used to drive traffic to a web site if enough targeted users can be persuaded to sign up as followers. The main problem with Twitter is that the overwhelming majority of tweets are useless dribble. While it is an ideal medium for celebrities and politicians to get their message out, do we really need to know that one of them is eating a ham sandwich or about to leave to go grocery shopping?

At this point, we do not know how Google will display tweets in their search results. They may cluster them together like they currently tend to do with YouTube videos. The problem is that they may just clutter up search results and push web site pages further down in rank positions.

Do not expect to be able to use Twitter to build links to your site. All outbound links from the major social media sites are blocked in one fashion or another so that they do not pass any link value. In the case of Twitter, all links are nullified with a “nofollow” attribute. That effectively eliminates any link value that might otherwise be passed. It may be safe to assume that Google will do something similar with tweets that show up in their search results.

The real question is, “How will Google determine which tweets make it into their search results?” This could be based upon some Twitter internal ranking criteria, similar to the way that YouTube videos are ranked. It could be based upon the number of followers that forward a particular tweet to their followers. The most logical assumption is that keyword phrases in the tweets will be part of the ranking algorithm.

Until we can determine how Google will select a few choice tweets from the millions of useless tweets generated each day, it would be wise to make sure that each tweet that you send includes targeted keywords and a link to the appropriate page in your web site. It might also be a good idea to make sure that your most important targeted keyword phrases are included in the description in your Twitter account.

Microsoft announced similar deals with both Twitter and FaceBook for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, so it appears that a trend may be emerging.

Of course, YouTube isn’t a perfect fit for every company, but anybody who does business online should consider taking advantage of the huge opportunities for brand impressions available on YouTube. Even if the product or service you sell might be considered dry or boring, think about creating a series of funny or interesting videos that relates indirectly to your core business.

Embedding video within a web strategy is a great way of bringing information to your audience, and with the increase in performance of Broadband lines it is now accessible to the vast majority of users.

North London Building firm ASP Builders use YouTube as an effective way to provide general information to thier audience.

Remember, a well optimised video and company YouTube channel will benefit the core website search engine optimisation strategy. Also, we do not have to create traditional TV commercials to get people talking about our brand.

Optimising YouTube pages requires us to follow the same rules as any other search engine optimisation (SEO) project, and all SEO can be broken down into three disciplines: content, linking, and architecture. Since YouTube is going to dictate how the page is built architecturally, that leaves us with opportunities to improve the on-page content that boosts the link popularity of the page.

There are primarily two places we can rank well for our target keywords. The first place is on YouTube itself. The other place our videos can rank well is on the search engines themselves. Remember that every video on YouTube has its own page, called a view page, that can be optimized the same as any other page on the web.

The videos themselves are invisible to search engines. YouTube converts the video files you upload into Flash, and search engines have a difficult time understanding what’s inside a Flash file, especially a video.

YouTube automatically generates meta tags for every view page. The name of the video becomes the title tag, the description (found in the “more info” section) becomes the meta description tag, and the YouTube tags become the content of the page’s meta keywords tag.

Quick tips for optimization:

* Include links in profile pages wherever possible. First decide where you want to drive the traffic from your channel/profile page, and then include links to those pages as much as possible. Ideally, you will be linking to other social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter in order to extend the social media experience, but you also might want to drive clicks to a customized landing page. There are many more opportunities to place clickable links than there appear to be at first glance.

* Include appropriate keywords in the name of the video, and use the word “video” when appropriate. The title is the most important piece of information that the search engines have about your video, and considering that most searchers include the word “video” when searching for a video, this inclusion boosts the relevance of your page as a search result.

* For each video, write a unique, keyword-rich description that includes a URL. Put the URL at the beginning. This way, even when the “more info” option is collapsed, the user will still see the link. Also, a video’s description is the next-best indicator to search engines of the video’s content, right behind the title. Use this space to place relevant keywords when appropriate.

* Provide video transcripts if possible. Until the technology improves, YouTube and other online videos are practically invisible to most search engines. Therefore, the search engines are only guessing about the content of your video based on the information they parse from the title, description, and tags. But if you have a full transcript of your video placed in the description, the search engines will fully understand the video.

* Take advantage of YouTube’s captions and annotation features. You can add notes, subtitles, descriptions, and links directly over the top of the video. Currently only links to other YouTube pages are clickable, but try this: You remembered to add a link at the top of your description, right? Place a call to action over the video that says, “Click here to become a fan of our Facebook page.”

* Tag your videos with keywords. Along with the title and the description, tags help the search engines identify the video’s content. If you have relevant keywords, place them here.

* Encourage participation. For each video, there are options for “Broadcasting and Sharing.” It’s best to open commenting and embedding as much as possible, but remember that you will need to monitor your videos for spam and naughty comments. Also consider posting your videos as responses to other popular videos. This is a good way to piggyback on the success of someone else’s video and divert some of those eyes to your own content.

* YouTube pulls thumbnails from the one quarter, half, and three quarters marks of every video. You can then choose which thumbnail is displayed. If it’s not disruptive to do so, try to manipulate your video so that a compelling image appears at one of these points. Thumbnails have a large impact in a video’s click-through.

* Take advantage of YouTube Insights. This analytics feature of YouTube is robust compared to other video sites and can provide information such as demographics and when people abandoned viewing specific videos. This data can help you improve future submissions.

Who did it great:

Today Translations is a Translation Services agency in London.

MintTwist provide Web Design and Web Marketing services.

Credau is an eco clothing brand for high fashion menswear.  Credau sell into high fashion outlets in London and Paris and are seeking retail outlets to carry their lines into the USA.

Mistakes to avoid:

Most YouTube videos and channels are not properly optimized, even by big brands. Therefore, there is still tremendous opportunity to rank well on search results pages for many competitive keywords. Perhaps the biggest potential mistake is to close your videos off to sharing. It is vital to let users interact and embed your videos.

Also, resign yourself to the fact that no matter how good your videos are, people are going to say nasty things. As long as comments aren’t profane, negative feedback is good. A mix of negative and positive comments makes the user experience more authentic.

Tags: web design london | buy wine online | fine wines

There aren’t any new revelations in the article entitled, Link Building for Smart Webmasters, but the article does do a good job of reinforcing good and bad link building techniques. Bing did reveal that they do have a team of people who actually look at a web site when their spiders report suspicious inbound link building methods.

Bing makes it clear that they are “less concerned about the link building techniques used than about the intentions behind the effort.” That basically means that if you are doing link building to assist users with finding relevant information, they look upon this favorably. However, if you are building links merely to raise search engine rankings, you may find your web site headed in the wrong direction in Bing’s search results.

The following summarizes Bing’s tips, along with our interpretation of how to best utilize these techniques.

What Bing Says You Should Be Doing To Build Links

• Provide high quality content to attract links from related sites. If you focus on writing the best informational content on the web, others will link to your web pages. Become an expert voice for your industry.
• Develop your business brand and be consistent about that brand in your content. A site should focus on a specific theme and be consistent with the information that is publish on the site site. Stick to a topic and do not become a generalist.
• Publish expert articles to online article directories. The publishing of articles to article directories such as eZineArticles.com, GoArticles.com and others has been a long-standing method to build links. The idea is to publish a unique article to these free article directories. The article becomes freely syndicated. Other sites will pick up and publish these articles and are supposed to provide a link back to your web site. Keep the articles focused on the the same theme as your web site. Do not simply publish existing articles from your web site, because that is asking for trouble with duplicate content.
• Participate in relevant blogs and forums and refer back to your site’s content when applicable. That is basically an encouragement to refer to your articles often in industry-related blogs and forums. A technique that works well is to look for a problem presented in a blog or forum that needs to be solved. Publish the solutions on your site and then link to it from the blog or forum.
• Launch a blog or a forum on your site. This may work well with some sites, but interactive blogs and forums can be time-consuming and require dedicated attention.
• Use social media networks to link to your site. While this can drive traffic, most social media networks block link inheritance factors by using the “nofollow” attribute on all outbound links. Bing focuses on building the industry connections that may stimulate others to link to your web site from their sites.

What Bing Says You Should Not Be Doing To Build Links

• Do not build too many links too quickly. That could trigger a review from Bing’s staff. This means that it is not a good idea to purchase thousands of links from web directories.
• Do not build too many inbound links from unrelated sites. This follows Google’s preference for natural linking and emphasizes that the old SEO cliche, “a link is a link”, no longer holds true. There is a quality factor with links that plays an important role in determining the inherited value of a link. Focus on building links from industry-related web sites.
• Do not use hidden links on your pages. Hidden links and hidden content have both created penalty situations for many years.
• Do not link out to known spam sites. Inheritance is a two-way street. When you link to a site that has been banned or heavily penalized by the search engines, your site can be penalized, as well. Google has long preached the same issue. Be careful who you link to.

The Bing article is worth reading and may provide you with one of two good ideas for improving your link building.

A VIDEO created by the Cocktails Mix campaign team has been banned from a website for being too controversial.

Video website YouTube has removed the Cocktails Mix NHS video clip, called Bloody Mary, which shows a group of young men jeering at a woman who is so drunk she urinates in the street, then falls over and injures herself.

It was one of two videos created by Derbyshire County Primary Care Trust for its £25,000 Cocktales mix campaign, aimed at getting young adults to drink sensibly.

It received more than 15,000 hits in the eight days it was on the website.

The second video made by the trust, Tequila Slammer, shows a drunk man dressed as a turkey being run over by a car, remains on YouTube and can be seen here (warning, some viewers may find these scenes disturbing):

MintTwist help businesses to improve their reputations and increase sales every day. With a Managed Web Marketing service, MintTwist make sure their clients have all the right things in place before commencing an all-encompassing web marketing stratgey that dramatically increases sales leads, visibility and improves the reputation of our client’s businesss. Contact Elliott King for more information.

You have the same advantage. Grownups use search engines to tell you exactly what they want. You simply need to show up, no matter what or how they are asking.

If Santa were dishing out corporate blogging advice for marketers this holiday season, I’m sure it would sound something like this:

Blog for search

Recognize that blogging is a terrific search marketing tool and embrace it early. Blogs give you an easy way to quickly tell lots of stories frequently. The reality is that most blog traffic is coming from first-time visitors. They don’t know you yet. What searchers do know is what they want or the problems they are trying to solve. Developing specific blogs targeting specific products or services is a terrific way to target these self-qualifying prospects.

Do your keyword research and take advantage of the space that your blogs give you to talk about your products and services using the words your customers use.

Example: GoalGroup

GoalGroup is an industry leader in protecting investors and funds against losses and retrieves them money after class action lawsuits. It sells its services through a worldwide network and is monitoring and reporting on class actions to its global network of clients and partners. It targets hundreds of specific terms through blogging, using keywords such as “class actions” and “class action lawsuits“.

For GoalGroup, targeting search through class action focused blog articles not only helps dramatically increase organic traffic, but such traffic also converts at a very high level — which is a clear indication that the search audience is happy to have landed on one of the company’s blog articles.

Example: Today Translations

Language Translation agency Today Translations has embraced targeted blogging to drive searches. By empowering its language translators in the markets (in London and financial centres worldwide) it serves to tell stories about their business, the company is able to target people in those markets the very moment when they need the services of a language translator the most. Targeting terms like “language translator“, “English to Chinese translation” or “English to Russian translation” shows up well because of the local stories the language translators tell.

The biggest miss in multi-channel merchant blogging is the conversion. Just like any other web page in your inventory, your blogs need to have clear, relevant, and effective calls-to-action. If a searcher lands on a web page about a Property in Wimbledon or a Private Detective Agency, they sure better have a way to buy that service.

Many companies do a wonderful job on PPC landing pages and totally fail on their blogs. You have to think of your blogs as organic landing pages. The goal is conversion — get your searchers to take the next step in the relationship.

Every kind of business can benefit from search-optimised blogging. By following the advice above, you are putting your organization in front of people who have expressed their intent to find a solution to their needs, whether it’s for information, services, or products.

MintTwist help businesses to improve their reputations and increase sales every day. With a Managed Web Marketing service, MintTwist make sure their clients have all the right things in place before commencing an all-encompassing web marketing stratgey that dramatically increases sales leads, visibility and improves the reputation of our client’s businesss. Contact Elliott King for more information.

A link to a web page is a popularity vote for the page. It demonstrates to a search engine spider that someone finds value in the information found on the web page. A link to a web page is called an inbound link or a backlink. Links contain inheritance factors that influence a web page’s ability to rank well. The inheritance factors include the keyword theme for the linking page, which ideally needs to match the keyword themes for the receiving page. This reinforces the theme for that page. Other factors include Google’s PageRank, which is a pseudo-measure of the quality of links leading to the linking page.

There are a number of inheritance factors that Google and other search engines use in their ranking algorithms, most of which they do not divulge. These are not trivial issues. Search engines keep track of every link leading to every web page on the Internet. The number of links leading to your site and your web pages can play a major role in the site’s ability to rank well, and the quality of each link can have a significant impact.

