Today alone, I have received over 100 emails about products and competitions and without reading them they have all been deleted!

So what can you do to make sure your email marketing campaigns don’t meet the same fate? Here are a few tips to help ensure your emails don’t end up being deleted without at least being read first.

Include an unsubscribe option Peoples tastes, needs and requirements change, so even though they may have signed up to receive your updates 6 months ago, they may no longer wish to receive them.

By law, you need to make sure that all marketing emails include an unsubscribe button, and that when a recipient requests to be removed from your list it is actioned within 10 days.

Spell check and proof read your email There is nothing more annoying than receiving poorly written, generic spam! It immediately creates an unprofessional image.

Proof read your email, spell check it and ask at least one other person to read through it as well.

Include a call to action So you have written an amazing email full of relevant information which has really caught the attention of the recipient, what do they need to do to find out more? Don’t forget to tell them, it may sound simple but just like attaching that file to an email it often gets overlooked causing the recipient work to actually get what they need!

If you have a landing page make sure you provide the link at various stages throughout the email, if you want them to call you make sure the telephone number is clearly visible, but most importantly make sure this information is included at the bottom of the email as this is where they will be when they have read the information and want to know more!

Test your email before you send it Before you send the email to anybody else, send a test to yourself, this will allow you to see how your email will appear to your recipients.

View the email in your chosen program, email programs may display the email differently to how it appears whilst you are creating it so this will give you the opportunity to go back and amend anything that doesn’t display correctly. You can also use this test email to check that any links in the email are working, and forwarding to the correct destination as well as asking somebody else to proof read it.

Have a snappy but relevant subject line People are more likely to open an email with a snappy yet simple subject line. Make sure your subject line is honest and hints about the content of the email, don’t attempt to mislead the recipient into opening the email as this will more than likely annoy them and cause them to unsubscribe!

Keep your emails relevant Make sure that any emails you send are relevant to the recipient, ‘if they AREN’T relevant – they ARE Spam!’

Avoid spam triggers Anti-Spam software looks for various words and phrases that are commonly used in Spam emails, if you want to avoid having your email marketing classed as Spam it is always wise to avoid trigger words.

A simple way to do this is to use an email marketing system that allows you to Spam check your email and identify problem words or phrases. Innocent words such as ’specialise’ can cause your email to be classed as Spam as it contains the word ‘cialis’, this may not even occur to most people but a Spam checker will highlight these problem words.

Avoid attachments The easiest way for unscrupulous people to infect your computer with a virus is to send an email promising further information if you open an attachment. The majority of people are now wise to this and don’t open emails from unknown senders if they contain an attachment.

If you want to offer further information in your campaign, include a link to a landing page on your website.

Make sure your identity is clear to the recipient Masking your identity, or attempting to make recipients believe you are someone else is a no no! Make sure that your display name is either that of yourself or your company and that your email body includes your contact details.

People are less likely to open or respond to an email if they cannot identify the sender.

Dani
Studio 2 Online
Internet Marketing Specialists Midlands

Branding strategy > This is all about creating awareness of your company and not necessarily about driving sales. It’s about the volume of impressions, which in other words means that the more people type in a keyword and see your website, the greater the impression you create. Keywords that would be used for a branding strategy are broad terms such as ‘furniture’ or ‘jewellery’.

Acquisition strategy > When users have an idea of what they want to buy, they will type in a more specific phrase into a search engine. This is where you need an acquisition strategy to make these potential customers come to your site. To do this you will need to understand what customers are actually entering into the search bar. An acquisition strategy will use more narrow keywords such as ‘discounted mahogany garden bench’ or ‘gold crucifix necklaces’.

As a search engine marketing company, we know how to make a search engine optimisation campaign work to reach the goals of your business. If you wish to discuss the advantages of using an SEO campaign, then give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

The text in the blue bar is the title of that specific webpage, and is the first impression a search engine will get of that page. Although the title is often ignored by users, it is important to not forget to optimise it for the search engines. When creating your titles for your pages, remember the following points:

• The title should contain the theme of the webpage
• It is normally the text that is displayed on the search engine result page
• It should be 80-90 characters long
• A title should be unique for each webpage
• The placement of words is important, with your keywords located at the front
• The title should be an informative summary of the page content

If you are looking for a search engine optimisation agency that can help with all aspects of improving your site for search engine optimisation, then give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

• Pick the right website name

For example, jargons.com will not do for a company selling watches, instead jargon-watches.com is a much more suitable name. If possible include your keyphrases in the domain name.

