Name: Smart Cow Marketing
Price range: $$$

Day 6: Google Webmaster tools

11/29/202106/01/2015 by scmarketing

Google webmaster tools is an excellent tool to analyse your sites performance allowing you to identify the areas you need to improve on, and what’s going well.

These are the features that it includes:

Submit/check the sitemap for your website.
Adjust the crawl rate of the Google bots for your website and view the statistics.
Generate/check the robots.txt file for your website.
List the internal and external pages that link to your website.
Check what keyword searches led the site to being displayed in the Google search engine results pages and click-through rates for them.
Check statistics about how Google has indexed your website and whether it has found any issues while doing so.
Set a preferred domain name (e.g. yourdomain.com over www.yourdomain.com or vice versa) which will determine how the site URL will be displayed in search engine results pages.

Google Webmaster Tools is a very popular solution for your website and it is highly recommended by webmasters. It will help you with the Search Engine Ranking Optimization of your website. You will be able to use it for a frequent analysis and for checking the statistics of your website. It gives you precise information how your website is indexed by Google and provides you with deep insights in case of an issue.

In order to use the Google Webmaster Tools for your website you need to confirm that you are the owner of the website and have full access to it. The process is absolutely automated and all you need to do is place a given text file in the Webroot directory for your website.

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to submit an XML sitemap for your website. This provides information about all pages on the website and making it easier and faster for Google bots to crawl and index it. You will also see more detailed information related to the indexing of your website.

Google Webmaster Tools provide a full list of the search phrases that result in your web site being displayed on the search engine results pages (SERPs). You will also receive full information about all internal and external links to your website, keywords, errors and missing pages. Such information is of upmost importance when you want to better optimize your website and have it displayed higher in the SERPs

In order to start using Google Webmaster Tools, you should create a new account (or use an existing one if you already have a Google account). Visit the Google Webmaster Tools web page:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

You will be asked to log in or create a new account. The registration process is simple and you should not experience any troubles.

Digital marketing agency Croydon

Interested in learning more? Book a Practice Growth Session with Smart Cow today.

Day 5: URL names

07/13/202105/24/2015 by scmarketing

A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator, its job is to locate resources in a web page. A URL is a formatted text string used by web browsers, email clients and other software to identify a network resource on the internet. Network resources are files that can be plain Web pages, other text documents, graphics or programs.

There are two different types of URLs, absolute and relative. Here’s how you should use them:

If you’re creating a document that you want everyone, anywhere in the world to be able to access, then you need to make it an absolute URL. An Absolute URL will point you directly to the file/directory on the internet. It also means that if you have two URLs that are the exact same, they will point to the same file.

If you’re creating links to other files on the same server you need to use a relative URL as you’re already in the location the link is going to be.

URL Strings consist of three substrings:

Network protocol
Host name or address
File or resource location

These substrings are separated by special characters:

Protocol:// host/ location

The protocol substrings are used to define a network protocol to find a resource. These strings are short names followed by three characters ‘://’. Typical protocol names are:
http:// ftp:// mailto://

The host substring identifies a computer or other network device. Hosts come from standard internet databases such as the domain name systems (DNS) and can also be names or an IP address. For example smartcowmarketing.com/home.aspx is the host for our site.

The location Substring is anything to after the domain suffix (‘.com’ etc.) For ‘smartcowmarketing.com/home.aspx’ the section of our URL highlighted in bold is the location of where you are in the website, in this example you would be at the home page.

Here is a list of the different resource prefixes:

Http – a hypertext directory or document (such as a Web page)
ftp – a directory of files or an actual file available to download
Gopher – a gopher document or menu
Telnet – a Unix-based computer system that you can log into
News – a newsgroup
WAIS – a database or document on a Wide Area Information Search database
file – a file located on your hard drive or some other local drive

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

Day 3: Ask for feedback from customers

07/13/202103/01/2015 by scmarketing

Once you’ve set up you’re site, you’re going to know exactly how it works and what to do to test the functionality. For example when you enter keywords into a search engine, you’ll choose words you know will point you towards your site. However, this is going to be a lot different for everyone else. For example, if your website was a clothes shop and someone was trying to find a new pair of jeans, ASK THEM what they’re most likely to search when looking for this item, ask them whether or not they tend to look at ads on the side of the Search Engine Response Pages (SERPs) and if the majority of people do, then you’ll know you need to have ads! Use the feedback you’re getting from the customers to help you to make the necessary changes.