Here are my observations regarding the effectiveness of inbound links.

1. The best inbound link is always a one-way natural link from an authority site or leader in your industry. If you are in the computer industry, this usually means a link from major manufacturers in your industry, or a site that is a central source for industry-related information.
2. The second best inbound link is a one-way natural link from another site focused on your industry. This is a link from a page that shares the keyword theme for your site.
3. The next best link is a casual natural link to your site from a site not related to your industry.

That being said, obtaining quality links to a web page can be one of the hardest aspects of search engine optimization. If there are other web sites in your industry or sites that share your site’s keyword themes that you can obtain links from, those links will help improve the rankings for your web pages. 5 to 10 links to the page can have a very positive impact on that page’s ability to rank well.

Do not just focus on links to the home page. A page that focuses on How to Housebreak a Puppy, should ideally have links to it from similar web pages. Try to obtain as many links as you can to inner pages. One way to do this is to write unique, quality content. Good, informational content that covers topics that people search for will pick up links naturally, especially if the page begins to rank well. The higher a page ranks on search engine result pages, the more inbound links it tends to to pick up–but only if the content on the page is informative or interesting.

Beware of Artificial Links
Search engines do not like artificial links because they see them as a method for manipulating a site’s rankings. Technically speaking, an artificial link is any link set up by a site owner that is used to improve search engines. The solution is to make sue that a site’s inbound links do not look artificial. This means focusing on obtaining natural links.

Some links are more valuable than others, and some links are more detrimental than others. In excessive numbers, some types of links can do more harm than good. Avoid excessive use of links from web directories, link pages (also called link farms) on other sites and reciprocal linking. Each of these types of links has been devalued. Avoid links to pages from web page footers, because they are easily identifiable as artificial links, especially when they come from an unrelated site.

Most new site owners think that links exchanges, also called reciprocal links, are a good thing. They were in the 1990s, but have since been devalued because they are artificial links and are easily identified by search engine spiders. To make matters worse, the overwhelming number of web sites that request a link exchange with your site are doing this fraudulently and never actually provide a spiderable link back to your site. There are simple recommendations for dealing with link requests. It is wise to ignore almost all of these requests.

Google is actively penalizing sites that are buying inbound links. They claim that they have become very good at identifying sites that sell links and are penalizing both those sites and the sites who buy the links. A few years go they penalized just about every directory that was selling links, and devalued all of the links they sold. The irony is that Google is the largest link seller on the web through their AdWords pay-per-click program. If you have a web site that is selling links, there are steps that you can take to avoid penalties. We can help you to correct these issues.

If you grasp the concepts in this SEO tutorial, you should now understand that not all inbound links are treated equally, a few quality links to a web site can have a significant impact on the site’s ability to rank well.

At one time, every link was a good link and the web site receiving the most links typically won a top position in search engine rankings. Today, the quality of each link plays an important role in determining how much influence a link will have on the receiving page. Not all links are treated equally, especially with Google.

The best quality link is a link from an authority site in your industry. Ideally, the link text should contain keywords that reinforce the keyword theme for the receiving page. That means that a quality link to a page selling green widgets should ideally originate from a web site for a major manufacturer or distributor of widgets, or perhaps from an authority site that already ranks well and is focused on the topic of green widgets. If the link is a one-way link and is found within the text of a page (like the links on this page), it is considered to be a natural link. Links are natural links when they are one-way links and occur naturally as part of the content on a page that covers a topic related to that of the receiving page.

Building links to a web site is one of the hardest parts of any SEO campaign, but one that is more important than most web site owners realize. The problem lies with the fact that with most businesses, the only industry-related sites are those of competitors. Whenever possible, obtain links from each of your suppliers, but keep in mind that the links must be a hyperlink that can be found on a “spiderable” web page, which is a page that a spider can reach. Many manufacturers offer dealer lookups using a zip code or state entered by a user. Those types of links are database-driven and cannot be reaced by a spider. They may still drive traffic, but they are useless for link building purposes.

So How Can a Web Site Owner Build Inbound Links?

The best way to accumulate links naturally is to provide excellent, informational content. Become an authority on a topic and write great content related to targeted search phrases, which are also known as keyword themes. Many authors, bloggers and forum participants like to link to web pages that provide the very best coverage of a topic. The numerous inbound links to Wikipedia articles is the number one reason as to why a Wikipedia page is very commonly found in one of the top three positions in Google for almost any topic that they cover. The content is generally excellent and all of the accumulated links push that site’s pages to the top of the search engine results pages.

The reason that most web sites do not accumulate inbound links is because they focus too much on laying out pages that simply tout the company’s products and services. While this information is important once a potential customer finds the site, the issue at hand with search marketing is one of getting the customer to the web site in the first place. Pages that accumulate inbound links will naturally rank higher and will drive more traffic.

A method successfully used by many sites is to provide something useful, such as an online tool that accomplishes something useful for your customers and potential customers. While this is not a fit for some businesses, for others it can be very successful. It is common to find mortgage calculators or home finders on real estate sites because they are useful for the site’s typical visitor. Sometimes it is a matter of providing a very good quality technical cheat sheet or a white paper that covers a topic better than any others on the web.

The key to making this work is to provide something unique and very useful. A mediocre freebie offering will not help build links to a web site. Think in terms of what would be useful to your customers and build a page based upon a targeted keyword theme. Include the freebie download link on that page.

Checking Competitor’s Inbound Links

It can be very useful as well as informative to check out your competition’s inbound links. This is easiest to do with Yahoo, primarily because Google only displays a random sampling of links to a web page and Bing (MSN) does not provide inbound link information.

If you are wondering who is linking to a competitor whose site performs better than yours on search results pages, it may be due to the number or quality of the links leading to their web site. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter the following on a Yahoo search page. Be sure to substitute the competitor’s domain name.

linkdomain:sparklywidgets.com -site:sparklywidgets.com

This will give you a comprehensive list of the links pointing to the home page that have been discovered by Yahoo’s spider. The first part queries the backlinks in Yahoo’s database and the second part eliminates internal links, which tend to clutter up the results. Study the list and see if you spot local business directories or industry sites that are providing links. Many local business directories offer a free listing and therefore are very likely primary opportunities for links to your site. Studying the list will also give you good idea as to which linking tactics the competitor is using, which can be translated into a new linking tactic for your site.

Twitter was started in 2004 and is officially referred to as a “microblogging” site. What that really means is that Twitter is a web-based text messaging system that allows you to send short messages to anyone who voluntarily signs up to receive your messages. While the actual numbers are guarded by Twitter, there are an estimated 30+ million USA users. Nielsen reports that the largest demographic segment is 35 to 49-year-olds, which make up 41.7% of users. That is an ideal age range if you have a retail store or offer online services and are looking for active Internet purchasers.

Twitter is a natural fit for celebrities, politicians and news organizations. It can also be a good fit for online stores to use to get their advertising message out to people who sign up to read your messages and respond to coupons, sales and special offers.

Here is how it works:

A user signs up for a free Twitter account. The account allows the member to send “tweets” to anyone who signs up to be a follower. You cannot sign people up to be followers; they must voluntarily sign up. When an member sends a tweet, it is sent to the Twitter accounts of all of the member’s followers, who can view all of the accumulated messages on their Twitter home page. The interesting part is that any follower who receives a tweet and likes what it contains can re-tweet it to all of their followers. The beauty of Twitter is that a business can send a tweet out to 500 followers. If the message is interesting or contains a special deal that is worthwhile, any follower can re-tweet the message to their followers. A percentage of those members will re-tweet the message to their followers. It is therefore possible for a message that was originally sent to 500 followers to be sent to hundreds of thousands of followers by the end of the day.

You can also send a “direct tweet” to any one follower that you wish to communicate with. When you send a direct tweet, only that follower will see the message. Messages can be sent via the web, a cell phone or via instant messaging.

The main limitation with Twitter is that tweets are limited to a maximum of 140 characters. That is because the concept was originally based upon cell phone text messaging, which is limited to 160 characters. The twitter founders shortened it to 140 characters to allow for a signature, which tells a follower who you are.

You can include links in tweets. Free URL shortening services, such as bit.ly, tinyurl.com and others, can convert long URLs to very short URLs that are then re-directed to the intended destination URL. URLs longer than 25 characters are automatically run through a shortening services by Twitter.

One problem is that it can be difficult to accumulate a substantial number of followers who are interested in the products or services that a web site offers. The best way to do this is to simply set up a Twitter icon on a web site and invite a site’s users to sign up as a follower.

The best part with using Twitter is that is is easy to learn and is completely free. There are no incremental costs for sending messages. The only investment is in the time it takes to send tweets and accumulate followers.

If you have a Twitter account, feel free to sign up as one of our followers using the Twitter link in the right column on this page. If you need to sign up for a Twitter account, simply click on the Join Twitter link when you arrive at the Twitter site and follow the instructions.

There is one important tip to offer when you sign up for a free Twitter account. During the signup process they will ask you to provide your e-mail password so that they can import all of the the e-mail addresses in your account and invite them to become your followers. If you feel comfortable with this, then go ahead and do it. Personally speaking, I would never provide any web site with my e-mail password. There is a link at the bottom of the page that allows you to skip that step.

As far as keyword selection tools are concerned, there is one clear leader among the free keyword search tools – Google keyword suggestion tool. There are good paid keyword research tools but why pay when some of the free alternatives are so good? There are other free keyword research tools but they are not that reliable. That is why the recommendation is to use Google’s tool.

Google Wonder Wheel is a very recent addition to the family of keyword research tools but since it is still not as powerful as the tool above, it is possible to try it out of curiosity, but leave the serious research for the veteran tool.

2. Find a Couple of Very Popular Keywords to Use as a “Base Camp” for the Search

The first thing to do is to open Google’s keyword suggestion tool and type a keyword. For instance, if the purpose is to find less competitive keywords for a site in the dating niche, the first keyword to search for is “dating”.

“Dating” is a very lucrative keyword because it has over 30 million monthly searches, Then go to Google and type “dating” in the search field to see how many search results are listed. For “dating”, the number is impressive – over 250 million. It is utopia to think that it is possible to rank in the top 10 for “dating”.

3. Narrow Down the Search to Less Competitive Keywords

Next, go back to the keyword suggestion tool and pick up a couple of other keywords with fewer searches – for instance, “dating advice”. At the time of writing of this article, “dating advice” has over 100,000 monthly searches and over 50 million search results. This is still a lot of competition!

That is why, it is necessary to filter the selection further. So, proceed to the next keyword phrase.

4. If Necessary, Filter the Selection Further

For instance, try “dating advice for men” or “dating advice for women”, both of which have under 5,000 searches a month but still their search volume is not under 1,000. The search results for “dating advice for men” or “dating advice for women” (without quotations because this is how users search) are still almost 50 million but a substantial part of them are search results for “dating advice”. The search results for “dating advice for men” or “dating advice for women” (with quotations) are less than 50,000 each, which is much better than 250 million or 50 million.

Of course, nobody says that after a web master has found a couple of lucrative keywords, he or she should stop here. He or she can pick up 10 or more less competitive keywords and it is not necessary for them to be with the same root (i.e. “dating” in the example above). However, in order to be able to come up with meaningful less competitive keywords, a web master must know the subject matter.

5. Include Synonyms in the Keyword Research Process

For instance, for a dating site, “single”, “lover”, “partner”, “relationship” and other similar words (synonymous or not) with a root, which is different from “dating” are also worth checking. The Google keyword selection tool offers synonyms (if this option is selected), so it makes sense to check them as well. Less popular keywords with a different root could be a golden mine because it might never occur to other web masters to optimize for them.

Once a web master learns how to discover less popular keywords and starts optimizing for them, it is realistic to expect that this will drive more traffic. When a site starts getting more visitors, as a rule this to a higher page rank. The higher the page rank of a site, the better the prospects to rank well for more competitive keywords.

In a sense, if optimizing for less popular keywords doesn’t pay off directly, it pays off indirectly – via increased page rank. This is one more reason to pay attention to less popular keywords and to invest time and effort to optimize for them.

The seminal promise of AR is as the touchstone technology allowing social networks, geo-based tracking, and the semantic web to converge. Put less geekily, think of AR as your personalized digital butler, who will get to know your behavior so specifically that it can prethink your choices based on your friends, location, and how you search online. The cyberpunk fictions have come to reality with AR, and the cultural ramifications are as powerful as the marketing opportunities.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the fundamental ways in which augmented reality will reshape consumer behavior and interactive marketing, as well as a few companies and applications that are leading the way.

From map to mindset
What’s your relationship to the GPS unit in your car? Do you lament the loss of serendipity that resulted from depending on the tinny voice on your dash? More likely, you’ve learned to lean on your satellite siren and have blissfully embraced paperless travel.