• Pick the right keywords!

Generic keywords won’t do, statistics don’t lie! A long tailed keyword has a higher conversion rate than a broad search term. For example, hotels v luxury hotels leicester

• Structure your website well

By having a sensible website structure i.e. directory folders and sensible file names, your webpages will make more sense both to a visitor as well as the search engine robots crawling your site.

• Suitable Internal Linking

A very strong SEO strategy much overlooked! Create a rational path linking the various web pages of your website based on a logical theme. By doing this you are guiding the user to your important pages which will help increase the enquiries or sales.

• Link building

There is no easy way to do this. It’s a tedious process but eventually very rewarding in terms of SEO.

Find the right inbound links to your website from free quality web directories, or post informative content to quality blogs creating links back to your website. By gradually increasing these links from other quality sites and having your keyword in the linking text, you will be building the authority of the website for your chosen keywords, hence ranking higher with the search engines.

• Monitor rankings and website activities

Finally, keep a close eye on the progress of your keyword rankings and use online tools like google analytics or smarterstats to monitor your website activity. This will help you gain an insight into the most popular webpages of your website, paths taken by the visitor, statistics on the number of visitors, working keyphrases and much much more!

This is just a brief outline of some SEO techniques to keep in mind while optimising for the search engines. For more information on how we can improve your search engine rankings why not call us on 0116 2758456 to see how we can help you website gain visbility and increase your sales revenue!

Mariam Shariff

Search Engine Optimisation team
Studio 2 Online – Search engine optimisation Midlands

If you are on online toy retailer and the latest buzz is that the Transformers Optimus Prime talking action figure is going to be the number one toy this Christmas, then you may wish to start targeting that as your keyphrase. Your site will then rank highly and come up near the top of the search engines when people search for that toy, and therefore bring in those extra sales.

This technique does not only apply to Christmas but also other holidays such as Easter and Valentines Day. You can also look at other yearly events that could benefit your business, for example a running shop could alter its SEO campaign in the run up to the London Marathon to push sales of a specific brand of trainers. The forthcoming World Cup in South Africa is an ideal opportunity to promote England merchandise.

As a leading Search Engine Optimisation agency, and the only SEMPO Platinum awarded SEO agency in the UK, we know what can work for your business. If you wish to discuss the advantages an SEO campaign, seasonal or otherwise,  could offer your business, then give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting.

Altogether now, “Holidays are coming, Holidays are coming…”

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

Often website owners don’t realise just how significant SEO is to the success of their website and their business. Too often they concentrate more on the design and layout of their new website. While it is important to plan the layout of the website and have an appealing design to go with it, it is more essential to plan an effective SEO strategy. After all, you can have best designed website on the Internet, but if people can’t find it it’s not going to contribute to building your business in terms of more enquiries and sales.

Below are a few tips to help you plan the search engine optimization of your brand new website or adapt this to an existing website:

• Pick the right technology i.e. the right web developing program to build your website. It’s best if the web developer is well informed about the advantages and disadvantages of using certain technologies while building a website. For example, too much javascript or flash can be a disadvantage because it hinders search engines from crawling the website effectively.
• Understand your business target audience and come up with the right keywords that people use when they are looking for your products or services. For this there are various tools available in the market. Wordtracker or Google Adwords keyword research tool are two examples of effective tools that provide useful statistics like search popularity of keyphrases as well as suggestions for long tailed search terms which have a much higher conversion rate into a sale or enquiry.
• Provide content that is relevant to the keywords chosen in the previous step. Categorise webpages to link to these keyphrases and stay focused on the web page content to increase relevance for your keyphrases.
• Finally, when the website has gone live start building links using strategies that give search engines the impression that you are building links gradually from authoritative websites that are relevant to your business.

To find out more on how search engine optimisation can benefit your website and build your business with increased enquiries or sales, give us a ring on 0116 2938090 and see how we can help you.

Mariam Shariff

Search Engine Optimisation team
Studio 2 Online – SEO Midlands and Leicester

So as a leading web design agency, Leicester we are well aware of the importance of having your website listed highly in the Google rankings.

Achieving a listing on the first page of Google can be a challenge, especially for competitive keywords. Getting to the top involves important decisions at the initial website design stages, as well as a well planned search engine optimisation strategy.