There are many ways you can engage with your audience to ask them for feedback, a very simple way would be to post on social media, asking your followers to comment back with what they think the areas are that you can improve. Other ways would include email campaigns asking your customers to reply with their feedback.

Not everything is going to work perfectly straight away, there are going to be features of your website that users may not like. Take Facebook for example, when they make changes to their interface there is always people giving them feedback, not always positive, but they use this feedback as a way of knowing what they can do to help make it more of a user friendly experience. In some cases the feedback you may receive will come across negatively, but you need to respond politely and inform the customer that their feedback has been noted and you will try to the best of your knowledge to try and improve this.

Getting feedback is a key part of Search Engine Optimization, it tells the search engines that you’re website or social media is kept up to date and also that other people are interacting with you, therefore your information must be useful. This will all help in ranking your site above your competitors.

Prompting your customers to leave reviews about your company on your Google+ local page should be your first priority.

Try to make it simple for your customers to leave reviews – if you have a database of email addresses, filter out the customers who have a Google Mail account and point them in the direction of your Google + Local company page. Reviews left from people with an active user account and Google + profile are likely to appear more authoritative. Here at Smart Cow Marketing, we also do free website reviews. If that is something you think you would be interested in, get in touch with us today.

It is also beneficial for people to leave reviews about your company on a selection of trusted online business listings and social hubs. Sites such as Yelp, Qype, Four Square and Trip Advisor, with an active and varied community, are at the forefront of local-social search.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

SEO trend predictions for 2015

08/03/202102/13/2015 by scmarketing

So 2015 is upon us and this looks like to be another exciting year in the world of online marketing. Well, when we say “exciting” it is for us at Smart Cow Marketing. But maybe not for those of you who like skydiving or running with the bulls in Pamplona. But for us it floats are very, very well, call us sad that this is what we really like.

Anyway, enough of our own inadequacies in being able to jump out of an airplane. Let’s look at what can get your business noticed on search engines in 2015.

In a nutshell, we can see that the search engines are going to continue on their drive to make search engine results as realistic as asking a real person over the phone. We can see the goal maybe five years’ time when most searches are done through talking to your technology. This is still a bit awkward for us today, but it’s becoming more popular.

So as well as keywords placed into the search, the search engines have also been to taking into consideration your location and also your own personal preferences of what you have searched for in the past and also what you’ve searched for in the immediate past. So your search may be “what is a California pizza?” And the results might come up with a menu on how to make this type of pizza. If your next search is where I can buy one of these, currently your results will show you one of many things to buy. But as the search engines get more intelligent, they will realise that you are talking about a California pizza place that’s in the search results.

The search engines will continue in their quest to remove black hat techniques in front of all the search engine results. So such as far too high density of keywords within a webpage or having far too many artificial links pointing to your website will continue to be penalised. They will also look at rewarding more and more sites that have got good relevant and fresh content placed onto the pages.

It will be interesting to see how much Google will still place businesses having a Google plus page, even though it is still not popular. We think that this is still going to be a factor moving forward. Whether this is just for the benefit of Google places and for reviews or if they will start taking into to more consideration content placed on your Google plus page is yet to be seen. But being Google. I’m sure they will try and push it much as they can.

We can see the use of video becoming more relevant this again, partly because Google owns the largest video sharing platform, YouTube and therefore can easily link the number reviews the video to your website.

There is loads of advice we can give in order to help ensure that your site is optimised and your business works well, however the most important bit would just to be as natural as you can with regards to placing great content and building good links to your site.

Digital marketing expert Croydon

We are a digital marketing agency based in South London working with small businesses, as well as those in accountancy and the construction sector to help get them noticed online. Drop us an email at Saymoo@smart-cow.com or give us a call on 020 3137 1826.