David Behan in Foam

One of our clients, Made In Hollywood, is running a little competition on their foam blog. They’re looking for some ideas on articles to write on their blog and ways they should utilise their blog, so they’ve put it out to the blogosphere to help them.

With a little push on twitter and a mention on Damien’s blog, they’ve started to collect up some good traffic and ideas. Fran is offering the first 10 respondents to the post, the opportunity to get their name in foam but he might update that to the best 10, as Michele had some good success on a recent competition on the Blacknight Blog. Hopefully Fran has similar success.

Oh, if you want to see what someone’s name looks like in foam, the image there shows a Christmas present I got from Made In Hollywood. Also, if you want to meet Fran behind Made In Hollywood, you’ll catch us making an appearance at the Blog Awards next Saturday night in Cork. We’ve got some more cool props for you bloggers and maybe a little competition too.

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The Internet for Consumers in the Recession

With everyone needing to become a lot more conscious of their spending habits and how much they are spending, more and more people with be researching and even making their purchases online, looking for better deals. Hence, I believe that although we are in a recession, there may be a shift of spending from traditional sales channels over to the online sales channel. During the boom times in Ireland, we didn’t really care what we were spending on items because there was always more cash coming our way (I’m generalising here but not always the case). I’m constantly reminded that I don’t know what it is like to live in Ireland during a recession and it’s a different mind set. The last recession in Ireland was in the 80’s and I was too young then to notice. With the Internet available to all in this ecomonic cycle, I wonder how much it will influence people in their buying habits. Spending figures may go down but I think the percentage of spending online will go up.

The Internet for Businesses in the Recession

So, it’s no longer the spending frenzy that as it has been in years gone by and I’ve found that a lot of businesses that previously didn’t need to do much marketing for the business to sustain their size and also grow, are now looking at new ways of bringing in the business. A recession pushes businesses to get back to basics and focus on sales and marketing to keep their businesses alive. This is where the Internet comes in to play. Utilising a business website to help market your business and generate sales leads or indeed direct sales can be a cost effective approach compared to traditional sales and marketing methods. Take a one day full page ad in one of the national papers that can easily cost upwards of €10,000 but it only lasts a day. By putting €10,000 towards your website, you’re looking at a sales and marketing tool that can last at least 2 years. Any subsequent traditional advertising can be directed to your website to pick up where they leave off, and generate those must needed sales leads. If you haven’t embraced a website for your business or your current site is looking a bit dated, now is definitely the time to look at how a strong web presence can benefit your business in these difficult times.

The Effect on the Industry

Both of the above lead to one thing for our industry, we are definitely getting busier. I’ve talked to a number of other professionals in the industry and nobody seems to be feeling the effects of the recession just yet. Everyone is saying the same thing – they are busier than ever. Will this last? I’m not sure but if businesses all come to realise the strengths a good website can have for their business during a recession, our industry will continue to grow. We’re working with lots of new clients on their new approach to online business as well as upgrading existing clients with new techniques to improve their presence. We would definitely recommend companies that need a new sales and marketing strategy in this unsure time to look into this further and contact one of the many companies out there that can provide a good service. Finding the right company can be difficult though so in addition to ourselves, I’d like to recommend a few web companies and individuals off the top of my head, that I know in the industry and believe they can do a great job:

• Ken Stanley – Standards guru with a good team around him for some exceptional work
• Contrast – They mainly build web apps but also design some very unique websites
• Sabrina Dent – Designs some great looking websites that have also achieved some great success
• Spoilt Child – Probably one of the best design companies in the country with an excellent portfolio
• Click Stream – Have a wide array of clients and producing some very good work
• Red Fly Marketing – For when you need to market your website in the online world

Do you need some advice?

We love talking to businesses and offering any advice we possibly can. Feel free to call me directly on 046 – 9072998 for a chat or email me at info [at] davidbehan.com.

