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Internet marketing, also referred to as
i-marketing, web-marketing, online-marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or e-Marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.

At STAR Digital we can help you to understand and implement digital marketing for your business.

Internet MArketing, Onloine MArketing, Digital marketing

On Page Search Engine Optimisation Explained

Any good search engine strategy starts with a review of your current performance. Often, if your website has been indexed by the search engines you'll show well on searches for your company name, but often not so well for the products or services you offer. Using a combination of web analytics and specialist ranking tools we can find out your search positioning in the major search engines.

The next step is to discover which keywords and keypharases (combinations of words typed into a search engine) would perform well for your business. We also look at the 'long tail' of search which is defined as the words that aren't searched for often but are likely to convert to a marketing outcome.

Now we have to develop your on-page search engine optimisation. This is a prescriptive approach to ensure that your URL's (web addresses), page titles, content headers and content keyword densities are fully optimised.

(In most cases we recommend utilising a web content management system that allows CH MOD rewrires to create search engine friendly web addresses known as SEF)

Where necessary we'll write 301 redirects - small snippets of code that redirect search engines from an old url to a new one permanently, onto the web server for URL's that have been modified so as not to lose any exisitng search ranking, and submit a sitemap of your web site to the major search engines using an XML file to tell it which pages we want indexed. (XML sitemaps are the preferred method for search engine bots or spiders to understand the taxonomy of your website)

So as you can see, there is a lot of commonsense behind search engine optimisation, there are complex algorithms in place but they are mainly there to ensure that searchers get the best results based on their search terms, and that spam sites and get rich quick schemes are penalised. (This is to become more evident with the Caffeine algorithm change being prepared by Google, see the section on Caffeine below)

Our clients know that we take a commonsense approach to search by building well structured websites that are relevant for users and search engines. Most of our clients have achieved first page ranking in Google for their major terms through a combination of best-practice on-page search engine optimisation tactics.

Please take a moment to fill out the form to the right and send us your website address and we'll see how well you are performing currently, and make sensible recommendations to improve your search engine rankings.

Paid Search Advertising - Pay per Click (PPC)

Paid search advertising is often employed to help advertisers get onto the first page of search in highly competitive areas, or during the period that they are redeveloping their websites to perform well in natural search - free search rankings achieved through a combination of on-page and off-page search engine optimisation.

In most cases the paid advertising results, known as sponsored listings, show as the top 3 results and to the right of the main listings, sometimes with a slightly tinted background. These ads show when a user searches for a terms that you have 'bid' on. Each show is called an impression, and the number of times a user clicks on an ad is determined as a clickthrough. Impressions divided by clickthroughs gives a clickthrough rate (CTR).

Put simply you bid for your position, the more you pay the higher you go. However, there are complex algorithms employed as there are in natural search engine optimisation that focus on relevancy.

In Google this is known as the 'quality score' which is known to be a combination of keywords/phrases, ad content, landing page relevancy and clickthrough rates. All of these factors combined determine the 'bid' price for every click made by a browser. We generally tell clients to expect to pay between 50p and £1 per click in average search areas, but in highly competitive search areas such as 'life insurance', even with a well optimised ad campaign and campaign landing page you could expect to pay upwards of £10 a click to achieve top 3 rankings in Google! Just like traditional advertising you need deep pockets to compete in popular business areas.

Paid search marketing can be tightly controlled with daily budget setting to ensure you don't overspend. You can also use tools to only show ads at certain times of the day, or in certain geographical areas. At STAR Digital we have agency accounts with the major providers, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook. We are experts in running cost effective highly measured campaigns that integrate with your Google Analytics account, and our focus is NOT on the highest number of clicks for your ads, but on the highest return on investment for your business.

We believe that a combination of on-page search engine optimisation and paid search advertising will create the best overall results for a typical business looking to promote itself online. Other methods can then be added into the mix such as targeted email marketing, social networking and off-page search engine optimisation.

"We saw a return of 74:1 on our PPC ad spend in the run up to Christmas 2009 when it was managed by STAR Digital. If you look at what that meant to our profit margin, there's no questioning their rationale for a campaign mix of Online PR, PPC, SEO and e-mail marketing to push a product through online channels"

Ian Swinburn - Slouchpod Ltd

Off-Page Search Engine Optimisation - Link Building

As the title suggests this method is all about obtaining links into your website from elsewhere. Unfortunately it has been the subject of much debate as it can be used to try and artificially increase ranking through link spamming which when dicovered can result in the search engines de-listing you.

However, this doesn't mean that it shouldn't form part of your search engine strategy. Rather you should ensure that any inbound links are relevant. An easy place to start is on B2B link networks such as Yell.com and Freeindex. These can help your local search results,. Then you move onto trade bodies, suppliers, social networking tools like Twitter and Diggit and relevant forums and blogs.

The general rule for webmasters is not to obtain more than 25 links a month per page of content, and to make sure that those inbound links are genuine. Avoid lots of fabricated blog posts or web pages created by spammers.

