Great and when is it going to be finished? Today we had another call from a business asking us could we start and finish a website in 10 days as he has been waiting over 2 years for the favour of creating a website to be completed.

Getting a website created for a business is like most things in life, there is a procedure and a process, bypass these steps and getting a mate or a friend to do it often leads to projects being put on the long finger and in fact, usually not being don’t at all.

If I take a look at the number of domain names that are registered in Ireland each year and then look at the amount of “Under Construction Signs” that are on the sites it would amaze you the volume that are not utilised for an actual website but rather a holding page that is permanently on hold.

Either the favour is not being worked on or the business is only using the domain name for email and does not really understand the impact of having a good website open 24/7 selling and promoting your business.  Whilst the under construction page has been on display often we find that a competitive business will and worked away and got their website up and runnign and is live in a google search. Mean while you seeing the guy or gal in Tesco and waving over wondering when they will ever get around to working on the site.

So by asking a real business to work on your website you are taking up a proper goal and deadlines with your web designer. “We need the website by the 1st September” etc. It has to be created, tested, marketed and proofed and live by then, can you do it?

Yes, Call Dave Jordan using your long finger you put stuff on and dial 053 9430748 today!

Charity Calendars

Watching Buyer Beware on RTE tonight and interested to see that companies are still using these traditional forms of advertising to promote their businesses, but also saddened to see that companies are exploiting those one who still are. Not every one doing charity calendars, but one company especially who has taken peoples money for advertising space and it turns out that the company are dodgy and the customer has got zero return for investment for the advertising spend they used. I could go on about how there are always more ads than actual practical space for the calender dates and that you can’t use it.

Anyway.

No matter what industry you are in you have to be aware that there are companies out there who will rip you off when it comes to advertising or even getting listed on a web directory for example. Our area of expertise is the Internet. We get many calls all the time from concerned companies who have received an invoice for getting listed in the world web directory or World business Register

€995 per year, 3 year listing!

And its a contract that the company would have signed making them agree to pay €995 per year to get their website listed in some obscure European directory that will bring them in no business. Is it a scam? Well in theory they are offering a service, but i personally think its a scam. In fact we write about it regularly, as we hear so many complaints from companies not under standing if it is the renewal notice for their domain name or from the irish domain registry etc. The program researches for Buyer Beware called our office when they were researching an item about these online scams and we were able to discuss that issue and let them know how were were trying to combat against these online scams.

If you are truly interesting in promoting your business I have to recommend using the latest form of marketing . . . . The Internet. We at Cada Media Ltd are a well established website design and web marketing company based in Gorey and supplying our services and expertise nationwide for the past 10 years. Give myself Dave Jordan a call of you would like to start a campaign to get you company or business noticed.

Well done to the producers of Buyer Beware for promoting this scam.

I was at a business meeting this morning and I allowed give a quick presentation about the Internet and so I talked about an interesting part of the web industry called “Link Building” as part of a Search Engine Optimisation campaign. I started by trying to make a similarity of a link on a website to a verbal referral from a business colleague.

The more of my business colleagues that let their friends and staff know that we have worked on their website the more people who are likely to let others know about ourselves. In Internet terms, it’s whereby you, your website address to be exact is named on another website. So if you are a garage repair service and you are members of SIMI. Do they list you as a member? By doing so they telling Google and the world that you are related to them in a business sense. Search engines count these “Links” and use it as part of their Algorithm to judge the benefit of your website to the world.

If your site is informative about your products and services, if it’s up to date, and is the best documentation that the search engine can find, then your sites “Page Rank” is increased.

How to get people to link to you?

Some companies will try to tell you they can do it for you and indeed they may be able to get you a few links, but are the links of any good. Good links I would suggest are from relevant and respected sites. Dodgy sites that are “Link Farms” (sites that could have a 1000 links on one page) are not recommended. Using these types of links can often be categorised a Black Hat* tricks by search engines

* Black Hat methods of SEO are sneaky tricks like, putting your key phrase in white text at the top of the page to add extra key phrases.

Sites that are respected by search engines are generally sites that you yourself would recommend, Use a spoonful of cop on when choosing sites to get linked from. Getting back to that Car garage, if he was offered a link from a Circus website, do you think that link would be of any use. . . . Me Neither. . .  I doubt Google would too.

So, I would recommend that you contact your suppliers in your industry and ask them to put a link to your website from their website. I could try to do it but they are more likely to do it for you rather than a stranger these days. Once that is in place make sure you put a link from your website back to them. This is called a reciprocal link.

To start a Link Building Campaign for your business today contact Dave Jordan of Cada Media Ltd, Tel: 053 9430748

We have just got in an email from a clients asking for advice on the renewal of her domain name. An american company emailed her and asked her to review her domain name and if she would like to renew it then she could click on the link provided to renew.

Transfer Away!!!

In actual fact what the company was asking was that they take over as the billing contact for her domain name. There is definately confusion out there and Internet Domain Name companies using these sneeky tacktics just make it more confusing for business owners.

I would recommend that anyone who get an email asking for information about their domain name give me a call and I will be able to tell you if it’s real (as in that you domain is about toi expire with tyour current registrar) or if it’s another company looking to poach your domain to their billing system.

Just letting you know as we see this nealy every week.

Dave Jordan – Cada Media Ltd 053-9430748

We get asked about how much does it cost to set up a website and why get a company involved as many people see that there are Free online tools to set up a website, in the video i try to explain the difference.

