Marketing touches our lives from our first to last breath. We are bombarded with marketing messages 24/7 and virtually everything we own has a brand name or logo prominently displayed. A constant battle for front of mind awareness and market share is being fought by slick marketers with big budgets. Marketing influences and persuades, brands differentiate the average from the extraordinary and define status.
But what if you were a dog languishing in an animal shelter waiting for some kindly sole to adopt you, feed you and care for you? You are featured on the shelters website, you have a great temperament and love kids. Yet, families that come to visit just seem to ignore you. What’s wrong with them? Read more...
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of making your website findable through search engine’s like Google and Bing. SEO is one of the best online marketing tactics available to businesses with an online presence. It can have a significantly higher Return On Investment (ROI), if done correctly, than other types of online marketing. It is a long-term process that depends on many factors and while there’s no guaranteed formula for page one success there are a few best-practices that can help improve your website in the eyes of the search engines. Here are 5 great tips you can implement in your SEO efforts today. Read more...
At our last Social Media Manitoba Tweetup we were lucky to have Susie Parker present to the group on the pros and cons of Google Plus. This lead to some great discussion and some surprisingly varied views on the service. Some of the group expressed feelings of being underwhelmed loving its potential but mourning its lack of innovation; they’ll never beat Facebook. Some feel the service isn’t intuitive and others just see it as another search engine tool primarily of interest to techs, geeks and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) folk. Overall I was surprised at the lack of love for Google Plus, I know I fall squarely in to that tech/geek/SEO category, but I think Google Plus offers something positive to every kind of user and as events this we prove, we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. Why do I think this? Am I just a hopeless Google Fanboi? Here’s my two cents on Google Plus: Read more...
Today, John is speaking about the importance of implementing Online Marketing tactics that have a direct benefit for your business’ bottom line, as opposed to tactics that simply are “hip” and popular at the moment.
A few months ago I wrote about Google’s QDF algorithm. QDF is an acronym for Query Deserves Freshness and it’s a method used by Google to provide fresh content in response to queries. When I first wrote about QDF around 17.5% of queries were affected, the latest update double that figure to 35%.
At this time the exact details of how Google determines freshness is unknown, however they have stated that one of the factors used to determine freshness is the date a page was first indexed. So if you publish page and then update it a few months later that is NOT considered fresh, even if you have completely rewritten the page. Read more...
What is a democracy? It’s a system by which people (regular, normal, everyday people) determine who or what is best for fulfilling their wants and needs. It essentially boils down to a popularity contest. This is basically how online search engines (namely Google) work as well.
For a long time now, it has been common knowledge that the biggest factor in determining a website’s position in Google’s search pages is backlinks. A back link is a hypertext link that is found anywhere on the web that points directly to your website. The more links you have, the more popular and relevant your website is considered to be. And therefore the higher (in theory) it should rank in search engines. Read more...
If you’re into Search Engine Optimization, you are probably already aware of all the uproar surrounding Google’s algorithm initiatives in 2011. This year has been a nightmare for certain website that were, let’s say, not the greatest in terms of unique, quality content. (For those unsure, content is essentially the stuff that visitors of your website can consume online – articles, videos, images, etc.) The latest algorithm updates, dubbed “Panda,” heavily penalized websites that had thin content, engaged in web spam and generally did not provide visitors with a good user experience. Read more...
An exciting announcement today for us, as we are launching FXR Racing’s expansion into the International E-Commerce world. New sites such as FXRRacing.no will be focused in Scandinavian countries at first, with the site in question being FXR’s Norway site. Other sites being launched FXR Racing Sweden and FXR Racing Finland.
What makes these new e-commerce solutions especially exciting is their localization features. Translations of the FXR site into local languages, combined with product prices displayed in local currencies mean that FXR’s global e-commerce expansion will be highly accessible for the consumers it will reach out to. Read more...
My October read was Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton. This brief design handbook is an excellent addition to any student of typography which boasts itself as “A critical guide for designers, writers, editors, & students”. This quick read, which I read in a couple hours on a flight home from Honolulu, covered many of the same bases my college course on typography covered. More than just a crash course, Thinking With Type delivers the basics, history, and techniques required for effective typesetting. The book is separated into three distinct sections. Read more...
Marketing touches our lives from our first to last breath. We are bombarded with marketing messages 24/7 and virtually everything we own has a brand name or logo prominently displayed. A constant battle for front of mind awareness and market share is being fought by slick marketers with big budgets. Marketing influences and persuades, brands differentiate the average from the extraordinary and define status.
