June 29th, 2009
So far, 2009 has been a very busy year for Metafocus. Our team has grown to more international with part time and full time international online marketing specialists and translators working for us. We’ve expanded our client’s to include more export companies wanting to branch out to overseas markets and we’ve also gained many international customers who are eager to break into the UK and European markets. So we have certainly been busy working with new companies as well as existing companies to improve their position in the search engines but mainly to help people grow their businesses online.
To help with our expanding international internet marketing team we have a few new faces join our team recently. We have also had to say goodbye to one of our International team, with the departure of Monika. We wish her all the best back in France with her studies. A quick snapshot of the current Metafocus Global team (with some people missing!):
L-R: Ling (China) Dolkar, Yigit, Glynn (Sales), Stu (China), Alan (MD), Monika (Poland & France), Pete, Anja (Germany), Rob (UK)
Some people missing from the photo, Andy, Rich, Yiju, Jessica (they were all there in spirit!)
Posted in International websites, Multilingual Websites, multilingual seo | No Comments »
June 18th, 2009
After a prolonged period the new Morley Hayes website has gone live. Morley Hayes offers Hotel Accommodation in Derbyshire. You can relax in the Restaurant, Hotel or on the Golf course. Morley Hayes is the ideal venue choice for a wedding or a conference in Derby.The new site is a significant update from the previous site and will provide many ways of gethering user information.
The site has provided many firsts for the company, the most notable is installing the text alert function
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
June 5th, 2009
After supporting the Metafocus Linguistic team, I am now a member of the SEO team as Online Marketing Account Manager (Germany). I moved from Germany to Nottingham three years ago to study English literature and linguistic. Prior to that I worked in a German direct marketing agency for five years. Now, at Metafocus I can combine my two interests and skills: marketing and languages. As the Online Account Manager for Germany, I am looking forward to help translating and building international websites that are designed for multilingual and international SEO.
Posted in Online Marketing, International websites | No Comments »
May 12th, 2009
Metafocus will be exhibiting at the “International Communications Masterclass” this Friday, 15th May at the Park Inn, 296 Mansfield Road, Nottingham NG5 2BT. The event begins at 9.30am and there is a full schedule of events including Case Studies, Workshops and Best Practice Round Table Discussions. For more information visit the EMDA website.
We’ll be promoting our international search engine optimiation work in countries such as China, France, Poland, Germany and all over the world. Come down and say hello, we’d love to hear from you.
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
May 6th, 2009
MediaCampNottingham is a FREE one day event for digital media professionals wanting to share and expand their knowledge, and businesses or social enterprises who are curious about the digital phenomenon wanting to learn more. This event is to share, explore, challenge and build understanding in digital media. Veterans and new comers alike can learn about audio and video podcasting, blogging, web marketing, graphics, email campaigns, Second Life, Twitter and other social media tools.
Saturday 9 May - Lace Market House
MediaCamp opens its doors - 9.15am
Workshops and talks 10.00am - 5.00pm
Live theatre performance - Drew Davies
http://qik.com/video/187078
“Fear of Projection” - 5.30pm - 7.00pm
Sunday 10 May - venue TBC
Late morning farewell coffee 11.00am - 2.00pm
To find out more about this event, visit http://mediacampnottingham.pbwiki.com/ or visit the official Twitter page at http://twitter.com/mc_notts
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
April 20th, 2009
Quite a good article came to my inbox today that I felt really made some good points about SEO. Although the article was about weighing up the SEO with more traditional methods of gaining traffic to a website, it nonetheless made a very poignant statement about SEO - Patience.
Coming from a SEO professional to a website owner or novice in the online world, that seems like quite a good stall tactic for not getting the results. However, what most people don’t want to realise is that this is a profession that requires a lot of hard work and a degree of time. As any website owner will be aware, you either find out about SEO by wondering why no-one if finding your site or somehow it finds you. The latter usually appears by means of an email or phone call with such promises as; “we can get you to the top of Google in a week”, “will will give you the secrets that Google doesn’t want you to know”, “guarantee hundreds of high quality backlinks from PR5 sites” or the best “special money back guarantee”. Anyone who is aware of the competitiveness and dynamic nature of the search engines should know that offering a guarantee is somewhat impossible.
Recently, we have seen more businesses use SEO as part of their online marketing mix as the value of gaining natural search traffic is highly important. The biggest misunderstanding that most website owners make about SEO is that it is ‘free’. If you were to carry out all the SEO work yourself then of course you would make a saving on marketing costs, however consider the cost of time. SEO is hard work…very hard work. This makes a challenge for us professionals but also a problem of time. The most frequently asked question we get from people is “how long will it take to get me to the top of Google?” Of course, this is something that we cannot answer with any degree of accuracy. Lets explore a few reasons why:
1: Depending on the competitiveness of your market; a niche market would always be easier to optimise for than, say a site selling iPods. Alternatively, if a service based business is targeting a local area than the overall time for gaining high rankings would be a lot shorter than if they were targeting a national, or international, market.
