We couldn’t start off the New Year without making some predictions of trends or events that we might see over the coming months. Nothing is ever that easy to forecast with the online market, but here are 5 predictions for 2005:
We’re pleased to announce that the new website for The Web Marketing Workshop is now online. The site showcases the range of services that we can now offer, including online strategy development, website design, a wide range of marketing options, and ways to analyse and improve your website. It also serves as a resource for anyone interested in promoting their business online or developing their website, with lists of issues to consider and resources to use.
We often refer to the way websites get ‘deep indexed’. This refers to the way that the search engine ’spiders’ can follow links into your site and record all the pages within their search indexes. The advantage of getting more of your site indexed by the main search engines is that it can provide you with more opportunities to target a range of popular keywords and will also increase the profile of your site in the eyes of the search engine.
In last month’s issue we showed you how to find out the number of links to your website. You can now find out how many pages of your site are indexed by Google and Yahoo by typing the following into their search boxes:
The results will show the number of pages indexed from your domain which should ideally be the total number of pages available. You can also see all the pages that are indexed and how these are optimised.
On face value, email is a highly effective method of reaching a target audience. It’s cheap, time specific, easy to personalise and measurable. Crucially it also pushes information to an audience in their homes or workplace in an obvious way, but this attribute has also been its greatest weakness as it has encouraged the rise of ’spam’. We are now all inundated with trash email which can be irritating, offensive, or damaging if it carries a virus - all of which pushes up the barriers and makes it a real challenge to communicate effectively with potential customers through email.
During September the eponymous butler has been ‘missing’ from the Ask Jeeves search engine, but has recently returned, having discovered new features for this tool. At the moment, it is only the
US version that includes these, although these are likely to filter through to the
UK version in time - meanwhile the UK site includes a movie of Jeeves’ adventures!
The end of August saw Google’s IPO (initial public offering) finally begin after several months of frenzied build-up! Google are auctioning around 10% of their company through the issue of 24.6 million shares to US investors only – but it has not been an easy ride so far. Firstly, the unconventional approach to this public offering has alienated parts of Wall Street and then the run-up to the valuation was beset by further problems due to Google’s failure to register 30 million shares previously issued to staff and from an interview with the founders in Playboy magazine – both of which contravened the rules for the sale.
You may have noticed that the MSN search
engine changed its appearance last month. With all the rumours that MSN is
about to unveil a new search engine it would be easy to think that there is a
new search engine behind this but at the moment the changes are mostly
cosmetic.
Affiliate marketing is a technique that allows a website to generate traffic
from adverts or text links placed on other websites (often referred to as the
affiliate or publisher). Payment for this traffic is made on a performance
basis, by the website owner either paying the publisher a set fee for visits
generated by the adverts (click throughs) and/or a percentage of revenue for
sales produced (conversions).
Inbound links are a key factor in the way many search engine rank your site.
To see how many links there are into your site you can type
link:www.yourdomain.co.uk in Google’s search box, (or many of the other main
search tools), and the resulting page will list those pages where links are
recognised into your domain.
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