When we took over the site late last year, one of our objectives was to increase search engine traffic. By employing standard SEO techniques during the development process (such as compliant code, css based design, naming conventions, search engine friendly urls, etc.) and some help from 2bscene with a targeted link building campaign and optimisation of the site, we are really happy with the results this week. Being no. 2, pushes Blue Sky Mortgages above the likes of GMC Mortgages, Permanent TSB, Irish Mortgage, Mortgage Store, Ulster Bank and Simply Mortgages – to name but a few.

Blue Sky Mortgages also rank very well for other terms such as “mortgage”, “mortgages ireland”, “mortgage broker”, etc. We’re looking forward to analysing the statistical information and improving on the current results. This actually coincides with a new service we will be offering our clients that makes use of PPC campaigns to achieve exceptional results. We’ll have more on that soon.

I also had another post about how crap the booking system were for the major ice skating rinks up in Dublin – Smithfield on Ice and 7up Christmas on Ice. I haven’t gone over to see if they have improved yet so there might be another rant about them later on! This also generated a lot of traffic to the site as these companies where spending a lot on traditional marketing, which had people searching for their names and related keywords in the search engines! Guess who was coming up?

So, where am I going with all this stuff? Well, it’s coming up to that time of year and as these keywords are seasonal, I thought I’d throw up this post as a bit of a test to see what traffic I can nab from people searching on terms like “ice skating dublin”, “smithfield on ice”, “7up on ice”, and of course “merry chrismas”. I’ll let you know how I get on but I’ll put it to some of my readers to try something similar in whatever area you like and see what traffic it generates. If you’ve got any suggestions or good stories, I’d love to hear them!

And just for the record… Happy Christmas!

#UPDATE – Related sites:

7up Christmas on Ice
Booterstown Ice Skating
Dundalk Ice Dome

Note: Under Google SERP’s (search engine ranking positions), (com) means google.com results, (ie-ww) means google.ie world wide results, and (ie-io) means google.ie ireland only results.

Note: This information was gathered using Google Analytics and is for the 4 week period, 26th April 2007 to 23rd May 2007 (i.e. prior to new site launch and new website promotion techniques) and the 4 week period, 24th May 2007 to 20th June 2007 (i.e. first 4 weeks of the new site).

Marketing Targets
These were the marketing targets that I had set for the site. Did I achieve them? Well, see below and why it did/didn’t happen!

• Increase Google Page Rank to 5 on next release
  Well, Google hasn’t released it’s new page ranks yet, but I expect the sites up at 4 at the moment. With a bit more link building, I’m sure it can get to the 5 target before the next release.
• Increase Backlinks 10 fold.
  Ok, I only doubled it and that has been due to lack of time on my part. I have a list of sites that I was supposed to go through and add links to but didn’t get a minute. I’ll keep working on this. 10 fold was a bit ambitious I think.
• Google Keyword Ranking Targets:
  – web design ireland: at least page 2 Got it! Really happy with this! Page 1, here I come!
  – web design meath: top 3 results Still lagging behind on Ireland searches. Need more backlinks I think!
  – web design navan: top 1 result Again, Clickstream hold the top spot. More backlinks should knock them off the top.
  – web development ireland: top 10 pages Got to page 2. Good start!
  – web marketing ireland: top 10 pages Again, page 2. Next targets will be page 1.
• Increase visits per day to 250
  Well, got this up to 306 for the 4 week period but I expect it may die down after the traffic spikes I described in part 2. Will need to keep link building to keep this figure up.
• Increase page views per day to 750
  Didn’t quite make the 750 with only a 630 result. Due to the site not being sticky enough and the low amount of pages per visit. Need to work on increasing that to get more out of the visitors I get.
• Treble the blog subscribers
  Actually, very ambitious here! Only managed a 50% increase. Glad people are reading though and hopefully I can provide some interesting reads and get more people to subscribe!