Why use a Newsletter for your business?

This another one of the frequently asked questions we get asked about how to use the Internet for business.  A email newsletter is a fast, efficient, cheap method of communicating with your clients.

You don’t even need a website!

There are many types of newsletter systems available both as hosted (on your own website) or as stand alone applications hosted on someone else’s website. Here are a few links to get you started.

• www.newsweaver.ie
• www.toddle.com
• www.constantcontact.com

We offer our own hosted versions on our clients website that have no monthly bills, you simply type up the newsletter and send. The system takes care of the legal issues like having an unsubscribe option etc. Note our systems wont charge you a monthly fee or won’t charge you per email.

Remember these types of systems will give you great stats, they will let you know who looked at the newletter, what part of it they clicked on to return to your website and much more.

To find out how a newsletter email system can help your business, call Dave or Roz on 053 9430748

How to get to the top of Google.

This again comes up week after week as inquiries ask about Domain Names and Search Engines. Today a guy was asking if he registered a certain domain name will he come up first in Google, rather than register his own company name.

The Answer is. . .

Maybe!

People under estimate the power of a search engine and the whole science behind it. Many assume its total fluke or chance to get listed in Google. It’s not. It’s hard work, experience and quality content.  How did you find this article? Most likely you searched for a certain term and a search engine return this as a possible answer.

I always suggest to clients to register a few domain names to cover your bases. About 6 years ago it was very important to have a good generic domain name lets say www.electricity.ie or www.estateagent.ie and Google would return them higher than others. But since then search engines have looked less at the domain and rather concentrated on the “Content” . They want to return a website that answered the persons question. They are always changing the methods in which they rank websites.

Changing their algorithm.

I have been harping on for the past six months about how “Google” for instance is changing the ways its is ranking website. One of the main reasons would seem to be that they are keeping up with technology and as new technology rolls out online they too must keep in touch and make sure they are able to read and index the new content, Flash animation, images and video to mention a few.

We have a number of inquiries at the moment and they all have registered nice names, good generic, easy to remember name. But one thing that they all assume is that they will automatically get listed No 1 in Google because they bought a domain.

It’s like buying a spanner and assuming that you will win the Formula 1 in Monaco next year. I’m not saying in out of the question, I’m just saying that it’s a bit of a long shot.

When you register a domain it is the first step in creating a successful online business. To see how we can help you get to the top of the search engine of your choice call me, Dave Jordan today to find out more.

I promise I won’t rant for too long!

Content, Content,  Content.

We had an inquiry today (you know you are “T”!) asking for a website with an into page with flash animation and maybe some soft music. This is available to everyone but I had to steer the conversation around to a few questions that soon answered if she really wanted a flash intro page with soft music etc

• Who are you target market?
  • How old are they?
  • Men or women?
  • Irish?
  • European?
  • USA?
• What is the website for?
  • Information
  • Sales Leads
• What time are they online?
  • Mostly evening
  • online in work

The list of questions goes on and on, but our answer is, why are you putting another hurdle in front of someone who has been looking for your services or products.

Get to the point and give them the info, they will appreciate it and use your business!

Have a good weekend

Dave

Blogging for business . . What does it mean?

This is a common questions these days as we see headlines in the Sunday Business Post “Computers in business” section explaining to us that “Blogs” are old and “Bebo” is the new way forward.

Well basically a blog is a style of website that the owner can update themselves and publish news or events or anything online using their own computer and Internet connection.

Blogs are user friendly.

A Web Log is easy to update and it is a less formal way of communicating to your customers or potential clients. It is still a “website” but just a less formal one. It is primarily used for publishing articles as in news stories and so it therefore lends itself to writing articles or as we call them “posts” to our news website under different categories.

In the blog I “post” stories on different topics as they arise. So if we have new news about how google is changing its algorythm, then I put the news into a category called “Google” and all related news snippets will go in there.

Blogging for Business, means that businesses can write articles about their own chosen fields explaining about the services they offer or the products they sell.

The are many consultants available in Ireland who will explain and teach how to use a blog for business uses and we are one of them! We are looking for comanies who are interested in reaching out to their clients and starting a conversation with them about theur products think a blog might me one way to reach them.

Convert your Admin Staff to your Marketing Staff?

One example I have been saying to customers recently is to use their existing admin staff to create more online content. Give us your staff for two days and we will convert them into “Bloggers” We will teach them how to write a blog, why write something, what to write, when to write it, etc

For more information about Blogging for Business call myself Dave Jordan on 053 9430748

This is a common issues with websites, trying to keep them fresh, you can look at the following

1. Read your website and each page to see if it makes sense to you as , a newbie or as an experienced user looking for information. Do you cater for both
2. Make sure you have good meta tags on every page, the description and keywords match each page.
3. Look at your competitors sites and see if they have something you may have overlooked.
4. Check other search engines to see how you rank try www.google.co.uk and search for your products and services there for example if you cater for the UK market.
5. Are you linked from enough sites, are their suppliers who should have a link to you? Link building is very important, get all of them to link to you.
6. Start a Social Media Networking campaign, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter etc for your business
7. Get involved in posting articles on forums say on Boards.ie etc

This is just a sample of how you can keep your site and information online about your business fresh for more call Dave Jordan on 053 9430748