For relatively un-competitive search terms simply having a great descriptive title tag using the keywords people are most likely to search for and only a couple of links can be enough to give you a first page ranking. This is one of the easiest things to optimise normally too!

In most web software, either blogs or ecommerce, the title of the article or product automatically becomes the pages title. This is not always perfect though and you might want the title to be more optimised than simply the name of the product. Most ecommerce software lets you adjust the title separately. WordPress users can download the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast which allows them to do this quickly and easily!

Once your titles are sorted – you need some links.

Any company that offers immediate results is selling too strongly. If it sounds too good to be true it normally is. One major issue with bad SEO is the long lasting damage it can do. A lack of technical savvy might lend a business to try out some SEO tactics which are not best practice and may even yield good short term results. However in the long term, these tricks, whatever they may be will be found out and measures taken against them. 2012 has been a big year for big Google algorithm updates and a lot of companies have suffered.

Focus on best practices and building for the long term. You will be better off in the end.

The main advantage of using alternative sales channels is simply huge traffic of buyers. There is a second important one though, and that is trust. People like buying on Amazon and other major online stores as they know the name, probably have an account already set up and they have dealt with them before. This creates a massive amount of trust which in turn increases the chance of a visitor converting to a sale.

The downsides are the strict control on listing formats and what you can say to sell your product. The other major downside are the fees and commissions you will have to pay out. In terms of Amazon this usually works out at 20-30% of the selling price, so unless you have a good margin, it can be problematic.

In my experience these sales channels can be well worth testing. Some products are more suited than others. It is important to give them a decent length test as well – I have found it takes months for the sales volume to build up, but it can build to a level which becomes well worth the effort it took to set it up.

What is Google Places?
Places is essentially a mash up between a business directory and maps where businesses and their contact details are listed and plotted on a map. The key is how these results are displayed in Google’s search engine results pages. When you search for something, Google uses your IP address to figure out your rough location (down to nearest major city in the UK) and then shows your businesses close to you which match your search. For example – if you search for electricians and your in Gloucester – or you search for Gloucester electricians then you will see a map with markers on for local electricians. You will also see a list of electricians in Gloucester appear below the sponsored links but above most organic links.

How does Google Places drive traffic?
By being listed in Google Places you will more than likely find that the places listing ranks higher than your company website would in the organic listings. The organic listings for this type of search are typically littered with business directories and other similar sites as opposed to actual firms.

If your business is not already listed on Places I suggest you do something about it as soon as possible! It can make a big difference!

After spending the last few years working hard building brands I have been developing my skills and testing out all kinds of marketing techniques as well as learning how hard it is to maintain websites whilst keeping on top of the day to day operations of running a business.

It is exciting times! Don’t forget to check out our services.

My platform of choice for building websites is self hosted WordPress. This is one of the most flexible platforms out there and is capable of pretty much everything. It is also very well supported by the community and updated regularly which reduces the risk of online security threats. Best of all it is free which keeps the cost to the customer down.

WordPress is pretty secure out of the box but there are a few things you can do to reduce the risk of attack including picking good passwords and keeping your installation, plugins and themes all updated. If there is ever a major security breach it is well documented as millions of sites use the software. This is another benefit of the great community surrounding WordPress.

No matter what platform you use it is important to report attacks as quickly as possible to your host and also your web developer. A good relationship with a company can be the difference between them taking a quick look at your site and seeing a common bug and a major headache which could waste hours of your time. I strongly believe in working to your strengths and outsourcing the rest.

If your bootstrapping your business and doing as much as possible yourself then be smart, take regular backups and befriend the community – it is amazing what help you can get. Also try reaching out to your social network, you never know what hidden talents people have.

What makes me think of Google base all of a sudden? Well today a SEO company called me up which is by no means rare and was typically pretty painful. They claimed to specialise in Google base however and this caught my attention. Surely it is pretty simple stuff to just list your products – especially now in the age of data feeds.

I am going to give base some time this week and see if it is worth the effort, and whether there is any real expertise required. I struggle to believe anyone can specialise in Google base however I may be surprised!

Tubemogul is a great video tool. You only have to upload your video once, and it automatically distributes it to every other major video site out there. On top of this is collects great stats.

I have been working a lot with Flickr recently, and it is slow work. It would be great if i could simultaneously upload to picasa as well using the same tool. A Tubemogul equivalent would be very handy.

In terms of blogs, WordPress has it covered. I love WordPress and it never ceases to amaze me how powerful it is. Managing multiple blogs can be a hassle but Dreamhost are a fantastic host and have an option to auto update all your wordpress installs in one go. This beats the hell out of manual updates.

Twitter and other forms of status updates, like Facebook are harder to manage. Twhirl is the best I have found so far for managing multiple twitter accounts, but it has no Facebook integration. This is an area which can and will see a lot of improvement in the near future. Integration with blogs is already happening and the results are pretty good.

Newsletter management and autoresponders are mostly done by Aweber for me. It is just a solid tool with great usability, functionality, support and pricing. I cant really fault it. If I were to be picky I guess they could make templating easier and synchronisation with blogs a bit simpler – however it is by no means complicated.

A marketing mega tool is what I am after. Any ideas anyone?

This season started off as usual with the back to basics task whereby the teams have to do some really simple task in order to make the most money. It is always very similar and in previous seasons has involved selling coffee, flowers, lemonade and that sort of thing.

As (almost) always – it is boys vs girls to start with. All the usual ridiculous characters are there battling to see who will be the alpha male on one side and queen bee on the other. Both teams managed to pick passable names relatively quickly for a change too. This part is pretty painful watching so we can skip over it.

The task was cleaning. It didnt matter what they cleaned – they just had to clean stuff and whoever made the most profit won. The obvious choice here is cleaning cars. Interestingly the guys team did some shoe cleaning for a bit which seemed to be going well – they made £60 an hour between three of them which by far tops what they were making with cars. However they only did the one hour then went on to clean cars.

The car cleaning from both teams was pretty ridiculous. It is by no means difficult, or complicated in any way to clean a car. Yet somehow both teams struggled – even with simple concepts like closing car doors before pressure washing. To cut a long story short, the teams spent £100-£200 on cleaning materials and turned over £250-£300. We are looking at roughly £100-£150 profit per team of 7 or 8 people. This means essentially each team member generated only £20 profit in a day. How are these the greatest up and coming business minds of the country? Kids make more money selling lemonade outside their house.