Summary
Well, that’s it for this part of the marketing strategy. I’ll report again in a month or two on how the site is fairing out. I’ll get the head down and do a load of link building and see if I can get the site on to the first page of Google for the chosen keywords as well as keep building the visitors and page views. I might even give a monthly snap shot of how things are going and what I’ve done in the past month to help push things further. Hopefully, someone will benefit from this information on how to market and build on their website. If you have any questions or comments, would love to hear them, so drop them into the comments below.

Slán anois!

So, what’s been the main changes in the past week, I hear you say? Well, here’s a quick summary of some of the stats from the past week in comparison to the month previous:

• Website Stats for Past Week
  - Visits: 4,454 (compared to average of 168 for previous weeks)
  - Page Views: 10,425 (compared to average of 352 for previous weeks)
  - Page Views Per Day: 1,489 (compared to 50 for previous weeks)
• Google Ranking for "Web Design Ireland"
  - on google.com: was 46th, now 23rd
  - on google.ie (worldwide search): was 55th, now 24th
  - on google.ie (ireland only search): was 37th, now 19th

Ok, that’s a massive jump in usage in comparison to the previous month. Basically what caused this was a temporary traffic spike to the site. This website was featured on the likes of cssmania.com, w3csites.com, mostinspired.com, screenalicious.com, and a few more. Other smaller sites pick up feeds from these sites and have also begun to link in. Actually, I think I only submitted the site to cssmania.com and all the rest picked it up from there. The visitors that have been coming to the site over the past week have not necessarily been the target visitors I am ultimately trying to attract to the site (and I mean that with total respect to you all). This is evident from the high bounce rate. However, a fair portion are, and I’d like to say thank you to all the people who have commented on the new site or dropped me a message. My aim for this site is to advertise the services that I provide as well as open my knowledgebase to whoever might want/need to use it. Along the way, I hope to pick up a client or two as well!!!

As I mentioned, this was a traffic spike and as the days go by, less and less visitors have been coming from those sites. However, what this is helping with is more inlinks that Google picks up, which in turn pushes the site up the rankings. The higher up the rankings the site goes, the more likely a potential client might find the site through the targetted keywords. Already, this has become evident with a jump up the rankings as shown above.

It is now time to get more and more of these websites linking in so that it pushes the site up higher in the rankings on Google. I’ve got a few plans for this and it’s going to take a lot of manual effort, visiting directory type websites, filling in the website details and getting a link in return. I’m planning on doing this over a couple of evenings in the next week and hopefully get a lot more backlinks than there is currently. I actually don’t think this process will end as there are so many websites out there you can get links from, it’ll take forever to do. I do however have a list of about 1,000 websites that competitor websites are linked from. It is this list that I’ve started to work off as well as try and find some other good quality inlinks. At the end of the day, it’s not always about the quantity of links but the quality of the links. The main one I got above was cssmania.com. The site was featured at the top of the page for about 3 days, and further down the page for another 2 days. Also, cssmania.com has a Page Rank of 6, which doesn’t hurt matters at all.

So, what’s the lesson for this week… get a nicely designed website using CSS (tableless) coding and get it featured on as many CSS Showcase websites as possible. Usually getting on to the top ones will allow the smaller ones to pick you up and they’ll add you themselves. Here’s a list to get you started: cssinsert.com. Please remember that the traffic from these sites will be a temporary spike and the majority of visits will be once off, but it will increase the inlinks to your site and help push up your search engine rankings, and that’s the name of the game in the end.

Well, that’s the update so far. I’ve a tough week of link building ahead of me and I expect a significant drop in the numbers to the site compared to this week unless some other top quality css showcase websites features this site for a couple of days. I don’t mind though. I always knew it was a traffic spike and I’ve heard of them being described as being addictive… once you have one, you just want more, more, MORE!!! I think I’m beginning to feel like that already

Any comments or suggestions are most welcome and maybe you’ll subscribe to the RSS Feed, if you haven’t already.

