Rob
Spiral Staircase Manufacturers Select Impact Media
Posted by Rob on August 29, 2008 4:22 pm
Posted in Impact Media News

Complete Stair Systems Ltd supply a comprehensive range of ‘off-the-shelf’ and fully custom staircases and spiral staircases, catering for both commercial and domestic markets.

We have been appointed to implement the companies natural search engine optimisation strategy, in order to increase the volume of relevant traffic visiting the site and maximise return on investment from their online marketing spend.

We very much look forward to working with Complete Stair Systems Ltd on this SEO project.

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It has long been known that searchers very often search for a brand for research purposes or even as a preference to typing the URL straight into their browser.

By way of example, Google estimate that there are an average of just over 300,000 searches for ‘coca cola’ every month.

To reinforce this message, Hitwise UK have announced in their recent newsletter that 88% of searches for the top 2000 most popular keywords performed during May 2008 were for brands. Not surprisingly, ‘facebook’ was top of the brand searches accounting for 1 in every 72 searches performed. (Facebook Becomes Third Most Visited Site in UK)

Clearly, it is impossible to know the intent of the individual user when they search for a specific brand but UK online advertisers will need to consider the implications of this, particularly after Google removed restrictions on bidding on trademarked terms within their AdWords Pay per Click platform back in April.

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Rob
Impact Media Appointed To Work With Test And Calibration Firm
Posted by Rob on August 28, 2008 5:03 pm
Posted in Impact Media News

Young Calibration provide dedicated test and calibration services to all industries, specialising in the areas of flow management and thermal systems.

We have been selected to develop their natural search engine strategy, in order to increase the visibility of the site across the major search engine’s organic results pages and generate a higher volume of new business via the Internet.

We very much look forward to working with Young Calibration and anticipate great success with their search engine marketing campaign over the forthcoming months.

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Ben Norman
Google Unaffected by US Economy
Posted by Ben Norman on August 20, 2008 9:04 am
Posted in Google, Search Engine News

Google’s online ad revenues will continue to grow despite the US economical downturn according to data released by eMarketer.

They predict that Google’s online ad revenues in 2008 will increase by 27.4% in the US alone. Even in comparison the other leading search engines (Yahoo, MSN and AOL) which take 25.7% of all US online advertising dollars Google exceeds them with a staggering 30.7%.

It seems that even in economical downturn that the power of online marketing shows through and it’s no surprise that when other areas of marketing spend are dropping of that online advertising continues to grow.

So if you’re looking for where to get the biggest return on investment for your advertising spend then why not look into online advertising.

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Ben Norman
You Can Now Pay MSN Anytime
Posted by Ben Norman on August 19, 2008 2:19 pm
Posted in Pay Per Click (PPC)

Last weekend Microsoft updated their adCentre system adding extra functionality to their billing processes including:

  • You can now pay your balance any time not just monthly as previously
  • You can now remove unused credit cards from file

Microsoft also claim that the process for adding new credit cards has been streamlined making it even easier to give them some money.

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Lucy
Internet Use is on the Up
Posted by Lucy on August 15, 2008 10:04 am
Posted in Internet News

Ofcom’s 2008 Communication Report shows that people in the UK are now spending on average £93.63 a month on accessing the internet, TV services, listening to the radio, landline and mobile phone services, a fall of 4.4% since 2004.

Web and mobile use has increased dramatically over the past five years. During 2002 the average time spent online was 6 minutes each day this has now increased to 24 minutes.

The report also showed that not only are users spending more time online that they are connecting to the net faster. Compared to 2002 when only 4% of households had broadband, 58% of all households now connect to the internet by broadband.

There has also been a significant growth in accessing the web while on the move. The internet has been accessed by a mobile phone by more than one in ten of users. This is set to rise over time with the increase of mobile phones with 3G mobile connections.

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Ben Norman
Gmail Outage Raises Questions for UK Businesses
Posted by Ben Norman on August 12, 2008 12:08 pm
Posted in Google, Internet News

Yesterday Gmail saw a big email outage leaving its users unable to send or receive email. The Outage started around 10pm here in the UK (GMT) so chances are it didn’t impact on UK businesses to much.Gmail Error

Around 10:30pm official word from Google was they were working on it and aware of 502 errors (as reported in a Google Groups thread). This then prompted hundreds of posts from upset Gmail users keen to see the service back up and working as soon as possible.