This adjustment to technology represents a step toward artificial intelligence, in which machines can learn our behavior and improve the way we live. Adopting GPS not only saves us time in our travels, it lets us clear our mental palette to make space for other thoughts, a “prethinking” process mirrored in augmented reality. Still in its nascent form until the majority of the public owns enabled smartphones, AR’s ability to layer 3-D images on a phone’s screen in the context of a person’s actual location makes it the touchstone technology galvanizing artificial intelligence and the promise of social marketing.

The tech you shouldn’t see
The trailer for Microsoft’s Xbox Project Natal announcement provides a key insight into the future of augmented reality, human behavior, and commerce. Noting from the outset that “no controller is required,” a typical family runs through a set of game scenarios based on their varying interests. A teenage boy karate-kicks an avatar, his older sister video chats with a friend who recommends a virtual dress to wear, and so on.

Although facial and voice recognition enhance the game, we’re reminded that to enjoy the Xbox, “the only experience you need is life experience.” This idea is key — like your GPS, you forget about the tech and focus on the benefits. You augment your reality in the context of what you’re presented.

Skewing social
Augmented reality assigns relevance for users of the “outernet” via AR applications like Yelp’s Monocle that allow you to see location-specific user reviews on the screen of your iPhone by simply pointing your camera and clicking on links. The process is faster than looking online, especially once users search via multiple AR services that aggregate relevant data for their location. The result is crowd-sourced commerce and a prethinking reliance of users to make purchasing decisions once they’re nearing their destination rather than at home. Social networks take on a new and more immediate relevance when posts are seen in the context of physical space.

Tagging taxonomies
Geo-tagging lets you create text, audio, or video you can assign a physical location to via AR-enabled smartphones. When others come to that spot in the future, they’ll be able to experience the content you’ve left behind. This communal prethinking in relation to location will become commonplace, as will the virtual offers pushed our way when we’re in the vicinity of local stores. Prethinking via dating services like Match.com combined with geo-enabled tweets will alter cultural behavior as well.

The sublime search
Prethinking also applies to how we tag ourselves, an act that has direct repercussions on semantic search. Instead of relying on keywords that have multiple meanings depending on context and native language, search powered by augmented reality assigned to specific geo-locations will have the relevance of our physical actions. Taxonomies relating to our actual locations will transform reliance on clumsy search algorithms in lieu of actual behavior. This aggregated data will provide a wealth of information to marketers in terms of when to deliver key messaging and relevance to geography. And as identity standards like Open ID continue to evolve, consumers can set their geo-privacy preferences to avoid unwanted airvertising to create standards for outernet etiquette as well.

Augmented reality becomes a transformative technology when campaigns move beyond Flash to demonstrate utility. Gimmicks can be useful to attract user attention, but AR needs to lead to relevant social or commercial connections.

Georgia Tech’s zombie game provides an example of flash and function that can move the needle for commercial adoption of AR. We all enjoy slaughtering the undead, and moving around a placemat-like game board to see 3-D action via our smartphone screens is sweet. But when an actual Skittles candy is placed on the game board and game characters react to its presence, the applications for marketing become readily apparent. Virtual aisles in retail environments can be festooned with interactive characters or videos. Beer goggles take on a literal angle, and placemats will provide games that respond to various bottles or cans maximized for AR.

Other services like Zugara’s Webcam Social Shopper let people virtually try on clothes, and users can take pictures of themselves to send to their friends on Facebook. Combining the AR app with crowd-sourced opinions from social networks provides utility along with the benefit of collaborative shopping.

USAA has also proven that non-sexy AR applications can gain more traction than gimmicky campaigns. Its iPhone app allows people to take a picture of their checks for instant deposits, a simple yet profound action inasmuch as it engenders ease of financial transaction. As reported by eWeek in an article about the application, “USAA’s customers have conducted more than 13.3 million mobile transactions in 2009.” Prethinking leads to profits via AR-enabled utility.

Jamais Cascio, the popular ethical futurist that regularly writes for Fast Company and other publications, dovetails the notions of prethinking combined with AR in his notion of “focus assistants,” or filtering tools that screen content you don’t want to receive. In his article for the Atlantic, “Get Smarter,” he notes that, “as our capacity to provide that filter gets faster and richer, it increasingly becomes something akin to collaborative intuition — in which everyone is effectively augmenting everyone else.

This process of collective intuition is amplified by AR applications like Pelago’s visual storytelling tool, Whrrl. The service, according to CEO Jeff Holden, is a “real-time storytelling product for people’s daily lives,” which aggregates multiple tweets, posts, and updates to form a kind of visual Twitter. These communal events are also shared to the larger community, which can comment while stories take place. This process creates a form of public prethinking known as group awareness. And it’s the data culled from these multiple communal stories that will form the basis of future interactions in commerce and culture at large.

More stories at Pike Place Fish MarketPowered by Whrrl
Conclusion
Augmented reality offers multiple touchpoints to interact with consumers in an intimate and impactful virtual landscape. When commercial experiences in the outernet honor consumer privacy, are relevant to location, and embrace communal group experience, marketers will benefit. But like GPS and our Xbox family demonstrated, AR is just a few steps away from being invisible. No experience is required and prethinking will become a habit without our realizing its taken place.

Just remember that, like the mom at the end of the video, you can always turn the AR technology off. And unless marketers collaborate with consumers on their virtual sojourns, they’re likely to do the same to us.

François Eales, a natural medicine practitioner who lives and works in Gonubie, said that last Thursday he bid to buy an Apple iPhone cellphone and a Sony Vaio laptop on a an Internet auction website.

“I’ve made over 300 purchases in the past through the site and have never had a problem before.”

Eales’ bid on the iPhone was not accepted, but his bid for the laptop was successful.

“I contacted the seller and got his details,” said Eales. “He told me he was moving to Australia.”

Eales deposited the money that afternoon into his account and arranged with his parents, who lived nearby, to collect the laptop the following day.

However, they could not get hold of the seller on the cellphone number provided.

Eales said he then turned to the internet again to find a reliable private investigator to help him trace the individual.

“I discovered the account was held in Namibia, in the name of someone else and that it had quite a substantial amount of money in it.”

Eales said police were looking into the matter.

The private detective agency, said that from preliminary investigations he suspected a larger syndicate could be at work.

“It’s possible the bank account in Namibia could be a money-laundering scheme where fraudsters deposit money and give a commission to the account owner,” he said.

Operations manager for the website, said it was unfortunate that people used the site to commit acts of fraud. He said 99 percent of the transactions on the website were legitimate

Conflict International is a Private Investigator firm that provides invetigative services for corporate and private clients. Its global operation covers London, Europe and the rest of the World.

From estate agencies to eco-friendly fashion designers , small business owners across the UK have been thrown an unexpected lifeline in the midst of the recession by social networking sites.

Companies that have jumped on the Twitter and Facebook bandwagon are reporting a surge in customers while others struggle.

With minimal marketing budgets available to many small businesses, social networking sites offer a quick and, more importantly, free means of promoting their wares to a global audience.

In the face of stiff competition and a global economic downturn, it is a route more and more companies are going down.

Wimbledon based entrepreneeur Tara Rez, has been using Twitter and Facebook as a marketing for her successful rental properties and property sales estate agency based in south london.

They are usng the media to post latest details of the latest new and available properties.  “The best properties always go in matter of hours or days – and are not normally advertised on the traditional sites”, says Tara.  “By providing a South West London Rentals and Sales facebook and twitter service we can provide prospective tennats, buyers and investors with an importnat head start”.

French eco friendly menswear designer Aude Lesur said, “our facebook fan page allowed us to push out our 10% discount codes to our target customer groups – they have been buying in droves.”, she continued… “my only problem now, is working out when to stop the discount code – 5x more people have made use of it than we budgeted for!.”

“Every day we are helping businesses to use Twitter in combination with the hundreds of other web marketing channels in more effective ways ,” says Elliott King, Director at the Web Marketing agency MintTwist Ltd.

“We’ve have lots of small and medium sized businesses, up and down the UK that are drastically increasing their sales leads using our combined web marketing service.”

Wimbledon Property Rentals and Sales



Wimbledon Property Rentals

When first using Caphyon’s ranking system users must be patient because the possibilities of the software can be overwhelming at times.  MintTwist users had to take some time to read the user manual and play around with the software for while in order to gain a full understanding of the possibilities.

The one complaint that we had with the software was it was not entirely easy to figure out how to effectively see how our competition was doing, but after some time spent reading the user’s manual we figured out the process.

The Link manager is also a very useful tool for anyone looking to build link campaigns.  Link Manger does exactly what it suggest in that it enables users of all abilities to efficiently and effectively organize their link campaigns to their specific needs.  Features of Link Manger include, but are not limited to: Finds links relative to the users site, keeps track of link partners, finds broken links that can negatively affect your page rank, monitor competitors, track your back links, and produce highly customized reports.  Link manager automatically eliminates manual searches to reduce the bandwidth burdens of other programs.

Overall Caphyon’s web ranking system has been an essential to MintTwist’s success and we highly recommend Caphyon over all other web ranking systems.  The level of competence and possibilities make it a dream to work with.

This is the according to Kevin Gibbons who, in a post on the Econsultancy blog, observed that using methods such as pay per click marketing once is valuable as the chances of conversions are high, but “you don’t want to pay to attract that customer a second or third time”.

Maintaining brand awareness for consumers can be important and blogs were highlighted as being a good way of doing this, as they can create user habits through “regular, engaging [and] relevant posts” that encourage surfers to save pages in their favourites.

Email marketing was also recommended by Mr Gibbons, although he did add that sending regular messages was “pretty useless” and risked angering the customer.

Aude Lesur of Credau, an Anglo-French firm that create eco-friendly fashion wear for men said “SEO alone, did not help us to effectively portray the benefits of our products to our potential customers. We wanted to reach men with style and an eye for classy clothing with a difference. By engaging with our audience through Blogs and Social Networks we have been able to reach more of our target customers groups.”

Elliott King of MintTwist, the web marketing agency recently likened search engine optimisation to politics, saying that it drives debate because many people do not know what it is, have had negative experiences or believe it to be overly complicated.

The company provides specialist legal services relating to class actions and security class actions that can protect clients against investment losses incurred through management failure that result in class action lawsuits.

The world wide web is constantly changing and to make sure your business keeps pace, it is important to be up to date with the latest trends and technologies. And this is why companies decide to redesign their website. Of course, there are other reasons too like re-branding the business, updating the website to reflect the present status of the company in the market, deleting old pages and uploading new information, better marketing fluff and so on.

However, search engine considerations are the most forgotten part in the website redesigning process. Website owners are so involved with creating a new look and feel for the website that they often fail to evaluate the SEO implications of their actions. They realize it only when the website is done and ready and there are fluctuations in the rankings of the website. But that is only when precious revenue is lost in terms of traffic, leads and sales.

Here are 4 SEO tips that you should adhere to while redesigning your website.

Strengthen the Information Architecture

Usability should be the key concern while designing the information architecture of the website. However, you should also consider including some SEO objectives for the usability process. Search engine optimization should not come after the website has been launched. Rather, it should be a key consideration throughout the design and development of the project.

Draft a set of relevant keywords that encompasses the essence of your company and business. Then make sure your website has pages that are devoted to those keywords so that search engine have relevant content when their crawlers come to index your website.

Make sure you add new pages to your website, especially if you are deleting certain pages. This is because you don’t want the search engines to think that your website is shrinking. Rather you should tell them that its growing. The deleted pages would obviously take with them their search engine credibility so you would need something to compensate the loss.

Don’t Change the URLs

When you change the URLs of your web pages, the new URLs would be treated as completely new pages by the search engines. All the search engine credibility of the previous pages would be lost along with the URLs.

Therefore, focus on creating search engine friendly web pages with search engine friendly URLs and light code with WordPress and other such CMS platforms. Make sure all the pages of your website are able to rank well in the search results and not just your homepage.

Update the Website Content

Search engine crawlers are always on the look out for new and fresh content. And there is no better opportunity than the redesigning process to upload new content on your website. Unlike blogs, it is not possible to change the contents of the website, especially on the homepage etc. on regular basis. So, make sure you upload useful and updated content on such pages. Ideally, focus on constructing more content on the homepage of the website followed by lesser supporting content on the internal pages.

Launch the website Carefully

don’t forget to run down the last minute check list before launching the new redesigned website. The search engine ranking of your website depends on a variety of factors including the website structure, the design and layout and the content. It is not just about the number of links pointing to your website that decides the ranking but how popular the website actually is among the users.

MintTwist Web Design understands the importance of  SEO in web marketing, MintTwist work with clients to significantly increase the number of targeted sales leads achieved by clients.

Microsoft’s launch party videos have proven to be entertaining to viewers even if not for the reasons for the marketing department had hoped for. There were a great many comments on my post that provided context to their release, but generally speaking most industry-watchers have been confused as to the goals behind the program, questioning the target audience not just for the videos, but for the launch parties as well.

