“Digital marketing is marketing that makes use of electronic devices such as computers, tablets, smartphones, cellphones, digital billboards, and game consoles to engage with consumers and other business partners.” – Wikipedia

Online marketing is a major part of digital marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) is a major sub-component of online marketing.

The SEO and Online Marketing You Knew Just Died A Painful Death

2012 was the year when search engine optimisation really matured. Google was ruthless and made a clear statement that only the best shall rank high and win. It has now become evident, more than ever before, that providing high-quality content and delivering the best possible user experience and value to our visitors and customers are the only means to succeed in the digital marketplace.

All those who sought quick and cheap results are now cleaning up from the aftermath of Google’s Panda, Penguin and now the frequent algorithm updates. Quick SEO tactics from this year onwards might show signs of a short-term fix at best, but will definitely cause long-term damages at worst.

It’s The Time To Celebrate

The bad news is that Google has become hard to please. The good news is that your competitors are probably struggling to catch up with Google’s rapidly improving algorithms. Google has now offered you a window of opportunity. It is now up to you to grab it and leap ahead or lose it and get left behind.

Becoming A Brand And The Secret To Winning

From 2013 onwards, to win in the digital world gatekept by Google, you need to commit to a strong long-term strategy. You can still build certain legit small wins into your long-term strategy, but only to assist in developing your brand strength. The only available way to beat your competition is to become a brand and establish yourself as an authoritative figure in your industry. Only then will Google allow you into the top league and you will gain increased visitors who will then convert into customers.

What Can We Do For You?

We are working successfully with small to medium-sized businesses and have helped them succeed online. While Google and all the other nuts and bolts of the internet keep twisting and turning, we stay alert and up-to-date and make it our mission to deliver results for our customers.

If you would like to succeed online and would like us to put together an action plan for you, speak to Sid Vel, our digital marketing specialist. He is available on 0131 440 9371.

Optimise Web is an Edinburgh based internet and software business which provides holistic web and eCommerce sites to positively influence traffic, conversions and profitability by using tech savvy and innovative marketing practices. The company is a small team of software and marketing specialists that have been helping organisations generate online revenue and expand their business and reputation on the web since 2006.

If have specific experience in building up Magento powered websites, or you have extraordinary skills in Web Project Management, please feel free to send a Cover Letter and CV to jobs (at) optimiseweb.co.uk

We are always looking for people based on experience and capacity, not necessarily on formal education. 

Sorry, no agencies please

Problem:

Verty Furniture wanted to improve their search engine rankings on Google. Their previous website was written as a custom written eCommerce site and their URL’s were not very search engine friendly. Rather than a clean category name, their URL’s were a bunch of ID’s and numbers.

For example:
vertyfurniture.co.uk/itemdetail.php?itemid=221

Solution: 

We redeveloped the website, recoding everything through Magento. Currently all of their URL’s now are clean and search engine friendly.

Their new URL now looks like:
vertyfurniture.co.uk/cube-sheesham-tall-chest-of-5-drawers.html

Due to a tight budget, Verty did not want a redesign of their website, however we were able to make some amendments to the Verty homepage to make it more marketable.

We included some Call to Action links.

The homepage also had no visible products on it, so we included product images.

We also integrated their site with Paypal using a special Magento shipping model.  We added upsell and fixed the site so that products could be shown in more than one category.

Why is Magento the best e-commerce software for SEO?

If you want to run a business online, it’s more than just selling products. You’ll have to think about “how” your customers are going to find your products. This is where good built-in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and marketing tools are vital.

1. Search-Engine-Friendly URL’s

The top reason to choose Magento would be its search engine friendly URL feature. This feature allows store owners to customise the URL (web address) of each and every page on the website. These links are beneficial because you can custom-build your URL to specify the product, even if there is only a picture of it on the page. Additionally, having search engine friendly URL’s helps SEO agencies to built great campaigns. So, if your trying to get a good Google ranking for “dining room chairs”, the URL will aide in SEO and conversion optimisation.

All the categories (known in the backend as Parent Categories) which you will create in Magento have potential subcategories (known in the backend as Children Categories). For example, if you run a furniture store and have “Dining Room Furniture” as a category, you can have “Dining Room Tables” as the subcategory and below this subcategory a list of all your products. All products can belong to more than one category or subcategory.

