Sk-etchbook

Permalinks are them squiggly wiggly long strings of letters/numbers/characters which point to the informative tit-bit of which you peruse.

Anyway. More often than not they look like nonsense and drivel. Here is a bit more info on how to make Worpress links a tad more easy in the eye:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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I been getting invitations from Google to attend webinars for a while now. Previously I've not really paid much attention to these, however while thinking about marketing I thought I'd look iinto the format and content. There's some great material in some of the ones freely available online. Here's a list of just a few, check them out.

Adsense

Adwords

Web Design & Marketing Strategy

Web Design & Marketing

Wordpress

Trends

SEO

PHP

And 100's of other things

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Today's problem is how to write an effective Bio? How do you condense a lifetime of experience and achievements into a few sentences. Whats more how do you write something which captivates the reader, summerises your (professional) persona and gets the message (that you are fantastic and they need you) across. Whats more how personal can you make it, surely the style and tone should also reflect your personality but as it is written for a purpose these aspects should not overshadow the desired outcome.

Hmmmm... Here's some reading (of varying usefulness, but a start).

How to Write a Bio

Brand-yourself.com

About.com

Ehow

Sitepoint

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Fist off there are two types available here which shouldn't be confused. The meta tag and the link attribute.

"Nofollow" provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links on this page" (the former) or "Don't follow this specific link" (the latter).

With the rise of social media and web 2.0 the link structure of the internet suddenly changed. As one of the measures of spam or link farming used by robots previously looked at the speed at which a website had gained links to it. The new forms of social media caused a problem as hundreds even thousands of links could appear in a day.

Here is Googles own page about nofollow and what it does.

However there seems to be some resistance towards it's use and it's practicality. Read more...

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The question of whether meta tags (specifically keywords) are of any use at all any more all always seems to receive a mumbled response. They used to be important, but for a long while now they have played little to no part in search engine listings. My previous stance was that they have little or none influence on results but description should be used as this is seen in results and keywords are worth adding as they take no time and are good admin. This forum post reflects that: Digital Point

The most important ones you should be sure to use are;
keywords
description
distribution=global or us or uk...
index=follow all or no follow...index all or no index
author=personal name or business name

However I still thought I'd check to see if there was an official bottom line response out there. And here it is:

View the official response from Google's Matt Cutts or view a full post and video on the Google Web Master Blog.

Unfortunately Google is only one of the search engines and making catering to them all is like throwing a barbecue and inviting a vegetarian, a Muslim, a guy with a nut allergy, a woman allergic to fish, wheat and gluten and a man with no mouth. And then attempting to make them all happy.

Google does command between 60 to 80 per cent of market share in various locations across the world so it should be the most influential. However the next largest are Yahoo and Bing.

Here is a good post on Search Engine Land referring to Yahoo's announcement (Oct 09) that it is dropping support for keywords tag, closely followed up by another report contradicting this. This is supported by many other tests reveling that keywords "DO" affect Yahoo still. Assumable they still have a ghost in their machine.

The former article also discusses Bing. Apparently they don't support meta keywords, but they have a big guide on how to use them on their official blog. A great example of how as soon as something can increase search rankings it is manipulated (in this case blogs) and exploited at the expense of quality. Presumably written by outside paid blogger.

And after all this research where am I? Exactly where I was when I started!!!

Keywords have little to no SEO use but ya may as well stick 'em in there. Good for organization and admin purposes.

Time well spent!

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I recently got asked to produce an email marketing campaign. I've been looking into some of the available software out there for client relations and mailing list management.

Opensource Newsletter & CRM Software
www.sugarcrm.com
www.vtiger.org
www.phplist.com
www.openemm.org

Paid Hosted CRM Service Comparison
Business Buy Guide

Free & Subscription Based Software
www.mailchimp.com
www.infusionsoft.com
www.sendblaster.com
www.sage.co.uk/software_and_services/customers/sage_crm.aspx

Reviews and Discussions
http://www.siteground.com/sugarcrm_vtiger.htm
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Search/email_marketing.html
http://email.about.com/od/windowsmarketingsoftware/Windows_Email_Marketing_Software.htm

Surveys
http://www.limesurvey.org/

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This is my first "official" approach to advertising my web design services. I posted on this on classified websites, where two years ago I would have expected a reasonable response. Unfortunately I've been occasionally posting ads over the past few years, testing the waters, and with the onset of the financial situation there has been a massive shift in the market.

At present it's a buyers market. Less spending is occurring, fewer businesses are flourishing and competitiveness has increased. The result being that free sources of advertising like Gumtree, Vivastreet and similar sites has become saturated. As businesses grow and develop there means increase as do their existing client base. The recession has caused a noticeable backlash. Now more established businesses seem to be listing on free sites battling it out for work along with the smaller guys and of course the usual spattering of bargain (as in cheap and crap) providers.

I'm still not satisfied with the look of PWD and functionality wise I've had to strip back on my initially planned offerings but I'd say it's better to start early and have some research built up along the way.

Results to follow...

Limited Time Offer

Primitive Web Design specialises in web, print and marketing for business startups and SME's.

Our aim is to take the stress and confusion out of the design and communication elements required of any business. We tailor make online or offline material to communicate the right message to the right target audience for your business, generating greater returns and building stronger relationships.

100% Satisfaction Guarantee
Up to 1 Hour Consultation & Briefing
Unlimited Revisions to Design Options
Search Engine Friendly & W3C Standards Compliant Design

Prices and offers as follows:

:::::::::: WEB DESIGN ::::::::::

Get online for just £50
(one page "business card" style website)

Up to 5 pages from only £150

Plus add one years hosting and domain registration for just £10

Larger projects, flash or dynamic sites by quotation.