The benefits of ranking well in Google are:

• Google controls a large percentage of the search engine market
• Google will send more traffic to your site than the other search engines, which means more customers and therefore more profit.
• A site performing well on Google will also generally do well on the other search engines.

Studio 2 Online offer both web design and search engine solutions for our clients. This may seem an obvious thing to say, but we get a lot of enquiries from people about optimising their website, where it’s obvious that the previous designer had little or no understanding of how to build a website that’s search engine friendly and ready for a SEO campaign.

So why not ‘kill two birds with one stone’ and let us design and build your website to a high search engine friendly specification and then run a successful SEO campaign for you? That way you can have the first page of Google as a goal right from the start.

Oh, and don’t forget the value of Google Adwords as a complimentary search engine marketing tool to boost your enquiries and sales even further. Needless to say, we can help you out with this as well!

To help your website on its way to the first page of Google, or to discuss any of the web design and search engine optimisation (SEO) services we offer, contact the Studio 2 Online team. Give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Web design Midlands

If so then that website was lacking a very important aspect of good web design – a site map.

A site map is as useful to a website user as a road map is to a driver, and here are 5 useful tips:

• Your site map should include a link to every page within your website; from the homepage, to your contact details, to your deepest subpages.
• A link to your site map should be included on every page of your website. This means that every page within your site is only ever two clicks away, which is not only good web design, but also useful for getting your pages indexed by the search engines.
• Keep your site map under 100 links, and if more are needed then split into multiple site maps.
• An XML site map is important for search engine optimisation as it allows search engine crawlers easy access to index every page within your site.
• It’s important to understand the difference between a HTML sitemap and a XML sitemap. A HTML sitemap is useful to the visitors to your site, while a XML sitemap is designed to give information about your site directly to search engines.

If you’re lost and in need of some direction with anything to do with your website, or if you are after a brand new site, as a leading web design agency, Leicester we can provide excellent web designs and search engine friendly services to promote your business and increase your enquiries and sales.

Give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting. If you need a map to find us, then there is one on the website…we wouldn’t want you getting lost after all!

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Web design Midlands

• Don’t change URLs: indexed URLs are precious!! Don’t change them!! Search engines crawl a website and index pages on your website that they then return for relevant search terms. It is alright to change heading, images and other content on the webpage but avoid changing indexed URLs.
• Optimise Website: Apply search engine optimisation to the website before it is launched, not after it’s live and up and running on the internet. Basic SEO techniques can be applied to a website during the build. This also helps to strengthen the information architecture of the website so a user can be led through the website as you planned it. For example, a user may enter a product page and actually be guided through to the information on the product and ultimately the ‘buy now’ webpage, hence changing a visitor into a customer.
• Website Content: for the above to be possible it is important that your website copywriter understands your business and its target audience completely. A good copywriter will write copy for the target audience, speaking their language. Good web copy will also help lead the user to the right web page once a visitor has entered the website.

To find out more of such useful tips contact our web design midlands agency based in Leicester to have an informal chat and see how we can help redesign your website and promote it in Google and other key search engines through SEO.

Mariam Shariff

Studio 2 Online – Web designers Midlands, Leicester

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PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… IP: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Some points to consider:

• Choose:

1. A professional Website Design Company who will spend time understanding your needs – very important!
2. A good copywriter who can appreciate your company ethos and your target audience to turn your website visitors into customers
3. A visually powerful website design that reflects your business
4. A website structure that is easy to navigate for a site visitor as well as a search engine robot, especially if you’re selling products/services online.
5. A website navigation system that is simple and easyto use, with information or products no more than three mouse clicks away. A copywriter specialising in websites will be able to help you with this.

• Make your website accessible in accordance to the W3C Standards
• Allow external links to open in a new tab or window, but avoid too many or it just becomes distracting
• Include a good user sitemap that is easy to navigate

Things to avoid:

• A website that is not accessible to everyone, including those with visual impairments. Indeed if a website is not accessible to everyone this could lead to legal action
• A completely Flash based website – it may look good, but it’s likely to take ages to load so people will lose interest before they even enter the site, and search engines don’t like Flash
• Too many back grounds – less is more when it comes to website design
• Too many external links – you want people to stay on your website, not wander off elsewhere!

For more advice on choosing the right web design for your business contact our Midlands based web design agency on 0116 275 8456 to have an informal discussion on our web design and other web services.

Mariam Shariff

Studio 2 Online – Web design Leicester, Midlands

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… IP: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…