Your URL would then look something like this:

Homepage: www.yoursite.com/
Dining Room: www.yoursite.com/dining-room-furniture.html
Dining Room Chairs: www.yoursite.com/dining-room-furniture/chairs.html
Dining Room Product Page: www.yoursite.com/dining-room-furniture/chairs/lumbar-support.html

In turn, you might have the lumbar-support chair available in both living room and dining room categories, in which case the user can find the lumbar support chair in two Magento categories:

www.yoursite.com/dining-room-furniture/chairs/lumbar-support.html
www.yoursite.com/living-room-furniture/chairs/lumbar-support.html

So whether you are looking for “chairs”, “dining room furniture”, “lumbar support chairs” or “living room chairs” there are several possibilities for your customer to reach that particular item.

2. Google Sitemap

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. Magento allows users to enable such a sitemap which will help you get indexed faster so that people can find your products easier. You can read about creating Google sitemaps for Magento on the Magento website.

3. Magento Top 5 Search Terms

Magento has another feature that helps with SEO and conversion optimisation, the site’s search bar.  You can see the most popular products on your website’s internal search bar so that you and your web designer can optimise traffic in the most popular pages.

4. Magento Most Viewed Products

More of a marketing tool, a potential conversion improver with Magento is the ability to see the most viewed products from the backend. By knowing which products you sell the most, you can target those pages to new customers, via online marketing techniques, Google Adwords or directly on your website. This not only allows you to focus on your niche online but supports you to apply the 80/20 rule to your business – find the vital few and make those products easy for your customers to find.

5. Content Management System (CMS)

The CMS section of Magento is the place where you can upload content. Most of our clients use it for news or media. This gives you the chance to write about your products, company, or anything else that clients should know about a store website. It also includes keywords and meta title and description.

A static block is a Magento custom variable which allows the site’s administrator to add and control chunks of HTML or content that can be displayed throughout the website. This is perfect for seasonal banners, sales, footer links a store map and anything else that serves as relevant content to your site. Magento includes a WYSIWIG editor, much like WordPress.

What do you think of these Magento SEO Features? Leave a comment.

Pro’s and Con’s of WordPress, Joomla and Drupal

Here is some useful information between three major open-source Content Management System’s that can help you decide which one is best for you and why some companies or developers might choose one over another for bespoke web design.

WordPress

WordPress Pros:

• Friendliest end-user CMS, easy to create and manage site content
• The backend is extremely intuitive and easy to navigate
• Search-Engine-Optimisation (SEO) Friendly
• Easy to customise as a website with the possibilities to use as a blog later
• Tons of plugins that extend and enhance the functionality of WordPress

WordPress Cons:

• Not great for eCommerce
• Not meant for advanced customisations
• WordPress updates far too often

Small to medium businesses and freelancers especially would do well to use WordPress as a CMS. WordPress can make inexpensive,  fantastic looking professional sites and if your going to add your own content to WordPress at least once a month, this is the friendliest end-user CMS. It is also tuned for Search Engine Optimisation, so if you hire an SEO they can do great things to make your site appear as a page one ranking. Not recommended if you plan to make major changes to your website in the future.

Joomla

Joomla Pros:

• Great capabilities to make a website look fantastic
• Functionality is very customisable, it can be used to make eCommerce, galleries, etc.
• Great capacity for developers and designers to do interesting stuff

Joomla Cons:

• Admin interface is not user friendly
• If you lack good knowledge of the internet, can appear very intimidating to use
• Have to learn how to use it first before using it

Once you get the hang of joomla, designing sites is fast and simple. Joomla is friendly for all types of users – designers, developers and administrators, but still not enough for everyone to understand.  Developers will choose this system because of its large capacity for development and customizations.