I reached out to Microsoft for comment but they withheld at this time as the videos are apparently just one step in a much larger integrated marketing campaign.

I personally found the most recent video weird, but after thinking through things a bit I think this is a case of a good idea hampered by poor execution. The videos are well-done and professional and try to connect with consumers in a humanistic tone. The fact that it feels like you stumbled into a shiny-happy Windows world filled with sit-com throwaways is the problem. Even if this is a training video to show others how to throw a launch party, it’s hard to connect with the vapid characterizations of party guests.

This is the crux of Microsoft’s marketing problems. It’s not that they aren’t good at technical marketing issues, it’s that the brand itself is so voluminous, it’s very hard for people to connect to specific products like Windows. And the efforts to persuade consumers isolate the tech media and confuse IT shops.

One of the biggest issues Windows Vista faced was consumer confusion as to why they should buy an upgrade at all. Microsoft did a very poor job of communicating why anyone should care and added such a complicated set of offerings that people simply couldn’t figure out what to buy. (Note that Windows 7 also has a very complicated pricing scheme.)

Right now, the Windows brand doesn’t have a huge amount of momentum behind it, even if Microsoft itself and Bing do. Getting momentum behind Windows 7, regardless of the methodology should be Microsoft’s main goal right now. And the company is pulling out all the stops, from commercials to launch parties to getting the OS out into the channel sooner than retail, it is trying to gain back the lost mind-share.

The challenge is that companies like Apple, with a significantly smaller share of the operating system market, have developed such sophisticated and stylized marketing, that Microsoft has a very hard time competing with the overall effect. So, Microsoft has instead gone after the mythical “every-man” (or every-man, woman and racial/gender/ethnically diverse party in the world), which falls way short for we Valley media types that will mock anything and everything.

But the target customer for Windows 7 may actually like the experience of a launch party simply because it humanizes the operating system and allows them to ask silly questions like how to burn a CD. These were not made for sophisticated tech buyers and that may not be a bad thing.

The point is that PC manufacturers need people to buy more computers and really only Microsoft can make that happen until vendors (and consumers) embrace Linux or switch to Macs.

Do not make the same marketing mistakes as Microsoft, Minttwist provides all our clients with effective and targeted  web marketing campaigns to propel your business to the next level.

The trouble starts when you, being so close to your own project, see your website as much more than it actually is. And I’m not only talking about finding a niche and all that fun stuff, but you have to take yourself and your project with a pinch of salt because that is exactly how the rest of the world will be taking it, too.

If salt is not your thing then you may just have to substitute it with a dash of failure because, perhaps unfortunately, the Internet is very salty indeed.

Being close to your project is not a bad thing – indeed you can be the driving force behind it and thrust it upon the bleary-eyed and unyielding world. But the measure of success comes from afar. You simply cannot march head-first into a new web venture with guns blazing and developers flanking your left and investors flanking your right; for a start, success comes, ninety-nine per cent of the time, over a long period of that thing we call time, after many sleepless nights.

However, a project often falls into disarray when certain procedures aren’t adhered to. I’m going to list five things here that I think are of such great importance that it could form part of a check-list by which to measure the success of many an online venture. I list them in no particular order and the list is by no means complete.

1. There’s no rush
   Really, there isn’t. If you’ve come up with a brilliant idea, a true light-bulb-ping moment, get it all noted down, research it and talk about it (a lot) with people in the know. They can advise you of what is out of scope, what might be better and what is so good or bad about your idea. Don’t rush to a cheap freelance developer and hope to get it done and be reaping the rewards by Friday.
2. Do a “soft launch” if you have to
   If you really want to get your project out there ASAP, there’s usually no problem with doing what the industry dubs a “soft launch”. That is, launch your project warts-and-all and hope to gather a decent enough following to continue after you update to full-launch mode. A soft launch doesn’t just mean slapping a ‘beta’ tag next to your logo, it means carefully informing users what’s going on and what might change. It is also a great opportunity to gather feedback from Joe Public. Remember that openness is so sacred on the Internet that if you don’t inform people that you intend to start charging, you may face a backlash as soon as you flip that big ol’ switch.
3. Don’t hope for an instant crop from a single seed
   As I’ve already alluded to above, it’s so important to be careful not to hope for too much from your project. I’m really not trying to put a downer on any project, I completely believe that more Facebooks and more Googles are hidden in the back of peoples’ minds in random exotic places around the world. I just think that keeping a cool and level head, working really hard and speaking a lot with people who know what they are talking about is much more successful than blind hope. They don’t talk about crops with regard to success for nothing; a crop takes time to grow and, often, people can only afford the time, money and effort to start that crop with one tiny-weeny seed.
4. Don’t panic when something goes wrong
   Things do go wrong, FACT. It’s not always one person’s fault and it can, almost always, be fixed. But the most important part, before fixing what’s broken, is to not panic. Remember, you are close to the project so it’s difficult to see it from a more reasonable, and indeed a more real perspective. Seek help, calm down and have a tête à tête with your developers, designers and anybody else involved. Not only are you more likely to get the problem fixed, but you will probably get it done a lot more quickly than if you ran around like a headless chicken first. If a project completely falls over, you don’t need to follow it like a sack of potatoes; cool it to the extent that you could shock an ice cube, roast your chicken and potatoes with your pinch of salt, then get things sorted. It’s also worth noting that, if you use an agency, they will have factored-in (I hate that phrase) some contingency time in case of such an event.
5. Enjoy the process!
   It’s one thing to be good at it. It’s a completely different thing to enjoy it, too! If you enjoy the whole process, you will find that you are able to handle a lot more problems head on, with fingernails intact. Things run so much more seamlessly if you choose people who you like working with to help build your project into something important. Gifted with the choice between a person/people/agency who are very good at what they do, but are lacking in the personality department, and another person/agency who aren’t as good but can get the job done and are fun, engaging, interactive and proactive with you then, hands down, the latter is the better choice.

I’ve tried not to be too negative in my five points up there. I think that the Internet would be such a cleaner and more successful place if people just stop falling over each other trying to find the next big thing and just relax, sit back and take things one step at a time! And if things don’t go according to plan, pick up the pieces and keep going with your head stuck firmly on your rigid shoulders.

My boss told me something today that resonates well with this article. He said, “don’t worry if there’s something that really can’t be done, or that goes wrong; there’s always a work-around”.

Indeed.

What are the pitfalls for an offender, what are the legal comebacks and can you turn the situation to your favour?

Maybe, take the real world example below…

A case of website and web copyright theft

MintTwist and N.I.D-lab both create websites. N.I.D-lab stole MintTwist’s website with a cut-and-paste job.

The Original MintTwist Website

Stolen MintTwist Website with MintTwist clients still listed

This provides MintTwist with an opportunity to demonstrate an important selling point

Indulge us…

Ok, Clients of MintTwist, the multi-national web design and web marketing company are a smart bunch. They know that for a business website to be successful at winning more new sales leads it must get the right messages across to the right audience groups in a fast and effective manner. In a nutshell this is the secret of website success and the true value of a web design service.

It follows then, that one design does not fit all…

For example, target customers of MintTwist are medium sized businesses that target customers in the UK, Europe, USA and across the Middle East. MintTwist returns value to its clients by helping them to increase their revenue by significantly growing the number of sales leads they achieve from their web strategy through improved web design and web marketing services. The design that MintTwist created for their website gets this message across.

Conversely, N.I.D-lab, is a cheap web design company that offers cheap website services to anyone. The design that they have chosen for their website is a cut-and-paste copy of the MintTwist site. This was an error of judgement for several reasons ….

Pitfalls for the offender and their clients

As well as risking a lawsuit for themselves and any of their clients, who will be liable if they have performed the same ‘service’ for them, they have also failed at the first fundamental step of web design. The MintTwist website design is aimed at well-informed professionals with a vision of how to extract a significant return from their website purchase. These are not the kind of customers who will buy from N.I.D-lab and therefore should not be N.I.D-labs targets.

The next time N.I.D-lab decide to ‘re-design’ their site, to make it more effective they would be well advised to focus and optimise for their own (somewhat unique) selling point and target customer group – “cheap copies for people who like getting sued”.

What to do if your website is stolen?

If you are a website owner who have had your website stolen you should consider legal action. Google can also help to prevent damage by black-listing offenders using the power of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Google page dealing with offenders of website theft will provide more information on this.

More Opportunities

After a successful launch into the Abu Dhabi Web Design and Dubai Web Design Markets MintTwist is seeking to further diversify its markets in order to increase the level of service it can provide to its clients. For more information on attractive partnership opportunities with MintTwist, contact Elliott King. N.I.D-lab management need not apply.

IE and FireFox are the dominant incumbents and Google’s Chrome is the rising super-power. However, dig a little deeper and you’ll see there are more potential players in the battle for world domination.

Are we heading for a second wave of browser wars?

“The issue that lies ahead is whether browsers will remain a relatively simple window on to the internet or become intelligent agents that shape online experiences. If they go down the latter route this would have potentially disruptive effects for others who do business on the internet”, said Elliott King of MintTwist web design.

For the internet’s booming social networking industry in particular, the prospect that some of the capabilities associated with social networking will be embedded into browsers, making them more aware of users’ interests and social relationships, could force difficult strategic decisions.

Google’s main contribution to the browser skirmishes we’ve seen thus far has been an obsession with speed. With a new, faster engine for executing Javascript – the code that makes it possible for a browser to imitate applications that run on a PC – Google galvanised the rest of the industry and forced rivals to focus harder on their own core technology.

Google’s goal, as it takes on Microsoft, is clear – to accelerate the advances in the internet platform in ways that eventually make it unnecessary to run “native” software applications that rely on a PC’s underlying operating system. That, ultimately, should benefit the web-based services on which its success depends.

Others, however, see deeper potential in the browser and are out to push its capabilities further. As a piece of software that all users have to use – it clearly has a strong strategic position.

For instance, Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, says it is looking into arming its browser with a number of extra munitions – such as ‘knowing who you are and handling authentication on the websites you visit, keeping a record of your social network so that you can interact with friends; and, making it easier for you to share content with your network.

Given that these are all territories that social networks like Facebook currently view as their own, that could create new fronts opening up between browser makers and the internet services that rely on them.

If it makes life easier for internet users, bringing more capabilities into the browser will be hard to resist and populations of internet users may start to migrate away from using artificial silos [like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn].

This has attracted a flurry of interest and investment in browsers from the social networking big guns. The potential for “social browsers” is a currently a hot topic in Silicon Valley.

The internet industry has long nurtuerd a feeling of mutual growth and co-operation; but there’s a growing evidence that the time may be coming for players to choose sides, ready themselves and prepare for war!

MintTwist help medium sized product and service based businesses to increase revenue and sales leads by defeating their enemies on the battlefields of the internet with better web design and web marketing services. Contact Elliott King for more information.

While Twitter is the toast of its native Silicon Valley in California, London boasts more users than any other city in the world.

Even though Twitter itself is yet to generate any revenue, early-stage investors are pouring millions of pounds into small companies in the Twitter “ecosystem” in the London area.

London web designers have produced many of the most popular of the many third-party tools used to post to Twitter, called Tweetdeck. Reading’s Tweetmeme, which tracks the most popular news stories discussed on Twitter, is attracting millions of visitors a month while Twitterfeed, based in Tooting, is used by thousands of publishers to post their latest headlines on to the site.

Twitter was launched in 2006 but really took off in the UK at the beginning of this year, thanks to support from celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross. But many see Twitter’s potential as far greater than documenting the lunching habits of the stars.

“Twitter has huge potential as a marketing and communications platform”, says Elliott King, Director at MintTwist Ltd.

As Twitter has broken out of the early-adopter niche, it has attracted more mainstream users and uses… Jobseekers are using Twitter to find new employment. Many businesses push marketing messages and even run customer support services through their Twitter profiles. Millions of users flock to the site for the biggest news stories of the hour, as defined by the Twitter community rather than newspaper editors.

MintTwist help medium sized product and service based businesses to increase revenue and sales leads with the smart application of web design and web marketing services. Contact Elliott King for more information.

If you are going to have a bad website, you are probably better off having no website at all. It’s true. While a bad website at least gets your name in the search engines, it can also ruin your credibility. A hard to use website, for example, may push your potential customers over to the competition, while an amateurish website can convince potential customers that your business is simply not a serious one.

So how can you avoid these marketing gaffes online? Quite simply, by:

1) Making sure that you get your website when you are ready. You should only invest in a company website when you are ready to spend time and money on the project. Only develop a website when you are ready to hire professionals to design it for you and you are ready to promote and update your website regularly.