The reason that link building is seen as important is because of the way that the Google search engine is structured. It assigns a 'Page Rank' score to every page that it has indexed on the web. For instance our home page has a ranking of 3. (We don't employ a lot of link building!) the score goes up to 10, and in the past the higher the page score, the higher the search ranking. This doesn't seem to hold true nowadays and we've seen sites in popular search terms with low page rank scoring highly in natural search.

This is because the search engines use a number of factors to determine ranking as described in the on-page search engine optimisation section above. However, once again as with paid search you should not write off link building as part of your SEO strategy. The important thing to remember is that any link building campaign needs to run for around 6 months, and ideally is ongoing.

Prices start from around £300 a month to optimise around 10 search terms, and in highly popular search areas there are no guarantees that this will deliver the right results.

Online Public Relations - Trusted Source Link Building

Another form of link building for SEO is online public relations. At STAR Digital we use a combination of journalist targeted email and online PR trusted feeds using the online PR newswire services available to us a marketing agency. These aren't the free ones that you sometimes see, as they tend not to have a quality following amongst journalists.

The construction and presentation of an online press release is very important, if not critical and you have to write press releases in a way that will generate interest for Journalists and Bloggers, and contain links to relevant pages on your website orr Blog.

The results can be impressive. When we helped Churchfield to launch the SlouchPod Gaming Chair we generated over a thousand high quality inbound links from a single online press release. Combining the release with an online press centre where all of the necessary assets for product promotion such as images, videos and marketing copy were available for download generated lots of coulmn inches both online and offline.

The most important element of Online PR is to promote a genuine product or service and generate trusted inbound links from publishers and new sites. Irrelevant releases and me too releases are no better than spam and will be ignored.

Online PR services at STAR Digital include;

Story creation and development
Writing of structured Press Releases
Emailing of releases to Journalists
Newswire via trusted online PR feeds
Creation of online 'Press Centre'
Measurement of uptake online

Breaking News: Google algorithm change 'Caffeine'.

The Google 'Caffeine' project is due to impact search indexing from about April 2010, and reportedly makes some significant changes to the way sites are indexed and ranked on the Google search engine.

At time of writing we believe the significant changes to be as follows;

Website speed - how quickly your web page loads. It will become essential to create web design that is separated from content to minimise the amount of mark up and scripting on your pages. Hosting will need to be fast, ditch the cheap hosting solutions! Goolge will be ranking faster sites better than slower ones.
Domain Ranking - It's believed that Google will start to take more notice of domain names, so if the domain name matches the search terms its likely to score well irrespective of inbound links or page rank. In addition domain authority will be taken into account, and the age of the domain. The older the better.
Focus on site content - Caffiene would appear to place more relevance than ever on a site's content, so best practice on-page search engine optimisation has never been more important. This will probably result in spammy sites and domain squatters being pushed down the search engine rankings. This fits in with Google's vision to deliver the most relevant search results to its users whilst continuing to index an ever growing internet.

HTML Email Marketing Best Practice

"I get a hundred emails a day from people I never asked to email me, don't they understand that I don't want their email?"

This is a common problem. Our own MD ran an experiment recently to gauge how much SPAM he got, that is actual SPAM email that no one wants such as 'Viagra' and 'Phishing' messages, and how much unsolicited email marketing he received, that is legitimate email marketing that he never requested. The results were staggering, in one week he counted over 600 emails!

For the email marketing messages that he hadn't opted into he started to unsubscribe, and was appalled at how difficult some really big brands made it by asking him to login to unsubscribe! Others confirmed they had unsubscribed him but kept sending emails, and the worst offender - PC World. They have still not stopped sending us emails over two months after unsubscribing!

If you are going to send email marketing you should ensure its relevancy for your audience. Best practice is to have an email sign up box on your web pages and a link to one on your offline marketing collateral that users can visit to opt-in to receive your emails. Another method that works well is to partner or advertise with trade bodies that perform regular emailings and run an ad to offer readers the opportunity to opt-in to your mailings.

Whilst it is not illegal to send B2B email without implicit opt-in it is still better to employ it as part of your digital marketing strategy as it will provide better results. For all B2C email marketing it is the law and you can read more on this subject in the Privacy and Electronic Communication Act 2003 (PECR)

Best practice in email marketing dictates that you must ensure that the email marketing being sent is relevant to your prospects interests. For instance, If you offer several services, and your prospect signs up for email information on one of them, you should not bombard them with email-marketing on all of your services. By all means include cross sell and upsell messaging in your email marketing, but not in such a way that it obscures their main point of interest.

Email list segmentation is important and we make sure that we consult with our clients to understand their email marketing audiences, then we create segmented email marketing lists to ensure that prospects get relevant email marketing. After all its all about the right people taking action on your website. You'd rather have 30 people from a list of 100 clickthrough to buy a product than 3 out of 1000 wouldn't you? Relevancy is the key.

Building your email marketing properly is paramount. We see a lot of DIY email from companies, and it looks just like that - DIY. Poorly designed, badly built, irrelevant execution and often straight into anti-spam or junk mail folders. A significant waste of your time and money.

Our email marketing experts know how to build email that will render well in both webmail clients such as Hotmail and Gmail and the corporate email readers such as Outlook and Exchange. We can test for deliverability and make sure that the email stands out in the inbox.