Drupal

Drupal Pros:

• It has over 7,000 plug-ins that help to boost the building capacities of a site
• Developers are usually really good, you can code Drupal or you can’t code it
• Terrific developer and user community to help with coding bits
• Drupal has tools like network integration, feeds, and search engine optimization tools that help you to connect with your viewers easily

Drupal Cons:

• Need to spend some time to understand the architecture
• Knowledge of PHP, CSS and DHTML are helpful for more advanced development
• Back-end is not user-friendly
• Most expensive developers

Drupal is very flexible and gives you the power to adjust your theme and way you’d like, even the White House has chosen Drupal as the platform for its official web site. However for those small, simple projects it’s simply not a good choice.  Its also described as “written by developers, for developers” so is not user-friendly unless you have mad coding skills.

Do you have anything to add? Please leave a comment.

Problem

The business owner came to us in the Spring of 2011 with a new business offering affordable lodgings for tourists in Edinburgh, which she planned to open by Summer in time for Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival. She knew that in order to get bookings she needed an online presence. Unfortunately her budget was very limited so we had to work around how to give her the most value for her money.

Solution

Since the website is for the accommodation industry, the goal of the site was to make her phone ring and generate email enquiries for online bookings. So we made sure the website included the relevant pages such as an image gallery, a contact form and immediate access to a phone number for immediate bookings.

Logo and Brand Development

We designed a logo for 7C’s using the owner’s vision of a fish leaping out of a rising wave, which represents the seven seas. We then based the web design and colour scheme on this logo.

Image Gallery

Images are the heart and soul of an accommodation website and can help build confidence in the accommodation and increase bookings, therefore the image gallery was designed to help to capture the visitors attention.

Call to Action

Having a ‘book here’ or ‘online enquiry’ button up toward the top right hand corner of a homepage above the fold has been known to increase hotels’ online revenues. Therefore the webpage was created with certain conversion goals in mind. We made the call to action button above the page so it was not too overwhelming in the design. Also, several call to action triggers are located throughout the homepage such as an online enquiry form, contact details and a contact-us page. The enquiries through the forms are then delivered directly to her private email.

Follow-Up

The owner of 7Cs Edinburgh is not tech savvy and she was pleased that we delivered a great website for her new business.

All your staff I encountered had great patience with me, a known computer novice, and we got there in the end. Thanks guys and gals for the great job on my website. – Margaret Ramsay, 7C’s Edinburgh

Are you going to set up a Magento store but are unsure of what kind of hosting to get? Web hosting comes in many forms: shared, cloud, VPS, semi-dedicated, and dedicated. It can all be a bit complicated which is why we have written a description for three of the most popular forms of web hosting available in today’s market and why we recommend one of them.

Shared hosting:

A decent shared hosting package will cost about £10 a month. The disadvantage with shared hosting is that your website will be one among 1000 other websites. This could cause your website to be slow and have a negative effect on your search rankings.

Dedicated Server / Dedicated Hosting:

Dedicated hosting is aimed at being a hosting solution for major online businesses, with a powerful server that will put all of its efforts on you and your site alone. This ensures that your IP address remains unique, clean and guarded. We run Magento on a dedidated server and charge £45 per month for Magento hosting. This includes customer support.

VPS:

Though you’ve got control over your service and its highly customizable, it is still within a shared hosting realm which means if someone is heavily using the server your server will be affected. This form of web hosting is often utilized by medium-sized companies and it will most likely cost around $30 to $40 per month.
Google wants to provide the best possible experience to its search users and will favour a faster website that resides in a good neighbourhood – so it uses page speed as one of its key ranking factors! This means that yes, your website’s neighbours can influence its rankings. On a shared server, you have zero control over the other sites that get hosted on the same server as yours. The performance, quality, nature and characteristics of these neighbour websites are considered before Google ranks your website.

The disadvantage with shared hosting is that your website will be one among 1000 other websites. This could cause your website to be slow and have a negative effect on your search rankings. The performance, quality, nature and characteristics of these neighbour websites are considered before Google ranks your website.

Read about selecting a good Magento solutions provider.

Problem

Heather was making so many cakes that she wanted to create a website where she could show-case them to potential customers around Edinburgh. Also, since she had actually established a business from just doing it for fun, she also wanted her website to be found in the local community to get more business leads.

As a cake company, Heather’s cakes visual presence needed to look creative but also professional without being too cluttered. The new site was custom designed with appropriate place of pictures and the home page show-casing simple and elegant cakes.

