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4 ways to help your customers this christmas…

December 11th, 2009, by Tamsin Whitfield

Every e-commerce website, no matter what its size or focus, could benefit from an increase in activity over the busy and highly competitive Christmas period. According to research conducted by eBay advertising, 85% of consumers intend to maintain or increase their festive online shopping for 2009, and it’s estimated that online retailers will see an overall spend of £8.9 billion this Christmas. We’ve just passed “ Cyber Monday” – the busiest Internet shopping day of the year, which typically falls on the first Monday of December (7^th December for 2009).

• Add a Christmas Gift Section
• Provide Extra Delivery Options & Notify Customers of Dates
• Focus on Email Marketing
• Offer a Gift Wrapping Service

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Think before you Move that page – 301 Redirects Explained

September 11th, 2009, by Paul Zanelli

As a website owner, there may well come a time when you want to reorganise pages or sections within the site. Since many modern websites and ecommerce sites are built around Content Management Systems this is a relatively easy task and in many cases, one you can do yourself.

What you need to be mindful of however is the fact that your website will have been crawled by search engine robots and its pages indexed accordingly. These pages will have a rank in the search engine results and could well be driving quality traffic and visitors to your site. Providing these visitors find what they are looking for then a conversion will be made and you will make money.

Moving these pages without planning ahead will likely result in one of two scenarios:

1. Your website may still show up in the search engine rankings but when viewed, return a 404 page not found error (because you have moved the page and it can no longer be found).
2. Your rankings for those pages may disappear completely from the search engines, which means potentially missing out on business.

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Tags: 301, 301 redirect, cms, content management, ecommerce, search engine optimisation, seo, website management
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Password management & security: the do’s & don’ts

July 14th, 2009, by Chris Ward

Despite campaigns recently to increase awareness about the need for secure passwords in the UK, many web users leave use themselves open to hackers by choosing easy to guess and insecure passwords. A survey by Visa Europe found that “over three-quarters choose passwords relating to friends, family and memorable dates” whilst following a recent phishing attack on the website MySpace it was found that “the five most common passwords are: password1, abc123, myspace1, password and blink182 (a band).”

A recent UK Government report carried out as part of the Get Safe Online campaign found the following information:

• 66% of users use the same password for more than one website
• 46% of users use the same 2 to 3 passwords for every website they access
• 45% of users use passwords made up only of dictionary words or names (the most easily cracked)

The lack of proper password security is one of the factors contributing to the ongoing problem of online fraud in the UK. The UK Cybercrime report identified the following worrying statistics: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: keepass, managment, open source, password, secure, security, software, tips
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What is Search Engine Optimisation?

July 6th, 2009, by Paul Zanelli

Many of you will already know (or at least have an idea) about what Search Engine Optimisation is but for those of you that are not sure, this section aims to outline exactly what it is.

So, what exactly is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? Well, essentially, it is the process of increasing the amount of quality traffic to your website by improving your organic rankings in the search engines and overall online presence. By organic rankings, we mean the natural listings as oppose to the sponsored listings that can be seen beside search engine results.

Anyone who has their own website wants it to be able to be found by friends, peers or in the case of a business, potential customers. When it comes to potential customers being able to find you on their favourite search engine, many of them will put more trust in the organic listings over the sponsored ones because quite simply, organic listings appear more trustworthy and relevant. This is largely because sponsored listings have to be paid for where the organic ones do not. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: online marketing, search engine optimisation, seo
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Is Search Engine Optimisation Right for you?

July 6th, 2009, by Paul Zanelli

How well is your website performing? Are you getting the best that you can out of it and does it drive a large amount of traffic that converts into sales? If you own a business then it is a simple fact that you want it to perform well. This is no different for your website. For many of us, the Internet has become part of our daily lives and somewhere we turn to for both entertainment and to shop or do business.

It has also been suggested that of those Internet users, around 80% use search engines to find what they are looking for. This is why it is imperative to ensure that your website ranks well within them because not doing so could result in you missing a lot of traffic. To help you achieve better traffic, SEO will provide the answer.

There is no escaping the fact that we are experiencing a credit crunch presently and people are nervous about how much money they are spending on their marketing strategies.  It has been suggested by various sources that online marketing techniques such as SEO are the most cost effective methods of marketing available at the moment.
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Tags: online marketing, search engine optimisation, seo
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