This does raise questions about not only the Gmail service but also the other widely available free email services that people take for granted. There are many UK businesses that rely on Gmail and the other free email providers to handle their company email. Although these services are free you should carefully consider the implications of using them for business use.

Remember the free email providers have the right to remove the services from use at any time (although this is unlikely to happen).

First impressions count for allot so ensure your business is well represented online and avoid using the free email services for business email as it really doesn’t create the right impression about your business.

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It seems that another development has arisen from the last Google Update seeing Google live up to its promise of not allowing the automated querying of its search engine by blocking some automated rank checkers.

It has been reported that popular software applications Web Ceo and Web Pro Gold have been blocked from querying the Google search engine leaving their owners unable to extract search engine positions.

Google have always made their standpoint clear in their Information for Webmasters that they do not allow Automated quires and it seems now is time for the crackdown.

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Google have been going through another PageRank update and it seems at first glance that many of the web directories have been affected.

Many low level directories have simply seen their child pages lose all PageRank meaning the only PageRank they have is on their homepage. This means that the appeal of buying links in these directories is now a very unappealing option for those who just buy links to influence the PageRank algorithm.

Effects have been seen all the way up to the likes of the Yahoo directory which have several child pages with no PageRank but most pages are still in tact.

But lets remember that the world is not Google and the directories are still worth being in for relevance, credibility and lead generation.

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Ben Norman
Please Use IE
Posted by Ben Norman on August 7, 2008 11:01 am
Posted in Accessibility, The Think Tank

When visiting a website today and attempting to use it I was met with a message that said “if the page freezes please use IE”.

Being a Firefox user, I hit the back button, went to a competitor, made my purchase and went about my business.

Any company serious about making it online needs to ensure that their website is accessible by the main browsers as, if not, you can potentially be losing a big percentage of your sales!

Don’t become another statistic and, at the very least, ensure that your site performs in both IE and Firefox as, after all, they account for approximately 93% of browser usage.

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Adrian
Facebook Becomes Third Most Visited Site in UK
Posted by Adrian on August 6, 2008 9:42 am
Posted in Internet News, Social Media

Proving that there’s something in the saying ‘It’s good to talk’, Facebook has now overtaken eBay as the UK’s third most visited site with 2.75% of all UK Internet traffic in July according to Hitwise.

In another demonstration of multi-tasking, Facebook’s demographic profiles highlight females between the ages of 18-34 living in the South-East being the most likely culprits visitors.

Google UK remains in top spot with Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) ranked in second.

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Adrian
Google Reduces Qualification Threshold to use Conversion Optimiser
Posted by Adrian on August 5, 2008 1:09 pm
Posted in Google AdWords

Google have just announced the qualification criteria for using their free Conversion Optimiser has been reduced from 200 conversions in 30 days to 100 conversions.

The Conversion Optimiser is a feature of Google’s Pay per Click (PPC) service, AdWords. With it, you can set a maximum Cost per Acquisition (CPA) bid.

CPA is just a way of establishing how much you’re willing to pay for each conversion, e.g. sell, made from your site. Google will evaluate your bids based on account history so if your AdWords account is not well optimised, this may not be the best thing for you.

At Impact Media, we’re happy to provide a free assessment of your AdWords account and will also be able to advise whether Conversion Optimiser would be appropriate for your PPC campaign.

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Rob
French Estate Agents To Raise Search Engine Visibility
Posted by Rob on August 1, 2008 9:46 am
Posted in Impact Media News

Premier French Property are a specialist French Estate Agent offering a wide range of properties for sale in the Aquitaine region, specialising in Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne.

Impact Media have been appointed to develop the online side of the business through the implementation of a professional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) stategy, we will be optimising the Premier French Property website to appear higher in the top search engines natural/organic listings for their most profitable keywords, maximising ROI.

We are very much looking forward to working with Premier French Property on this SEO project.

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