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4 steps to online marketing success

September 10, 2008 · 1 comment

Online marketing doesn’t have to be complicated, and as far as I know there aren’t any rules to say you can’t have fun doing it.

Everything your microbusiness needs to be an online success is contained within the next 4 points. Granted, it’s a bit simplified, but the basic idea is bang on. So read carefully and take these ideas to heart:

Step 1: Get WordPress

Forget about what anyone else tells you about websites, the Internet and search engines. Content is what drives search engine results and there’s no better content management tool than WordPress. Of course it does cost £0.00 so that may be a sticking point for some of you corporate types.

If the world wasn’t on the brink of destruction, WordPress would go down in history as one of the most important inventions of the 21st century. You can download a copy of WordPress from www.wordpress.org.

If you don’t like the default theme that ships with WordPress, you might want to spruce up your design. You can either download a free theme from themes.wordpress.net (or do a Google search for ‘free wordpress themes’), or you can buy a premium theme from diythemes, woothemes or from Brian Gardner’s Revolution Theme store (there are plenty more, but these are the cream of the crop). Alternatively you could hire me to design a custom theme for you. That’s a subtle hint that I’m for hire, in case you didn’t notice.

Step 2: Install some plugins

To get the most out of WordPress, you’ll need a few plugins. A WordPress plugin is a little piece of add-on software that helps your WordPress driven website achieve more, and act more like a Website than a blog. For most microbusinesses wanting to run a small website with a blog, consider activating Akismet to protect you from spam, and download cForms II, Sociable, Related posts and the All-in-one SEO pack. That’ll do for the time being.

Step 3: Learn SEO

It doesn’t matter if you know absolutely nothing about Search Engine Optimisation. You should still sign up to Aaron Wall’s SEObook training program. There’s never been a more comprehensive guide to understanding SEO. For those of you who don’t have the time to do the whole course, I suggest Aaron’s guide to Blog Optimisation (it’s shorter, and it’s free).

Step 4: Communicate

Now that you’ve got a website that can do backflips, you know all about SEO and your site looks pretty, you need to start blogging. If you still don’t know what a blog is, or how it can help your business, I recommend reading Problogger or Chris Garrett’s blog. Blogging is probably the most important marketing activity your microbusiness should be doing regularly. There’s never been a faster, more organic way to grow a business while still having fun.

Well, that’s it. Four simple steps to online success. Other than Aaron’s SEObook and a decent hosting account, you don’t need to spend a penny. You’ve still got a bit of time until CERN’s LHC makes the world disappear into a black hole, so unless you want to spend that time with friends and family you can achieve almost everything on this list. Good luck!

Does web hosting affect Search Engine Optimisation?

September 2, 2008

Apparently it does. 6 months ago, when I finally made the decision to return to the UK for good, I started actively targeting UK based website maintenance clients by writing content specifically targeted at google.co.uk.

To date the response from Google has been non-existant. If you were to do a Google.com search for ‘UK website maintenance’ you’d find thinkdave.com right up there in the top 5. Great. Except for the fact that the majority of people in my target market use the ‘pages from the UK’ feature on Google. Searching in this way doesn’t bring up thinkdave.com in the first 20 pages – hardly desirable.

It appears that Google looks at (a) your website’s domain name and (b) the location of your web host’s servers when deciding where to index a website geographically. So my .com site, hosted by Dreamhost in the US is hardly likely to inspire Google to list me under pages from the UK in their results.

How to fix the problem

Luckily there are a couple of ways to fix this problem, although neither of them is without a bit of manual labour.

Option 1 – Move hosts. This is the most obvious solution to the problem. By moving my .com website to a UK based web host (with UK based data centres), Google will assume that it’s quite likely that I am in fact based in the UK. And in a few weeks time I’ll start climbing up the search engine rankings for ‘website maintenance’ on google.co.uk.

Option 2 – 301 re-direct. For those of you who just went ‘Huh?’ don’t worry. A 301 re-direct simply tells visitors and search engines that a website has moved and re-directs them to the new site. In my case, I could re-direct thinkdave.com to thinkdave.co.uk and be done with it. Not particularly elegant, but it’ll work. Like the first option it will take Google a few weeks to twig on, but eventually they’ll have to admit that thinkdave.co.uk is most likely UK based.

My solution

Firstly, I’m going to move thinkdave.com to a UK based host. I’m getting a bit sick of moving hosts (this will be my second move this year), but I think it’s important. I’ll also benefit by not having to contact a US based company every time something breaks, although it remains to be seen whether I’ll get any support from a UK host…

Once the server move is done I may install the re-direct anyway, just to make sure. I’ll re-evaluate this problem in a few weeks and see how I’m doing on local search engines.

Why should you care?

If you’ve been having a problem getting ranked on google.co.uk, it may be due to your hosting setup, especially if you’re using any domain other than a .co.uk. Contact your hosting providers and ask them where their data centres are based. And if they’re not based in the UK, you might want to consider moving.

Needless to say, I’ll be moving server towards the end of the week, so expect some minor downtime issues while I’m making the switch.

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