2) By entrusting your website to professionals. You may know someone who understands basic HTML or WYSIWYG programs, but you need professionals with a discerning eye to develop your professional website for you. You need a professional team – like the one at Ciplex – to get professional results. While amateur results may be OK for a personal webpage, any minor glitches or design errors on a company website make you look less credible. Unfortunately, with so many scams online today, customers may see any lack of credibility on your part as a red flag sign. Don’t give customers an excuse to not do business with you. If you cannot afford professionals, wait until you can or work out a financing plan.

3) By making your website part of an overall business plan. Your website is not stand-alone. It should work with your overall business plan, marketing strategy, and branding plan. If you are not sure what you want your website to accomplish, you should determine this before setting a site up. Nothing is worse than the business website with no discernable goal.

4) By ensuring that your website looks its best. Your website should be professional, clean, and attractive. It should err on the side of simplicity and work well with no delays or glitches. It should work well on different computers and with different browsers, so that all your potential customers can read your marketing message. Check and re-check your website to ensure that it looks as good as it possibly can.

MintTwist help medium sized product and service based businesses to increase revenue and sales leads by defeating their enemies on the battlefields of the internet with better web design and web marketing services. Contact Elliott King for more information.

Dr Gitte Lindgaard and colleagues from Carleton University in Ottawa flashed up websites for 50 milliseconds and asked participants to rate them for visual appeal.

When they repeated the exercise after a longer viewing period, the participants’ ratings were consistent.

“Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 milliseconds, suggesting that web designers have about 50 milliseconds to make a good impression,” the Canadians report in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology.

Associate Professor of psychology Bill von Hippel, from the University of New South Wales, says it takes about 50 milliseconds to read one word, making this a “stunningly remarkable” timeframe in which to process the complex stimuli on a website.

“It’s quite remarkable that people do it that fast and that it holds up in their later judgement,” he said.

“This may be because we have an affective or emotional system that [works] independently of our cognitive system.”

He says that in evolutionary terms, this ability helped us respond rapidly to dangerous situations.

Halo effect

Professor von Hippel says the study also reflects the so-called halo effect, where an initial bias towards something drives subsequent judgements.

“This suggests that we make very quick judgements based on some sort of emotional reaction and our more considered judgements still reflect that first impression,” he said.

Australian researcher Sue Burgess, who evaluates website useability and is a senior lecturer in information management at the University of Technology Sydney, says the finding comes as bad news to anyone hoping to convey information.

“There’s no doubt that people do respond very quickly to websites and decide very quickly whether to stay on them,” she said.

She says the appeal of a website is usually tied to colour, movement and interactivity, with the way the information is structured coming second.

Ms Burgess says it is unclear whether the Internet is changing our ability to concentrate for long periods or if we are adapting to the medium.

“There’s so much information and … there’s always going to be a lot of clicking around just to see what’s there,” she said.

MintTwist help medium sized product and service based businesses to increase revenue and sales leads with the smart application of web design and web marketing services. Contact Elliott King for more information.

Many of the business people in my network have answered an emphatic YES to this question…

Jurga Zilinskiene who runs established language translation services company Today Translations said, “During the recession we realised the value of our local suppliers. Trust and pulling together has been the key to the success that we’ve enjoyed through these lean times. By working in close proximity with our partners we have been able to focus on delivering a high quality service and a fast turnaround for our clients which has really made a difference to our bottom line.”

Jurga Zilinskiene who runs established language translation services company Today Translations.

Doing business with people trust and meeting people face-to-face are coming back into fashion. The perception amongst my ad-hoc sample appeared to be that by working with people (suppliers) that you’ve met and with whom you have developed some level of trust – and by trust I mean an intuitive feel for the person, as well as an understanding of the services their business can offer – you will achieve a greater level of customer service and ultimately an increased ROI.

Aude Lesur of Credau an Eco Menswear label specialising in eco clothing for men all made in Britain said “From conception to packaging, Credau has always believed in using local industry. All of our clothes are made in Britain, East London. Our care labels are woven in Pembrokeshire, and environmentally sustainable. We keep our carbon footprint to the minimum. We do not use plastic and we send out goods using a biodegradable polybag. We started out doing this because we care about the environment and it’s a core business value of Credau – however, we have been amazed at the resilience this policy has given our business during this downturn. We have experienced increased levels of service from our suppliers – all of them know the value of raising quality and because we are in it together they are also personally motivated to deliver even more value.”

Another client of ours who is reaping the rewards of the increased value that is being placed on “trust in business” is Mike Lacorte, Director of the Private Investigator agency Conflict International. Mike said, “We are seeing an increasing number of corporate businesses come to us, who want to find out more about potential employees they are thinking of taking on for key positions. They want to know if the person is drinking too much or doing drugs before they take them onto a very lucrative package. For them it’s a smart business decision and everything we do is within the law and entirely confidential.”

My conclusion; meeting with and trusting in your suppliers, partners and employees is crucial if you are to create sustainable business relationships. The benefits are a strong ROI, increased profit and (dare I say it) ‘friends’ who will be amongst the first to provide real help in challenging times.

Sorrell told reporters Wednesday that the ad industry will look very different when it fully recovers from the effects of the recession, with the focus moving away from traditional, The Wall Street Journal reports.

“It’s not going to be in 30-second TV ads; it’s not going to be in newspaper or magazine ads; it’s going to be digital, it’s going to be viral and organic” Sorrell said.

One particular reason the industry won’t rebound as quickly as the economy is that marketers have grown accustomed to paying less for campaigns as agencies have been forced to slash rates in an effort to retain clients. Even Dublin-based WPP, the world’s largest agency by revenue, reported a 48 percent drop in net profit (to $177.3 million) for the first half of the year.

MintTwist help businesses increase sales in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Worldwide markets. With a Managed Web Marketing service, MintTwist make sure their clients have the right setup before commencing an all-encompassing web marketing stratgey that dramatically increases sales leads, visibility and improves the reputation of our client’s businesss in target markets.

For more information contact Elliott King on +44 20 8349 8213 or elliott@minttwist.com.

Brand building is just the start of bigger things to come. How people perceive your business matters – it can increase sales and reinforce your reputation. Negative perceptions, on the other hand, can do great harm to your business.

These days the extension of your online brand and reputation management is as crucial as it is in the real world.

Whether we like it or not, with the advent of social media people will be talking about us online. And two, the possibilities this word of mouth online presents – are endless.

Online PR is therefore about building and managing your brand and reputation online by creating relationships with the right people and linking up to them. Where possible, engaging in convesrations that are taking place about your business (because they will take place whether you like it or not) can potentially provide huge benefit to your brand, and increase your sales.

So just why is online PR so important?

It’s quite simple really. If you care about your business – then you should care about creating and maintaining a good reputation online. The web has changed the way we live, the way we communicate and the way we do business.

Once driven by the offline world, now we need to go where our customers are and the fact is, most of them are online. However with trust being as important an issue as its ever been, a good reputation plays a big part in closing the deal. And social media gives you the ability to create a seal of approval and build a reputation that can last forever to counteract this issue. A blinkered view of the online world could have the opposite effect.

An even bigger advantage in building that reputation because by getting other reputable people to talk about and link back to you, you increase your visibility. Think of it as networking with your niche.

Getting relevant links back from websites and other internet channels also increases your search engine ranking!

Tradespacer, Antonia Chitty (AC PR) who has used online PR extensively for her business recommends it, “I use online promotion for my business and it gets great results. The wonderful thing is that you can post a call to action with a link that takes people straight to your site: this can lead to much better response rates than in print media. I’m writing this while in the middle of an online campaign to promote www.themumpreneurguide.co.uk and it is really gratifying to see how many people are responding by visiting the site within minutes of receiving an email, and going on to make a purchase too.”

Spelling out some of the benefits of online PR. Here’s what’s in it for you ….

• You become aware of what’s being said about you and by whom.
• Millions of consumers are turning to the web first for news – if you have news, it should be online as well as offline.
• When news sites and bloggers talk about or reference you, it not only increases credibility, it gives you a link back to your website which helps your search engine optimisation and ultimately your ranking.
• By being part of the conversations taking place online, you lead the conversation rather than being the butt of it.
• By building relationships with online bloggers and influencers, you are helping build your own reputation.
• A reputation built online has a longer lifespan. An offline press release for example, has a limit to its lifespan it only lasts as long as that issue of the newspaper lasts (if you get featured). This is not so online, once you get a link from a valuable source, it’s there till someone manually takes it down.

I’m convinced! How do I build my reputation and traffic? Online PR takes a bit of skill to get it right, so here are a few things to consider when drawing up an action plan.

• Do an audit of how you are currently perceived. Google yourself, and take note of what Google suggests people are searching for with your brand.
• Research your audience online and how you can reach them. Spend some time researching where your online audience hangs out – forums, blogs they read, communities they participate in.
• Find out who the stakeholders/influencers are within your space.// Identify who sets and challenges the trends within the scope of your own business and then prepare to build relationships with those people. Tip: bloggers and influencers need to be approached on a one to one level – not with a press release.
• Setting yourself up as an expert is key – so brush up and make sure you blog often and that your blog works (so people will want to reference it or link to it)
• The search optimisation bit works when you get a link from a reputable site back to your own – so aim to build these up.
• Learn how to write an effective online press release that you can distribute online to PR websites.
• Add a place for press releases, coverage etc…. have a look at ours for ideas.
• Finally don’t forget to use those all important and relevant keywords when submitting an online press release to get the maximum benefit of tying in your reputation and your search engine ranking!

MintTwist help businesses to improve their reputations and increase sales every day. With a Managed Web Marketing service, MintTwist make sure their clients have all the right things in place before commencing an all-encompassing web marketing stratgey that dramatically increases sales leads, visibility and improves the reputation of our client’s businesss. Contact Elliott King for more information.

1. Keywords are cool when it comes to writing copy for search

Many websites that guess their keywords and are spreading themselves too thinly (this included us at one stage). So getting your keyword strategy right is crucial . Also, we talk about keywords but phrases or key phrases is more accurate. How many of us have typed in just one word into Google? SEO experts should be able to provide a list of target key phrases based on SEO analaysis.

2. Highlight your keywords on the page

Keywords essentially tell search engines like Google what your website or that page is about. So for your page to increase its search engine ranking, your keywords need to be reflected in your copy as well as within the code (this bit is for the SEO people).

Within the actual copy itself, it is important to ‘highlight’ your keywords in prominent areas of the page, so insert your target keyword naturally into the main heading and body copy. Also, if your paragraph headings and subheadings contain your keywords (or related terms), it all helps summarise what this page is about so work them in!

3. Write good copy that’s keyword rich (note: it’s not the same as spamming)

Imagine you arrive on a website that’s a Fairtrade business and here’s what you see.

“Welcome our website, we’re an ethical & green business. Buy our ethical & green baby wear, plus we also specialise in ethical & green girls tops ….”

Two words: Not nice.

There’s always the temptation to just splatter your keywords or phrases all over your Tradespace or website to get to that all important page one of search results but a word of advice – this is not a good strategy.

Spamming your content will only drive your customers away. In fact, it will turn the search engines away because the focus now is on having authoritative content, well placed keywords and forward planning. In short, your content needs to work for your customers. If it works for your customers and gives them what they are searching for, it will increase your ranking naturally.

4. Build your content up

One of the best ways you can help your search engine ranking is to update your website regularly. The most successful blogs in terms of search are ones that constantly updated with good highly relevant content.

Updating regularly not only gives your customers and the search engines something to come back for it presents more opportunities to use your keywords and set yourself up as an authority in what you do!

5. Links work when writing copy for search

It’s no secret that getting links from authority sources and linking out to them is a great way to increase your rank. But equally important is how these links are named and how you’re naming/using other links on your page.

If you’re still using the old ‘click here’ to describe your links, ditch it now. One good reason to do so is the fact that that link makes no sense to a screen reader or a search engine. To give search engines a flavour of your content, insert links that are contextual, and reflect your keywords and try to get your network that links back to you to do the same.

Contextual linking is one way of improving your search engine ranking but to increase your links, you’ve got to consider every element of your page as an opportunity. So using keyword or key phrase rich titles and descriptions when linking your video files, your images and yes, even your navigation can all give your search ranking a boost!

MintTwist help businesses to improve their reputations and increase sales every day. With a Managed Web Marketing service, MintTwist make sure their clients have all the right things in place before commencing an all-encompassing web marketing stratgey that dramatically increases sales leads, visibility and improves the reputation of our client’s businesss. Contact Elliott King for more information.

What kind of Twit are you?

1. The link pirate
Spend the majority of your tweets dropping links to other people’s stuff. Combine this with a retweet, and you are off to a good start. i.e. Retweet someone else’s link. Continually. This results in exposure to the original tweeter (who will thank you for exposing them) – and has the additional bonus of exposing you to the owner of the link. Best of all – you’ve spent absolutely shit all time composing the content, and your followers give you a great big slap on the back for “finding” such a great link. Go you.

Commonly found browsing Digg / Delicious / Reddit home pages for juicy tit bits, in the hope that someone cares that they found it.