:::::::::: PRINT & BRANDING ::::::::::

Logo design from £25

Corporate Identity, Flyers & Stationary design by quotation.

:::::::::: BUSINESS STARTUP PACK ::::::::::

Logo, Business Cards, Stationary, Website plus:

Flash Banner or Flyers or HTML Email all for the bargain price of £350
(printing costs vary depending on order size)

---------------------------------------------------------------------

SEO, marketing and consultation services can also be arranged.

Please get in touch for more information or to have an informal chat about your needs.

Here's a few examples of previous work:

http://www.shine-valeting.co.uk
http://www.upanotherlevel.co.uk
http://www.rhubarbrentals.co.uk

Regards
Shaun Knowles

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I've recently been reading SEO Truth by Philip Midwinter. It's a short Ebook produced by a Leeds based SEO agency.

When discussing the subject of Page Rank he talks about Salton's Vector Space Model. I had not heard of this before. Now the mathematics behind it is a little complicated so I thought best not get obsessed trying to fully comprehend what is going on but apparently this is the basis originally used for information retrieval by Google and many other search engines.

Given the fact that search indexing has come along way in recent years and that Google keep their exact algorithms tight to their chest to outwit them pesky SEO execs this is not a 'holy grail' answer to understanding Page Rank. However it is a good basis. It's like meeting a man who once sold a dog to the man who made the holy grail!

Definitely worth looking into.

More Reading:
Google Directory Papers
www.2002.org
Stanford

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Yes, my sentiments exactly!

The formula c=4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a sums up the potential factors that influence landing page conversion rates. This include everything from site design to what your potential customers had for lunch.

Developed by MarketingExperiments.com this “formula” is based on their own research encompassing many client web sites. It is not a true mathematical relationship in any formal sense, but it can help you understand which factors affect landing page conversion rates at a practical level.

C= The probability of conversion.

m= Motivation of the user. This is basically how badly they want what you have, and the reason they want it. This is the element you have the least control over.

v= Clarity of value proposition. This is probably the most important element because you do have control over it. I’ll be writing about this next month in detail.

i= Incentive to take action. What are you offering to stimulate a desired action.

f= Friction elements in the conversion process. Anything that impedes the visitor from taking action. Common friction causes are forms with too many fields, or confusing options/choices.

a= Anxiety about entering information. This could be things like testimonials, an award, Better Business Bureau logos, etc.

Sources

Marketing Experiments

Searchengineland

Ezinearticles

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The #1 Conversion Killer in Your Copy
(And How to Beat It)

This is a good post relating to marketing and copywriting. The extract below I might add is pretty much what I put down as my company ideals in my brief:

"Trustworthiness, transparency, credible authority, lots of high-value content, and just plain old decency are your best weapons."

And this line sums it up well:

"There’s an old joke that a second marriage is the triumph of optimism over experience. In fact, that’s exactly what happens every time you make a sale, especially to someone who hasn’t done business with you before."

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There is a good Buffet analogy used by Seth on his blog here.

He talks about how to expand your business and tap into additional shares of the market by either deepening or widening what you offer.

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I've had this video flagged to watch for a while but every time I tried to watch it I got that bored I fell off my chair. Today I managed and after the first 5 minuted it is actually interesting. I had a rough idea of how a recession functions as part of the economic cycle but had never really investigated the difference between a recession and the credit crunch as they are two totally separate things.

A recession is usually defined as a general slowdown in economic activity over a sustained period of time, this is normally measured by a decrease in the GDP over two consecutive quarters.

More...

The credit crunch on the other hand has been caused by short-sightedness, bad management and greed. Banks and financial institutions put profits before risk and now it has come back to bite them on the ass. This means that any reserves that should be in place to brave the recession do not exist. Personally I think all the banks that needed bail outs should be seized by the government and owned by the state. Banks are bastards anyway I've spent 9 months out of the past 2 years having to sort out mistakes and issues with mine. They are very greedy and unethical especially since the reclaiming business began. Banks should not be ran as businesses as people are now totally dependent on them. They should be institutionalised and then when we come out of the recession the profits put towards repaying the government debt.

The government debt is also a big issue. Admittedly it is making matters better at present in terms of job losses, closures and preventing the market stagnating but at what cost? Massive tax rises for a long time coming. You would think trying to correct a debt problem by getting into more debt is a bit of a gamble especially when attempting to maintain what could be a false economy anyway. The housing market is another area where human needs have been over-capitalized on. The basic wage in the UK is (age 22) £5.73 so that's about £12,000 a year. This is the end of the housing market which needs stimulating, house prices just got too high for young people, first time buyers and low earners to buy. Banks then started lending larger mortgages as they could make money on them, fueling the market on via sales raising prices further. Eventually this had to collapse, there is a limit to how much people can and will pay for anything. The problem then is asset prices decrease, loans are no longer covered and securities are worthless the entire market is based upon money which doesn't really exist.

So finally is it better to keep throwing money at the problem or are we better off letting the market crash? Sure companies would fail, jobs would be lost and the better off would be grumbling about the value of their shares or interest on their savings but the new market would boom. People would have less but things would cost less, there would be increased equality and access to goods. Increased tourism, less outsourcing abroad and new companies will always start if the demand exists.

Think I've rambled on enough for now. Here is a comment about the effect the media has had on the situation - Don't even start me on that subject!
The Media Effect

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I've been looing at different types of promotional items lately. This company has some interasting products taht wont blow the bank.

Paper Products Design

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