Solution

From scratch we created a template wordpress design which was suitable to her business model. The new website aimed to give potential cake customers a comprehensive but friendly browser experience to Heather’s cake expertise, as well as showcasing her very tasty cakes and design styles.

Heather can easily add new products herself through the simple yet powerful wordpress content management system.

Optimise Web have been very helpful. They have created a great, easy to use website for me and continue to give me excellent marketing support. They are efficient and friendly. I highly recommend them. - Heather Maciver, Heathers Cakes

When taking the first steps into getting a website, many business owners may not understand the differences between a custom or bespoke website and a pre-made template website. It is important however to understand the implications of both. The fact that all CMS’s are built using a template does not mean a “template” is bad, the issue that is addressed here is whether the template is pre-made or custom-built.

If a web agency offers “see your website before it is made” or is giving a bargain at hundreds of pounds below competitors’ prices, most likely they are using a pre-made template. Pre-made templates are not bespoke web design  as these templates have been used from other websites. A pre-made design template means that you’ll be unable to change the design, layout or functionality; the look and feel is unchangeable; and it is difficult to apply any custom made features.

Nevertheless there is one advantage of a pre-made template. The quickness with which your web agency can get your website online, perhaps up and running within a week’s time. If budget is holding you back from getting your business up on the Internet, then maybe a website template might be the way to go.

With a custom-built or bespoke web design service a web agency can discuss the most important issues of a business and give a good think over on the best way to maximise a businesses potential on the web.

For example, one of our customers Wright Automotive, an Edinburgh garage that provides van and car repair servicing and repairs, wanted customers to be able to access his website and contact him through a booking form. This meant we had to build a form for each one of his service pages, this we did by building a bespoke web template for his website only. In the end his customers could book his services directly through the website. Though we had not built something like this before, we recognised the form was an important element for his website to bring in sales.

Custom made templates:

• It will be constructed so it is search engine friendly
• The website will be more adaptable to your company’s needs
• If you have planned what you want in the future for your website, the designer will take this into consideration when they select the technologies to use while building the website

A bespoke web design service will be built by talented and expert web developers who will take time to plan your site so that it is search engine friendly. Web designers will create a custom website and also be sure that it works and looks good in all browsers. A higher budget is needed for a custom built site, but the benefits far outweigh the investment and most often the business will break even from a bespoke web design.

History

In 2007, not long after the introduction of the powerful ecommerce platform Magento, we were asked to revamp the online store of an existing furniture retail client whose website was not bringing any revenue. Within six months after the launch of their Magento-built site their eCommerce profits paid off their website investment. Currently their website accounts for 75% of their current revenue. After this Magento project we quickly become one of the fastest growing web development companies that use the Magento platform within the UK. We continue to strive to deliver holistic websites and positively influence traffic, conversions and profitability.

Throughout the years we have also supported small Edinburgh businesses, such as 7Cs Edinburgh and Heathers Cakes, by helping them attain customers through great looking websites at an affordable price we often go the distance to get results for our clients. We believe that when they do well, we do well. Sure enough, many of our new customers came to us through word-of-mouth and recommendations. Our current client-base includes more than forty small-to-medium sized organisations scattered throughout the UK.

Growth

In 2009 Optimise Web took on an in-house designer to handle the visual-appearance of our sites and in 2010 we welcomed an experienced coder for the back-end development and programming of our quickly growing Magento projects. This year in 2011 we have had two new hires; another coder to handle our WordPress Websites and an SEO specialist for Marketing and Web Analytics. These skill-sets have given Optimise Web a well-rounded edge to provide expertise in both the front-end and back-end areas in order to build complex websites and bespoke ecommerce sites. In addition our marketing expertise helps to boost our client’s online reputation post-launch. As a team we understand that building a website is more than just making it look good, it’s about using the proper web standards and mastering it as an art.

Current Events

Currently Optimise Web is a member of the Midlothian Chamber of Commerce and Business Link. We like to participate in the Edinburgh community when possible and recently sponsored Social Innovation Camp (SIC) Edinburgh, a weekend workshop that helps bring together people and digital tools to build web-based solutions to social problems.

Contact Us

If you are an Edinburgh or UK established business and would like to inquire about a website design or eCommerce website, please contact us.