Business Marketing Online

This is how Google judges your page as having provided a good user experience, and there's little that beats that in the SEO stakes nowadays.

There are a lot of things you can do to protect your site, and they're well worth the time and/or financial investment involved

Two of our clients have had this experience in the last year. I've had a site hacked as well. It's been a learning exercise for all of us.

Have a look at yours and ensure any standard landing pages or forms are updated to be as good as your main offer pages

Even if you're a confident writer and an authority on the subject, I'd suggest that 'none' would be asking for trouble

It's one of those decisions that a bit of testing might help with, but we may also have to rely on some intuition

I always recommend adding a constant stream of authoritative background articles and FAQs. What else can we put on the website?

Google soon won't be supporting the command 'noindex'. So if your robots.txt contains any lines with that in it, you may want to change it.

I've known businesses change their marketing message for a product to something far more effective, based on this sort of customer feedback

Google has said it will soon only use what it sees on our websites using the equivalent of a mobile device.

Expertise, authority and trust: as usual, Google is only trying to quantify and specify what prospects probably look for without thinking.

As I've mentioned many times before, a how-to video is one of the most cost-effective pieces of content any company can produce.

What worries me a little is the many businesses who could be getting ads showing that don't make much sense.

The 'canonical' tag should be generated automatically by your content management system. But do make sure it is.

Wordpress is free, and there are so many people who know how to maintain it that your installation will be pretty well future-proof.

The codes '301' and '302' tell browsers that the URL requested is understood, but the server is going to send them somewhere else instead.

The traditional 'three-act structure' is an easy approach that can be as applicable to a technical article as it can to a novel

A fun resource which could give you some competitor intelligence or provide inspiration for your next image advert.

It's not unusual to discover that the best time of day for your advertising is not when you'd expect it to be.

PPC search advertising is great value for money, but it's important to be realistic about how thinly you may be spreading things

Your customers do not expect an instant reply from you, so don't use that as an excuse for checking emails every five minutes

Whether the length of an article is 200 words or 2000 isn't nearly as important as answering the question in depth.

There are so many corporate presentations being made every day which just disappear into history. It's a big waste.

Make your website an increasingly useful repository of information in your area of technology, and the results will follow.

Search advertising is fantastic at tailoring the sales message and enquiry experience to the location of the prospect.

What links are helping you with specific product searches, and what ones are just telling the search engines what they already know?

Please don't make the mistake on social media that so many companies do, of just pasting in the headline as the message.

Don't just take a look now, feel happy that renewal isn't for another year, and promptly forget the issue. Make sure you'll get a reminder.

Like driving a car with an automatic gearbox, automated bidding has been seen by professionals as somehow beneath them.

If you have just one sentence to summarise the message the page is trying to convey, is it what's in the headline?

When you 'gate' content, you hide it from the search engines, and can any of us afford to do that? I think there's a compromise.

Wikipedia is not some opportunity to be exploited in a dubious way. It's a terrific source of quality traffic. Just treat it with respect.

The very first email you send someone by request is more likely to be read than any other, so don't waste the opportunity to offer something!

Google's 'Display Network', and it may be the company's least well promoted service

We suggest letting the prospects point to their industry once they've got to the site.

A Google Business listing means prompting satisfied customers to add their review, and here's how

It might be worth seeing if your traffic has been affected in the past week or so.

Here are some nice freebies for you: my former colleague Andrew Leon Walker has written three genuinely useful guides

It's previously been possible for a single site to grab three or four of the spots in the search results.

If you have the facility to do so, at least ensure you have a sub-heading every two to three paragraphs.

How long should the title tag be? The consensus among SEO experts though is that 50 to 60 characters is just fine.

An easy trap to fall into is to just let a content management system take the page headline and dump it into the title tag field.

How do we get in the natural, free results as quickly as possible?

At what point is it worth looking at the number two search engine?

SEO Analyzer will spend three minutes and then present you with an action plan.

Take a look at any search results on a mobile device and you'll see that some sites' favicons look much better than others.

Instead of this piece just fading away, I could end it by posing a question, and then a call-to-action.

What does Google understand the intent to be, in the face of a search for 'blue widgets'?

Examine the forms on your website on different devices, and ask the question: "Is this easy to complete?"

I'm sure that from time to time you've noticed Google results featuring odd characters such as ticks, stars and even smiley faces.