2. The retweeter
Spend the majority of your tweets, retweeting other people’s opinion. This can indicate that you a). Share the opinion or b). You want to get on their radar (because they are big blogger in niche X, Y or Z), or c) you retweet them in the hope that one day they retweet you. The cynic in me says that 80-90% of retweets are just that. Just take a look at Retweetist – you can easily see who the top dogs getting retweeted are. But are they top dogs because they have an audience already? Some are. Mashable for example. Other’s are just Internet Marketers with potentially huge reach – who are being coat tailed. In fact such is the power of the RT that Twitter has a spam cloud to deal with automated RT’s. Plenty of Twitter users want completely rid of RT’s and are creating filters to lose them. Combine the Retweeter with the link pirate and you find another monster. The retweet thief.

Commonly found browsing your most recent tweets, will have a high following count

3. The discoverer
These are the people whom I value most. Along with conversationalist, they are the people that REALLY find stuff. Not just the fluff that floats to the top of the delicious list, or does the rounds virally. The people who actively browse and read blogs, and discover the great content before the rest of the community turns it viral. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been on the receiving end of viral traffic before. It’s a warm feeling inside to know you are loved. But somehow, it loses it’s charm. It’s no longer a shiny needle in a haystack. Once it gets passed around the gem loses a bit of its lustre.

Commonly found reading blogs, keeps themselves to themselves until the treasure is found. Selfish – Sometimes doesn’t even share, and keeps the treasure for themselves.

4. The conversationalist
Uses twitter as an extension of MSN / Skype, often has to use twitter minimising tools or multiple tweets to get their point across. Doesn’t quite understand why it’s limited to just 140 characters. Conversationalists can be argumentative / keen debaters. Sometimes uses links to substantiate claims / points of view. They are most likely to be owners of low traffic, personal sites, or not have website’s at all. If they tweet a link, it more often than not will be to help someone, or as a reference – normally not out for personal gain.

Commonly found on Facebook, Bebo, Friends Reunited, MSN messenger or Skype. Sometimes all at once.

5. The twitter expert
Give me a break. Go read the UN-guide to Twitter. There’s more Zen tips in there than you can shake a stick at. And no we don’t need a freakin’ book to mould us into champion tweeters.

Commonly found giving advice, or trying to make a quick buck from an E-book.

6. The Narcissistic
The ego has landed. Oh yes. This piss artist commonly ignores tweets from the retweeter or the link pirate, mostly ignores the conversationalist – mainly because there is some gains to be had from the first two. Generally one way conversation, (with bottom feeders) – either listen or go away. If they tweet a URL, it will 9 times out of 10 be their own, and they may also have a web application which adds noise (from their own site) to their stream. Only interested in driving traffic, and promoting themselves.

Commonly found hob knobbing with social media experts or other narcissistics. May also be busy reading a “how to tweet” Ebook on Twitter.

7. The scam artist
What’s the best way to gain money from Twitter? That’s right, setup a pyramid scheme that puts you at the top of the most followed list, and then use that to spam other people’s twitter streams with ways of making money. If you are going to get sucked in by this crap, at least acknowledge that it won’t be long before the currency of followers gets cashed in. And you become the sucker getting sold, or spammed.

Commonly found concoting a brilliant internet marketing scam somewhere.

8. The webbot
Half man half machine – Like the Terminator and similar to Fembots in Austin powers, this user will lure you in with their charm, and then proceed to integrate regular tweets with one’s coming from an automated service running on their website. They have one goal, to drive traffic to their site. Problem is though – you can only communicate with one half.

Commonly found double checking their Google Analytics.

Submit Your Site to Key Directories, since a link from a directory will help your ranking — and get you traffic. A directory is not a search engine. Rather, it is a hierarchical listing of sites sorted according to category and subcategory. Be sure to list your site in the free Open Directory Project, overseen by overworked volunteer editors. But if you don’t get listed right away, don’t be impatient and resubmit, or you’ll go to the end of the queue. A link in this directory will help you a lot.

Yahoo! Directory is another important directory. Real humans read submission, so be careful to follow the instruction given. Hint: Use somewhat less than the maximum number of characters allowable, so you don’t have wordy text that will tempt the Yahoo! editor to begin chopping. Yahoo! Directory Submit requires a $299 annual recurring fee to have your site considered for inclusion within seven business days. Other paid business directories that might help are About.com and Business.com.

Submit Your Site to Trade Organization Sites and Specialized Directories. Some directories focused on particular industries, such as education or finance. You probably belong to various trade associations that feature member directories. Ask for a link. Even if you have to pay something for a link from the organization, it may help boost your PageRank.

Marginal directories, however, come and go very quickly, making it hard to keep up, so don’t try to be exhaustive here. Beware of directories that solicit you for “upgraded listings.” Unless a directory is widely used in your field, a premium ad is a waste of money — but the (free) link itself will help boost your PageRank and hence your search engine ranking.

SubmitWolf is a directory submission tool I’ve used with good success . You complete a listing form in the software interface. Then they submit your listing to all the appropriate directories they know of, plus links to sites that require manual submission. It’s a timesaver and works well. Just be careful to submit only to actual directories, not “linking sites.”

Request Reciprocal Links. Find websites in your general niche and request a reciprocal link to your site. Develop an out-of-the way page where you put links to other sites — so you don’t send people out the back door as fast as you bring them in the front door. Your best results will be from sites that generate a similar amount of traffic as your own site. High-traffic site webmasters are too busy to answer your requests for a link and don’t have anything to gain. Look for smaller sites that may have linking pages.

Check out Ken Evoy’s free SiteSell Value Exchange. It (1) registers your site as willing to exchange links with other sites that have a similar theme/topic content and (2) searches for sites with similar topical content. Additionally, two automated link building software programs stand out — Zeus and IBP Link Builder. Both of these search the web for complementary sites, help you maintain a link directory, and manage reciprocal links. However, use these programs to identify the complementary sites, not to send impersonal automated e-mail spam to site owners.

When you locate sites, send a personal e-mail using the contact e-mail on the site or to the administrative contact listed in a Whois Directory. If e-mail doesn’t get a response, try a phone call. Warning: Only link to complementary sites, no matter how often you are bombarded with requests to exchange links with a mortgage site that has nothing to do with your teddy bear store. One way Google determines what your site is about is who you link to and who links to you. It’s not just links, but quality links you seek. Reciprocal linking as hard, tedious work, but it doesn’t cost you a dime out of pocket! Keep working at this continuously, a little bit at a time. Patience and persistence will get you some good links, so keep at it.

Write Articles for Others to Use in Websites and Newsletters. You can dramatically increase your visibility when you write articles in your area of expertise and distribute them to editors as free content for their e-mail newsletters or their websites. Just ask that a link to your website and a one-line description of what you offer be included with the article. This is an effective “viral” approach that can produce hundreds of links to your site over time. You’ll find lots of information on how to do this from the most popular article marketing site, EzineArticles.com. When you create a free membership account, they begin sending you instructions and ideas each week.

Issue News Releases. Find newsworthy events and send news releases to print and Web periodicals in your industry. The links to your site in online news databases may remain for several months and will temporarily improve traffic to your site and increase link popularity. Use a online news release service such as PR Web. Placing your website URL in online copies of your press release may increase link popularity temporarily.

MintTwist help businesses to increase revenues and increase sales leads every day. With a Managed Web Marketing service, MintTwist make sure their clients have all the right things in place before commencing an all-encompassing web marketing stratgey that dramatically increases sales leads, visibility and improves the reputation of our client’s businesss. Contact Elliott King for more

Include Your URL on Stationery, Cards, and Literature. Make sure that all business cards, stationery, brochures, and literature contain your company’s URL and see that your printer gets the URL syntax correct! In print, I recommend leaving off the http:// part and including only the www.yourwebsite.com portion.

Promote using traditional media. Don’t discontinue print advertising that you’ve found effective but always be sure to include your URL in any display or classified ads you purchase in trade journals, newspapers, yellow pages etc.  Use a two-step approach: (1) capture readers’ attention with the ad, (2) then refer them to a URL where they can obtain more information and perhaps place an order. Look carefully at small display or classified ads in the back of narrowly-targeted magazines or trade periodicals. Sometimes these ads are more targeted, more effective, and less expensive than online advertising. Consider other traditional media to drive people to your site, such as direct mail, classifieds, post cards, etc. TV can be used to promote websites, especially in a local market.

Develop a Free Service. It’s boring to invite people, “Come to our site and learn about our business.” It’s quite another to say “Use the free kitchen remodeling calculator available exclusively on our site.” Make no mistake, it’s expensive in time and energy to develop free resources but it is very rewarding in increased traffic to your site — and a motivation to link to the site!  Make sure that your free service is closely related to what you are selling so the visitors you attract will be good prospects for your business. Give visitors multiple opportunities and links to cross over to the sales portion of your site.

The primary focus will be to drive targeted traffic to the website for their key business phrases. We will be utilising all forms of social networking as well as traditional natural ranking SEO.

Install a “Signature” in your E-Mail Program to help potential customers get in touch with you. Most e-mail programs allow you to designate a “signature” to appear at the end of each message you send. Limit it to 6 to 8 lines: Company name, address, phone number, URL, e-mail address, and a one-phrase description of your unique business offering. Look for examples on e-mail messages sent to you.

Publish an E-Mail Newsletter. While it requires a commitment of time, creating a monthly e-mail publication is one of the most important promotion techniques. It could be a newsletter (“ezine”), list of tips, industry updates, or new product information — whatever you believe your customers will appreciate. This is a great way to keep in touch with your prospects, generate trust, develop brand awareness, and build future business. It also helps you collect e-mail addresses from those who visit your site, but aren’t yet ready to make a purchase. You distribute your newsletter inexpensively using e-mail marketing services such as Campaign Monitor . If you have a very small list, some of these services let you use their services free until you grow larger. Blogs are very popular, but don’t really replace e-mail newsletters. You have to go to a blog to read it, while an e-mail newsletter appears in your inbox asking to be read.

1. Create a Twitter account. If you haven’t gotten around to signing up for Twitter yet, what are you waiting for? Go to twitter.com and sign up for an account. If you need a little more help, read How to Set Up a New Twitter Account in the resources below.
2. Decide what type of image you want to portray. Part of the difficulty in setting the correct background is deciding what you want your Twitter page design to say about you. Many folks take any image or graphic and upload it to their Twitter account without much thought. Take some time to come up with something that speaks of your style, taste and personality.
3. Consider the screen real estate. The important information to be viewed on Twitter occurs in the center of the page. No matter how many images or sayings you have on your background, the center of the screen belongs to Twitter. Therefore you have to create a background that gives Twitter center stage.
4. Go large. Larger images and/or graphics reduce the necessity for tiling an image. It gives the appearance of one large background specifically made for Twitter. Try starting with an image as large as 1600 x 1200.
5. Remember that all screen resolutions are not the same. The smaller the screen resolution, the lower the likelihood of your image will have to repeat. In other words, if you elect to use an image that has a flower located to the extreme left of the screen, on a lower resolution screen (800 x 600 for instance), the flower displays once. A screen with a resolution of say 2048 x 1536, the flower will display tiled on the screen several times.
6. Think about using a border. When creating an image, remember that a small portion of the top of the screen is dedicated to the Twitter logo and user navigation. It’s a little easier on the eyes if the design included a boarder over which the Twitter logo and navigation could sit without having to fight against a busy background.
7. Upload your image to Twitter. Once you’ve played around with the image, upload it to Twitter to see how it looks. Log onto your account. Click “Design” found under the “Settings” tab. Once on the design screen click “change background image.” Once you upload your image, check it out to see if you like it. If you don’t you can change it or use one of the Twitter default images until you come up with something you like.

SEO is a vital part of any website these days, and with expressions like “Having your website on the front page of Google is like having a store on Oxford Street” everyone is trying to get a piece of the action. And one big cloudy issue that seems to keep swinging from side to side is URL rewriting, and many web developers are getting confused with what Google says about dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs.

With Google’s most recent blog article about this issue they have mentioned that they have changed their policy when it comes to dynamic URLs, before Google would not index anything past the question mark of a dynamic URL, but now they do accept it and are saying that with a dynamic URL it is possible for them to get more information from a web page; this is where most web developers get confused as this blog post is directed at the less savvy web masters in order to protect them from harming their websites stats, but Google failed to mention this is the post and has left most people in search of whether or not to go ahead with URL rewriting.

But before you make a decision about doing URL rewriting to switch from dynamic URLs to static ones, you need to be sure that the benefits outweigh the costs and that you make sure you keep the entire website consistent.

The Pro’s and Con’s

You have to consider the pro’s and con’s of rewriting your websites URLs and make sure that the pros outweigh the cons, below are some of the pros and cons of dynamic URLs and static URLs that have been rewritten from dynamic ones.