Our email design team are experts in creating great looking functional email marketing for our clients, we also help our corporate clients with the creation of email marketing templates that their marketing departments can use to insert relevant messaging and deploy via our STARmail email marketing system.

A/B testing of subject lines on larger campaigns can increase open rates and clickthroughs, and we make use of technologies that can test these on the fly, quite simply you can send as little as 1000 emails in an A/B test and the winning subject line can then automatically broadcast the winning email marketing campaign out to the remainder of your list after a pre-determined time, often 2-3 hours after the test email broadcast.

Measurement of your email marketing efforts is important and all of our systems incorporate web dashboard reporting for every campaign. You can even compare your camapigns against your industry standard using our huge archive of email marketing results, plus you can select your previous campaigns to measure against to see if your email amrketing results are improving. You'll get all of the standard email marketing reporting metrics such as opens, clickthroughs, forwards and bounces so that you can see your results on every email campaign broadcast.

Social networking has become a major part of any online marketers arsenal and our email marketing systems integrate perfectly with Twitter, allowing you to link up your email marketing to your Twitter account. Every time you send an email it will post a link with the subject line into your Twitter feed. As for Facebook we have a simple subscriber form that can be added directly onto a Facebook page so that you can convert Facebook fans into email marketing prospects. We've even got plugins to put email subscriber forms onto your WordPress Blog!

So, if you want to find out more, James looks after email marketing at STAR Digital. You should give him a call or email him to see if he can help you do a better job, and save you time and money in the process.

When we launched the www.watchauctions.co.uk website for Fellows & Sons we saw a fast uptake in on-site opt-ins for email alerts. The first broadcast delivered an unprecendented opens rate of 78%, and has settled down in the high 40's. It just proved that a combination of opt-in, quality creative and relevant messaging delivered great email marketing results.

Using Twitter, Facebook and Social Bookmarking

The biggest hype in digital marketing over the past 18 months has been around social media marketing. Whilst this is subsiding and mobile marketing is rearing its head again, you can't ignore the power of tools like Facebook and Twitter.

One of the biggest problems with both platforms is time. It actually takes time to develop the 'Tweets' and 'Posts' required to develop a presence on these platforms. Then, like email marketing you have to focus on relevance and you shouldn't be overly salesy.

We have developed a number of campiagns in association with Twitter and Facebook for clients including 'Pimp my Cooler' which utilised Twitter and Flickr. Our digital marketing experts create the necessary Tweets with all of their associated hashtags and appended shortened links to blog articles, landing pages and lead generation forms. All of which is tracked using tools like Google Analytics

Another form of social media is known as Social Bookmarking. The leaders in this field are social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com and delicious.com. They were a precursor to Twitter that (still) allow you to promote content from anywhere on the web for other users to see and comment on. In addition posts that link back to your site can help with page rank, particulalry if they are popular, and they can ebven get search indexed in the same way as Twitter posts.

We've learned that there are tools out there to help you simplify the social media marketing experience and we've listed the most effective with a brief description of what they do below.

TweetDeck - The fastest way to 'tweet' and keep track of your favourite searches in one dashboard. Allows you to put your 'tweets' directly onto your Facebook timeline as well. Available for Mac and PC, its really easy to use. Plus there is an excellent iPhone and iPad app as well.
Bit.ly - The URL shortener, essential when inserting links into Twitter. It shorthens even the longest links to about 10 characters, which is important when you've only got 140 characters to work with!
TwitPic - Great tool for posting links to your photos on Twitter, also gives you statistics on the number of times your photo has been viewed
Facebook Advertising - The page from Facebook that explains how their profile driven paid search marketing platform works
This article from Marketing Sherpa can be useful for those wanting to understand a bit more about using the Facebook platform. Just register for the free trial to view it in its entirety

If you need help and advice on planning a successful social media marketing campaign, give us a call to see how we can help develop the strategy and online marketing collateral. Why not follow STAR DIgital on Twitter, we post lots of useful 'tweets' to help anyone looking at doing digital marketing.

Blogging about your business

Blogging is an important part of any online busienss strategy, and at STAR Digital we have our own digital marketing blog designed to help marketers with various topics related to digital marketing.

The reason that a well written, regularly updated blog is important is that it can help to build reputation for your business as a thought leader or expert in your industry sector. If you want to comment on a recent news event or legislation the Blog is the perfect place to do it. You can then promote your blog posts in emails, in 'Tweets' on Twitter and through your Facebook pages.

At STAR Digital we can build your Blog in either WordPress or Joomla. We can modify the templates or 'themes' in these applications to suit your corporate identity, and we can help to train your staff in the art of 'Blogging'. Our own blog is built using WordPress and contains a number of useful plugins to help us gather good analytics. In addition we have a Twitter feed on the Blog and a tool for promoting the latest books that we've read.

If you are interested in having a Blog designed and built, just give us a call, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how little they cost.

If you're still hungry for more take a look at our resource list below. If you want to talk to us about digital marketing strategy or the tactics and tools that can make your life easier just email us, fill in the form to the top of the page or call us on 01604 696385.