Our Daily Articles: Complete Index 2008–2021

From time to time we might want a new website for a specific initiative, and it’s worth knowing the best practice for when that happens.

Available for a while now, selectable modes on Teams and Zoom make it look like everyone is in the same room, and I like the approach a lot.

It’s hard to convince search engines that our sites are more relevant than similar ones thousands of miles closer to the search engine user.

I cannot understand business websites that have a home page that stays the same for years on end. And there are plenty of them.

Think of different customers. Answer these three questions. And use these answers to write pages for your website.

Companies can be reluctant to delete stuff from their website but will happily add more which isn’t part of the sales or support narrative.

Many of your YouTube viewers will always have the closed captions button switched on. What are they seeing?

Limit the social media links to accounts you frequently update, and only link to them on pages where people will be looking for them.

Dark Mode is appearing across operating systems and websites, and we need to consider the way our web properties display.

Cleaning up our own website has given us a degree of simplicity that I’d never have expected. I can’t see any downside to this.

In terms of marketing, email is very much alive and kicking. Indeed, after 50 years its effectiveness may be greater than ever.

I think we will see a move to more freelance talent in many job roles, such as accounting, sales and marketing.

I see this as the end of a bit of a ‘free ride’ for those of us in marketing; we’re going to have to act a bit smarter.

iPhone users who use the standard Mail app will now not send back information from your emails such as whether they’ve opened it or not.

Our friends at marketing consultancy Walker Riley are running a prize draw competition called ‘Is Your Business “Marketing Ready” For 2022?’

The index of everything that’s been in our ‘An Article A Day’ blog in the last month.

Leaving the “Request a quote” message in the website visitor’s peripheral vision drives home that this is the logical next step to take.

It’s easy to make claims, and when you know them to be true, it’s just as easy to forget to prove that’s the case.

None of us will need to go back to the drawing board, but the tips are certainly worth bearing in mind. There’s also a link to give feedback

Letting YouTube pick a still frame from our video and using that as the thumbnail is not an option to get any clicks from casual viewers

If you create standalone documents with a standalone application on your computer, you’re dating yourself as coming from an earlier generation.

It’s easy to think a rush of visitors will never happen, but ensuring there’s a contingency plan in place if it did shouldn’t cost you much.

“Is it a ranking factor?” Is there any more contested topic in the industry of SEO? Find out what is and isn’t in with this huge new guide.

FLoC aims to group users with similar interests, so advertisers can target them without needing to track information about individual users.

A reminder of what third-party cookies are, as they’re more than first-party cookies, which only track user movements on a particular site.

Recipients might not have taken action simply because the email was received in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

Windows 11 will be the first time Microsoft has not bundled Internet Explorer with a new version of Windows for more than 20 years.

Surely having good references to reliable sources makes a page stand up? And if something makes a page better, wouldn’t Google like it more?

It turns out to be almost certainly the case that having quality outbound links with good anchor text will help the page hosting those links

If your goal is to make your site more ‘sticky’, it’s a good thing to monitor. Otherwise, I never include it in analytics reports.

With most marketing channels, if they fail, it’s probably not critical. But have you considered what would happen if they do?

Why we should ask the prospects where they want to go, and frame our products as being the outcome that they desire.

A new ‘Best practices for ecommerce’ guide from Google makes points equally relevant to sites that list products not available online.

The index of everything that’s been in our ‘An Article A Day’ blog in the last month.

SEO has changed over the years, and pages now need to be targeted at ‘search intent’ rather than ‘keywords’.

Whatever market you’re in, I’d bet AnswerThe Public can come up with ideas for articles that you hadn’t thought of.

Many companies undermine their product launches by making it all about them, rather than the benefits to the customer.

If we have separate products or services which overlap, it’s important to choose between them on the customer’s behalf as early as possible.

The types of websites we manage are more likely to be looked at in an everyday office, so we should opt for black text on a white background.

If you’ve got a long and important document to publicise, one of the best ways is to create an intermediate-length article. Here’s how.

Sure, the amount of ‘link equity’ we’re going to get from a local business directory isn’t great, but it’s something.

Whether your video is a product demo, a how-to, an interview or a case study, focus entirely on that, both in the content and the presentation.