Dynamic URLs Pros & Cons

1. Con: Having dynamic URLs exposes the underlying technology such as article.php?id=34 shows that this page is built in PHP.
2. Con: Dynamic links do not give users any idea of what the page contains.
3. Con: Dynamic links are harder to remember than static links.

Static URLs Pros & Cons

1. Pro: In a rewritten static URL you can add keywords pertaining to what your article or page is about helping in your Google ranking for a particular keyword or phrase.
2. Pro: A static URL looks much nicer than a dynamic URL and can be made much cleaner article.php?id=23 can turn into article/article-name.
3. Con: If done incorrectly will be messy and be bad for rankings.
4. Pro: Static URLs are easier to remember than dynamic ones.
5. Pro: Rewriting a dynamic URL to a static one hides underlying technology such as PHP or ASPX giving added security to a website.

The bottom line is that URL rewriting is not essential as Google indexes pages with dynamic URLs as long as they are not generating duplicate content, but although Google prefers static URLs to dynamic ones they recommend that you do not do it unless you are comfortable doing it and will do it properly. Otherwise, it can hurt your rankings if done incorrectly. For those who do it properly, URL rewriting can make your site more SEO-friendly and also make your URLs more user-friendly.

Hash Tag: The “#” sign. Allows Twitter users to group tweets by topic, making it easier to search particular conversations using Twitter Search.

ReTweet (RT @USERNAME): To repost something that’s already in the Twitter stream.

SnapTweet: A tweet that includes a photo taken with a phone.

Twittcrastination: Procrastination brought on by Twitter use.

Twadd: To add someone.

Twaigslist/Twebay: To sell something.

Tweeter/Twitterer/Twit: Someone who uses Twitter.

TwinkedIn: Inviting friends made on Twitter to connect on LinkedIn.

Twittectomy: To remove someone from the list of people you follow.

Twitterati: The A-list twitterers everyone follows.

Twitterfly: Twitter’s version of a social butterfly, marked by the extreme use of @ signs.

Twadd: http://twitter.com/minttwist

Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title.
Write a descriptive title for each page — rich in keywords you want people to find you with — using 5 to 8 words. Remove as many “filler” words from the title (such as “the,” “and,” etc.) as possible, while still making it readable. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative.  Place this at the top of the webpage between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format: <TITLE>MintTwist Web Marketing Checklist -- Top Tips to Promote Your Website</TITLE>. (It also shows on the blue bar at the top of your web browser.)

Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title.
Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that’s what people will be searching for, don’t just use your company name “Acme Services  Ltd” use “Shipping Overseas with Acme Services Ltd”.   The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title (called “keyword prominence”).  Remember, this title is your identity on the search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue hyper linked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.

Write a Description META Tag.
Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title in the search results. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and key phrases on this page. Don’t include keywords that don’t appear on the webpage. Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format:

<META CONTENT="Increase visitor hits, attract traffic through submitting URLs, META tags, news releases, banner ads, and reciprocal links.">

The maximum number of characters should be about 255;  just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.

When I prepare a webpage, I write the article first, then develop a keyword-rich title (#1 above). Then I write a description of the content in that article in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and keyphrases included in the article.  This goes into the description META tag.

Next, strip out the common words, leaving just the meaty keywords and phrases and insert those into the keywords META tag. It’s no longer used much for ranking, but I’m leaving it in anyway. I think it may have some minor value. So to summarise so far, every webpage in your site should have a distinct title and META description tag.  If you implement these two points, you’re well on your way to better search engine ranking.  But there’s more that will help your ranking….

Include Your Keywords in Headers (H1, H2, H3).
Search engines consider keywords that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags.   Don’t expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines — it won’t. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine.   N.B. Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That’s a big mistake. Make sure your designer defines these tags in the CSS rather than creating headline tags with other names.

Position Your Keywords in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text.
Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document — where most people write an introduction to the content of the page.  You don’t want to just artificially stuff keywords here, however.  More is not better. Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high, so don’t overdo it.

Include Descriptive Keywords in the ALT Attribute of Image Tags.
This helps your site be more accessible to site-impaired visitors (see here) and gives additional clues to the search engines.  The ALT attributes do help get your images ranked higher for image search.

Use Keywords in Hyperlinks.
Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your webpage.  When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important, so hyperlink your important keywords and key phrases.  To emphasise it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or key phrase, such as blue-widget.htm — another clue for the search engine.

Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly.
You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don’t read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site. Don’t set up your navigation system using HTML frames (an old, out-dated approach); they can cause severe indexing problems.

Some content management systems and e-commerce catalogues produce dynamic, made-on-the-fly web pages, often recognisable by question marks in the URLs followed by long strings of numbers or letters. Overworked search engines sometimes have trouble parsing long URLs and may stop at the question mark, refusing to go farther. If you find the search engines aren’t indexing your interior pages, you might consider URL rewriting, a site map, or commercial solutions.

Create a Site Map.
A site map page with links to all your pages can help search engines (and visitors) find all your pages, particularly if you have a larger site. You can use a free tools, XML-Sitemaps.com to create XML sitemaps that are used by the major search engines to index your web pages accurately. Upload your sitemap to your website. Then submit your XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (formerly MSN), following instructions on their sites. By the way,  Google Webmaster Central has lots of tools to help you get ranked higher. Be sure to set up a free account and explore what they have to offer.

Develop Web pages Focused on Each Your Target Keywords.
SEO specialists no longer recommend using external doorway or gateway pages, since nearly duplicate web pages might get you penalized. Rather, develop several web pages on your site, each of which is focused on a target keyword or key phrase for which you would like a high ranking. Let’s say you sell teddy bears. Use Google Insights for Search or the free keyword suggestion tool on Wordtracker to find the related keywords people search on. In this case: write a separate webpage featuring the keyword “teddy bear,” “teddy bears,” “london teddy bears,” ” london bears,” “the teddy bears,” teddy bears picnic,” “teddy bears pictures,” etc. You’ll write a completely different article on each topic. You can’t fully optimize all the web pages in your site, but for each of these focused-content web pages, spend lots of time tweaking to improve its ranking, as described in point #10.

Fine-tune with Careful Search Engine Optimisation.
Now fine-tune your focused-content pages and perhaps your home page, by making a series of minor adjustments to help them rank higher.  Software such as Rank Tracker or Advanced Web Rankings allows you to check your current ranking and compare your webpages against your top keyword competitors. I use them both regularly. Advanced Web Rankings also has a Keyword Analyser tool that gives you pointers on increasing the ranking of your page.

Frankly, this kind of SEO fine-tuning is time-consuming, painstaking work that takes a lot of specialized knowledge. For this reason, many small and large businesses outsource search engine optimisation.  Please contact Elliott King at elliott@minttwist.com if you would like to discuss outsourcing your SEO to us.

Promote Your Local Business on the Internet.
These days many people search for local businesses on the Internet. To make sure they find you, include on every page of your website your postal address, phone number and the five or 10 other local community place names your business serves. If you can, include place names in the title tag, too. When you seek links to your site, you should request links from local businesses with place names in the communities you serve and complementary businesses in your industry nationwide.

Also create a free listing for your local business on Google Maps Local Business Centre and Yahoo! Local. That way your business can show up on a map when people do a local search.

Promote Your Video, Images, and Audio Content.
Google’s “universal search” displays not only webpage content, but also often displays near the top of the page relevant listings for images, videos, local businesses, and audio clips.  Therefore, consider creating such content appropriate to your business and then optimizing it so it can be ranked high enough to help you. For example, if you were to get a top-ranking, informative video on YouTube that mentions your site, it could drive a lot of traffic to your site. For more information, search on “optimising images” or “optimising videos.”

Although the computer revolution that started thirty years ago is still not mature, the novelty has worn off. The Internet is a part of everyday life for nearly everyone, from tiny children to grey-haired grannies. The dust from the upheaval of the last thirty years is settling and everyone can see the competitive landscape more clearly.

Regardless of what the techies or web gurus say, as a small business your website probably isn’t going to bring you vast hoards of customers from around the world, let you compete with the “big boys” in your industry, or make you rich.

It’s just not true.

What your website can and should do, however, is be a powerful tool to attract your hottest local prospects and activate your existing customers.

More and more customers are going to go on-line to get your telephone number, see if you’re open on Sunday, find out if you carry a brand of products they are looking for, see what’s new at the store this month, or get directions to your store.

Many of your hottest prospects are comparison shopping on-line before they decide which store to visit in person. They are “checking you out” and if what they find on-line doesn’t match up to your competitor’s you could be out of the running.

For example, let’s say I wanted to buy a new mountain bike. One of the things I’d probably do is search on-line for local for bike shops. I’d browse around on their sites (just like I might if I was actually in their stores) to see what bikes they had to offer, check out how knowledgeable they were, how professional they seemed, what kind of post-sale service they provided.

Just based on that web experience alone I might make a decision about where I was going to buy my bike. At the minimum, I would rule out any places that looked like they couldn’t give me a good buying experience.

This scenario takes place thousands, maybe millions, of times a day in your selling area for a huge variety of goods and services. That’s why every single store should have website with a minimum of 3-7 pages about their business and possibly many more.

This type of website is basically an e-brochure. It’s the high-tech version of the print brochure you give to promote your business to customers. It’s also becoming the high-tech version of your yellow pages ad.

So is it worth the cost of a website just to have an electronic brochure? Absolutely. How much would you pay for a magical print brochure that just showed up whenever your customer was wondering about your store or thinking about buying what you sell? Remember, websites don’t have to be expensive to be good.

Begin a Business Blog. Want links to your site?  Begin a business blog on your website, hosted on your own domain. If you offer excellent content and regular industry comment, people are likely to link to it, increasing your site’s PageRank. Consistency and having something to say are key. If you have a blog on a third-party blog site, occasionally find reasons to talk about and link to your own domain.

Become Part of a Social Media Community. Some of the best online communities for business include Facebook LinkedIn, and Twitter. In addition, you may want to participate in a social bookmarking community in which members share with each other information about websites, articles, or news items that they like (or don’t like). These include Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Google Bookmarks. Search engine spiders troll these sites looking for links to something new and relevant. You can usually place a link to your website in your profile, but the biggest gain comes when other people mention you (which generates traffic to your site), link to you (which increases your PageRank and brings traffic), or bookmark you (which increases your PageRank and brings traffic).

One important reminder, don’t join a community to spam them or talk incessantly about your business. Like any community you must listen, comment, and make a genuine contribution for the good of others. Don’t hog the conversation. Otherwise, your self-serving links and comments will hurt your reputation.

Promote Your Site in Online Forums and Discussion Lists — “old school” social media. The Internet offers thousands of very targeted e-mail based discussion lists, online forums, and groups made up of people with very specialized interests. Use Google Groups to find appropriate groups. Search online for blogs or other forums.

Don’t bother with groups consisting of pure spam. Instead, find groups where a serious dialog is taking place. Don’t use aggressive marketing and overtly plug your product or service. Rather, add to the discussion in a helpful way and let the “signature” at the end of your e-mail message do your marketing for you. People will gradually get to know and trust you, visit your site, and do business with you.

Ask Visitors to Bookmark Your Site. It seems simple, but ask visitors to bookmark your site or save it in their Favorites list. I use a widget called AddThis. When you put the AddThis JavaScript on your webpage, it automatically determines the title and URL of that page. When visitors click the button on your page, they are automatically taken to a page that allows them to choose which bookmarking service they prefer, and then pre-populates the appropriate form with the title and URL of your webpage. I use AddThis throughout my website, as well as in my newsletters. If you have good content that people want to bookmark, this can generate hundreds of links to your site and significantly raise your rankings.

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May 25

Tagged in: inspiration Comments:Add

30 Examples of Attractive Nav

Guest Post by Joel Reyes

Web designers always have to strike a balance between usability and visual appeal when designing a website. Without this balance, a website might be nice to look at or difficult to navigate. Or, it might be easy to navigate, but not easy on the eyes. With this in mind, balancing attractive navigation with usability does not need to be overly difficult. To help you generate new ideas and inspiration for user navigation, here are 30 great examples of attractive and usable navigation.

Typographica

This site features the simplicity of an attrractive menu that empowers users with undeniably easy to follow navigation. If you hover over the headline under the logo you will see that the word “Type” remains highlighted, and as you begin to hover over the rest of the words you’ll be able to clearly select the corresponding area you’d like to visit.

Atebits

Links are in the form of icons that feature a neat effect that allows the icons to light up as you hover over them. It’s simple, subtle, attractive, yet effective.

Contrast.ie

The navigation on Contrast.ie displays a unique approach to creative styled menus. All of the buttons are placed in a comment shaped figure and pop out as you hover over them.

Search Inside Video

The navigation on this site clearly directs you in the form of an arrow as you hover over them with your mouse. Effective navigation leaves behind complex design. Seems as though this site made use of this suggestion.

Leihu

This site takes creative navigation to the sky. If you look to the left and mouseover the guy you will see a smile appear, if you mouseover the icons and images you’ll instantly see a description next to the mouse’s pointer as well.

