In the current economic environment, consumer confidence low and many businesses are feeling the pinch of poor sales. Retailers like Myers and David Jones are competing aggressively to stimulate sales in a down market, so what are you doing to improve your sales?

What strategies are you planning to entice new buyers? Perhaps discounting certain stock items may help cash-flow.

Once customers are attracted to your business, it’s much easier to cross or up sell on additional products or services. In this way it’s good to think about what items are easy to cross or up-sell. E.g. if you are a beauty salon owner, you might advertise waxing at a discounted price, and then once you have your customer through the door, up-sell them to laser hair removal or a skin care treatment.

It’s surprising how many businesses cut their marketing budgets in weaker economic conditions at a time when marketing is crucial to preserve existing clientele and attract new buyers to the business. Naturally costs and overheads are a factor for any business so the key is marketing your business smarter. If you currently use traditional marketing methods such as newspaper, magazines, radio and letter box drops why not consider web marketing. Web marketing by comparison to traditional marketing methods is quite low cost, and is often not only more effective but more measurable as well. This means you can better track the cost of obtaining a sale.

If you’re already utilising web marketing, take the time to work on developing and improving your web strategy. You should consider improving your current site from an information perspective and improving it for sales conversions. Increase or develop a social media presence, send out email newsletters, write blogs etc.

Whilst some of these strategies will drive sales immediately, other strategies will develop sales long term.

Not getting the best results from your website and not sure how to get them?
Call us today on 02 8904 0288 or complete our free website assessment here.

We still come across many sites that simply don’t work unless you type in www. Before the domain name. This potentially means you are losing website visitors who type your domain name in without the www, and as a result, see an error page advising the web page does not exist.

This is actually a really simple thing to setup with your domain DNS settings, and yet many fail to do so. Quite often this is due to a companies IT Department or support team not having much knowledge of the web, and so do not realise the need to do so. Speak to your IT Support or your domain registrar if your domain is currently not setup properly. It is simply a case of entering two ‘A Records’ to your domain servers, one for the non www record, and one for the www. Record.

Are you going through the process of a website rebuild?

There are some very important points to take note of during this process, to make sure that your site:

• does not lose any search engine rankings, or
• have any broken links, be they within your website, or through anyone who has bookmarked your website.

So what are the things that could affect my website?

Each page in your website will very often have an associated rank, especially with Google. If your page is named www.website.com.au/page.html, and in the new site this exact page is now called www.website.com.au/new-page.html then Google will view this as a new page, and your rankings could start from scratch.

Of course wherever possible keep the old page names exactly the same as the original names.

How do you minimise the risk of a loss in rankings?

A 301 redirect in a .htaccess file on the server is the best way of doing this. The 301 redirect is a command that shows you have moved that page permanently. You may still find a temporary drop in rankings of pages within your site, but from experience, I have found that this generally ranges between no time at all, and a two to three weeks.

Please note, the above reference to a 301 redirect will not work on a windows server. Refer to your Windows hosting support for this reference.

Other important elements to think of, that can also affect your search engine rankings, as well as lost traffic/business.

• Bookmarking – When people have bookmarked your website in the Internet Browser – a 301 redirect will fix this.
• RSS feeds – Internal and External.
• Social Media/Networking/Bookmarking sites, and Directories – Try to updates your links on all of these sites.
• Internal Links – Internal links within your website carry SEO value from one page to the next.
• External Websites that link to you – These can be very important, as Google places high value in some external links that point to a website. Changing your pages, could result in a large drop in rankings. – Try to updates your links on all of these sites.
• HTML Structure – Is it the same as it was, or improved? Consult your SEO expert on this to be sure.
• Meta Tags – Are these the same as they were or improved? Consult your SEO expert on this to be sure.

Please note, that using the 301 redirect method will certainly ensure there are no broken links, however it will not pass on the same SEO value associated with each site link, so it is important to update as many of these links as possible, to ensure minimal impact to your site.

If you need help with your site move, contact us today for a quote.

Has Google penalised or banned your site in the past or currently? These days, many businesses have a strong reliance on Google, and as such, a drop in rankings for whatever reason can be a cause of great stress. At times a drop in rankings may be caused simply by Google changing their algorithm, but it can also be due to a Google penalty.

So what do you do?

Well firstly, don’t panic. It is important to wait at least a few days to a week, to make sure that the cause of the drop is not due to an algorithm change. An algorithm change can make your site drop a few places, a few pages, or even drop from the rankings altogether. During this time:

• speak with your SEO expert as they should know of any recent changes within Google, and
• document any recent changes that have been made to your website to see if anything obvious has cause a Google penalty.

If nothing obvious has been the cause, and your site is still not appearing after a week, have your SEO expert conduct a thorough full site analysis to determine anything that has caused the penalty. If you are still not getting answers, or your SEO expert is not able to help, call us today for a full analysis of your website. We specialise in search engine services, and keep up-to-date on the right techniques to help keep you at the top of Google.

You may also be interested in this video below:

‘How Google Penalties Can Help Your Site’.

Author Note: During the interview, it is mentioned that ‘link building can never hurt’. We disagree with this, and you should consult with an SEO expert before you commit to any link building within this time.

Over the last couple of months, you may have noticed an increase in the amount of spam coming through. I know I did, and have gone from receiving four of five e-mails, through to almost thirty a day. An interesting article in Internetweek discusses the spike in e-mail Spam recently: http://internetweek.cmp.com/193500922?cid=rssfeed_pl_inw

A few tips to remember to help ensure you don’t open yourself to spammers are:

1. Don’t display your e-mail address on your website, use an online form as a contact point for your website visitors. There are programs out there that scour the internet searching for e-mail addresses purely for spam purposes. The form will generally still send the enquiry through to you by e-mail, but if it is created properly then there is no risk of a spammer being able to get a hold of the e-mail address it is being sent to.
2. If you are using an e-mail address on any website directories, use one you can easily change at a later stage if spam to that e-mail address gets out of control.
3. Create a hotmail address specifically for signing up to newsletters, free software or anything on the web that asks for your e-mail address, unless it is very well known company that strictly follows its privacy principles. That way if they sell your e-mail address to spammers, then you can let hotmail take care of filtering the spam.

Spam is an unfortunate evil we need to put up with, and will not be going away anytime soon, but if you follow the tips above you can at least lessen how much you will receive.