The script below should be inserted into the top of all the pages you want this to work. The best way to do this is using an include file or adding it to the top of one of your existing include files that runs before anything is written to the page. The pages also need to be ASP. This will not work on plain html pages. This isn’t a perfect solution as it will only work on actual pages but it will help a lot of people out there I think. On linux, this is much easier using the htaccess solution but as IIS doesn’t have this, this is a good alternative. If www exists in the URL, this script will not execute. You may want to do the same in reverse, as in redirect www to non-www URL’s. If there is a demand for this, I’ll modify the script to support it.

You can see a working example of this by trying to visit http://davidbehan.com/?test=ok. It should redirect to http://www.davidbehan.com/?test=ok.

In honour of this, I’m going to track the campaign here in the blog. I don’t know how other web design companies are fairing out with traffic but I’m going to open up some of my stats on where davidbehan.com is, what promotion is being done and how it is effecting traffic. Ok, so to start, here is a brief account of where the site is at the moment. To gather this information, I’m using Google Stats, Google Webmaster Tools, Web CEO, PopURI.us, Feedburner and it is accurate as of launch of the new site last Thursday.

Links and Search Engine Analysis

• Google Page Rank: 3
• Google Back Links: 627
• Google Home Page Back Links: 171
• Google Keyword Ranking Positions:
  - web design ireland: 46 (com), 55 (ie-ww), 37 (ie-io)
  - web design meath: 12 (com), 27 (ie-ww), 21 (ie-io)
  - web design navan: 4 (com), 6 (ie-ww), 6 (ie-io)
  - web development ireland: n/a (com), n/a (ie-ww), n/a (ie-io)
  - web marketing ireland: n/a (com), n/a (ie-ww), n/a (ie-io)
• Yahoo Back Links: 630
• Technorati Links: 74
• Del.icio.us Bookmarks: 0
• Alexa Rank: 843,100

Note: Under Google Keyword Ranking Positions, (com) means google.com results, (ie-ww) means google.ie world wide results, and (ie-io) means google.ie ireland only results.

Website Statistics Analysis (Past 4 weeks)

• Visits: 673
• Visits Per Day: 24
• Page Views: 1,410
• Page Views Per Day: 50
• Page Views Per Visit: 2.10
• Average Time on Site: 00:01:40
• Bounce Rate: 67.46%
• Percentage New Visits: 81.72%
• Traffic Sources: 9% (direct), 35% (referring sites), 56% (search engines)
• Blog RSS Subscribers: 14

Note: This information was gathered using Google Analytics and is for the 4 week period, 26th April 2007 to 23rd May 2007, i.e. prior to new site launch and new website promotion techniques.

Marketing Targets

• Increase Google Page Rank to 4 if not 5 on next release
• Increase Backlinks to 1,500.
• Google Keyword Ranking Targets:
  - web design ireland: at least page 3
  - web design meath: top 3 results
  - web design navan: top 1 result
  - web development ireland: top 10 pages
  - web marketing ireland: top 10 pages
• Increase average visits per day to 250
• Increase average page views per day to 750
• Treble the blog subscribers

Note: These targets are for the next 4 weeks (although some may not get updated for awhile after) and results will be posted on Thursday, 21st June.

Summary

OK, stop laughing!!! I know those stats aren’t really the best and could be a lot better… and that’s what this is all about. It is difficult to work on your own self promotion and marketing when you are working on so many client websites. I’m sure any other web marketing individuals reading this will agree but I’m determined to change that here. For now, you have the current state of affairs, the targets and soon you will have the results. I’ll keep you posted throughout the next 4 weeks with an update as to the positions and the techniques I’m using to do the promotion. If anyone has a comment or suggestion they would like to add, they are always welcome. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to sign up for the RSS feed to get notified of updates.

p.s. Wordpress logged me out during this post so when I went to publish it, I lost almost the entire thing (everything except the first 2 paragraphs). Agh!!! Lesson learned… write it in notepad and do a copy and paste