Forty

Forty uses a creative, image-based user navigation. The arrows “guide” the users attention to the buttons and invites the user to click on them.

Healogix

Healogix asks the four most important questions of itself with large text that draws the users attention. When, what, why and who? Can all be answered one click away from the homepage.

Ideas on Ideas

There is only one main link to the home page, but the idea is both creative and usable. The link is prominent and it “speaks” to the user. Users, in general, enjoy web pages that they can interact with.

Sarah Longnecker

The navigation of this website is simple and easy to use. The banners behind the selected page make the navigation easily identifiable from the rest of the page.

Made By Elephant

Made by Elephant features large and easy to use navigation. The blue text also adds a nice contrast to the heavier red and black.

Work at Play

As you begin to click through the menu of this site, you’ll be able to notice that the position of the background and color of the entire site quickly change.

Clear Left

The menu on this site resembles that of a post it note as you mouseover the links. Then entire layout of the site is based on this concept.

Pattern Tap

As soon as you enter the site you’re greeted by a green arrow that feeds you information about every section as you scroll through the site. This makes it easer for users to interact with the site.

Unstoppable Robot Ninja

The navigation is as bold as the name of this website. Furthermore, it also enhances the design tremendously.

Red Nose Day

The main navigation links fit in well with the playful theme of the website, while maintaining usability and prominence.

Polar Gold

This text-based navigation features a colorful and playful look while maintaining usability without the use of Javascript, but Flash instead.

Webpage FX Blog

A unique and interesting take on navigation. The links to the home page and blog are featured in a sentence across the header of the page. It does not violate usability principles, it is easy to read and highly effective.

Opera Ma-gé

The main navigation is easy to find, and the green underline creates uniformity between the navigation and the rest of the page.

Owltastic

Owltastic is a perfect example of good user experience. Every element of the main navigation animates when the user hovers the mouse over it. Like other examples on this list, the navigation is also prominent and easy to locate.

Guillaume Pacheco

Like Owltastic, this website interacts with the user as they mouse over different elements of the page. The site is well laid out and easy to navigate.

Full Cream Milk

Full Cream Milk uses a distinct text-based navigation, as you roll over the links, a portion of the top of the page is highlighted. This is a great example of navigation that is pleasing to both users and search engines.

Arca Lui Noe Hotel

This site features user navigation that is both beautiful and easy to use. It is very stylish and adds to the overall design of the page.

Sushi & Robots

Sushi and Robots uses elegant Typography to create a beautiful and attractive navigation that stands out.

Sharify

Sharify features a monochromatic user navigation that is pleasing to the eye, and usable because of the contrast between the white text and the sky blue background.

Stephen Caver

Here, the navigation is essentially the first content you see on the home page. It is “clean” and easy to use. Moreover, the use of whitespace in the navigation is excellent.

Thought and Theory

This site takes a minimalist approach to navigation, and it simply works. It does not take anything away from the page or distract the user.

Slightly More

Again, the high contrast black and white adds to the usability of the site. The javascript rollovers are light blue tabs that add interactivity and aesthetic value.

Ulster Grocer

The navigation makes use of bright colors, easy accessibility and unity with the blue background of the main content of the page.

Adaptd

The Adaptd site features creative, easy to follow, and beautiful navigation. The aspect of this navigation that stands out the most is located in the section where the portfolio resides. When you place the mouseover these buttons the words become transparent blend in with the sites background.

Sac Jazz Festival 2009

This site has navigation that the user does not even have to search for. In addition, the vibrant color of the navigation adds even more color to the page. The elements of this design blend together seamlessly.

Delicious Stumbleupon Digg

30 Untypical WordPress Sites Microsoft Event & Free Giveaways

Comments

Pages: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 » Show All

There are 79 comments (+Add)

• 79 Jessie Matanky http://jessiematanky.com
  July 28th, 2009 at 11:09 am

  I really liked these- these sites seem to be up on all the blogs & web design sites for all sorts of different stuff. They should be proud.

• 78 chris
  July 20th, 2009 at 8:22 pm

  Be sure and check out the page source for the Slightly More site, includes some ascii art and text! Very shocking and funny.

• 77 Nashville Web Design Guy http://www.nashvilleinteractive.com
  July 15th, 2009 at 2:31 pm

  Very diverse range of styles and functionality on the list. Very nice compilation. I tend to lean toward linear navigation if it can fit at all into a project. I like to lead people through the experience. It’s not always feasible of course but a nice change for users and it allows you to gauge interest pretty easily via analytics.

• 76 London web design http://www.totallydesignlondon.co.uk
  July 11th, 2009 at 12:57 pm

  Yeah this is well nice!

• 75 egypt web design http://www.egyptwebdesign.com
  July 7th, 2009 at 6:43 am

  great article thanks for share with us, really great list.

• 74 yapidekor http://yapidekor.blogspot.com/
  July 6th, 2009 at 1:51 pm

  Thank you my friend …

• 73 matrax http://multimanyak.com/matrax
  July 3rd, 2009 at 2:17 pm

  Your site and your content to a really great hand healthy;)

• 72 Bernard Teske http://www.bernardteske.de
  July 1st, 2009 at 7:46 am

  In this webside, http://www.druckundrepro.de you can use the navigation in the left side or use the cursor like a “hand-tool”. Think this is also an interesting way

• 71 Rob http://robstathem.com
  June 25th, 2009 at 10:24 pm

  @ Joe…I don’t think your rude behavior is appreciated by anyone in this forum. I would automatically delete your outcast behavior, and so should the designer of this website.

  There’s no need for your attitude. Take it somewhere else!!!

• 70 Rob http://robstathem.com
  June 25th, 2009 at 10:21 pm

  Fantastic!! Thanks for posting these examples of awesome navigation! I’ll admit, it can be real exciting adding different design touches to the navigation!

  I tend to design the navigation based on the style of my website. For elegant designs, I tend to use subdued text for links or maybe a subtle roll-over. The hotel website listed above is definitely an elegant type of roll-over!

  I think it’s probably important to note that when doing roll-overs, image based roll-overs should be done with CSS instead of JavaScript. The JavaScript is a bit clunky and CSS just makes it a little cleaner. Just my personal opinion!

  Rob

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Web Designer Wall is all about design, ideas, web trends, and tutorials. It is designed and maintained by Nick La, who also runs N.Design Studio, IconDock, and Best Web Gallery.

© Web Designer Wall 2009 . N.Design Studio . Best Web Gallery

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The primary focus will be to drive targeted traffic to the website for their top 4 keywords: car shipping, commercial shipping, residential shipping and student shipping.

We will be utilising all forms of social networking as well as traditional natural ranking SEO.  I will keep you updated with the progress of the campaign.

KFC, the fast food chain, learnt a thing or two about the power of Twitter , the messaging site that allows members to post 140-character updates for all to see, when it launched grilled chicken earlier this year.

Something of a departure for the fried-chicken specialist, the company’s move into grilled chicken was unveiled by Oprah Winfrey on her show, with details of a voucher on her website for a free meal.

Once the link to the voucher hit Twitter, it was quickly forwarded to millions of users.

“The Kentucky Grilled Chicken launch made a particularly big splash in the Twitterverse,” says KFC. “During the online discussion of our free meal, KFC became the top trending topic on Twitter, which is an amazing accomplishment for a brand.”

KFC and DraftFCB, its advertising agency, were anticipating a rush after the promotion but demand was so high that the voucher’s web page crashed and its restaurants were overwhelmed. Still, in the world of viral marketing, where generating a buzz is all important, the campaign was a massive hit that led to a huge amount of free press coverage, even though some of that was critical of KFC’s ability to manage demand.

If last year’s must-have accessory for the clued-in marketing manager was a Facebook page, in 2009 Twitter is the place for brands to see and be seen. While it remains some way behind Facebook in total members, Twitter has recorded stratospheric growth since the start of the year. It has more than 32m monthly unique users, according to comScore, an agency that measures web traffic.

But as advertisers have flocked to the site, there have been casualties along the way. The same power to amplify promotions and positive messages also means that any missteps on Twitter are very public ones.

As KFC showed, brands have been quick to see the importance of Twitter’s “trending topics”, a list of popular phrases that appear on a user’s Twitter homepage. Clicking on a trend takes the user to a list of the latest “tweets” featuring that word or phrase. This can be a useful tool for marketers but it also requires careful management.

Habitat , the high-street furniture retailer, found itself the subject of a witch hunt on Twitter after it used phrases relating to the contested Iranian elections to boost its mailing list. “#MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card,” read one tweet, referring to the opposition candidate in Iran’s recent presidential elections, whose supporters have used Twitter to organise a series of demonstrations and to communicate.

Habitat has since deleted the offending messages, which it claims were posted by an unnamed intern, and apologised . “We have been listening to the feedback on Twitter and we are learning more and more about how the community would like us to engage with them,” the company said in a statement.

Even though it said social media sites were a “huge opportunity to hear people’s views”, Habitat has not returned to Twitter since late June and would not say when it intended to start posting messages again. Some Twitterers, including a former BBC manager with thousands of followers, have kept the story alive by trying to find the intern.

“The Habitat story went everywhere very quickly,” says Daljit Bhurji , managing director of Diffusion PR. “They realised the hard way if you give [Twitter posting duties] to someone with no experience of how social media works, it will come back and bite you. It has made a lot of clients more nervous.”

Mr Bhurji recommends listening to what is said on Twitter before joining, to inform your tone and the issues to tweet about. “Think before you tweet” is one of his maxims.

The most popular Twitter accounts are those that do more than just post lists of links to brands’ websites or vouchers. According to Will McInnes , co-founder of the NixonMcInnes, the social media agency, many marketers on Twitter have forgotten that engaging consumers on the internet requires more subtlety than simply broadcasting their messages. “What people like is help and utility and value,” he says. “Most of our clients have substantial multimillion-pound investments in customer service and those are the people we need to get online.”

Indeed, many successful corporate Twitter accounts are more an extension of a customer call centre than part of the marketing department.

Whole Foods , the US organic grocer, has accrued more than 1m followers on Twitter since joining a year ago, not least because of quick responses to what it says is a “very knowledgeable” customer base. “Certainly at times we’ve encouraged folks to follow us with contests and promotions exclusive to Twitter,” says Winnie Hsia, Whole Foods’ social media specialist. But mostly it is “customer service, and valuable and relevant content that keeps folks following us”. Whole Foods aims to respond to questions within 24 hours, and many are answered much faster.

It tends to limit its replies to direct questions. “We find that only responding to folks who seek us out or formally mention us is less invasive than listening to and responding to all instances of our name being mentioned,” she says.

Ben Ayres, one of two permanent ITV employees who run the broadcaster’s 10 Twitter accounts , says brands “have to have a personality”. Marketers should not be too sensitive about speaking in public, he says. “There is a skill in that – it comes from knowing the brand, but not taking it all too seriously.”

ITV’s Twitter profiles, which promote shows such as Coronation Street and This Morning as well as its Tour de France and football coverage, have thousands of followers and generate a “significant amount of referrals for us”, says Mr Ayres.

Those are most obvious during live shows such as Britain’s Got Talent , which dominated Twitter’s trends when it was broadcast as fans chatted about the contest.

Mr Ayres recommends timing tweets to coincide with periods of high online activity, such as mornings, lunchtimes and the workday “late afternoon lull”.

Advocates admit that it can be hard for companies to measure Twitter’s value for anything more than referrals to websites. One exchange on Twitter suggests its achievements could go further. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are virtual friends on Twitter, at the prompting of digital agency Amnesia Razorfish.

Responding to a “gracious (but competitive) hello” from Coca-Cola , Pepsi replied : “Can rivals and tweeps coexist? We’re willing to find out. “

Find out more about using twitter to increase sales leads for your business with a manged web marketing campaign, for targetting UK, European and global customers. Contact Elliott King on +44 208 3498 213.

Our personal research preference is to use our Google adwords account to research the popular phrases that are being searched on as well as the volume of individual searches each month.  This is in preference to using independent SEO keyword research tools.

Once we know who is searching for what and how they are searching ,we then need to see how much competition we have to fight against in order to reach a top rank in Google (bearing in mind the phrases  chosen must make sense when inserted into the main body of text).

Just this alone accounts for 25% of the overall process for SEO but I can’t stress enough -  get this right from the outset and it will save you much time and money in the future. For example we have had clients adamant on the key phrases they which to be found on through search engines as “costumers are always right” we wait for the phone call when the complaints come in on their rankings.  We then have to reopen closed projects and start a new SEO quest which not only takes up time and money it also loses the clients potential business.

So once again research is key to success in the world of SEO.  These are just the first steps on the road to high ranking success.  The whole SEO process lasts far longer and once the site has been built and gone live the trick is to make the site work hard for your business.  I hope this helps you in your quest for Google success.