NetNews our ONLINE NEWSLETTER (NetNews July 2006)
Developments in web marketing, site design, and web services
The Online Newsletter from Net Commerce Solutions
“Online Advertising Soars” – we have shown in previous NetNews how internet advertising spend overtook radio advertising, then cinema. It is now exceeding national newspaper advertising, as widely reported this month. (see (2) below)
In our own business, more and more clients and prospects approach us, not about issues on their web site, but to ask us to manage the promotion of their site, including creating the Pay Per Click programmes, and the site ranking improvements they need to achieve.
These actions give measurable, trackable results, and form an increasing part of their overall marketing approach. We hope that you are among those businesses now using the web in this way – if not, or if help is needed, please contact us to explore how best you can do this.
1. NET ISSUES
Important issues that could impact on your website approach
Improve your web site ranking
Pay Per Click is assuming greater importance, and we manage PPC programmes for an increasing number of businesses. However, it is critical not to rely solely on this, but, over time, to work to improve the position of your site in the Search Engines, and get the maximum flow of visitors from “natural searches”.
On our own site, we find the sharpest improvement comes from using a mix of the available levers, and we have tested this over many years, but especially the past nine months. Sharpest increases in traffic have come from:
- getting more non-reciprocal links in place – we have used both paid, and free directories.
- in managing PPC Programmes, we always try to maximise the number of clicks achieved for the client's budget - means we may not bid aggressively on very popular (ie high cost) terms but spread our bids over many low cost but still highly relevant terms.
- adding new site content – Google values sites which show continual changes in their content – we have added new pages with details of new services and capabilities.
- getting new, good quality reciprocal links. Google like to see a flow of new links – we check the Page Ranking, and the quality of the sites involved in every case.
- it is related links that matter – often not easy to judge this exactly – where we accept less closely related, we group them separately, and keep them to a small percentage of our total inbound links.
Finding time to manage these points strongly, is not easy for any business – NCS has many tools we use to help ourselves and our clients - please contact us if you think we can assist.
2. NET HAPPENINGS
News, themes and trends from the Internet – home and abroad
Technology enablers still developing strongly…
Text messaging - 32 billion text messages were sent in 2005. In Q106 this increased further to reach a record monthly total of 3.16 billion for March.(mda-org)
Broadband – 3m broadband connections were installed in UK in 2005 – only 5 countries worldwide now have more broadband lines than UK - China, US, Japan, Germany and France.
Mobile web use - recently announced (May06) dotMobi high level domain to deliver web services to mobile devices, is likely to accelerate trend to using mobiles to access web sites.
Web Usage – wealthy individuals (ie earning £75k+ pa) now spend 104 minutes online daily – very close to time spent watching TV (107 mins) (ipa/nma.co.uk)
Online Shopping Update - UK figures showing strong growth…
- Annual % growth in online shopping is higher in Clothing than in Event Tickets.
- Actual sector growth figures for 2005 were: Clothing 36%: Computer Software 36%: Home and Garden 32%: Jewellery 27%: Event tickets 26%: Furniture 24% (comscore.com)
- UK online shopping is now growing 5 times faster than offline. (Verdict Research)
Internet Advertising – continued shift away from traditional media…
- Internet advertising spend continues to soar – expected to grow by 39% in 2006, versus a decline 9% in national press advertising.
- Digital advertising now has a bigger spend than Cinema, Radio, Outdoor, Consumer Magazines, or Business-to-Business advertising. (ft/groupm)
3. NET TIPS
Some hints you could consider
Show your offer – put your products/services on the landing page – don’t make your visitors watch a graphics display, then go through an “Enter Site” stage – let your products hit their eyes as soon as they land on your site.
Don’t be flash – be careful that your web pages aren’t loaded up with too much movement, especially rapid movement – apart from annoying many site visitors, it can hamper visibility, and be in conflict with The Disability Discrimination Act (see next item).
Accessible Designs – the Disability Discrimination Act now requires sites to be accessible to the disabled. We can point you to tools to check your own site accessibility, and provide help thereafter if you have a problem.
East-West not North South – web sites increasingly use the lateral PC screen space - this reflects trend for users to have a wide screen view in their own browser.
We now design sites that will “flex” to fit the browser of each visitor – if they use a high screen resolution (ie sites designed for lower resolution browsers appear in the centre of their screen) your site would occupy the full screen width – if they use a lower screen resolution in their browser, your site will sense this and still occupy the full width of their screen. Please contact us if you wish to pursue this further.
4. NCS FOCUS
News and services from NCS that might help
Web Site Availability – significant site downtime is unusual, given the high quality site hosting process we use. However, we have checked and validated a number of tools to enable site owners to track performance, and have trialled these on a number of sites – just contact us if this would be useful to you.
NCS Property-related web services – over recent years we have built a strong competence in handling web-related property promotion and development – for further details, just click here
5. NET NOTHINGS
You probably already know that:
Google is King – in fact they power 75% of UK searches – way ahead of Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask UK. (nma.co.uk)
There will soon be more digital women than men – although last year women spent less time online per week (11 hours) than men (9 hours), women’s usage is growing much faster – by 2007 they are predicted to be spending more time online than men. (eiaa.net)
Dave Abernethy,
Managing Director,
Net Commerce Solutions Ltd
Tel: (+44) (0) 870 246 7642
info@net-commerce-solutions.co.uk Web site: www.net-commerce-solutions.co.uk
Registered in England and Wales. Company number 4052885: 6 Bramble Close, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, AL5 4AN
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