2: Time; the saying of ‘you get out what you put in’ is very true of SEO. If you were going to spend around 2 hours a week on SEO, the results would be quite different if this was only 2 hours per month. What is also important to point out here is maintaining the effort. Google is looking for a natural growth in activity, not huge sudden spikes followed by nothing at all. Activity that peaks over the normal organic, viral growth looks suspicious and therefore harder to classify as natural. Once you have started the natural cycle of growth, maintaining this is vital if you are to remain where you are.
3: The activity of competitors; your site has progressed well and you have achieved the number 1 position over your competitor after your second year in business. Fantastic. However, if a new site crept up on you and overtook your position, would you stand for it? Quite so, you’d be getting busy to re-gain your position. Therefore, you have to be prepared to fight for your top position as this is the one everyone wants and they will know all about SEO too.
4: Anything can change; Google et al are always trying out new ways to deliver the best results to the users. This means that quite often, what was important yesterday can suddenly be valued differently today. Therefore, if you’re putting all your eggs into one basket with SEO (such as relying on blog posts only) any algorithm change to the contrary might have a huge impact on your rankings.
So it can be tough to answer but the bottom line of SEO is that is the best means of online growth. More importantly sustainable growth that can change your business. Sometimes the challenge is not to get to the top but to manage the activity once you are up there. That would be a nice problem to have thought, right?
To learn more about SEO and what it can do for your business have a look at our Search Engine Optimisation page, or better still contact us to see what we can do.
Posted in Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
April 17th, 2009
Hi I’m Rob I’ve just been welcomed into the Metafocus team as an online marketing account manager, wow what a jazzy title!! Well anyway I’ve just come down fro Leeds to set up home in the sun capital of Europe Nottingham…..yeah that’s not a lie. But saying that I have learned a lot from my beginning, like sports jackets are the future and always invest in bricks and mortar.
This is just a short intro you can keep tabs on me through my twitter account and blog.
http://twitter.com/sutts274
http://attractionsnottingham.wordpress.com/
muchas gracias
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
April 15th, 2009
We’ve been working with a local solicitors on their UK speeding offences website with a view to getting it to the top of Google.co.uk and despite good rankings in Google.com, it’s just not appearing in Google.co.uk serps. Why would this be? A few questions to ask if this happens:
- where was the domain name registered?
- where is the website hosted?
- who links in to the website?
- are you listed on any local directories?
This particular site was registered in the UK and has UK hosting so the first thing to do is claim it in the Webmaster Tools to reinforce that it’s a UK site.
Once this was done, we approached the site in 3 ways:
1. Make the site more UK focussed e.g. literally add ‘UK’ to addresses, title tags, content and anchor text, add Google Maps
2. Register site with UK resources such as Google Local etc
3. Build links from UK sites and directories focussing on the chosen keywords with a ‘UK’ suffix or prefix
4. Write blog articles and link from UK blogs to the site
We’ve been busy working on this site and have followed these guidelines so hopefully the site will be listed for keywords like ‘motoring solicitor‘ and ‘drink driving ban‘ in the Google.co.uk results as well as the .com ones!
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
March 4th, 2009
Newson Gale are market leaders in anti static electricity safety equipment, selling their products throughout the world through a network of distributors and agents. We’ve been commisioned to build a completely new content managment system for their international group of websites targetting users in each country from the UK to France to China and promote in each country using geographically targetted SEO and online marketing.
Whilst the new system is being built, we’ve kicked off the international SEO work by building a series of individual satellites sites, to gain some recognition in the search engines before the main site goes live. There are a number of advantages to this approach:
- localised domain name and hosting can be sourced in advance of the main build (This can be a time-consuming task depending on the territories involved)
- localised keyword research can be undertaken without holding up the web build
- launching a basic site lets the search engines begin to index your domain to help reduce the ‘Sandbox Effect’
- links can begin to be built to the correct long-term domain
- writing a brief one-page description of a business is often a good way to start the copywriting and content generation process and can help a company focus on their USPs and main selling points
- a well-designed and promoted satellite site can even generate business, depending on the competition!
We’ve found this to be a sensible approach as it really does reduce the dreaded ‘Google Sandbox’ which hurts the first few month’s SEO for a new site when a client is often the keenest to see results. Of course, a single page satellite only goes some way to getting your site noticed but it is far better than a generic holding page or the over-used ‘Under Construction’ graphic!
So far for Newson Gale we’ve build satellite sites for Spain, Italy, China with France and Germany coming soon. On top of that we have the established US and UK sites which we are actively promoting prior to the launch of our new GMS version - watch this space.
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
February 10th, 2009
I’ve always been very interested in Eyetracking software and a recent post on the Offical Google Blog describes their recent use of eyetracking in researching how people use their Universal Search SERPS. Very interesting stuff. I Was particularly impressed with this video showing how the test users’ eyes will scan across the page and only dwell on text, links or images for a fraction of a second before moving on to something else.
To be honest, the rest of the article confirms what we’ve always known about user behaviour but I’m a sucker for pretty pictures:
Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it — or until they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking at that part of the page. This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.
Rich
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
